John 4:27-42: The Fields Are Ripe for Harvest

John 4:27-42: The Fields Are Ripe for Harvest

This morning, I’m going to preach a message that’s in many ways a continuation of last week’s message. Last week, we looked at the conversation between Jesus and the Samaritan woman. We saw how Jesus very skillfully began talking to this woman about spiritual matters and, based on that conversation, we extracted a very practical five-step process for sharing the gospel. And a method like that can be a very good and helpful thing. But this week, we’re gonna take a step back and focus not on any evangelistic method but on our own hearts. Because if we don’t grasp in our hearts the need for and urgency of this evangelistic mission—this gospel mission—I don’t think we’ll ever see that mission move forward. And for those of us that are Christians, that mission is the main thing God’s left us on this earth to do. And as I survey the landscape of Christians in America, I think there’s a great danger of sleeping when we should be working.

When I was in college, I spent a couple years working in the electronics department of the local Sears store. And as you know very well if you’ve ever worked in retail, what’s the biggest day of the year? Black Friday, right? Black Friday is for the retail industry what the Superbowl is for the NFL. It’s game day. Everybody needs to be at their posts and ready to handle the massive influx of people that will come seeking a bargain. And that’s especially true for the electronics department where I worked. So Black Friday came around, and keep in mind this was back in the day when Black Friday didn’t start until 5am on Friday. I know that seems like a crazy thought now and people wonder, “Why would you start it so late?” but that’s when we started it. However, on this particular Black Friday, our department manager committed the worst sin a retail worker can commit on that day: he overslept. So there we are, at the store at 4:30am, and he’s not there. There we are at 4:45am, and he’s still not there. There we are at 5:00am, with another manager unlocking the doors to let the crowds in, and our fearless leader is nowhere to be found. If I remember correctly, that guy didn’t come in until 8 or 9am. It was bad, and I’m pretty sure it had something to do with him getting fired a few weeks later. He was sleeping when he should have been working. 

And as we think about the mission Jesus has given us of spreading the gospel, I pray that we’re not sleeping when we should be working. Because it’s one thing to oversleep on Black Friday. Yeah, things may not be handled quite as efficiently on the sales floor, but no lasting harm is going to be done. A small reduction in corporate profits isn’t the end of the world. But when it comes to spreading the gospel, we’re not just talking about corporate profits—we’re talking about people’s souls. Let that sink in for a moment. We’re talking about their souls.

So please turn with me to John 4. If you’re using the Story Bibles we provide, that’s on page 737. For those of you who are visiting, we’ve been working our way passage by passage through the Gospel of John. So wherever the text goes, that’s where we go. And this morning, the text takes us to John 4:27-42. We pick up mid-story after Jesus has just finished talking with the Samaritan woman and sharing with her the truth about who he is. Verse 27: 27 Just then his disciples came back. They marveled that he was talking with a woman, but no one said, “What do you seek?” or, “Why are you talking with her?” 28 So the woman left her water jar and went away into town and said to the people, 29 “Come, see a man who told me all that I ever did. Can this be the Christ?” 30 They went out of the town and were coming to him. 31 Meanwhile the disciples were urging him, saying, “Rabbi, eat.” 32 But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you do not know about.” 33 So the disciples said to one another, “Has anyone brought him something to eat?” 34 Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work. 35 Do you not say, ‘There are yet four months, then comes the harvest’? Look, I tell you, lift up your eyes, and see that the fields are white for harvest. 36 Already the one who reaps is receiving wages and gathering fruit for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice together. 37 For here the saying holds true, ‘One sows and another reaps.’ 38 I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor. Others have labored, and you have entered into their labor.” 39 Many Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me all that I ever did.” 40 So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them, and he stayed there two days. 41 And many more believed because of his word. 42 They said to the woman, “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is indeed the Savior of the world.”

