General • Refresh: A Summer Collection (Vol. 3) •
“I am certain that God, who began the good work within you, will continue his work until it is finally finished on the day when Christ Jesus returns.” — Philippians 1:6 (NLT)
General • Refresh: A Summer Collection (Vol. 3) •
“The Son of Man is the farmer who plants the good seed.” — Matthew 13:37 (NLT) General • Refresh: A Summer Collection (Vol. 3) •
“Anyone with ears to hear should listen and understand.” — Matthew 13:9 (NLT) General • Refresh: A Summer Collection (Vol. 3) •
“Still other seeds fell on fertile soil, and they produced a crop that was thirty, sixty, and even a hundred times as much as had been planted!” — Matthew 13:8 (NLT) General • Refresh: A Summer Collection (Vol. 3) •
“People judge by outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.” — 1 Samuel 16:7 (NLT) General • Refresh: A Summer Collection (Vol. 3) •
“The Lord is good to everyone. He showers compassion on all his creation.” — Psalm 145:9 (NLT) General • Refresh: A Summer Collection (Vol. 3) •
“I am certain that God, who began the good work within you, will continue his work until it is finally finished on the day when Christ Jesus returns.” — Philippians 1:6 (NLT)
We’ve been sold a particular version of purpose. Find it. Chase it. Achieve it. Prove it. Entire seasons of life get spent searching for the right calling, the right caree, or the right moment when you’ll finally feel like you’re living the life God intended. But when you arrive, there’s always another horizon. The syndrome of almost there, but not quite yet. And then when you reach it, you need more.
Purpose got sold to us as a target. But what if it’s something else entirely?
Pastor Leon spent ten years leading and flourishing church in the Netherlands, then God called him to Canada. In navigating immigration, language, and mourning what was, he slowly discovered that God is more interested in your posture than your position.
There is more in the journey than the destination, which is already promised. The promised land was good for Israel, yet what God was after in those forty years was something deeper than a piece of land. He was after their hearts.
Your divine purpose is not to achieve a certain result. It is to receive the heart, attitude, and mind of Christ. Purpose is formed in you, not accomplished by you.
What version of purpose have you been chasing? What keeps moving the horizon?
How has that shaped your relationship with God?
Lord, I’m learning that purpose is not a target to hit but rather a posture to keep. I’ve been more focused on what I’m building for You than on who I’m becoming with You. Today I let go of the destination for a moment. I want what You’re after — the heart, the attitude, the mind of Christ formed in me. Continue to work in me. Amen.
General • Refresh: A Summer Collection (Vol. 3) •
“The Son of Man is the farmer who plants the good seed.” — Matthew 13:37 (NLT)
The farmer in Jesus’ parable does something that strikes every gardener as strange: he scatters seed everywhere, not just in the good soil. He throws it across the whole field in footpath, rocky ground, thorns, and fertile soil alike. A careful farmer doesn’t do that. You find the best spot and plant there. But this farmer scatters everywhere.
What Jesus is revealing about Himself in this image is staggering. He doesn’t survey the ground first and decide who is worth the seed. He sows into every kind of soil, including the soil He already knows won’t carry it.
God’s goodness is not rationed to the deserving. His sunlight falls on both the evil and the good. His rain comes on the just and unjust alike. The Son of Man is constantly sowing: peace of mind and heart, every spiritual blessing, the joy of His presence, grace and more grace.
This means the question is never whether God is sowing into your life. He always is. The variable is never the sower or the seed but the ground itself. This means the question is always about your posture, your soil, and how your heart is currently positioned to receive what He’s already throwing.
What does it do to you to know that God is sowing good seed into your life constantly — not waiting for you to become worthy soil first?
Where in your life might God be sowing something you haven’t yet recognised as a gift because of the condition of the ground it landed on?
Lord, You sow everywhere. That kind of generosity is beyond me, and I’m grateful. Today I want to notice what You’re sowing into my life. Not just the obvious moments, but the quiet daily seeds od peace, presence, blessing, and grace. I receive it. All of it. Let it find good ground in me. Amen.
General • Refresh: A Summer Collection (Vol. 3) •
“Anyone with ears to hear should listen and understand.” — Matthew 13:9 (NLT)
Nobody in the parable was deaf. The seed reached every type of ground so every person in the story heard the message — the footpath, the rocky soil, the thorns, the good ground. It’s about whether they let what they heard actually land, take root, and become something in them.
There’s a difference between hearing and truly hearing. We hear selectively all the time — certain words register because we’re already attentive to them, and others pass straight over us. Jesus used the same pair of words for the good soil: those who “truly hear and understand.” The Greek word behind “understand” means to set or join together in the mind — to connect what you heard to how you live. Not just to receive information, but to let it become formation.
This is the posture question at the heart of the parable. You can sit in a service, hear a word, agree with it, even feel moved by it, and still let the seed get taken, scorched, or choked before it bears anything. The soil that produces thirty, sixty, a hundredfold is the soil that truly hears. That stays open long enough for the seed to go down. That doesn’t just nod at truth but lets truth change the ground.
Think about the last time something from God’s word genuinely changed the way you lived, not just the way you thought. What made that different?
What is one thing God has been saying to you repeatedly that you have been hearing without yet letting it land?
Lord, I pray that the seeds You’ve scattered in my life would grow. Help me slow down enough to let what You’re saying actually land. Connect what I’m hearing to how I’m living. Let the Word find soil in me that holds it. Amen.
