My butch roommate has been working a lot outside these days. She’s been getting the garden ready; working with the soil, making a plan, preparing the landscape, digging up weeds…soon it will be planting time. I can’t wait to find out what she plants and see the benefits of the labor … and I think I’m going to try canning this year. I haven’t done that since I was a teenager. When I was little my dad grew a big garden every year (plus we had lots of fruit trees) and we canned all sorts of stuff: green beans, beets, chow-chow, tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, jellies, and lots of other goodies. I loved to eat the pear preserves and apple butter the most. “What are you doing to make yourself fertile to receive seed?” That’s the question that the Lord asked me the other morning as I awakened. I knew what He meant (His Word is seed and it gets planted in our hearts so that we can produce good things in our lives). I began to examine myself, “Do I have weeds?” I thought. So, I started studying Matthew 13, Mark 4 and Luke 8 (the teachings Jesus) to find out what I might be missing: The first thing I noticed was that as he headed toward his garden, he dropped some seed along the way as he went down the path. Unintentional seed distribution was done … not in the “normal place” which was his ready field. Sometimes there are “unintentional” seeds of God’s word dropped into our lives, at least we may think they are unintentional … but they were probably put there for a reason. The Word says that the birds came and quickly grabbed them up. What did I learn? Look for it and be ready because you never know when or where a Word is coming from God. And, if we don’t have our hearts ready to receive (anywhere and everywhere), the opportunity to grab it will quickly disappear. Next I noticed that some of the seed was dropped onto soil that looked fine from the top, but underneath it was rocky and hard, so the seeds sprouted but quickly died because the seed couldn’t root deep enough to get nourishment and water from beneath. How many times have we pretended that everything is OK on the surface, but deep inside our hearts we are filled with hurt, anger, bitterness and despair making hardness in our hearts so that even if we do hear the Word God is giving us, we try to take it and run with it but are quickly discouraged because our hear ts are so hard we cannot fully grasp it so the slightest thing robs us of what we could have had (Ezekiel 11:19 & 36:26). Third, the seed that got planted was surrounded by thorns that choked out the plants as they grew. The Bible describes evil people as thorns. So, even if we have our own heart ready to grow whatever God is growing in our lives, if we get too close to too many people who are full of junk in their lives, often it kills what is growing in us. Thus, we never fully get what was intended for us (Ecclesiastes 7:6, 2 Samuel 23:6). The good news is that some seed was planted in fertile, well-prepared ground and it successfully yielded a harvest multiplying 30, 60 or even 100 times “God gives seed to the farmer and food to those who need to eat. God will also give you seed and multiply it. In your lives he will increase the things you do that have his approval” 2 Corinthians 9:10 (NET Bible). ! That’s great for us if we have our hearts in the right place we can get a harvest from the Word … enough for ourselves and enough to share. I’m going to get my heart ready for that, how about you?
Posted on: Tue, 25 Mar 2014 16:13:01 +0000
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