Jesus has begun telling His disciples what the parable of the sower means. “Listen then to what the parable of the sower means: When anyone hears the message about the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what was sown in his heart. This is the seed sown along the path.” The message about the Kingdom of God is like a seed. It needs to be sown in fertile soil in order to produce a crop. This much any reader of Matthew’s Gospel can understand.
Not everyone’s life is a patch of fertile ground. Some are beaten down and barren places. Not because their lives couldn’t be fertile, but because they are ‘going places’. The pace of life and franticness of their schedules railroad every attempt to plant something worthwhile in their lives. The seed of the Gospel cannot take root in that soil until the ground is softened and watered.
That’s not impossible. Every path and every packed dirt road can become a garden. But there needs to be some structural changes first. First, people need to stop using it as a path or road. You cannot expect to grow anything if the smallest of shoots gets bent over and stomped on repeatedly every day. Neither can you plant the Gospel seed among those who have no margin in their lives. They will not think about the meaning of the Kingdom, or the wants of the King. They think only about the next task, the next personal goal, the next thing to own or conquer. For them, life is a race against the sun. They innately know they will lose, but they run all the same.
Such people are told the Gospel, but they can barely hear it. It never gets ‘planted’ underground. It sits on the surface of their hearts. For them, the Gospel is like a car commercial when they are not looking for a car – a piece of noise to be dismissed at the next thought. The message of the Kingdom is easily picked off. And it does get picked off. For while the message of the Kingdom is to them only noise, to the spiritual beings of creation it is anything but.
To spiritual beings, the Gospel is a tasty morsel. It is life sustaining and highly sought. It is not something to be overlooked or left alone. They long to hear it so they can take it in, but not for noble purpose. For the demonic, the Gospel is like seeds to a bird – their longing is to consume, not to see it grow.
At the end of creation the Lord choose to take a rest. To set aside a full day to enjoy what He had made. In so doing He established that there is a high value on keeping margin in one’s schedule. Moreover, God wrote it down as the fourth commandment for His people. For His people must reflect Him to the rest of creation, and that includes modelling rest on a repeated and frequent cycle. Without margin in our lives, we can scarcely hear what God is saying. Without it we have little joy and no lasting fruitfulness. Worse, without margin we are unable to properly receive the full message of the Kingdom.
It will be picked off us before we even know what it really was.
Again and again has God spoken to you so that both your ears have tingled, but there it ended; the avenue from your ears to your heart has still been blocked up by the devil and his angels, and by your sin; and, as yet, you have not answered to the divine call, and said, “Here am I.”
Charles Spurgeon
APPLICATION: Intentionality
Let us humble ourselves and do business with God, lest anything hinder His voice to us.