Meditation

Read Matthew 13:1-23                                 —Matthew 13:23 (NIV)

The seed falling on good soil refers to someone who hears the word and understands it. This is the one who produces a crop, yielding a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown.

One of our church members invited us to her farm to experience agriculture. We got up early one day to go to her farm to plant taros, a type of root vegetable. Several weeks later, we were invited back to check each taro we had planted and remove weeds around it to help it grow healthily and to obtain a rich harvest. We found that every young taro looked bigger than before, which made us happy. However, when we looked carefully, we saw that almost every taro had been surrounded by weeds; some of the weeds had even grown bigger than the taros. We started to pull the weeds from around the taros. One of my church members advised me as she watched my work, “Just picking the weeds is not enough! You have to pull out the roots!”

This experience made me think about our spiritual growth as Christians. We can cultivate spiritual growth as Christians. We can cultivate spiritual fruit, such as love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. To make this possible, we must completely remove all the weeds—including the roots—that hinder our spiritual growth.

Prayer—Dear God, help us to remove what is unnecessary in our lives in order to be what you want us to be. Amen.

Thought for the Day—What “weeds” are hindering my spiritual growth?

Kazuo Ishikawa (Akita, Japan)