In the morning sow your seed, and in the evening withhold not your hands, for you know not which shall prosper, whether this or that, or whether both alike will be good. – Ecclesiastes 11:6, Amplified Bible

Most of us have a near insatiable desire to know the future. We want to know what’s going to happen next, and we want to know when it is going to happen.

Due to our desire to know the future, we often try to predict the future based on the information we have in the present. Some professions, like meteorology and securities exchanging, are built entirely on this fascination with prediction, while many other fields, like farming and entrepreneurship, rely on forecasting to some degree.

There is nothing inherently wrong with trying to predict the future, but our obsession with the future can often cloud our judgement in the present. This can happen in particular with the souls that The Lord introduces to us every day. We often make judgement calls about people, and due to our judgement calls we may choose not to sow the Gospel with some people. We look into their future, and we forecast that our efforts to share the Gospel will be unfruitful because these people are too hard or too rich or too skeptical. But our job is not to pick and choose the people with whom to sow the Word. Our job is to faithfully sow the Word regardless of what we think the outcome might be. As Ecclesiastes 11:6 teaches us, we don’t know which seed will prosper and which will not. We are simply to sow the seed. We also have no idea when it will bear fruit, but that should not matter. We may sow the Gospel and never see it come to harvest in a person’s life. But, as John 4:35-38 teaches us, although we may not see the results of our faithful witness, the Word of God never returns void.

When it comes to sowing the Gospel, don’t try to predict which of your efforts will be worthwhile and which ones will not. Simply sow, and leave the results to The Lord of the harvest, God Almighty.