2.01.02. The harvest field and the harvest laboureres, Part 2

II. THE HARVEST FIELD AND THE HARVEST LABOURERS.

“Then saith he unto his disciples, The harvest truly is plenteous, but the labourers are few; pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he will send forth labourers into his harvest.” — Matthew 9:37-38.

PART SECOND. THE HARVEST LABOURERS. A HEAVY burden lies on the husbandman’s heart when he sees his cornfields fully ripe, and knows not where to find a sufficient band of reapers. The thought that the last year’s labour and the coming winter’s hope may both be lost together occupies and oppresses him. For the fruit he planned and toiled and spent his means; and shall it slip, now that it is so near his lip? This heaviness of heart the Man of sorrows employed to express his care at the sight of human generations perishing for lack of knowledge. When he lifted up his eyes and saw the people of Sychar coming out in companies to the well, his soul yearned for their salvation as for the reaping of ripened fruit, lest it should drop and be lost for ever. “ Lift up your eyes,” he said to the twelve, “ and look on the fields; for they are white already to harvest “ (John 4:35). If the mind that was in Christ were in his people now, there is much in the aspect of the world fitted to stir both fear and hope in their breasts" I. As the world’s population, living and dying without God, appears in the Redeemer’s eye a great harvest-field, ripe and ready to perish, those who in any sphere strive to win souls are, in his eye, as reapers gathering the wheat into the gamer. A labourer need not expect to lead an easy, idle life. To eat his bread with the sweat of his brow is a necessity of his condition. Our Father is our Master; and he says, Son, go work to-day in my vineyard. For a reconciled man who possesses the spirit of adoption work is worship. The labour of his hand, as well as the song of his lips, is praise to the Lord that bought him. Christ the Son made himself a servant, and it was his meat to do the Father’s will Christians are admitted to be Christ’s fellow-servants; and the more they resemble the Lord, the more they rejoice in their work.

Labourers are not a high class of functionaries. They need not expect to get all their own will as to the times and places of their toil. It is their business not to select the field that pleases themselves, but to labour diligently at the task which the Master may have assigned them.

What thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might. The Husbandman may send some of the reapers into a thin and comparatively barren field, where they must bend very low and toil very long ere they get their bosoms filled with corn; and he may send others to a more favoured spot, where with less exertion and in a shorter time they may gather many sheaves. Sometimes, in the natural sphere, a jealousy springs up, and a murmuring breaks out among the reapers on this ground; but in the spiritual harvest there is no cause for complaint: there is no respect of persons with God — “ Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life.” The Judge of all the earth when he distributes the eternal reward lays the emphasis, not on the number of the talents that may have been intrusted to the servant, but on the faithfulness of the servant in the execution of his trust.

II. In the judgment of the Lord Jesus the labourers were few. They were few then; they are few still. We are not at liberty to set aside the force of the word by pointing out that the circumstances are different in our day. Such a prophecy of Scripture is not of any private interpretation. Jesus spake as never man spake. He spoke to his own generation with his eye on all generations.

Although, in point of fact, a much greater number of labourers are employed in the harvest-field to-day, the Lord himself would not retract his word if he were now amongst us. He would still say, “ The labourers are few.” After a multitude whom no man could number had entered by the narrow gate into the kingdom, he cried, “ Few there be that find it.” A great multitude have pressed in since that day, and yet he would certainly repeat the same cry were he on earth again. His heart is so enlarged toward a lost world that he will complain, Few are coming, until the last man is safe within the gate. In like manner here he would not retract his plaintive word about the paucity of the labourers because one Church has sent fifty missionaries to the heathen, and another a hundred. All flesh is grass; but the word of the Lord abideth for ever: it is true for us to-day. The labourers are few, — few in proportion to the world’s need; few in proportion to the compassion of the Lord. As that same Jesus from his throne to-day looks down upon the world, and counts the numbers that attempt to reap the vast fields of India, and China, and Africa — the vast fields of our overgrown cities in so-called Christian lands — we may rest assured he will not retract or modify his word, “ The labourers are few.” A very remarkable contrast is presented in the multitudes that may sometimes be seen pressing forward to the natural harvest. The pressure has slackened of late; but a few years ago you might have seen, any day about the beginning of autumn, dense crowds of Irish labourers clustering like bees about the wharves of Liverpool and Glasgow. On one occasion the master of a Londonderry steamer, on arriving at Glasgow, was prosecuted for admittmg a much greater number of passengers than his ship was legally entitled to carry. His defence was that the men rushed on board in spite of his efforts to prevent them, and took forcible possession of the deck. Such were the numbers that poured into the Scottish harvest-fields at that time, and such the eagerness of each man to get a share of the work and the reward.

It is even so: natural wants press heavily, and their pressure is keenly felt. The motive is sufficient to throw an abundance of labourers into the harvest. But a spiritual taste and a divine power are needed to fill with reapers that vast ripe field over which the compassionate Saviour looked and longed.

