Depending on the Dirt

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Back when I was teaching school, I had a middle schooler ask me what life was like during the Dust Bowl. Yeah, you already picked up on it. It took me longer.

I thought they were just asking because I’m an Oklahoma history enthusiast. So I started explaining some of what happened. Kid looked at me with all the sincerity he could muster and say, were you ever scared? When I realized he thought I was there.

I was born 40 years after the dust bowl. I wasn’t there. But we did have a good conversation about what the Dust Bowl was as a result of that.

There were a lot of things that went wrong that led to that Dust Bowl. Most of you are aware of what the Dust Bowl was if you’re new to Oklahoma. You may or may not be.

But it was a time back in the 30s when farmers couldn’t grow anything, especially out in western Oklahoma, the panhandle. They couldn’t grow anything. The topsoil blew away.

you’d end up with just piles of dust and sand in your house. So it blew away all the good soil, these massive dust storms, and what was left on top wasn’t good for growing anything. It was just a really difficult time.

And part of what led to that was going back 50 years before that, some of the practices that settlers had used and the government had encouraged that just really messed up the soil. They encouraged people to settle that far west and to try to farm because they were in the middle of an unusually rainy period of time. And they thought it was going to be even wetter.

As a matter of fact, you can go to the Panhandle today and there’s a dam that they built across one of the rivers up there in order to fill it up with a reservoir. And there is no water in that thing to this day because they were assuming it was going to be based on these old historical rain levels that were just a fluke. But they would plow and they would try to plant things that weren’t suited for that soil.

And they would pull up the native grass that held the top soil in place and different things that they shouldn’t have done. And the soil was just wrecked by the 1930s. So they couldn’t get anything to grow there.

They would try everything. They would have these massive government projects to try to fix the soil, try to get things to grow there. And no matter what they did, no matter how much money they dumped into it, There was no way for them really to grow crops like they did further east. And that’s sort of in our collective memory as a country and especially as a state, what people went through, that no matter what they did, they couldn’t get anything to grow there because after years and years of mismanagement, the soil was bad.

And it’s an object lesson to us that sometimes, no matter how much effort you put into it, No matter how much stuff you try to plant, how much different stuff you try to plant, if the dirt is not good, you’re not going to grow anything there. Maybe weeds. Weeds will grow everywhere.

I can baby a tomato plant and it will just limp along, but weeds will grow up through the cracks of my driveway and thrive. It’s crazy. But nothing you want to grow will grow there because the soil is bad.

And that’s the lesson that Jesus taught as we get to Luke chapter 8. If you’re new with us, we’ve been studying our way through the book of Luke, piece by piece, and we come today to this parable of the sower where Jesus uses the idea of planting in the soil and what happens to those seeds as an illustration of what takes place in the human heart. That you can continue to cast seed, but if the soil is not good, nothing’s going to grow.

That’s the point that Jesus made. So we’re going to look at Luke chapter 8 this morning, starting in verse 1. And once you find it, if you’ll stand with me as we read together from God’s Word, if you can’t find it or don’t have your Bible with you, it will be on the screen for you up here.

But we’re going to look at Luke chapter 8. We’re going to look at these first 15 verses at this parable of the sower and the parts leading up to it. So starting in verse 1, it says, Soon afterwards, he began going around from one city and village to another, proclaiming and preaching the kingdom of God.

The twelve were with him, and also some women who had been healed of evil spirits and sicknesses. Mary, who was called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out, and Joanna, the wife of Chusa, the Herod’s steward, and Susanna, and many others who were contributing to their support out of their private means. That means there was this following of wealthy women who had decided to go with Jesus as well, and they were supporting his ministry.

They were feeding everybody. Verse 4, When a large crowd was coming together, and those from the various cities were journeying to him, he spoke by way of a parable. This is what he said.

The sower went out to sow his seed, and as he sowed, some fell beside the road, and it was trampled underfoot, and the birds of the air ate it up. Other seed fell on rocky soil, and as soon as it grew up, it withered away, because it had no moisture. Other seed fell among the thorns, and the thorns grew up with it and choked it out.

