I really should place a disclaimer before I begin: no one can discern the mysteries of God, except those to whom He reveals them. Jesus even makes a point to His disciples when they were asking Him about one of His parables:
“He answered and said to them, “Because it has been given to you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given.”
Matthew 13:11 NKJV
God does what He pleases, so He gets to decide what to reveal, and to whom, and at what time.
Below is the Parable of the Sower, which came up recently in my Bible reading:
“Then He spoke many things to them in parables, saying: “Behold, a sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seed fell by the wayside; and the birds came and devoured them. Some fell on stony places, where they did not have much earth; and they immediately sprang up because they had no depth of earth. But when the sun was up they were scorched, and because they had no root they withered away. And some fell among thorns, and the thorns sprang up and choked them. But others fell on good ground and yielded a crop: some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. He who has ears to hear, let him hear!””
Matthew 13:3-9 NKJV
Then, after His disciples expressed their confusion, Jesus explained further:
““Therefore hear the Parable of the Sower: When anyone hears the word of the kingdom, and does not understand it, then the wicked one comes and snatches away what was sown in his heart. This is he who received seed by the wayside. But he who received the seed on stony places, this is he who hears the word and immediately receives it with joy; yet he has no root in himself, but endures only for a while. For when tribulation or persecution arises because of the word, immediately he stumbles. Now he who received seed among the thorns is he who hears the word, and the cares of this world and the deceitfulness of riches choke the word, and he becomes unfruitful. But he who received seed on the good ground is he who hears the word and understands it, who indeed bears fruit and produces: some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty.””
Matthew 13:18-23 NKJV
Over the last few years, I’ve thought about how the Parable of the Sower applies to me, in regards to what soil. This time around, the predominant thought that came to mind was the idea that one’s soil could change. Before I continue, I want to be careful not to utter anything that God did not ordain, so I exhort you to take this directly to the Lord yourself. Test this against Scripture and ask for God to speak. All the same, I will share what I’ve heard because I found it gave me grace and peace.
When I say that I’ve thought about this “over the last few years,” I actually mean that I’ve thought about this for longer (off and on), but it’s been only the last few years that I’ve been thinking about it more. Where my reflections began was to try to categorize myself into one of the four soils that Jesus mentioned based on what I considered at the time to be a “searching and fearless” moral inventory of myself.
I think a trap that so many people habitually have fallen into (myself included) is the idea that I’m better of a person than I actually am. Worldly people call themselves a “good person” or refer to themselves as having a “good heart.” Churchy people who also tend to be more worldly than not also tend to espouse the same beliefs. Then there are people who are more religious, who know their Bibles and might even make some attempt to live it out (but an attempt not greater than trying to convince others that they need to not only follow what Scripture says but also to follow said person’s interpretation of it!). These are the people who understand sin enough to know that any idea of a “good person” or a “good heart” are false, but they don’t understand themselves let alone how their sin deceived them into believing that they are better than they actually are.
““The heart is deceitful above all things, And desperately wicked; Who can know it?”
Jeremiah 17:9 NKJV
Such cunning, deceitful traps! And unfortunately, almost all persons fall into one of these categories. And that has included myself many times. Hence my first reaction to cross-examining myself against these four soils to say: “well, I’m definitely not the good soil, because I’m having trouble believing anything good right now…” [context: I was going through a major trial at the time] “...and I know that whatever my fruit looks like, it definitely doesn’t align with the fruit described in the good soil.” I say this not to say that I’m better than other people (I sure hope it doesn’t come across that way) but to illustrate the sad reality that the vast majority of people don’t ever come to themselves in this way. I myself even have trouble with this, and I’m someone who happens to have been blessed to have this awareness! I think unfortunately that so many people are truly in danger of hellfire precisely because they don’t cross-examine themselves against the Law, church-going or not, and Bible-reading or not!
“I, the Lord, search the heart, I test the mind, Even to give every man according to his ways, According to the fruit of his doings.”
Jeremiah 17:10 NKJV
(Now, in today’s post I am only going to really look at the Parable of the Sower, plus any applicable surrounding text; but I want you the reader to know that the totality of the things that I share in this post will be drawn from what God has revealed to me through all of Scripture.)
