Lynn Jones: How close to plow to the corn
By Lynn Jones
One Saturday morning several years ago, I used a tiller to till my garden rows. Wild morning glories were everywhere. Morning glories are opportunists. When they see you plowing up a garden and planting seeds, they come running and jump right into the middle of the rows along with your seeds. They time their appearance as plants to coincide with the emergence of your plants in hopes of sneaking by you. They then disguise themselves to look like an emerging garden plant. Or failing that, they get so close to your garden plant that it is difficult to dislodge them without dislodging your plant.
As I plowed the rows that day, I tried to get as close to my plants as possible without uprooting them. This made me think of a line that the late Landrum Leavell often used when he was preaching. He would make some rather pointed applications of the Scripture, would name sins and would point out in clear language what ought to be done about them. In the middle of that, he would often say, “Now I know that I am plowing awfully close to the corn.”
When you are plowing corn or any other crop, you have a very tedious task before you that pulls you in two directions. If you plow too close to the corn, you uproot the plants and destroy the very crop that you are trying to help. On the other hand, if you plow too far away from the corn, you do no good. You leave the weeds and grass next to the corn untouched.
That’s the dilemma that we face in trying to bear witness to the gospel. On the one hand, we must get close enough to the lives of people and the sin that is destroying them to dislodge the sin. If we never confront persons and their sins directly, we may leave them untouched by the impact of the gospel. On the other hand, if we get too direct, then we may do more harm than good. We may cause people not to hear our words at all.
It is possible to kill house flies with sledgehammers, but it is probably not a good idea. You damage an awful lot of furniture in the process. What you need to do is attack houseflies without destroying furniture. One observer of preaching said that people need to hear the gospel “without being ambushed by it.” We must find the happy medium in our presentation.
Jesus said that we should be as wise as serpents and as harmless as doves. That implies the need for wisdom and tact in bearing witness to Him. Tact has been defined as the ability to step on a man’s toes without hurting the shine on his shoes. We need to pray for sensitivity to pull off that challenging task.
Lynn Jones is a retired pastor who lives in Oxford. He does supply preaching for churches in his area and often serves as an interim pastor. Jones is also an author, has written two books and writes a weekly newspaper column. He may be contacted at: kljones45@yahoo.com.
