Read Mark 4:3, 13-15
Are You LISTENING?
Just begins to teach to a large crowd a parable, by the sea, while he sits in a boat. He starts by saying, “LISTEN!” Jesus has something important that the crowd needs to hear because it can change the course of their lives. So he wants to make sure he captures their attention. He tells a parable about a sower, who’s a person who plants seeds, and how the seeds fall on different kinds of soil. As the sower planted the seeds, some fell beside the road where the ground was very hard. The seat could not penetrate the soil so it made it very inviting for the birds to come along and eat them.
In the parable, the sower is the one who is sharing God’s word. The soil represents the heart of the person listening to God’s word. The birds represent the enemy, satan. So we see how God’s word fell on a hard heart which was closed to the Gospel of Jesus. Some heard the message but because their hearts were so hard, Satan immediately came and took away the word that was sown in them.
How’s the condition of your heart when it comes to God speaking to you? Is your heart receptive to what he has to say? Or is your heart hard? When we hear a message about God’s love for us and how wonderful we are to him, do we grasp that message real well.
When people compliment us over and over again, boy, our hearts are open and we love to listen to all the positive comments!! But if God convicts us of a weakness in our lives, or a friend confronts us about our weakness, now all of a sudden a wall goes up and we don’t want to listen to what God or others are saying to us. We immediately want to defend ourselves because we like to think of ourselves as being flawless people.
I find that if I am humbled by a comment, whether by God or another person, that God is actually wanting me to experience spiritual growth in my life. So rather than let my wall go up, I need to humbly listen to what is being said, take it to the Lord, and let him use the uncomfortable and difficult circumstance as an opportunity to conform me more and more into the image of Jesus.
Are You LISTENING?
