Jesus traveled around to all of the villages and towns in the area where he did his work. Even though there were times where his disciples wanted him to stay and set up their ministry work in a particular area, or even though the people would ask Jesus to stay for a much longer time, Jesus continued on, covering an entire area with his message, that the kingdom of God had come near.

In what seems like an effort to be able to cover more ground more quickly, Jesus also sent out his disciples. Jesus would be subsequently coming through that same area where he would send the disciples, but he would send them in advance of his arrival.

As he sent them, though, he started with this command:

Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.”

Matthew 9:37

Jesus commands his disciples to pray and to ask God to send out workers into his harvest field. Now, in one sense, the disciples themselves are the answer to the prayer, but in a completely other sense, their first instruction as he sends the disciples is that they are to pray for workers.

But at that time, they themselves are the only workers! In all of the earth, they are the only ones carrying the message of the kingdom of God that they had heard Jesus telling and that they are now to go out to repeat. Who else are they going to pray and ask God to send?

There are no pastors.

There are no missionaries.

So who will it be? The only possible response to this question that I can think of is that these workers will come directly from the harvest. The harvest field itself will provide the workers who will be sent to do the harvest work that needs to be done.

So, practically speaking, what does that mean? It means that when Jesus sent his disciples to proclaim the kingdom of God, they were not only looking for believers in the message, they were looking for workers for the kingdom.

Do we have any less of a harvest that needs to be done today? There are billions and billions of people across the earth that need yet to even hear the message of God’s redemption through Christ and the only way in which that will happen is to pray that God will send out workers into his harvest field.

Within those billions of people, there are many languages that most of us will never speak. There are differences between our cultures that will block the Gospel from moving forward. There are natural human tendencies that will continue to create tribes among the peoples that will divide us between “us” and “them”.

We also must pray to the Lord of the harvest, that he would send out workers into his harvest field. Those workers can and should, come from anywhere and everywhere, but given the size of the harvest field in certain parts of the world, let us pray that the Lord would send out workers into his fields where the name of Christ is not known and where the kingdom of God has not yet been proclaimed. And let us pray that those workers will look like, speak like, and understand the cultures of the peoples of those cultures where the harvest fields are today the largest around the world.