General • Refresh: A Summer Collection (Vol. 3) •
“Still other seeds fell on fertile soil, and they produced a crop that was thirty, sixty, and even a hundred times as much as had been planted!” — Matthew 13:8 (NLT)
Here’s the temptation with this parable: we pick our favourite. We hear the four soils and we choose the one we want to be (the good ground, obviously) and then we read the rest of the story through that comfortable lens. I’m the good soil. Those others are the difficult people I know.
But a farmer doesn’t own four farms. Footpath, rock, thorns, and good ground are all conditions inside one field. There are areas where seed lands in you and takes root immediately, where fruit comes easily and abundantly; and there are areas where the ground is hard because you’ve walked the same path so many times the soil won’t open. There are areas where the roots are shallower than you thought. Areas where the thorns of worry and the lure of distraction crowd out what was genuinely growing.
All of it is in the same field. The invitation is not to claim the good soil and ignore the rest. It is to honestly assess the whole field — to look at where you’re bearing thirty, sixty, a hundredfold with gratitude, and also to look at where the footpath has formed, where the rocks are, where the thorns are growing. That honest assessment is not condemnation. It is the beginning of good gardening.
Which of the four soils do you most readily identify with in one area of your life? Which do you least want to admit is also present?
Where are the thorns currently growing in your life — the worries, the distractions, the lure of things that seem legitimate but are crowding out what matters?
Lord, help me have an honest assessment with myself — the hard paths, the shallow roots, and the thorns I’ve let grow. Don’t let me skip past them to get to the comfortable parts. Be the gardener in every corner of my field so that seeds would sprout and grow. Amen.
General • Refresh: A Summer Collection (Vol. 3) •
“People judge by outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.” — 1 Samuel 16:7 (NLT)
God didn’t pick David for his height, appearance, or overall resume. He picked David for his heart posture. It didn’t mean David’s heart was perfect, but he continually sought after God even when he failed. He kept tending the ground of his own heart. He brought his honest prayers, his anger, his fear, his repentance, his joy — all of it into the presence of God. The soil of his life stayed workable because he kept working it.
Tilling is the practice. Good soil is not naturally occurring, it is made. It requires someone with a spade. The footpath that has formed because you’ve walked the same mental route over and over needs to be broken open. The rocks, which often represent pain and offence that hardened the soil over time, need to be dug out. Sometimes that requires professional help, honest conversation, or the slow work of letting God into places you’ve kept locked. The thorns need to be named and pulled: the worries, the distractions, the legitimate-sounding anxieties that crowd out what God is growing.
And here’s an important thing to remember: you cannot make the seed grow. That is God’s work. But you can tend the soil. You can invest in your posture so that God can produce fruit in you.
What are the rocks in your soil — the pain, the offence, the wound that has made the ground shallow? What would it look like to let God (and perhaps trusted people) help get them out?
Lord, I pick up the spade today so that Your Word would fall on good soil. Show me where the path has hardened, where the rocks are buried, where the thorns are choking. I’ll do the honest work of opening it up while You water the ground. Amen.
General • Refresh: A Summer Collection (Vol. 3) •
“The Lord is good to everyone. He showers compassion on all his creation.” — Psalm 145:9 (NLT)
One of the subtler forms of hard soil is the script. Scripts are not always wrong beliefs, but they could be old frames that once held truth and have become too small for what God is currently doing.
God has to change the ground before new seed can grow there. The process of having a script challenged, a certainty disrupted, or a familiar framework questioned can feel like loss before it feels like freedom. These are not signs that faith is failing. They are often signs that the spade is going in.
The Son of Man scatters seed on every type of ground, including the hard paths He knows will resist it. That kind of persistent, non-discriminating generosity is itself a script-changer. He doesn’t sow only where the return is guaranteed. He sows everywhere, because His goodness is not conditional on the quality of the soil. And if you’ll let that truth land, it changes what you believe about who is worth the seed in your life, and in the lives of the people around you.
What is a script (a framework, a way of thinking about God) that God may have been challenging recently?
Who in your life have you been deciding is not worth the seed? What would it look like to scatter more generously, the way God does?
God, change the scripts that have become the only paths my mind walks. Where certainty has become hardness, break it open. And where I’ve been deciding who deserves the seed, make me more like the Sower who scatters everywhere. Your goodness is not rationed. Let mine reflect that. Amen.
General • Refresh: A Summer Collection (Vol. 3) •
“May God give you more and more grace and peace as you grow in your knowledge of God and Jesus our Lord.” — 2 Peter 1:2 (NLT)
Here’s a script that might need changing: the best is yet to come.
It sounds hopeful and faith-filled. But underneath it can run a quiet dissatisfaction with the now — always pressing toward the next experience, the next revival, the next breakthrough, the next season that finally delivers what this one hasn’t. Never fully present in the current field because the eyes are always on the horizon.
The best has already come. His name is Jesus. He is with you in the field today — this ordinary week, this unresolved season, this imperfect and still-being-tilled ground. The revival spirit is not something to call down from heaven. It is in you, now, because God is in you now. Christmas: God is with us. Easter: God is for us. Pentecost: God is in us. One big message, already delivered, already present, already sowing.
There is purpose in your posture. Not in your platform, not in your accomplishments, not in the harvest you can report at the end of the season. In how you stand before God today. In the honesty with which you tend the ground. In the willingness to pick up the spade and keep working the field. God who began a good work in you will finish it.
Where have you been living in “almost there, but not quite yet”? How can you be fully present in what God is doing now?
Lord, Your best, Jesus, has already come down. You’re already here with me. Today I stop pressing toward the next thing long enough to be present in this one. I tend the ground You’ve given me — in this season, in this church, in this ordinary week. There is purpose in my posture. Let that purpose be formed in me, not achieved by me. Amen.