Luke 9:62 "No-one who puts his hand to the plough and looks back is fit for service in the Kingdom of God."
This is another one of those scriptures that I'm so familiar with that I've never really stopped to think about it! But when I was home in NZ recently I was shown a whole new aspect to this scripture by my Dad, who used to be a farmer.
Imagine, it's 2000 years ago. A lone farmer is out in his field, sun beating down, calloused hands wrapped around the warm wooden handles of his plough, sharing a companionable silence with his ox. (Is the scene sufficiently set?!) Now the deal is, when ploughing, a farmer would pick out a tree or a hill or a fence post (did they have them back then?) and fix his eyes on that spot until he got to the end of the field, in order to make sure he ploughed a straight line. If he happened to turn around to check his progress or see how straight his line was and take his eyes off that spot, his furrow would become crooked.
A simple concept, one which dropped into my heart with the force of a meteor! I all at once got a completely different meaning from this well-known scripture. Whereas before I'd thought that Jesus was simply saying that we can't look back once we decide to follow him, I now realised that He was also telling us why. No life is lived properly if we are continually looking behind us and living in the past. Sometimes it is good to see where we've come from and how God has worked in our lives. But if we start regretting our mistakes and looking behind ourselves to see how we've been doing, we often miss what we could do if we fix our eyes on Jesus and just keep going.
And after all, Jesus sees as we will be, not as we are, so we should look at ourselves in the same way.
