Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 2843
“As he sowed, some fell by the wayside; and it was trodden down, and the fowls of the air devoured it.” Luke 8:5.
THIS parable is recorded by Matthew, Mark and Luke. It is a very important one and, therefore, it is very carefully preserved for us. Matthew puts it, “When he sowed, some seeds fell by the wayside, and the fowls came, and devoured them up.”
Notice that the sower is always spoken of as a solitary man. In the harvest field, there is a great company and they sing and shout together in harmony, but the sower goes forth alone. Our Savior was the great Sower—“THE SOWER went forth to sow,” unaccompanied. He pursued His solitary way and all day long He continued His personal task. For that reason, I feel that when we come together in large numbers, the majority of us, I hope, being earnest sowers of the Good Seed of the Kingdom, we help to cheer each other up, for, to a large extent, we have to work alone. I have, thank God, many helpers, but there are certain parts of this work in which I feel an almost unbearable solitude. I suppose that you who are engaged in your own spheres of service often derive much comfort from Christian communion, but there must be some parts of your work in which you have to act by yourselves—to labor alone and to wait upon God alone. I think that this experience is good for us. I do not believe that it is good for us to be continually leaning upon one another, like those houses of which so many are being run up nowadays. If you took the end one away, they would all fall down! We want to be self-contained—not merely semi-detached, but altogether detached—so as to be able to stand by ourselves upon our own foundation. God sometimes takes away a helper from us in order that we may learn to lean upon Him, only, and to go about our service in entire dependence upon the Master who is to derive Glory not only from the result of the service, but from the service itself.
It may do us good to talk a little while about our failures. I suppose that we have all had a good many. When some of you began your work for God, you thought that you were going to push the world before you and to drag the Church behind you—but you have not done it yet. You fancied that you were going to convert everybody by your preaching, but, like Melancthon, you have had to say, “Old Adam is too strong for young Melancthon.” And you have been driven closer to God by the very failures which you have experienced. If the Holy Spirit shall graciously help us, we may both glorify God and comfort one another while we meditate upon one set of failures with which we are constantly meeting, that is, those that are set forth in these words, “As he sowed, some fell by the wayside; and it was trodden down, and the fowls of the air devoured it.”
So, first, we learn that we shall have some unprofitable labors. Secondly, we shall find that some soils will remain unsuitable for the Good Seed. And, thirdly, we shall have to watch that seed, that we may learn something from what happens to it
I. First, then, WE SHALL MOST CERTAINLY HAVE SOME UNPROFITABLE LABORS, something to sigh
over, something that will drive us to cry, with Isaiah, “Who has believed our report, and to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed?”
We may expect this, first, because it is so in everything else. There is not a tradesman here who makes a profit on everything. There never was a merchant who was successful in every transaction. There are losses in the most gainful trade.
Look at the fisherman—does he catch fish every time he casts his net? I have stood, many times, on the sea shore at Men-tone and seen from a dozen to 20 men pull in a net which had encompassed many acres of sea—and when they had pulled it in, I could hold in my hand all that they had caught! And I have seen them go out again almost directly after, and come in again with as little as before! But they still kept on their task even though, often and often, the tiniest plate would hold all that they took. Fishermen do not give up their work because they have some failures in their fishing—and if we take the figure which our Lord used, that of the farmer, we find that all crops do not succeed. The farmer, after some years of experience, at any rate, does not expect that every seed will come up and that every crop will be, alike, bountiful. If he did, he would be sorely disappointed! He learns at last to set the gain over against the loss, to set the success over against the failure and so he perseveres and has patience, expecting and believing that, in the long run, he will be a gainer. So, dear Christian Friend, whatever is your sphere of service, I would lead you to expect that there will be some unprofitable parts of the field because it is so in everything else—and the analogies of Nature generally hold good in the sphere of Grace.
Do you not think, in the next place, that our disappointments and our unprofitable labors teach us our dependence upon God? Perhaps we are not yet able to bear a very large measure of success. If the Lord blesses some Brothers a little, and they see a few souls brought to Christ, they are not only very grateful and very happy, which is quite right, but they are very great in their own esteem, which is quite wrong! You should hear them at night after a successful meeting—you would hardly know them! God has given them a puff of wind in their sail and they are almost blown over, for they have so little ballast. There are some of us workers for God whom He cannot trust with success—that is one reason for our failures, for our Master means to make more use of us, by-and-by. It does not yet appear what we shall be and He is humbling us that we may be fitted to bear the exceeding weight of happiness which He means to lay upon us when, in later years, He makes us bring forth abundantly to His praise and Glory.