Featured Article - Edition 11 When I became a Christian in the true sense of the word and started trying to live for God I remember it as a time of much pain and confusion. The reason for this was because so many of my friends (and most notably my boyfriend at the time) were not Christians. I remember feeling like the outsider, a prude, boring, unadventurous, dull. |
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I even had a fall out with a close friend because I simply did not know how to handle my new faith and what it meant for my lifestyle – that getting drunk did not put a smile on God’s face, that sex before marriage was not a God–glorifying choice, that I needed to clean up my language, that gossiping was actually hurting my spirit. It was a hard, frustrating and unpleasant time and there were moments when I wondered why on earth I was following this road. When I look back on it, I can clearly see the hand of God planting seeds in my heart through circumstances and through people. As I made peace with my decision and surrendered to God, His love came into my life and I was able to more easily grow into my new faith without sitting at the braai like an ice queen, wearing a scowl and daring anyone to offer me a drink. As the transformation of my mind began, I found myself wanting to talk to my friends about what was really going on; how my faith was actually enhancing my life when to their eyes it was having the precisely opposite affect. What followed was more pain… It was hardest with my boyfriend. With my friends there was a distance, I didn’t see them every day. But with my boyfriend, my decisions affected him almost as much as they affected me. I found myself in arguments with him – telling him that my faith was adding to my life, all the while sobbing my heart out. I can’t blame him for being confused and not leaping at the chance to go to church with me – I hardly made Christianity seem fulfilling and appealing. I found myself growing more and more frustrated as I tried to tell him about Jesus and seemed to have so little impact. It was at the beginning of last year that I really hit rock bottom. I had been trying so hard to come to terms with my convictions and to convict other people at the same time and I was making no progress in either area. I heard God telling me that I needed to sort out myself first. I needed to decide what I believed and come to terms with the implications for my life before I tried to explain it to anyone else. So I left everyone else alone, especially my boyfriend. I concentrated on having my quite time, going to church, continuing with my cell group and learning through it all. During the next few months I found myself to be more calm and positive about things. And then without me even being aware of it, I started to tell people about my faith. I started planting the seeds from the words flowering in me. This time though, there was growth… A while ago someone made me aware of a passage in Isaiah that explained for me why I had found it so much easier to talk to people about my faith once it had taken root in my heart. The passage it Isaiah 28:23-29 and it goes like this… 23 Listen to me; The verse that jumped out for me first was the last one, verse 29: The Lord of Heaven’s Armies is a wonderful teacher, and he gives the farmer great wisdom. To me, we are clearly the farmers in this scenario. In Luke 10:2 Jesus tells the disciples, “The harvest is great, but the workers are few.” We are all living with the Great Commission to spread the Gospel and the Holy Spirit gives us the wisdom to do so. I have found that the when the topic of Jesus comes up in conversation that I need to try and figure out if the Holy Spirit is telling me to speak or not. Those times when I have tried to use the opportunity even if the timing wasn’t right, the results were disastrous; but when I spoke only when spoken to by God, then I found that people received my words much more openly. The second thing that struck home with me was verse 25: Does he not finally plant his seeds— black cumin, cumin, wheat, barley, and emmer wheat— each in its proper way, and each in its proper place? During those dark days of confusion, I would give someone a teaching or share a story with them that had revolutionised the way I saw God. I simply could not understand when the person was left completely untouched. I remember feeling such frustration that what had worked for me did not work for them. But I have learnt to remember that we are all different. God meets us where we are when we seek Him and when the time and place is right, the seeds will fall on fertile soil and take root. What we need to do is to listen to Him so that when He tells us the time is right – we can plant! Verses 27 to 28 describe the sensitivity we need to employ when trying to plant seeds in the hearts of others: A heavy sledge is never used to thresh black cumin; rather, it is beaten with a light stick. A threshing wheel is never rolled on cumin; instead, it is beaten lightly with a flail. Grain for bread is easily crushed, so he doesn’t keep on pounding it. He threshes it under the wheels of a cart, but he doesn’t pulverize it. The truth hurts even if it is the Word of God. I know for me it did. I remember when God convicted me about sex before marriage. I was doing my ironing and watching a talk by David Pawson on DVD. When he started talking about premarital sex, his words just cut straight to my heart and I stood there, resolutely ironing away but with tears just pouring down my face. The reality is that despite being the Good News, some things are not always easy to hear. We need to realise this but when the seeds we plant cause pain, don’t bring out the sledge hammer! Growth almost always comes out of hurt but we need to support people through their “light beatings” and not pulverize them further. In the two and a half years that have passed since I started following Jesus, God has done incredible things. That boyfriend is now my husband and finding his feet in a sincere and genuine Christian faith. God truly has answered my prayers and when I look back at it now, I see that I was often guided by Him to plant seeds in the heart of my husband. Remember that seeds are small and that you might not see anything happening, but deep down they are germinating, the definition of which is to come into existence: to begin. Henry David Thoreau puts it well: “Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been, I have great faith in a seed. Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders.” Expect wonders!
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