Sinclair B. Ferguson

Those God uses have always been those who have been conscious of their sinfulness.

The second dimension of his experience, of course, is his experience of God's pardoning grace, that electric moment when the seraph takes the burning coal from the altar with tongs and puts it on Isaiah's lips and cleanses him.

That's exactly what he needed and what we need at the beginning of the year, cleansing.

As the hymn teaches us to sing, be of sin the double cure.

Cleanse me from its guilt and power.

But then the third dimension of his experience was this, an unreserved willingness to serve the Lord without question.

He didn't even know what God wanted him to do, but he was willing to say, here am I, send me.

All this week on Things Unseen, we've been thinking about what I've called the parable of parables, the parable of the farmer, the seed, and the soils, the parable that explains what happens when the Word of God is preached.

Jesus himself is like a farmer sowing seed.

And he tells us here that we need to take heed how we hear, as well as what we hear.

And I signed off yesterday by pointing out that there's a rule in the parables that's sometimes called the rule of end stress.

The major point is likely to come right at the end.

Like when you tell a story, you don't put the conclusion in the middle.

And if you tell a joke, you don't give away the punchline before the end.

If you do, you'll ruin it, and nobody will laugh, unless perhaps they're laughing at you.

So in Jesus' parable, there's not only searching analysis of our spiritual condition, but there's also good news right at the end.

When the good seed of God's Word falls on good soil, it yields a harvest, even a bumper harvest, thirtyfold, sixtyfold, or even a hundredfold.

That's pretty amazing, isn't it?

But what is good soil?

What Jesus means is soil that's been well prepared.