Other seed fell into the good soil and grew up and produced a crop a hundred times as great. As he said these things, he would call out, He who has ears to hear, let him hear. And whenever he uses that phrase, he who has ears to hear, let him hear, what he means is, if God has given you the insight to understand, pay attention to what I’m telling you.

So his disciples, verse 9, began questioning him as to what this parable meant. And he said, to you it has been granted to know the mysteries of the kingdom of God, but to the rest it is in parables, so that seeing they may not see, and hearing they may not understand. Now the parable is this, the seed is the word of God.

Those beside the road are those who have heard, then the devil comes and takes away the word from their heart so that they will not believe and be saved. Those on the rocky soil are those who when they hear receive the word with joy, and these have no firm root. They believe for a while and in time of temptation fall away.

The seed which fell among the thorns, these are the ones who have heard, and as they go on their way are choked with worries and riches and pleasures of this life and bring no fruit to maturity. But the seed in the good soil, these are the ones who have heard the word in an honest and good heart and hold it fast and bear fruit with perseverance. And you may be seated.

Now these opening lines about the people that came with Jesus, aren’t necessarily part of the parable of the sower, but they set the stage for what’s about to happen and who Jesus is talking to. And once you start to realize that, they set a nice contrast to the story he’s telling. Because in these first four verses that we read, he’s listing out, Luke is listing out the people who were there with Jesus on a regular basis at this point, and those who were there listening to the parable of the sower.

And he gives a list of people, and this shows us that people were attracted to Jesus’ ministry for a variety of reasons. Not everybody who followed Jesus, not everybody who was with Jesus at this point was a committed follower. Not everybody was there because of what they believed or because of what they were committed to.

Everybody had their own individual reasons. And Luke highlights Jesus’ growing popularity. He had the ability to draw a crowd.

Jesus was a big draw for these people. When they heard He was coming to a city, people would pour in from all the villages. They would come to see Jesus.

They would come to hear Jesus. And they all had their own individual reasons for why they wanted to see and hear Jesus. Now, a couple of the reasons are spelled out here in the text for us.

It says He was performing miracles and exorcisms. It talks about the women that He had healed and those that He had cast demons out of. People ate that stuff up. They wanted to see the healings.

They wanted to be healed in some cases. They wanted to see the demons be cast out. They wanted to see all of this dramatic stuff unfold.

And now Jesus wasn’t doing it to put on a show, but they liked the show that they were seeing. And so some just came because of the miracles and healings. But it also says in verse 1 that he went out proclaiming and preaching the kingdom of God.

Some people were there because they actually were interested in what Jesus was teaching. For some of the people, it wasn’t about the show. It wasn’t about the drama and the spectacle.

It was about the truth. And so they had their different reasons. And just as they were drawn to different things, they had different motives for following Him.

The 12 are mentioned in verse 1. They were there with Jesus to learn from Him and to work alongside Him. Earlier in the book of Luke, we saw this scene where Jesus calls His disciples, calls the 12.

Sometimes we use disciple and apostle interchangeably. He calls these 12 to a special role in his ministry. And then he talks to them among the crowd and talks about the need for total commitment.

And so these guys had made the commitment at this point that they were with Jesus. They were there to learn from him. They were there to work with him.

Some of the others were there for other reasons. The women that are mentioned in verses 2 and 3, they were there to support the work. They were there because if Jesus is putting all of his time energy and his focus on ministry, somebody’s got to support that.

Somebody’s got to make sure that these people who are out doing ministry and doing the work of the kingdom, that they’ve got a place to eat or they’ve got food to eat and a place to stay. And so these women very graciously and very generously came along and said they were going to provide that. So they were there to support the work.

And then the crowds mentioned in verse four were largely there to see what he was going to say or do. And then Jesus turns around and teaches this parable, probably because you had some in his circle, some of these 12 thinking, this is great, we’re attracting a huge movement here. Once you start to attract a lot of people, obviously things are going well and they’re going to keep going well and you’re doing something right.

