Jeremiah 8

Jeremiah 8:20

IF WINTER COMES Jeremiah 8:20THIS text is one with which pioneer preachers harrowed my youth. I saw more than one protracted meeting open and end leaving me in the same conscious sinfulness. Again and again I heard the preacher quote this Scripture until it became an impressive refrain, “The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and I am not saved.” That circumstance renders it all the more strange that I should have remained in the ministry for forty-seven years without ever once preaching from this text; and possibly even now, if it were not for the on-coming of our studies in this complete Bible course, I might pass it by untouched.The intense heat of the past weeks have impressed all residents of this part of the world with the fact that the summer is at its climax, and however much we have discoursed upon the severe winters of Minnesota and the matchless summer climate of the same, the average Minnesotan is more than glad to think on the clear briskness of autumn, and even the shrill breezes of mid-winter, and so by mental manipulation, cool his parched frame. In other words, the theme of this moment is altogether a gracious one, “If winter comes.”Some ten years ago a book that wore this title held a chief place in popular reading lists. Its characters are but shadow images in my memory but its theme marvelously fits my text, for it is exactly that of which Jeremiah, the Prophet, was speaking—the apostasy on the part of his own people. The increasing feeling that God was gone forever; and that He had been provoked to departure by graven images of strange gods, excited this lament, “The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved”.Jeremiah is known as “the weeping Prophet”; and certainly at that juncture in Israel’s history his tears had occasion. But it is gravely doubtful whether they had more occasion than the Christian minister now feels. In the church today there is a kindred apostasy on the part of those who make up her membership, a kindred departure from that spiritual worship which is alone acceptable, and the result is a slow dearth, yea, even a drought that argues death.The text then, should have a present, and even a potent, application. Its three sentences suggest three subjects:THE HARVEST TIME“The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved”. In all ages “harvest time” has been a perfectly understood expression. The word describes a definite season, characterized by definite features and facts. But it also supposes and includes other seasons.First of all, It necessitates a time of seed sowing. Apart from seed sowing no harvest is possible. The seed-sowing belongs to the early months, to the spring season. Then the law of germination is operative, and that which is cast into the ground will respond to the warm rays of the sun and the gentle falling of the rain, and the young blades will break forth therefrom. To delay seed sowing then is fatal to farm interests and this fact has its spiritual counterpart.I own some land in Wisconsin. A little of it is cleared and has been under cultivation.

Early last spring a man wrote me concerning a forty acre piece, saying that he would like to put it into corn on shares. I replied by telling him that the man who occupied the adjacent farm had spoken for the forty and would doubtless be applying for the same. He answered, “I am that man who has rented the adjacent farm.” I wrote him asking him what he meant by shares, whether we would have equal amounts. After many days he replied, saying, that he expected to keep two-thirds of it and give me a third. I wrote and asked him how he would treat my third. After some days he replied saying, “Corn planting time is past now; we can do nothing with the forty this year.”How often men have lost out in spiritual farming after the same manner.

Too much time cannot be lost in spring season. Youth is the time in which to receive the seed, which is the Word of God, and if it be frittered away in discussing non-essentials, the soul may ‘waken too late, only to learn that the time of receiving the Word is past.

That is why it is written “Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth”. That is why it is said, “They that seek Me early shall find Me”. That is why Jesus said, “Suffer the little children to come unto Me, and forbid them not”.Furthermore, The harvest requires a period of careful cultivation. The most of the seeds that go into the ground, when once they have come forth in the blade or leaf, must be cultivated.In the South where I grew up, March and April were the time of seeding, but April, May and June were also the time of cultivation, hoeing and weeding. Potato crops had to be hoed, and tobacco, five times in that short season, in order to keep the weeds down. Corn-fields had to be treated after the same manner, and so the garden stuff.

In proportion as we were industrious at that season our crop was commonly a profitable one; and in proportion as we failed in the work of cultivation, in that proportion harvest fell short.Times have not changed! Out in Linden Hills, where I live, I have a small piece of rich ground in my back yard.

