How’s Your Spiritual Soil Quality?

There’s a revolution happening down on the farm. It’s a revolution in the way that American farmers works their land. People are calling it the most significant change in U.S. agriculture in over 100 years.

Way 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 thick strong roots of the prairie grass and turn up the rich soil underneath. The slick surface of the steel kept the plow from gumming up with soil the way the old wooden plows did. John Deere’s plow was a success.

By 1839, he was making 10 plows a year, then 40. By 1850, the John Deere Company was turning out 2,100 blades a year. Settlers took those steel plows out onto the Great Plains and uncovered a mother lode of rich black soil.

By 1922, 700,000 steel plows per year were being built 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 know-how.

But all that plowing came with a terrible price only to be realized a few years later. Those plows exposed the topsoil of the Great Plains to relentless erosion by wind and water. When a severe drought came in the 1930’s, angry windstorms lifted millions of tons of soil and carried it as far east as the Atlantic Coast. The Great Plains turned into the Great Dustbowl.

Some farms lost half their topsoil as the rains carried it away to the creeks and the rivers. People said that you could stand beside the Mississippi River in those days and watch one whole farm flow by every hour.

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 leftovers from last year’s crop recycles nutrients back into the soil, so the farmer doesn’t have to use as much chemical fertilizer.

Farmers are finding that this new method, which is called “no-till farming”, is not only good for the soil, it makes sense economically as well. They are getting crop yields 10-20% better than with the old methods.

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 in America.

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’ll never grow quality crops. It’s a rule of farming.

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

He drew a picture of a farmer sowing seed. Now there were two ways of sowing seed back in those days. One of them was the lazy man’s method. You’d just put a sack of seed on the back of a donkey, tear a hole in the bottom of it, and lead the donkey around the field.

But the better way of doing it 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 the field. That was called the broadcasting method, and that is probably what Jesus was talking about. As the farmer broadcast the seed, it fell on various kinds of ground.

Some of it fell on the pathway. In 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 allow 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. Apparently, 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 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 come right up to the surface, and there is very little topsoil covering it. This is where some of the seed fell—on shallow soil which had rock underneath.

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 part of the field early in the spring, you would say that the seed growing in the shallow soil was going to do best. It was already sprouting up; it was ahead of the rest of the field.

The spring rains kept that shallow soil nice and moist, because the water wouldn’t penetrate the bedrock underneath. 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. So they put all their energy into growing taller above the ground.

But spring soon turns into summer, and in the Middle East, the sun begins to really bake the land. The rain disappears; and the dry season begins. And now, that seed on the rocky ground is in trouble.

That shallow soil that was once so nice and warm is now as hot and dry as a oven. The moisture has all evaporated out of it because it’s so shallow. And the little plants growing there have no root system.

They quickly begin to lose their energy and vitality. They start to droop and turn brown. They can’t send roots down deep for more water because of the limestone. Pretty soon, they wither up and die. What starts out so promising ends 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 apparently fell there.

I am not a farmer. I am not a gardener. I do not have a green thumb. I have a hard time growing anything. But I do know one rule of agriculture: Whatever you’re trying to grow, the weeds always grow faster.

I’ve often thought that maybe what I should do is try to grow weeds. Then maybe the good plants will grow better because they’ll think that they’re the weeds!

At any rate, in Jesus’ parable, 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 out the good little plants.

You see the weeds had been there all along. The 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; because it had no room.

But finally, some of the farmer’s seed fell on good ground. Ground where the soil was soft and porous. Ground where the earth 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.

Matthew 13:18 “Listen then to what the parable of the sower means: When anyone hears the message about the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what was sown in his heart. This is the seed sown along the path.

The one who received the seed that fell on rocky places is the man who hears the word and at once receives it with joy. But since he has no root, he lasts only a short time. When trouble or persecution comes because of the word, he quickly falls away.

The one who received the seed that fell among the thorns is the man who hears the word, but the worries of this life and the deceitfulness of wealth choke it, making it unfruitful.

But the one who received the seed that fell on good soil is the man who hears the word and understands it. He produces a crop, yielding a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown.”

The Word of God produces different results in different people’s lives. That is happening right now as the Word of God is preached. Some of you are listening and absorbing it; some of you aren’t. Some of you are going to go out of here and have a hard time even remembering what you heard by this time tomorrow.

And the same thing was true this past week at VBS. Some of the children really listened, and took in what was being taught. It’s going to stay with them for the rest of their lives. But some of them have already forgotten what it was all about.

Have you ever wondered how two people 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 he becomes a disciple.

But the other person hears the Word, and he is totally unaffected by it. Pretty soon he drifts away from church, falls in with bad company, and his life ends up a mess. How can it be that the Word of God 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, - the world’s values, the world’s outlook, the world’s sinful habits - have packed the soil of their hearts down so that it is hard and resistant.

In our house, we try to limit the amount of television that our children watch. We’re not always as consistent as we’d like to be. But the reason we do, is because a steady diet of the world’s entertainment is like the tramp, tramp, tramping of many feet across a child’s heart. If he’s constantly feeding on the world’s perspective, and the world’s way of thinking, his heart will become hard, and resistant to God’s perspective.

