The Soul-Saving Word | Luke 8:1-18
Brian Hedges | July 19, 2026
Let me invite you to turn in Scripture this morning to the Gospel of Luke, where we’re going to be studying Luke 8:1-21. I’m just going to read verses 1-8 in just a moment. Then before that I’m going to also read a second verse, James 1:21. So two texts this morning, a short one and a long one.
While you’re turning there, have you ever wondered why two people can sit side by side in a church service, can hear the same sermon, and yet walk away completely different in their responses? One person is deeply convicted of their sins and then finds comfort and hope in the gospel, while another person leaves unchanged or maybe even offended.
Or have you ever wondered why two children can grow up in the same home with the same parents, they hear the same Bible stories, they attend the same church, and yet one child embraces Christ while another walks away? Why does that happen? What is the explanation for those varied responses to the same word, the same message, the same gospel?
The answer is found in Luke 8. The message this morning is called “The Soul-Saving Word.” It is the second in this series of six messages that we’re calling “The Living Word,” and really what we’re doing in this series is trying to recover our love for and our devotion to and our confidence in the Bible as the word of God, the Bible as the vehicle through which we receive the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Last week we looked at 2 Timothy 3, the God-breathed word, and we considered what the Scriptures are and what the Scriptures do and how we should respond to the Scriptures. And today we’re looking at the soul-saving word, and I want to read James 1:21, which gives us this language and I think describes in one verse what Luke 8:1-18 are all about.
Listen to James, the brother of our Lord. He says, “Therefore put away all filthiness and rampant wickedness and receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your souls.”
“Receive with meekness the implanted word,” the word that is like a seed that is planted, “which is able to save your souls.” That’s what this message is about this morning: the implanted, soul-saving word.
It’s really what Luke 8, the first half of this chapter, is about. In Luke 8 we have one of the most famous parables of Jesus, the parable of the soils. And what James talks about when he calls the word “the implanted word that is able to save your souls,” Jesus illustrates for us in this famous teaching about the four different kinds of soil.
So let’s read Luke 8:1-8, which gives us the parable itself. We’ll read the interpretation of the parable in the following verses a little bit later in the message. Luke 8:1-8, and this begins with Jesus’ ministry, a description of what’s happening in Jesus’ ministry, which is important; it sets the context for the parable that Jesus then teaches. Beginning in verse 1:
“Soon afterward he went on through cities and villages, proclaiming and bringing the good news of the kingdom of God. And the twelve were with him, and also some women who had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities: Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out, and Joanna, the wife of Chuza, Herod’s household manager, and Susanna, and many others, who provided for them out of their means.
“And when a great crowd was gathering and people from town after town came to him, he said in a parable, ’A sower went out to sow his seed. And as he sowed, some fell along the path and was trampled underfoot, and the birds of the air devoured it. And some fell on the rock, and as it grew up, it withered away, because it had no moisture. And some fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up with it and choked it. And some fell into good soil and grew and yielded a hundredfold.’ As he said these things, he called out, ’He who has ears to hear, let him hear.’”
This is God’s word.
So this morning, as we consider the soul-saving word, I want us to look at three things together:
1. Proclamation of the Word
2. Salvation through the Word
3. Reception of the Word
Really, we’re just looking at the three different parts of this parable, the three images that are used in this parable. We’re looking at the sower as we think about the proclamation of the word—this is the person who sows the seed—then we’re looking at the seed itself and the purpose and power of the seed as we think about salvation; and then finally, we’re going to look at the reception of the seed in the different kinds of soil, the four different kinds of ground.
1. Proclamation of the Word: The Sower
So point number one, the proclamation of the word as we think about the work of the sower.
So the passage here begins with a summary of Jesus’s ministry. It doesn’t begin with the parable itself; it instead reminds us of what Jesus himself is doing. He is going about proclaiming the good news of the kingdom of God. He is bringing in the good news of the kingdom of God—proclaiming, bringing in. This is a description of Jesus’ teaching and preaching ministry. Jesus was a preacher. He was an itinerant preacher who went about from town to town, village to village, place to place. And as he went, he preached and he taught.