And Jesus is making the point to them that not all of these people are going to stick. Not everyone who encountered Jesus’s preaching was going to be, was actually going to turn and follow him. And the story he told illustrated that point.

He goes on to tell this story of four different kinds of soil. And in three of the kinds of soil, nothing will Nothing lasting will grow there. It’s only in the fourth one that something grows.

There’s hardened soil on the roads, nothing will grow there. There’s rocky soil, nothing will grow there. There’s weed and thorn-infested soil, and nothing will grow there.

And the point he’s making, and the point I think Luke is emphasizing by putting this here, in contrast to the popularity of Jesus that he lays out, is that, again, just because somebody was there with Jesus, just because they encountered Jesus didn’t mean that this was going to stick. And this phrase came to me a couple weeks ago in a previous message that really I’m starting to see as the theme of this section of the book of Luke, and that there is a massive difference between following Jesus and merely following Jesus around. I said that to you a couple weeks ago, and that phrase just kept going through my head as I was preparing this message.

Some of these people were there because they were following Jesus. And some of these people, all they were ever going to do was just follow Jesus around. And we face the same danger today that we may think we’re following Jesus and all we’re doing is following him, following him around.

We’re looking for what he’s going to do, what he’s going to provide, how he’s going to make us feel. But it never has anything to do with a commitment to him and obedience to him. And many of the people in this crowd, you know, you look at this and think, man, Jesus is creating a mass movement and Jesus is making the point, not all people are going to stick.

Not every soil is the seed going to grow in. Not everyone who hears the truth will be changed by it. And he gives us, as I’ve mentioned, three examples of this.

Now, for most of you, for many of you, this is not anything new. You’ve heard the parable of the sower. It’s a common story.

I went to OU, and even at OU, where I wouldn’t say Jesus is necessarily popular on campus. They’ve got a statue of the sower sowing his seed that goes back to this story. It’s a commonly known story, but it’s a good reminder for us, even if we’ve heard it a billion times, of what Jesus was talking about here.

There’s three kinds of soil that he says nothing’s going to grow there. That these kinds of people, he compares each of the kinds of soil to the heart, to the kind of heart he’s talking about, and says nothing’s going to grow there, that not everyone who hears the truth is going to be changed by it. And this is really helpful to us because in a lot of the parables, he uses a commonplace story to illustrate a spiritual truth and something the disciples probably would have gotten and we can get from context, but sometimes people go overboard in the details of the story.

You know, the parable, it always comes to mind, the parable of the woman who swept her house clean looking for the lost coin. And I heard a preacher talking about, well, the coin is this and the woman is this. Okay, I’m with you.

The act of sweeping is like this. The broom is like this. The dust she swept out of the house means this.

I think we’re reading more into the story than Jesus intended to communicate. In this parable, he tells us exactly what he’s talking about. He lays out what the seed is.

He lays out what each of the kinds of the soil are so we don’t have to speculate. And the first kind of soil is what he talks about, the hard soil, the road. Now, we probably think, why are you throwing seed in the road?

It’s not necessarily a road like we would think about, like we’re going to go out into the middle of I-44 and just start throwing seed. We know that’s not going to work, again, unless they’re weed seeds, and then they will grow anywhere. But any kind of desirable seed, we’re not going to go out in the middle of the road and throw it there.

In ancient Israel, they had these, the ground was hard and dry anyway. And in order to prepare the soil to grow anything, you had to prepare it very carefully. You had to plow it.

You had to do all these things. In between that, they would pat the ground, pack it down hard and firm to where it was almost like a concrete consistency. And they would have these pathways through the fields and on the edges of the fields that they would walk on.

And so no matter how careful you are at some point, you know, just that hardened ground is going to be there on the edge of the, on the edge of the field. And you’re going to get some of the seed on that. And Jesus’s point was nothing is ever going to grow there because that, the top of that ground is so rock hard, the seed can’t penetrate to get any of the moisture, any of the nutrients, because it’s just not there.

