Glenn and Scott are bungee-jumping one day when Glenn has a brainstorm, “You know, we could make a lot of money running our own bungee-jumping service in Mexico.” Scott agrees that it would be a great idea, so the two pool their money and buy everything they need – a tower, an elastic cord, insurance, etc. Then they travel to Mexico and begin to set up on the square. As they’re constructing the tower, a crowd begins to assemble. Slowly, more and more people gather to watch them at work. When everything is ready Glenn gives it a test jump. He jumps, bounces at the end of the cord and comes back up, but Scott notices that Glenn has a few cuts and scratches. Unfortunately, Scott isn’t able to catch him, so Glenn falls again, bounces at the end of the cord, and comes back up. This time, Glenn is bruised and bleeding. Again, Scott misses him. Glenn goes down once more and this time, he comes back pretty messed up. He’s got a couple of broken bones and is almost unconscious. On the next attempt, Scott finally catches him and pulls him in. “What happened?” he asks. “Was the cord too long?” Glenn catches his breath and replies, “No, the cord was just fine, but tell me, what in the world is a piñata?”

I guess Glenn learned the hard way that there are inevitable consequences to your actions. If you play around with something dangerous, you could wind up getting hurt. In effect, that’s what St. Paul was talking about in our text for today, when he said: “A MAN REAPS WHAT HE SOWS. THE ONE WHO SOWS TO PLEASE HIS SINFUL NATURE, FROM THAT NATURE WILL REAP DESTRUCTION; THE ONE WHO SOWS TO PLEASE THE SPIRIT, FROM THE SPIRIT WILL REAP ETERNAL LIFE!” How true that is. If you plant a tomato seed, you get tomatoes. You don’t get potatoes or onions. You get tomatoes. And that’s not only true in nature. It’s also true in spiritual terms. You see, if you sow to the Spirit, you will reap life. But if you sow to the flesh, you will reap death. In other words, there is a dangerous consequence to living in sin. For if you and I plant sinfulness, all we will get is sinfulness in return. If we keep on breaking God’s Law, indulging in the desires of the flesh, we don’t get more righteous. We get more wicked! It all depends on the kind of seed you sow. No farmer worth his salt would ever waste his time using old seed, contaminated seed, or seed with a low germination count, because he knows the end result would be disastrous. Yet, too often that’s exactly what you and I do in our spiritual lives.

In the previous Chapter of Galatians, St. Paul tells us that, “THE ACTS OF THE SINFUL NATURE ARE OBVIOUS – SEXUAL IMMORALITY, IMPURITY AND DEBAUCHERY; IDOLATRY AND WITCHCRAFT; HATRED, DISCORD, JELOUSY, FITS OF RAGE, SELFISH AMBITION, DISSENSIONS, FACTIONS AND ENVY; DRUNKENESS, ORGIES, AND THE LIKE.” If those are the kinds of seed you and I are planting, if we are living a life of dirty thoughts, selfish desires, anger towards others, fighting and bickering, getting drunk, playing around with the occult, holding grudges and so on – if that’s the kind of seed we are planting, then it is old, contaminated seed. If we are sowing the wild oats of sin and iniquity, about all we can do is pray for crop failure. And Scripture assures us that won’t happen. Instead, the end result will be disastrous.

There is an ancient Chinese parable that sums it up perfectly. It tells about the judge Ch’en Shuku, who was seeking to determine the thief among several suspects who had been arrested. No one would confess. So Ch’en placed a bell behind a curtain and had an assistant smear it with ink. Then he told the suspects that when an innocent man touched the bell behind the curtain, it would remain silent; but when a guilty man touched it, it would ring. He did not tell them about the ink. Each suspect then put his hand through the curtain to touch the bell, but the bell did not ring. Then Ch’en examined the hands of each suspect. All were ink-stained but one. Caught, the thief confessed. He explained, that he was afraid if he touched the bell, it would ring because he was guilty.

Well, dear friends, you and I are also guilty, caught red-handed sowing to the flesh rather than sowing to the Spirit. In the opening verse of our text, St. Paul describes it as being ‘caught in sin,’ or as the Greek text puts it: ‘overtaken in sin.’ For that is what sin does to you and me. It overpowers us, so that we cannot escape. As a matter of fact, the word for ‘sin’ that Paul uses there literally means, “a falling beside the road.” It’s the idea that you and I frequently get ensnared by sin and fall away, like a car sliding into a ditch on a patch of ice. We wind up slipping away from God and becoming separated from His love. That is the deadly consequence of sowing to the flesh, instead of sowing to the Spirit.

