Good Dirt.

Here recently the Parable that Jesus taught of the sower has been coming up a lot in my life. About every day for the past week I’ve heard or read that parable, and today during service at CLC it came up again and again during a guided study I started about strengthening your grip on God’s word. So I think that it’s time to pay attention.


I enjoy gardening, and I have some limited knowledge about the process. As far as I can tell the most important part of a garden is the dirt. Without good dirt, it’s almost impossible to grow a good crop of anything.

The first part of Jesus’ parable is as follows:

“Behold the sower went out to sow; and as he sowed, some seeds fell along the road and the birds came and ate them up.”

The road is not a good place to sow seeds…okay. The dirt of a footpath is trampled down and tightly packed; birds go there to look for food that we humans may drop, the seeds never had a chance.

He continues:

“Others on rocky places, where they did not have much soil; and immediately they sprang up, because they had no depth of soil. But when the sun had risen, they were scorched because they had no depth of soil.”

As a small time gardener I know that whenever I’m rooting around in the soil of the garden that it is necessary to remove the rocks from the soil, when a garden first starts it is easy to spend hours or even days removing rocks from the soil of a garden. The good thing about this kind of soil is that with time and effort and some digging down and rooting around it is possible to make it into good soil.

“Others fell among the thorns and the thorns grew up with the plants and choked them out”

This is probably the most dangerous kind of soil; it isn’t always obvious that there are thorns and weeds in the soil. It isn’t always obvious to us what it is that we may have hidden in our hearts choking out the word of God, neutralizing it before it has the opportunity to grow and yield fruit in our lives. The cares of this world and the deceitfulness of riches are so bad because they are so deceitful. Our enemy above all else wants to make us comfortable, and give us all we could ever wish for. Unlike our father he will say yes to all our whims. He will give us all the material wealth we could ever hope for, if only we would worship him. A pampered American Christian is an ineffective one, it may not be pretty but it’s true. Extreme excess puts blinders on us, we are less receptive and less aware of the needs of others and the still small voice of God.

Lastly there is hope:

“And others fell on the good soil and yielded a crop, some a hundredfold, some sixty, and some thirty.”

This is where we want to be, this is where we all need to get to. Good soil rarely just happens, it takes work and time. The gardener needs to till the soil, add some fertilizer and dig up any bad roots or rocks that might harm His crop. Enter suffering. It isn’t pleasant but it is absolutely necessary. When God starts digging around in our business it can start to hurt, especially when he starts pulling up those old roots that maybe we don’t love but have been with us for so long that we’ve learned to live with them. He’ll pull out those hard cold stones and give us a heart of flesh, one that feels one that is more acutely aware of the suffering and needs of others than it was before.

If God’s word is to have any lasting effect on us, we must allow Him to till the soil of our hearts. To make it dark and rich so that His word can penetrate deeply into our lives and withstand the temptations and trials of this present age. When our hearts are more receptive, we are more effective, more usable we can hear His voice and recognize it easier than before.

I know that soon and probably today the Lord will start to reveal some old roots and cold stones that are still lodged in my heart, and I will probably feel Him start to tug at them and dig around them in order to pull them out. It is probably going to be slow and most likely a little painful, but good soil rarely just happens.