We'll be looking in Luke chapter 8 this morning. I'm going to go ahead and switch over here. Luke chapter 8. And moving forward here, in both... Questioner 2. Question being asked. And from which we can draw a moral lesson or spiritual truth. The word parable is related to the word parallel. Also, maybe more closely related to the word parabola, but that's something that we talk about in math, so we're not gonna talk about parabolas. We're gonna talk about parallel lines, a little bit more accessible for us, but it basically means two things that are really mirror images of each other, two things that are related, two things that show two sides of an issue, where there's a natural side to the story, one that is accessible and understandable to anyone who hears it, but there's also a, a parallel side of it, a spiritual truth contained within that. That's why when the Lord comes and He says at verse 9, the end of verse 8, He says, He that hath ears to hear, let him hear. That's why later in the text that we read in verse 18, he says, take heed, therefore, how you hear. And not everyone who hears a parable like this is going to understand the deeper truth and the deeper meaning that is inside of it. Anyone who heard that story as Jesus Christ told it, anyone who heard that parable from the lips of Jesus Christ in that day that he spoke it would have understood that. And Israel was still largely an agrarian country, an agrarian economy. Basically everyone, even if that wasn't your primary job, you did something that was kind of agricultural in nature. Even if it was just to have a small garden or something like that, the people understood growing their own food. I don't know what that is. They understood growing their own food. They understood planting seeds and reaping a harvest. They understood these kinds of things. And so to some in the crowd, all they heard was a story about seed falling on different kinds of ground. Yeah, that's true. If seed falls on the road that everybody walks on, it's probably not going to grow. going to grow, but it's probably not going to grow for very long and get very big. If seed falls on ground that is thorny and weeds and thorns are allowed to come around, then it's probably going to take all of the moisture and the nutrients out of the soil. And it's going to rob that from the good plant. And it's probably never going to really become a fruitful plant. I understand that. And if seed falls on good ground, then yeah, it's going to grow. Yeah, that makes sense. And as Jesus says, then he says, take heed how you hear. If you have ears to hear, let them hear. Some would say that, would use statements like this by the Lord to say that it's then God who determines who will hear and understand the spiritual things and who then will accept that. And essentially that means that God then determines who will and will not be saved and who will and will not take steps of faith. And that's not at all what the Lord was saying. saying if we hear these things and we only take them at face value and we don't hear them with ears of faith, we will never hear, we'll never understand the deeper... A parable allows for, I'm gonna switch to this one, a parable allows for a person to hear the story and think they understand it, but if they only understand, only want to understand the natural application of that, that's all they will understand. But it also allows for someone who hears with ears of faith to hear the spiritual meaning and be helped by that. Jesus said that they seeing might not see and hearing they might not hear. The Lord is saying that anyone who does not believe will never see anything deeper or more significant in the story than the natural story that's there. I dare say that there have been times where that's been true even in my own life. Even in my Christian life, I've been saved most of my life. I was born into a church-going Christian family. I heard the gospel a whole lot when I was a little kid. And so when I was pretty young, I was in first grade, I got saved. And I dare say that even as a saved person from seven years old onward, there have been times in my life where I did not hear what God was really saying out of scripture. that though the word of God was taught to me and though the word of God was preached to me and though the word of God was something that I read and memorized. I mean, I went to a Christian school quite a bit. I had to memorize a lot of scripture and a lot of scriptures that I had memorized that I didn't understand them at all because I didn't have ears to hear it at the time, at least. It's a parable, again, called the sower and the seed, but it's really a parable about the four types of ground. Again, the sower indiscriminately and liberally broadcasts the seed over all ground, widely available. If this was a story that was supposed to picture that God somehow decided who would and wouldn't be saved, then the sower in this story would not be broadcasting the seed liberally and indiscriminately. He would be very careful about where he planted seed. I told you a few, we talked kind of on a concept