Get Your Shovel Ready
Matthew 13:22
22He also that received seed among the thorns is he that heareth the
word; and the care of this world, and the deceitfulness of riches, choke the
word, and he becometh unfruitful.
I note that the verse does not say the seed is destroyed;
rather the problem is that it becomes unfruitful. I grew up on a farm of
thousands of peach trees. We would plant the little trees, water them frequently
and watch them grow. My father, an unbeliever, used to comment that there actually
was little for the farmer to do other than planting and watering. I think even
he recognized the hand of a Providential God was at work.
The little trees would struggle through their first year,
but sometimes we had weeds which grew so splendidly that they would threaten
the tree. They were tall weeds, and thick, and would quickly dwarf the tree,
which the farmer would often have to find the little tree amongst all the
weeds. We called the terrible weed, which grew everywhere in the field, Johnson
Grass. I remember as a young fellow being cut again and again by the sharp long
leaves of grass. They hurt!
Anyway, if Johnson Grass got into your field it was very
difficult to get rid of. It would grow everywhere, and even when we freshly
plowed the field, ridding the top of grass, the root balls would be left intact
under the plow, and soon Johnson Grass would spring up again. But when we
plowed a field of trees of course we did not plow the trees, and grass was left
intact there, soon growing to five or six feet, eclipsing our poor little
trees.
At that point my uncle would hand me the shovel and point me
to the field. It was my task to dig all those weeds out, to give the tree a
chance to grow and begin to shade out areas where the grass would not grow so
well. It was hard work! Johnson grass
was famously for its gnarly roots, which might form a root ball. Often the
root ball itself could be dug up and might measure a foot or more across.
Those root balls meant the grass would come right back, and
I had to stick the shovel in and get as many of them dug out as possible, so that
the tree might not be choked out. And that is what I think of when I read the part
of the verse that says they would “choke the word’. They would not kill the
tree; they just kept it from getting the sunshine and slowed its growth.
Familiar to farmers is the phenomenon of things choking out
plants. Most often the weeds severely curtail the desired plant’s growth. To
have a “fruitful” plant means keeping the weeds to a minimum. In the days
before Round Up, the shovel and muscles were the best way of helping the tree.
All that to get back to the words of our Lord: “he that
heareth the word; and the care of this world, and the deceitfulness of riches,
choke the word, and he becometh unfruitful.”
I think our Lord here is not talking about a destroyed plant;
rather he is talking about a plant rendered ineffectual by the choking weeds. Christians
can be choked by the weeds of life. They can so easily destroy all our witness,
ending our fruitfulness in the middle of the hostile world. Are you letting
weeds ruin your witness? Why not renew yourself before God, and disdain the weeds
of the world? It is the best path of the Christian life, so get out that shovel,
and work at getting weed free, that the Holy Spirit may have free rein in your
life. Being fruitful for a Christian is not just the best thing; it is the only
thing. A life surrendered to Christ is a life that will be pretty much weed
free.