As St. Paul put it in our text: “THE ONE WHO SOWS TO PLEASE HIS SINFUL NATURE, FROM THAT NATURE WILL REAP DESTRUCTION.” Destruction – that’s the harvest that awaits us, if we’re sowing to the flesh, planting the dirty seed of sin. Destruction – the word Paul used there comes from a Greek word meaning worm. The idea being, that something is so rotten and decayed it’s being eaten away by worms. That’s what destruction is. It’s a picture of our soul’s damnation in hell. As Jesus Himself said in Mark 9:47-48, “AND IF YOUR EYE CAUSES YOU TO SIN, PLUCK IT OUT. IT IS BETTER FOR YOU TO ENTER THE KINGDOM OF GOD WITH ONE EYE THAN TO HAVE TWO EYES AND BE THROWN INTO HELL, WHERE THEIR WORM DOES NOT DIE, AND THE FIRE IS NOT QUENCHED!” That’s what happens to our soul, our spiritual life, when you and I sow to the flesh instead of sowing to the Spirit, when we don’t put God first in our life. The seeds of sin and temptation bring forth death, the deadly worm of hell, which consumes and rots away at our soul. And the end result is everlasting condemnation, separated from God forever.

On the other hand, Paul says that, “THE ONE WHO SOWS TO PLEASE THE SPIRIT, FROM THE SPIRIT WILL REAP ETERNAL LIFE.” But just exactly who is the one who does that? Who sows to spirit? In one sense, Paul was talking about you and me, urging us to daily sow to the Spirit by using the Word and Sacraments. But in a greater sense, the One who really sows to the Spirit, is our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. On our own, you and I make miserable gardeners. That’s why we need the help of the Master Gardener, Jesus Christ. The Man with the green thumb, who can touch all things, even the dead plants of our hearts, and make them grow and thrive unto eternal life. And my friends, that is precisely what He has done for you and me. He has taken the tender, fertile soil of our heart and uprooted all the weeds of iniquity that we have grown there. He did it by coming to this earth and laying down His life for us on the tree of the cross. For His cross is like a huge hoe, which has dug out the thorns and thistles of our sin, and cultivated the soil of our heart with redemption and forgiveness.

Then He took a tiny, powerful, life-giving seed and planted it inside our souls. And what is that seed? Jesus Himself told us in Luke 8:11, “THE SEED IS THE WORD OF GOD!” The Word of God, the Gospel of salvation – that salvation is the seed, which Jesus has sown in our hearts. He sowed it in our Baptism, and He continues to sow it as we daily read and study the Scriptures and regularly partake of the Lord’s Supper. And what a powerful seed it is. I’m sure most of us have seen a pavement buckled by the force of one tiny seed, pushing up and budding to life. Why, it is so powerful that sometimes a whole building can suffer structural damage from a single sprouting seed.

Such is the power of God’s Word, His Gospel of salvation in Jesus Christ. When we are feeling deep remorse for our sin; when we feel down in the dumps about our shameful condition; when we feel trampled upon by the world, God’s Word causes our dead souls to bud and flourish, to come alive again with joy – the joy of His peace and forgiveness. The seed of God’s Word sprouts up and buckles our fears and problems and crushes our sin to pieces. But best of all, the harvest that we receive, the fruit that we reap from the Gospel God has planted in our hearts, the crop that we get is eternal life. We get to live with Him in His beautiful Garden of Paradise forever and ever. That is the harvest, which God has given us in Jesus Christ our Savior.

May that motivate us, then, to daily sow to the Spirit rather than sowing to the flesh, by putting Jesus first in our lives, making constant use of the Means of Grace, and by being good stewards of all that He is given us; by giving generously of our donations to the church to support the ministry of the Gospel, by using our time wisely to spread God’s Word wherever He gives us the chance to witness, and by gladly employing our talents and abilities in our congregation to build up the kingdom of God. That’s how we sow to the Spirit and not to the flesh, to the glory of His holy name. Amen.

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