New Testament : The Parable of the Sower? What Is the Parable of the Sower? The Parable of the Sower is recorded in three of the four biblical gospels. The human heart is like receptive soil to the seed of the Word of God. Jesus used this analogy in the Parable of the Sower. The Parable of the Sower is recorded in three of the four biblical Gospels – Matthew 13:1-23, Mark 4:1-20, and Luke 8:1-15. The human heart is like receptive soil to the seed of the Word of God. Jesus used this analogy in the Parable of the Sower. The soil that the seed fell on represents four categories of hearers’ hearts, four different reactions to the Word of God: the hard heart, the shallow heart, the crowded heart, and the fruitful heart.
The sower is the one who brings the word of God to the people. The seeds are the word of God coming to the people. The places where the seeds fell are the hearts of people. Pathway denotes the hearts of some people who doesn’t understand the word of God as their hearts are hardened and Satan take away the word of God from their hearts. Stony areas denote the hearts of people who accepts the word of God happily but when they face tribulations for word of God, they cannot withstand the pain and thus the word of God can’t grow in them to produce fruits.
The Parable of the Sower (sometimes called the Parable of the Soils) is a parable of Jesus found in the three different Gospel books of The Holy Bible in Matthew 13:1-23, Mark 4:1-20, and Luke 8:4-15. Speaking to a large crowd, Jesus tells a story of a farmer who sows the seed and does so indiscriminately. Some seed falls on the wayside with no soil at all, some on rocky ground with little soil, some on soil which contains thorns, and some on good soil. In the first three cases, the seed is taken away or fails to produce a crop, but when it falls on good soil it grows, yielding thirty, sixty, or a hundredfold. See more info with the The Parable of the Sower video on YouTube.
Later, Jesus explains to his disciples that the seed represents the Gospel, the sower represents anyone who proclaims Jesus is the messiah and Son of God, God the Father himself. The various soils represent people’s responses to it, The first three representing rejection and not holding onto their faith while the last one represents holding and growing their faith until the end. The Parable of the Sower story begins with a farmer in this farmer who had a big huge bag of seeds. He decided one day that he was going to go into his field and he was going to start sowing seeds.
Now wait for a second here I’ve heard of sewing machines and sewing clothes, but I’ve never heard of sowing seeds. What does “The Parable of the Sower” mean? Well, sowing seeds actually just means to scatter or to throw seeds. So the farmer went to his field, he started to scatter seeds around and throw seeds around into the field. Some of the seeds fell onto a path while other seeds fell onto Rocky soil. Still, others fell into the soil with thorn bushes. And finally, some seeds fell into good soil. Now after some time, the seeds that fell onto the path were snatched up and eaten by birds.
The last kind of soil that Jesus talks about is a deep, fertile soil. The word of the gospel falls in that soil and it sends down roots, it sends then a deep foundation into the soil and grabs on and begins to get nourished by the soil. The plant sprouts up and it begins to produce fruit and that’s the kind of life Jesus is saying, that you ought to have. That’s the kind of response you ought to have to the gospel. Not when it gets choked out, not when it gets shriveled up by persecution, not one that just really doesn’t care and has no penetration at all. But one that receives the word and sends down roots into it, begins to get nourished by it and then creates fruit.