IBS Application for John 4:36-38

“Already the one who reaps is receiving wages and gathering fruit for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice together. For here the saying holds true, 'One sows and another reaps.' I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor. Others have labored, and you have entered into their labor.”

I find that God has been doing a lot to try to reveal more and more of His grace to me lately. And in this case, this passage came to me at a time when I needed to start understanding that grace cannot be earned.

To know that I get to reap the benefits without taking part in any of the required labor needed to have salvation and receive God’s blessings is both humbling and frustrating. It’s frustrating because I don’t like feeling like I haven’t earned it. But that’s just the thing. I haven’t earned it, nor could I ever earn it. In that way, it’s a humbling truth.

But beyond this, it ought to be a source of joy for me to know that I don’t have to work for that which God seeks to give to me. I just have to be willing to receive, because God seeks to give to me, and that is a beautiful thing.

The problem lies in when I get in the way of all of that. When I try to earn that which only God can give, He can choose to not give me what He has in store for me for a time. What He has promised to me, He will not fail to give to me, even though He may choose to disqualify me from those things. But beyond disqualification, He may choose to let me suffer the consequences of my actions when I act apart from Him. I can get in the way of what my blessing is to be from God.


My application for this one will be to try to stay faithful to that which Jesus promises in this passage, which is to walk knowing that I am going to harvest the good that God has labored for in my life, without laboring for it myself, and praying over the next few days that God will humble me in this time to not get in the way of what He seeks to do in my life.

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