If you had to rate your faith on a scale of 1-10, how would you rate it? One of the purposes of Mark is to teach us what it means to have faith in Jesus, by showing examples of people who have it and who don't have it. The first was in ch.2, with the guys who dug a hole in Jesus' roof to get their friend to Jesus. Faith will drive you to get close to Christ. Today we'll see another aspect—the way faith responds when life is out of control and nothing makes sense.

As Christians, we all claim to believe that God's Word contains awesome divine power. We claim to believe that, but what do our lives say about how much we believe it?

Imagine a farmer who was completely perplexed and dumbfounded by the fact that he had little or no harvest. Year after year, he barely gets any wheat or corn and he's beside himself trying to figure out why. Then you find out he never plants anything. That's a dumb story—would never happen—but it happens every day in our spiritual lives.

Jesus made some of his words hard to understand on purpose to protect us from listening to them the wrong way. It's to protect us from having our hearts turn into hard soil, shallow soil, or weedy soil. How does making things hard to understand accomplish that? So far we've seen how it protects us from becoming hard or shallow. Today we'll see how it rescues us from the weeds.

We've been studying the parable of the soils in Mark 4, and we're discovering that each of these soils has a lot to say to Christians about how we should listen to God's Word. It's not just a parable about unbelievers. It's for us. And the soil we look at today, the shallow soil, might be the most important one for us to consider in our daily Bible reading.

When you read something in the Bible and don't understand it, how content are you to remain ignorant? How much that bothers you provides important information about the condition of your heart.

If you had to rate your relationship with God on a scale from one to ten, where would you put it? And when you answer that, the next question is, on what basis are you making that judgment?

Think of the last time you read the Bible or listened to a sermon. Do you know what God wanted that passage of Scripture to accomplish in your life? And is it being accomplished?

What are 3 or 4 things in this world you desire today? Some good food, some good personal interactions with someone, some rest, some productivity—what do you want? In today's passage, Jesus is gong to warn us about a very significant danger those desires pose to your relationship with him.

You're being lied to. And who is the liar who is trying to pull the wool over your eyes? That liar is sitting there in your bank account.