Luke also in this passage introduces some of the followers of Jesus, the community that surrounded Jesus. It seems that Jesus in his ministry was not traveling by himself. Instead, he always had companions. And so Luke here names the twelve—these are the twelve disciples, the twelve apostles—but also a group of women who had been healed by Jesus, including Mary Magdalene, out of whom Jesus had cast seven demons. I mean, these were women who had benefited from the healing, saving, delivering power of Jesus. There’s also Joanna, who is the wife of this character Chuza, the household manager of King Herod; and a woman named Susanna; and Luke says many others. And he tells us that these women helped to support Jesus and the disciples out of their means. So these are women who have some financial means, and through their donations they are helping to support the ministry of Jesus.
This is the context in which the parable of the soils is given. It’s really interesting when you read through the Gospel of Luke, which I’ve been personally studying through, reading through for the last few weeks, that Luke highlights especially (and more than any other Gospel writer) the marginalized people that responded to the good news of the kingdom of God, the marginalized people who responded to the message of Jesus. It was not the people you would have expected. It was the poor, not the rich. It was the people who were obviously sinners, tax collectors and sinners—not the religious people, not the Pharisees, not the scribes, the teachers of the law—and a lot of women. And these were people who were somewhat on the outskirts of society, the outskirts especially of Jewish religious society, and they are the ones who are receiving the word and responding to the proclamation, while many of the religious people kind of keep their distance from Jesus. They listen, but they criticize him and his practices.
The parable that Jesus here gives is explaining what’s going on in these varied responses. The parable explains something that every Christian eventually asks: “Why do people respond so differently to the same message?” Some believe, others reject. Some begin well, but then don’t actually continue, don’t bear lasting fruit. Why does this happen? The parable explains this.
But before Jesus explains the soils, I want you to notice what remains constant in his ministry. What remains constant is the message of the gospel, the proclamation of the gospel. The seed is the same, the message itself is the same, and in the parable the sower is simply sowing the seed.
I think this has some implications for us in the realm of evangelism. Our church has been making more effort in evangelism in the last few months, as a group has been going around the neighborhood inviting people to church, sharing literature with them; as we went to the Jesus Fest and led in worship and preached evangelistically just a little over a week ago. We’re trying to do evangelistic work. But what should we think as we do evangelism? What should be some of our expectations?
Well, Jesus is the model. Jesus is the master evangelist, the master preacher, the master teacher, and we learn some important lessons as we look at the ministry of Jesus.
Notice three things really quickly here, three lessons for evangelism.
(1) The first one is this, that we are to spread the seed indiscriminately. The sower is just using the broadcast method of planting seed. He’s just throwing seed right and left, sowing it to the field, but some of that seed goes onto the paths that were between the various fields. Some of the seed falls onto rocky soil, some of it falls into weedy soil, the thorns, and some of the seed falls into good ground. But the sower is just throwing the seed indiscriminately. He’s throwing it out there, and it’s a picture for us of what we should be doing with the gospel. We shouldn’t be constantly trying to figure out whether somebody is elect or not, whether someone is ready or not. We should be sharing the gospel as often as we have opportunity to share it.
(2) Secondly, the seed itself doesn’t change, and this is important in our day. It’s important that we don’t tamper with the seed, we don’t tamper with the message. The same seed is spread around to all the different kinds of people. In a day when there’s always the temptation, in the name of contextualization (which we certainly must do; we have to speak in people’s language and in words they can understand) to tamper with the message, to either add to it or subtract from it; to add to it we think things that we think will make the message more palatable, or to subtract from it things that we think will make the message more offensive.
But we can’t mess with the basic message of the gospel, even the offensive aspects of the gospel—talking about sin, talking about judgment, talking about the cross. And in fact, the apostle Paul made much of this in his letters to the Corinthians, that he did not peddle the word of God. He didn’t mess with the word of God. He didn’t come in plausible human speech, but he spoke in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, and he said, “We determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified,” even though the message of the cross was an offense to both Jews and Greeks.
You don’t mess with the message, and we don’t need to tamper with the seed. We don’t need to change our message in order to reach anyone. We simply need to spread the word. We spread the seed.
(3) Then thirdly—notice this—that we must measure success by faithfulness to the work of spreading the gospel, not to the results. The same seed falls on four different kinds of soil. The sower is not, in this parable, responsible for the conditions of the soil or the response of the soil. He is responsible for faithfully sowing seed.
This is important, because it’s tempting to constantly be looking at results, counting numbers, whether people respond or not. And ultimately, people’s response is not our job; that’s God’s work. Sometimes our task—really, always our task—is to faithfully proclaim the message regardless of the results.
