The Parable of the Seed That Fell on the Ground

The crowd that gathered by the sea had come looking for miracles and for answers to their troubles rather than for the truth. So Jesus brought them the word through a simple story of a farmer sowing seed. Some seed fell by the road, some on rocky ground, some among thorns, and some on good soil, and only the seed on good soil bore fruit, thirty, sixty, and a hundred times as much.

The roadside is the person whose heart has grown hard, who hears the word yet has no desire to let it take root. The rocky ground is quick to give thanks and quick to make resolutions, but it soon grows cold when hardship comes. Among the thorns the seed does take root, but the cares and desires of the world choke it so that it can grow no further and rots where it stands. Such people seem outwardly to have faith, so they do not see their own limits, and this is the greatest danger of all. The parable of the weeds that follows is not about the heart. The field is the world, the good seed are the children of the Kingdom, and the weeds are the children of the evil one. Though the two grow together in one world, people do not separate them; God does that at the harvest.

The sermon taught that what matters is not how much has been given but how faithful one has been with it. The way to become good soil lies in laying down one’s own righteousness and obeying with patience. It closed with the word that hardship is not something to flee but an occasion to hear God’s voice, and that a life which endures in this way becomes at last the fruit gathered into the barn.