When first my home was built there, some twenty years ago, the farming spirit would come upon me every springtime, and I would go out and industriously spade up this ten by twenty feet square and plant it to radishes and tomatoes and sweet corn. Then the preaching calls would come in and I would start off for Texas or California to be gone for two weeks, or three, right when my garden cultivation was most needed; and lo, when once I had returned, my puny garden stuff, shadowed by rank weeds, was not worth the attempt to extricate it.This also has its spiritual counterpart. It is not enough to say—I accept Christ, I believe His Word, I am going to lead a Christian life. Bible reading, secret prayer, public confession; in other words, spiritual cultivation must follow or the weeds will come and choke and kill.In California, Pastor, Rev. E. E.

Ford, had a young man come to him who said that he would like to join his church, with the understanding that he would have his liberty. He said, “I am fond of the dance and the theater and other worldly amusements and want to keep all these.” “All right,” said the pastor, “you may come in and have your liberty, provided you will agree to one or two little stipulations that I will make.

They are as follows, That you will be in service every Sunday morning and night, attend the mid-week prayer-meeting and give your testimony.”The young man stood for a moment; then said, “Mr. Ford, that cannot be done.”“So,” said Mr. Ford. “It is impossible to mature thorns and wheat in the same field with any degree of success.” Cultivation, careful cultivation, is the possible procedure that hints promise of rich harvest time. This is true at many points, the successful man is the man who has met the conditions of fruitfulness. Henri Favre was a poor lad. He hawked lemons on the streets of Paris for a living and in his off hours studied insects.

His mother, counting this a most useless occupation, had boxed his ears many a time when she found him studying his bugs, but Henri Favre became an expert entomologist, an authority in that realm.Wagner, when he was a child, loved music. He told his teacher that he did, to be answered by the same teacher, “A musician you will never be.”But by perseverance he became world-famed in the profession of his choice.Handel’s father greatly disliked music, and was determined that his boy should study law.

But in spite of all his advice, the boy stuck to his determination and one of the greatest oratorios ever written was the result.Caruso began to study at twenty years of age and his teacher told him that he would never sing; but by the process of cultivation he became the world’s idol in song.There are people who imagine natural gifts are capable of cultivation, but spiritual graces are not. How absurd! Let William Booth tell us. He himself tells the story of how when he caught a vision of the needs of men, he offered himself to God for whatever he was worth. And when the success of his Salvation Army movement had reached the point where all the world was honoring him as a great spiritual leader and guide, he said, “God has had all there was of me. There have been men with greater brains; there have been men with greater opportunities, but from the moment I got the poor of England on my heart and what God could do with and for them, I made up my mind that God could have all there was of William Booth.” In other words, he laid his talents on the altar; he utilized his strength in service, and the growth came.But seed time and cultivation look to the days of reaping.That reaping is twofold, for here it applies in the spiritual world, “Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap”. Dr. Reuben A. Torrey, when he was yet alive, said that when Horace Bushnell became a teacher in Yale he was without God, without salvation. In those days constant endeavor was made to win the students to Christ. They found the endeavor was failing for the reason that the boys said, “There is Bushnell. He is our beau-ideal of what a man should be, and he is not a Christian.” “We do not need to be!”The excuse reached Bushnell’s ears. He saw at once that he was sowing seeds of indifference, and even of skepticism, in the minds of the students and he determined that he could not afford to reap the harvest that was sure to come from such sowing. Consequently he himself bowed before God, begged to be forgiven his past, that he might sow the seed not of damnation but of salvation instead.

Seed time, plow time, reaping time, these three are needed to ensure the harvest.But that is not the end of the year,THE SUMMER CLOSESReturn again to the text, “The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved”.The summer does not end with harvest time; it includes days beyond the same. There are few crops that ripen in autumn, most of them at midsummer instead; consequently when the Prophet thought of the summer ended, he was looking to a period still further on and therein lie other suggestions:The springtime long since past! Spring is a challenge. All nature seems to respond to it. After the long winter sleep it is anxious to awake, and like the rising of the sun girds itself as a strong man to run a race. Miss out there and you have missed out for more than that season; you have missed out for all seasons.

It is a great thing in the race of life to get a good start.Years ago I was on an athletic field one day when one of my own lads was a contestant. His older brother, much less athletic, said, “Now watch him; and see how far he goes at the crack of the gun.” To my amazement, for he was short of stature, his first leap sent him into the front rank and he was never overtaken.That is why a child who comes into the life of Christ grows and no convert of later years is likely to overtake him.