You know, in history we have learned that sometimes God greatly blesses a ministry that is faithful, and sometimes there are people who serve faithfully in places of obscurity without much visible success, but they are still faithful in the eyes of God.
A few years ago, I read a little book by D.A. Carson called Memoirs of an Ordinary Pastor. D.A. Carson is fairly well known as a great Christian scholar; he’s written and edited dozens of books. But this book was actually about his father, who was a very ordinary pastor of Baptist congregations in Canada and who labored most of his life without much visible fruit. He had small congregations of less than a hundred people, not much response, but he just faithfully spread the word, faithfully did the work of a pastor, the work of an evangelist, faithfully taught the gospel without a lot of visible fruit, but yet faithful in the eyes of the Lord. It’s much different from someone like a Billy Graham who preached to thousands, but not less faithful.
Our job, brothers and sisters, is to be faithful. Our calling is not to produce conversions, our calling is to proclaim the word faithfully. It’s to sow the seed. That’s our job, and it’s not just the job of pastors and preachers; that is the job of every Christian: to broadcast the seed of the word, to spread the good news, to share the gospel with others. Proclamation.
The reason why we need to proclaim the word is because the word itself is the power of God for salvation. That leads to point number two, salvation through the word.
2. Salvation through the Word: The Seed
This becomes really clear in verses 11-12, where Jesus says,
“Now the parable is this: The seed is the word of God. The ones along the path are those who have heard; then the devil comes and takes away the word from their hearts, so that they may not believe and be saved.”
Now we’ll come back and talk about the path here in a moment, but I want you to just notice a few things here under this second point.
(1) The first one is this, that the seed is the word. Jesus says that very clearly, doesn’t he? “The seed is the word of God.” In the parallel passage in Matthew’s Gospel, Matthew 13, he says “the word of the kingdom.” It’s the word of the kingdom. And the word, the gospel, the word of God is compared in Scripture over and over again to a seed.
So once again, James 1: “Receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your souls.” It’s implanted like a seed. Or in 1 Peter 1, Peter says that “you have been born again, not through corruptible seed but through incorruptible seed, through the living and abiding word of God.” And then he defines that word in verse 25. He says, “This word is the good news that was preached to you.” The seed is the word.
(2) And notice this: the issue at stake is salvation. You see that very clearly in verse 12. Jesus says, “The ones along the path are those who have heard; then the devil comes and takes away the word from their hearts so that they may not believe and be saved.” Because they do not believe, because they don’t receive the seed of the word, they are not saved. The issue at stake in our response and in anyone’s response to the gospel and to the word of God is salvation.
That means that Jesus here is not just talking about fruitful versus unfruitful Christians. He is, rather, talking about a saving response to the word of God, in contrast to unbelief or in contrast to a temporary response, to a response that is something less than saving faith. The issue at stake is salvation.
The seed is the word—the word of the kingdom, the word of God, the implanted word, the good news of the gospel through which we are saved. The seed is powerful to bring salvation.
Just think for a minute about this image of a seed; this seed, this gospel word. A seed is weak, and yet it is powerful, isn’t it? A seed is a small little thing; it’s weak. You take any seed and you can stamp it with your shoe and crush the life right out of it. Yet, have you ever noticed—maybe in your own sidewalk, maybe in the sidewalks of our church—have you noticed that seeds produce cracks that then grow up through the pavement? A seed is weak and yet it’s so powerful it can split asphalt. It can actually even split marble. A seed is a powerful, powerful thing.
This is a picture of the word of God. It’s subtle. The word subverts our expectations, the word of the kingdom, the gospel of the kingdom. It’s not what people expect. It is the gospel of a crucified Messiah who dies in weakness on the cross. But through that death comes resurrection and salvation and life for all who believe.
The gospel is the power of God for salvation. That’s why Paul calls it the foolishness of the message that we preach. But this foolishness in the eyes of men is the wisdom and the power of God.
One of the things, brothers and sisters, that I want us to get is this gospel in its power and confidence in the power of the gospel to bring salvation. Jesus himself takes up this imagery when speaking about his own impending death. You see this in John 12:23-24, when he says, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” He goes on to talk about the path of discipleship, where each one of us is called to die to self so that we may live.
But here Jesus is talking about himself. He is the grain of wheat who fell into the ground and died so that through his death there could be an abundant harvest of salvation. And this is the message. This is the seed, the powerful seed, weak though it seems to be in the eyes of the world. This is the seed that has the power of God to bring salvation to others.
