One of my favorite parables is the one about the Sower and the Four Soils (Mark 4:1-20). It is a parable that captures our imagination with its sights (the Sower scattering the seed, the vast field with the varieties of soil), sounds (the wind blowing, the birds calling, the seeds falling on the ground), textures (the seeds, the dirt), even tastes.
The Sower goes out one day and scatters seed in the field; and the seed falls on four types of soil: the hard-packed path; the shallow soil with rocks; the soil filled with thorns and weeds; and the good soil that produces an abundant crop. As Jesus explains, the seed is the Word of God and the four types of soil are four different conditions of our hearts. Our hearts being in different conditions of receptivity take in the seed in different ways.
I know I have experienced some of each type of soil in my heart, sometimes in succession, sometimes all at once. There are times when my heart is like the hard-packed soil of the path. Whatever it is, I’ve heard it enough times and I become hardened so that when God speaks to me, nothing gets through. What God has said gets ignored and nothing grows. There are times when I hear the Word and I get excited about it, but when I need to live it out, that situation becomes more challenging than anticipated and the little plant wilts. Sometimes, I let my responsibilities overwhelm me. I focus more on how I am going to get everything done instead of praying and asking God to guide me and show me ways that I never would have dreamed up myself; the good word that I’ve heard and the ministry God has asked me to do gets choked out by my worry, and any fruit produced is pretty shriveled and dry. And finally, there are the times when everything goes just right: I hear the Word, the soil of my heart is well-turned and soft, ready to receive the seed; the Holy Spirit does all the feeding and watering necessary, and a good crop is produced.
My observation has been that an awful lot of Christians are like the third soil in the parable, the soil filled with the thorns and weeds that choke the seed which never gets a chance to really take hold and grow. We are choked by the cares and responsibilities of our lives. As adults, we have our jobs that take a lot out of us each day; we have to make sure the bills get paid, that our children get to school and do well and stay out of all the trouble it’s possible to get into these days; we have to keep up with the car payments and the boat payments and the mortgage payments for our home (maybe even a vacation home or time-share). We have to get our children to soccer practice, swimming lessons, ballet lessons, piano lessons, after-school tutoring to help get them into the right college—and none of that is free, either. We have so many things going that we don’t have time or space to let the seed planted in our hearts grow. There is lots of noise and distractions; there are so many things competing for our time and attention—sometimes they are legitimate things—that we just seem to let God, who is forgiving and understanding, wait while we “stand him up.”
I find that so many Christians don’t take (make?) the time to read let alone study the Bible. It has been said a lot but the Bible is truly a love letter from God to us, intended to draw us, the readers, to the Writer. If we ignored our spouse, our children, or our friends as much as we ignore God we would be pretty alone in the world! We all need to ask the Sower to weed our gardens, to turn over the soil, so that it will be soft and ready to receive the good seed which will then produce the fruit that the world needs.
And he will do it!
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