by Jared Hardin

October 3, 2022

Two of my job titles are pastor and farmer. It’s striking how many comparisons one could draw between these two callings, and in fact, the Bible does just that. Scripture calls leaders of the church “shepherds” and compares sharing the Word of God with sowing seed (1 Pet. 5:2; Matt. 13:1-23).

As I was reflecting on these comparisons the other day, I was reminded of the agricultural practice called crop rotation.

The Method to the Madness

You’ve probably noticed that the fields around here often alternate year after year between corn and soybeans. This isn’t just because farmers like to mix things up. There’s a scientific reason behind it, and this practice dates back thousands of years to many cultures and many different crops.

You see, corn requires nitrogen in the soil to grow productively. Soybeans, on the other hand, are legumes, which means that they draw nitrogen from the air and “fix” it in the soil, to use the technical term. So by rotating corn and soybeans from year to year, a farmer can optimize the health of the soil without having to buy and apply extra nitrogen.

Expositional ‘Crop Rotation’

So what in the world does this have to do with being a pastor?

As I mentioned earlier, Jesus compares our hearts to soil and the Word of God to the seed that’s sown there. Genuine Christians are those with hearts of fertile soil, where the Word of God grows and bears fruit (Matt. 13:23). The primary way that the Word of God falls on the soil of our hearts is through the weekly preaching of God’s Word.

It may surprise you to learn that, as the pastor at Mt. Pleasant, I don’t often “choose” what passage of the Bible I preach on from week to week. Typically, I preach through books of the Bible passage by passage. For example, on Sunday I preached the last half of Ephesians 2. Next Sunday, I’ll preach Ephesians 3. We should finish our series in this book sometime around Thanksgiving.

Before we studied Ephesians, I preached through the book of the prophet Zechariah. This was a very different book of the Bible from Ephesians—full of symbols and visions and prophecies about the future. But that’s exactly the idea: God’s people need to hear from all parts of the Bible, Old and New Testaments, to be built up and to grow in the faith. Planting the same crop over and over again is unwise and unfruitful.

Because of this, I try never to spend more than a few months preaching through a book of the Bible. After some Christmas sermons, Lord willing, we will return to the book of Genesis in January. Last winter, we studied Genesis 1-11. This winter, we’ll pick back up in Genesis 12 and look at the story of Abraham for a few months. This, you might say, is expositional crop rotation. “Expositional” because my job is to expose the meaning of the words of Scripture. “Crop rotation” because I’m preaching all sorts of topics from all parts of the Bible, rotating from book to book.

Some of us have heard preachers that have about three sermons, and they always sound the same. They get stuck on one or two topics that really fascinate them—whether that’s the end-times, justification, or the breakdown of family values. This is unhealthy, and it results in the soil of our hearts being depleted of the nutrients we need to bear fruit for God.

I’m not claiming that I have preaching all figured out. I don’t. It’s hard work, and I don’t always do it perfectly. But by God’s grace, if I’m faithful to the task, his Word will find fertile soil and a crop will be produced, “yielding a hundred, sixty, or thirty times what was sown.”