One of my favorite stories of Spurgeon is a story that took place on October 7, 1857. Charles Haddon Spurgeon was a great Baptist pastor from the nineteenth century. And he was to preach at the massive Crystal Palace in London, England, on a day of national humiliation.
Several days prior to the service, Spurgeon went to the Crystal Palace to test out the acoustics. And he thought that he was alone in the building, so he’s there in the center of the Crystal Palace, and he just yells out at the top of his lungs, “Behold the Lamb of God, who taketh away the sins of the world.”
Unbeknownst to Spurgeon, there was a janitor who was up in one of the galleries cleaning, preparing. And he heard that resounding voice of Spurgeon speaking the word of God, the gospel in just a sentence. “Behold the Lamb of God, who taketh away the sins of the world.” That janitor came under conviction of sin, repented of his sins, believed in Jesus Christ, and became a Christian.
Friends, that’s the power of the word. The word that proclaims Christ as the Lamb is the word that brought that man to salvation. This is a powerful word, the powerful seed. And one of the things I want us to get out of this series is a fresh confidence in the word of God to do the work of God. It’s a soul-saving word.
So, if the seed is so powerful, why do some people get saved and other people do not? Why do some people respond and some people do not? That leads us to point number three, the reception of the word.
3. Reception of the Word: The Soil
What we learn here is that the variable is never the seed, it’s always the soil. And the soils represent different kinds of hearers of the word.
Now, this passage is all about hearing. That’s what Luke 8, really verses 1-21, are all about. Nine times in these verses Jesus speaks about hearing. In verse 8, he says, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.” In verse 18, “Take care, then, how you listen.” And then in the next story, when Jesus’ mother and his brothers come to find him, he’s surrounded by people who are listening to his teaching. People come to Jesus and say,
“Your family is looking for you—your mother, your brothers, they’re outside, they’re looking for you.” And he looks around at those who are listening to his teaching and said, “Those who hear the word of God and do it, they are truly my mother and my brothers and my sisters.” He’s saying the true family of God is defined by those who hear and obey the word of God.
So, this passage is about hearing the word, receiving the word. And the four soils, which Jesus explains in verses 9-15, those four soils represent four different kinds of responses. Let’s look at this. Let me read the text here, verse 9.
“And when his disciples asked him what this parable meant, he said, ’To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of God, but for others they are in parables, so that “seeing they may not see, and hearing they may not understand.”’”
He’s quoting from Isaiah 6. He’s essentially saying the parables serve as filters, and people’s response to the parable, their response to the word, shows something about the condition of their hearts. Then he explains the parable in verse 11.
“’Now the parable is this: The seed is the word of God. The ones along the path are those who have heard; then the devil comes and takes away the word from their hearts, so that they may not believe and be saved. And the ones on the rock are those who, when they hear the word, receive it with joy. But these have no root; they believe for a while, and in time of testing fall away. And as for what fell among the thorns, they are those who hear, but as they go on their way they are choked by the cares and riches and pleasures of life, and their fruit does not mature. As for that in the good soil, they are those who, hearing the word, hold it fast in an honest and good heart, and bear fruit with patience.’”
Four different kinds of soils.
This invites some self-examination, doesn’t it? As we think about these, ask yourself, “Which kind of soil am I? Which kind of hearer am I?”
(1) First of all, there are those described as the path, the seed that fell on the path. This represents the hard heart. The seed falls along the path and is devoured by the birds, and Jesus says this is the devil who takes away the word from their hearts so that they may not believe and be saved.
These would have been hard, well-worn paths, footpaths, beaten down by people’s feet—so a hard surface—the seed falls on that surface and it never even gets in. It’s a picture of the unbeliever, the person who hears with physical ears, but they never receive the word, they never respond to the word. It’s as if they didn’t hear it. The word just doesn’t go in. They are so distracted that the word never gets any depth in their life.
C.S. Lewis illustrates this wonderfully in The Screwtape Letters, which is the story of a demon—really letters from a demon, who is writing to a junior demon, teaching him how to tempt someone. And he’s really talking about someone who’s having these spiritual thoughts. Screwtape says, essentially, “Just remind him that it’s time for lunch, and that these kinds of things are much too important to think about on an empty stomach, and he’ll go on his way and forget what was said.” He said, “Our best work is often done by just keeping things out of their minds.”
