Break up the fallow ground

For thus says the LORD to the men of Judah and Jerusalem: "Break up your fallow ground, And do not sow among thorns. – Jeremiah 4.3

This is one of those verses that I can remember back to the first time I came across it. It was probably 30 plus years ago when I had just started a new devotional guide. This was the verse and the question for the day was ‘is there fallow ground in my life?’

Fallow ground is that ground which now longer bears fruit. Sometimes lands are allowed to lie fallow as a part of crop rotation. Sometimes fields are just allowed to lie then for years and weeds and thorns grow up. The soil gets hard and even if seeds were sown they would not take root.

This fallow ground that Isaiah talks about can also apply to our hearts. If we don’t check ourselves we can allow our own hearts to get hard and cold.

That’s why we need to break up the fallow ground of our own hearts so that God’s word can take root there. We let our heart become cold and hard when we do not spend time with God. We all spend plenty of time in this world. We have more possible distractions than at any time in history. Facebook and films and sports and entertainment and work and family and friends are not bad things, but if that is where we spend all our time we don’t have time to spend time in God’s word. If we find ourselves more drawn to the distractions than we do to the word of God and Christian fellowship and going to church and prayer we can be pretty sure that our hearts have become fallow and hard and overgrown.

The answer is not that hard. We need to be less focused on the distractions and more focused on the Lord.  Pray, read the Bible, go to church, spend time with godly friends, pursue holiness. These pursuits will break up the fallow ground so that we are ready to receive God’s word into our hearts and allow it to bear fruit.