Power Of Truth

Mark 4:20  

"And these are they which are sown on good ground; 

such as hear the word, and receive it, and bring 

forth fruit, some thirtyfold, some sixty, 

and some an hundred."

        There was the ground that was full of thorns. The Palestinian farmer was lazy. He cut off the top of the fibrous rooted weeds; he even burned off the top; and the field might look clean; but below the surface the roots were still there; and in due time the weeds revived in all their strength. They grew with such rapidity and such virulence that they choked the life out of the seed.
        It is easy to pack life with such a multiplicity of interests that there is no time left for Christ. As a poet once said, the cares of life can be like the clogging dust until "we forget because we must and not because we will." The more complicated life becomes, the more necessity there is to see that our priorities are right, for there are so many things which seek to shoulder Christ. 
        If we are really to benefit by the Christian message the parable tells us that we must do three things. We must hear it; and we cannot hear unless we listen. It is characteristic of so many of us that we are so busy talking that we have no time to hear, so engaged in arguing that we have no time to listen, so occupied in advancing our own opinions that we have no time to attend to the opinions of Christ, so much on the move that we have no time for the essential stillness.
        We must receive it. When we hear the Christian message we must really take it into our minds. The human mind is an odd and dangerous machine. We are so constructed, in the wise providence of creation, that, whenever a foreign body threatens to enter the eye, the eye automatically closes. That is an instinctive, reflex action. Whenever the mind hears something that it does not want to hear it automatically closes its door. There are times when truth can hurt; but sometimes a distasteful drug or an unpleasant treatment must be accepted if health is to be preserved. To shut the mind to truth we do not want to hear is the straight road to disaster and to tragedy.
        We must put it into action. The yield in the parable was thirty, sixty and a hundredfold. That is a large yield but the volcanic soil of Galilee was famous for its crops. Christian truth must always emerge in action. In the last analysis the Christian is challenged, "not to speculate, to what might be," but to "act."
        Amen!!

Reading: (Mark 4:13-20)
               (Luke 8:11-15)
Ref: (HGSB, BSB)

May God Bless You

And Your Families

Minister Robert A. Lail Sr.

The Cross Life Ministry