The Four Soils: The Good Soil

In Mark 4, Jesus uses the language of seed and soil to help illustrate how people respond to the Word of God. The Seed represents the WORD of God, and the Soil represents the condition of the hearts of people in response to the availability of the Kingdom of God. As powerful as seed is, it is always at the mercy of the SOIL it finds itself in. Jesus describes the path on which some seed is planted as being good soil. In Mark 4:20, Jesus explains what he means: Others, like seed sown on good soil, hear the word, accept it, and produce a crop—some thirty, some sixty, some a hundred times what was sown.”The key word here is ‘accept’ and it means “to embrace with assent and obedience.” The hearer embraces Jesus as the WORD of God, and the Bible as the written Word of God, as being true and instructive and binding, and they set out to obey Jesus as the WORD – through listening to His voice by His Spirit and through the Bible. To not just be hearers of the Word, but doers also.This is the heart of true apprentices of Jesus, of those who are taking deliberate steps to reorder their priorities around Jesus as first in everything. Watch now as Pastor Jeremy unpacks this a bit further in Seed Thought #15