creating good soil...

And these are the ones sown on the good soil: they hear the word and accept it and bear fruit, thirty and sixty and a hundredfold.

Mark 4:20

in preparing sermons, i have come to understand that i must speak in ways that makes the message accessible to the congregation. this is hard work. not only does the preacher have to exegete the scripture, but the preacher must exegete the congregation, in order to speak God's Word to them in their needs.

but the work that a preacher does in preparing the sermon does not do much good if the congregation doesn't understand that they too have a task, which is perhaps even more difficult than the preacher's task. this task is not to critique the sermon - how "good" the sermon was in terms of entertainment or in terms of the preacher's ability to deliver it. instead, their task is to receive the Word of God.

the problem is that we have been trained to listen in a specific way. it is much like the way we are taught to read. we read for information purposes. we read to analyze... to pick out specific details that we find relevant.

further, information is cheap. we are exposed to all kinds of information daily, which we simply put in our information database and move on. this information doesn't affect us.

when we read the Word of God, it must be done devotionally, though. it isn't simply for information... it is to find the living God through the words, which scripture tells us are dead (the letter kills!). if what we are reading doesn't affect us, we aren't reading it correctly.

the same thing happens when we listen to a sermon. if we can listen to a sermon that doesn't affect the way we live, the Word has fallen on bad soil. i realized the other day that most of the time i come out of a worship service wanting to analyze the sermon because i didn't prepare the soil of my heart to receive the Word. i leave the church no different than i went in.

friends, we have not been attentive to God if we are unaffected by His Word. because we are sinful, we cannot receive His holy, perfect Word and remain unchanged. we, by nature, cannot receive it without being affected by it, just as a piece of gold cannot be put into a fire without its impurities being burned away.

may we all figure out how to listen devotionally that the soil may be prepared to receive the seed that will produce fruit in our lives. may we create room for God to dwell within us, burning away all that is not of Him.

cheers,
jw <><