Don't you just hate it when Jesus takes away a perfectly good excuse? After all, is it not much more convenient and comforting to blame others than to face your own responsibility?
If you dare ingest straight medicine, consider Jesus' all-too-personal parable about growing plants. Through his story we discover we can not blame the sad state of sickly and dying plants as well as those which never even germinated upon the leadership of a church, the preacher or a Bible school teacher. In the same conditions where some plants had withered, others had thrived! Why the difference? The hard-to-hear message is one of personal responsibility.
Jesus' parable revealed that the difference between the spiritual growth producing a harvest verses the spiritually stunted or dying is the state of a person's heart. Call it whatever you like, but a diseased spirituality occurs where people are more concerned about having fun, their bills and other pressures in life than they are about how God's word should change their thinking, habits and lifestyle. Similarly, spiritual death can occur when a person's desire is to avoid persecution or trouble on account of God's message. The reason why some plants were stunted, died or never even germinated comes back to personal responsibility.
For those who want to understand, Jesus' Parable of the Sower calls us to allow God's word to change our values and mold our lifestyle by His word so that our character will change and our time and lifestyle will achieve His purposes. Good soil produces a harvest.
Jesus' parable steps all over our toes. I'm not so concerned about this. Good soil understands that being uncomfortable presents the opportunity to change and grow. I am concerned about that person who simply doesn't care, or who understands but whose final response involves being defensive or aggressive against the message. Such is not the behavior of growth.
Barry Newton, Copyright © 2004
FOOTNOTE: To be sure, not all of the responsibility lies on the hearer. Those who teach God's word carry a very heavy responsibility to faithfully present God's message. James 3:1; 1 Corinthians 3:5-4:5 Similarly, those who are called by Christ's name shoulder the responsibility of not causing the Lord to be blasphemed on account of their behavior. While not belittling any of these responsibilities, each of us as hearers of God's word need to own up to the reality that our own growth will be determined by whether we allow God's message to transform us.
Other Articles Which Might Be of Interest:
Pay Attention to How You ListenThe Way of the Cross (Examples of how the cross should shape our life)