Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 1563
“Break up your fallow ground: for it is time to seek the Lord, till He comes and rains righteousness upon you.” Hosea 10:12.
“BREAK up your fallow ground.” Nature at its largest is but a small farm and we had need to get a harvest out of every acre of it, for our needs are great. Have we left any part of our small allotment uncultivated? If so, it is time to look into the matter and see if we cannot improve this wasteful state of things. What part of our small allotment have we left fallow? We should think very poorly of a farmer who, for many years, allowed the best and the richest part of his farm to lie altogether neglected and untilled. An occasional fallow has its benefits in the world of Nature, but if the proprietor of rich and fruitful land allowed the soil to continue fallow year after year, we would judge him to be out of his wits! The wasted acres ought to be taken from him and given to another farmer who would worthily cherish the generous fields and encourage them to yield their harvests. Bad is the man who neglects to cultivate his farm, but what shall be said of the sluggard who fails to cultivate himself. If it is wrong to leave untended a part of our estate, how much worse must it be to disregard a portion of ourselves!
Now, there is a part of our nature which many allow to lie fallow. It is not often that they neglect the clay soil of their outward frame. They dress that field, which is called the body, with sufficient care and, truly, I would not that they should be careless about it, for it is worthy to be kept in due order and culture. Albeit that it is a very secondary part of our nature, yet it is so interwoven with the higher that it is most important that the body should not be neglected. See you well to that field and, by temperance, cleanliness and obedience to the rules of health, let it be as a garden. Though it is, after all, but dust and ashes, akin to the common earth around us, yet the body is honorable and when Divine Grace has sanctified the soul the body becomes the temple of the Holy Spirit.
Few need to be exhorted to pay attention to their bodies. “What shall we eat? What shall we drink and how shall we be clothed?” is a trinity of questions which the majority of mankind spend all their lives in answering. The fault is not that they care for the body, but that it takes an undue share of consideration and usurps a higher place than it can claim. There is a second field in man’s self-farm and this is called the mind, or the soul, and there are many who neglect this. These do ill, for, “that the soul is without knowledge, it is not good.” There should be, for the mental powers, instruction and discipline. We should seek to know and learn to understand, for we are not as the brutes which perish, which know nothing beyond their daily needs. We have thought and judgment and memory and imagination—these all need to be trained and used.
Let the mind be cultivated, by all means, and yet I need not say much upon this, for “culture” has become a kind of watchword with certain professors of religion and with supposed knowledge they are puffed up. They have enough thought for the mind and they glory in the harvests which it yields of human knowledge and earthly learning. The soul, in such cases, seems to be well tilled, but the spirit, the highest nature of all—that with which we speak to God—is suffered to lie entirely fallow! The soil where true religion should flourish in the furrows is left, by many, to produce the deadly nightshade of superstition, the hemlock of error, or the thistle of doubt!
Is it not so with some of you who listen to me at this hour? Your hearts, your innermost natures, have been neglected and from the finest part of your being the Lord has derived neither rent nor revenue! Your best acres lie fallow—fallow when you have good need to cultivate every inch of the ground. Do you know what happens to a fallow field? Do you know how it becomes caked and baked hard as though it were a brick? All the pliable qualities seem to depart and it hardens as it lies caked and unbroken—I mean, of course, if year follows year and the fallow remains untouched. And then the weeds! If a man will not sow wheat, he shall have a crop, you can be sure of that, for the weeds will spring up and they will seed themselves and, in due time, the multiplication table will be worked out to a very wonderful extent!
These seeds, multiplying a hundred-fold, as evil usually does, will increase and increase and increase, again, till the fallow field shall become a wilderness of thorns and briars and a thicket of weeds, nettle and thistle. If you do not cultivate your heart, Satan will cultivate it for you! If you bring no crop to God, the devil will be sure to reap a harvest! I fear that I am speaking to some who have never thought about this. It has not occurred to them to consider themselves and the reasons for which they have a being. There is one text which I should like to drop into your ear in the hope that it may drop down through your ear right into your heart, “The wicked shall be turned into Hell.” “Oh,” you say, “that is not me.” No, I did not mean that for you—I have not finished the verse yet. This is the part for you—“and all the nations that forget God.”