But the seed on good soil stands for those with a noble and good heart,
who hear the word, retain it,
and by persevering produce a crop.
Luke 8:15
I closed Sunday’s message with the above verse. I love verse 8. It carries in it an an incredible promise. I believe that God wants to multiply his blessings in your life one hundred fold. The reason I believe that is because it’s in the Bible! I believe that He wants you to be one hundred times more fruitful than you are right now. He can see the spiritual potential in you and when you rise up to one hundred times more fruitfulness, you will noit be the same person you are today – as a mother, a father, a minister of the Gospel, a businessman. You will be transformed, changed from glory to glory.
Here’s what I want to do. There are some challenges and conditions related to this promise, like any promise in the Bible. There are going to be challenges you need to face and conditions you need to meet in order for God to multiply his blessings in your life, so what I want to do for the next few post is unpack this passage. It is exactly what Jesus does, it’s classic. The disciples hear the parable and have no idea what it means, and so Jesus has to unpack it and share what it means, so let’s do that together.
Luke 8:11: Jesus starts explaining the parable. He says, this is huge,
The seed is the Word of God.
God always speaks to us before He speaks through us. You need to get the Word in your heart. You need to retain the Word. Let me try to share the way I feel about the Bible. In 1801, Sir David Brewster was awarded an honorary Master of Arts degree from the University of Edinburgh and ordained to preach, but his first sermon turned into his last sermon. Brewster was so nervous when he got behind the pulpit that he vowed it would be the last sermon he ever preached. One of his colleagues said, “It was a pity for the National Church of Scotland, but a good day for science.” Brewster went on to pursue his true passion, the science of optics. And in 1816, his childlike passion produced an invention that has captured the imagination of children forever. He called it a kaleidoscope. Consisting of fragments of coloured glass, the kaleidoscope reflects light in an endless variety of colours and patterns. With every turn of the kaleidoscope, a new pattern of light is revealed. And so it is with Scripture.
According to Jewish tradition, every word of sacred Scripture has seventy faces and six hundred thousand meanings. You need to meditate on that for a minute! Every word, six hundred thousand meanings! If you ask me to describe Scripture in a single word, it would be kaleidoscopic. It really is amazing the way you can read the same verse on different occasions and it will speak to you in totally different ways. It reminds me of the old adage attributed to the ancient Greek Philosopher, Heraclitus: you never step into the same river twice. In a sense, you never read the same verse of Scripture, the same way twice. Why? Because the same Spirit who inspired the writers of Scripture thousands of years ago is the same Spirit who illuminates readers today. What’s so amazing about this is that He speaks every known dialect, but beyond that, His intimate and infinite knowledge of your personality, your circumstances, your dreams, your doubts, your history, and your destiny allows Him to speak to you in a way that is absolutely unique. That is why the Bible is so kaleidoscopic.
But my concern is this, we never even turn the thing! We just read it. Listen to me, the Bible wasn’t meant to be read, the Bible was meant to be meditated. Reading without meditating is like eating without digesting, you don’t absorb the nutrients, it does not metabolize in your body. You have got to get the Word into the soil of your heart. It has to take root so that it can bear fruit in your life. You must retain the Word. That means you cannot just listen to a sermon without reflecting and you cannot read the Bible without meditating!
It is the reflecting and the meditating that enables retention of the Word and it the retention of the Word that brings forth a hundred-fold fruitfulness.
