Summary

Have you ever started a spiritual habit with great intentions only to watch it slowly disappear under the pressures of everyday life?

In this message from Matthew 13, Pastor John Arnold explores Jesus’ Parable of the Sower through a lens of grace and hope. Rather than focusing on trying harder to become “better soil,” we discover the remarkable persistence of God’s Word and the patient work of the Gardener who never gives up on us.

Through memorable stories—including 2,000-year-old date seeds that sprang back to life and unexpected tomato plants growing where they weren’t planted—this sermon reminds us that God’s truth continues working in our lives long after we think we’ve failed.

If you’re walking through a spiritually dry season, this message offers encouragement to trust that God is still at work.

Transcript

The Parable of the Sower – The Seed that Never Gives Up.
A sermon by Rev. John Arnold
Matthew 13:1–9, 18–23**

The Ugly Truth About Good Intentions
Roughly fifty days ago, on Pentecost Sunday, a journey called One Minute with the Holy Spirit  started here. Many of you picked this up, and there are still some copies out there if you missed it.

One Minute with the Holy Spirit is a simple devotional that takes you every day into a single verse about the Holy Spirit along with a reflective thought. For fifty days, people have been journeying through it — some starting a little earlier, some a little later. As I was preparing this sermon, I realized we were hitting the finish of this. We’ve hit day fifty now, and this is wrapping up.

If I could poll everyone who picked up a copy, downloaded it, or received the daily delivery in their email, my guess is we’d find that human nature hasn’t changed, the world hasn’t changed a whole lot, and the Word of God speaks very truthfully to what happens when we embark on these journeys — the reality of the Parable of the Sower.

Some of us grabbed that guide, were so excited, and did great for a handful of days — and then the guide wound up under some mail on the kitchen counter, or under the seat of the car, and we never saw it again. We were a bit like the plant that sprang up and then withered away, because our root wasn’t very deep.

Some of us probably picked it up with all the greatest intentions in the world, and then life legitimately sideswiped us and took us off that path. Life happens. Suddenly a morning routine gets disrupted, or you get sick for a few days and forget about it, and the break in the chain of doing it becomes not a pause but a stop. Or maybe it’s just not as consistent as you thought — kind of hit and miss. That would be the pit I fall into most frequently — where lots of things yank and crank around my schedule, and it’s easy for things to disrupt my plan. Consistency is the big challenge.

And then others of you got it online, or read it, or picked it up nearly every day because you had it set out — maybe you had a spot at home where you sat down and read it every day. That’s a great way to be consistent: having a spot and a time where you do something. It makes all the difference in the world, and you’ve seen some amazing fruit flow out of that. I know that’s true, because people have come and shared with me how it has changed their awareness of the Holy Spirit and their response to it.

So I think human nature is alive and well, just as it was in Jesus’ day. We would find that many seeds were sown fifty days ago — some fell on a hard path, some got plucked away by birds, some fell beneath the heat of the sun, and some took deep root and prospered. That’s life. That’s the ugly truth about good intentions. They too easily fall apart. 

The Good News in the Parable 

I’m telling you this not to beat you up or shame you if one of those things happened to you — quite the opposite. I lift it up first to point out how true and wise the Word of God is to life. Jesus thoroughly understood human nature, and he spoke astoundingly accurate truth to it in his parables. But I also lift it up because I have some really good news: seeds that are scattered are amazingly tenacious. A seed is a tenacious thing — a little spark of life housed in a hard outer shell — and it’s astounding what a seed can endure and still burst forth in life.

As I was preparing this message, I wondered if there were any stories of old seeds coming back to life. What I discovered is an astounding story of a clay jar of seeds found by archaeologists in the 1960s at the site of Masada. In a deep, dark hole, in a little clay jar, they found date palm seeds that had been there for about two thousand years — dating back to the time of Jesus.

They brought the seeds to a museum in Tel Aviv, put the jar in a drawer as is often done with museum specimens, and it sat there for forty more years. Then a biologist named Elaine Solowey decided to try the impossible. She pulled out three seeds from the jar and gently soaked them in warm water. Once they had softened, she planted them in a sterile but fertile soil environment — and after over two thousand years, the ground broke open and a sprout came up. They named that date palm Methuselah, and it’s still alive today.

