How’s Your Spiritual Soil Quality?

There’s a revolution going on in the heartland of America. It’s a revolution in the way that the American farmer works his land. People are calling it the most significant change in agriculture in over 100 years.

Back in 1837, an Illinois blacksmith named John Deere took an old saw blade and hammered it into the first simple steel plow. That plow was sturdy and sharp enough to cut through the strong matted roots of the prairie grass and turn up the rich soil below for planting. The slick surface of the steel kept the plow from gumming up with soil the way the old wooden plows did.

By 1839, John Deere was making 10 plows a year, then 40. By 1850, the John Deere Company was turning out 2,100 blades a year. Settlers rushed onto the Great Plains, and with their steel plows, uncovered the mother lode of rich black soil. By 1922, 700,000 steel plows were being built per year in the U.S. Farmers began to use big rubber tired tractors, which could pull up to 24 steel plows behind them. The plow became a sort of symbol of America’s agricultural prowess.

But all this plowing came with a terrible price that was only realized decades later. The plow had exposed the soil of the Great Plains to relentless erosion by wind and water. By the drought years of the 1930’s, angry storms lifted millions of tons of soil and carried it as far east as the Atlantic Coast. The Great Plains became the Great Dustbowl.

Some farms lost half their topsoil as the rains carried it away to the creeks and the rivers. It was said, only half in jest, that you could stand on a bridge over the Mississippi and every hour watch an Iowa farm flow by in the current below.

But over the last twenty years, American farmers have been experimenting with a new method of farming that does away with the plow. Rather than tilling the earth with massive machines every spring, farmers are planting their new seed amid the residue of last year’s crop. The old crop provides a mulch for the new seedlings, and the soil is much less vulnerable to erosion. The decaying residue puts nutrients back into the soil, so the farmer doesn’t have to rely on chemical fertilizers.

Farmers are finding that the new method, which they call no-till farming, is not only good for the soil, it’s good for business as well. They are getting crop yields 10-20% better than with the old methods. Bill Richards, the head of the U.S. Soil Conservation Service, says that by the year 2000, no-till farming will be used on 80% of the cropland.

No-till farming is all about soil quality. Farmers are vitally interested in the state of their soil. They know that if you don’t have quality soil, you can’t grow quality crops. It’s as simple as that.

The same principle is true when it comes to your spiritual life. You can’t grow good crops in poor soil. Jesus gave us this principle in the parable of the soils, which is found in Matthew 13.

He described a farmer sowing seed. There were two ways of sowing seed in those days. One of them was to just put a sack of seed on the back of a donkey, tear a small hole in the bottom of it, and lead the donkey around the field. That was the lazy man’s method. The more common way was for the farmer himself to sling a bag of seed over his shoulder and scoop it out and scatter it as he walked through his field. That’s called the broadcasting method, and that is probably what Jesus was referring to. As the farmer broadcast the seed, it fell on various kinds of ground.

Some of it fell on the pathway. In ancient Israel, the farm fields were long and narrow. They didn’t have fences in those days. One farmer’s field was separated from his neighbor’s field by a narrow pathway. The pathway would enable the farmer to get across to the other side of his land. The trampling of many feet packed the earth of those pathways down hard. That’s where some of the seed fell.

But because the earth was so hard packed, the seed couldn’t penetrate the soil. It just lay there exposed on the surface, and pretty soon the birds came along and saw it and swooped down and ate it.

Some of the seed fell on rocky places where there was not much soil. Now this doesn’t mean that the soil had a lot of rocks in it; it means that it had a layer of rock under it. The hill country of Israel is made out of limestone. In many places, the limestone bedrock come right up to the surface, and there is very little topsoil covering it. This is where some of the seed fell.

Now when the weather got warmer, the sun heated up that soil quicker than the rest of the field, because it was shallower. And in that nice warm soil, the seed quickly sprouted. For the first little while, it grew very well. In fact, if you looked at that field early in the spring, you would say that the seed growing in the rocky places was going to do best. It was already sprouting up; it was ahead of the rest of the field.

The spring rains kept that rocky ground nice and moist, because the water wouldn’t penetrate the bedrock under the topsoil. So the seedlings didn’t need to put their energy into growing a deep root system to go down after the water. Everything they needed was right there within a few inches of the surface. They put all their energy into growing taller above the ground.

