It Shall Not Return Empty
Isaiah 55:10–11 (ESV)
I have preached in churches where the congregation numbered fourteen, where the carpet was worn down to the hide, where the offering wouldn’t have kept the lights on if there were lights worth keeping on. I have driven home from Sunday services wondering whether anything I said reached anyone at all, or whether the way I delivered it was all wrong. I’ve been told I was a little harsh, that I could be a little more loving and patient. The doctrines of the biblical Gospel are terribly offensive to many even when delivered gently.
If you have been in ministry for any length of time, you know that feeling. It isn’t despair, exactly. It is something quieter, and in some ways worse — a low, persistent question that doesn’t announce itself but just sits with you on the drive home. Does this matter? Is any of this reaching anyone? Should I even call myself a preacher?
Isaiah 55:10–11 is God’s answer to that question. And it is categorical.
“For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return there but water the earth, making it sprout and flourish, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I send it.”
The analogy is plain and unhurried. Not lightning. Not fire from heaven. Rain. Snow. The quiet, patient work of water moving into ground. No one stands at the window watching it fall and wonders whether it will work. The farmer doesn’t lie awake worried that his fields might refuse the moisture. He just knows. God made the water and he made the ground, and the two of them have some arrangement that does not require the farmer’s anxiety to function.
The text does not promise what we purpose. It promises what God purposes. That distinction matters more than we tend to let it. We send the Word out hoping for one thing and God uses it for something else entirely, while we wonder what happened. We preach what feels like an ordinary, unremarkable sermon, and it is the one that breaks through to the man sitting in the back row at the worst moment of his life. We write something modest and it finds its way to a person we will never meet in a place we have never heard of. The Word goes where God sends it. Our responsibility is faithfulness in the sending. What it actually accomplishes is not our job. I know that. I believe it. And still, sometimes, it makes me so emotional I get teary — and at the same time I can hardly wait for the next chance to preach.
Spurgeon seemed to understand this better than most. He sent his words out into the world with the settled conviction that he had no way of knowing how far a single sermon might travel, or how long it might keep working after he was gone. That uncertainty was not a burden to him. It was a form of worship. The Word was God’s, not his. The work was God’s, not his. He was only the voice.
Most faithful ministry looks like failure by the numbers, most of the time. The congregation of fourteen. The newsletter reaching a hundred people in a world of millions. A voice crying in a wilderness that doesn’t seem to echo anywhere. But the text won’t allow that arithmetic. What God sends out in his Word is not subject to our measurement. The rain doesn’t know how many seeds it’s watering. It just falls. The ground receives it, and something that was not there before begins to grow. By the time anyone notices, the rain is long gone.
I think about the men who shaped my own understanding of Scripture — Spurgeon, Dabney, Watson, Flavel, Matthew Henry, Lange. Every one of them has been dead for a very long time. Not one of them has stopped working. Their words are still falling on ground, still producing something in readers who could never have been imagined when those books were written. Those men had no idea. They were only being faithful with what they had, sending out what they believed, trusting the God who made this promise.
That is the only standard that finally matters. Not whether the harvest is visible in our lifetime. Whether we were faithful in the sowing.
What goes out from this place goes into ground I cannot see, watered by the God who promised that none of it returns to him empty.
That is not my promise. That is His.
“It shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I send it.” — Isaiah 55:11
Joel Taylor is a Baptist minister and the founder of Voice in the Valley Ministries. He makes his home in Abingdon, Virginia.
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