The Power of Sowing the Gospel Seed #1

It's a great blessing for me to be a part of PC Global Network. It's with joy that I serve and strive to lead this movement through the direction and guidance of the Holy Spirit to a greater place of fruitfulness for all of us.

I don’t believe it’s difficult to be fruitful and live lives that count in the Kingdom of God. The church is made up of people from the bottom much more than from the top. No matter where you are in life today, God can use you as He has used so many others. You don’t have to be a super star.

The vision of PC Global Network is to, “Win, Build, and Send.” Through this simple vision, we are seeing thousands of people fulfill their calling and become fruitful in God’s Kingdom.

I have written each Power Principle of Fruitfulness in an individual book. I trust they will help you to know that you can be one of His workers who brings forth “much fruit.”

He who observes the wind will not sow, and he who regards the clouds will not reap. As you do not know what is the way of the wind, or how the bones grow in the womb of her who is with child, so you do not know the works of God who makes everything. In the morning sow your seed, and in the evening do not withhold your hand; For you do not know which will prosper, either this or that, or whether both alike will be good (Ecclesiastes 11:4-6 NKJV).

It's simple. We are called to sow seed. Fruitfulness in the Kingdom of God is the result of sowing the Gospel seed. You plant seed. You watch it grow. It produces fruit.

Fruitfulness is not difficult. It doesn’t take multi-talented people to produce spiritual fruit. God chooses to use the weak and insignificant for the Kingdom of God.

It may be sharing your faith with your family and friends or taking a Gospel track and witnessing to someone. You may go to the unreached people of the world as a missionary. Wherever you go, the task is still the same… we are called to sow the Gospel seed.

You can't take the “Go” out of the Gospel. 

It’s an action word. The Bible says,

“He who continually goes forth weeping, bearing seed for sowing, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him.” (Psalm 126:6)

Time is important in sowing the gospel seed. 

In working with the “Power Principle of Sowing the Gospel Seed," time is a very important factor.

You Can't Circumvent Time. 

Good fruit doesn’t develop and mature overnight. Discipleship and church planting is much the same way. One of the main reasons many don’t invest in church planting is this factor of time. It’s great to be involved in sowing the Gospel seed, but you must be willing to invest the time for the seed to grow. When we send out a worker to plant a church we understand that we can’t circumvent time.

Time is on Your Side. 

Sowing the Gospel seed is like investing. The more you invest, and the earlier you invest it, the more probability you have of success. Wise investing starts early in life because of the power of compound interest.

If you invest $25.00 a week at 6% compounded interest, in 10 years you will have $17,802. If you continue for another 10 years, it’ll be $50,240. Continue another 10 years and you have $109,345, and 10 more years, it doubles to $217,043.

I've found that the Gospel seed that I've sown throughout the world is like that. It keeps bringing forth more fruit as the years go by. Jesus said that the Gospel seed will produce.

“But some seeds fell on fertile soil and produced a crop that was thirty, sixty, and even a hundred times as much as had been planted.” (Matthew 13:8 NLT)

In 1982, my wife, Janet and I joined with Pastor Sammy and Naomi Mores and started our first church in the Philippines. The church was located on the third floor of a small building where we had many services with only a handful of people.

At the end of seven or eight years we had a strong mother church and had planted about 60 churches. Today, Pastor Sammy Mores leads a great family of fellowships in the Philippines with thousands of people, in hundreds of churches, in many countries. It all began by sowing the good Gospel seeds.

How we sow the seed and build will determine the lasting fruit we have in the kingdom of God. 

Sowing and reaping is a fundamental principle of the Kingdom of God.

Another parable He put forth to them, saying:

“The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and sowed in his field, which indeed is the least of all the seeds; but when it is grown it is greater than the herbs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and nest in its branches.” Matthew 13:31-32

Increase is the reward for labor. 

Here is a man who sowed seed in his field. That's all it takes to begin fruitfulness in our lives. Go out and do some sowing. If you want your church to grow, you must go out and sow some seed. The more seed you sow, the more you're going to reap a harvest in your life and in the Kingdom of God.

The building that the Praise Chapel in Dallas,Texas used to rent, had stained glass windows. On them were written the names of the donors who had given to that church back in 1918.

That church was pioneered in that area of Dallas in the early 1900s. Somebody had to pioneer it. Dallas has churches of every size and style and somebody had to plant each and every church in that city. Someone went and planted the church. They sowed the Gospel seed.

Every season there has to be sowing. It never stops. “There is a time to sow and a time to harvest.”

Today, they meet in another building, but the church is still in Dallas and growing and bearing much fruit. We can never stop sowing.

It’s great to be a part of a family of fellowships with churches all over the world, but I can remember when there was no “PC Global Network."

When my brother Mike and Donna Neville got in their car, towing a luggage trailer and drove off to Los Angeles to take a small church in Maywood, California, there wasn’t a Praise Chapel Fellowship. There was just one church called, “Rosewood Assembly."

Today, because of the seed sown from that church, we are part of a fellowship of “fellowships of churches and ministries” that are reaching into many parts of the world. It’s blessing all of our lives who are a part of this fellowship.

One reason organizations and churches stop growing or even die is because they stop sowing. 

It’s that simple. They get a harvest and prosper, the blessing is flowing and they stop working the field. Or, they move into “maintenance mode,” taking care of what they have.

Then, stagnation sets in and maintenance programs replace sowing new seeds. It’s so easy to fall into this mode of life and ministry. We aren't called to maintain.

Yes, we have a responsibility to conserve the fruit the Lord has given us. That's why we have a “Family of Fellowships” who partner together working to help conserve the harvest. But mainly, we do this through the planting of new churches. There's no greater way to reap a harvest than to plant a church. In every church growth study, church planting is still the most fruitful method of extending the kingdom of God.

You can’t stop sowing. 

You can’t stop working at plowing the You can’t stop doing the outreaches that reach the unchurched. 

The fields must be plowed over and over again. In every season we have to sow the Gospel seed through effective evangelism and do all that we can.

If we stop sowing the Gospel seed, we will die. It’s not us; it’s the seed we sow that has the power.

The power of the Gospel is in the seed.

Larry Neville

Pastor, Missionary, & President of PCGlobal

-This blog post is an updated and edited excerpt from Pastor Larry Neville’s book, The Power of the Gospel Seed.