Once they had success with Methuselah, they planted about thirty-two more seeds a year or two later, and six of those sprouted. Methuselah was a male date palm, and one of the thirty-two — named Hannah — was female. They were able to pollinate the two, and now there are multiple date palms descended from seeds over two thousand years old. Hannah’s first year of producing dates, she produced 111 dates — two thousand years after that seed was thrown in a jar, stuck in the dirt, and forgotten for millennia. That is absolutely amazing.

If God can do that with a little physical seed, imagine what God can do with his word, which is eternal. Sometimes it falls into our lives, sometimes it’s planted into our lives, and sometimes it surprises us — a seed will have been sown and totally forgotten, and then it sprouts up. So if you picked up one of those guides, or were doing some other devotional practice, or have been reading your Bible along the way and have fallen off, don’t be surprised if out of the blue a verse, a thought, or a nudge comes up — sometimes even years later — to comfort you, teach you, guide you, or convict you. The Word of God is a powerful and enduring thing, and we need to be on the watch for it, because it can surprise you.

The Surprising Nature of God’s Word

This past spring, my wife and I have two flower beds. After we cleared them back, she decided to do something different — vegetables and herbs in one raised bed, and cut flowers in the other, since she loves having cut flowers in the house. She bought a variety pack of seeds and, like the sower, just went out and liberally scattered them in the dirt to see what would come up.

I didn’t know what she’d planted, but soon this bed had blooms as tall as this, some as big as this, in all kinds of colors. As things started sprouting, I was out there looking and saying, “What did you plant out there?” “Oh, just a variety of stuff.” And I said, “Well, I don’t know what that is, or that, or that — but that right there, that’s not a flower, that’s a tomato plant.” “Did you plant some of our tomatoes in there?” “No.” “Well, I’m pretty sure that’s a tomato plant. And look, there’s another one, and another one.” All through the flowers, tomato plants. She said that’s not what she had in mind, so she pulled those tomato plants out and tossed them to the side.

Me being me, I have a hard time letting go of things and just throwing them away — if anybody needs a five-and-a-half-inch piece of two-by-four, I probably have it. So I couldn’t just let those little plants lay on a pile in the yard. The next day, after they’d been sitting out in the sun looking pretty wilted, I grabbed them, put them in a plastic bag with some water, and brought them up here to our garden beds across the parking lot. One bed was severely overgrown, so I knew nobody was using it. I did very little prep — just tore up what was there and cleared it off — and there are now eight tomato plants over there. I went out this morning and picked a handful of cherry tomatoes, and I’m waiting for an abundance — they’re just covered in little tomatoes. I think they’re celebrity tomatoes, so I’ll have a mix of big ones and cherry ones. But these were just volunteers — they showed up from an old planting we’d done.

I find God’s work is like that a lot of times. We have sown a seed, or bumped into a seed, years ago, totally forgotten about it — but it’s still there. It doesn’t die. It waits until the soil is just right, the sun is just warm enough, and there’s just enough rain, and then that seed breaks forth, and we get a volunteer — sometimes in the unlikeliest of places, having nothing to do with our plan. Susan definitely did not plan on tomatoes in the middle of her flower bed. But what a blessing to have them there.

God’s word does that. It endures. You have no idea where it’s going to pop up. It surprises us in the wildest ways. God can speak to us through people in our lives in ways we didn’t expect. God can speak to us through circumstance in ways we never saw coming. So we need to be on the lookout, because the Word of God is a living, amazing, enduring, and creatively invasive — in a good way — thing in our lives.

What I love about reflecting on the power of the Word is this: it would be easy to read this passage and preach a sermon that says, “Work harder at being better soil.” But soil doesn’t turn itself. I wish it did — believe me, every spring I wish the soil would turn itself, break itself up, fertilize itself. But it doesn’t. It takes the hand of a loving and dedicated gardener to come in, find the soil that is hard and lacking nutrients, break it up — which can be a little painful — fertilize it, and feed it so that life can take hold.

