Sometimes a little ploughing in prayer is required before you sow the seed.

Plough The Ground

---

00:00:02.750]
When a farmer goes to, say, seed in his field, he is already invisibly envisaging a harvest and it’s like there’s some kind of prophetic thing within him that can see the future before it exists. He sees the harvest before it’s grown, and even though he doesn’t see it, he applies all of his energies and pours himself in to really reach for that as yet unseen outcome. He works as if the fruit of his labours will be inevitable. Jesus described it this way in Maag four, verse 26, he says So is the kingdom of God.

00:00:53.150]
If a man should cast seed in the ground, sleep and rise night and day and the seed springs and grows up, he doesn’t know how this is. That’s just in that statement alone is powerful. We don’t need to know how everything works. We just need to know that it will, for the Earth brings forth fruit of herself, first the blade, then the year after that the full corn in the air. And when the when the fruit is brought forth immediately he puts in the cycle because the harvest has come.

00:01:29.750]
The farmer really does operate by faith and we are called to operate in the same way natural laws inform the farmers actions and allow him to trust for a future result before the first seed has even been sown. Prayer works in a similar way. You know, it harnesses spiritual laws of faith and patience and applies them to whatever subject has been addressed in the spirit. You know, there’s a world of kind of exposition and exploration that we could enter into as we discuss this whole world of faith and that kind of prophetic vision, etc.

00:02:14.350]
But there’s something that I just want to kind of highlight today as something that I have exercised and experienced in prayer and I believe is really powerful and also helpful, because sometimes we can wonder why things are not working the way that we expect or that things are not happening in the way that we would want them to. Anyone who has ever kind of taken this, embarked on this journey of faith will know exactly what I mean. And there’s something that is missing from this story.

00:02:51.760]
Yeah. And that is the fact that the farmer had to plough the field before he sowed the seed. The story of the farmer here in the Book of Mark begins with casting seed. But something happened prior to that and that was ploughing the ground, you know, turning over the soil. And in my experience, that same ploughing process can can be applied in the spirit as we pray, you know, because there are a lot of situations that we face that really where the inner in a spiritual sense, the ground is very, very hard.

00:03:33.640]
You know, it’s been compacted three possibly decades, even centuries of hard wearing and hard treading. And, you know, we can throw our seed onto the soil. But as Jesus also taught elsewhere, there are different kinds of soil. Now, he was speaking of the different kinds of heart and how the heart receives the word of God. But the same can be said of the the culture and the atmosphere of a circumstance or a family or a nation.

00:04:11.770]
The the ground that we are seeking to sow into the ground that we are seeking to grow a harvest from can be so compacted, can be so calloused, can be so hard that even if we throw an abundance of seed and put our prayers out there, we see few results. And and I think that there’s a need sometimes for us to really understand the different activities that take place in the spirit world when we come to pray. You know, it’s there are certain situations, there are certain circumstances where really just a shotgun prayer of faith is not going to materialise.

00:05:04.240]
The kind of harvest that we want, you know, rapid fire request in the name of Jesus thrown into the air is just not going to cut it. You know, a lot of times these well-meaning and sometimes even faith filled prayers just bounce back and don’t even break the surface, you know? So ploughing, really ploughing in the spirit requires time and effort to infuse an atmosphere with a new responsiveness to the words of faith and those prayers of faith when they’re sown and when they’re spoken.

00:05:44.410]
I used to visit a lot of schools. There was a few of us, a small team of us would go into secondary schools and spend time with kids there during their lunch hours. And as part of the preparation for that, we would come together excuse me, we would come together and we would literally just paced the floor in our church building, just praying in tongues, praying in tongues, praying in tongues. You know, the scriptures say that when we don’t know how to pray as we ought, if we’re in a situation where we we are seeking to see results, but were not seeing the kind of results or the level of results that we want, that he will come to come together with us and help us to pray according to the will of God, that we will pray with Groening’s.

00:06:38.350]
That can’t be uttered or understood in natural language that this language of the spirit can come up within us and we can go into the spirit and we can begin to break up the fallow ground ready for sowing. There’s a great verse in Hozier, chapter 10, verse 12. It says so to yourselves. In righteousness, rip in mercy, break up your fallow ground, for it is time to seek the Lord until he come and reign righteousness upon you.

00:07:11.020]
Prayer that we see here breaks up the fallow ground. It prepares the ground. You know, some things just take a little bit of hoeing, but other situations demand really heavy duty intercession to soften that soil and break it up. You know, I understand I’m using natural pitchers to try and describe spiritual activities and spiritual things. But I can promise you, man, as you pace the floor, I choose to pace the floor. You don’t have to pace the floor because that’s just my nature.

00:07:46.870]
I love to get my body involved in the exercise of prayer as much as I like to get my my heart and soul involved in it. But as you pray, as you pray and pace and just like move in Shela, robust soul no more clearly Makatea Kalama Collabo, Rakia silly, maybe Bioko, Aracataca Cucumber Baragon Dakara got no I’m not talking for like two minutes. Five minutes. Ten minutes. Fifteen minutes. I’m talking for half an hour.

00:08:18.670]
Sixty minutes. 90 minutes. You do that, you just plough that ground, walk up and down that field, turning that soil over so to yourselves in righteousness, breaking up the ground, infusing the atmosphere with Kingdome presence and kingdom power. I promise you, you will begin to sense the shifting atmosphere and you’ll feel faith rise for the harvest that you envision in the soil will be softened and your seed will fall in pleasant places. Some bear, some bearing thirty, some sixty, some a hundred fold, and you will see fruitfulness begin to spring up around you.

00:09:03.970]
So I encourage you, you know, it’s like understand the different ways that the Holy Spirit wants to work with you in prayer. And I think that one of the ways in which he can do that is to exercise this ploughing this this turning over of the soil, sowing tea in righteousness and breaking up that hard ground, breaking up that overgrown ground so we can begin to put seed in it and see the kind of harvests we want, whether that be in our family, whether it be in our community, whether it be in our businesses.

00:09:41.860]
The Holy Spirit is there to help us at every stage of the journey. Well, thanks for listening. Hopefully it’s been an encouragement to you today. If you want to connect any further, you can do so through my website at Davidleemartin.com. Have a great day.