Men, I don’t know if we are as receptive as we think we are. I guarantee it. I bet you think you’re the most receptive person in the world, to all kinds of truth. I bet you think that. But as you are listening today, I guarantee that you are not as receptive as you think you are. Jesus is going to challenge us today with this topic. He’s going to challenge our heart, and he is going to till the soil of our heart today as he begins to farm the hard soil in our heart. He’s going to put a hoe to it, and he is going to dig into it and dig down deep.
Now, if you don’t have a Bible, you want to open it right now. Luke, chapter 8, beginning in verse 4 – Luke 8:4 – I’ll read it for you if you’re driving along right now. It says this. “While a large crowd was gathering, and people were coming to Jesus from town after town, he told them this parable.” I love this about Jesus because we always know that he’s just making these things up on the spot, and they’re fantastic, right? So he says this.
“A farmer went out to sow his seed. As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path and it was trampled on, and the birds ate it up. And then some fell on rocky ground. And when it came up, the plants withered because they had no moisture. Other seeds still fell among the thorns, which grew up with it and choked the plants. Still others fell on good soil. It came up and yielded a crop 100 times more than what was sown.” When he said this, he called out, ‘Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear.’ His disciples asked him what this parable meant, obviously bewildered. He said, ‘The knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of God has been given to you, but to others I speak parables so that – quote – though seeing they may not see, though hearing they may not understand.'”
Now, I love this about Jesus. Because at this point in this life, he’s concealing everything, and giving a few secrets away to his disciples. And I’ve got to tell you, right away – there’s all kinds of observations to be made about– Really, the occurrence of how this is happening. The story that Jesus tells himself, and even the bewilderment of the disciples. Because Jesus is trying to teach us something about our own receptivity. I mean, receptivity is all over this thing, obviously.
So here’s what Jesus imagines – he imagines a farmer who’s got a bag of seed over his shoulder. And he’s taking the seed out of the bag, and he is telegraphing it – or he’s casting it, along a plot of land. Now, if you might imagine a little plot of land where someone might be farming – and if you’re driving around your home area, you’ve probably seen a farm before. Or you’ve seen little plots of land that people rent out to farm, to grow vegetation, or produce, or whatever. You can imagine what that piece of land looks like.
And so that piece of land has four different types of soil on it.
First, it’s got the hard path – that’s the place where you walk, typically it marks the territory, alright? So you can imagine this farmer telegraphing some seed, and some of it falls upon very compact earth that’s as hard as concrete. I mean, the seed is gonna go nowhere. The birds of the air and they capture it, they grab it. They steal it away before it can ever find its way into the earth.
The second soil is this, the rocky ground. Now, for us we don’t really understand what rocky ground means. But people who grew up in Israel understand rocky ground, because it’s like living in a place where a big rock blew up all over the place. For people to farm a plot of land, they had to pull the rocks out of it. Often they would use those rocks as a wall around the place where they were farming. But there were rocks everywhere, and in fact, there were rocks that you could not see. Sometimes there were big pieces of limestone underneath the ground, and even though the ground looked fertile and good, when the heat came up it would start to cook those pieces of limestone underneath the earth. Therefore cooking the roots of the seed that had found its way into what appeared to be good soil.
Then third, you’ve got some thorny ground. You’ve got seed falling among other seed, and the thorny seed is more invasive. And it grows up, and it chokes – because it grows faster and more aggressively – it grows up and chokes off the life of the plant.
And then fourth, there’s seed that falls on good soil. And it came up and yielded a crop that was ridiculous. I mean, 100 times than it was sown. I mean, that’s crazy – crazy kind of numbers.
And of course, these people are hearing this story and they understand it. Because everybody in that day lived and grew up in an agrarian society; everybody farmed. So Jesus clearly is giving them a good understanding of what it means to farm. No, he’s not talking about farming at all – he’s using a farming analogy as a metaphor, so that they can understand something different. But what’s so funny about it – I mean, this is the funniest thing about this whole story – is Jesus is trying to teach them how to be receptive, yet they can’t even receive it. I mean, it’s ironic that everybody hears this story and probably is bewildered by it – including the disciples that we see, and they don’t understand that he’s talking about them. He’s talking about how receptive we are to truth. Because all these images mean something.
So for us, the seed represents the truth. The farmer represents – I think, in this story – Jesus, who is telegraphing truth. And the soil represents the conditions of our heart. That’s what it represents. What’s funny about it is, his disciples in verse 9 have to ask him what it means. I mean, if you’ve got to ask what it means, are you truly receiving the truth? No, but there’s something about them that wants to receive the truth. And then Jesus throws in this incredible statement. “Though seeing they may not see, though hearing they may not understand.”
And Jesus is trying to teach them how to be receptive, how to hear is what he’s teaching them. How to hear truth. He keeps repeating it over and over again. In fact, his great punch line of this whole statement, found in verse 8, is this. He calls out and he says, “Whoever has ears to hear let them hear.” In other words, if you’ve got a couple of ears on your head, which everybody does – 100% people I know have ears. At least most people do. Then you have a responsibility to use those ears to hear the message of truth, and then respond it. To actually hear and listen to it. To become receptive to that truth. But the funny thing is, I don’t think that we are as receptive as we think we are. That’s just it.