Then when he does hear the Word, it just won’t seem to penetrate. He won’t be touched by it; he won’t be challenged by it; he won’t be captivated by it. He just won’t even seem to understand it.

I’ve known many adults like this. One of them in particular comes to mind. He was a funeral director I knew on Long Island. 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 often conducted funerals at this man’s funeral home. And I preached the Word of God at those funerals. He would hear it. I had lots of conversations with this man as he drove me 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. They simply don’t take it seriously. THey think it’s boring and irrelevant. The evil one just comes and snatches it away before it can ever get a foothold.

But then there are people at the opposite end of the spectrum. They hear the Word of God and joyfully receive it. They’re enthusiastic about it, they’re excited about it. 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 something negative happens to them. Trials come, problems, maybe persecution. They begin to realize that being a follower of Jesus Christ isn’t all fun and games. And that’s when they begin to droop and wither.

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 back the next morning, and you can’t find it because it’s under a table somewhere. It has lost all its lift.

There are a lot of Christians like that. Jesus says the problem is shallowness. They don’t have any roots. When everything is going great, they don’t put their roots down into the Word of God. Their spiritual life is all on the surface; they don’t have any depth. When the fiery trials come, they wither up and die spiritually. Because there is no root, there can be no fruit.

This world is full of people who are willing to be follow Jesus as long as it’s convenient. Like the 5,000 that Jesus fed, they’ll make him king as long as he keeps them fat and happy and well stocked with bread. As long as he meets their needs.

But when there’s sacrifice to be made for Jesus, and service to be done for Jesus, and trials to be borne for Jesus, they’re out of there. Gone with the wind.

They look good at the beginning, but they’re invisible at the end. By the way, that’s why we are not to lay hands on a novice, on a brand-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 world and the deceitfulness of wealth come and choke out the influence of the Word in his life.

I met more people like that on Long Island than anyplace else I’ve ever been. People who wanted to serve Jesus, and whose heart was in the right place, but whose lives were just so crowded with other commitments that they never really grew.

Jesus said if the Word of God has to share space with competing forces in your life, then it will never grow and produce spiritual fruit. If your life is jam-packed with other priorities, and other allegiances, other commitments, then don’t expect to grow and be fruitful for the Savior.

If your focus is on temporal things instead of eternal things, then you are trying to grow the seed among the weeds and it just won’t work. Oh, you can have a lot of good things in your life—you can be involved with this organization and that organization, you can be involved in sports and recreation programs, you can have all sorts of good commitments. But someone has well said that the good can be the enemy of the best.

We all know that there’s a player for the New York Yankees named Pat Kelly. He’s from Catasaqua. But a few years ago, there was another Pat Kelly, who used to play for the Baltimore Orioles. That Pat Kelly was a born-again Christian.

The manager of the Orioles at the time was the famous Earl Weaver. Weaver had a mind for one thing and one thing only - baseball. That’s probably why he was so successful as a manager.

One day, Pat Kelly tried to witness to him. He said, “Weave, it sure is great to walk with Jesus.”

Weaver replied gruffly, “That’s nice, but it’s even better to walk with the bases loaded.”

One man had his mind on eternal things, the other on temporal things. If the Word of God has to compete for space with other interests in your life, it will never grow.

So many Christians here in America are struggling along with lives that are overcrowded. They’ve let the world dictate their schedule, their agenda, their priorities. They’re lives are jam-packed with activities. They’re like hamsters in a cage, running on that spinning wheel but going 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 over-crowded agenda. He wants to be Master. 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 roots down 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 God’s eyes as the soil that yielded 100-fold. Let’s not fall into the trap of comparing our apparent fruitfulness with someone else’s. Jesus is the Lord of the harvest, and he takes care of our fruitfulness.

When Peter preached, thousands were saved. When Jeremiah preached, they laughed at him and threw him in a pit. Who, in God’s eyes, was more fruitful?

Our business is to be faithful, not fruitful. If we’re faithful, God will take care of our fruitfulness. Being faithful means making sure that our lives are good, clean, deep 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 with sin, because sin makes us hard and resistant to the Word of God.

For others of us, perhaps we have placed a limit on how deeply the Word of God is going to affect us. Maybe we’ve placed a barrier of bedrock under the topsoil that prevents the Word of God from really getting deep into our lives. Maybe that barrier is pride. Maybe it’s bitterness; a basic conviction that life isn’t fair, and that God hasn’t been good to me. Maybe it is an unwillingness to allow God to deal with a certain area of our lives. Maybe that barrier is simply laziness and lethargy—an unwillingness to put ourselves out..

Whatever it is, unless that barrier is removed, the Word of God will never get beyond the first few inches of topsoil, and you’ll be a shallow, unfruitful Christian who will wither at the first sign of trouble.

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 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 on your knees, with much prayer. You need to ask the Lord to show you the things in your life that are sucking the life and the energy out of the soil and give you nothing back in return. The things that are leaving you with not enough time and energy to give to the good seed of the Word of God.

Four types of soil in Son Country. Four types of people. All four of them received the Word of God. But only one of them produced spiritual fruit. The reason? Soil quality. Which type of soil are you?