Are You Wasting Seed?

Which soil does your lives represent? Do you have a

- Hard heart – what is said doesn’t get to first base. It doesn’t make an impact at all on you.

- A shallow heart – you don’t really have a strong faith – you are all froth and bubble, following the crowd, but not really having a relationship with God of your own.

- A Distracted heart – what is most important for you – is it God? Or do you spend all your time worrying about other things in this world?

- A Productive heart – the truth you hear is applied, it grows and it transforms you and it in turn bears much fruit.

Which soil does your heart look like. Circle it on your sheets now.

If you have circled a hard heart, you need to work to soften it – you need to PLOW it up, turn it over. How? By REPENTING. If you have a hard heart, you have been shutting God out for a long time. You need to say sorry for that and surrender yourself afresh to God. That is what repentance is – stopping walking down the road that leads away from God, turning around, and starting to walk towards God. Ask God to break up the hard surface of your heart. So if you have a hard heart, you need to turn it over, break it up you need to start afresh.

If you have a shallow heart, you need to PREPARE the ground. You need to first dig the rocks up. But that is not all, Rocky ground is renowned for having poor soil so you may need to then fertilize it and water it. SPEND TIME WITH GOD reading God’s word, developing a deep relationship with Him. Join a home group – get into reading about God and thinking about it – that’s what Meditation is. If you need to find some bible reading material, let me know, there is heaps of good stuff out there. Josh 1:8 “Do not let this Book of the Law depart from your mouth; meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do everything written in it. Then you will be prosperous and successful.” Meditate on God’s truth and allow it to transform you deeply.

If you have a distracted heart, you need to PROTECT your plants. Any gardener knows that when you plant new seedlings, you need to keep weeding the soil around it because the weeds love broken up and freshly turned soil. If you don’t want the weeds to grow up and choke God’s truth, you have to WEED OUT THE DISTRACTIONS. What does that mean in practice. It means that you need to set the right priorities and set appropriate boundaries. God has to be the first priority – not friends, not family, not work, not sport. It means that you can’t play football on Sunday mornings and expect to go to church too. Football is a distraction so get rid of it – weed it out of your life if it is taking you away from God. Some of you are workaholics – you are trying to climb that ladder to the top, but what it is meaning is that your work is dominating your life and squeezing out God, his church and the things he has for you – you don’t have time for a home group, you don’t have time to come to prayer meetings, you don’t have time to read your bible. What do you need to do, you may need to tell your boss that you can’t work over time. You may need to accept that you aren’t going to get that promotion, because you decide not to sell yourself out to the distractions of life. Hard decisions, but that’s what it takes. If we are honest, we would all admit that there are weeds in our life which are trying to pull us away from God. What are the biggest distractions you face today? Write them down on your handout. The nature of weeds are that if they aren’t pulled out, they’ll grow bigger and bigger and without you even knowing it, they will stunt your growth. Pull them out now before they do any more damage.