John 4:34-38

Think about everything that contributed to the story of how you came to know Christ as your Lord and Savior. It’s probably not possible to fully count all those spiritual seeds that God used to draw you to Him. And not all the people who sowed good seed into your life knew what the outcome would be.

We also have the opportunity and privilege–every single day–of sowing seeds into the lives of others, such as our friends, co-workers, children, grandchildren, or even strangers. God takes what you plant and adds to it. He leads others to sow further seed or “water” the ground. Little by little, truth gets cultivated in their lives. What greater thing could you do?

Conversely, you might focus on providing your kids with plenty of material security and send them to the best schools and colleges–and yet it would count nothing for eternity. But when you sow into their lives the things of God and the qualities of Jesus, you’re feeding their spirits. The seeds that affect their hearts, view of God, and desire to make a difference for Him in the world are what will produce genuine, lasting fruit and a great harvest in their lives. Whether or not you ever see the results, the Lord is using you profoundly when you sow this kind of crop.

God sees all the little things you do; He’s interested in more than just “big” things. The fruit of His Spirit–such as kindness, patience, and self-control–often manifests itself in quiet ways that others may never give you credit for. But such spiritual seeds accomplish powerful work in His kingdom.

The Christian Vision Project was an initiative that began each of three consecutive years with a question. The aim was to stir thought, creativity, and faithfulness within the Christian church around the subjects of culture, mission, and gospel. In 2006, project leaders asked a group of Christian thinkers how followers of Christ could be countercultural for the common good. Their answers ranged from becoming our own fiercest critics to experiencing life at the margins, from choosing wisely what to overlook and what to belabor to packing up and moving into the city.

But today one answer in particular comes to mind. To the question of counterculturalism for the common good, professor and author Lauren Winner proposed: More sleep. She quickly admitted the curious nature of her retort. “Surely one could come up with something more other-directed, more sacrificial, less self-serving,” she wrote.  Still, she carefully reasoned through the forces of culture that insist we give up an hour of sleep here, or two hours there–the grinding schedules, the unnerving stock piles of e-mail in need of responses, the early-taught/early-learned push for more and more productivity. Thus, Winner concluded, “It’s not just that a countercultural embrace of sleep bears witness to values higher than ‘the cares of this world, the deceitfulness of riches, and the desire for other things.’ A night of good sleep—a week, or month, or year of good sleep—also testifies to the basic Christian story of Creation. We are creatures, with bodies that are finite and contingent.”(1) We are also bodies living within a culture generally terrified of aging, uncomfortable with death, and desperate for our accomplishments to distract us. “The unarguable demands that our bodies make for sleep are a good reminder that we are mere creatures,” Winner concludes. “[I]t is God and God alone who ‘neither slumbers nor sleeps.'”(2)

Last week the Christian church celebrated Ash Wednesday, the day on the Christian calendar that urges humanity to remember its condition with countercultural audacity. The season of Lent, the forty days in which Christians prepare to encounter the events of Easter, begins by proclaiming the humble beginnings of creatureliness. The ashes of Ash Wednesday starkly remind us of the dust we came from and the dust to which we will return. On this day, foreheads are marked with a bold and ashen cross of dust, recalling both our history and our future, invoking repentance, inciting stares. Marked with his cross, we are Christ’s own: pilgrims on a journey that proclaims death and suffering, life and resurrection all at once. The journey through Lent into the light and darkness of Holy Week is for those made in dust who will return to dust, those willing to trace the breath that began all of life to the place where Christ breathed his last. It is a journey that expends everything within us. To pick up the cross and follow him is to be reminded at every step that we are mere creatures, and he has come near our humanity to show us what that word originally meant.

In fact, in the season that marches the church toward the vast and terrible events of Holy Week, there are times when we may justifiably feel like the disciples, weary with sorrow, our own eyes heavy with sleep. Current world events and worn-out cries of anguish only deepen this wearied exhaustion. Arguably, this innate instinct is fitting. “[T]o sleep, long and soundly,” says Winner, “is to place our trust not in our own strength and hard work, but in him without whom we labor in vain.”(3) We cannot carry all that Christ carried anymore than we can carry the sorrows we now see all around us. Yet, where we are prone to exchange sound and trusting sleep for fretful slumber, helpless sorrow, or apathetic fatigue, Christ emerges through his own weariness to wake us. “Are you still sleeping and taking your rest? See, the hour is at hand” (Matthew 26:45).

The journey toward the Cross is one that will show both the Christian and a world of contrasting beliefs that we are all finite, fragile creatures in need of a guide, in need of sleep, in need of one who can bear far more than we are able. The Cross will also show that the one we need truly exists. While his friends slept, Jesus stepped closer toward betrayal and agony, going all the way to his death, so that one day he could wake us for good:  “Wake up, O sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you” (Ephesians 5:14). The journey from dust to dust and back to the Father’s house would be far too great without him.

 Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Lauren Winner, Books & Culture, January/February 2006, Vol. 12, No. 1, Page 7.
(2) Ibid.
(3) Ibid.

Now we have received . . . The spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God.

1 Corinthians 2:12

Dear reader, have you received the Spirit who is from God? The necessity of the work of the Holy Spirit in the heart may be clearly seen from this fact, that all which has been done by God the Father and by God the Son will be ineffectual to us unless the Spirit reveals these things to our souls. What effect does the doctrine of election have upon any man until the Spirit of God enters into him?

Election is a dead letter in my consciousness until the Spirit of God calls me out of darkness into marvelous light. Then through my calling, I see my election, and knowing myself to be called of God, I know myself to have been chosen in the eternal purpose. A covenant was made with the Lord Jesus Christ by His Father; but what good is that covenant to us until the Holy Spirit brings us its blessings and opens our hearts to receive them? These blessings in Christ Jesus are beyond our reach, but the Spirit of God takes them down and hands them to us, and so they actually become ours.

Covenant blessings in themselves are like bread in heaven, far out of mortal reach, but the Spirit of God opens the windows of heaven and scatters the living bread around the camp of the redeemed. Christ’s finished work is like wine stored in the wine-vat; through unbelief we can neither draw nor drink. The Holy Spirit dips our vessel into this precious wine, and then we drink; but without the Spirit we are as truly dead in sin as though the Father never had elected, and though the Son had never bought us with His blood. The Holy Spirit is absolutely necessary to our well-being. Let us walk lovingly toward Him and tremble at the thought of grieving Him.