“All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness,”
II Timothy 3:16 NKJV
As God has been taking me through the latest round of reflections and examinations, I believe that He has revealed to me wisdom about various moments and seasons from previous chapters where 1.) I sorely lacked wisdom on many things, 2.) it was clear that I lacked said wisdom, and 3.) what it would have been better to have done instead. Additionally, I was informed regarding certain events that were genuinely out of my control vs things that were within my control, as well as which events and decisions mattered more than others.
To wit: one clear example of a large event that was out of my control was my childhood best friend announcing that he was gay. (Being a liberal at the time, I of course was in support of him then.) And I understood to a degree the significance of that. One major influence of that moment was it snapped my fear of telling people that I was attracted to women. (For reasons unknown to me at that time, I was terrified of revealing that truth to others, and this moment finally changed that.)
What I wouldn’t realize until decades later was the spiritual implications of that experience. I had been attending the weekly Fellowship of Christian Athletes meetings, but my desire and interest had already been waning at that time. Although I had experienced the Holy Spirit in some really cool moments, the hunger I had for God was still superficial, and I needed more traction to my small faith than merely attending meetings and listening to sermons. I had been relying on my childhood best friend to be my everything regarding support for the stage of life that I was in at the time, but the reality of his personal revelation crystallized (or at least, should have crystallized) for me that he couldn’t adequately support certain areas of my life, no matter how hard he tried or how sincere. As such, God provided me a new friend, a friend who, like me, was also interested in women and hoped for a girlfriend, but also someone who had what I believe to be supernatural maturity to help walk me through the next season of life.
So, the one friend’s decision to announce his desire for homosexual relationships and intimacy, coupled with the provision of a second friend with whom we could bond as friends in general but also connect over our respective and mutual desire for heterosexual relationships and intimacy—those were events outside of my control. But what was in my control was whether to accept friendship with the second man, and whether to (in a sense) reclassify my friendship with the first man, my childhood best friend. I ultimately accepted the friendship with the second man (a very good decision), but I also kept the friendship with the first man (not a terrible decision at the outset, but my failure to continue to set up and cultivate friendships to support my need for a growing faith and relationship with Jesus allowed him to continue to have greater influence on my life, ultimately hurting my Christian faith walk, such as it was at that time).
Of course, there were lots of other spiritual moving parts occurring at the same time, and I won’t be getting into the rest of them. But I will say that the two above events and choices were part of what I believe God was trying to do in my life, to move me away from being under a curse and instead toward being blessed.
As I look back, there were more areas that God wanted to bless me in and to help me grow (including ultimately receiving Jesus Christ as my personal King and Savior). I unfortunately did not recognize what was going on, and as such I didn’t act in faith. For this reason, I believe that I was the first soil that Jesus was talking about (the road/wayside where the birds could snatch the seed), for much of my life. This was mind-blowing, because I had not ever considered that to be a possibility. Until recently, I figured that, because I “lost my faith” every time a trial occurred, I was the rocky soil. And I was. But I also had recognized that I tended to want the riches of this world and as such was the thorny soil. And I was that, too. But it was so confusing to me, because the way the parable had read, each person was but one of those soils. They surely could not be more than one, let alone all four!