That’s what Satan often does. That’s what the enemy does. He steals the word so that it never gets into the heart. This is the hard heart, the seed on the path.
(2) Secondly, you have the rock or the stony ground, depending on your translation. And really, this was ground where the seed got in a little bit, but it didn’t get any depth because there was a limestone hard pan a couple of inches under the surface. It meant that the seed never got deep roots. So Jesus says it has no moisture, and so when the sun comes up (in another parable), the seed is scorched.
Jesus here says these are people who receive the word with joy initially, and they believe for a while. They believe for a while, but in the time of testing, they fall away. These are people who have shallow responses to the word of God—an initial emotional response, but it never takes root. It never goes deep enough to produce lasting fruit. High emotions initially, but then quickly discouraged by trials. This is the person who makes some kind of an outward response to Jesus, but then when life gets hard—when they find out they have cancer or when someone dies in their family or they lose their job or they end up getting a divorce or things don’t go the way they expect—they say, “What did God ever do for me? I tried Jesus. That didn’t work. My life is still hard.” And they quit Christianity altogether.
It’s a shallow response. It’s a defective faith. It’s not real faith. It’s a defective faith, a shallow response to the word of God.
(3) The third kind of soil Jesus calls the thorns. We might think of this as the crowded heart. This is where the seed gets in a little bit, but the seed is choked by weeds and thorns. And the scholars tell us these weeds could grow up to be six feet tall. These weeds in the Palestinian farmlands could grow up to be six feet tall, and it would just absorb all the moisture out of the soil so that the seed would never actually get enough root and depth that it would bear fruit to maturity.
In verse 14, Jesus says these weeds are like “the cares and the riches and the pleasures of life.”
Now note this: both good things and hard things can choke out the word. Cares can choke out the word. Riches can choke out the word. Pleasures can choke out the word.
Man, this is one we’ve got to be aware of, isn’t it? We live with so much stuff in our lives and in our world. We live with so many burdens and so many anxieties in the modern world, and often with so much prosperity in the modern world. And really, whether you have it or whether you don’t, the burden and the cares of all of that can so choke out the word that it’s not bearing fruit in your life.
(4) There’s one kind of good soil, the fourth soil, which is a good and honest heart. And Jesus says that this seed grew and yielded a hundredfold. Darrell Bock in his commentary notes that there are three marks of this good soil: it’s a right heart holding fast to the word with patient perseverance. “They bear fruit with patience.”
This is a good soil. This is the person who receives the word, holds the word, sticks with the word, so that the word over time begins to bear fruit in their lives. This is a picture of the authentic Christian, the person who really genuinely is saved, who receives the word of God so that it changes them, so that fruit is the result.
Now, having heard all this, I just want us to end now with kind of a threefold application for our conclusion. I want us to just get the basic need that we all have, the basic exhortation of this passage and the grace that is our hope. Look at each of these things.
(1) First of all, the need. The need is the gospel going deep in our hearts, the word and particularly the word of the gospel going deep into our hearts. Darrell Bock points out—and I think this is quite interesting—he points out that Luke uses four different prepositions to describe the different kinds of seed. Four different prepositions. These are little Greek words. These are the important words, often, that help explain the passage.
There is seed that is by the road. It’s by the road. There is seed that is upon the rock. There is seed that is in the midst of the thorns and there’s seed that is in, goes into the soil.
Only one kind of soil actually receives the seed with a deep kind of penetration. Only one kind of hearer has the word penetrate deeply into their hearts. And Bock says, “In contrast to the failure of the other seed, only the last seed penetrates the soil and achieves its goal of becoming fruitful.”
I think this is important for us. I think one of the reasons why we do not experience the depth of transformation and the level of fruitfulness in our Christian lives that God desires and maybe that we want in some way or another, one reason is because the word hasn’t gotten deep enough yet. The gospel hasn’t gone deep enough into our hearts and lives that it begins to work on every different aspect.
It works on our attitudes and emotions. It works on our family relationships. It works on our desires. It works on our sense of ownership, possessions, things, the way we interact with money. The gospel is meant to work on all of those parts of our lives. But the only way that happens is if the word goes deep enough that we actually begin to receive the word in a way that changes our hearts.
This is one reason why we need not only to read the Bible, but we need God’s ordinary means of grace. We need the regular proclamation of the word, we need the Lord’s supper, we need worship, we need not just reading but meditating on the Bible—all of these different means of grace are really intended to help the word go deeper. This is what we need: the gospel going deep in our hearts.