So, let me tell you this through a story in my own life. So, we in our home, we have a dog. I’m not a big pet guy, but one day 8 years ago, my wife brought home a little Yorkie Poo. A black little lap dog – ferocious, as you might imagine. And when she brought this dog home, of course, everybody in the house loved it but me. Because, I gotta tell you – honestly, I’m one of those guys that believe that animals belong outside. That’s where they belong, okay?
So, over the last week or so, my dog got sick. And it’s been sick probably for a couple of months. Because for a couple of months, we’ve been finding little presents all over the house. And you know what I mean – this dog has been crapping all over the place. And it hasn’t been good, and it hasn’t been fun. And we thought it was a training issue, and so we start trying to retrain the dog, and she got better for a period of time, and then it got worse again. And it wasn’t looking good, and finally one night me and my wife said, “I think we probably should make an appointment at the vet.” And I said, “Yeah, you should probably do that.” And so she did that, she made an appointment for the dog to go to the vet.
And of course she calls me the next day and says, “Can you take the dog to the vet today? Because I can’t.” And I responded to her by saying, “You know how I feel about this dog, don’t you?” And she says, “Yes,” she says, “But would you please take the dog to the vet?” So of course, I have to go home and I’ve got to get the dog, and I’ve got to take a couple hours out of my day, and a few hundred dollars later, right? That’s what I’m thinking in my head. So I pick the dog up, and I try to be as compassionate as I can, while going to the fridge to get the stool sample. Yes, we put crap in our fridge. I can’t believe we did that.
And so, then I take the dog to the vet. And I’m trying to get some empathy – gentlemen, for this animal. And I go to the vet, and I kind of pretend like I’m enjoying this trip. And I’m trying to pretend to be sensitive. The vet walks in, and she’s trying to be all sensitive with me. And then she takes the dog and kind of gives it a little physical in front of me and asks me some questions. And then they take the dog out to get some testing, and then bring the dog back in. And after about 30 minutes, the vet comes back in and says, “Uh, Mr. Miller. I’ve got some bad news for you.”
And she kind of looks me in the eyes to just kind of see if I’m going to be one of those guys who I think is going to cry like a baby. And I’m thinking to myself, “Just give it to me, doc. Just give it to me. What’s the problem?” And then she says next to me, “Autumn has a really, really bad case of Lyme’s Disease. Really, really, really bad.” And I said, “Okay.” And she says, “We need to get some medicine into this dog right away.” And then she begins to explain the medicine regimen, what we’re going to have to do. And then she says, “But if it doesn’t work in 30 days–” she takes a deep breath, she looks me in the eye, she crosses her hands. She says, “We are going to have to hospitalize Autumn for multiple days.”
And then all of a sudden I just started thinking to myself, “ching-ching-ching-ching-ching-ching-ching-ching-ching-ching. Money-money-money-money-money.” I just started to think to myself, “Money.” Like, “This is going to cost me a whole lot.” And I started to think to myself next, “Do we have health coverage for this dog?” Literally, I thought about that. I was like, “Man, that would be a great scam. Doggy health care.” It’s got to exist; it’s probably out there somewhere, and I just don’t know about it. So anyway, she’s starting to share all this with me, and all of a sudden I realize we’re in a really serious situation here.
So she comes back in with all this medicine that I’m supposed to give the dog, and then we go check out at the counter. And the person at the counter – the receptionist, says, “I’ve worked here a long time. I’ve never seen us give so much medicine to a dog.” And then all of a sudden I realized, “This is really, really serious.” Like, “This is really abnormal. What’s going on here?” So I went home and explained it to the kids, what we had to do. And of course, one of my kids is crying. She’s really upset about it. She’s 17, she loves the dog. My son comes in and tells me, “Thanks for taking care of the dog. I really love Autumn,” etc, etc.
And all of a sudden, I’ve got to tell you, over the last week or so my heart has been changing toward this dog. Because I realized something. That it’s not all just about me, right? All my attention was focused on me, what I wanted. The dog was pooping in my house, the dog was creating “me” problems. The dog was costing me money. And all of a sudden, something happened in my heart through the activity of taking this dog to the vet – and then watching my kids respond to it, where it softened my heart again. I mean, that’s really what happened this week.
God taught me that there was another place in my life where my heart needs to be receptive. And I’m not just talking about the dog. I’m talking about places in my heart where I want things to go my way, right? This isn’t about the dog at all. This is about me. It’s about my failure in my own heart to be receptive to truth about who I am, and who I’m not, and who God is to me. Now, this is significant, because I think as Jesus is sharing this story -he’s trying to teach us that each and every one of us has places in our heart that are hard, rocky, thorny, or very receptive. And it isn’t about us being just all these thing and only in one category. It’s about that we are all these soils in many different places in our life.
And as I’ve grown to mature, I’ve come to understand – gentlemen, that there are all kinds of hard places in my heart. There are places that need to be worked on all the time. That you and I need to be working on together, gentlemen. That we need to be doing this all the time. And so, I don’t know what it is for you today, but I can guarantee you – you can find a hard place in your heart – in a place where something isn’t going your way, and you wish it was going your way. That’s a sure tale sign, a perfect question to ask yourself about a place in your life that you need to become more receptive. Basically to the sovereignty of God what he is trying to teach you about you. “He who has ears to hear, let them hear.”
