Mark 4: Sowing the Word Without Manufacturing the Harvest

Introduction

Have you heard of the effective altruism movement? Stephen, one of the pastors at Renew Anglican Church, opens his message with that question. The movement asks: if you want to do good in the world, how do you do the most good with your money? Some now apply that reasoning to Christian ministry and fund churches on the condition that they report how many conversions they produce.

The pastor sees some truth in this, but also something troubling: it is God who brings people from death to life. So he turns to Mark 4:1-20, the parable of the sower. A farmer takes something precious, throws it on the ground, and waits. By almost any ordinary measure, much of his investment looks wasted. Yet Jesus announces an extraordinary harvest. "What does Jesus know about success that we might be missing?"

Message Outline

1. Can You Calculate a Ministry's Effectiveness?

Effective altruism asks a simple question: if one organization can save a life for $5,000 and another for $50,000, isn't it better to give to the first? The movement has brought some interesting insights about giving, weighing evidence, and looking at results.
But as soon as you calculate the good your money does, you have to define what "the Good" is. The logic can even lead to preferring to fund the colonization of Mars over the fight against Ebola, in order to "diversify the risks" for the human species.
Organizations modeled on venture capital now fund churches and evangelism ministries if they can prove a track record of conversions, with reports on the number of new Christians and the money spent.
The pastor admits there is some truth here. He gives the example of a missionary family partnered with the church, who moved to France for student ministry and are learning French intensively. If they announced that they would read the Bible in English on street corners without learning the language, nobody would support them. You need to speak the language and understand the culture to show how Jesus answers people's longings.
Even so, demanding efficiency in ministry is troubling. Imagine a funding proposal: "14 people converted last year at an average cost of $3,700 per person, and we think we can bring that down to $2,900." No church, even with the right strategy and enough money, can guarantee that a single person will come to faith. And how do you know whether a faith will last?

2. A Sower Who Takes Risks

For Jesus' listeners, farming was not a hobby, it was survival. With a sack of grain, you can grind flour, bake bread, and live. Or you can throw it into a field and hope something comes up. That seems absurd, "unless you know what seeds are capable of."
Three sowings fail: the grain eaten by birds, the grain that withers for lack of roots, the grain choked by thorns. Then the good soil yields thirty, sixty, a hundred times over. A single seed producing a hundred makes up for all the rest.
Jesus is not giving an agriculture lesson. He is explaining what he himself is doing. He is sitting in a borrowed boat, at the edge of the Roman Empire, telling gardening stories to a crowd of ordinary people. Some mock him, others are curious or hostile, and the religious leaders have already decided to have him killed (Mark 3:6).
Jesus answers: this is what the kingdom of God looks like. He does not tell the sower to stop because some of the seed is lost. He keeps sowing.
Talking about Jesus with a friend or a family member often means throwing something precious on the ground and seeing nothing happen. The pastor experiences this himself: it bounces off. Many people know the pain of inviting someone who says yes and never comes, or of watching people come and then stop. Jesus says: don't be surprised. "I never thought, what an impressive seed. But I have thought it many times about what grew from those seeds."

3. Why Jesus Speaks in Parables

Alone with the Twelve and a few others, Jesus says: "To you is given the mystery of God’s Kingdom, but to those who are outside, all things are done in parables, that ‘seeing they may see, and not perceive; and hearing they may hear, and not understand; lest perhaps they should turn again, and their sins should be forgiven them.’" (Mark 4:11-12). This seems unworthy of Jesus, the pastor admits.
In reality, Jesus is quoting Isaiah 6, the way you hum a line from a song that stays in your head all day. Isaiah had been sent to a stubborn people who refused to listen to God.
Jesus does not speak in riddles because he does not want to be heard. Otherwise, why would he begin with "Listen!" and end with "If anyone has ears to hear, let him hear!"?
His words reveal what is in those who hear him, then as now. Some are ready to hear. Others have already decided what kind of king he should be and what kind of kingdom he should establish, and when Jesus does not match their expectations, they refuse to listen.
The difference is not in the seed: "The farmer sows the word" (Mark 4:14). It is the same Word everywhere. The difference is in the soils.

4. The Hard Soil and the Shallow Soil

The first soil is hard (verse 15). Picture a path trampled for years, hard as concrete. You can throw seed on it all day and nothing goes in. Some people hear the Bible read, hear a clear explanation of who Jesus is, and it just bounces off them.
In the Gospel of Mark, it is not the irreligious who resemble this soil, it is the religious experts, who conclude that Jesus works for the devil (Mark 3:22). "You can be extraordinarily familiar with the Bible and have a hard heart toward Jesus." You can come every Sunday, know all the songs, and feed Satan week after week while the Word bounces off you and he swallows it. There is a spiritual battle every time the Word of God is proclaimed.
The second soil is shallow (verses 16 and 17). This one breaks your heart, because at first everything seems wonderful: the person loves what they hear, comes to church, reads the Bible, asks questions, is baptized, and everyone rejoices, rightly so. Then following Jesus starts to cost something. The enthusiasm was sincere, but there is no root.
How many soils produce shoots? Three out of four. "It is very easy for churches to count green shoots, but it takes a long time to count the fourth soil." The pastor wants to know not only that you trusted Jesus when you were in the youth group or in your twenties, but that you stayed with him in your thirties, forties, fifties, sixties, and seventies.
We should rejoice over every person who comes to faith. But Jesus warns us not to mistake an enthusiastic start for the finished product. Discipleship is not a sprint, it is a lifelong road.

