Guard Your Heart — Only Let What You Want Growing Get Planted There

I'm excited to keep going in this series, because today I want to talk to you about something that's easy to forget: seedtime and harvest doesn't care what anybody thinks about you.

If you sow a tomato seed, you're going to get a tomato plant. People can talk about you, people can join up against you, people can hate you — it doesn't matter. The seed still produces after its kind.

Concentrate on the cause, not just the symptom

When you've got a challenge — health, finances, family — start with health first, because if you're not alive, none of the rest of it matters.

But I've also had to ask the Lord a harder question: am I treating a symptom instead of the cause? I was spending too much money once, meditating on financial seed, and He showed me the actual problem wasn't income — it was that I needed to be wiser with what I already had.

My body is the product of what I've sown. If I quit sowing sandwiches into my mouth, I'd quit reaping a belly-roll harvest.

I haven't worked out like I should lately, and I can tell — there's a harvest for that too. Everything works this way. The Kingdom of God is no different.

Are you sowing seeds for the future you actually want?

Don't just sow seed for what you need right now — sow seed for what you want.

I've got a daughter, Victoria, and I started sowing seed over her life the moment she was born. Every time I change her diaper, I speak over her: she'll never be a moment of heartbreak to her mother or me, or to the Lord Jesus. Sickness and disease are broken off her. She'll marry the right man at the right time.

I read the Word over her every morning during my own Bible reading. I'm sowing that seed on purpose, on a schedule, before I ever see the harvest.

You get to reject what gets planted in your heart

Here's the flip side. What are you allowing other people to sow into you?

If a friend showed up at my house and said, "I brought some asparagus seed, I want to plant it in your yard," I'd tell him no — I don't want an asparagus harvest, so I'm not taking the seed, no matter how much he loves me or how much he says it's out of concern.

It matters what gets sown. You have to decide: I'm only going to allow the Word of God to be sown in my heart.

Stop letting somebody else's failure become your excuse

People love to bring up the guy Paul left sick, or the fact that Elisha died sick, as proof that healing isn't for everybody.

For every one exception somebody wants to argue with me about, I can show you a hundred places where Jesus healed everyone who came to Him. There's only one perfect person in Scripture — Jesus. Everybody else, Paul included, had a flesh to deal with, same as we do.

You need to be watchful about what you allow to get sown down on the inside of you.

If you're going to tell me a story about someone's loss, fine — but you'd better also tell me how Jesus raises people back up, because that's who He is.

It's not enough to hear it — you have to apply your heart to understand it

“And these are the ones by the wayside where the word is sown. When they hear, Satan comes immediately and takes away the word that was sown in their hearts.”

Mark 4:15 (NKJV)

Here's what a lot of people miss: that day, nobody understood the parable — not even the twelve. The difference is what they did next.

Some people heard it, shrugged, and went to go get lunch. Others stayed and said, "I don't understand this, but I need to." That decision is what moved them out of the first ground.

Don't get frustrated because you don't understand something you're reading and throw the Bible down. Sit with it and say, "I don't understand yet, but I'm going to."

There are things in the Word today that I understand after thirty years that I didn't understand my first year saved. I'm still growing. But I keep applying my heart to understand — and I'm asking you to join me in that.

Fight To Win.