Prayer and Multiplication

Pray for the harvest

I will try to make the backstory short. When I was in 10th grade, I got really sick. As in stay in the bed for a few weeks sick. I lost a lot of weight in those few weeks and even though I went back to school, I was not recovered. No clue what it was. Was it some kind of pericarditis? A mental breakdown? There weren’t any answers. I “got better” but wasn’t better. I knew something was still not right.

That summer, I did what I always loved to, I went to my grandparents’ ranch in California. I loved it out there and figured the hot sun was just what the doctor ordered. Long story short, working with my grandfather in the vineyard he managed, I felt whatever it was that had made me sick leave. It went out my arm and into the ground. I knew God had healed me.

Big problem: I was an atheist. So what was God doing? How was I supposed to make sense of it? A few days later, I was in church with my grandfather. There was a bulletin from a previous service (best I can recall). I was looking at it and saw, “Luke 10:2.” “The harvest is great but the laborers are few.” I had no clue what it meant. I was pretty sure it did not mean the coming grape harvest. But, one thing was for sure. I knew these words were for me and about me. I can see now that God seriously had my attention after I was healed.

It gets weirder. You would think it would be so obvious, that I would immediately give my life to Christ. Healed. Powerful moment with a Scripture. Nope. It took 8 more years! I would like to say it was because I was such a good rebel. Nope, just general, boring, run of the mill depravity. Sometimes, the banality of original sin is more frightening than its violent eruptions!

So… when I came to Christ 8 year later, I was immediately captivated by Luke 10:2 again. I was called into ministry the day after I came to Christ, and I was completely shocked to find out that was what the Luke passage was about all those years ago.

Luke 10:2 is a life verse for me, for what that’s worth. I knew I was going to be a laborer in the harvest field, and praise God, He has made it so, and has sustained me in it. But there is a second half to the verse: “pray earnestly therefore to the Lord to send workers into His harvest field.”

Because the harvest is great and the laborers are few, pray that God would send more laborers into the harvest field.

First, have you thought about how FEW things Jesus asks us to pray for? There are the petitions of the Lord’s prayer. There is the ominous warning to pray The End does not come in winter. And then there is this: ask God, pray to Him, that He would send more laborers into the harvest field. I think we all agree we should pray what Jesus asks us to. But when was the last time you prayed for more workers in the harvest field? I confess, I do not as often as I should.

Second, this prayer is a key to multiplication. Jesus’s talk of seeds and harvest is about multiplication. Go do the math on how much wheat kernels you will have if you take one stalk of wheat (6 kernels) and plant its kernels and the kernels that come from each plant for the next 10 years. (It’s 60,466,176, or about 5400 loaves of bread… go think about multiplying the loaves and fishes for 20,000 people…) It’s too much to handle for the few workers that are in the harvest field.

That’s why I started this substack, to recruit prayers for the harvest, for multiplication.

Will you pray? And let me give you a heads up: when you pray that more workers would be sent into the harvest field, you are asking God to soften your heart to hear Him calling you into it!

Pray for the harvest… corn, beans, and souls.