5. The Soil Overrun with Thorns

Verse 19: "and the cares of this age, and the deceitfulness of riches, and the lusts of other things entering in choke the word, and it becomes unfruitful." The pastor wonders whether this might be the soil that should worry us most: the first is obviously bad news, the second is tragic, but the third is "life in the twenty-first century."
There is no spectacular rejection of Jesus here and no great crisis of faith. Other things simply block out the sun.
The cares: work, the mortgage, raising children, aging parents, the state of the world. The riches: we are surrounded by them, in a culture that keeps telling us we do not have enough. The other desires: a bigger house, a better vacation, a promotion, a new experience, a little more financial security. None of these presents itself as a rival to Jesus, and that is what makes them so dangerous.
The plant keeps growing, but so does everything else, until so many things demand our attention, our affection, our time, and our money that the word of Jesus is choked.
The church is good at encouraging people to meet Jesus in the Scriptures week after week. It is perhaps less good at asking: what else is growing in your garden? What do you dream about? What are you most afraid to lose? What do you keep telling yourself will finally make you happy?
The rocky soil is a quick sorrow. The thorny soil is a slow-motion drift: a few Sundays become a few months, then a few years. Prayer becomes less frequent, the Bible stays on the shelf or ends up in a donation box. Jesus becomes peripheral, not because you decided he was not true, but because a hundred other things have taken his place.

6. The Good Soil, and Soils That Can Change

Verse 20: these people hear the word, receive it, and bear fruit, thirty, sixty, and a hundred times over. The Word takes root, transforms their lives, and produces something that did not exist before.
Jesus does not sort humanity into four final categories, like a magazine quiz, "Which soil are you?" Many in the congregation can recognize themselves in one of the other three soils and say: "That was me." The pastor points to people who were the first, second, or third soil and who have been lifted up. "God changes hearts. He really can."
So do not look at the friend who refuses to talk about Jesus and decide that he is hard soil and no longer worth sowing in. Do not look at the one who left the church and conclude that he is shallow soil and the story is over. "The seed does not change. The soils can."
Back to the conversion report: should we count the rocky soil on the day it receives the Word with joy? The thorny soil as long as it still comes to church? How long should we wait before saying a person is good soil: five years, ten years, fifty years? We cannot see into hearts or into the future. Jesus can.

7. The Seed and the Harvest Belong to God

The sower does not have a special seed for the rocky soil and another for the thorny soil. He sows the same seed everywhere: the Word, the news of Jesus and his kingdom. A seed is nothing impressive, but what comes out of it is.
The same is true of Jesus: a carpenter from Nazareth in a borrowed boat, plotted against by the religious leaders, abandoned by his friends, betrayed, arrested, and nailed to a cross. It all seemed over. Except that Jesus rose from the dead, and from that apparently disastrous end came a harvest that nobody on the shore could have imagined.
Nearly 2,000 years later, a congregation gathered in a school hall in Tuggeranong listens to the words of a first-century Jewish preacher. The Roman Empire is gone, and his words still change lives around the world. And the method has not changed: Jesus proclaimed the Word, his disciples proclaimed it, others believed it and proclaimed it in turn.
Paul says it in 1 Corinthians 3:6: "I planted. Apollos watered. But God gave the increase." Planting and watering matter. Paul can talk about Jesus, reason, answer questions, love, pray, and invite, but he cannot make anyone believe. That is God's work.
It is humbling, because nobody can take credit for someone's conversion. It is freeing, because if someone does not respond to the gospel, it does not necessarily mean you failed. Maybe you have been praying for a loved one for years, maybe friends have left the church, or maybe you have served among children for a long time without knowing whether anything got through.
The pastor tells the story of a woman who taught Scripture to children for 50 years in Sydney. Three years after she retired, she received a call: a former student told her she wanted to become a Christian, and that hers was the only Christian name she remembered. 47 years had passed between the seed and the conversion.
We need to be thoughtful in ministry, responsible with money, and clear in how we speak. "But we must never confuse what we can measure with what matters most. We can measure what we sow, but we cannot manufacture the harvest. The harvest belongs to God."

Key Takeaways

The seed is always the same: the Word. The difference comes from the soil, that is, from the heart that hears it.
Three soils out of four produce shoots: an enthusiastic start is not yet fruit. Faith is proven over time, when following Jesus costs something.
Thorns do not announce themselves as rivals to Jesus: cares, money, and other desires choke the Word quietly.
Soils can change, because God changes hearts. Nobody should be written off for good.
You are responsible for sowing, not for making things grow. The harvest belongs to God, and it may come decades later.

Personal Application

What else is growing in your garden right now: what do you dream about, what are you most afraid to lose?
Have you stopped talking about Jesus with someone because you filed them under "hard soil"?
Are your roots in Jesus deep enough to hold when following him costs you something?
In what area do you sometimes measure the success of your service by the number of visible shoots rather than by your faithfulness in sowing?
Who can you keep praying for and sowing into this week, even without seeing results?

Verses Cited

Frequently Asked Questions

What do the four soils in the parable of the sower represent?

The seed is the same everywhere: it is the Word. What changes is the soil. The hard soil lets the Word bounce off and Satan takes it away. The rocky soil receives the Word with joy but has no root. The thorny soil lets cares, riches, and other desires choke the Word. The good soil hears, receives, and bears fruit.

Why does Jesus say he speaks in parables so that some will not understand?

Jesus quotes Isaiah 6, where the prophet is sent to a hardened people. He is not trying to keep people from understanding: he begins with "Listen!" and ends with "If anyone has ears to hear, let him hear!" His words reveal who is ready to listen and who has already decided what kind of king he should be.

Can you measure the success of a ministry by the number of conversions?

For Stephen, we need to be competent and responsible, but three soils out of four produce shoots: counting shoots does not tell you who will bear fruit. As Paul says in 1 Corinthians 3, one plants, another waters, but God makes it grow. We can measure what we sow, but we cannot manufacture the harvest.