It’s been compacted and it’s been hardened. And he tells us that in verse five, talks about that kind of soil. The seed couldn’t penetrate the soil.

The birds would come along and gobble up the seed. So they were just waiting to gobble up the seed. And he compares the birds to the devil.

And he tells us that in verse 12, that this is kind of the hardened heart that will not receive the seed, that the seed can’t penetrate. And whatever is thrown there, Satan just comes and gobbles it up, pulls it away, where they’re not impacted by it, they’re not affected by it. Nothing grows there to the point that Jesus says in verse 12, these people will not believe and be saved.

Now, I want to caution you on this. He does not say they cannot believe and be saved. He says they will not.

Each of us who eventually, over time, our hearts were good soil for the seed to grow, there was probably a point earlier in our lives where we were in one of these other three categories. It doesn’t mean that the master gardener can’t change the soil, but there is a point where in our lives, our hearts are hardened and it makes us unreceptive to the gospel. Jesus warns them of that because some of the people that they thought, oh, they’re part of this movement with us, they were eventually going to fall away from Jesus because their hearts were not receptive to the message they were hearing.

And furthermore, as the apostles went on later to preach the gospel, just as Jesus did, they were going to run into this same kind of people. And when you get serious about evangelism and you go share the gospel with people and you run across somebody whose heart is hardened, they’re not open, they’re not receptive to the message, if you’re not prepared for that, it can be devastating. And you can say, well, what am I doing wrong?

Oh, this doesn’t work. I’m just not going to do this anymore. You can get discouraged.

Listen, even Jesus came across hardened soil. Didn’t mean that he didn’t throw the seed anymore. There’s another kind of soil that things just won’t grow.

It’s where there’s a shallow attachment, and a shallow attachment doesn’t last. Rocky soil doesn’t mean an area with a lot of rocks mixed in. I had never thought about this until I was reading this week. These people had to do, in ancient Israel, they had to do everything they possibly could to make the best conditions possible for the seed to grow because of the harshness of their climate.

So I can’t remember, honestly, if it was John MacArthur, Warren Wiersbe, one of those guys, they were writing about the soil. They said no farmer was going to leave big rocks in his soil. No farmer was going to go out and plant in gravel.

That’s not what this is talking about. This is talking about a prepared field that has a layer of rock underneath it. I’ve not experienced that here where we’ve got sand and clay, but I remember trying to plant a garden when I lived in northwest Arkansas, and you could only rototill about two inches down before you started hitting sandstone.

It was really inconvenient to try to grow anything in my backyard. That’s the kind of thing it’s talking about here. The soil is fine.

It’s just very, very thin. And underneath it, there’s a layer of rock that once the plant starts to grow there, the root can’t go very deep. And because it can’t go very deep, it doesn’t get stronger.

It doesn’t get the nutrients it needs. It doesn’t get the water it needs. And so it’s very shallow.

And when the sun comes out in full force, that plant is just scorched because the roots aren’t deep enough. And Jesus said these plants would be scorched by the sun and would die. Sometimes we will run across, just like Jesus did, people who appear to have an interest in the truth, but it doesn’t go very deep.

And as soon as the scorching sun comes out, as soon as there’s some difficulty, as soon as there’s some challenge to that newfound faith, it just withers and dies. We’ve all seen it. Maybe you’ve experienced that at some point in your life.

Maybe you’ve shared the gospel with somebody and you’ve labored over them only to see this happen. Shallow attachment doesn’t last. and it’s a reminder to us again don’t be discouraged over that jesus experienced the same thing the the job we have is to sow the seed and then the third kind of soil he talks about the weeds and this one teaches us that a casual interest is crowded out if you’ve got a garden plot that has seeds and things in it for weeds which I have never had a garden plot that was not every garden I’ve ever planted, you take your eyes off that thing for five minutes, you’re overgrown. It’s a constant struggle to keep the weeds out.

