The Parable of the Sower: The Heart of the Matter (2)
Notes
Transcript
Introduction:
This morning, we are going to continue to talk about the different types of soil that make up a person’s heart. Jesus tells the parable of the sower to help his listeners understand His teachings on the kingdom of God. God wants us to hear Him.
I’m sure that you have heard the old cliche phrase, God gave us two ears and one mouth because He wants us to hear more than we talk. Well, this morning, let’s listen to what He has to say in His word to us today.
Pray.
1 That same day Jesus went out of the house and sat beside the sea.
2 And great crowds gathered about him, so that he got into a boat and sat down. And the whole crowd stood on the beach.
3 And he told them many things in parables, saying: “A sower went out to sow.
4 And as he sowed, some seeds fell along the path, and the birds came and devoured them.
5 Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil, and immediately they sprang up, since they had no depth of soil,
6 but when the sun rose they were scorched. And since they had no root, they withered away.
7 Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them.
8 Other seeds fell on good soil and produced grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty.
9 He who has ears, let him hear.”
10 Then the disciples came and said to him, “Why do you speak to them in parables?”
11 And he answered them, “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given.
12 For to the one who has, more will be given, and he will have an abundance, but from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away.
13 This is why I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand.
14 Indeed, in their case the prophecy of Isaiah is fulfilled that says: “ ‘ “You will indeed hear but never understand, and you will indeed see but never perceive.”
15 For this people’s heart has grown dull, and with their ears they can barely hear, and their eyes they have closed, lest they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears and understand with their heart and turn, and I would heal them.’
16 But blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear.
17 For truly, I say to you, many prophets and righteous people longed to see what you see, and did not see it, and to hear what you hear, and did not hear it.
Last week we began looking at two of the four types of soil that make up a person’s heart.
1. The Hard Heart (v.4, 19)
1. The Hard Heart (v.4, 19)
We looked at the heart heart that simply will not hear the word of God. This is the unregenerate person who has hardened his heat and cannot receive the Word until the work of God changes the heart and regenerates it.
2. The Shallow Heart (v.5-6, 20-21)
2. The Shallow Heart (v.5-6, 20-21)
We also began looking at the shallow heart. This is the soil that has some depth to it but not a lot of depth and underneath is still hard.
This is the soil that allows a seed to germinate but not take root and produce a harvest.
These people are the ones that may start off with a bang but they fail to last because they were not properly rooted.
It’s critical that when people come to faith in Christ, we make sure they develop roots. This is where the role of new members classes come in.
In using these classes, we make sure that people understand the gospel and what it means to follow Christ. We make sure they are equipped to handle the scorching heat of the sun and the pounding of the rain in their life.
These are people that we must watch to see if we see signs of life and if not, we must resow the gospel. In fact, we should always resow the gospel, again and again anyways.
I like to use a method of gardening called the square foot garden method. It is an amazing method that was created by a civil engineer named Mel Bartholomew to make gardening more fun and more productive at the same time.
You plant in raised beds that are gridded off into square foot sections. These sections allow you to plant your plants in different spacings. Sometimes I will plant something that may have 9 plants to a square and notice that a plant won’t come up because it didn’t germinate. When that happens, I just resow that section.
That’s the way it is with these people. Sometimes we have to resow the gospel into their hearts. I know that I need to resow because I know where a plant should be and I’ve been looking for it and noticed nothing came up.
For these people, Jesus says that there may be vigorous signs of life, but the plant will eventually whither away.
Moving on, we see two more types of soil we want to get to this morning.
The Distracted Heart
The Fruitful Heart
3. The Distracted Heart (v.7, 22)
3. The Distracted Heart (v.7, 22)
The first one we will look at this morning is the distracted heart. Jesus says,
7 Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them.
22 As for what was sown among thorns, this is the one who hears the word, but the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches choke the word, and it proves unfruitful.
Have you ever considered how distracted your life is these days?
Think about the things that you spend your time on. Some of you may have an app on your phone that lets you see how much time you spent on your phone on different apps or how much screen on time you had.
Do you realize that one of the greatest tools the enemy uses today is our phones?
For some people it isn’t a phone. It may be video games. For others it may be a book. For others it may be social events and being around people.
Consider how much time you spend distracted by the things of this world vs. how much time you spend in the Word of God.
So many people say that they do not have time to read their Bibles. They say that to read through the Bible in a year is virtually impossible for them.
The more I read through the Bible, the more I’m convinced this is an excuse. It takes approximately 10-20 minutes of reading a day to get through the Bible in a year. That’s roughly 2-3 chapters a day.
You can listen to the Bible as you are getting ready. You can listen on your way to work. You can ingest the Bible in various ways.
But listen to me. Can we not spare 10-20 minutes out of our day? If you are an unusual person and you get 8 hours of sleep a day, that means you are awake for 16 hours. That is a total of 960 minutes. Do we not have 10-20 of those minutes to give to God?
Now, notice what Jesus says again in v.22.
22 As for what was sown among thorns, this is the one who hears the word, but the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches choke the word, and it proves unfruitful.
I want everyone to look at me for just a moment. Young people especially. I know that we have people who grew up in different generations this morning. Some of you remember life before we had these cellphones at our finger tips.
Listen closely to me. The enemy wants your mind! Some of you are so distracted that even right now, you are more worried about the recent TikTok ban or what someone has sent you in Snapchat that you might have missed than you are what God is trying to tell you this morning.
