The Laws of Sowing and Reaping—Part Two

Guest (Male): Hey everybody, welcome to Pastor Rick's Daily Hope. Well, we're talking about your money. That's right. We're continuing a powerful series called Financial Fitness. Rick is opening God's Word and showing us how to manage what we've been given with wisdom, faith, and purpose. And I know if you apply these biblical principles, you'll start to experience true financial freedom and lasting peace. Okay, and now here's part two of a message called The Laws of Sowing and Reaping.
Pastor Rick Warren: Now here's the third law of sowing and reaping: whatever I sow is what I will reap. Whatever I sow, whatever I put in the ground, is what I'm going to reap. This is the law of reproduction. Now, if a farmer goes out and he's got a trailer load of beans—red beans, kidney beans, lima beans, whatever—and he goes out and he starts planting beans in a barren field, what does he expect to bear fruit? Watermelon? No. If he's planting beans, is he going to get cucumbers? No. Is he going to get candy canes? No. Is he going to get horses? No. He's going to get beans. Whatever you plant is what you're going to get back. He doesn't doubt it. He doesn't question it. He knows whatever I sow, I'm going to reap. Now, this applies to every single area of your life, but especially in your finances. There's a phrase that is repeated over and over in the book of Genesis, and it is the phrase where God says, each is to reproduce after its own kind. In other words, tomato plants have tomatoes, not potatoes. Apple trees bear apples, not pears. You're never going to see corn growing on a grapevine. Cows produce baby cows, and chickens produce baby chickens, and human beings produce baby human beings because in God's economy, we reproduce after our own kind. And we reap in the same kind as we sow. Now, this can work either positively or negatively in your life. It can be for you or it can work against you. Whatever you sow in life, you're going to reap. Galatians 6:7 says this: Do not deceive yourself. In other words, don't kid yourself. No one makes a fool of God. You will reap exactly what you plant in life. Now, as I said, that can be either positive or negative, work for you or against you in your life. He's saying here that whatever I dish out in life is what I'm going to get back. What goes around comes around. And if I'm out planting seeds of kindness to other people, people are going to be kind to me. And if I go out and I show grace and mercy and I cut people some slack, people are going to show grace and mercy and cut me some slack. If I go out and I'm forgiving of others, people are going to be forgiving of me. If I'm generous with other people, people are going to be generous with me. Whatever you sow, you're going to reap. But the opposite is true, too, in a negative sense. If I go out and I'm angry all the time, you know what I'm going to get back? Anger from other people. I'm angry, I'm going to make them angry at me. If I'm critical, then people are going to criticize me. If I'm judgmental, people are going to judge me. If I cheat other people, people are going to cheat me. If I gossip about other people, guess what? People are going to gossip about you. Let me just give you a little hint: anybody who will talk to you about somebody else will talk about you. Count on it because they're indiscriminate. The Bible says gossip is a very evil thing and that it has negative consequences. And the Bible says that what you sow, you reap. If you're always talking about somebody else behind their back, you can count on it: people are talking about you behind your back. It is the law of the universe. What you sow, you will reap. Let me show you a couple of negative ones. Here on the screen, Proverbs 26:27 says, He who digs a pit—in other words, to hurt somebody else—will fall into it himself. He who rolls a stone will have it roll back on him. What goes around comes around. What you give out, you're going to get back. Let me give you another one. Hosea 10:13, You planted wickedness and now you have reaped evil. Now, what we want to do is we want to plant one thing and reap something else. It doesn't happen. You can't plant beans and get grapefruit. It isn't going to happen. Growing up, when I was a teenager, I had a number of friends who were pretty wild, and on Friday nights, they liked to sow their wild oats. And then on Sunday, they'd go to church and pray for crop failure. But it doesn't work that way. No matter what you pray, you're going to reap what you sow. I cannot sow irresponsibility and become a success in life. I cannot sow laziness and be rewarded in life. I cannot sow stinginess in my life and expect to have people be generous with me. Whatever you put out, that's what you're going to get back. This is true all through the Scripture. There's a story of Jacob. Jacob was a cheat. And one of the first things we find is he's cheating his brother and his father, deceiving both of them in order to get the family blessing. And you know what happens later on in life? Jacob's father-in-law cheats him of his own wife. Well, what goes around comes around. There's a story in the book of Esther. There's a guy named Haman. Haman was an anti-Semite. He hated Jews and he wanted all the Jews in Persia killed. And he particularly hated a guy named Mordecai. And so he had these gallows built to have Mordecai hung on. And as things turn out, you know who got hung on his own gallows? Haman. That happens all the time. You sow a thought, you reap an act. You sow an act, you reap a habit. You sow a habit, you reap a character. You sow your character, you reap a destiny. Whatever you give out, you're going to get back. I train leaders, and I have business leaders, church leaders, and government leaders ask me, Rick, how do I get people to trust me? Because trust is what leadership's all about. If people don't trust you, they don't follow you. You say, how do I get people to trust me? Well, it's real simple. You trust them. It's not rocket science. If you trust people, they're going to trust you because that guy's got good sense. I mean, he certainly is smart enough to trust me. So he's worthy of being trusted himself. If you trust other people, people are going to trust you. Parents, how do I get my kids to trust me? Simple: trust them. You ever trust your kids? The more trust you put in your kids, the more they are going to trust you. Whatever you give