We thank the Lord that now we all are learning to eat the Lord. However, according to the revelation in Deuteronomy, there are many particular points in the matter of eating, drinking, and enjoying the Lord. On the one hand, the Lord is the bread of life, and we simply need to eat Him. On the other hand, according to Deuteronomy 12, 14, and 15, the Lord Jesus, whom we eat, comes out of our laboring; He is produced from our sowing of the field and from our raising of the herd and the flock. Therefore, according to Deuteronomy, our enjoyment of the riches of the Lord is the result of our laboring on Him.
I can further describe the particulars of this type of eating. For example, if you open your Bible, call on the name of the Lord, and pray-read His word, you can enjoy the Lord even now. However, this is only the initial enjoyment; it is not the enjoyment of a rich harvest, because it is devoid of your own toil and labor. You enjoy the Lord simply by opening up yourself, by using your spirit to call on His name, and by pray-reading His Word. This is the enjoyment in sowing but not the enjoyment in harvesting.
Many of you have testified regarding your enjoyment of the Lord, but all that I have heard pertains to your eating, your enjoyment in sowing. You have not yet reached the level of eating with regard to harvesting. The initial sowing is easy, but the final harvesting is not so easy. After the seeds are sown, whether or not there will be a harvest is still a question. Up until now, your eating of the Lord for enjoyment has been in the initial stage, the sowing stage.
Therefore, I have to make it clear to you, brothers and sisters, that you should not stop at the enjoyment of sowing, but go on to the enjoyment of harvesting. When you sow, you simply bury the seed into the ground. After sowing, you still need to take care of the sprout that it may grow and bear fruit. Only then can you have the enjoyment of the harvest. In our enjoyment of sowing, we receive something of the Lord into us. Whenever we call on the name of the Lord and pray-read His word, we receive a portion of the Lord as a seed into us. Whether this will result in a harvest depends upon our willingness to let the seed grow. If we let it grow, it will surely yield a harvest. Otherwise, nothing will happen.
According to my own observation, the enjoyment of the brothers and sisters is mostly in the enjoyment of sowing. Most of the seeds that are sown into you have no result. Why is there no result? This is because after you eat, drink, and enjoy the Lord, you do not let Him grow, mature, and bear fruit in you.
Suppose you call, “O Lord Jesus.” I believe that this calling will have a definite effect on you. You cannot call on the Lord without any consequence. He comes to you whenever you call on Him. On the one hand, He will come to comfort you; on the other hand, He might come to bother you. If you as a husband call, “O Lord! O Lord!”, He may come to touch you within, saying, “See? You have offended your wife.” You may say, “O Lord! Cleanse me with Your precious blood!” But He may go on to say, “Indeed, the blood can cleanse you, but it cannot confess your sins for you. Go quickly and confess to your wife!” What should you do? Some husbands may harden their hearts and refuse to obey. Because they refuse to turn, the Lord is through with them. If you were such a one and you tried again to call, “O Lord,” it would not be as effective as before. The Lord Jesus knows your story; therefore, when you call on Him again, He will not move. We all have had this kind of experience. In the past He came when you called, “O Lord”; now He does not come. The more you call, the less it works; the more you say “O...” the more deflated you are. Then you may begin to question the practice of calling on the name of the Lord to such an extent that you do not want to call any longer. Is this not pitiful? You only sow the seed into the ground, but you do not let the seed grow to have a harvest. Eventually, even the enjoyment of the seed is gone.
Isaiah 55:10 says, “That it may give seed to the sower and bread to the eater.” I sow a seed into the ground, and it yields thirty seeds; I consume fifteen of them and still have fifteen seeds to sow for the next year. But what is your situation? The seed you have sown is finished because it did not grow. Therefore, there are no more seeds. Why are you out of seeds? It is because you did not let the seed grow.
When you call, “O Lord,” and the Lord gives you a sense that you have offended your wife, if you would quickly confess your sins before the Lord and also go to your wife to admit your failure and ask her for forgiveness, then the seed in you will grow very fast. When you come back to call, “O Lord,” the flavor is completely different. However, the Lord keeps on bothering you. When you call, “O Lord” again, He comes to point out that your hair is not cut properly and that you have to take care of this matter. If you obey immediately and get a proper haircut, you will sense much joy in you. Dear brothers and sisters, when this is the case, the result is tremendous. Your inner being becomes a field, a big farm, that has a rich reaping every day. This truly fulfills the word spoken by Isaiah, to give seed to the sower and bread to the eater. Today I want to check with you all. Do you as sowers truly have seeds? Do you as eaters really have bread? Perhaps you have only half a bowl of rice, which is not enough even for yourself. If you cannot feed yourself adequately, how will you be able to take care of others? What is the reason for this? It is because you sow the seed, yet you do not labor to let the seed grow.
We all know that when a farmer labors on a field, he has to remove the stones, eliminate the weeds, water the soil, add fertilizer, and sometimes apply some pesticides. What do you do? You have done very well eating the Lord and pray-reading His word, but you do not remove the stones, nor eliminate the weeds, nor water the soil, nor add fertilizer, nor apply pesticides. In the end you might as well have not sown at all. If you do not sow, your seeds will remain intact, but once you sow, you lose the only seeds you have. There are some people who indeed have a reserve of a small portion of the Lord before pray-reading the Word, but after they gained the Lord through pray-reading and then are disobedient by not laboring, they lose the presence of the Lord. The Lord went farther away from them.
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