Spiritual Growth Requires Good Soil in the Garden of Our Hearts

Yesterday I opened my compost bin and began to dig out the organic matter that I had been waiting to incorporate into my garden.  As I shoveled through the broken remains of the once delicious fruit, I thought about how God wants to use the refuse of our lives to produce good fruit for the future harvest.  

Ezekiel 17:5,6

Then he took of the seed of the land and planted it in fertile soil.  He placed it beside abundant waters. He set it like a willow twig, 6 and it sprouted and became a low spreading vine, and its branches turned toward him, and its roots remained where it stood. So it became a vine and produced branches and put out boughs.

Every good gardener knows that a garden's soil is the most important component of a garden.  In order to produce good fruit it is necessary to plant your seeds in fertile soil.

You can have the best heirloom tomato plant but if the soil where you plant it is not nutrient rich and composed of a fertile loam, then it will not produce the desired fruit.

Loam soils are comprised of nutrient-rich moist humus that provides good drainage and serves to provide roots with the much needed infiltration of water and air they need to grow a strong, healthy network to support the needs of the growing vascular system of the plant.


In order for a plant to have a good root system the developing roots need to be able to plow through the soil and they must have water as well as air to grow properly.  

Our hearts are the soil of our spiritual garden.  If we have hardened our hearts then the  water of the word and the breath of God are unable to penetrate to the roots of the plants that are planted their awaiting a harvest of righteousness.

If we continually avoid the hard work of digging up the fallow ground of our hearts and adding to it the broken shards of our past that enrich our lives and thus provide the fertilizer for new growth of ourselves and others, then we are not being good stewards of the garden where God longs to meet us and redeem us.

Other seed fell on good soil and produced grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty.  He who has ears let him hear...

 As for what was sown on good soil, this is the one who hears the word and understands it. He indeed bears fruit and yields, in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty.” Matthew 13:8,9,23

If we want to bear much fruit we need to pay attention to the words of Jesus.  We need to consider what He is saying here.  We must be intentional about maintaining a rich, fertile, aerated heart where seeds can develop to full maturity.

We need to be willing to do the sanctifying work of allowing the Word of God to penetrate our hearts and minds and bring conviction and breakdown the strongholds that we have erected there to prevent God and others from seeing our broken shards in the pile of our lives.  

Compost is developed into a its rich, moist, nutrient rich consistency by an anaerobic environment that produces much heat.  We too must allow God to be our only source and shut of the oxygen that the world feeds us and determine to allow Him control of our hearts in order to go through the process of changing our hearts by heat and pressure.  

We must allow God to do the deep penetrating work through His word and by His spirit so that our roots can grow deep and therefore be a well watered branch attached to the vine. Let's turn toward Him!

Ezekiel 19:10-11 (ESV)

Your mother was like a vine in a vineyard

    planted by the water,

fruitful and full of branches

    by reason of abundant water.