Reading: Video Transcript - The Opportunity to Sow

Missional vision is seeing the opportunities that God gives us to plant the seed, to sow, to go into the field to sow and to grow the seed. So in this section, I want to talk about sowing the seed. Just exactly what is seed? We're going to deal with that.

Before we do that, let me tell you a story about the first seminar I ever did in India back in the 70s. It was in a huge Assemblies of God church in Calcutta. This church, or this mission station really, fed 25,000 poor people a day. It's hard to imagine that. But if you're in Calcutta and you see the masses of people, you'll realize that 25,000 people in reflection is a very small number of the people there. Along with that, there was Mother Teresa's work just beginning nearby.

After I did the seminar, I was walking through the streets with Bill Scott, the mentor, my mentor, the Indian missionary who had been there for 20 years from Ireland. And as we walked through the streets and looked at all the poverty and wondered why things weren't changing, Bill observed something that really became the foundation of our ministry. He said, "John, let me tell you what the greatest temptation of Satan is. It's the temptation to do the good that God hasn't called you to do. "

Wow. Chew on that for a minute. You only think Satan's tempting you to do wrong, to do sin. No, Satan also tempts us to do good. Because in doing the good that God hasn't called us to do, substituting our choice of good for God’s can really frustrate the whole program.

Now, let me explain that with a very simple little illustration. Let's imagine that I'm a farmer. Now, that's crazy because I'm a city guy. I grew up in the city. The first church I served was out in farm country in the state of Minnesota. But I used to get so overwhelmed with it all, that on a hot summer day, I'd go to Sioux Falls just to stand on the street corner and breathe in some good old-fashioned bus exhaust and settle my stomach.

Anyway, be that as it may, this is really funny. I actually had a vision of this - that I'm driving a brand-new tractor, see. I'm a farmer. I'm driving a brand-new tractor, and I'm plowing the field, and I'm cultivating the field, and I'm disking the field. I'm doing everything you do with a tractor, and I'm having a great time of it. I really work it every single day. Along with that tractor, I have an irrigation system, and I'm watering these fields faithfully. Day after day, I go out and look at this irrigation system. I just love it. I love all of these good things about farming. You can't farm unless you plow and cultivate. You can't farm unless you irrigate. It's just really an awesome thing. But you know something? I got to the fall and into the winter, and I didn't have a harvest. Nothing. All that work, all that plowing, all that cultivating, all that irrigating, there wasn't a single crop that was grown and I couldn't figure out what in the world happened.

You know what I forgot? I forgot to plant the seed. Go back to that story I started with 1967 when I wanted to build a church and God said, "You can't build a church. You can only grow it and you can only grow it by planting a seed. " And the heart and core of missions, true missional vision is to see how much seed you planted and where you planted it. That's the core. All the other good things in farming surround it. You probably won't get much of a harvest if you don't plow and you don't cultivate and irrigate. All of those things are good things. But if they substitute the main thing of teaching the Bible to non-Christians, folks, you're not going to get a spiritual harvest.

Seed is something that contains the potential of the whole, like an avocado pit or an acorn. You plant an acorn. What do you get out of an acorn? You can get an oak tree that's 50 feet high or higher - huge trees. Take a kernel of corn. Hold it in your hand. Just look at it. Look at how small that kernel of corn is. Do you realize that when that kernel of corn is planted, it can produce 600 kernels of corn?

Take a sunflower seed. Look at it. A little black thing produces a great big mammoth sunflower. You can hardly count the seeds in a sunflower. Seed is something that contains the potential for everything.

Now, God's seed, the spiritual seed is his Word. I Peter 1:23 says, "For you have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, through the living and enduring word of God." Now, look at that very carefully. You've been born again. What? Not of perishable seed. But every time a person is born again, he is born again with imperishable seed, which is the living and enduring word of God which produces an eternal life.

I love the way the New Living Translation puts it. "For you have been born again. Your new life did not come from your earthly parents, because the life they gave you will end in death. But this new life will last forever because it comes from the eternal, living word of God."

Look at that. It comes from the eternal, living word of God. That's what sowing the seed is. When a mom teaches her little boy a bible story, what's she doing? She has already had physical seed grow in that little boy. But now she's planting eternal, spiritual seed. Every time the Bible is taught, be it in vacation bible school, be in children's Bible clubs, be it in our adult literacy program in India, I don't care what way as long as that seed in its wholeness from creation to the second coming is somehow planted in a person's life. You are planting the seed of eternal life.

Now, in India, there is a special type of seed that we've developed. And in all different countries, the seed can take different kinds of forms. Here in the United States, it also can take the form of Freedom from Fear. Freedom from Fear is a little bible overview from creation to completion, which answers the five basic fears that people in every culture and every language have.

I developed this concept one time when I was out in a village of India with some church planters, and I asked them, I said, "We're getting all this material, this Bible course and so on. How many of these people around here can really read?"

And they kind of were embarrassed, and these were people that we were training to plant churches. They said, "Well, sir, about 10% of the people can read."

I said, "How do you get the rest to the others?"

"Oh, we tell them stories and we do that."

I said, "How would you like to have a set of pictures instead of this print?" Oh, they loved that. So what we did was we took five concepts and we drew pictures. We drew pictures of creation. We drew a picture of the fall. We drew a picture of Jesus coming, and teaching, and dying on Calvary's cross, and rising again. We drew a picture of the church going out to tell others and of heaven.

And we put them all on a very little pamphlet, and we said, "Now you go out and you go from home to home in a village, and you give them these pictures."

