Good-ground Hearers
But others fell on good ground and yielded a crop: some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty.
What an encouragement it is that the sower is not always to meet with disappointment. The seed is sometimes received into honest hearts. The hearers comprehend the truth and do not resist the Spirit of God or refuse to receive the impression of truth in their hearts. They receive the truth into the heart, and it accomplishes its transforming work upon the character. They are not able to change their own hearts, but the Spirit of God, through their obedience to the truth, sanctifies the soul.
The good heart does not mean a heart without transgressions, for the Message is to be preached to the lost. Messiah says, “I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.” Convicted sinners see themselves as transgressors in the great moral mirror, God’s Holy Torah. They look upon the Messiah and ask why the Messiah prayed and interceded for the transgressions of men, and point them to the Torah of God, which has been transgressed. It was to save the transgressor from ruining his life, that He was the High Priest. The Torah has no power to pardon the evil-doer; but the High Priest has taken the sins of the transgressor through intercession, and as a sinner exercises faith in God, the Messiah imputes His own righteousness to the guilty one. There has been but one way of salvation since the days of Adam. “There is no other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be healed.” It is in the name of God that we find redemption and healing. We have no reason to fear while we are looking to God, believing that He is able to save all who come unto Him.
As the result of active faith in God, we are brought into moral warfare with the world, the flesh, and the devil. If we undertake this warfare in our own wisdom, our human ability, we shall certainly be overcome; but if we exercise living faith in God, and practice godliness, we shall understand what it means to be sanctified through the truth, and we shall not be overcome in the conflict, for heavenly angels encamp round about us. Messiah is the High Priest of our salvation. He is who strengthens His followers for the moral conflict which they are pledged to undertake.
Those who open and study the Scriptures and feed every Shabbat upon the heavenly manna, the bread, and the libation of the vine. We become partakers of His divine nature. They have no life or healthy experience apart from God. They know that in character they must be like Him with whom God is well pleased.