A few years ago, I made a major mistake with my lawn. I put down too much fertilizer. Then my error was compounded by a near drought. The result was that all my grass burned up and died.
I really felt bad about that. I regretted no end having messed up my lawn by my own ill advised actions.
But this episode taught me a valuable spiritual lesson. It allowed me to see, in a very practical way, that the biblical Law of Sowing and Reaping works both ways – for the positive as well as for the negative:
Galatians 6:7 (NKJV) Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, that he will also reap.
On the negative side, my dead grass was the result of me reaping from the overdose of fertilizer I had sown. If I had just continued to wallow in regret for my stupidity, that would have been the end of the story.
But then I began to realize that the Law of Sowing and Reaping could work for me as well as against me. So instead of continuing to moan, groan, and complain about the grass that died, I planted new grass!
I used what I learned from my previous failure to help me grow a great new lawn.
Many of us have episodes in our past lives that we deeply regret. Trying to do the best we knew how in life, we made stupid mistakes that were much more damaging than just using too much fertilizer.
It may have been marrying someone we shouldn’t have married. Or divorcing our mate when the marriage could have been saved. Many times our regrets come from spending money we didn’t have, and being saddled for years with debts that hang on us like weights. Whatever it was, it left us living with our regrets.
We can never go back in time and undo the mistakes we made. But the Law of Sowing and Reaping teaches us that we can go forward in time and overcome those mistakes.
How? By doing just what I did with my lawn. The way to get beyond reaping the corrupt harvest of the bad seeds we planted in our past is to plant new seed for our future!
The apostle Paul showed us the way:
Philippians 3:13-14 Brethren, I do not count myself to have apprehended; but one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forward to those things which are ahead, 14 I press toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.
So, stop moaning, groaning, and complaining about reaping from the stupid mistakes of the past, and start making some biblically wise decisions now. You’ll continue to reap what you have sown, but now you’ll have a new crop, green and lush, not just dead grass.
