When we sow a seed of the Gospel it is important to remember that it is God who causes that seed to grow and not oursleves.........
I'm not sure how much experience you have with organised evangelism; perhaps you've done door-to-door or street evangelism in the past. Before Covid, my church actively participated in monthly Saturday activities, collaborating with numerous other churches in the area. It was a laid-back, easy evangelism that frequently featured "Acts of Kindness."
We would set up a free refreshment tent with crafts, ice cream sundaes, hot cross buns, cake decorating, and other children's activities. The idea was to keep the youngsters occupied while we spoke with their parents.
Was it a success? The kids enjoyed doing things, but convincing the grownups to stop or pay attention was difficult. I'm confident that I'm not alone in feeling that the Kingdom of God is not progressing as anticipated. Sometimes, when you summon the bravery to speak up for Christ, all you encounter are blank and disinterested looks.
Disinterest is nothing new, and our Lord's followers probably experienced similar feelings at different times during his earthly ministry.
During His ministry, Jesus frequently disclosed His divinity by performing miracles and wielding authority over demonic spirits, disease, death, and storms, and these miracles drew tremendous crowds. In a time when medicine and successful recovery from illness were rare, wherever Jesus went, disease started to decrease.
Jesus did not lack in His ability to draw a crowd; He was popular, resulting in large crowds, all wanting something from Him. On one occassion we read that to put some distance between himself and the pressing crowd, Jesus resorted to sitting offshore in a boat Mark 4:1
Jesus taught with wisdom seldom heard before, and the disciples witnessed all that Jesus did. In Matthew, Peter gives his classic answer to Jesus's question, "Who do you say I am?"
"Simon Peter replied, You are the Christ, the Son of the living God."Matthew 16:16
Peter was answering for the group, and his answer did two things: it identified Jesus as the Messiah, and even more critically, it identified Jesus as divine: "the Son of the living God." That combination of ideas makes Peter's confession so crucial because he acknowledged that Jesus was not just a man but God himself, who came to save his people.
The disciples must have been surprised by the apathetic and superficial response from the people, considering that this is the moment for which they have been waiting a lifetime and more.
However, it appears the only cries from the people were ones of selfishness for the fulfilment of their desires and needs. "Feed us, heal us, but that's all we want to hear from you" Throughout history, man has always sought the guidance of his own heart.
John 1:11 sums it up: "He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him."
Eventually, what was a superficial interest in Jesus and His blessings would turn into hatred, powerful enough to demand his crucifixion.
Despite many identifying themselves as believers and disciples, we read in John 6:66 that after one of the greatest miracles, the feeding of over 5000 people with just a handful of food, many of these self-identifying disciples turned back and no longer walked with Him.
Very few were genuine believers, and we see this in Matthew 7:14:
"There's a narrow door and a narrow way, and few there be that find it."
………there were so few real followers of Christ, so few true disciples, that in Luke 13:23, the disciples themselves asked if just a few would be saved.
"Lord, will those being saved be few?"
This situation is challenging for them to grasp, and this fundamental evangelistic question remains for us today…why do some people repent and believe the gospel while others reject it?
And now here we are, trying to figure out what to do.
We ask ourselves, "How do we get people to respond to the gospel message? How do we even get them to listen? How do we, how do I, go about this? Our mandate from Christ is to make disciples, but how can we make disciples if people don't become Christians? Never mind towns, cities, and countries….what about our families….our friends? What's happening?"
And often, we will be disappointed when it seems that all our efforts are to no avail. This lack of response may, very appropriately, encourage us to keep working hard, reaching out, and praying, but it may also lead us to try every new gimmick in the hopes of getting the desired outcome.
But in Mark 4, verses 26-29, Jesus has better advice for us. Here, Jesus explains the nature of His Kingdom, the sphere of salvation over which he rules in the hearts of believers. How it covers the earth, permeates and influences it, how the Kingdom is personally appropriated, and how it grows.
And he said, "The Kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed on the ground. He sleeps and rises night and day, and the seed sprouts and grows; he knows not how. The earth produces by itself, first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear. But when the grain is ripe, at once he puts in the sickle, because the harvest has come."
He's saying that it's like a man who casts seed on the soil; he then goes to bed, gets up and over several days, the seed sprouts.
It was buried; it looked as if that was it; it had gone. If you looked, it was as if there was nothing there, but one morning, there it was, sprouted.
Right now, our windowsill has a tray on it that my husband is using to cultivate seeds. It has been there for a few days and appears to be a tray of soil, but underneath are some dahlia seeds. After more than a week of looking at this tray daily, I saw some little eruptions on the soil's surface this morning. What had previously appeared to be death was now displaying indications of life.
And just like the sower in Mark 4, my husband doesn't know how it happened: "and the seed sprouts and grows; he knows not how."
The growth happens because the seed contains everything it needs to produce life and grow. The seed dies and gives life, but the sower has no control over the process; he doesn't do anything, he can't make a seed die, and he can't make a seed grow; he can't make a seed produce life and continue to grow. All he can do is plant and wait because all the life comes from within the seed.
What did Paul say in Romans 1:16?
"For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation."
The gospel has the life; the gospel is the seed.
The power is in the seed; it's in the gospel, in the Word; the sower is ignorant about how it happens; he doesn't know how the seed dies and then produces life. All he can do is sow and wait as the crop grows; all he can do is wait as God does His work.
