Luke 8:11

The seed is the Word of God

The seed

I. THE TRUTH TAUGHT, THE SEED SOWN BY JESUS CHRIST, THE GREAT SOWER.

1. The necessity of repentance.

2. The forgiving love and power of God.

3. The necessity of holiness; of obedience, submission, trust, unselfishness, and brotherly love.

4. Christ enjoined fidelity, and warned of judgment to come.

5. Christ taught the necessity of His death for our redemption; proclaimed Himself the one Mediator between God and man; declared our dependence upon Him for all spiritual life and strength; promised His Spirit to lead us into all truth, and His grace to enable us to endure to the end.

II. THE APPROPRIATENESS OF THE ANALOGY BETWEEN THE SEED AND THE TRUTH.

1. Both contain the principle of life.

2. The development of the life in each depends upon conditions. The seed must be sown in congenial soil, and duly watered and nurtured; the truth must be received into an honest and good heart. (A. F. Joscelyne, B. A.)

Missionary sermon

I. WHAT IS THE SEED TO BE SOWN? The Word of God.

II. THE SOIL UPON WHICH THIS SEEN IS TO BE CAST. The field is the world.

III. THE MANNER OR SPIRIT IN WHICH THE SEED IS TO BE SOWN.

1. With much prayer.

2. In simple faith upon God’s promises.

3. In entire dependence upon the influences of the Holy Ghost.

4. In a spirit of love to Christ and the souls of men.

5. Not sparingly, but bountifully. (J. Hatchard, A. M.)

Use the Bible

Never were there so many Bibles in the world. The seed of eternal life is in our days plenteously sown. Why, then, has the crop failed so shamefully? The failure of a crop must be owing to one or more of these four causes. Either

(1) the seed must be bad; or

(2) the season must be bad; or

(3) the land must be bad; or

(4) the tillage must be bad.

Now the failure of a crop of holiness cannot be owing to the first of these causes, for the seed is as good as ever. Nor is the failure owing to any peculiarly bad season. The influence of the Holy Ghost still falls, like mild showers, gently and plentifully on men’s hearts, to soften and fit them for receiving the Word of God. The Sun of Righteousness still shines in the heavens, and from His golden throne, when the good wheat has sprung up and come to ear, He pours down warmth enough to ripen it and bring it to perfection. Nor again is the failure of the seed due to the badness of the soil. Bad enough it is, to be sure, naturally; but we know how much the very worst soil may be bettered by care and labour. Man’s heart is not worse than it was formerly. The scantiness of the crop, then, is owing to nothing but badness of tillage. (A. W. Hare.)

The seed gives life by means of death

Just so is it with all truth, and superlatively so is it with the Truth. How often does the discoverer reap his first harvest in derision and loss! How often does the pioneer of some beneficent enterprise lay its foundation in his own wealth, health, and peace I How often does the patriot pay the penalty of living a purer and nobler life than his self-seeking contemporaries! Above all, what a countless army of men, “valiant for the faith and truth upon the earth,” have had to water the seed of Christ’s gospel by their blood and tears! How often in this and that land, and in none more than in our own, have those gospel institutions, which are God’s Tree of Life for the world, had to grow up like a weeping willow and suck their first nutriment from the graves of their martyr-slain! The blood of Scotland’s proto-martyr, the noble Patrick Hamilton, and the memory of his dying prayer, “How long, O Lord, shall darkness cover this realm?” fomented the young Reformation life over a comparatively silent germinating period of more than twenty years. Knox, and with him Scotland, kindled at the pile of George Wishart. Andrew Melville caught the falling mantle of Knox. And as with the martyrs under Popery in that century, so with those under the “black prelacy” of the next. When Richard Cameron fell on Aird’s Moss--as if in answer to his own prayer as the action began, “Lord, spare the green and take the ripe!”--all the more strenuously strove Cargill, till he, too, in the year following, sealed the truth with his blood. And more followed, and yet more, through that last and worst decade of the pitiless storm known, as by emphasis, “the killing time.” Through those terrible years Peden dragged out a living death, and, as he thought of Cameron now at rest, often exclaimed, “O to be with Richie!” Young Renwick, too, caught up the torn flag, nobly saying, “They are but standard-bearers that have fallen; the Master lives.” Thus one after another, on blood-drenched scaffold or on blood-soaked field, fell the precious seed-grain to rise in harvests manifold, till just at the darkest hour before the dawn, Renwick’s martyrdom closed the red roll in 1688, the very year of the Revolution, and the seed so long “sown in tears” was” “reaped in joy.” Marvel not at this. He who is at once the sower and the seed had Himself to die that we might live. (T. Guthrie, D. D.)

Vitality of latent seeds

Much interesting information has been furnished lately upon the vitality of buried seeds. It is astonishing how long many of them retain their germinating powers although lying so deep in the earth as to be beyond the reach of atmospheric influences. This is so--e.g., with the seeds of gorse. A piece of land in Northamptonshire was converted from a furze fox-cover to pasture, a state in which it remained for thirty years or more; it was then deeply cultivated, and the following season a crop of gorse sprung up over the whole field. A gardener, in order to plant some rhododendrons last spring, turned over a quantity of peat soil, the bottom portion being brought to the surface. That bed is now covered with a thick crop of seedling foxgloves, the seed of which must have been lying there in a state of complete dormancy for probably half a century. In the same manner do seeds of truth often lie in the hearts of men. The sower forgets that he has scattered them, or mourns that they have not sprung up. The harvest may come, however, after many years have rolled away, for the seed contains the germ of a God-given life. Those who scatter the “Word of God” ought never to despair of results. (Christian Journal.)

Sowing the seed of the Word

Billy Dawson, that great natural orator, had a wonderful sermon on the “Sower and the Seed.” With every stroke of the hand in imitation of the act of sowing, the speaker would drop some blessed passage of Scripture. The Methodist chapel in one of the midland counties not being big enough, the use of the Particular Baptist Chapel was secured. The minister of the chapel was upon the platform. Dawson gave this “sowing speech,” and went along the platform scattering the seed and giving one passage of Scripture after another: “God so loved the world;” “Come unto Me, all ye that labour;” then there came another handful; “If any man sin, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous, and He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world.” “There, it’s out,” he said, “and you can do what you like.” When remonstrated with for this breach of ministerial propriety he said, “I did not think about the chapel, nor the parson! I thought about the seed.” (Handbook to Scripture Doctrines.)