That’s why the basic exhortation of this passage is found in verse 18: “Take care then how you hear, for to the one who has more will be given, and from the one who has not even what he thinks he has will be taken away.”
Take care how you hear. Take heed how you hear, in the old King James. It’s an exhortation with some urgency in it, that we need to pay attention to the way in which we receive the word of God.
Is it possible that some of us come to church in the same way that we go to a movie? We come as a passive spectator. We come as consumers. We come to be mildly entertained or maybe to learn something, but without hearts that are really engaged, thinking, “What is God saying to me from his word today?”
Listen to the old Methodist writer E.M. Bounds. He said,
“To hear the word of God is no small matter. It is our life. It is as milk to the babe, our God-appointed food by which we are nourished. It is not a lecture, an entertainment, the whiling away of an hour, but it is the incorruptible word of God that liveth and abideth forever. The soil that receives this precious seed must be well prepared.”
Take care how you listen. At the very least, brothers and sisters, this means that when we gather to worship, we should come prayerfully. We should come asking God to prepare our hearts. We should come asking God to bless the ministry of his word. We should come seeking God to do what only God can do.
My words aren’t going to change anybody. The word of God will change you, but the word of God will only change you if your heart is prepared. The seed only germinates and bears fruit in good soil. So we need to pray that God would do the work that only his Spirit can do in our hearts.
(2) The great encouragement of this passage—the final thing I want to leave you with—is this: that hearing itself is a gift. And here’s the grace we find in this passage. There’s grace, there’s gospel in this passage, and it’s found in Jesus’ explanation to his disciples in verse 10, when he says, “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of God.” To you it has been given. It’s a gift. It’s been given.
It’s similar to Matthew 11, where Jesus prays to the Father and he says, “Father, I thank you that you have hidden these things from the wise and from the prudent, but you have revealed them to babes, for such is your gracious will.”
Why do some people hear and some people don’t? Why do some people receive it and are changed and some people are left unchanged? At the end of the day, it’s grace. We have a responsibility—take heed how you hear. Yes, but the only way you can actually take heed, take care how you listen, so that you listen in a way that changes your life, is by the grace of God.
Faith is a gift, repentance is a gift, hearing is a gift, having the kind of heart that responds to God’s word in this way is itself a gift from God, and so it casts us on God’s grace. That means we need to pray something like this, words that we will sing in a few minutes:
“Speak, O Lord, as we come to you
To receive the food of your holy word.
Take your word, plant it deep in us,
Shape and fashion us in your likeness.”
We’re asking God to do something in us. So take care how you hear, receive with meekness the implanted word for it is able to save your souls, and trust in God’s grace to give you a heart that is a good heart, a heart that can receive the word, a heart that will hold the word, a heart that will continue in the word and will bear the fruit of transformation in your life. Let’s pray.
Father, we thank you this morning for the promise of your word, that your word will not return to you void but will accomplish the purpose for which you sent it. We thank you for the confidence that we can have that the gospel is the power of God for salvation for all who believe, and that through the foolishness of preaching you display your power and your wisdom. Thank you, Lord, that through my feeble words you can communicate your powerful, living, and abiding word of God.
Lord, our prayer this morning is that your Spirit would now do exactly what we have talked about, what we will sing about in a moment; that your Spirit would take your truth and plant it deep in us, so that this will be more than just a Bible lesson, this will be more than just a sermon, more than thirty-five minutes spent listening to someone teach; that instead this will be a moment in which we have heard God speak to our own hearts, where the Spirit has communicated truth to our minds and hearts and souls and has planted a seed so deeply that it will change our lives.
Lord, I want to pray this morning for those who have never believed, that today would be the day that you give them the gifts of faith and repentance. I want to pray for all of us who are believers, who are Christians, that we would bear these marks of the good soil and that we would see fruit in our lives as we receive your word and hold it fast and continue in it with patience.
As we come now to the Lord’s table, we ask you to draw near to us through this means of grace. Just as the word proclaims to us the gospel, may we see today how the gospel is also proclaimed through the table—through the bread that we eat, through the juice that we drink—and how it proclaims the death of our Lord Jesus Christ until he returns. Lord, may we seek you in prayer in these moments, may we come to the table with faith, and through it all we pray that you would work. Draw near to us as we draw near to you. We pray this in Jesus’ name and for his sake, amen.
Brian G. Hedges
