Seed Rejecting Soil
A lady from the local area recently called to request that she and her husband’s address be removed from our House-to-House, Heart-to-Heart mailing list. She explained how they currently had three trash bags that needed to be taken down to their burn pile as it was, and that they really didn’t need any more unnecessary mailings only adding to that volume. (I must admit that afterward, when I had a chance to stop and think about it, I wondered if she either had, or was going to, contact all of the other sources of flyers and mail-outs that came on a far more frequent basis than our little bi-monthly publication). She additionally informed me that they didn’t wish to receive them anymore because she and her husband were not members of our church, but had been (identified themselves by their denomination’s name) for fifty years.
Some soil is tough and and will not accept seed for growth.
I told her that where HtH is mailed in bulk to targeted areas, individual addresses within such areas could not just be selectively removed – at which point her exasperation seemed to increase. Besides I replied, we all used the same Bible, right? And after all, I told her, we were just seeking to “spread the seed” … to which her response was actually quite revealing, and terribly chilling. Along the same lines as what the people responded with according to Matt. 27:25, she said, “Well it’s not gonna sprout here!”
How sad. How tragic. But apparently, how true. “The seed is the word of God” (Lk. 8:11). It is the word of God which HtH seeks to point everyone back to. Hence, God’s word is that seed we are seeking to spread with our HtH mailings. However, her resolutely vocalized rejection of that seed should come as no surprise, but only serve as a sad validation in light of the other information she provided. For when any religious person decides to risk and devote their entire earthly and eternal life, on and to, a salvation process which is totally foreign to any of the thousands of examples of conversion to Christ we see in God’s New Testament (Acts 2:37-41); to become a proud and productive part of a man-made denominational church never seen anywhere in God’s New Testament (Mk. 7:5-13; 1 Cor. 1:10); and to practice worship which is nowhere to be found anywhere in the truth of God’s word (Jn. 4:23-24); why should it surprise us, should they admit that the seed of God’s word isn’t going to sprout in their home? Isn’t that quite obvious?
Let us all determine to go out and seek to teach some poor, lost, misguided religious soul, with the life-giving seed of God’s holy truth!