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The Fields are
Ripe
By Major Howard Webber
Major Howard Webber, UKI Territory, provides an excerpted
chapter from his sparkling book, Meeting Jesus, called The
Fields Are Ripe.
When the disciples
returned from the town with food for Jesus and the woman left
his company, Jesus turned to his disciples and said, ‘I tell
you, open your eyes and look at the fields! They are ripe for
harvest’ (John 4:35). This verse troubled me for years,
especially the phrase ‘they are ripe for harvest’. Trying to
avoid the point of my personal discomfort, I sought relief in
other translations, but in none was there a solace. Jesus
quite clearly states that there is fruit ready to be picked,
and he makes this statement amid the scepticism around him
which said the harvest was yet to come, that things were not
yet ready. ‘Do you not say,’ says Jesus, ‘“Four months more
and then the harvest”?’ It is neither his saying nor his
belief.
If we have genuinely endeavoured to lead men
and women to Christ, only to be met time and time again with
abysmal failure or extremely limited success, we have a
tendency, having reached the end of our resources of
imagination, ingenuity and energy, to seek refuge from our
self-condemnation, guilt and failure by telling ourselves that
we are just sowers not reapers. We say that the age of
harvests is an age past never to return, or an age yet to
come. Or we say that the gospel cannot penetrate the rationale
or the mindset of this present age, this postmodern,
post-Christendom age.
We read the words of Jesus in
Matthew 13:14, 15, as he quotes Isaiah, ‘You will be ever
hearing but never understanding; you will be ever seeing but
never perceiving. For this people’s heart has become
calloused; they hardly hear with their ears, and they have
closed their eyes. Otherwise they might see with their eyes,
hear with their ears, understand with their hearts and turn,
and I would heal them.’
‘That is why we do not
harvest,’ we say. ‘The people have defective sight and
hearing!’ And we back up this line of thought with a host of
other scriptural recalls. Yet still our rest is incomplete. We
remain uncomfortable, for we know that, despite the fact that
thorn bushes, hard paths and rocky ground may predominate,
good soil there will be and sufficient good soil, according to
Jesus, for there to be an abundant harvest (Mark 4:1-9,13-20).
In a world of deafness there are those ready to hear. In a
world of blindness there are those ready to see.
So
where lies the fault? Let us change the metaphor. In Luke 5:2
we read of how the fishermen, soon to be Jesus’ disciples, had
given up fishing because they had failed to catch anything.
They had pulled their boats up out of the water and left them
and were busying themselves washing their nets, resigned to
the fact that they had failed.
Was it because there
were no fish to be caught? Was it because the fish were
uncatchable? According to the verses that follow, neither of
these was the cause of their abysmal failure. Nor was the
reason a lack of effort or laziness. With all their energy,
time and expertise, Simon and his companions had failed to
catch one solitary fish. As Simon says, ‘Master, we’ve worked
hard all night and haven’t caught anything’ (v 5).
These men were not lazy. They had worked all night long, no
doubt trying every conceivable technique they had, pooling all
their knowledge and experience, yet they had failed. Even now
they were not idle, they were washing their nets – a necessary
chore for any fisherman. But this chore, however necessary,
would not catch them any fish. They were no longer fishing.
We can’t help feeling for them. They are so much like us.
Having failed to catch fish for the Kingdom, we frequently
give up and just do something closely aligned to it, something
necessary even, but something that is not fishing. We assure
ourselves that we are ‘being faithful’, ‘holding on’; that
‘being an influence’ is sufficient; that any results are in
God’s hands.
Some of us will have smiled at that
cartoon of a fisherman in the middle of a river in his waders,
with line cast and net handy, being asked if he had caught any
fish. He responds by saying that he hasn’t caught any, but
that he has influenced quite a few.
‘It is his work
not ours,’ we say. ‘In four months time,’ we say. ‘When the
Church has made the changes it needs to make,’ we say.
Meanwhile we play at evangelism and attribute our lack of
results to the non-receptiveness of the world that we live in.
We invite folk to meetings and poke leaflets through
letter boxes. Some of us conduct meetings in the street,
offending a few, blessing some. We busy ourselves with good
works, remembering how Jesus spoke of men seeing our good
works and glorifying our Father in Heaven (Matthew 5:16), and
fail either to see or to acknowledge that most of the glory
and gratitude falls on us rather than him. Satan, the father
of lies, can use the truth very subtly to convince or confuse
the less discerning. He backs up his deceit with plausible
reasoning and even biblical support. Of course Jesus commended
‘good works’ – the cup of water (Matthew 10:42), visiting the
prisoner, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked (Matthew
25:34-46). Of course nets need washing – nothing will be
caught if they are not maintained. The cleverness of Satan’s
subtle deception is that he would make it appear that we are
taking issue with the dictates of Christ himself.
We
can do all these things – many do – and still miss the very
core of the gospel, the central purpose of Christ: to seek the
lost (Matthew 18:12), to save sinners (1 Timothy 1:15). The
central issue is the eternal issue. As important as a person’s
present state is, as a person’s present welfare is, it is not
the most important thing. What matters more than anything is a
person’s relationship with God and where he or she will spend
eternity. The Church needs to major in on this again.
The great 19th-century evangelist, D. L. Moody, used to say,
‘The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.’ I
would suggest that we need to make the main thing the main
thing again. If our boats are now out of the water and the
souls of men are no longer our immediate or ultimate concern,
then all our commendable works that ought to result from an
earnest desire to save the lost become merely the substitute
for it.
I often think that this life is like a waiting
room for Hell for those who do not know Jesus. Where the
waiting room is an uncomfortable, dirty or unpleasant place,
we Christians go in and decorate it. We put in carpet, running
water, heating, new furnishings and other pleasantnesses to
keep the occupants comfortable, amused and occupied while they
wait. Most times they are grateful and appreciative. But it is
still Hell’s waiting room. It is somewhere that those within
its confines need to be rescued from. Provide for the needy,
the hungry, the lonely, the dispossessed and the damaged by
all means. We should. We must. But above all else we need to
be focused on getting them out of that waiting-room-for-Hell
by any means possible and on to the road with Jesus to Heaven.
Dr Edward Jenner, that great physician who discovered the
vaccine for smallpox, was introduced to a friend by a
well-known minister, Sir Rowland Hill, as having saved more
lives than any other man. Dr Jenner’s reply was, ‘You said I
saved more lives than any other man, and that may be true.
However, I would rather have it said of me as it might be said
of you, that I saved more souls!’
Catherine Booth it
was who, shortly before her death in 1890, said, ‘I can
remember a sort of inward pity for what I thought then was the
small expectations of the Church … I can remember how
disappointed I felt at the comparatively small results which
seemed to give satisfaction.’
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