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Muskegon SDA Church

Jason Sliger

Life Lessons from a Seed

Father in heaven, we are grateful that we can come together as a family to worship you.

Lord, we thank you for both the blessings and the trials of this past week that grow our faith.

And Father, as we pause from the busyness of life, I pray that you would speak to us this morning as we open your sacred pages and read from it.

It was my freshman year in high school And I was assigned to take a certain Bible class called the Life and Teachings of Jesus.

Basically, in the class we would go through the book Desire of Ages, chapter by chapter, and learn the life and teachings of Christ.

It was a fantastic class if I had had the right mindset at the time.

But my teacher of that class, it was her responsibility to select portions of the book, Desire of Ages, for the students to memorize.

1 that has stuck with me from that time till now is Desire of Ages, page 25, Christ was treated as we deserved, that we might be treated as he deserved.

He was condemned for our sins in which he had no share, that we might be justified by his righteousness in which we had no share.

However, about halfway through my freshman year, a friend of mine and myself, we decided that we were wasting a lot of time memorizing.

We decided that we wanted to get good grades in that class, but we also wanted to have some time to fool around during study hall.

We wanted to have our cake and eat it too.

It's taking so much time, all of this memorizing, and we're not getting as much time to hang up.

The night before we would be quizzed on our memory verse, we would sit at our desk with our desire of ages and a clean sheet of paper, you know that clean, those white sheets of paper with the blue lines on them, the ones you probably haven't seen since you were in high school or college.

We would get 1 of those out, and we would take a pencil, and we would very carefully sketch out the memory verse, very lightly.

And when we finished, you could stand back and look at the piece of paper, and it almost looked like there was nothing on it.

And so the next morning, we would go to our class, and we would take out our clean sheets of paper, right?

And we would write in ink, we would copy over in ink the memory verse and then we would erase the pencil marks And everything looked great.

We were getting good grades in our class, 100% on all of our memory verses.

And this went on for quite some time, and we thought, man, we have beat the system.

And then 1 day, when my teacher said, get out your piece of paper and start writing down your memory verse.

We got our piece of paper, our clean sheets of paper, and we started our work of deception.

But something different happened this day, and I noticed out of the corner of my eye that my teacher got up from her desk, and that made me a little nervous.

And then she started pacing around the classroom in between the desks, and I thought, Ah, this is not looking good.

And then she went over to my friend's desk.

I didn't want to look too close at what was going on over there.

I just, I was feverishly trying to write this memory verse down as fast as I could.

They were like the sound of a hammer coming my direction.

And if you could have saw me, I was probably sweating bullets.

And before I knew it, I was sitting in the shadow of my teacher.

And I was about halfway through copying down my memory verse.

And now the light sketch at the bottom that I thought nobody could see as I looked at it now, I thought all the world could probably see it.

And as she looked over my shoulder, I knew it, I was done.

And she very quietly reached over and she grabbed the piece of paper and she pulled it off my desk and walked back to her desk and sat down.

Teachers just know how to make students feel very uncomfortable.

I think it's something they teach them in college, I don't know, but anyways.

All the class, for the rest of the class, she didn't say anything.

She taught her class and all of that, and I sat there and was wondering what in the world was going to happen.

You know, Punishments are always worse in anticipation than they are in reality.

And so the end of class came and I was stuffing my books in my backpack and I was getting ready to walk out with all the rest of the students and she said, oh, Jason and Peter, can you please stop?

This teacher happened to also be the principal.

And you know, it's kind of dawned on me that, You know, it seemed like everything was going well.

These seeds of deception that I was showing seemed like everything was paying off.

That I, you know, to my teacher it appeared like I was getting good grades.

To all of my fellow students, they thought I was 1 of those students who didn't need to study to get good grades.

Everybody thought things were going well.

And then that seed of deception bore fruit.

You know, for the rest of my freshman year and even into my sophomore year, I unfortunately did not learn the lesson that I should have that day.

I continued to sow seeds of deception and had 1 trial after another come into my life as a young person.

And now as I look back, I see that it's just a natural result of what I was doing.

Got to the point where I almost ended up getting myself expelled out of the school and would have missed out on 1 of the greatest experiences of my life, meeting my Savior for myself.

You will be happy to know that I did graduate with a high school diploma.

I didn't get a 4.0, but I did finish in the end.

But you know, I robbed myself of many wonderful blessings.

Desire of Ages, page 25, has stuck with me my whole life.

And I wonder what would have happened if I would have taken the time to memorize all of those memory verses, how much they would have been a blessing to me throughout my life.

But because I chose to sow seeds of deception, I robbed myself of a tremendous blessing.

Now, this is a concept that we are well acquainted with.

The Bible tells us in Galatians 6 and verse 7, for whatsoever a man soweth." Ah, you're good Bible scholars.

Now, usually, we think of this in a negative context, and if you do bad, bad happens, and that's true.

But it's also good to look at this in the light of a positive context, that when we sow, or when we do good things, good things happen.

In fact, Jesus said, if you sow to the flesh, you reap the flesh, but if you sow to the spirit, you reap the spirit, you reap everlasting life.

So it goes both ways, both good and bad can happen depending on what we choose to sow.

This morning I wanna share with you just quickly 3 life lessons that we learn from seeds.

The first life lesson that we learn is 1 that you know, that we all know, that what you sow is what you reap, right?

It's a law of nature that is well understood that whatever you put in the ground is what you end up getting out of the ground.

You don't have to be a gardener to understand this.

Nobody questions it and everybody understands it, that what you sow is what you reap.

What we find is that the harvest is simply a reproduction of the seed that has been sown.

The Bible tells us in Proverbs 22 in verse 8, whatsoever, or sorry, whosoever sows injustice will reap calamity.

Of course, we can sit back on our comfy little pews here and say, sure, that makes sense.

But the question we have to ask ourselves is, what type of seed am I sowing?

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Life Lessons from a Seed

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