like this a few months ago, and I told you I've grown a garden. I'm actually doing pretty well this year, guys, by the way. I'm doing a lot better this year as a gardener than I've ever done in my life. It's an amazing thing. But you know what? When I planted seed, I was very specific what kind of seed I planted, and where I planted it, and how I tended to it. That is not what the sower is doing here. I want my cucumbers growing here, and I want my tomatoes growing here, and I want my cantaloupes growing here. I've got cantaloupes right now that are this big. I'm telling you. It's crazy. That's not what the sower in this story did. He didn't decide that this was his melon patch and so only melon seeds go. No, he was taking seed, he was just throwing it everywhere. That's why it lands on all types of ground. If the Lord was out there in heaven saying, there's some people I want to be saved and some people I don't want to be saved, he would pick and choose where the seed went. Because it is the seed that gives life, right? The seed is the word of God. He would choose who could have access and availability to the word of God. God doesn't do that. Now, man does, but God never does. Man is guilty of that. Man is guilty of who he takes the gospel to and where he will take the gospel and who he will share the gospel with. We do that all the time. God never does. So that can't be the picture, right? The sower indiscriminately and liberally broadcasts the seed over all the ground. The seed is good seed that has the potential to grow into good, productive, fruitful plants, every single one of them. The seed is not what is the limiting factor to whether or not the plants become good, productive, full, mature, healthy plants. It's not. It's the ground. The differing results are based in the ground on which the seed falls. Christ gives the meaning of this parable in the second half of the text, and from that we know that the seed is the Word of God, and that the sower, then, is the one who distributes that. I mean, essentially, and ultimately, it's the Lord, but it really, the sower of the seed is us. Proverbs, I'm sorry, Psalms 126, I'm sorry, Proverbs 126, there isn't 126, Psalms 126 speaks of, "...he that goeth forth and weepeth bearing precious seeds shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him." It's talking about those who would share the Word of God and take the Word of God to other people. We are called, in the Word of God, we are called sowers of the seed. You go to the argument early, the divisions in the church at Corinth. You read the first part of the book of First Corinthians and he talks about how there were disputes and divisions among the church based on who led them to Christ and Paul says that that's not the thing that matters because the person that showed you the gospel is just a sower of the seed or a planter of the seed or a a waterer of the seed. They're just a vessel through which God worked. It was the Word of God that brought faith unto salvation. It was the Word of God that was the seed that, it was the gospel that brought us, that saved us, not the person who gave us the gospel. The sower is us. And again and again we find that the sower is just the person who is willing to share the gospel. They're willing to share the Word of God, willing to broadcast that to others. The ground, then, we think of, then, is the heart and the condition of the heart in which the seed falls. And really even, to an extent, it's even the ear on which the seed falls. And if that ear is open and prepared to receive it, then the Word of God can get down in from the ear into the heart. We sing a song in, especially like our preschool classes, to our really little kids, we sing a song with them, oh be careful little eyes what you see, you know, be careful little ears what you hear, and all that, and why? Because your father above is looking down in love, oh be careful little ears what you hear. Why? Because our eyes, our ears, are gateways to our inner man, to our heart. If our ears are stopped up, And there's examples of that in the Word of God, where the Lord uses that as a metaphor, as an illustration, where it's not literally fingers in their ears, but essentially it is that we've stopped up our ears so that the Word of God does not get in our ears to get down into our hearts, so that the Word of God can grow into something that is spiritually fruitful. Romans 10, 17 reminds us that faith comes by hearing. Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God, and we hear the Word of God, and we actually hear the Word of God, and it gets down into our hearts, it produces faith in our hearts, faith unto salvation, faith unto spiritually productive works in our Christian life. Whole Christian life is lived by faith, supposed to be lived by faith. Faith is the key to the Christian life. Christian life begins because of faith. The gospel enters into our heart and produces faith unto salvation, but the rest of the Christian life is lived by faith also. And as I hear the Word of God, as I'm exposed to the Word of God, I know I'm gonna be saved. There are some works of faith that God calls us to do individually and then together as a body of Christ that God calls us to do that requires faith. And that faith is produced by the Word of God getting into our hearts. And so the question then becomes, what is the condition of the heart in which the Word of God is trying to grow? We have to have ears to hear if our hearts are going to be changed by the word of God. We must let the word of God into our ears. The Lord makes an emphasis of this in the passage. He says, again, at the end of verse eight, he that hath ears to hear, let him hear. Verse 18, he says, take heed, therefore, how you hear. For whosoever hath to him it shall be given, and to him that hath not it shall be taken, even that which he seemeth to have. There's one example of, the first example that's given of the ground is the ground by the wayside, the ground of the wayside. The wayside is the road on which people walked. Imagine in a, we've probably been around, I'm from New Mexico so I'm used to dirt roads, but been around dirt roads before. a well-traveled path, a well-traveled track, either a footpath or even a vehicle track or whatever it may be that is driven over the road and over the road, same path, same path, day in, day out, multiple, multiple times. Eventually, that turns into a well-worn path on which nothing is going to be growing. It's going to be too packed down for the seed to get into it, to get below the surface. Even if the seed were able to penetrate, it is so well-traveled and commonly traveled that if something did begin to grow up, it would be quickly trampled out. And here the example is that seed that fell on the wayside is like the heart in which the seed falls. And because it cannot penetrate below the surface, the devil is able to come and snatch that seed away lest it get down into their hearts and make a change. This is those who reject the word of God and reject the gospel outright, that heart on which the world and the devil have hardened so that the gospel can't get in. This is the only heart condition that is obviously of a lost person. I believe the Lord can do things that we obviously can't do in the hardest of hearts. The Lord can eventually break through with enough exposure to the gospel, with enough prayer, and enough effort, enough preparation, and enough persistence on behalf of the sower. God can break any heart. Thank God for that. Thank God for that, but that unregenerate heart is this hardened heart, and the devil is trying to make that heart harder and harder and harder over time through various means. Hearts, I think, start out as hardened hearts anyway, because life is hard. And we're born sinners. And there's enough pain and tragedy and wickedness in our hearts where there's already a work to be done by the Word of God and by the Holy Spirit to soften our hearts enough to receive the gospel. be hardened through pain and through tragedy, can be hurt by wicked people around us. We've talked a lot here on Sunday mornings out of Psalms 119 about the enemies that we have. And I believe that, yes, as Christians we have enemies. I believe that everybody has people around them that would do them harm that are out there to take advantage of them, out there to do horrible things to them if they could, and if they would, and if they have the opportunity. There's not a person out there that hasn't suffered some kind of pain that the devil is trying to use to harden their hearts to the gospel, harden their hearts to the Word of God. Not only harden through pain and tragedy, unfortunately, the one that we don't suspect is that we can actually be hardened in our hearts through pleasure and through decadence. What did Jesus say in the gospel? He said it's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to be saved. Why? Because it's not just tragedy that hardens our hearts to the gospel. It's not just pain that hardens our hearts to the gospel. It's not just a sense of being treated unjustly that hardens our hearts to the gospel. It's even just the decadence of this world, the pleasures of this world. One of the reasons that Moses was considered to be a man of great faith and one in which God could use greatly was because in a time when he could have chosen the pleasure of life and the decadence of life, being the son of Pharaoh's daughter, he rejected the pleasure of sin for a season and chose to suffer affliction with the people of God. Why? Because just as much as pain and tragedy will harden hearts to the word of God, the pleasures of life, the pleasures of sinfulness, the decadence of this world will do the very same thing. It can also be hardened in our hearts through religion and tradition. Who was Jesus speaking to that had the hardest of hearts in his ministry? It says that he was a friend of the publicans and the sinners, and the publicans and the sinners who knew they needed something in their hearts, they knew they had a spiritual need, they readily listened to Jesus Christ when he spoke. Who was it that rejected Christ? The religious crowd. And the more religious they were, the more