Well, in the Indian context, giving them a picture or something to hang on a wall is really awesome. And so you explain it and when they have understood it, you take the back page off, which is a certificate of completion and you hang it on the wall. Then they cut the other pictures out and hung them on them up too. But this little approach just worked wonders.

Now, we did something else with that. Before we went to Freedom from Fear, we were working with a course called Guide to Happiness. And we still work with that. That's the second course, and it's a follow-up. And that course-- or the first course, “Five Reasons for Fear” deals with five questions: Who am I? What's wrong with me? Why doesn't God do something? How can I have meaning? What happens when I die?

Those are universal. When people don't understand who they are, they don't know what's wrong, they don't know what God has done, they don't know how life can have real meaning, they don't know what happens after they die, they're full of fear, whether that's India, or Nigeria, or Chile, or United States, or Canada. It doesn't make any difference.

And so we answered those five questions with pictures, in India. Here in the West, in the United States, we're doing with a little booklet called Freedom from Fear. Both courses are called Freedom from Fear. This little booklet, Freedom from Fear, starts with Genesis 1 and it answers the question, who am I? People don't understand that. You and I, as humans, are created as image bearers of God. We're created in his likeness. Genesis 1:26 says, "Let us make man in our image and in our likeness." We're greater than the angels. Can you imagine what happens when you proclaim that to somebody who's without hope in the inner city, to somebody who's in a slum in India or to wherever you're proclaiming it?

You are precious to God. You are a child of the king. You are created in the image of God. He calls us his children. He doesn't say that to angels. Angels are his messengers. Sure, they're strong, and big, and can do miracles and wonders, but they're not his children. Someday, we will judge the angels. Angels never have the comfort that we have. When you look at a little baby held in the arms of Mommy or Daddy and you hear them singing lullabies, do you realize that this is a picture in scripture? Zephaniah 3:16 says, "I will rejoice over you with singing." What glorious good news. That starts at the beginning of creation.

And then, the second thing - what's wrong with me? We go into the story of sin, and failure, and how we've messed up, and how we've not been content to be in the image of God. We want to be God, and we've rebelled against him.

And then, you've got the third question. Why doesn't God do something? I asked that so when I went to India for the first time. Why doesn't God do something? There in India, I looked all around. I thought, "God, how can you let all this go on for 2,000 years, 3,000 years? There's so much suffering here."

And God said quietly, "I think I have done something, John."

"Oh. What is it?" And I said, "I know what it is." With tears coming down my face, I said, "God, you've given your only son."

And he said, "Fine. What have you done for India, John?"

Then I said, "All I've ever done was I didn't want to go when you called me."

And God says, "Well now, get busy. Plant the seed, and we'll talk about other problems later on."

So I've just had that great comfort that God before Jesus comes again, is going to turn the lights on all over India. But also, he's going to turn the lights back on in the United States. He's going to work here just as well. He's going to work in all countries of the world. There's going to be a massive harvest before he comes because, in Revelations 7, we read that there will be people from every tribe, and tongue, and nation, and people.

How can I have meaning, the fourth question is that once you're born again, the Holy Spirit comes into you. You have to read John 7:37, 38, 39. Jesus is speaking about this when the priests are pouring the water out on the temple in that reenactment of the vision of Ezekiel 47. And he shouts above all the noise, standing there. And the people look at him in amazement. He says, "Whoever believes in me from within him will come torrents of Living Water." Meaning in life, you have all kinds of meaning when you understand that the Spirit comes in you when you're born again. And out of you comes the Spirit of God, giving life to others. And how does that life come? It comes only when you plant the seed of God's word.

And what happens when you die? You go to live with him for all eternity.

Now, we follow up with this course in India with another little course called Guide to Happiness. This is really the course I started with. It was probably the last of the courses that I'd written in the late 60s and 70s. And I sent all the nice courses that I had done to India, and nothing worked.

Finally, Bill Scott asked, "Don't you have another one?"

I said, "Well, yeah. I've got a course I wrote for kids. It only took me three days. It goes from creation to the second coming in 12 lessons."

"Well, send it over." And he translated it into Telugu, and it just took off like crazy.

By the end of the 90s, we had distributed 30 million copies. And I couldn't figure out why it was so incredibly effective. But it's so effective simply because it presents the Gospel on linear time.

A Brahman explained this to me one time.  He said, "The Hindu mind is like a glass with all baffle plates in it. And when you're trying to get the Gospel through, they put their own meaning into words like hell, heaven, Jesus, all this sort of thing." But there are two things that the Hindu can't accommodate into this worldview. That's a beginning and an end. Because his worldview is built on reincarnation. It's a cyclical worldview that goes around, and around, and around."

"Oh."

And he says, "When they start at the beginning and they end at the end," as both Freedom from Fear does and Guide to Happiness does, all of a sudden, they understand. And these two bible courses are really profound seed that everyone around the world needs. We need this desperately today in the United States. We've never been quite so low as we are right now. And we need to get this Freedom from Fear into every single home. That's what we'll talk about in the next section of Going. Let's bow in prayer.

Father, we thank you so much that you've put into our hands the seed of eternal life. Help us to understand that. And help us, Lord, never to substitute our concept of good for yours. Help us to focus as good, spiritual farmers that everything has to revolve around whether or not we're effectively planting the seed of eternal life in others as we love them, as we meet their needs, as we plow, as we irrigate, as we cultivate. Guide and direct us. Give us missional vision, Lord, to see the opportunities to sow the Word of God. Hear us Jesus for the sake of your honor, your glory, and your sacrifice. In your name, we pray. Amen.