But spring turned into summer, and the Middle Eastern sun began to really bake the land. The rain disappeared; the dry season began. And now, that seed on the rocky places was in trouble. That shallow soil that was once so nice and warm was now as hot and dry as a furnace. The moisture had all evaporated out of it because it was so shallow. And the little plants that were growing there had no root system. They quickly began to lose their energy and vitality. They started to droop and turn brown. They couldn’t send roots down deep for more water because of the limestone. Pretty soon, they withered and died. What started out so promising ended up in failure, all because of no roots.

But some of the farmer’s seed fell among thorns. This was seed that probably fell near the edges of the field. If you ever look at the edges of a farmer’s field, you’ll find lots of weeds. Some of the seed fell there.

I am not a farmer. I am not a gardener. I do not have a green thumb. I have a hard time even growing crabgrass. But I do know one rule of agriculture: Whatever you’re trying to grow, the weeds grow faster. I’ve often thought that maybe what we should do is try to grow weeds. Then maybe the good plants would grow better because they would think that they were the weeds!

At any rate, the seed that fell among the thorns or the weeds did begin to grow. But the weeds grew faster. And they grew up and choked the little plants. You see the weeds had been there all along. That soil was crowded. There was too much competition for moisture and minerals and space for the good seed to really take hold. So it couldn’t grow; it was choked out.

But of course, some of the farmer’s seed fell on good ground. Ground where the soil was soft and porous. Ground where the soil was rich and deep. Ground where there were no weeds to compete with it.

And that seed began to grow. And when the sun came up and the dry season came, it continued to grow, because it had its roots down deep. It grew up to maturity. And when harvest time came, it yielded a good crop, giving the farmer back 30, 60, even 100 times what he had sown.

Jesus told that story to illustrate some powerful spiritual truths that we need to know about today. He explained the parable’s meaning in Matthew 13, verses 18-23.

Read Matthew 13:18-23.

The Word of God produces different results in different people’s lives. How is it that two friends can come to church and sit under the teaching of the Word. One of them is profoundly touched by what he hears. It makes a deep impact on his values, his priorities, his outlook on life. He commits his life to Jesus Christ and eventually becomes a missionary to South America.

The other man hears the Word, but he is not affected by it. Pretty soon he drifts away from church, falls in with bad company, and ends up in jail through some shady business dealings. How can it be that the Word meets up with such different responses in people? It all boils down to the question of soil quality.

Jesus said that there are some people whose lives are like the hard-packed soil of the pathway. The tramp, tramp, tramping of the feet of the world, - its values, its outlook, its sinful habits - have packed the soil of their hearts down so that it is hard and resistant. When they hear the Word, it just doesn’t seem to penetrate. They’re not touched by it; they’re not challenged by it; they’re not drawn up short by it. They just don’t seem to understand it.

I’ve known many people like this. One of them was a funeral director I knew in Buffalo. He was a ruddy-faced Irishman who always had a joke or a funny story to tell. He was a back-slapper who liked nothing better than to go out for a few beers with the boys after a hard day at the embalming table.

Now I frequently had funerals at this man’s funeral parlor. And I preached the Word of God at those funerals. He would hear it. And I had lots of conversations with this man as we rode in the hearse to the cemetery. You would think that all that would lead to his having questions about the meaning of life, and his own eternal destiny. But no. He just kept up with the jokes and the one-liners, and never gave any indication that the Word of God had made any impression on him at all. Jesus said there are people like that.

The Word of God just doesn’t penetrate. And the evil one comes and snatches it away, lest it somehow get a foothold.

Then there are people who hear the Word of God and joyfully receive it. They’re enthusiastic about it, and pretty soon they’re volunteering to sing in the choir and teach Sunday School and do all sorts of things. They show every sign of growing up rapidly to maturity.

But then trials come, maybe persecution. They begin to realize that being a follower of Jesus Christ isn’t all fun and games. They begin to droop and sag. They’re like those helium balloons you get at a birthday party. On the first day you bring one home, it’s right up there pushing on the ceiling, but you come down next morning, and you can’t find it because it’s under the table.

