Daily Devotional For Friday, April 5, 2024
Well, we are now finally into Spring. It is mowing time and gardening time. Have you noticed that you never have to do anything to cultivate weeds, vines, and thorns in your flowerbeds or garden? They just grow naturally. What is true with physical weeds, is also true of spiritual weeds — the sins in our lives. Isn’t it amazing how quickly we can be praising God at church one moment, or having a quiet time with Jesus Christ, and then a few minutes later . . . we show a spiritual weed or sin in our life? Some thought, or some action or some word comes out of our mouth and we show that we have not been pruning spiritually enough the spiritual weeds in our lives.
Read Hosea 10:12, “I said, ‘Plant the good seeds of righteousness, and you will harvest a crop of love. Plow up the hard ground of your hearts, for now is the time to seek the Lord, that He may come and shower righteousness upon you’” (NLT). Gardening is tough. Whatever plants or vegetables or flowers you want, you can’t just randomly throw seeds into the ground. First, you have to prepare the soil. This is the only way to guarantee a good harvest.
Before you can drop a seed in the ground, you have to break it up, fertilize it, make rows, and maybe even a few more steps, depending on what you’re planting. There are a lot of things about gardening you can’t control, so you do the best job you can of what you can control such as pests, insects, animals and etc. That kind of preparation in our lives makes a big difference in how fruitful we will be for God.
How diligent you are to prepare the soil determines how fruitful you will be. The same is true with the soil of our heart for God. Even Jesus told a parable about this in Matthew 13:3-9:
“Then He told them many things in parables, saying: A farmer went out to sow his seed. (4) As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. (5) Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. (6) But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. (7) Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants. (8) Still other seed fell on good soil, where it produced a crop—a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown. (9) Whoever has ears, let them hear” (NLT).
In this parable Jesus gives different types of soil to teach symbolically how open the soil of our heart will be to Him. It is possible that as Jesus told this parable, there was someone throwing seed on their fields. In those days, sowers carried a bag with the seed in it and they would cast or throw the seed as he or she walked up down the furrows they had created for the seed to grow, take root and produce what they wanted.
The downside to casting is that you cannot always control where it falls. The “path” Jesus refers to in verse 3 is a reference to the paths that separated individual fields owned by others. So, sometimes your seeds fall in your neighbor’s fields. The seed that fell on those paths, could not grow because the dirt had been packed down so firmly and was so hard.
The second kind of soil Jesus mentioned was the rocky soil. “Rocky” does not refer to loose rocks, because the farmer always removed all rocks, sticks, and other such objects from his field before planting. It rather refers to underlying beds of solid rock deeper than the plow reached, mostly limestone, which did not have much soil covering them. So, the soil is ver shallows and thus what is planted will die.
When the seed began to germinate, its roots could not penetrate the rock that was just below the surface, and the little plant would instead start to spring up above ground much faster than it normally would. For a brief period these plants would look healthier and hardier than those in good soil, because more of them showed above ground and they grew faster.
The third kind of soil Jesus mentioned was thorny soil. This refers to soil that has been cleared and plowed. Thus, this soil looked good to the farmer or sower but after seeding, wild thorns began to grow. So as the seeds spouted and began to grow, so did these wild thorns that eventually chocked the life out of the healthy plant that was spouting. These thorny vines steal the water and nutrients in the soil. I have seen this in my own flower beds. I will plant beautiful flowering plants and soon, these wild vines with thorns on them sprout. The only way to get rid of them is you have to dig down and pull them out from their root ball, which is big.
The fourth kind of soil Jesus mentioned was the good soil. This soil was loose and soft and had enough depth to support the plants and for the seeds to take root and draw up the water and nutrients in the soil. Growing plants for food in Palestine was tough and did not often produce a good yield. Pastor and author John MacArthur writes this:
“The average ratio of harvested grain seeds to those that were planted is said to have been less than eight to one. Even a tenfold crop would have been well above average; and the yields of which Jesus speaks were truly phenomenal” (Source: John MacArthur, The MacArthur New Testament Commentary,” “Matthew,” p. 346).
So, in order for all of us to reap a plentiful harvest, we had better make sure the soil of our heart is good. In Luke 8, where we have the same parable, Luke gives us some additional information. The parable is this, Jesus said: The seed is the word of God. (By that he means the word from God about salvation, about forgiveness of sin, about entering the kingdom. Salvation comes by hearing the word of God.) So when you go out, whoever you are, and you proclaim the gospel, you're like a man throwing seed. It's the same man in this case for all four soils, and it's the same seed. The issue that varies, then, is the soil. And the soil refers to the heart.
Questions To Consider
- What kind of “soil” would you say spiritually your heart is to the Word of God so that it takes root and grows?
- What spiritual “thorns” do you need to uproot from your heart?
- How often does your heart think on the Word of God that has been planted in it? Why?
- Many Christians say in surveys they wish they had more faith. The Bible tells us in Romans 10:17, “So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ” (ESV). So, how would you evaluate the amount of faith you have based on the amount of God’s Word you are in or not in? Why?
- In Hosea 10:12 above, what do you Hosea means when He quotes God saying “plow up the hard ground of your heart? How can you do that?
Scripture To Meditate On: 2 Corinthians 9:6, “Whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows bountifully will also reap bountifully” (ESV).
Prayer To Pray: “Dear Jesus, I need to plow the soil of my heart more often and pull out the thorns and weeds that are chocking Your Word out of my heart. Help me to be a biblical sower so that I reap a harvest so great that it impact the Kingdom of God in ways I could never imagine. Lord, convict me to honor You with what seed I allow to germinate in my heart. You tell me in Proverbs 4:23, “Guard your heart above all else, for it determines the course of your life” (NLT). I ask this in Jesus’ name, Amen!”
I love you Southside! — Pastor Kelly