Is it the case that you are a stony ground hearer? ‘I am a Christian,’ you say, because you assented to the message, but did it change you? Do you only come to church once a week, Sunday morning? The preaching doesn’t really affect your life deeply. You don’t live for him. You are not his. You have not had a new life. He isn’t everything to you – Jesus Christ. You must pray to God to show you. Ask him to lead you to a real change of heart and life. Someone laughs at him for being religion and it is very painful to him, or he sees an unbeliever who is successful in this life and it shakes him. You must ask him to make you serious, even to make you afraid – you have never grasped how far you are from God, how holy God is, how you must be judged. You need to be certain and to know him and walk with him. Pray to him to help you to see. It would be a terrible thing, if there are people who go to an evangelical church week after week and really the stony heart has never been broken up and there is life in the soul.
But this can even apply to the Christian believer. Something has made us very superficial. If the preacher gives an interesting illustration, we suddenly pay attention. ‘Oh, that was interesting.’ If he gives an anecdote from his personal life, we wake up. After the sermon, we could probably write notes on all the illustrations and but we haven’t the slightest recollection of what the sermon was about. Does that happen to us? We have become superficial people in handling the word of God. We are Christians, we are saved but we have become really spiritually quite cold and unreceptive. Pray that God will warm your heart and re-inspire, re-ignite your enthusiasm for his word.. Fear that you will become a superficial reader or hearer.