Thorny Soil

"Listen! Behold, a sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seed...fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked it, and it yielded no grain...And others are the ones sown among thorns. They are those who hear the word, but the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches and the desires for other things enter in and choke the word, and it proves unfruitful. "

Thorny Ground
The next kind of soil is thorny. We're told that these are the people who hear and accept the good news. Again just as we saw with the rocky soil, Jesus doesn't say these are the people who say they believe but are really liars and hypocrites. No. They readily accept the good news. But that message is crowded out by the cares of this life, the lure of wealth, and the desire for other things. I believe that most people who abandon their faith do so because of this. They don't wake up one day as a healthy, strong Christian and say “I'm going to leave the faith and reject Jesus, today!” It happens slowly over time as the cares of this world choke out their faith. If you’re not regularly in God’s Word and regularly repenting of your sins, not just in church on Sunday morning but daily to God and to your family, then you’re drifting without realizing it. John Owen famously said in The Mortification of Sin, “Be killing sin or it will be killing you.” There is no neutral gear in the Christian life, you’re always moving either closer to Christ or farther away from Him. It’s amazing how far you can drift before you realize it, and by the time you realize it, if you’ve drifted far enough, you no longer even care.

A real danger for us to avoid is getting so caught up in worry and anxiety about this life that we forget to thank God and love Him as we ought. The desires that Jesus talks about leading people away are not necessarily wicked desires. It’s that these desires are being put before God’s kingdom. I have seen people led away from Christ, for example, because their kids were in sports that had games on Sunday, and so they traveled on Sunday. Now the desire for your kids to play sports is not a sinful desire. And yet over time a family in this situation may start to view church attendance as optional. Eventually they don’t really feel like they need the church anymore. The drift is slow, subtle, and disastrous. I know from experience when I was in college that those students who would stay up too late studying (or more likely playing video games) on Saturday night, and who told themselves that it was okay to miss church just this once because they were tired and needed rest, were the same students who had stopped going to church altogether halfway through the semester.

If you have some sin in your life, don't buy into the lie that it’s a little sin. The roots of sin go deep like weeds in a garden. You may see a little weed poking up and think nothing of it, but when you finally try to pull it, you realize that it's part of a vast underground root system that runs through your entire garden. In the same way, if you have a small and private sin that you’ve allowed to grow without regular repentance, soon you’ll realize that you’re actually dealing with a whole host of sins that threaten to choke out your faith. It's a slow process, but in the end, your faith dwindles. You may still profess Christ, but He doesn’t come into your thoughts day-to-day in any meaningful way. You have become, for all practical purposes, an atheist.

Good Soil
Soil has to be regularly weeded so the ground does not become thorny and choke the plant. You need to regularly repent of your sins and break them off. Don’t let them grow up in your heart, because what may seem like a small, little sin has a root system under the ground that will overcome your entire life. Nothing is more important in your life than staying close to Christ in His word, in prayer, and in loving one another.