One time my friend Bob and I were talking over coffee down at Modocs coffee shop, and he shared something really insightful. I was torn up inside about a situation and losing sleep. (Does that happen to anyone else?) Bob said: When our hearts are broken, when your soul gets scratched up by sinful and broken people doing what sinful and broken people do, that’s the time the soil in your heart is prepared to receive the seeds of Truth from God. But, he reminded me, at the same time Jesus tells us that the evil one is sowing seeds, too...
Jesus told them another parable: "The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field. But while everyone was sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and went away. When the wheat sprouted and formed heads, then the weeds also appeared... (Mat 13:24-26 NIV)
Jesus was talking about people around us, even in church, that there would be good and bad. Bob took it in a slightly different direction, that in our own hearts we experience both good seeds and bad seeds being thrown in, both truth and lies that might grow in our hearts. And we have to be ruthless to identify those bad seeds and root them out.
You know what I’m talking about. Evil one wants to sow lies that you can’t trust people, telling you not to take chances, that you should make them hurt the way that they hurt you, or that you should hide so that maybe somehow you won’t get hurt again… sometimes the lie is that if we can pile up so much security that maybe we won’t have to go hungry later – even though everything we pile up ends up going unused and spoils, or just gets taken by somebody else. Sometimes the lie is to discount or disbelieve that God is good or that God even exists, because people say if God is good, why doesn’t He make everything easy for me and give me everything I ask for like a spoiled child? But we know what those seeds grow into.
The seeds of Truth are what bring health and healing: forgiveness, mercy, repaying good for evil, looking at ourselves in sober judgment, fighting the urge to pull back and instead stepping in to give…
When your heart is torn up, laid open by the cuts inevitable in this world, cultivate Truth.
It takes more work. But that is the only seed which will blossom and produce a legacy to eternity, not only for you but for all those that you then get to sow into.
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