out, you're going to get back. It's true in every single area of life. If you say, how do I get people to like me? Real simple: like them. If you like other people, people are going to generally like you. I genuinely like people. I like hanging out on the patio. I like talking to people. And as a result, I have a lot of people who like me. Not everybody. But if you like people, guess what? They're going to like you because whatever you give out, that's what you're going to get back. Now, here's the fourth principle: everything starts as a seed. Nothing happens until a seed is planted. Whatever I sow is what I'm going to reap. Now, this one's going to surprise you: I'm not the only sower. I am not the only sower. And what that means is you are reaping, both good and bad, from what other people are sowing around you. There are people who are beside you, there are people who are in your family, there are people who came before you, there are parents and grandparents and on and on. And they have been sowing. And now in many ways, you are reaping what the previous generation experienced. For instance, you enjoy many things that you didn't pay for, you didn't work for. You enjoy the freedom of America and you didn't have to pay for it. Other people died in many wars over the last 250 years to preserve your freedom. You enjoy it. They sowed with their own lives, and you reap the freedom. You drove to church today on a road you didn't pave, in a car you didn't design, with gas you didn't get out of the oil yourself. Somebody else sowed energy, time, creativity, invention, ideas. They sowed all those things, and so there are many things in life that you get to benefit from that are the result of other people's sowing, and you're reaping it. Now, it's also true in the opposite way. You have been hurt by what other people have sown around you. Some of you grew up in families where there was a history of multiple generations of abuse. And you look at the—there was abuse, abuse, abuse, abuse, abuse. You need to say, all right, it's stopping here. I'm breaking the chain. It's not going any farther. Some of you grew up in families where there was over multiple generations a history of alcohol, alcohol, alcohol, alcohol, and you need to say, okay, hang on, this is it, timeout. We're stopping this right here. The chain is being broken. I'm not passing it on to the next generation. Some of you grew up where it was bigotry, bigotry, bigotry, bigotry. Some of you grew up in homes where over the past multiple generations, it was divorce, divorce, divorce, divorce. And you go, okay, I can't control the past, but I'm stopping it right now. I'm starting a new legacy. What I'm saying is everything you do has consequences. Everything you do has consequences, not just for you, not just for your peers, not just for your partners, but for the next generation because you're reaping both the positive and negatives of the generations that came before you in both ways. PBS, the network, called up and said, we'd like to come do a four-hour interview of you. And I go, me? They said, yeah. So they came out and said, what is this? He said, well, we're doing a series on the genealogical roots, the family traditions, and the family roots of well-known Americans. And they had done all kinds of people: Quincy Jones and Oprah and a bunch of people. They said, we want to do you. So I said, fine. So they set out all of these people to research my family tree. They took DNA samples from me. They traced it back like, I don't know, 400, 500 years. And there's actually going to be a show on it this season on PBS. They're doing 14 different American leaders: Barbara Walters and Kevin Bacon and a bunch of different people. Which Kevin Bacon, I'm only six degrees separated from Kevin Bacon. I don't know if you know that, but actually his wife, Kyra Sedgwick, is the one I want to be closer to because she's much prettier than he is. So they did this, and so they brought me this scrapbook they'd put together of all my ancestors that I knew nothing about. And they talked me through it. I had me turn the pages as they were filming and interviewing me on this from this Harvard professor. And I learned some interesting things. For instance, both sides of my family came to America in the 1630s. We've been here like 400 years. Within 10 years of the pilgrims, there were Warrens in Massachusetts. In fact, they came over on the boat with William Bradford, who was the founding governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. And interestingly enough, on that boat there was a guy named John Eliot who was a pastor, and one of my eighth-great-grandfathers was a very wealthy businessman in England who came over with the colonists to colonize America and was a deacon in that guy's church and funded the first Bible translation in America, which was not in English but was in the Algonquin Indian language because this John Eliot was the first missionary to the Indians. That's a heritage. And then on another side, the other side, I had a guy who was here who fought in the Revolutionary War. And after the Revolutionary War, one of my great-grandfathers became a pastor and founded a church in Atlanta which was one of the first interracial and integrated churches in America. Now, you think about how rare it would be to have an interracial church in the 1700s. That's pretty rare. That's a heritage. And when I hear about that kind of stuff, I'm going, I'm floating on a lot of goodwill. I'm reaping a lot of blessing in my life from some generations of godly men and women in my life, and I get the benefit of that. You say, well, I wish I had a heritage like that. Well, you start it. Start it now. You say, okay, starting today, my clan, my tribe, my name, our family, we're going God's way. As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord. And we're going to make the change so that the future generations are blessed because the blessing of God was on us. You be that person. You can't change the past, but you can change the future by how you make the choices today. Now, your life's going to affect other generations, so you just can't think about yourself. You can't make that stupid statement that says, well, it's my life, I can do whatever I want to with it. Sorry, it's not just yours. You're part of a thing called the human race, and you affect other people. And if you're dishonest, it hurts other people. And all these other