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True Education
to change all this. He desires that our dull senses shall be quickened
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to discern His merciful kindness, that His gifts may be to us the
blessing that He intended.
It is the word of God, the impartation of His life, that gives life
to the seed, and we, in eating the grain, become partakers of that life.
God desires that even in receiving our daily bread we may recognize
His agency and be brought into closer fellowship with Him.
By the laws of God in nature, effect follows cause with unvarying
certainty. The reaping testifies to the sowing. Here no pretense is
tolerated. Mortals may deceive other mortals and may receive praise
and compensation for service they have not rendered. But in nature
there can be no deception.
On the unfaithful husbandman the harvest passes sentence of
condemnation. And in the highest sense this is true also in the
spiritual realm. It is in appearance, not in reality, that evil succeeds.
People in any business or profession who are untrue to their highest
responsibilities may flatter themselves that so long as the wrong
is concealed they are gaining an advantage. But not so; they are
cheating themselves. The harvest of life is character, and it is this
that determines destiny, both for this life and for the life to come.
The harvest is a reproduction of the seed sown. Every seed yields
fruit after its kind. So it is with the traits of character we cherish.
Selfishness, self-love, self-esteem, self-indulgence, reproduce them-
selves, and the end is wretchedness and ruin. If you “sow to your
own flesh, you will reap corruption from the flesh; but if you sow to
the Spirit, you will reap eternal life from the Spirit.”
Galatians 6:8
,
NRSV. Love, sympathy, and kindness yield the fruit of blessing, a
harvest that is imperishable.
In the harvest the seed is multiplied. A single grain of wheat, in-
creased by repeated sowings, would cover a whole land with golden
sheaves. The influence of a single life, of even a single act, may be
just as widespread.
What deeds of love the memory of that alabaster box broken for
Christ’s anointing has prompted through the long centuries! What
countless gifts that contribution of “two mites” by a poor unnamed
widow has brought to the Savior’s cause!