While visiting a friend on his farm, as we were looking around his place, we saw a solid clump of vegetation, perhaps 5 or 6 feet square, enclosed in a wire netting. All around it were sod and short grass, but within the netting the vegetation shot forth fresh and green.

My friend said it was an object lesson, and sure enough it was. It had been a chicken pen and he had simply left it alone. The soil was fertile, but no good seed was sown in it. Then from this untended and unseeded spot had sprung up every miserable, worthless weed that you could think of; and they had grown tall and dense, until they were thick as a hedge, so that a chicken could not have found its way through them.

This was simply the result of neglect. No seed had been sown, no evil weeds had been killed, and the enclosure was a mass of useless, pestiferous vegetation. Wormwood, pigweed, sinkwood, ragweed, and every kind of useless trash, which had simply grown of itself, without anybody’s help or hindrance, were growing there in profusion; and the owner of the place had left this spot as an object lesson to show his men what would become of any neglected, unseeded, untended piece of ground. He did not propose to leave the weeds there long, for they would ripen seed enough to ruin a farm; but while they were there, they served as a lesson.

The human heart is just as full of evil things as any foul, weedy soil. Let us see what kind of crop it will produce if left to itself. The Saviour explains that those things which proceed out of the mouth come forth from the heart; and they pollute a person, “for out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies: These are the things which defile a man” (Matthew 15:19, 20).

If we would save our gardens, we must kill the weeds; if we would have a good crop, we must sow good seed; and if we would save our souls from death, we must kill out the weeds of sin, and must have our hearts sown with the good seed, the word of God.

The heart cannot be empty. If it is kept filled with error, folly and falsehood, its fruits will be evil and only evil; but if the good seed is sown, and the weeds are pulled up, then we may expect a harvest of precious fruits and flowers, bright, beautiful, and useful. But if the seed-sowing is neglected, if the weeds are not kept down, then our lives will be a tangled mass of wickedness, sin, and sorrow, and we shall be like those fields filled with worthless plants, which scatter evil seeds on every hand. One field filled with thorns and thistles may spread its cursed seeds over a whole country; and one person full of sin and vileness may poison a whole generation. To avoid such evils we commit the evil plants to the flames, and “that which beareth thorns and briers is rejected, and is nigh unto cursing; whose end is to be burned” (Hebrews 6:8). And so if we do not receive good seed and bear good fruit, let us remember that when God gathers His wheat into the heavenly garner, He will burn the tares in a furnace of fire.

Let us learn an object lesson from the weeds, and let us see to it that our hearts are well sown with the Word of God, and kept clear of thorns and briers and evil seeds. So with God’s blessing the good seed sown within us shall bring forth fruit, thirty, sixty, and a hundredfold.—Adapted from an unknown author.