Your Moment at the Well
The Lord’s insight. You can be filled when you glean the best of your life to the treasure of others.
Deuteronomy 24:21: “When you gather the grapes of your vineyard, you shall not glean it afterward; it shall be for the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow.”
Isaiah 33:6: “Wisdom and knowledge shall be the stability of your times, and the strength of salvation. The fear of the Lord is His treasure.”
I have a pecan tree in my backyard. Every year the squirrels will come along about August and over the next few months they will haul away every pecan on the tree. Not a single pecan is left – not a one. The squirrel reaps where it did now sow, and it consumes all that is before it without regard for anyone else.
But they are squirrels. They are a greedy gluttonous little bunch of rascals. They are wasteful too. I am helpless to keep them from taking everything from my tree. Nothing I have done has kept the squirrel from consuming my pecans. They are greedy, self-centered and they act as if they are the only ones who can eat from the tree.
God does not want us to be like the squirrels who act based on their nature more than their hearts. We have the ability to reason and not to act based simply on our hunger. Our hunger should never make us act like a glutton. Our needs should never make us act like we are totally lacking. Our desires should never make us act like we are in total need.
In Deuteronomy 24, Moses tried to teach the people these principles by telling them to, “gather the fruit of your labor but don’t glean every fruit from the tree.” Often times, the same thing may have a different value and worth to you and to someone else based on the circumstances. You may have eaten earlier in the day, but to the person who has nothing to eat, what you leave behind is life sustaining for them.
The Lord wants us to know how empty life is when we are filled with all that the world has to offer but we are empty in offering to others the things that cannot be produced by the world. The world cannot produce love, but we can. The world cannot produce an act of service, but we must. The world cannot produce graciousness and thankfulness. Thankfully we can do this too.
To the poor and the needy, even our leftovers can be their treasures. Isaiah 33:6 helps us to see that the Lord treasures our fear of the Him – of not knowing His nature. One of the best ways for us to learn to appreciate the poor and the needy is to allow ourselves to be poor and needful in some way for something.
When you have much, you have probably learned how to reap and to glean. And those who have are probably slow to sow anything at all. The knowledge and wisdom they have, they treasure. And they will keep it from others. People who have much, work hard to make sure they have need of nothing they cannot use their treasures to get.
But listen. It is not true that those who have much of everything generally have need of nothing. We may believe we have no need to have anything more than what we can obtain, but we all have a fundamental need to give something more of ourselves. We all have a need to help others. We all have a need to support others. We all have a need to sow for others.
The Lord is looking for us to sow into the lives of people and into the world. Sowing is what we get to do because we are blessed by the Lord. What we get from others and from the world cannot satisfy our fundamental need to sow as much as we get from reaping.
If you lack something in your life today, perhaps it is time to look at what you are sowing into the lives of others. The Lord tells us He did not come to be served but to serve. Let’s take that mindset for ourselves. We are not here to simply get from what we do, but as importantly, we are here to get to do for others what others cannot get for themselves.
You can be totally filled when you learn to glean from yourself all of yourself to make the lives of others more fulfilled.
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