The good soil: good heart
Reading it
“As for that in the good soil, they are those who, hearing the word, hold it fast in an honest and good heart, and bear fruit with patience..” Luke 8:15
Studying it
Hearing the word.
There’s hearing something and then there’s hearing something with the intention of doing something about it. We’ve done plenty of the first kind. So many times we’ll take in what someone says only to let it float out of our heads by the end of the day. Whether we mean to or not, we’re deciding if that information is worth holding on to. Granted, we aren’t always the best judges (anyone else keep thinking about that mean thing someone said?). But when it comes to the Word of God, we shouldn’t have to decide. It should be second-nature to deem what our God says is something we want to hear with intention. Because we know that of all the things that we hear, these words have the power to change our lives.
Hold it fast.
Imagine watching a movie where the main character gets a love letter from the man of her dreams, the one she thinks about all the time, the one she’s confessed to loving during the course of this story… and then she tosses his letter in the trash. We would be so confused and betrayed — there’s such a disconnect! Did she actually love him? If we claim to truly love God with our everything and then don’t think His Word is worth trying to read, then we’re no better than she! We want to clutch God’s Word to us and, even though life gets hard, we want to treat it with the utmost respect and love, because it’s from our King. Thy are the only words we have from Him.
An honest + good heart.
A good heart can seem pretty generic. We meet a lot of people that we'd consider "good," probably including ourselves. We don't lie, steal, or cheat. We’d consider ourselves trustworthy and overall good citizens. But that's not what makes someone good. No one is good except God alone (Mark 10:18). So how could we have an honest and good heart? We could dig way deep inside of us and still not scrounge together enough goodness. A good heart is one that reflects God. When we are covered with Christ in baptism, we take on his goodness. Not of our doing, but his. It’s a heart that is willing to give up the chase of following our own desires — and instead follow unreservedly after God.
Living it
It takes time. We tend to overwhelm ourselves into thinking that we have to be perfect right away. But sometimes we have to first shoo away the devil trying to take the seed from us, or seek the water we need, or remove the rocks and thorns trying to get in our way. The beautiful thing is, throughout it all, we are not alone. We aren’t stuck on our hands and knees with tears streaming down our faces, desperately trying to get it right but always knocked down. Because Jesus is on his hands and knees with us, gently wiping the tears from our faces and asking if we’ll let him get rid of all the bad soil.
He’s given us everything we need to thrive. We just need to hear him, hold fast to him, and keep our heart pure in imitating him.
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