And as soon as you think you’ve got everything out of there, the birds will scatter more in there again, or the squirrels. But if you’ve got a plot that is overrun by weeds, you can try to plant plants in there and they’ll start to grow, but eventually those weeds are going to choke them out. Those weeds out-compete them for the nutrients and the resources in the soil.

And eventually the plants are left starving to death. And Jesus compares this this idea that the seeds would sprout only to be crowded out by the thorns, he compares those thorns, those weeds, to the cares and the pleasures of this life. It says in verse 14, they go on their way and are choked with worries and riches and pleasures of this life and bring no fruit to maturity.

So sometimes somebody can seem interested in God’s Word. They can seem interested in Jesus, but then the things of this life come along and distract them. And suddenly we’re back in the pursuit of money, or we’re back in the pursuit of a relationship, and we’re back in the pursuit of a job.

And none of those things are evil in and of themselves until we allow them to compete for the place in our hearts that only belongs to Jesus. But we can let other things crowd out this casual interest in Jesus, if that’s all it is. And so he gives this as a warning.

He’s giving this as a warning to the disciples, I think, number one, don’t be discouraged, because one day they’re going to be the ones preaching the kingdom, and they’re going to face the same types of soil that Jesus faced. And if even Jesus, who is God in human flesh and the ultimate teacher, if he faced results like this, you and I shouldn’t be surprised when we don’t fare any better. I think we put pressure on ourselves in evangelism to have better results than Jesus did.

We’re going to face these same things. I think it was given as an encouragement to persevere, to keep proclaiming God’s word, knowing that sometimes these things are going to happen. I think it’s also a message of warning to anybody who was willing to hear, make sure the soil in your heart is not in one of these three categories.

What it doesn’t mean, however, is that the Word of God is powerless. I don’t believe that’s what Jesus intends to communicate here at all. They don’t, Jesus does not mean that God’s Word and His truth lack real power, because when we get to the good soil, everything’s different.

We see that nothing brings lasting change like good seed in good soil. When God’s Word is sown in a heart that is ready to receive it, it produces lasting change. His Word is powerful, and He has designed it to sit there and to sprout and to root and to grow and to thrive and to flourish in the proper soil.

And as I said earlier, just because we’re in one category of soil at one point in our lives doesn’t mean that we can’t be ready to receive the seed later on. So that’s part of the reason you and I just continue to scatter the seed because we don’t always know what kind of soil we’re dealing with. But he says in verse 8, the other seed fell into the good soil and grew up and produced a crop a hundred times as great.

Can you imagine planting a seed and getting a hundred of whatever it is from it? That only happens with cucumbers at my house. And we can’t eat that many cucumbers.

I love them, but we can’t eat that many. That’s why in years past, we’ve had boxes of cucumbers out here in the welcome center. Just give them away.

Most things don’t proliferate like that, but God’s Word has that kind of power that when the seed is planted in good soil, the fruit that is produced is a hundredfold of what was planted because it’s the power of God’s Word. So the question we’re faced with is what is the good soil? Jesus answers us in verse 15, these are the ones who have heard the Word in an honest and good heart and hold it fast and bear fruit with perseverance.

So how to tell if your heart is good soil for God’s Word to work in, do you go to hear the Word? Do you try to hear the Word? When I say hear the Word, I don’t just mean preach here at church, although that’s good.

Hopefully that’s helpful to you. I mean in your daily life, are you trying to hear the Word? Do you believe it when you hear it, when you read it?

Do you believe it? Do you hold fast to it? When I say hold fast, I mean are you committed to it?

Is it your foundation? And are you determined to obey it? Now that doesn’t mean that we do any of those things perfectly.

I don’t think any of us are to that point. But it means, is that your pattern? Is that what you’re demonstrating in your life?

Is that you have a hunger for God’s Word? That you believe it when you’re exposed to it? You say, my flesh may not like it, but that’s what God’s Word says, and that’s the way it is.

You hold fast to it. when what it teaches gets undermined and questioned by circumstances, by people around you, by the philosophies of this world, do you hold on to this? Are you willing to do what it says?

