May 28, 2025
Summer of The Soul
Galatians 6:7-10 - 7 Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows. 8 Whoever sows to please their flesh, from the flesh will reap destruction; whoever sows to please the Spirit, from the Spirit will reap eternal life. 9 Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.10 Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all people, especially to those who belong to the family of believers.
First, let me say that all Scripture is true and God-breathed. But of all the principles of Scripture that I have seen born out in my life, it is this passage in Galatians 6 known as the law of the harvest.
Here are 3 truths about the law of the harvest:
You reap what you sow. If you plant corn, you’ll reap corn.
You reap more than you sow. From the little seeds planted, it can produce bushels and bushels of produce.
You reap later than you sow. If you plant seeds, the fruit won’t be produced tomorrow. It takes time for the harvest to come in.
We tend to take this passage in a negative context, and, to be fair, Paul was using it that way with the churches in Galatia, because he was writing to correct some issues in the early church. Paul declares, “God cannot be mocked.” In other words, you’re not going to get over on the Lord. You’re going to reap whatever you’re investing in.
Basically, he said to the churches in Galatia that if you continue sowing the seeds you are now, you’re going to reap destruction.
And we’ve seen this passage play out time and time again, as we sowed seeds of destruction in our own lives for quite some time. And for a while it didn’t come with a cost, but eventually the rent came due. And when it came due, the consequences were far greater than we ever could have imagined and it led to some definite winter of the soul seasons.
But this passage is a two-way coin. While it’s true that if you sow to the flesh, you’re going to reap destruction, it’s also true that if you begin sowing to the spirit - or doing the things God wants us to do - you’re going to see an unbelievable harvest of good in your life.
For the last couple of devotions, we’ve been looking at spiritual seasons in our life. We talked about spiritual winter where everything seems barren and hopeless and spiritual spring when there has been repentance and renewal and it sparks a season of growth in your life.
Today we’re examining spiritual summer, where you’re enjoying a season of prosperity in your life. I’m not talking about money. I’m talking about spiritual prosperity where God is opening up doors and you’re beginning to see the harvest of the fruit of your labor. God just seems to be opening up the floodgates of blessing on your life.
And if that’s happening, chances are that you started putting in the work months ago, even years.
For me, it often starts with a renewed focus on God’s Word. To be honest, as a pastor, it can be easy to get in a habit of only opening the word when you are preparing and studying for messages. But that usually leads you to spiritual dryness and eventually it shows up in your preaching.
But when I have determined to commit to His Word for my own growth, good things begin to happen, maybe not overnight, but months down the road.
I remember recently being so convicted over the inconsistency in my reading of the Word, that I vowed to myself, “No Bible, no food.” In other words, I wouldn’t eat anything when I woke up until I had gotten into God’s Word. I kept that commitment every day for the next two years.
I wish I could say there were radical changes in my life overnight, but there weren’t. For a while, it was just the grind of trying to be consistent every day.
But several months down the road, I began to see the harvest. God started opening up the Word to me in ways that I had never experienced before. Messages just started coming to me out of nowhere. It was like, “I’ve got to get this out of me or I’ll bust!”
The same principle is true of those who commit to living your life to honor God in some other way. Whatever it is, whether it’s helping others, committing to encouraging others or just committing to doing what is right, God’s going to honor it. Just don’t get frustrated and give up because you’re not seeing any results.
Verse 9 reminds us that if we won’t get weary in doing good, the harvest is coming. Summer is coming - at least in spiritual terms.
There are other ways we can experience a spiritual summer. I would include those mountain top moments in this category. For me, as a teenager and then later as an adult, it was this place called Ridgecrest where they would put on these amazing conferences where great speakers and teachers poured into your life for a week or a weekend and you felt closer to God than ever before. Those can be fleeting but I would place them in the spiritual summer category.
A few warnings:
while spiritual summers are sustainable for quite some time, especially if you continue to sow to the spirit, they do come to an end.
Sometimes the circumstances of life can interrupt a spiritual summer where you just are thrust into overwhelming circumstances and you find yourself in a spiritual winter through no fault of your own
But the biggest thing to watch for is complacency. We can easily get used to the flowing blessings and God’s favor and we stop putting in the work and sowing to the spirit, which is what got us there in the first place. I referenced my vow of “no Bible, no food” which I kept for more than two years without missing a day. But eventually life began overwhelming me and I started missing days and getting out of those good routines. And, no, I didn’t starve to death. That promise not to eat unless I got into the Word fell by the wayside too. It’s human nature, but we have to be vigilant to confess our failures to the Lord and ask for grace and strength to start back on the path that produced the harvest in the first place.