In my latest reflecting, I realized that in fact, I had had a lot of seed that had been stolen from me, particularly during college (when the above-mentioned story took place) as well as throughout my young-adult years. But also in that time, there were certain good seeds that were down in me that stayed: 1.) Jesus Christ as the Son of God and Savior of the world; 2.) Christ died and rose again, conquering death, 3.) Jesus was born of the virgin Mary, 4.) that God created the heavens and the earth, and 5.) that Jesus’s suffering, death, and resurrection were historical. I’m not sure how I reconciled the above with the false worldly teachings of evolutionism, false Greek mythology, Santa Claus, etc. I think I must’ve applied the same childlike faith to all and reasoned, as a child, that “it all must be true” somehow, and simply didn’t worry about the details or trying to sort it out intellectually. But what did me in was the praise of man. I didn’t understand the gift of being set apart for any reason, or the idea of God isolating me the desert to prepare me for a future calling. My simple-mindedness let me to only go after what I could see. As such, although I had good seeds sown in me stay for a long time, but I also had other seeds that were more complex (requiring greater discernment and discipline) that I inevitably rejected because I didn’t understand them. And not only didn’t I understand them, but I didn’t realize that I needed to understand them to the point of pursing greater spiritual wisdom than what I had. So as such, in one sense, while the basic seeds fell on “pretty good” soil, that “pretty good soil” of mine was only as good as my desire for God over man. As such, when I hit my teenage and young-adult years, being starved for attention, affection, mentoring, and support, that’s when I suspect that I was rocky soil. Moreover, I still had my desires and hopes for the American dream: the money, the house, the wife, the kids. Even with the wounds and severe brokenness that I had, I was still stubbornly optimistic about receiving those things, because good had to come, no matter what. …right?
The truth was, I have been all four types of soil at different times. But I now suspect that the dominant one historically was the road/wayside. Next-most dominant was the thorny soil. Of course, it didn’t help that the church I was a part of was not a truly believing church on fire for God; as such, I had received a watered-down gospel that stated just barely enough of the basic facts about God the Father and about Jesus, but missed key supporting doctrines such as sin and the Law. Therefore, I received New Testament theology about Jesus being the Light, the Way, the Truth, the Life, and the Bread of Life, among many other truths, without gaining a real understanding of what He was really saying when He was rebuking people who weren’t the Pharisees (and even when He was rebuking the Pharisees), and why He was all these things. Evidently when any person, let alone a church, lacks key elements of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, he will tend to fill it with something. In my church’s case, it was the worship of the earth and supporting latter-wave feminism and homosexuality, all of which contradict the Bible (and by extension, the Gospel), and these things were what filled those gaps. And in my case, also throw in being the one poor and broken family amid a sea of well-to-do individuals and families who appeared to have it all together. From all that, the surrounding soil which also became my soil, was that of doing well in this life without making any effort to truly live out the authentic Gospel of Jesus Christ.
Of course I saw what I determined was good and evidently set my heart (I didn’t realize I had the capability to do that! Especially since I didn’t have the capability to do much else that really mattered to me) on that which was around me, which was to gain all that I could in this life. (That is, if someone would gift it to me, because I hadn’t figured out how to achieve it myself and wouldn’t be able to for a very long time.)
Now, having by God’s grace worked for and received a portion of that, and having had gone through more life challenges, I have been blessed to have received wisdom on more things from previous chapters. I have asked God to reveal such things to me so that I can be better prepared for what He wants to do in future seasons. Oftentimes I didn’t act in faith because whatever it was that He might’ve (or in some cases, did) called me into was outside of my frame of reference, and I had to suffer the loss of whatever I might have received had I simply trusted and obeyed. I went through something like this about a decade ago. It was a risk, a step of faith, but because I couldn’t get myself to believe, I lost the prospective blessing. I had to suffer that loss and then go through a sort of remedial training to dismantle the strongholds that had kept me from moving forward. Thankfully, after a few more lumps, God had mercy on me and did give me another chance. By this point it was finally ingrained in me to say yes and walk the walk. And I finally got to receive a nice reward for it.
To recap, with the following Bible citations:
“When anyone hears the word of the kingdom, and does not understand it, then the wicked one comes and snatches away what was sown in his heart. This is he who received seed by the wayside.”
Matthew 13:19 NKJV
The above was largely me for a long time. Unlike others, I do believe that I had an interest in learning the things of God. I even began to see possibilities of what my purpose in life could be (seeing them was one thing, but understanding was another; I foolishly rejected some of these things in favor of lesser things, not realizing let alone understanding the ramifications of having done so). As such, I was also:
“Now he who received seed among the thorns is he who hears the word, and the cares of this world and the deceitfulness of riches choke the word, and he becomes unfruitful.”
