I’ve been trying to lose weight for forever. I’m just barely in the obese category, and I’d like to be just barely in the overweight category. But just as I start making progress, it seems like I mess up and go right back to where I started.

Life has a way of knocking us down. Sometimes just when we get on the right path, circumstances get in the way. But God invites us to rest not in our ability to get it right, but in Jesus, and then we begin to truly rejoice.

Mark 4:5-6 says:

Other seed fell on rocky ground where it didn’t have much soil, and it grew up quickly, since the soil wasn’t deep. When the sun came up, it was scorched, and since it had no root, it withered away.

Do you have any of these sitting around your house?

47% of U.S. adults have at least one unspent gift card, with an average value of $187. When asked why, we have a variety of reasons why we don’t use our gift cards:

But the thing we forget is that this is free money!

Many people treat the offer of salvation the same way, and it’s worth far more!

We started looking last week at Jesus’s parable about how various groups of people respond to the gospel. We talked last week about a group of people who outright reject the gospel.

This week and next, however, we’re talking about people who appear to believe, at least for a time. And yet, neither is the ideal, because they’re neither joyful nor fruitful. So as we look at all of these, really ask yourself: “Which one am I?”

This week, we’re looking at what Jesus describes as the rocky soil. (v. 5) So Jesus describes the soil as a thin layer of dirt on top of a thick layer of rock.

Now, once again, I’m going to show how much I don’t know about farming. Such conditions simply can’t produce a good crop. It might, at first, look like it’s going to sprout up, but it can’t grow much.

And not only that, but the plants would likely be killed off by the sun. Plants, of course, need the sun to grow, but without healthy roots, they will quickly die. So you can probably start to see where Jesus is going with all this.

Here’s how Jesus explained the rocky soil in this parable. (v. 16-17) So, as we saw last week, we’re compared to these different types of soil. Which, as I thought about it, makes a lot of sense. We’re all dirty because of our sin.

I used to go to this huge Christian music festival called Agape.

Because of the rain, there would always be quite a bit of mud there.

Even when we were completely filthy, that’s when God saved us.

The seed is the word of God. And the rocky soil are those people who initially hear the gospel and believe it. It says they receive it with joy! They even appear to grow a little, just as the seed initially began to grow. But then not long later, they fall away.

And it says they fall away because of persecution or distress because of the word. In other words, they believed the gospel because of the promise of joy and eternal life, but they weren’t willing to continue to follow Jesus when it got hard. And the reason given for that is because they had no root.

Maybe their faith was more about growing up in a Christian home. Or maybe they just liked the idea of having faith, but didn’t want to follow through. But when it came down to it, they never really made their faith their own.

So as we talk about this, maybe you’ve wondered, “Is this me?”

There’s a very simple solution to this: make your faith your own! God calls us to have a deep faith! It’s so common for Christians to have a shallow faith. But a shallow faith will always cause you to abandon God during hard times. But a deep faith will sustain you during the hard times.

Life is hard, but God is good.