He lays that out for us in verse 15. When he says, the good soil are those who have heard the word in an honest and good heart and hold it fast and bear fruit with perseverance. That’s the test. And if the pattern of your life matches up with those four questions, then your heart is good soil.

Not just for the gospel, but once you’ve received the gospel, it’s how you know you’re cultivating good soil for God to work in. And that’s what we should be determined to do. Because we may have moments, and again, I think he’s talking here in context about people who are hearing the word to respond to the gospel.

But I also believe the human heart is the human heart. And we need to be careful that we are working with good soil. We don’t allow ourselves to slip into one of these other categories.

where we become hardened to what God’s Word says and what God wants for us, where we become shallow in our approach to God’s Word, or where we allow other things to crowd out God’s Word in our lives. But I want to share one more thing with you before we close that we can easily overlook because it’s in between the parable and the explanation here in verses 9 and 10. It says, His disciples began questioning Him as to what this parable meant, and He said to you, and He’s talking to the twelve, It has been granted to know the mysteries of the kingdom, but to the rest, it is in parables so that seeing they may not see and hearing they may not understand.

He’s quoting a passage from Isaiah here that talks about how Israel at some point just would not be able to understand what it was God was saying. Now, what’s the difference between the disciples and some of these people that he’s talking about in the crowd? The difference is the disciples had already put their trust in Jesus.

They’d already thrown their lot in with Jesus. They believed. Those who didn’t believe wouldn’t understand this truth.

That’s why he also says we have to hear the word with an honest and good heart. But we can’t overlook the fact that we have to believe God’s word in order to understand it. Now, if you’re new here, that may not make a whole lot of sense.

But let me explain. Because if you’ve been here for a while, you know that I’m all about evidence and arguments. I don’t know how many times we’ve gone over the evidence for the resurrection.

How many times we’ve gone over the evidence for the reliability of Scripture? How many times we’ve examined that evidence? I’m big on evidence.

I’m not talking about we believe things without evidence. But I’m telling you, Jesus had already given the evidence of who He was to the point that a couple weeks ago in our study, when John the Baptist said, Are you really the Messiah? Are you the expected?

When Jesus said, Look at the evidence of what I’ve done. He’s already given the evidence of who He is. There were people in the crowd who believed who he was based on the evidence he’d given.

There were people who had not yet believed. Who were the ones who understood the spiritual truth he was trying to convey? It was the ones who’d already believed.

So when I say we have to believe his word to understand it, I’m not saying turn off your brain and just believe everything you hear. But as we know and believe and are convinced by the arguments and the evidence, the proofs that God has given us, as we are convinced that he is speaking to us in his word, It becomes our job to believe even the things we don’t understand, knowing that He’ll explain it to us, knowing that He’ll help us understand. But if we come to His Word saying, I’m not going to believe it until I understand it, we’ve got it backwards and we’re not going to understand.

And that’s why so many people in front of Jesus that day didn’t understand. Jesus tells the disciples, you’re going to get this, but to them they’re just hearing a story. The call here for us is simple.

Look at the evidence that He’s given us and believe based on what we do understand. And then He is going to grow us and He’s going to grant us more understanding. But it all starts with believing Him.

All of this starts with believing Him. For them, it was believing the one that they had seen raise people from the dead, that they had seen cast out demons, the one that they had seen heal, the one they had seen teach with divine authority. For us, we don’t have it in front of our eyes.

But we look back for one thing at the certainty of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The historical certainty of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. And if we can establish that, everything else follows. If he could predict and accomplish his own resurrection from the dead, then he is everything he claimed to be. He’s God in human flesh.

He came to die on the cross on our behalf for our sins as he promised. He can offer us forgiveness just like he said. And yes, there are things you’re not going to understand yet about Jesus.

There are things you’re not going to understand about God’s word. But believe what you already do understand based on the evidence, And God will unlock that and help you understand. But don’t wait to believe Jesus until you say, oh, let me wait until I understand everything.

Believing comes before understanding. And this morning, if you do