Sowing and reaping

The first rule is the one from Genesis: every seed after its kind. Nobody plants cucumbers and gathers turnips, and nobody is surprised. The strange thing, Moody says, is expecting life to work any other way.

Here he tells the fable of Lukman, the servant who sowed oats hoping barley would come up. When the master asks what madness that is, the servant answers: the same as yours, sowing evil in the field of the world and expecting to reap virtue on resurrection day.

The second rule is multiplication: one seed goes in and a hundredfold comes back. Moody quotes the whole Spanish proverb: sow a thought and reap an act; sow an act and reap a habit; sow a habit and reap a character; sow a character and reap a destiny.

His examples scale up: the thistle-down that blew off a ship's deck and covered an island, the one glass that ends in a drunkard's death, the one lie that ruins a career. No harvest is the size of its seed.

The third rule is the least comfortable: ignorance does not alter the harvest. If I think I am sowing good seed and it happens to be bad, the harvest will be bad all the same. Moody's conclusion is not fear but diligence: look at what you are sowing, above all at home.

He presses with direct questions: father, what seed are you sowing in your family? And he tells of the man who would not speak to his son about faith so as not to prejudice him, until the boy broke his arm and cursed the whole time the doctor set it. Something had been sown anyway.

The last rule answers the obvious objection: if God forgives the one who confesses, what remains of reaping what you sowed? Moody answers with the parable of the hired man who mixed thistles with the wheat out of spite and then asked forgiveness. The master grants it, and adds: but you must reap the thistles along with the wheat.

It is his way of holding both at once without softening either: the forgiveness is real and so is the harvest. Many a Christian, he says, is reaping thistles with his wheat, sown twenty years back.