Taking It to Work:
What we get paid is important. We work for a paycheck . . . most of us anyway, and the amount of money we get for each hour or week or month is something most people track, at least to some extent. We don’t want to feel undervalued, and a healthy paycheck can make the hard week worthwhile.
The Lord reminds us today that our workplace and its tasks, those we get paid for, are right in the middle of His larger workplace with even greater task, and it pays a wage that we can’t measure this side of eternity.
What is that workplace? Well, to use the Lord’s description, the field is white for harvest (very ready). What are the tasks within that field? They are any actions that will bring those around us closer to Him. In so many cases, we are the earthen vessels that the Father uses to draw those He loves to the Son. The kindness, the patience, the beaming out of God’s light through you, a light that is there to eventually draw them to Him.
We have a great role to play in the Lord’s gathering of His people. As you work side-by-side with those who were once strangers, friendships form, lives are shared, and conversations happen. Some of those conversations will be about family, blessings, tough times, suffering, faith, and eventually God’s call on your life. In sharing your call to faith, God may awaken theirs.
So often that is how it works. As He enters into the hearts and lives of those we work with, because we were there and aware of their need for what we already have, one by one, the harvest is brought in, and the God of the universe rejoices.
This is the ultimate work of the believer, and it pays the ultimate wage, as His Word works through you, in the wheat field of your workplace, today.
John 4:35-36 (ESV) – Do you not say, ‘There are yet four months, then comes the harvest’? Look, I tell you, lift up your eyes, and see that the fields are white for harvest. Already the one who reaps is receiving wages and gathering fruit for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice together.
1Tim 5:18 (ESV) – For the Scripture says, “You shall not muzzle an ox when it treads out the grain,” and, “The laborer deserves his wages.”
Luke 10:2 (ESV) – And he said to them, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few. Therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.
John 6:44 (ESV) – No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. And I will raise him up on the last day.
Heb 10:36 (ESV) – For you have need of endurance, so that when you have done the will of God you may receive what is promised.
Listening to the Holy Spirit (Rhema):
Brimming over – the wage of he who serves the Kingdom will cover the wage of the world, as the ocean covers a single grain of sand. Your work is among the great harvest; your light, among the great darkness. The harvest is white beyond its ideal gathering, time that many more would be gathered. Your workplace brims with those. Focus both on the needs of the tasks, but also on the needs of the people I bring to you. Treat them as I have treated you. Show patience; bring blessing to their lives; bring truth. The light that shines from the way you work will draw them close, that the Holy Spirit may move and the sickle of the harvest will bring them bound in My love into the Kingdom. It is a difficult thing to see the great wage of the harvester, but he who works for this wage will not have room to contain it. Even in eternity, its measure cannot be held.
