These words have their parallel in Luke 10:2 and John 4:35, and press upon us awesome gospel truths. The illustration is a familiar one. Here are fields of wheat now turned pale yellow by the sun and awaiting harvest. The farmer must be about his work without delay, the harvest will not wait, next month will be too late. Too soon the golden fields will blacken and droop, and mildew and rot will set in. So it is with the harvest of men's souls. "Death is in the field with his flashing scythe mowing down the nations and gathering his sheaves for hell fire" (R.L. Dabney). There is a terrible urgency about the work. So let us think about the implications of our Lord's words.

1. The work is great but the labourers are few.The work is glorious - to serve such a Master and proclaim so great a gospel and, as Amy Carmichael once put it, ‘to run a rescue shop within a yard of hell’. And yet the labourers are few. I do not think the force of our Lord's words should be restricted to preachers and pastors and missionaries - are we not all labourers in the harvest field? The work of proclaiming the gospel to the world is the work of the whole church, and every member in particular. And yet how many in our churches are prepared to leave the work to a few. Where is that earnest, wholehearted commitment that will cheerfully take up even the most lowly tasks and do them as unto the Lord? Sadly, ‘the labourers are few’. And what of pastors and missionaries? A whole generation of such - in Wales - is retiring and dying; their names appear from month to month in the ‘Evangelical Magazine’. And the same is happening in England - but who will fill their places? Who will take up the torch and run with it?

2. The men and women of this generation will perish unless saved by the gospel labours of the church. The church - believers like you and me - is God's chosen instrument to make the gospel known to the world. It is the agency which the Spirit uses. Without the gospel men and women perish. And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved (Acts 4:12). No word could be clearer than that. Listen to Dabney preaching on that text in New York in 1858: ‘We conclude, then, that the church should feel and act towards the human race substantially as though all without the gospel were perishing for ever. Do any murmur at our earnest, yea, vehement, zeal to drive the dread conviction home upon you? I answer: It is not because we are glad to have it so, but because we sadly know it is so.’

Surely we need a new awakening to these twin truths - the vastness of the love of God for sinners made known in the gospel, and the perilous condition of men and women who live and die without Christ.

3. Our first and primary response to these things is to give ourselves to prayer. Let us beseech God to thrust forth labourers into his harvest. And let us begin with ourselves – ‘Lord, what would you have me to do? Is there some task, however lowly, that I could do in your service?’