hardened their hearts were to the gospel of Jesus Christ. We took a Pharisee and Pharisees were the most morally upright people you could find. They had memorized nearly all of the first five books of the Bible. And if you're not familiar, that's a lot, okay? That's hundreds of chapters, thousands of verses. They knew the law inside and out. They knew all the little nuanced things about the law. They knew even all of the teachings surrounding it, and they were the kind of people who, on the Sabbath day, they would basically count their steps, how far they walked, so as to make sure that they didn't technically do work on the Sabbath day by walking too far. And they weren't doing it for health reasons. They were doing it for spiritual reasons, right? They were counting their steps, trying to keep that step count low. The more religious they were, the more hardened their heart was to the message of grace, to the message of faith in Christ. The devil wants to keep our hearts hardened. And he has, and he's kept heart to heart. Now, the other three types of ground let the Word of God in their ears, and the Word of God then does take root in the heart, and we see that the Word of God, through that, produces a plant, and we find it landing on the stony ground, we find it landing on the thorny ground, we find it landing on the good ground, and when the Word of God comes to those types of ground, the plant springs up, begins to grow. This picture of of initial faith is a picture of salvation, but only one type of ground produces a fruitful Christian life. The other two, the one that falls on the stony, rocky ground is soil that lacks depth and moisture. It lacks the nutrients for a large, productive growth. We think, instead of thinking about like bedrock kind of soil, we think about like rocky, kind of arid soil, which has a lot of stones in it, and gravel and that, which would be fairly easy for the seed to penetrate, would be fairly easy for the seed to initially grow from. But as the plant gets bigger and as the demands of the plant's health become more and more for water and for nutrients, that soil just simply can't provide that. The Bible says of it that it is shallow ground. It has no depth to it and the root can't really find any purchase on anything that can really sustain long-term and healthy growth. These are shallow hearts that have no depth or substance. Sadly, this ascribes many, if not most Christians, those who readily receive the gospel and are saved, and experience initial growth, and even show great promise in their life, but they never move on to a deeper and more abiding relationship with Jesus Christ. They like the assurance of salvation, and they like the sincere milk of the Word that the Bible talks about, but they never grow to a point where they're able to sustain and take on the strong meat of the Word. They never develop the spiritual strength to bear up under the weight of the temptations and the burdens of this world, to walk in this life by faith and not by sight. The thorny ground is representative of like a soil that lacks the attention and the intention that supports productivity. Thorny ground has the potential, it has the moisture content, it has the nutrients there that are provided for it, and the seed is able to get into the ground and it's able to sprout and begin to grow. And but while it grows, it is growing in and amongst weeds and thorns, things that are competing with it for the moisture, competing with it for the nutrients. We've seen this happen before. I mean, if you have garden, you know that one of the things you have to do is you have to manage the other things that are growing. You can't let weeds grow rampantly. They're going to diminish the productivity of your good plants. What's lacking in this is tending to the new growth, the removal of the weeds, the removal of the pests and the competition that harm the good plant. These are carnal hearts. hearts that either never were not carnal, saved, but still very, very fleshly and immature and never grew out of that, or hearts even, as the book of Romans describes it, hearts that have been set free from the bondage of the world, the bondage of the flesh, the bondage of sin, but go back to it at some point, become carnal again, and through backslidden-ness, This describes a lot of Christians also, those who receive the gospel and begin to grow in their new life. And their growth is likely slower and more deliberate than it might be out of the stony ground of the shallow hearts there. Their progress, they actually progress to some depth in their roots and some strength and some stability to begin bearing fruit. But that fruit bearing is choked out by worldliness, by carnality, by the cares and the burdens of the material world. Understand something about carnality. Carnality is not always that which is overtly sinful. It's not always that which is easily identified as carnal and as sin. It's not always, well, you know, there's some things that it'd be easy for you to point out as a Christian and say, you know, this thing is something a Christian shouldn't