“Open Doors” Rather Than “Hard Soil”
June 2024
The Bible uses metaphors of both “open doors” and “hard soil,” but recently God has been showing Eddy* that it might be better for global workers like himself to think in terms of “open doors.” The metaphor of soil types comes from Jesus’s parable of the sower in Matthew 13 where a farmer sows seed (God’s message) on a number of different soil types (people with different levels of spiritual openness). While the parable is full of insights, Eddy realized that if we only view missions in terms of reaching the “good soil,” we might develop some inaccurate beliefs. Some of the incorrect beliefs we might develop are:
- When sharing our faith, we need to distinguish someone’s soil type ahead of time and then choose the right seed to use
- If we want to share our faith effectively, we need to prepare the soil before sowing the seed
- As human beings, we have the ability to make the soil more fertile through the efforts of our flesh
- Acts 14:27 – “And when they arrived and gathered the church together, they declared all that God had done with them, and how He had opened a door of faith to the Gentiles.”
- 1 Corinthians 16:9 – “A wide door for effective work has opened to me, and there are many adversaries.”
- Colossians 4:3 – “At the same time, pray also for us, that God may open to us a door for the word, to declare the mystery of Christ, on account of which I am in prison.”
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