“Be not too busy with thy work and care
To look to God, to clasp thy hand in his;
Miss thou all else, but fail thou not of this;
Thou need’st not all alone thy burdens bear;
Listen and wait, obey and learn his will,
His love and service all thy life shall fill.”
Some lives come to nothing because they take in too many interests. They are too crowded. One thing chokes out another, and, of course, it is always the best that is choked out. In one of our Lord’s parables he illustrates the mistake of this kind of living by a bit of soil in which the good seed sown in it failed because there was too much else growing in the same piece of ground. The soil itself was good, as good as the best. The seed was of excellent quality, the same that in another part of the field yielded a hundredfold. When it was first sown it began to grow and gave fine promise. But it soon became apparent that the soil was preoccupied. The roots of thorn bushes had been left in the ground, and when the wheat began to grow the thorns shot up too, and they grew so rapidly and so rankly that they crowded out the wheat, overshadowing it, drinking up the nourishment from the soil, so that nothing came in the end from the good seed which started so hopefully.
It is interesting to read our Lord’s interpretation of this part of his parable. The thorns, he says, are the cares, riches, and pleasures of this world. These things stay in the life where the good seed has been planted, and so fill the ground that they absorb the life’s strength and interest, and are so aggressive that they crowd out the gentler growths.
It is easy to understand how this can be. We all know how it is in a garden that is not well tended. The weeds spring up and choke out the flowers and vegetables. Weeding is a very important part of a gardener’s duty. The ground must be kept clean. Our hearts are like gardens. We plant the seeds, but the weeds were in the soil first, and they spring up at once, or even before our seeds have had time to send up their tender shoots. At once the battle begins. If the weeds are let alone they will soon have full possession, and all our gardening will be a failure.
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