Bible stories : The Parable of the Sower? Next, there is the crowded heart. That is the seed that falls on ground where weeds choke out its growth. Slowly and surely, these people, busy with the cares and riches of the world, just lose interest in the things of God. Finally, there is the fruitful heart that receives the Word. The seed falls on good ground and the plants produce a rich harvest. We are the ones who determine what kind of soil our hearts will be. We decide whether we will have a hard heart, a shallow heart, a crowded heart, or a receptive heart. This is exactly what James meant when he said, “Therefore lay aside all filthiness and overflow of wickedness, and receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your souls” (James 1:21).
The sower is the one who brings the word of God to the people. The seeds are the word of God coming to the people. The places where the seeds fell are the hearts of people. Pathway denotes the hearts of some people who doesn’t understand the word of God as their hearts are hardened and Satan take away the word of God from their hearts. Stony areas denote the hearts of people who accepts the word of God happily but when they face tribulations for word of God, they cannot withstand the pain and thus the word of God can’t grow in them to produce fruits.
The Parable of the Sower (sometimes called the Parable of the Soils) is a parable of Jesus found in the three different Gospel books of The Holy Bible in Matthew 13:1-23, Mark 4:1-20, and Luke 8:4-15. Speaking to a large crowd, Jesus tells a story of a farmer who sows the seed and does so indiscriminately. Some seed falls on the wayside with no soil at all, some on rocky ground with little soil, some on soil which contains thorns, and some on good soil. In the first three cases, the seed is taken away or fails to produce a crop, but when it falls on good soil it grows, yielding thirty, sixty, or a hundredfold. See additional details on the The Parable of the Sower video on YouTube.
Later, Jesus explains to his disciples that the seed represents the Gospel, the sower represents anyone who proclaims Jesus is the messiah and Son of God, God the Father himself. The various soils represent people’s responses to it, The first three representing rejection and not holding onto their faith while the last one represents holding and growing their faith until the end. The Parable of the Sower story begins with a farmer in this farmer who had a big huge bag of seeds. He decided one day that he was going to go into his field and he was going to start sowing seeds.
Now wait for a second here I’ve heard of sewing machines and sewing clothes, but I’ve never heard of sowing seeds. What does “The Parable of the Sower” mean? Well, sowing seeds actually just means to scatter or to throw seeds. So the farmer went to his field, he started to scatter seeds around and throw seeds around into the field. Some of the seeds fell onto a path while other seeds fell onto Rocky soil. Still, others fell into the soil with thorn bushes. And finally, some seeds fell into good soil. Now after some time, the seeds that fell onto the path were snatched up and eaten by birds.
In the Parable of the Soils, Jesus wanted to reveal to us the human heart in its response to the word of God. In other words, he gives us four different examples of how the human heart will often respond to the word of God. Starts out with a heart that is very hard and the seed, which is the word of God, falls on the path as Jesus calls it and the birds of the air come and just eat the seed right off of it. It’s as if someone sits under the preaching of the gospel and it doesn’t penetrate their heart at all. They’re simply there. It’s simply hitting their eardrums and bouncing right off. They never even hear it. It never penetrates and they walk away completely unaffected by the word of the gospel.