The Foot Path

I traveled to Uganda several years ago and while there our short-term missions team visited a few small villages. One day as we walked from one village to another we approached a vast field full of some high-growing crop which stood before us as a sea of green. As we drew closer, one narrow footpath emerged, well-trodden and rusty-brown, where no life grew, splitting the fertile crop in two.

As I read the parable of the sower recently, the Lord brought to mind that Ugandan footpath long ago forgotten. Have you heard this lesson taught by Jesus as he sat in a boat on the sea?

“Listen! Behold, a sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seed fell along the path, and the birds came and devoured it. Other seed fell on rocky ground, where it did not have much soil, and immediately it sprang up, since it had no depth of soil. And when the sun rose, it was scorched, and since it had no root, it withered away. Other seed fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked it, and it yielded no grain. And other seeds fell into good soil and produced grain, growing up and increasing and yielding thirtyfold and sixtyfold and a hundredfold.” And he said, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.” Mark 4:3-9

The parable, which begins and ends with a call to listen, describes four different kinds of soils.  John MacArthur notes in his Study Bible, “This parable depicts the teaching of the gospel through the world and the various responses of people to it.”  Jesus helps us understand his metaphor with these words:  “The sower sows the word.” (Mark 4:14)  The seed is the Word of God, and the soil is our response to that Word.  How is our response when we hear the Word, either in a sermon on the radio, through a friend sharing the gospel, or in a Sunday morning church service? We have ears, but how do we hear?

Surely we’re not like the first soil, the one where the seed fell along the path? It’s always good to do a heart examination, so let’s do it.

The seed that fell along a path is like the footpath I traveled along in Uganda. That path that was hard and lifeless, though life was abundant all around it. As the seed was sown in our parable, “some fell along the path, and the birds came and devoured it.” (Mark 4:4) Jesus explains this a few verses later:

“And these are the ones along the path, where the word is sown: when they hear, Satan immediately comes and takes away the word that is sown in them.” Mark 4:15

There is a sad reality for some: the Word that is sown is completely rejected, the soil of their hearts so hard there is no possibility of the seed penetrating so that life can come. They hear the Word, yet they do not respond to it.

J. C. Ryle, in his commentary on the Gospel of Mark, says of these hard soil hearers:

"These are they who hear sermons, but pay no attention to them. They go to a place of worship, for form, or fashion, or to appear respectable before men. But they take no interest whatever in the preaching......and as they sit under the sound of it, they are taken up with thinking of other things......It produces no more effect on them than water on a stone....week after week they live on, without faith or fear or knowledge or grace - feeling nothing, caring nothing, taking no more interest in religion than if Christ had never died on the cross at all."

He who has ears let him hear.

I’m quite sure we all have ears, even two of them. Jesus has left us this parable in three of the gospels as a warning to each of us. Let us ask ourselves – how do I hear? How is my heart when I hear the Word of God each Sunday morning as I gather with God’s people? If I don’t regularly gather on Sunday’s, how do I receive the Word when someone shares the gospel with me?

May we each heed this warning and let the Word of God be received on good soil in our hearts.  If we find our hearts to be like this footpath, there is still hope of having better soil. How do I know? Because I was a hard-hearted, footpath hearer once, as we all are before grace came and gave life in Christ.

How can your heart be changed? By faith and repentance – acknowledgement and confession of our hard hearts toward the things of God, a turning away from this pattern, and a turning toward God, beginning with the Word of God. So says the words of the prophet Hosea:

“Sow for yourselves righteousness; reap steadfast love; break up your fallow ground, for it is the time to seek the LORD, that he may come and rain righteousness upon you.”  Hosea 10:12