The key to fruitful hearing that results in crops springing up 30fold, 60 a hundred fold so people can gather around you

and feast off the grace that is flowing through you that's what everybody

wants everybody wants to be a purposeful, useful, significant person from whom others draw life.

As Christians, we want God's word to be fruitful in our lives, and that's the last thing that Satan wants.

In this episode of Light and Truth, John Piper turns some Mark 4 1 to 20 to expose the devil's goal of

taking away the word from those who hear it. The sermon was originally preached at Bethlehem Baptist Church on December 2nd, 1984.

The word this morning is brief, but it is very, very important.

I want to expose the devil's habit and goal of taking away the word.

And if you were listening carefully,

you noticed in verse 14 that the soer

sows the word.

And in verse 15, these are the ones along the path where the word is sown, when

they hear Satan immediately comes and takes away the word, which is sown in them.

That's his first strategy in this battle of the soils.

It's the only one we're going to talk about.

And I want to mention three ways that Satan begins to implement on a Sunday morning and a Saturday night his strategy of taking the word

out of your heart before it can even land. Number one way. He works immediately before you give any

sympathetic hearing at all sometimes to make you unable to hear.

How does he do it? Three things.

Inattention, ill will, and ignorance.

So those will be the three that we'll look at and then we'll look at how to respond to these.

Satan works overtime in a service like this to make people inattentive.

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