Preparing the soil
Thursday, Nov. 28
Mark Chapter 4 Click here to read
I once heard the story of someone seeing a frazzled-looking woman in the grocery store pick up a microwave meal, look at the instructions, and mutter, “I don’t have time to cook today.” She put it back and headed for the deli.
Somehow, in spite of all of our labor-saving technology and relentless striving to make things faster and easier (or maybe because of them, but that’s a conversation for another day), we feel overwhelmed. If things don’t happen right now it feels like a deliberate affront.
Most of Chapter 4 is a series of parables we usually connect to evangelism…each in its own way is about sharing the faith.
While it’s not surprising that many of Jesus’s parables were about either fishing or farming, two of the main occupations of the day, the agricultural images used today make us reflect on an unpleasant aspect of evangelism: the need for patience and trust.
Even with our modern technology that allows us to control light and temperature, there’s a limit to how much we can speed up the growth of a seed.
Once you plant the seed, it’s going to grow as fast as it’s going to grow, and we just have to live with that.
That’s probably a reason that gardening isn’t as popular as it once was: patience is almost a lost virtue.
The parable in verses 26-29 makes the connection to evangelism when it says, “Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how. All by itself the soil produces grain—first the stalk, then the head, then the full kernel in the head.”
We often have a mistaken impression that evangelism is using high-pressure sales tactics to force someone into reciting a particular formula. Compare that approach to the words of Jesus in Chapter 4, and you’ll see how wrong it is.
In the parable of the sower, probably the saddest example is the grain that falls in shallow soil. It grows quickly, but can’t withstand the inevitable challenges that come later. The hearer represented in the parable will be less likely to listen to the message later.
The grain that grows to be healthy is the seed sown in deep and well prepared soil.
John Wesley was so emphatic about getting new believers into accountable discipleship groups that he did not preach where such groups were not available. To bring someone to salvation then fail to provide needed support was to beget children of the devil, he said.
In our own ministry of evangelism both preparing the soil and caring for the growing fruit of faith are as important as spreading the word.