Blogging in Christ — Issue 8

The Herald Goes Out

A piece that has been proved still sits in the writer's hands. Proving it was never the end of the work. The end is release. The herald does not keep the word; he carries it out. The question is not whether the piece will go out, but how it goes out, and what the writer expects once it has left his hands.

The Lord gives the image, and the image governs everything that follows. "Listen! Behold, the farmer went out to sow." (Mark 4:3) He went out. The seed did not sow itself, and it did not stay in the storehouse. A storehouse full of seed is not a harvest. It is only potential, kept. The farmer's first act is not cleverness. It is departure. He takes what he has been given and carries it beyond his own ground, into ground he does not control.

And what he sows is named at once, before any result is described. "The farmer sows the word." (Mark 4:14) Not his reputation. Not his platform. The word. This is the first correction to every notion of distribution. The herald does not distribute himself. He distributes a word that is not his own, and the word carries its own life. The moment the writer thinks of distribution as the spreading of his name, he has changed the seed.

Therefore the sowing is indiscriminate, and deliberately so. "As he sowed, some seed fell by the road, and the birds came and devoured it." (Mark 4:4) "Others fell on the rocky ground, where it had little soil, and immediately it sprang up, because it had no depth of soil." (Mark 4:5) "Others fell among the thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked it, and it yielded no fruit." (Mark 4:7) "Others fell into the good ground and yielded fruit, growing up and increasing. Some produced thirty times, some sixty times, and some one hundred times as much." (Mark 4:8) Four grounds, one sowing. The farmer does not first survey the field, test the soil, and sow only where the yield is assured. He sows everywhere, and he lets the ground declare itself.

This undoes the whole machinery of targeted distribution. The modern instinct is to aim: find the right audience, speak only to the receptive, measure the response, and refine the aim until every seed lands on good ground. The parable refuses that instinct at the root. The sower does not know, at the moment of sowing, which ground is which. He does not withhold seed from the road in case the birds come, nor from the thorns in case the cares of this age choke it. The interpretation names the losses plainly, including that "the cares of this age, and the deceitfulness of riches, and the lusts of other things entering in choke the word, and it becomes unfruitful." (Mark 4:19) The losses are real, and they are foreseen, and the sowing continues anyway. A herald who sows only where he is certain of fruit has stopped being a herald. He has become a merchant, counting the return before he opens his hand.

The reason he can sow this way is that the growth is not his work. "God's Kingdom is as if a man should cast seed on the earth, and should sleep and rise night and day, and the seed should spring up and grow, though he doesn't know how." (Mark 4:26-27) He does not know how. That ignorance is not a defect in the parable. It is the point. "For the earth bears fruit by itself: first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear." (Mark 4:28) The life is in the seed, and the increase is in the ground's Maker. The farmer does not dig the seed up to check whether it has sprouted.

The apostle states the same division of labor as a rebuke to every planter who confuses his part with God's. "I planted. Apollos watered. But God gave the increase." (1 Cor 3:6) "So then neither he who plants is anything, nor he who waters, but God who gives the increase." (1 Cor 3:7) Neither is anything. The planter is not nothing in the sense that his work does not matter; the seed must be sown, and sowing is real work. He is nothing in the sense that his work does not produce the life. Planting and watering are the herald's part. Increase is God's part, and it is not shared. A writer who measures his faithfulness by the size of his harvest has seized a measure that belongs to God alone. A writer who measures his faithfulness by whether he sowed has the right measure in his hand.

This is why the word can be sent without the writer's management of its journey. "So is my word that goes out of my mouth: it will not return to me void, but it will accomplish that which I please, and it will prosper in the thing I sent it to do." (Isa 55:11) What is promised is that the word accomplishes what God pleases, not what the writer pleases. The writer may send a piece hoping for one result and watch God use it for another, or for none that he ever sees. The promise stands either way, because it belongs to the word, not to the writer's plan for it.

The pattern in the church's first days confirms it. Distribution there was not a campaign. It was a scattering. "Therefore those who were scattered abroad went around preaching the word." (Acts 8:4) They were scattered — driven out, not sent out by a plan — and wherever they landed, they preached. The scattering was the distribution. And the result is recorded without any credit to their method: "The Lord's word was spread abroad throughout all the region." (Acts 13:49) The subject of the sentence is the word, not the preachers. They preached; it spread.

Nor is weeping an objection. "He who goes out weeping, carrying seed for sowing, will certainly come again with joy, carrying his sheaves." (Ps 126:6) The tears are part of the going, not an interruption of it. The sheaves come to the one who went, not to the one who stayed home until he felt confident.

So the charge stands, plain and unqualified. "Preach the word; be urgent in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort with all patience and teaching." (2 Tim 4:2) In season and out of season — when the ground looks promising and when it does not, when the piece is welcomed and when it is ignored. Urgency belongs to the preaching, not to the measuring. The herald is urgent about the word and patient about the result, because the result is not his to hurry.

The sending itself sets the scope wider than any audience the writer would choose for himself. "Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that I commanded you. Behold, I am with you always, even to the end of the age." (Matt 28:19-20) All nations — not the receptive nations, not the nations most likely to respond. And with the command comes the presence: "I am with you always." The herald does not go out alone, and he does not go out to manufacture disciples.

What, then, does the herald actually do, on the day the piece goes out? He does three things, and no more. He sends it where it can be found, plainly and without disguise, on ground no platform owns. He sends it without a price and without a hook, because a word with a price attached is no longer freely given. And then he lets it go. He does not chase it, or watch the numbers gather around it, or revise it in response to silence, or inflate it in response to applause. He returns to the next piece, and leaves the last one in the ground where he cast it.

The herald goes out, and the word goes farther than he does. That is not a failure of distribution. That is distribution, rightly understood. The seed is sown, the sower sleeps and rises, and God gives the increase. The writer's part ends at the edge of the field. The word's work begins there.