One Final Encouragement

So I want to encourage you: don’t beat yourself up if you’ve made efforts in the past, whether it was *One Minute with the Holy Spirit* or a season where you worshiped a lot and then walked away into a dry season. Seasons happen. Some seasons are very fertile, and some are very sparse — but at the end of the day, they’re just seasons. They will come, and they will pass. In the eternal, grand scheme of things, we just need to be patient.

A friend recently said something to me that has really hung on to my heart. It was a simple text, but it has stayed with me: “Don’t worry, it’s going to be okay in the end. And if it’s not okay yet, it’s not the end.” Those are words to live by, because we live in an eternal landscape, not just the landscape of the circumstances right in front of us. There is a loving God, a good gardener, and we have to come to a place where we’re willing, sometimes, to yield ourselves to the hand of the gardener — so the gardener can do the things only a gardener can do: work the soil, sow seeds, and cast them into our lives.

So here’s what I would encourage you to do: be on the lookout. Watch for the unexpected little sprouts of green life popping up, and rejoice, and get excited, and then nurture and feed those things. And if you’re not seeing that — if you’re in a season of sparseness, a season of wanting — go before God and simply acknowledge that this feels like a season of dryness, a season of wanting. And ask God, in as much as it is needed — I say “as much as it’s needed” because sometimes I have to look at God and say, “I know I need some correction here, but can you give me just enough? I probably need a lot more, but for right now, give me just as much as is needed.” God, soften my heart. Break up the hard places. Bring the rain. Bring the sun. I need you right now, God. I need you right now.

And then wait, and trust — because the gardener is a really good gardener. The gardener is a loving gardener. And the gardener, if you take nothing else from this, is a generous gardener with the seed that he sows.

Blessings, as you look for the fruit of God’s labor in your life. Praise be to God — we have a good and loving God. Amen.

Reflection Questions (Personal)

1. Where have you experienced enthusiasm for God that eventually faded?
2. Are you in a season where your faith feels fruitful, or does it feel dry? What signs point you in that direction?
3. Can you remember a Bible verse, sermon, or conversation that came back to you long after you first heard it? How did God use it?
4. What “hard places” in your heart might God be gently trying to soften today?
5. What is one simple practice that could help you stay attentive to the Gardener this week?

Small Group Discussion Questions

1. Which of the four soils in Jesus’ parable do you most identify with right now? Why?
2. Pastor John suggested that this parable is as much about the generosity of the Sower as it is about the condition of the soil. How does that change the way you hear this passage?
3. What stood out to you from the story of the 2,000-year-old date seeds? How does it encourage you about God’s work in your own life?
4. Share a time when God surprised you by bringing spiritual growth from something you had nearly forgotten.
5. As a group, how can we encourage one another through seasons when faith feels difficult or dry?

Prayer Prompt

Loving Gardener,

Thank You for never giving up on me. When my heart has been hard, distracted, fearful, or weary, You have continued to sow Your Word with grace and patience.

Soften the places that have become resistant. Break up what needs to be broken. Nourish what has become weak. Give me eyes to notice the unexpected ways You are working around me, and give me faith to trust that Your Word never returns empty.

Help me remain rooted in Christ so that my life bears fruit—not for my glory, but for Yours.

Amen.

Scripture for Further Study

God’s Word Bears Fruit

• Isaiah 55:10–11
• Hebrews 4:12
• Psalm 1:1–3

Remaining Rooted

• John 15:1–8
• Colossians 2:6–7
• Ephesians 3:16–19

God Finishes What He Starts

• Philippians 1:6
• Galatians 6:9
• James 5:7–8

Trusting God Through Dry Seasons

• Psalm 126
• Isaiah 43:18–19
• Lamentations 3:21–24

Practical Next Step

This week, spend one intentional minute each day listening before God.

Read one verse of Scripture slowly. Sit quietly for sixty seconds. Ask:

“Lord, what seed are You planting in me today?”

Write down whatever comes to mind—a word, a verse, a conviction, or a prayer—and look for unexpected ways God nurtures that seed throughout the week.

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