Matthew 13:22 NKJV
Because I began following after worldly things, pursuits, and desires (because that’s what I could see), that’s when I lost my grip on being able to hold on to hope when things got hard (and confusing):
“But he who received the seed on stony places, this is he who hears the word and immediately receives it with joy; yet he has no root in himself, but endures only for a while. For when tribulation or persecution arises because of the word, immediately he stumbles.”
Matthew 13:20-21 NKJV
As such, for many years I did not seek help or mentorship. I had always had my needs taken care of (and I’m very glad and grateful for that!) but I also expected that support to always be there, and I expected that adulthood would be easier than childhood (spoiler alert: as hard as childhood was, adulthood was still harder). I did not understand that I needed to make the effort to seek more support, more assistance, and more learning in order to succeed at adulthood. (I understand these things now, thankfully!) But because of my not seeking those things, I didn’t grow. And I did try to accomplish life on my own strength, on what I thought were my own terms, by going to college in Minnesota and by living there to begin adulthood after college. To no one’s surprise except my own, things didn’t work out. My “plan,” whatever it may have been, heavily depended on life working out the way I expected it to. I had to “hit bottom” multiple times across multiple situations over multiple years.
But God had mercy on me. When I first moved to Minnesota to start college (after having left my church and was in a sense in “church exile”), He was hard at work getting me connected with Bible-believers who would preach the unadulterated Gospel of Jesus Christ and invite me to events at FCA. Awhile later, after I had gotten plugged into the FCA community as well as surrounding communities (kind of like “friends of friends” types of communities), the devil sent me a roommate who was part of FCA and who professed to be a Bible-believer but didn’t always follow Scripture (and doubled down each time when confronted), in order to discourage me from continuing to hang out with other believers and grow in my own faith.
But God saw that and planned ahead. Even in spite of another development that happened that set the stage for that roommate and me to clash, He had gone ahead and raised up several new friends to support me through the next leg of the journey. (This was also the same season when my childhood best friend announced that he was gay, and God wanted to free me from spiritual curses and to position me to be blessed.) Even when the next stage may or may not have worked out exactly to plan (although I believe it did in many ways), God prepared me to have, well, a long “
Minnesota Goodbye” to the state of Minnesota itself. He allowed me to work one job there after college before the reality of the economic recession hit me. And then once it did happen, He went ahead of me to prepare the least of my few remaining friends to invite me to my next church, thereby bringing me out of “church exile” once and for all.
Through more bumps and bruises, including another two massive waves of personal community turnover (the second which had me changing churches once again), I believe that by God’s grace I’m finally starting to become good soil more and more. Am I perfect? Absolutely not. There are still many things about life that I do not know or understand, and there are yet many more things about a life of holiness and Godliness that I still don’t follow. But the point is in the trying, and more significantly, in the surrendering. I cannot save myself. I can work on bettering myself, but it God who provides the increase. The fruits of the Spirit only come with devoting oneself to Jesus and letting Him dictate the growth. And, they’re not called “fruit” by accident; just like crops, a person’s fruit needs to be watered and cultivated. While God’s role in this process is far bigger than ours, we still have to say “yes” with our words and our actions.
““Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes from thornbushes or figs from thistles? Even so, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Therefore by their fruits you will know them.”
Matthew 7:15-20 NKJV
“Now the works of the flesh are evident, which are: adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lewdness, idolatry, sorcery, hatred, contentions, jealousies, outbursts of wrath, selfish ambitions, dissensions, heresies, envy, murders, drunkenness, revelries, and the like; of which I tell you beforehand, just as I also told you in time past, that those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Against such there is no law. And those who are Christ’s have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live in the Spirit, let us also walk in the Spirit.”
Galatians 5:19-25 NKJV
So I do believe that one can, in a sense, change one’s soil. More accurately, I believe that God can change a person’s soil, so long as we surrender to Him and allow Him to do the redemptive work of personal growth and change. Jesus desires for us to be that good soil where, when the seed of the Word of God is sown, it will be deeply rooted in us and, as promised, bear much fruit.
“So then faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.”
Romans 10:17 NKJV
“But he who received seed on the good ground is he who hears the word and understands it, who indeed bears fruit and produces: some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty.””
Matthew 13:23 NKJV
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