The main point of this passage is that the fields are ripe for harvest. And there are three ways Christians should respond to the fact that the fields are ripe for harvest. Number one, seeing the fields. Number two, grasping the urgency. And number three, working to bring in the crops. Seeing the fields, grasping the urgency, and working to bring in the crops. 

Seeing the Fields

So first, seeing the fields. It’s interesting to observe in this text how little Jesus’ disciples seem to understand about what he’s trying to do. Look back at verse 27: “Just then his disciples came back. They marveled that he was talking with a woman, but no one said, ‘What do you seek?’ or, ‘Why are you talking with her?’” Then after the woman leaves, we read in verse 31, “Meanwhile the disciples were urging him, saying, ‘Rabbi, eat.’ But he said to them, ‘I have food to eat that you do not know about.’ So the disciples said to one another, ‘Has anyone brought him something to eat?’ Jesus said to them, ‘My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work.’” Think about that. What’s he telling them? “My food is to do the will of him who sent me.” Food is something that satisfies us. It gives us fullness and contentment and satisfaction. And that’s what Jesus says we experience when we dedicate ourselves to God’s mission. 

Then he continues in verse 35, “Do you not say, ‘There are yet four months, then comes the harvest’? Look, I tell you, lift up your eyes, and see that the fields are white for harvest.” So we’re not waiting for them to be ready for harvest. They’re ready right now. “The fields are white for harvest.” The thing Jesus’ disciples had to do was to “life up your eyes.” Another translation says “open your eyes”—open your eyes to what’s right in front of you. 

You know, it’s amazing how our eyes can look at something, but we don’t really see it. We don’t really take it in. We just kind of glance over it. I think of the homeless people who hang out all around the downtown area. How often do our eyes just look right past them? I was blessed a few months ago when I got to join someone from our church and distribute some much-needed supplies to one of the two main homeless camps downtown. This camp is located underneath an elevated roadway, and you wouldn’t really be able to see it if you weren’t looking for it. But we were able to go there and deliver the supplies to these people. And as we entered their camp, which was a collection of about 15 tents or so, I have to say that my eyes were opened to homelessness in a new way. I saw the plight of the homeless community in a way that I had never seen it before. The daily struggle to find sufficient resources, the daily anxiety over whether someone was going to steal all of your stuff while you were out trying to get money, and perhaps most significantly, the deep shame of being viewed as an outcast of society. This visit opened my eyes to all of those things. I had seen homeless people more times than I could count, but I hadn’t really seen them the way I came to see them through this visit. This visit opened my eyes. 

And in a similar way, I pray that God would open our eyes to people around us who don’t know Jesus. We see them every day. We interact with them every day. Yet so often, we become cold to the fact that they are condemned before God and—if they were to die today—would most certainly suffer in hell for all eternity. That’s a really disturbing thought—so disturbing that we would prefer to not think about it. And so we often don’t. But that doesn’t make it any less real.  The fact is that our city’s most pressing problem isn’t the number of people that are homeless or the number of people addicted to heroin or the number of people who suffer from the lengthy list of other social ills. No, our city’s most pressing problem is the number of people who stand condemned before God and in desperate need of a Savior. We have to remind ourselves of that. It’s not pleasant to think about, but we have to be reminded of how high the stakes really are. Because only then will we be a church that is truly broken for the lostness that’s so prevalent in our city. Only then will we be a church that’s not inwardly focused like some kind of country club but a church that’s bent on seeing lost people come to know Jesus. How I pray that God would break us and open our eyes to see that fields are truly white for harvest. 

