Jesus is explaining the human heart will always have a response to the Word of God.
Written by Costi Hinn |
Sunday, April 21, 2024
Genuine fruit is the evidence of a genuine heart being saved by the gospel. If people think they can be hard soil, rocky soil, or thorny soil and simply be in a growth phase as a believer, then they’ve missed the entire point of Luke’s gospel and the entire point of following Jesus. This gives people false assurance that they’re saved, when in fact they need to repent and surrender their lives to Christ. In Luke’s gospel, there are constant reminders that following Jesus is a narrow road. There are no half-in, half-out Christians. It’s all in or nothing at all.
“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.”— Luke 8:15 (NASB)
I’ve heard several more seeker-driven preachers explain that the four soils, or the parable of the sower, are the four stages of the Christian life. They’ll say something like this:
Some of you are in a season where the blessings of God keep falling on you like seeds, but the devil keeps snatching them away like the birds on the hard path. Don’t worry, this season of barrenness is just a setup for your season of blessing. Some of you, you’re growing, but there are rocks in your life and you keep hitting them over and over and over. Your breakthrough is coming. Those rocks will be moved and you’re going to be blessed. Some of you are leaders in this church and you’re in temptation and sin, and it’s choking you out, but you just need to untangle those thorny weeds and keep on growing. Some of you have been faithful in all those stages, and now you are bearing fruit in maturity. You’ve endured the burdens and now you get the blessings. You know what it is to find purpose in the pain and now it’s your time to prosper.
Maybe you’ve heard that kind of teaching on the four soils. That approach lessens the harshness of Christ’s words in the parable, so let’s just let Scripture speak and submit to it, no matter how uncomfortable it makes us feel. We’re going to dive into the meaning of this parable and why it’s so important to get it correct.
First, the seed in the parable of the sower is the Word of God. Jesus says clearly in Luke 8:11, “Now the parable is this: the seed is the word of God.” This helps us understand the seed is not a material blessing from God but in the context of this parable, the gospel, and the good news about the kingdom of God. No matter where the sower sows it or the kind of soil it falls upon, the seed is unchanging. This is how we ought to view the Word of God and the seed of the gospel.
The other key piece to this parable is the soil, which represents the human heart. Each one is described as being sowed upon with the seed of the Word. But each one represents a different response, just like human hearts. Jesus uses very clear language to describe each heart, and only one ends up producing a harvest.
The soil on the side of the road represents a hard heart.