Some of you sit in youth group or Bible study and all you can do is look at your phone and send messages back and forth. You don’t give the teacher who is trying to pour God’s word into your heart the respect they should be getting from you. You have become this type of soil that Jesus is talking about.
You are distracted by the cares of this world.
Now, you may get angry with me for calling you out this morning, but I want your attention for a moment because I want to warn you!
One day you are going to have a car, the Lord willing, to get you around from place to place. If you have a car, you will have an instrument panel that has all kinds of lights that are on it. The thing is a lot times, those lights never light up. You have a few that are there all the time. You have a speedometer or a gas gauge to tell you how fast you are going or how much fuel you have.
But sometimes a funny little light will come on that you have never seen before. You may not even recognize the symbol. But that light came on because it means something. It is a warning light to tell you to check on something. If you ignore it, you do so to your own peril.
For some of you this morning, what I have just said is a warning light to you that God is giving on the dashboard of your life. He is trying to get your attention. He is telling you to pay attention to His word.
You must decide this morning if you are going to continue to let the distractions of this world keep you from hearing God’s Word or not.
Now, listen to me closely this morning. Every eye on me and every ear tuned in. I’m going to give you just a second to finish sending that message you were sending or to quit doodling for just a second to look at me.
Are you paying attention to me this morning? Listen! God is going to hold you accountable for every Word you heard AND every word you should have heard but you were too distracted to pay attention.
God will also hold you accountable for the distraction you created that kept someone else from hearing from God because you were too busy sending that message to listen or allow them to listen.
Jesus said in Matthew 13:12
12 For to the one who has, more will be given, and he will have an abundance, but from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away.
If you won’t listen up when you have the chance, you might not get another chance to hear. Seize the moment and pay attention when God is trying to speak to you.
Now, lest you think that I am sitting here in an ivory tower this morning and that I have never done this before myself, I want to correct you. I have. I have sat in some pretty boring sermons before and texted my preaching buddies who were sitting in the same room as me and were bored as well.
We all are distracted and must learn to put the distractions away and pray for God to give us a heart to receive His word.
For some of you in this room who do not struggle with your cell phone, you may feel pretty good about yourselves right now, but I’m not letting you off the hook this morning either.
Your distraction may be in the form of a project that you need to get done around your home. You may be distracted by the football game or baseball game on TV. You may be distracted by your kids or your grand kids travel games.
You may be concerned about your finances and have let the pursuit of money take all of your focus and attention. You may be distracted by watching the 24 hour news networks and your heart is so anxious within you that you need medication to deal with it all.
No matter what your distraction is, these distractions will choke out God’s Word in your heart and keep it from bearing fruit.
You have to constantly weed a garden. I really don’t know very many gardens that don’t have the constant battle of weed seeds blowing in and competing for the nutrients that your plants need in the soil. They grow up and choke out the plants and either kill them off or rob the soil of nutrients so that the plant doesn’t bear much fruit, if any at all.
To combat this you have to get down and dirty and keep battling the weed pressure so that these weeds don’t choke out your plants.
If you will tend your soil and you will get rid of the rocks and the weeds, you will be primed to be the final type of soil Jesus talks about.
4. The Fruitful Heart (v.8, 23)
4. The Fruitful Heart (v.8, 23)
8 Other seeds fell on good soil and produced grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty.
23 As for what was sown on good soil, this is the one who hears the word and understands it. He indeed bears fruit and yields, in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty.”
Notice that this is the good soil. It is the heart that is primed to hear from God.
But also notice something about this soil that Jesus points out. Even though this is good soil, the harvest is different. There are different yields from the soil.
Some yields are 100, 60, some are 30 fold. All produce a yield but the yield is up to God.
Here’s the message to take away from that. No matter what there is a fruitful harvest.
If you planted a plant that from one seed produced even a 30 fold harvest, that would probably be considered a bumper crop for you.
Think about it. If you had one tomato plant that gave you 30 tomatoes off of it, would you be willing to plant that variety again? Sure you would!
Some plants can give us more than we can handle just a few plants.
Conclusion
Here is the message that God wants us to hear this morning. God wants you to hear His word this morning. He wants to communicate to you.
Do you realize this morning that we worship a God who is a self-revealing God?
I’ve been reading an excellent book on knowing God’s will called Demystifying Decision Making by Aimee Joseph. It is an incredible book.
She talks about this concept in the book and points out that God is not trying to play hide and seek with what He wants us to do. He wants us to know His will.
She points out that the grand design of God in creating a world where we have so many decisions to make is not to stress us out, but to draw us into a relationship with Him.
Remember that God took the initiative to create us, to communicate to us, and to save us from the mess we had made of life.
Jesus came into this world as the best possible representation of Who God is that we could ever have and He left and went back to the throne of God, but sent the Holy Spirit to come live in the heart of every believer so that we could know what God desires and hear from Him.
We get to be in a personal relationship with the God who sent Jesus to die for our sins on that cross. We get to talk to the one who knows our beginning from our end and sees the whole course of our lives before there is ever one day of it. All we have to do is come before Him and listen.
For some of you this morning that is going to require that you humble yourself and come before Jesus, repenting of your sin and accepting Christ’s sacrifice for your sins. It means becoming a follower of Christ.
For some of you, you need to make some life changes. You need to get rid of some things in your life so that you can pay attention when God is speaking.
You need to accept that we have an addiction to distraction. Recognize this tactic of the enemy and fight back by removing the distraction so you can hear what God is trying to say to you.