Grasping the Urgency

But not only is it important for us to see the fields, it’s also important for us to grasp the urgency. That’s the second point. Grasping the urgency. Now I don’t know much about farming, but I do know this: you don’t mess around during harvest time. There’s an urgency to getting those crops harvested. You can’t really get a head start, because the crops won’t be ready yet. But you also can’t wait too long or the crops will spoil. You only have a narrow window of time to harvest those crops if you want your harvest to be worth anything. So the minute those crops become ripe, it’s a race against time. And it’s a lot like that with people’s souls as well. Life can end at any moment. If you’ve ever known someone who’s died young, you know how true that is. And even for those who live to a ripe old age, life is still so short. James 4:14 compares our life to a mist or a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Also, Jesus tells us in John 9:4, “As long as it is day, we must do the works of him who sent me. Night is coming, when no one can work.” So not only is a lost person’s opportunity to receive the gospel terribly short, but our opportunity to share it with them is terribly short as well. So there’s a distinct urgency that characterizes this harvest time.

So how should that affect the way we approach the harvest—the energy we expend, the resources we allocate, the focus we maintain? Perhaps you remember a few years ago when those 33 miners were trapped half a mile underground in that mining shaft in Chile. It was a national crisis. The Chilean president visited, reporters were providing 24-hour news coverage of the rescue effort. It was a crisis. And since it was such a crisis, the government spared no expense in rescuing those miners. They immediately assigned 130 people to the rescue efforts, they brought in consultants from NASA, they used all kinds of different drills and other pieces of equipment. It was a heroic effort. And it took them 69 days, but they managed to rescue those miners. That’s how you act during a crisis. That’s how you act when there’s an urgent situation. You don’t worry about some of the secondary things you would otherwise worry about. You don’t work at the pace you would otherwise work at. You understand that you’re in a race against time, and that mentality affects just about every aspect of the way you approach the situation. 

So when we think of the fact that we only have a limited time to bring in the harvest Jesus calls us to bring in, that changes things. It changes things a lot. When we really grasp the urgency of the situation, we don’t spend time doing some of the things we would otherwise do. We don’t spend our money on things we would otherwise spend it on. Instead, we use every available resource we have in order to launch a truly heroic effort to take the gospel to those who are in dire need. 

Working to Bring in the Crops

And that leads us to the third way we should respond to the fact that the fields are ripe for harvest: working to bring in the crops. Having seen the fields and grasped the urgency, we actually have to do something about it. We have to work to bring in the crops. Now, let me just say something. I realize that the thought of personally sharing the gospel with people is a scary thought for many Christians—even many of you here in this room. You’re not the only one who’s felt that anxiety. You see the fields, and you grasp the urgency, but you just feel inadequate and underequipped. After all, what if someone asks a question you don’t know the answer to? What if you come to a point in the conversation where you’re just not sure what to say? What if you end up doing more harm than good? I realize those questions have probably gone through your mind, many of you. 

But I want you to look at this text in John 4. Look at this woman from Samaria and how freely she shares her faith simply because she’s excited about Jesus. Notice in verses 28-29 how she’s so excited that she leaves her water jar at the well, goes off into town, and says to the very people she had previously spend her life trying to avoid, “Come see a man who told me all that I ever did. Can this be the Christ?” Then verse 39 records how “Many Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman’s testimony. So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them, and he stayed there two days. And many more believed because of his word. They said to the woman, ‘It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is indeed the Savior of the world.’” 

So this woman is just really excited about Jesus, and she quite naturally shares that excitement and that joy with others. And it’s very persuasive because they can see she has something they don’t have—something real, something attractive, something powerful. Jesus has changed her life. Notice that as she talks to her fellow townspeople, she’s not a Bible scholar giving some lofty discourse about the intricacies of biblical theology. She’s not a highly trained apologist providing airtight philosophical arguments for what she believes. And she’s not a slick saleswoman skillfully walking through the complex dynamics of a sales presentation. She’s just an average woman who has experienced a very real change, and she’s sharing her story with others. No training, no evangelism seminar. Just a story of how Jesus changed her life. By the way, sharing the story of how Jesus has changed your life is one of the most powerful things you can share with people who aren’t Christians. It doesn’t require any training, you don’t have to be a theological genius, and best of all, nobody can argue with it. Nobody can tell you that you didn’t experience that. They may not like it, but they can’t refute it. That’s why it’s so powerful. 

