Dear Discipleship-first Friends,
A full schedule doesn’t always mean a fruitful life. Sometimes the noise of everyday life crowds out the very thing we need most: time to listen to Jesus.
In this excerpt from his new book, Wait/Hear, Robby Gallaty invites us to examine the soil of our hearts—and consider what might need to change so God’s Word can take deeper root.
Excerpt from Robby’s new book, Wait/Hear
You’ve heard Jesus’ parable of the sower, probably a hundred times. I’m assuming you’ve always believed—as I did and preached about it for years—that His main point in telling this story was to illustrate how evangelism works. A sower “went out to sow” (Matt. 13:3)— to spread abroad “the word about the kingdom” (v.19)— and the seed landed in different types of soil. Three times out of the four, the person given the opportunity to receive the seed, to receive God’s gift of salvation, turned it away instead. Therefore, these are the rates of return we should generally expect whenever we share the gospel with the unsaved. It’s a one-in-four proposition. Some receive Him, but most reject Him because the makeup of their “soil” is resistant to the gospel. That’s the popular interpretation of this parable.
But after carefully considering the cultural context of the story and the audience to whom Jesus was speaking, I have changed my perspective. No longer do I think His purpose was to show His followers the difference between people who are going to heaven and people who are not. I now believe His story is a mirror for us as believers to hold up in front of our own faces, helping us diagnose the condition of our soul. Because even in being a person whom God has already saved, our lives can look like all the different kinds of soils, sometimes in the space of one weekend. Hard-hearted, shallow, overcrowded, receptive. Yet only one of those types of soil—the “good” soil (vv.8, 23)— gives the seed what’s required for bearing fruit in it.
I want to spotlight one of the soils Jesus described: the ground that was tangled with thorns. “This is one who hears the word,” Jesus said, “but the worries of this age and the deceitfulness of wealth choke the word, and it becomes unfruitful” (v.22).
These are the distracted hearts. And all too often these are our hearts. This is the heart of someone who’s become a cyber-zombie tethered to his or her digital devices. This is the heart that keeps us constantly swiping up and swiping down, forever responding to the texts and emails, almost from the moment our eyes crack open in the morning until our heads hit the pillow at night.
This is the heart that scrunches down into Netflix and football and video games at the first opportunity, as soon as the workday lets up long enough to give us a minute to call our own. This is the heart that looks up from watching YouTube Shorts, one after another, and then wonders what just happened with the last two-and-a-half hours.
This is the heart so preoccupied with the demands of growing a business or perfecting a skill that it’s lost all sensitivity for focusing on anything that doesn’t contribute to its own pursuit of what feels like success. This is the heart deceived into thinking that consuming news and political commentary is more important than any other information we could be gathering at any given moment.
It’s a heart overrun with true crime documentaries and cultural podcasts and Amazon purchases and travel ball. A heart that’s forgotten what it’s like to have an original thought anymore. A heart who’s first impulse at the sound of a spare moment is to reach for the smartphone.
And do you know what else it is? It’s a heart that’s too busy to hear from God. Therefore, it’s a heart that produces little, if any, fruit. Because fruit doesn’t grow amid the thorns of distraction.
Fruit only grows in the fertile soil of hearing God’s Word, of valuing God’s presence.
The volume of God’s voice, when He speaks to His children, is subtle. It’s a whisper. The cadence of His words, as they resonate in our spirits, is imperceptible to the untrained ear. We must discipline ourselves to pick up on His whisper by slowing down, by setting the distractions aside and by cultivating space for stillness and silence.
Charles Spurgeon, the prince of preachers, was known to have attendees sit silently for a minute at the conclusion of his message, instead of just rushing off to the next item on the order of service. He knew how the Holy Spirit worked in people’s lives—not by keeping the schedule rolling but by allowing the seed enough time to set. He understood that his responsibility to his hearers was not merely delivering them information but creating an environment that made possible in them a divine transformation.
The Quakers employed a similar practice, something they termed “expectant waiting.” Robert Barclay, a Scottish Quaker living in the 1600s, said, “When assembled, the great work of one and all ought to be to wait upon God, and returning out of their own thoughts and imaginations, to feel the Lord’s presence and know a ‘gathering into His Name’ indeed, where he is ‘in the midst’ according to His promise.”
We never lose when we seek the Lord, when we choose His presence over our own problems, our own pressures, our own preoccupations. The thing that costs us is all the time we’ve given over to our demanding distractions, only to come away with nothing. When we could have had everything. When we could have had Him.
In a world that values productivity over presence, choose presence.
In a culture that rewards busyness over being, choose being.
In a time when everyone is distracted, choose to be fully present with the One who is always present with you.
Don’t let the noise of life drown out the voice of God. Choose to sit at the feet of Jesus. Because the choice is yours.
What might change if you made room to listen?
In Wait / Hear: Recapturing the Lost Art of Hearing God’s Voice, Robby Gallaty shares his journey through burnout and invites readers to rediscover stillness, surrender, and time with God.
This article is an excerpt from Wait / Hear, published by B&H Publishing.
Robby Gallaty (MDiv, PhD, New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary) is the Senior Pastor of Long Hollow Church in Hendersonville, Tennessee, and the author of multiple books. He was radically saved from a life of drug addiction on November 12, 2002. In 2008, he formed Replicate Ministries to empower churches to activate their unique disciple-making movement. Robby and his wife Kandi have two sons, Rig and Ryder.