do. And the Bible talks about this in Hebrews chapter 12. It says we run the race of the Christian life. It makes this comparison and it says that we must lay aside every sin that so easily beset us. But before that it says every weight and the sin which so easily beset us. And I think those are two different things. I think that's an important distinction that's being made in the scriptures, is that there are sins that hold us back. Those are the things that we can look at and we say, I know that's carnal, I know that's fleshly, I know that's wrong, I know that's hurting my Christian life. And sometimes we're a little bit faster to admit that, even if we struggle to set them aside, even if we struggle to get victory over them, we at least acknowledge that they are holding us back. But it also says there's weights. The things that are just unnecessary, the things that are just of this world that hold us back in the Christian life, and we have to let the Lord honestly evaluate those things also. There are some forms of carnality in my life that I don't want to admit and I don't want to set aside, and those are the weeds that choke out spiritually productive growth in my life, as much as the sinful things in my life. Carnality is any prioritization, any primary focus on that which is temporal, that which is material, rather than that which is spiritual. There are things that are obviously physical necessities. There are things that are even, you know, physical comforts that we have. And those things aren't sinful, but we have to be careful to never let them become the focus and the priority in our lives. And when they do, our hearts have become carnal, even if they haven't become overtly sinful. We have to be careful about that. Why? Because our spiritual growth, our spiritual productivity is at risk. Both of these types of unproductive heart conditions need attention. In Jeremiah 4.3, the Lord called to his people and he said, And so not among thorns. Kind of addresses both of those. The fallow ground is the ground that needs some amending. The ground that needs to be broken up. The ground that needs to have some things tilled into it. Some things of some substantial value and fertilizers and things like that. That's the fallow ground. Ground that was left uncultivated. And so not among thorns. Whether that's to avoid places that are thorny or whether that's to remove the thorns and the weeds from that ground before you sow, but the heart needs that attention. Hosea 10, 12 says something very similar. It says, sow to yourselves in righteousness, reap in mercy, break up your fallow ground, for it is time to seek the Lord till he come and rain righteousness upon you. Ideally, seeds should be sown where they're are no weeds and thorns to begin with. Weeds and thorns spring up. The best time to deal with them is when they are brand new, when they're small. And a fallow field needs to be plowed because it's been unused and it needs to be turned and amended and fertilized so that it can support deep growth. Process that God is calling for in the hearts of his people was not an easy process. It was not even an enjoyable process all the way. Now, the results of it are the peaceable fruits of righteousness, right? It's not that we'd enjoy the process of sanctification all the way along, but the end result is worth it. And if we want to come to the end and we want to have a harvest of fruit that remains, of spiritual fruit produced in our lives, then we have to go through the process of breaking up our fallow ground and intending to and amending the ground of our hearts so that the Word of God can produce faith and obedience as it should. I'll say lastly, there's, I believe, a false assumption about good ground. Not that it doesn't exist. but that some ground is just good to begin with. You know, I was thinking about this, that originally good ground doesn't exist. And I was thinking about this in the light of some other pictures the Bible gives us. Again, the ground is symbolic of the human heart. and that all human hearts are cursed with weeds and with thorns and with stones and with problems. Remember when Adam and Eve, Adam sinned in the garden and he fell and he disobeyed God, ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and part of the curse of sin, part of the fall was that God cursed the ground. And he cursed the ground with thorns, and he says, out of the sweat of your brow, you're going to feed your family now, and you're going to till the land. When God cursed the ground, he didn't curse some of it. Did he? I mean, he cursed all of it, right? I mean, like, Adam was not going to go somewhere else and find Garden of Eden, perfect soil, anywhere else for the rest of his life. And then we think about the fact that the Lord uses kind of the same picture as the picture of the human heart in this parable. When God cursed, when the human heart was cursed by sin, all human hearts were cursed by sin. There's not a human heart out there that doesn't have problems. I say that to say like, A, be encouraged by that. Be encouraged by the fact that there are