Vincent Van Gogh painted The Sower more than 30 times. One of the most striking versions shows a man mid-stride, flinging seed across a freshly tilled field. The sun is low, almost setting, and the soil is golden, ready. There’s no guarantee in the image. No visible fruit. Just a man walking forward in hope, scattering life into the dirt.
Jesus tells a similar story in Mark 4:1-20. A sower goes out to sow — the seed is the Word of God, and the soil is the human heart. Some seed is snatched away. Some withers. Some is choked. But some lands in good soil — soft, deep, uncluttered — and produces a harvest far greater than what was planted.
It’s a familiar parable. But maybe it feels more distant in 2025 than it once did.
James K.A. Smith, drawing on Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, describes our moment as one enclosed in an “immanent frame” — a cultural airlock where belief in anything transcendent feels not only unlikely, but almost unreasonable. Ours is an age of doubt — not loud, rebellious doubt, but quiet, ambient disillusionment. Even faith can start to feel like wishful thinking. The soil doesn’t just seem hard — it seems sealed off.
So what does Jesus’ story of the sower mean in an age like ours?
It means the miracle of soft soil is still possible.
Jesus knew what kind of world He was sowing into. He didn’t avoid the path, the rocks, or the thorns. And He doesn’t now. He keeps sowing. Generously. Why? Because surprising grace still breaks up hard ground.
The soft soil — the heart that receives the Word and bears fruit — is always a miracle. Not a product of personality, effort, or optimism, but of the Spirit breaking open the hard-packed ground of unbelief. We don’t become receptive by nature. We are made receptive by grace.
Which brings us back to Van Gogh. He wasn’t painting certainty. He was painting faith. He saw, in that everyday act of sowing, something eternal — a sacred trust that life could rise from dirt. He wrote once that “the sower continues calmly sowing on the field,” because he believes something unseen is already happening beneath the surface.
So let me ask: What is the condition of your soil?
Are you open — not just on Sundays, but in the middle of an anxious scroll, or a hard conversation, or a quiet walk? Is your faith rooted deep enough to endure heat? Are there thorns — worries, lies, ambitions — slowly choking what God is trying to grow?
Jesus doesn’t demand we fix the soil. He invites us to let Him soften it. To repent. To surrender. To listen. To receive.
And then, He calls us to become sowers.
At Cross Point, we believe every follower of Jesus is both soil and sower. We receive the Word, but we also carry it into our fields — workplaces, families, coffee shops, city blocks. The harvest isn’t our job. Faithfulness is.
Smith reminds us that even in a disenchanted world, there are still cracks. Longings we can’t explain. Restlessness that refuses to settle. These are entry points for the seed. Places where the Word might just take root. Listen for them.
And don’t stop sowing. Keep walking like the man in the painting — calm, faithful, generous. The field still belongs to God. And the miracle beneath your feet might already be underway.