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A good friend of mine, we’ll call him Andrew, has one of the most interesting stories of coming into faith.
Andrew spent many years working in finance. He was basically your normal Wall Street type person. Until a fateful day happened. 9-11.
Now Andrew wasn’t around for 9-11. He living in his native England at the time. But 9-11 made him stop and think. It made him question what he was doing with his life. Whether any of it was worth it.
So he did the stereotypical thing. He went out to the East to “find himself.”
And an interesting thing happened. What he found was the faith he would have grown up in as a British Citizen. He found the power of the Gospel there to change his life for the better. He eventually made his way to seminary, which is where I met him.
From Wall Street to Seminary. All after a trip to the Orient. Although I strongly suspect that it was not traveling East that helped him. It was removing the clutter from his life, the distractions of the world of finance, that made him open to receiving God’s Word.
That’s what the Parable of the Sower we read in today’s Gospel is really about. It’s easy when reading this story to worry that we are one of the bad types of soil. But the parable is about more than that. It’s about making sure we know there are forces that are trying to work against God’s Word in the world, whether it is the devil, those who would persecute us, or the various ways the world distracts us.
And sometimes all we really need is to hear that those forces are out there and that they exist. It is knowing they are there that we can be rid of those influences on us.
That is what happened with my friend Andrew. The needs of the world had prevented him from remembering the Good News of Christ Jesus. But when he was able to realize that, he was able to purge himself of those influences. He was able to allow the Word of God to come in and be planted in his soul.
The Word of God has great power. That is what we hear about in Isaiah this morning. “It will not return to [The LORD] empty.” No matter what. It will accomplish that which it has set out to do.
So these things that prevent us from hearing God’s Word don’t have to remain there forever.
Another way to look at this issue is in Paul’s word to the Romans this morning, as well as our reading last week. Last week we heard of the two minds, the mind of sin in the flesh and the mind of spirit that leads us to be closer to Jesus. None of us wants to follow the mind of sin, and yet, as Paul said last week, we at times find ourselves acting out those sinful ways that we don’t want to do. But that is where Christ Jesus comes in. He comes to free us from the flesh, the way of sin and death, and He comes to bring us back to the way of the Spirit, the way of life and hope.
We move away from the things that prevent us from hearing God’s Word and move toward the direction that God wants us to go.
To do that, we have to realize that those things that want to keep us from God and His Word are there. That they are real. Because it is often in naming our demons, those things trying to draw us away, that we have power over them.
So take the time to recognize whatever thorn, or bird, or rocky soil that is preventing from being closer to God. And then slowly work to remove it. God is continuing to work on all of us with His Word. So let Him. Be like Andrew and remove the distractions in your life that maybe keeping you from remembering that God’s Word is still there to work it’s power on you.