Sowing and Soil

This morning in Mark 4 I read the parable of the sower and the four soils. It's a parable I must have read, heard, or heard taught on 200+ times. But, like so many things in else in God's word, something new caught my eye.

Your familiar with it, of course. A sower goes out to sow seed, which in the Ancient World would most likely have been pulling out handfuls of seed and tossing them. They land on four kind of soils: one by the field, where the seed got eaten; one on stony ground, where the plants initially grew but were then scorched by the sun due to lack of soil depth; one among thorns which grew but were then choked out, and one on fertile soil which yielded a crop. Christ then explains the four soils: the first is are people which hear the Word but whom Satan steals it away from; the second are those which hear the Word and initially receive it but give it no root in themselves and so it withers; the third are those who receive the Word but the cares and delights of the world choke it out, and the fourth are those who receive the Word and bear fruit.

But the thing that hit me this morning as I read it was twofold: the sower and the soil.

In our world of high tech and precision, the idea of a person just casting handfuls of seed is ridiculous and moronic. What a waste of seed, we cry - we have farm equipment that precisely plants each seed (we do, trust me - or look on the internet!) or we do precision plantings in our home gardens. What a waste of seed.

And secondly, what did this sower not get about where he was planting? He didn't know the difference between soils? If I look out my window, I can tell where there are rocks pointing out and where there is a good place of deep soil to plant. What kind of nutty farmer is this?

And then it hit me: I've always been confusing the sower for God. The sower is not God. The sower is us.

Everyone who is a professing Christian is the sower. But we're not the sower of our own land, where we intimately know every inch of soil; we're tenant sowing on another's soil, where all we can see is the new turned earth. We sow the Word of God by our deeds and our words. However, we are like the sower in the parable: we don't really know the condition of the soil which we are sowing on. It looks all the same to us, just as looking at people does not give us an insight into their inner nature.

In these situations, how do you insure the greatest return of your crop? By sowing as much as possible, because you never know what soil your seed will hit on or how fruitful it will be. We try and make our seed fall where we believe it will be most fruitful. There can be a time and a place for all things, even as Solomon says in Ecclesiastes 3. But too often we mistake timing for how much seed we should be liberally spreading.

The sower planted much because he knew that only by sowing much would he reap much. Would that we all sowed more.