As a result, when we communicate the gospel, we must understand that no individual, human strategy, or presentation technique can produce the spiritual life.
This is true regardless of how fascinating, brilliant, or charismatic a speaker you are, how well you can relate the gospel to modern audiences, or how effective your illustrations are. We might be able to bring intellectual clarity, but we cannot bring about spiritual growth; we can only plant the seed.
Jesus makes that clear in John 6:65 when he says,
"And he said, "This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted him by the Father."
Although men and women are commanded to believe and will be held accountable for unbelief, genuine faith is never exclusively a matter of human decision.
There are various reactions to hearing the gospel. In Mark 4:3–9, Jesus relates a parable known as the Parable of the Soils that illustrates these reactions.
The leading players in this parable are the sower, the seed and the soil. The seed is the gospel; the soil is the condition of the heart and the sower….who is the sower?.....the sower is you; it's me; it's anyone who sows the seed, anyone who shares the gospel.
The parable goes to great lengths to explain the soil and the condition of a man's heart, but notice there is no mention of the efficiency of the sower; we are not told if the sower was a good, average or second-rate sower. We're not told because the success of the seed does not depend on the strategy of the sower….it simply depends on the seed's power and the soil's condition.
As gospel sowers, we simply need to know one thing: the seed is God's Word, which is what we sow. It is not about me or you, how brilliant we are, how exceptional our presentation abilities are, how culturally sophisticated we are, or even how dramatic and sensational our testimony is; it is about the seed. Anyone who scatters seed and spreads gospel truth is a sower; the power is in the seed.
The seed is front and foremost; it is created by God; it is spiritual seed, the Word of God. More importantly, it must never be altered; we do not have a mandate to alter the message to make it more palatable. This is not earthly seed; it cannot be genetically modified to give it more strength, growth, or a higher likelihood of development. We cannot and must not tamper with the seed; if we alter it in any way, it is powerless.
Do the soils not matter? Do the hearts of people not matter?
Let's find out.
The parable Jesus shares speaks of fruitless and fruitful conditions or soils.
Some seed fell on the path or road, and the birds of the air or the lies of Satan and the world ate it up. These are unresponsive, hard-hearted people whose hearts have become calloused by their love of sin and their unbelief.
There is many a mention of such people in the bible, those who stiffened their necks. 2 Kings 17:14 These are the ones who stoned Stephen. Acts 7:51
"You stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, you always resist the Holy Spirit. As your fathers did, so do you.
These hearts are as hardened against available grace as against impending judgment. They are at the mercy of the enemy as he takes away the Word from their heart.
The second batch of seeds falls on rocky ground and sprouts up quickly, only to be withered away by the sun as their roots cannot go into the soil where the water is. These are those who seem to respond joyfully and enthusiastically to Christ; they understand the gospel intellectually and seem to respond, only to renounce Him once persecution heats up; here is the danger of only appealing to people's problems, to their felt needs, without a requirement to conform their lives to the Word. John 8:31
So Jesus said to the Jews who had believed him, "If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples,"
This happens when people respond emotionally because they just want their problems solved. It's similar to those who followed Jesus for healing and food…then walked away.
Some kind of joy rises, but it's rootless because when the problems come, as we know they do, because they're not truly saved, they, too, walk away because there is no call for these people to deny their natural feelings or cravings. They are still walking and controlled by the passions of their mind and flesh; they still retain their old nature. Ephesians 2:3
The third heart condition looks like a response but
"the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches and the desires for other things enter in and choke the word, and it proves unfruitful."
These are those who are too preoccupied with the world's distractions; they can sometimes show incredible potential for fruitfulness; they enter the church with much joy and enthusiasm, but in the end, their fruit fails to develop, and they gradually drift away from the teaching of the Word and continue in a worldly belief system.
The soil in which my husband planted his dahlia seeds was guaranteed weed and contaminant-free. But the soil Jesus speaks of here, despite being deep and ploughed well enough to allow for germination, is not contaminant-free; weeds may already reside in that soil and will grow faster and stronger than the good seed and choke it.
Then we have the good soil: do not be misled by the term; this does not imply that only good people can be converted. Good soil has been changed by God the Holy Spirit; it has been ploughed and prepared by God, it is tilled and is fertile. God prepares it because we cannot do this ourselves.
The good soils are the ones who hear the Word, understand it, accept it, love it, embrace it and bear fruit thirty, sixty and a hundredfold.
I don't think any farmer at that time ever attained such success rates. But don't be amazed by the numbers; be amazed that there is fruit…be amazed that God caused the seed to germinate, grow and produce fruit; the presence of fruit is what matters, not the quantity.
So, we can conclude from this that the condition of the soil, the heart, does matter, but it is God who determines, affects, and changes the heart.… We only need to recognise that we sow the seed, but it must be the true seed, the uncorrupted seed, the truthfulness of the gospel that penetrates the heart, and God will do the rest. Luke 24:47
"and that repentance for the forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem."
That is how the Kingdom works: we sow the seed, then go about our daily lives for God, and He takes care of the rest.
We do not always have to analyse our success rates or failures because we may never see the results of our efforts in this life. We are called to sow the gospel's good news, and God will take care of the rest according to His will.
May you find well-cultivated soil as you sow your seed this springtime.
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