different things. I'm not the only sower. Now, Jesus talked about this. He told it to the disciples in John 4:38. He says to his 12, I sent you to reap where you did not plant. And others had already done work before you, and you will gather the harvest. You get the cream. You get to reap the results. So I need you to realize: everything starts as a seed, nothing happens until a seed is planted, whatever I sow is what I'll reap, and I'm not the only sower. Now, the fifth law of sowing and reaping is this: I always reap in a different season than from when I sow. I always reap in a different season than from when I sow. There is a time delay from when I make the effort, I make the deposit, and I get the fruit. Now, you know this. It's obvious. Plants take time to grow. There's no such thing as instant maturity. No farmer goes out, plants a seed in the ground, comes back an hour later, digs it up and says, have you grown? You just got to let it be. You got to let it be covered up and you got to let it grow. There is no such thing as instant success. There is instant fame, but there is no instant success. Somebody may be serving for years or practicing their craft for years in obscurity, and then all of a sudden they're instantly famous, but they didn't get there overnight because it takes time to grow in wisdom. It takes time to gather. It takes time to build skills. It takes time. And the Bible tells us that there are seasons in life. In Ecclesiastes, this book by Solomon, it says in chapter 3, there's a time for everything and a season for every activity under heaven. Now, it goes on listing out eight or 10 different things: a time for this and a time for that. You remember that song "Turn! Turn! Turn!"? The Birds sang it. Bob Dylan sang it. It's actually written by Pete Seeger. And it's based on this text. There's a time for everything. There's a time to plant and there's a time to harvest. There's a time to scatter, there's a time to gather. There's a time to sow, there's a time to reap. They are different seasons. And so between the then and the now, or the now and what's coming next, there's always a delay. And that is so irritating to make a deposit, to make an investment, to make a plan, to invest time, energy, money into something you know is right, and it's not there instantly. Now, fruit ripens slowly. I mean, would you rather eat a vine-ripened tomato or one of those ones they picked that was green and then when they brought it to the store, they gassed it to turn it red? It may be red, but it still tastes green. There's no comparison between a vine-ripened tomato which was allowed to grow slowly. If you pick it too soon, you miss the flavor. Now, this is a principle in money management that I always reap in a different season than I sow. And by the way, not all fruit ripens at the same time. When you have a peach tree, they aren't all ripe at once. No, you pick a few a day. It comes in little by little. And when you start planting and sowing and you start following God's money management principles, you're not going to get a windfall tomorrow just because you started practicing God's money management principles today. You're not going to win a lottery. No, it's going to come in over time. It's going to ripen little bit at a time. It never ceases to amaze me the people who think God is a slot machine. They say, Pastor Rick, I tithed today and I didn't get a job this week. It's like I put 10 bucks in the plate and now I'm supposed to get a $100,000 job. You think God's a genie? God is no genie. You serve Him. He doesn't serve you. God is not a vending machine. He's not a slot machine where you just put in the tithe and then all of a sudden you get whatever you want. No, there's always first a season between when I sow and when I reap. Now, while I'm waiting, God is working. You might write that one down. While I'm waiting, God's working. A lot of times when I'm waiting for the fulfillment of the efforts that I've put into something, or the money that I've given, or the time or the energy, while I'm waiting for that to happen, I think nothing's happening. Oh, it's happening. While I'm waiting, God's working. And while that seed is hidden in the ground, it is slowly germinating. And one day it's going to burst. And when that seed bursts, God is in it. And the life is going to start growing and growing and growing and one day a little shoot will stick up out of the ground. And then you know it's working.
Guest (Male): Hey, thanks so much for being with us today and listening to Pastor Rick's Daily Hope. I hope that you were just as blessed as I was from today's broadcast. Right now, here's Pastor Rick with a special message.
Pastor Rick Warren: When I started Saddleback Church over 40 years ago with just a handful of people in our living room, I also began writing a simple devotional just for the people in our church to help them start each day with hope and with truth and with peace that comes from Jesus Christ. Well, that little devotional grew and grew, and today Daily Hope is one of the largest email devotions in the whole world. And each day people all around the globe are reconnecting with God's promises and finding fresh strength in His Word to face whatever comes their way. Now here's the best part: it's absolutely free. We don't have any charge for this. Every day you'll get a quick devotional read and a podcast that you can listen to on the go. In a world that's more distracted and uncertain than ever, I want to help you start your day centered on what never changes. And what never changes is God's love, His unconditional love for you and His promises to you. If you'll just spend just a few minutes a day in the morning with the Lord, it can bring so much more clarity, more purpose, more peace to everything that happens in your day. Particularly psychologists have said that what you do with the first five minutes of your day pretty much sets the tone. So friend, you were never meant to go through life alone. I want to personally invite you to just sign up for the Daily Hope devotional. Do it today. I think it's going to bring fresh encouragement to your walk in God.
Guest (Male): If you'd like to sign up for the daily devotional, it's easy. Just go to pastorrick.com. That's pastorrick.com. Be sure to join us next time as we look into God's Word for our daily hope. This program is sponsored by Pastor Rick's Daily Hope and your generous financial support.