Yes, it is important for Christians to share their faith. Yes, we are all called to participate in Jesus’ Great Commission to make disciples of all nations (Matthew 28:19). Or as Jesus explains in the Parable of the Sower and the Soils, we are called to cast the seed of the Word of God all around us, on all kinds of soil, even though some of the people who hear us will not, in fact respond to the gospel by bearing fruit in their lives (Mark 4:14-20).

But the fact that so many people won’t listen, or won’t change their lives can be deeply discouraging to those of us who are trying hard to build the Kingdom of God. For it’s easy to imagine that we are somehow responsible if our efforts don’t seem to make any difference: if individual lives go unchanged or if the broader culture stubbornly refuses to be transformed.

But today’s passage is a helpful corrective to the kinds of pressure that we evangelists tend to put on ourselves. For Jesus explains that spreading the gospel is a whole lot more like agriculture than it is like manufacturing. For after a farmer has prepared his land and sowed his seed, there’s very little he can do to make it grow: he simply has to trust the Lord to give the right amount of rain and the right amount of sunshine at the right time. And no one really knows how plants use their chlorophyll to transform water and nutrients and sunshine into sugar. Yes, when corn and wheat and oat and rice plants produce the grains that we eat, they are performing a miracle that cannot be reproduced by scientific means.

And the same thing is true of evangelism. For while we scatter the seed of the Word of God all around us, none of us can open the ears of our listeners to hear it. None of us can open their hearts to believe it. No, our job is to sow the seed and wait for God to do the work of bringing new life to those who are dead in their trespasses and sins (Ephesians 2:2, 5).

But there is one other thing we can do: just as a farmer harvests his grain, we can participate in the harvest of the souls that the Lord has brought to life. For as we spread the gospel, we can also tell our listeners how to respond to God’s grace. We can explain how they need to repent of their sin, to trust in Christ as their Savior and to bow the knee to Him as their Lord. In short, we can welcome into the Kingdom those whom the Lord has drawn to Himself and made His own.

So let’s get busy sowing the seed of the gospel. But let’s trust God for the results of our evangelism, joyfully reaping the harvest that He will provide for Himself.

Mark 4:26-29 (NASB)

26 And He was saying, “The kingdom of God is like a man who casts seed upon the soil;
27 and goes to bed at night and gets up by day, and the seed sprouts up and grows– how, he himself does not know.
28 “The soil produces crops by itself; first the blade, then the head, then the mature grain in the head.
29 “But when the crop permits, he immediately puts in the sickle, because the harvest has come.”