III. When additional labourers enter the field, they are sent into it by the Lord of the harvest. The expression “send forth” in the English version is feebler than the corresponding term in the original. The word which the Lord employs conveys the idea of force. It is literally “ throw out,” as missiles are thrown in war into a besieged city. The labourers are grasped by the providential hand of God, and thrown upon the field where their services are needed, not indeed against their will, but by means of their will. They are made willing in a day of power. A secret force, like the force of fire, is generated within the man, — as it were behind and beneath his will. While the man is musing alternately on the Redeemer’s mercy to himself, and the need of a perishing world, this fire bums and disturbs his rest. To such a height of pressure the force at length attains that he can no longer resist: he is torn from the fastenings where he had said, Soul, eat and drink and take thine ease, and thrown with a great impetus forth from himself and into the field of labour. It is after this manner that missionaries are made. He works best on this field who cannot help working: “ Woe is unto me if I preach not the gospel.” The power that throws the missionary into the field is the love of Christ to his own soul: it is divine mercy tasted in secret that swells about his heart, until all barriers burst, and the volunteer comes forth with the old oflFer founded on the old reason, “O Lord, I am thy servant thou hast loosed my bonds.” The distinction between a missionary properly so called, who abandons his secular calling and devotes himself wholly to the ministry of the word, and a disciple who abides in his calling and commends the gospel to his neighbours, although important, is a distinction of detail and not of principle. The Lord has need of both sorts; and the world has need of both. Some portions of the work cannot be reached except by men set apart for the purpose; and other parts cannot be reached except by the silent every-day influence of Christians upon the consciences of those with whom they come into closest contact from day to day and from hour to hour. The Master will send some reapers forth into great and distant fields, and some down into minute openings, where only those can work who are every day and all day upon the spot.

“The poor always ye have with you,” not only indicates a fact of history, but reveals a plan and purpose of the Lord. Exercise is provided for the spiritual life. None shall be able to say that the field was too distant, and that he consequently had not an opportunity of rendering service as a reaper. A man cannot sit at meals in his own family, walk along the streets, or pursue his daily toil on the farm or in the workshop, without passing along this laden harvest-field. Everywhere precious fruit, ready to perish, offers itself to the reaper’s hand. Nowhere in the world at the present day can a sadder sight be seen than in the great cities of so-called Christian lands. Great, needy, promising fields have been placed within reach of every disciple of Christ; none should stand idle. If any stand all the day idle, they will not at last be permitted to urge either that the field was distant or that the hirer made no proposal. Work is offered to every one, and the reward is sure. To win souls is both work and wages. To illustrate the manner in which it pleases the Lord of the harvest sometimes to throw a reaper into the field, I shall mention one example which came under my own personal knowledge. In a remote rural district of Scotland, a boy passed through a spiritual struggle of several stages, resisting the Spirit with varying measures of determination, in order to keep himself free for the expected pleasures of the world, but never able wholly to silence the still small voice. At length the love of Christ gained the mastery, and the youth surrendered; not unwillingly, but because now his will had been won, and it became both a reasonable and a pleasant service to own the Redeemer as his King. Few, perhaps none, were aware of the conflict while it lasted, for he kept it secret as if it were a crime.

Having occasion one day, after he had chosen conclusively his side, to cross a range of hills on his way to the market town of the district, he must needs pass a lonely thatched cottage where he knew a poor and very old man lay dying.

He must go in; he dare not pass by; the groans of the old man would have followed and haunted him. Nor was he unwilling to go in; the conflict now lay with a certain conventional and constitutional bashfulness. Grown now, but inexperienced and shame-faced, he stepped in and stood by the old man’s bed, repeated some texts, and uttered some timid words to commend Christ to a sinner.

He was about to take leave, when the old man’s daughter, herself far advanced in life, and of rough, ungainly appearance, came forward, tamed at least for the time by a sense of loneliness, and with a beseeching look from filling eyes, underneath long shaggy eyebrows, and gray dishevelled hair that hung over a weather-beaten, wrinkled brow, said, “ Yell pray wi’ my faither? “ The youth was enclosed; the net was round him; his retreat was cut oflT; backward he cannot, forward he must go. He prayed for the first time in the hearing of strangers. Such was the instrument that the Lord of the harvest employed that day to come behind one reaper who was hesitating and holding back on the border, and to throw him, ere he was well aware, over that dreaded fence into the harvest-field. It is a long, long time ago; and, God helping him, he is in the field, a reaper still to-day.

IV. The Lord of the harvest presses labourers into the field in answer to the prayers of his people. The request of Jesus possesses a tender interest for us. He who bids us address this prayer to the Father knows the Father’s mind, and always does what pleases Him. Let it be settled firmly in a disciple’s mind that Christ would not persuade us to say anything to the Father that the Father would not like to hear; and it is certain that the Father loves to grant the requests that he loves to hear. Indeed, it is because he longs to grant the requests that he delights to hear them. There is an encouragement of peculiar power to induce us to prefer the request in the fact that the Mediator between God and man urges us to prefer it at the throne. But some who hear, and hear with reverence, the word of Jesus, so far from being themselves ready to be sent forth as reapers, may be in sadness reckoning themselves the wheat that is not yet gathered atid ready to perish.

Yet even in these circumstances he who hears the word of Christ should obey it, — should pray the Lord of the harvest to send forth labourers. Let the first groans of an anxious soul be shaped into this prayer, and the Lord may send out a reaper to gather thee. We know that the Spirit of God sent out Philip from his mission work in the city to a desert place near Gaza, to meet the Ethiopian treasurer there, — a reaper to gather a precious head of wheat into the garner; but I think that silent sable African, with his weeping eye bent on Isaiah’s gospel, had sent a petition up to the Lord of the harvest for a reaper; and in answer to his own prayer a labourer was sent out to the field to gather him in.