people out there, there are Christians out there right now that have good hearts. It means that they grew to that point. And if theirs could, mine could also. But also, be challenged by that, by the fact that you don't have an excuse to say, well, you know, I just don't have the faith for that. I don't have the spiritual strength for that. You might not right now, but why? Is it through neglect? The reason that thorny ground is thorny ground is largely through neglect and inattention and unwillingness to do something about the problems that exist. Don't convince yourself that your heart is good or bad. It is what you've been making it into. I'm encouraged by that, but I'm challenged by it at the same time. If my heart is good ground right now, today, that is because it has been becoming that by the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit for many, many years now. If yours is good ground today, it is because the Lord has been working in your heart, but it wasn't always that way. And just because it might be today doesn't mean it always will be. You know, good ground can go bad. Good ground can be sown with thorns. Good ground can be sown with tears by the enemy. Good ground can be hurt and harmed and destroyed by, hardened by tragedy, hardened by decadence, hardened by religion and tradition or any of the other things. Good ground today is not good ground forever unless we continue to allow the Lord to break up our fallow ground and continue to do a work that is deeper in us that produces more and more good fruit. You say, well, some ground is better than others, and that might be true. Thank God, I'm blessed to have the testimony that my heart was well prepared to receive the gospel at a young age. I mean, I was going to Sunday school, Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday, revival meetings, missions conferences. My parents listened to preaching in the car. We go on road trips. And we drove everywhere. We drive road trips 8, 10, 12 hours. We live in New Mexico. We drive down here to Texas to see family 12 or 14 hours in the car. And my dad would put in cassette tapes of preaching the whole way there. That's just what you want to hear as a teenager, right? 14 hours straight of preaching. I heard the gospel a lot, and so when I was seven years old and God finally put his finger on my heart, I was ready. My heart was good ground, not for my own efforts, but because I had been exposed to the gospel, and exposed to the gospel, and exposed to the gospel, and was ready to get saved at a young age. That's not everybody. Good ground isn't just automatically good. I wasn't born with a good heart. And my heart didn't stay good ground for very long, shame to say. It is a work of the Lord that He does in our hearts to make good in them. There's this fallacy that, oh, well, some people's hearts are good hearts, ready to receive the gospel. Yes, that might be true, but it's not because they were born that way. Their hearts have been prepared to receive that. You ever see that some people, they hear the same message that you hear, and God speaks to their heart in a way He didn't speak to your heart. And part of that is the fact that the Holy Spirit works in each of us individually, and part of that is some people's hearts are more ready to receive the word of God than others' hearts are. And we can allow God to do that same kind of a work in us. I hope this morning and I believe this morning that we all want to have a heart of good ground in which the word of God can grow and abundantly produce spiritual fruit. Where the word of God gets into my heart and begins to do a work that grows into something that is real and beneficial and glorifying to God and helpful to others. I hope that's what we all want. I think that's what we all want. And I believe that this is something that we can all see in our lives. but it starts with letting the word of God into your ears. It begins with allowing the Lord to break up that fallow ground of our hearts, allowing the Lord to amend the condition of our hearts, to pull some of the weeds and get some of those distractions and weights out of our lives so that good things can grow. One of the things about fruit, and I've said this before and I close, fruit actually is one of the things that is actually measurable. If you're not sure what the condition of your heart is this morning, then I would just challenge you to in your mind this morning, in your heart this morning, just evaluate what kind of fruit your life is producing. If your life is producing spiritual fruit, there's probably something good going on in your heart condition. But if there's some lack there, if there's some weakness there, if there's some inability to produce and follow through and be consistent in good things, maybe there's some room to have the Lord do a work in our hearts this morning. So I don't know what the Lord may be speaking to your heart about today and this morning, but whatever it is, we want to take some time as we close to respond to the Lord's, as he speaks to our hearts. And so if you would join me here this morning.