Are You A Seed Sown Among Thorns?

This post is a part of my series of once weekly devotionals called Faith for Thought. Bookmark the homepage for Faith for Thought here to return to it for the weekly update on Thursday!

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A Reading from Mark 4:13-20

¹³ Then Jesus said to them, “Don’t you understand this parable? How then will you understand any parable? ¹⁴ The farmer sows the word. ¹⁵ Some people are like seed along the path, where the word is sown. As soon as they hear it, Satan comes and takes away the word that was sown in them. ¹⁶ Others, like seed sown on rocky places, hear the word and at once receive it with joy. ¹⁷ But since they have no root, they last only a short time. When trouble or persecution comes because of the word, they quickly fall away. ¹⁸ Still others, like seed sown among thorns, hear the word; ¹⁹ but the worries of this life, the deceitfulness of wealth and the desires for other things come in and choke the word, making it unfruitful. ²⁰ Others, like seed sown on good soil, hear the word, accept it, and produce a crop—some thirty, some sixty, some a hundred times what was sown.”
Mark 4:13-20, NIV

Devotion

This year for Christmas, our family got the board game Ticket to Ride. And much to my husband’s dismay, we’ve been playing that game every day since. (Not that my husband hates games…just ones that take several hours. And did I mention we got arguably the most difficult — and lengthiest — version featuring the Great Lakes?)

Despite my competitiveness, I hate to admit that I’m not very good at this game. If you’ve never played it before, here’s the condensed version of the complicated rules that would normally take hours to learn: There are lots of different train routes connecting different cities on the board, and, in this Rails to Sails version, ship routes as well. Each person randomly takes a few “tickets to ride” — route tickets that have a city as a starting point and a city as an ending point. Then, it’s a race to try to play little trains and ships to complete the secret routes connecting your cities before the game is over. Complete them, and you get the points on the card. Fail to complete them, and those points get subtracted. 

My problem is that I always get distracted.  

One game I had my route all planned out…before realizing I didn’t have enough trains left — only ships. In another game, I used up all of my trains trying to get to Toledo…before realizing that my route card said Toronto.

You might wonder how I could mess this up, when I had my trains and route cards next to me the whole game. I could have easily counted my trains or double-checked my route cards.

Let me just defend myself: With 4 other players, this game is quite complicated. Not only are you trying to complete your own routes, but you’re trying to complete them before you get blocked by the other players. And then you have to decide if you want to build harbors for bonus points, too. Or would it make more sense to try to build longer routes? Or take more tickets to try to complete even more routes than the 3-5 you start with? In the middle of trying to figure all of this out, I mistakenly thought I would remember the most important thing: completing my routes.

• Save

I’m afraid we do the same thing with our Bibles, too. In the midst of big decisions like what career path to follow or who we should marry, and small decisions like where to go on vacation or what we’re going to have for dinner tonight, we forget the most important thing. We think we already know about God; we forget to pick up the Bibles right next to us. Someone told me once that he didn’t need to go to church anymore. He already knew all there was to know, he said. 

That couldn’t be further from the truth. 

Like I do during that board game, we get easily distracted. We become like the seeds that fall among thorns; choked out by worries, wealth, and the things of the world. Without continuing to study God’s word, we lose sight of what really matters.

Take Action

If you don’t already have one, commit to beginning a daily routine of Bible reading. (And if you do, may this devotional encourage you to continue it!) If you don’t know where to start, check out the YouVersion Bible app. There are plans for those new to the faith, plans to read the entire Bible, and thematic plans. Check it out + commit to a plan today!