There’s a lot of people like this in their response to the Word. And Jesus says the problem is shallowness. They don’t have any roots. When all was hunky-dory, they didn’t put their roots down into the Word of God. Their spiritual life was all on the surface; they didn’t have any depth. When the fiery trials came, they withered up. And because there was no root, there could be no fruit.

The world is full of people who are willing to be temporary disciples of Jesus Christ. Like the 5,000 that Jesus fed, they’ll make him king as long as he keeps them fat and happy and well fed. They’ll make the rounds of the Bible conferences and the Christian concerts and they’ll say “Praise the Lord!” with the best of them. But when there’s sacrifice to be made, and service to be done, and trials to be borne, they’re out of there.

They look good at the beginning, but they’re invisible at the end. That’s why we are not to lay hands on a novice, on a new Christian, and put him into a leadership position in the church. Because we can so easily be fooled by one of these shallow disciples.

Then there’s a third type of person. It’s the person who hears the Word of God, understands it, and begins to grow. But the worries of this life and the deceitfulness of wealth come and choke out the influence of the Word in his life.

I’ve met more people like this on Long Island than anyplace else I’ve ever been. People who want to serve Christ, and whose heart is in the right place, but whose lives are just so crowded with other commitments that they never really grow.

Jesus said if the Word of God has to share space with competing forces in your life, then the Word of God will never bear fruit. If your life is jam-packed with other priorities, and other allegiances, and other commitments, then don’t expect to grow and be fruitful for the Savior. You’re trying to grow the seed among the weeds and it just won’t work.

So many Christians here on Long Island are struggling along with lives that are overcrowded. They’ve let the world dictate their schedule, their agenda, their priorities. They’re like hamsters in a cage, running on that spinning wheel to nowhere.

If you want to be a fruitful follower of Jesus Christ, then he is going to have to be your number one priority. Jesus doesn’t want to come into your life to become just one more item on an already crowded agenda. He wants to be Lord. The seed of His Word will not bear fruit in ground that is overgrown with weeds.

Finally, there is the person who hears the Word of God, understands it, and obeys it. His life is like the good soil. He’s not hard and cynical and resistant. The seed can take hold and grow. It can put down roots deep into his life.

And he’s not shallow. He’s in it for the long haul, not for the thrill of the moment.

His life is not full of other commitments. His soil is not crowded and cluttered with other things growing there.

In that person’s life, the seed of the Word will grow up to maturity. It will produce fruit.

How much fruit it will produce is God’s business, not ours. Notice that Jesus didn’t rank the good soil according to performance. He didn’t talk of the 30, 60, and 100-fold yield in terms of good, better, and best. The soil that yielded 30-fold was every bit as good in his eyes as the soil that yielded 100-fold. Let’s not fall into the trap of comparing our apparent fruitfulness with someone else’s. Christ is the Lord of the harvest, and he takes care of our fruitfulness.

It’s our business to do all we can to make sure that our lives are good soil for the Word of God to grow in. For some of us, that may mean that we need to do some plowing, to break up the hard ground. Perhaps there are some habits, or attitudes, or willful sins that we need to confess to the Lord. Those things can block us from being fruitful. The seed of the Word cannot penetrate our lives when we indulge ourselves by allowing sin to exist.

For others of us, perhaps we need to do some weeding. We may need to take a hard look at our schedules, our priorities, our commitments. We may have crowded our relationship with Jesus Christ into one little corner of our lives. We may find that the weeds have taken over the rest. We need to pull out those weeds.

If you’ve ever done any weeding in a garden, you know that it’s hard work. You have to be ruthless. If you don’t get every part of a weed’s root system, you come back in a week, and there it is again. So you have to be persistent. You have to persevere. You’re never completely done weeding until the crop is in. And if you really want to weed effectively, you have to do it on your knees.

It’s the same way in the spiritual life. If you want to get rid of the weeds, you have to do it with much prayer. You need to ask the Lord to show you the things in your life that suck the life and the energy out of the soil and give you nothing back in return; that leave you with not enough time and energy to give to the good seed of the Word of God.

Four types of soil. Four types of people. All four of them received the Word of God. But only one of them produced a crop. The reason? Soil quality. Which one are you?