Take Heed How You Hear

(#38, Yermo, Hinkley, Dagget, Kelso, 1946)

Read Luke 8:1-15.

This parable, reported more frequently than any other, must be of great importance.  The four kinds of hearts it describes are to be found in every assembly -- this should make us read it with a deep sense of its importance.

We see here that there must be good hearing as well as good preaching.

The sower and the seed.

Every person is a sower.  The seed may not be the right kind but everyone is sowing seeds.  

The right kind of seed is God's Word.  

The soil or the hearts.

ƒ    Wayside hearts.  Beware of the Devil when you hear the word.  These are hard hearts, made hard by continual hearing of the Word of God without obedience.  The seed is stifled by sin.  There is no place where Satan is so active as in a congregation of Gospel hearers.

ƒ    Rocky hearts.  Beware of resting in a temporary impression of God's Word.  The seed springs up immediately and bears a crop of joyful impressions.  It is only on the surface.  Trial and persecution come and it withers.  It is possible to feel great pleasure or deep alarm under the preaching of the Gospel and yet be destitute of the grace of God.  We may be warm admirers of a favorite preacher and yet remain nothing but stony ground hearers.

ƒ    Thorny ground.  Beware of the cares of this world (money, pleasure, the world's business); they are the greatest dangers to the Christian's path.  In pursuit of lawful things we need to be on guard.

ƒ    Good ground.  Beware of any religion that doesn't bear fruit.  Without fruit something is wrong with the soil.

The history of the seed lies in three words: in, down, up. 

    1.  The wayside didn't go in.

    2.  The stony ground went in but not down.

    3.  The thorny ground went in and down, but not up.

There are three soils whose souls are in peril.  Only one is right: that which bears fruit!