Luke 10:2 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters

Navigator

Luke 10:2

Comments

Often a verse like this is used in connection with missionaries serving the Lord overseas, or ministers preaching the gospel, and we are told to pray for such workers. That is good, but it takes our eye off the full sense of the verse. We must see more than this in the text. We don't just pray that the Lord would send labourers into his harvest. We do more than that: we pray for the work of the harvest; we pray that we may be successful in our representing the Lord. We do not only pray that there will be speakers, witnesses, messengers. It follows that we must pray for the whole work. The full sense of the Lord's words is obvious. We must pray for every aspect: pray that there will be those who are effective witnesses – not just ministers and missionaries, but all God's people – and we must pray for ourselves in the work, and for the church in the work of the harvest of souls. Prayer is vital. First of all there is the commission, the appointment, and immediately there is the exhortation to pray. It is described as a harvest, and we can learn much from that. Our work is that of harvesting. It is God who works in hearts and prepares souls. We can apply all aspects of the harvest to our work, but essentially it is God who causes the seed to grow and brings the crop to a ripe state. So too, it is God who prepares the ground of the heart, opens the ear, inclines the will; all we do in a sense is harvest. The growth and the ripening are beyond our understanding, and completely beyond our power to accomplish. At the harvest we see the end result of a process that God has designed, which requires such unimaginable skill. He has sent the rain and the sunshine. He has designed the plant to grow and produce fruit which is edible and to ripen it. We are like children being fed: the ingredients are obtained, the food is cooked, it is served to the child, and the child must only put the food in its mouth. We are like those who are chosen to cut the ribbon at the launching of the ship, after everything else has been done.

Application

But the harvest is hard work. If we are not working for the Lord, if we are not urging ourselves into this work, it is hardly a harvest. The harvest of olden times – before the great harvesting machines were invented – involved much manual labour. Many people were involved, and so it is for us. You are out there all day in the heat of the sun, bending down, doing back-breaking work. There is much lifting and carrying. There is the sense that the crop is safely brought in out of harm’s way. There is the camaraderie of working together, and mutual encouragement, and the rejoicing that comes at the great accomplishment, the sower and the reaper rejoicing together. So too there is much Christian fellowship in bringing in the harvest as fellow-workers.

But the emphasis is on the element of prayer in this second verse. ‘Pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest’, and we should read it in this sense: that he would both send and bless the work. Both are needed. The seventy were being sent out: they must be those who not only work themselves, but have a deep concern for the entire project, the winning of God’s elect out of a lost world. Their concern is bigger than their own work. They are in sympathy with all the aims of the Lord of the harvest. He is the one who chooses his elect in eternity past, sends his Son into the world to give his life for them, arranges the circumstances of their lives, draws them to himself, pardons their sins, places them among his people, sends teachers to them, sanctifies them, and gathers them safely into his heavenly barn at the end of life.

How amazing that God has in part made the success of the harvest dependent on our prayers! It is a further privilege given to God’s people; it is his drawing us close to him as fellow workers, and giving us a part with him in his work and that we do not deserve.

Questions

Outline

Purpose

Introduction

Luke 10:2 Commentary and Bible Study