He started well and at the right time; he does not have to pay the price of illy-recovered delays.Fannie Crosby was handicapped in life’s start. She was only a few months old when blindness smote her.. But in spite of that fact she made her way to teacher first and to song-writer later; and through the success of the same influenced the world for salvation and for God.Helen Keller was more handicapped still, and yet, after identically the same manner, she rose and made her life immortal.Don’t lose the springtime; don’t lose the time of seed sowing; don’t fling away the opportunity that is as much bigger than that that can ever come, as the spring day is more full of promised fruitfulness than are all autumn days combined.Autumn means that the fruitful days are gone.There are very few things which we can sow even in mid-summer and reap from; and fewer yet when autumn comes. Charles Spurgeon realized the relation of seedtime to harvest. He knew that without sowing the seed and the careful cultivation of the same the reaping days would not reward.Sometime before his death he said: “The presence of God in saving power in the church will put an end to the present plague of infidelity. For a thousand reasons we need that Jehovah should come into the camp as aforetime He visited and delivered His people from bondage in Egypt.

Could we not all unite in prayer for this—Come to Thy Church, O Lord, in fulness of power to save. A generation has passed by and the Great Advent is not yet: a generation, and the Church is still waiting; a generation, and a billion souls have gone into eternity—a billion souls for whom Christ died.”This leads naturally to the text.

The winter comes; its cold blasts are on, then nothing sprouts, at least in the Northland. Not one sprig of growing grass; the icy chill of death is over all, the symbol of the spiritual estate of souls. Think of a whole year going by in the great Methodist denomination, one of the largest in the land, and in the world, making few converts and losing thousands of members.There is but one way to account for it, the winter is on; the cold breezes of infidelity are beating against the Church; the icy indifference of spiritual deadness claims an apostate church. It has had its day of opportunity and it failed. Harvest is not.But the last sentence:WE ARE NOT SAVEDWhat does salvation mean? Certainly this—a new life in Christ Jesus.

That, and that alone, can give victory over sin. That and that alone, can give promise of peace and joy and fruitfulness in the Spirit.

Christ is life! It means life to have Him.When A. J. Gordon was living he referred to the necessity of this new life within and illustrated his meaning by saying, “Imagine one without genius and devoid of the artist’s training sitting down before Raphael’s picture of The Transfiguration and attempting to reproduce it. How crude and mechanical and lifeless it would be. But if such a thing were possible that the spirit of Raphael, should enter into the man, obtain the mastery of his mind and eye and hand, it would be entirely possible that he should paint this masterpiece; for it would be simply Raphael producing Raphael and this is true of every disciple filled with the Holy Ghost.”’Christ in us, then, is salvation!

That is why Paul could say, “Nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: the hope of glory”.But we speak of those who are not saved. Who, then, are they?

The answer is simple because Scriptural: “If any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of His”. “He that hath not the Son of God hath not life”.These are days when we have what Mr. Spurgeon called “lavendar water theology”. All that fails to harmonize with the flesh is either forgotten or flatly denied. “Hell” therefore, is increasingly an unpopular word; and as for the soul’s being lost, Christian Science, so-called, and the pseudo-science called Science, agree that such is impossible and even inconceivable.But the Bible, which is the Word of God—and which has been the only Guide Book for immortal man these forty centuries, changes not. The word “hell” is still on its sacred pages; and the word “lost” still plays a permanent part in its discussion of souls.The figures of “Hell” are a multitude: “lake of fire and brimstone”, “the worm that dieth not”, “foam of the sea beating itself on the sands of time”, “blackness of darkness forever”, “destruction from the presence of the Lord”,—these are a few of them. I know not which one is to be taken literally; or whether all are to be taken figuratively, but I am fully persuaded that God would not use a figure beyond the fact. Hell is real; and lost souls are certain, if they live without Christ, rejecting Him, for John said, “There is a sin unto death: I do not say that he shall pray for it”.What is that sin? What, but the rejection of Jesus? “He that hath not the Son of God hath not life”; “but the wrath of God abideth on Him”.Beloved, with many of you it is springtime; it is the time to give the good seed of the Word of God place in your hearts; it is the time to begin the cultivation of the Christian life; it is the time which, if properly employed, will bring you one day to a harvest that is beautiful and abundant; and to a summer that shall never end!