Maybe you used to be a really bad person even by our society’s standards—addicted to drugs, part of a gang, in and out of prison—whatever. But Jesus saved you from that. He rescued you from your addiction and gave you a new family to belong to—a family that will last forever. Or maybe you were the opposite of that, like I was. Maybe you were a self-righteous Pharisee, raised in church your whole life, dotting all of your religious I’s and crossing all of your religious T’s, and imagining that God was pretty impressed with your righteousness and your devotion. But God saved you from that and helped you understand that they way you can approach him and be accepted is to approach him as a beggar with nothing whatsoever to offer him and trusting in Jesus alone to save you because of what he did on the cross. That’s an amazing testimony. Or maybe you spent your life looking for true satisfaction in a thousand and one different things—thing like career advancement, intimate relationships, really nice material things. But no matter how much you gave yourself to pursuing these things or how successful you were at obtaining them, they actually ended up leaving profoundly unsatisfied. But God saved you from that, and what you never could find in all those other things, you ended up finding in a relationship with God. He satisfies you in a way nothing else ever could. That’s amazing. Those are the kind of stories people need to hear. 

And like I said, you don’t have to be a Bible scholar to share those things. You’re already an expert because it happened to you. Just share that with people. How has Jesus changed you? How has he made you different? How has he given you a new reason to live? And hopefully, as you share your story with others, you can also share with them how Jesus can change them as well. Hopefully you can explain, in a very simple way, what Jesus has done to save them by dying on the cross and rising from the dead, and then how they can have the same thing you have as they put their trust in Jesus. 

Again, you don’t have to be a Bible scholar. I remember just 2 or 3 years after I became a Christian, I was in high school, 17 years old, and working at a local supermarket called Food Lion. And one of my classmates named Nick worked at Food Lion as well. It was really close to the high school and a popular place for us high schoolers to work. And I knew that Nick was not even close to living a Christian life. He was very much caught up in the high school party scene, doing his thing with the ladies, and—as far as I could tell—had just about no knowledge of Christianity. But Nick and I kind of got to know each other though the classes we had together and working at Food Lion together. And one day I finally worked up the courage talk to him about Christianity. I took him out to a fast-food restaurant (which made him happy to get free food), I shared some of my story with him, and I basically just read through a piece of paper that explained the gospel. There was nothing slick or complicated about any of that. I was just a new Christian who was excited about Jesus. And I gave Nick a Bible and the piece of paper I had used to share the gospel with him, and I encouraged him to read those things when he got home. A few days later, I asked him if he had gotten a chance to read them, and he acted kind of uninterested said that he hadn’t gotten around to it yet. But then I asked him again maybe a week or so later, and he acted a lot more interested and said that he would love to talk more about it. And I think it wasn’t too long after that that he came to know Jesus started really pursuing Jesus. We started meeting together just about every week to study the Bible and go through some other books together. And I was able to help him get involved in a good church. And nowadays he regularly teaches evangelism classes at this church and serves as one of the key lay leaders at the church—and this is a larger church, definitely what we would call a mega church. So it’s ready been incredible to see how God continues to change Nick and use him for his glory. 

And the reason I tell you that story is so you can see that you don’t have to be some kind of elite Christian with extensive training in order to share your faith and see people come to know Jesus. I had no clue what I was doing, and I’m guessing the Samaritan woman we see in John 4 didn’t have much of a clue either. But when we step out in faith and talk about how Jesus has changed us and can change others as well, the Holy Spirit uses that in a powerful way. So think about who you might be able to share your story with. Who has God put in your life that might be even the slightest bit open to talking about spiritual matters? Why don’t you make a list of the top three people like that, start praying for them every day, and think about how you might approach that conversation. And by the way, if you’re with us this morning and you don’t have a story of Jesus changing your life but you want to learn more about that, I would love for you to come and talk to me after our service and ask all the questions you want.