The Bag of Seed

UV 3497/10000 The Bag of Seed
He who goes back and forth weeping, carrying his bag of seed (for planting), will indeed come again with a shout of joy, bringing his sheaves with him.

Psalm 126 v 6

The bag of seed is a metaphor for the word of God, the promises of the Lord. These are like the seed that we carry in our times of fear, anxiety, crisis. When we carry His seed in our hearts and minds, it will grow to yield sheaves of wheat, a symbol of fruition of the promises of God in our lives. Hence, if we sow in tears, we will reap with joy the blessings of the Lord. We need to run the scripture verses that speak to our specific situations back and forth in our minds. This kind of persistent holding on in faith to the word of God is what is rewarded.

The psalmist writes that the Lord will restore us from our captivity to the enemy of our souls. He will restore us like the dry beds of rivers and streams when there is torrential rain in the upper reaches of the mountains. He will do great things for us. He will make our hearts glad again. We will have a testimony of the goodness of God for the nations. All this happens when the seed is planted in us and it grows and multiplies to produce fruit. There are two kinds of fruit- external fruit which are blessings that we can see on our outside and internal fruit of the spirit that the Holy Spirit can perceive and rejoice in. While we humans revel in the former, the Lord revels in the latter.

Liquid prayer or tears nourish the seed of the word in us. Why does sorrow and pain play such a large part in our lives? Since our hearts are hermetically sealed and do not have an external door or entrance, it has to be broken from inside, from deep within for God to enter and do His work with His word in us. Left to itself, our conditioning by the world makes our hearts hardened and inured. Our brokenness enables us to feel the pain of others- empathy, feel the pain of the Lord on the cross – ‘sempathy’ or spiritual empathy feeling the pain of the Lord – the physical pain of the torturous death on the cross mingled with the spiritual agony of separation from the Father, the spiritual burden of the load of all of man’s sins, curses and ailments.