While I was meditating on 1 Chronicles 11 & 12, I noticed some ways that warriors are much different than workers in the harvest field.
1. Developing expertise. Both warriors and workers are experts. Warriors develop their expertise through practice and training before the battle. They practice swordcraft and archery. They practice hand-to-hand movements until they become second nature. Practical experience comes during the battle, but you have to stay alive long enough to experience it.
Workers in the harvest field develop their expertise through OJT — On The Job Training. They learn a quick technique and they go out and try it. Then they evaluate. They make some modification and they go out and try it again. Evaluate and repeat. If you do that in a physical battle you die while you are evaluating because enemy soldiers keep coming. Speaking of the enemy . . .
2. The enemy is different. Warriors battle other human beings. The quality of the weapons may be different on each side, but the operators are humans.
Workers work with humans. Satan is the enemy. His tactics are much different. He mount psychological warfare. He gets “in the head” of the worker. His purpose is to get the worker to give up. To quit trying. He wants people to quit working in the harvest field. Ignore the people going to hell. Those are Satan’s prize and he wants to keep. They are prisoners of war. He doesn’t want workers trying to free them.
3. The stakes. Warriors compete for physical life and death. Everyone dies sometime. Warriors know that there is the potential they will die in the next battle. It’s a risk. Any one could die at any time. Warriors just think about it more because it is a very real possibility when they go to battle.
Workers compete for spiritual life and death. The kind that lasts for eternity. Ecclesiastes says that God has set eternity in men’s hearts. Everyone knows their is an eternal destiny in the depths of their heart.
Spiritual death is not as tangible to most people as physical death is. Which is unfortunate, because the stakes are so very much higher.
Do you recognize the importance of working in the harvest field?
Tags: evangelism, laboring / working, working
