Sermon Illustrations on sowing seeds

its simplest form, the term “missional” is the noun “missionary” modified to be an adjective. Missional churches do what missionaries do, regardless of the context. They can parachute-drop into a vill...

One of my favorite sections of Home Depot is the power garden tool department. Even though I have all the tools I need, I still like browsing through Home Depot’s collection of power mowers, chainsaws...

The Bible has its own garden path. It runs from Genesis to Revelation. In fact, some of the most important events in the Christian faith take place in Biblical gardens, evens around which Christianity...

If we are to be God’s image-bearers with regard to creation, then we will carry on his pattern of work. His world is not hostile, so that it needs to be beaten down like an enemy. Rather, its potentia...

The story is told of a farmer in a Midwestern state who had a strong disdain for “religious” things. As he plowed his field on Sunday morning, he would shake his fist at the church people who passed b...

Many churches today remind me of a laboring crew trying to gather in a harvest while they sit in the tool shed. They go to the tool shed every Sunday and they study bigger and better methods of agricu...

My mom studied horticulture and could make a dead stick grow leaves. I do not have her genes. So what I am telling you know comes from sources who do know about fig trees. Here’s what they tell me. Fi...

An experienced gardener knows the value of not watering their tomatoes. Well, there's a little more to it, but that's the headline. Suppose you go to the nursery in the spring and get a tom...

It takes at least three years to for a grape vine to begin producing fruit. The planting site must be carefully chosen, the vine planted at just the right depth and at just the right time of year, the...

In the growth cycle of fruit-bearing plants, fruit comes at the very end. The cycle starts with a seed being planted in the ground. When watered, the seed will break open and begin to put down roots. ...

A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I made the long drive from San Antonio, Texas, to Pasadena, California, where we now reside. We passed through hundreds of miles of southwestern desert, most of whic...

In many parts of the country, leaf clean-up is an annual chore. They fall from the trees, blanket our lawns, and we often bag them up and toss them out (or burn them). There’s a lesson in this… In my...

The most exemplary nature is that of the topsoil. It is very Christ-like in its passivity and beneficence, and in the penetrating energy that issues out of its peaceableness. It increases by experienc...

In this excerpt from a sermon on the Lord’s Supper delivered by Augustine of Hippo to a group of Catechumens, (a Christian believer preparing for Baptism) the great bishop compares the process in whic...

In his excellent book, An Unhurried Life, Alan Fadling contrasts our overly busy lives with a vision of the kingdom from Isaiah chapter 61: Isaiah envisioned a kingdom in which those people in need ...

An empty-nester friend of mine was recently reflecting on the long days at home with a growing family. “You just gotta keep slinging chow,” she said with a laugh. I laughed too . . . but not quite as ...

The earth had been completely unformed and empty; in the six-day process of development God had formed it and filled it—but not completely. People must now carry on the work of development: by being f...

At start of spring I open a trench in the ground. I put into it the winter’s accumulation of paper, pages I do not want to read. Again, useless words, fragments, errors. And I put into it the contents...

In Thanks! I wrote that legendary investor and philanthropist Sir John Templeton had posed the question, “How can we get six billion people around the world to practice gratitude?” Not long after Sir ...

The following story comes from the collection of sayings of the Desert Fathers and Mothers in Egypt, teaching that would have first been transmitted orally (around 350-450 A.D.) and later written down...

I’m more of an aboveground type of girl, as in, I like the stuff you can see. Flowers, trees, and vegetation symbolize life, growth, and transformation. The problem with focusing on external manifesta...

In this short excerpt from a series of sermons for the Lenten season, pastor and author John H. Baumgaertner shares this short poem about the Lenten journey: Opening our windows toward Jerusalem And...

Sabbath honors the necessary wisdom of dormancy. If certain plant species, for example, do not lie dormant for winter, they will not bear fruit in the spring. If this continues for more than a season,...

The child became a man and the man became a preacher whose sermons were full of commonplace things: seeds and nets, coins and fishes, lilies of the field, and birds of the air. Wherever he was, he had...

All the succession of time, all the changes in nature, all the varieties of light and darkness, the thousand thousands of accidents in the world, and every contingency to every one, preaches our funer...

I am told that when SAS soldiers parachute into unknown territory they are trained to pause before moving. They must first get their bearings and only then set out for their destination. That is wise ...

The inordinate desire in the west to increase productivity, to go faster and faster, especially in business, can actually become counterproductive. In this short story from the Chinese philosopher Men...

It’s been right here all along—the land teaching us how to un-hurry our hurry-sick hearts. Land speaks stunning truths through Scripture. The Hebrew word for land is eretz. It is the fifth most freque...

In the Parable of the Lost Coin, the woman who discovers that she has lost one of her ten silver coins doesn’t just hope that the coin will be found. She diligently works at finding it. She lights a l...

In his excellent study of the famous Biblical passage on shepherds, ( The Good Shepherd: A Thousand Year Journey from Psalm 23 to the New Testament ) , scholar Ken Bailey provides helpful context...