What's Actually Your Job? (Lessons from the Sower and Isaiah)

A look at what the church is and isn't called to do

As a pastor, and previously as a youth minister, I have done plenty of things beyond my job description. I've cleaned toilets, cooked meals, and dried out flooded basements. I've helped people move, assembled furniture, given rides. One Sunday morning I had to wrangle a bat out of the church building (not Tulip Street).

I don't say any of this to brag, believe me. But I've never once seen "bat removal as needed" listed on a ministerial job description. I'm sure you have your own version of this story, things you've done at your job that nobody warned you about when you were hired. It's just part of it.

When it comes to our “jobs” as followers of Christ, we also have a job description of sorts. It’s safe to say there are some elements of the job we probably haven’t been doing as thoroughly as we should. And there are other tasks which definitely are NOT part of our duties, yet we try to do them anyway.

The Parable of the Sower, along with Isaiah 6 (which heavily influenced that parable), can help us figure out what is and what is not on our job description.

✗ Not Our Job: Judging People's Hearts

The parable makes this clear from the very first image. The sower doesn't walk out to the field and assess the soil conditions before deciding who deserves seed. The path got seed. The rocky ground got seed. The thorny ground got seed. The sower's job was to scatter the seed broadly and generously, not to predict who might be a worthwhile investment.

When Isaiah received his calling in Isaiah 6, God was equally upfront with him. Most people were not going to receive his message well. In fact, God told him from the start that his preaching would meet with resistance, that people's hearts had grown dull and their ears heavy. Isaiah wasn't being sent to a receptive crowd. He wasn't surrounded by cheerleaders or "yes men." He spent much of his career as a thorn in the side of Israel's leaders, preaching to people who didn't want to hear it.

And yet, God sent him anyway.

That's the point. Sometimes the most resistant people are exactly the ones who most need to hear the message. It is not our job to judge the readiness of someone's heart before we decide whether to share the gospel with them. That job belongs to God alone. Jesus told his disciples that if people weren't receptive, they should "shake the dust off their feet" and move on. But the seed should still be scattered. You never know whose heart might start to crack open just enough to let the Spirit in.

✓ Our Job: Producing Fruit

The very first command and blessing God gave humanity in Scripture was to "be fruitful and multiply." That commission hasn't expired. Jesus built on it throughout his ministry. He spoke constantly about bearing fruit, producing fruit, being known by your fruit.

Here's a simple piece of biology worth remembering: what's inside fruit? Seeds. What do seeds do? Make more plants. What do plants do? Make more fruit. You see where this is going.

Jesus told his disciples to go and make more disciples. It's multiplication, and it can compound dramatically over time. In the Parable of the Sower, a single plant could produce between 30 and 100 times its original seed. That's not unusual math for the kingdom.

Think about it at a smaller scale. If every follower of Jesus committed to making two or three new disciples in a year, and those disciples did the same the following year, and that pattern continued, the numbers become global very quickly.

Jesus once told his followers, "The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Pray for the Lord of the Harvest to send out workers into his field." Here's what I've noticed about that prayer. When you pray it sincerely, you tend to become the answer to it. You start to see the harvest differently. You realize the prayer isn't just a request, it's an invitation.

Isaiah understood this. When God declared that he had a mission and needed a messenger, Isaiah didn't wait for someone else to raise their hand. He stood up and said, "Here I am. Send me," (Isaiah 6:8). That is one of the most courageous statements of faith in the entire Bible. The call is still going out. The question is whether we're willing to answer it.

✗ Not Our Job: Changing People's Hearts

This one is harder to let go of.

In the Parable of the Sower, Jesus describes three less-than-fruitful soil conditions, each representing a different kind of heart. The path, hardened and exposed. The rocky ground, shallow and rootless. The thorny ground, crowded out by competing priorities. These aren't permanent conditions, soils can change. But the key phrase is: they have to want to change.

I'll be honest with you. I have sometimes wished I, as a minister, had the power to change hearts. And plenty of pastors over the centuries have tried. It never ends well. What starts as a sincere desire to help someone grow ends up becoming control. Behavior that appears to change under that kind of pressure isn't real transformation. It's compliance. It's fear. It's performance for the person in charge.

Our job is not to change hearts. That job belongs to God alone.

I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; I will remove your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. (Ezekiel 36:26)

God knows what rocks are buried beneath the surface, preventing someone from putting down deep roots. God knows what weeds are quietly choking out someone's faith. God knows why a heart has grown hard and calloused. We don't. And if we're being honest, we usually don't even know those things about ourselves until God reveals them.

Isaiah's prophetic work actually had an almost counterintuitive effect. His proclamations would harden hearts, dull minds, and deafen ears before they would ever open them (Isaiah 6:9-10). That sounds discouraging until you realize it wasn't his job to produce the results. He was faithful to the message. God handled the hearts.

It's like the time Jesus encountered a lame man beside the pool. He asked the pointed qustion, "Do you want to get well?" Some people aren't ready initially. Some people aren't ready for a long time. But God is patient with all of us (2 Peter 3:9), and praise be for that, because most of us needed that patience before we got to where we are.

✓ Our Job: Encouraging & Cultivating Growth

So if we're not responsible for judging hearts or changing hearts, what are we actually supposed to be doing?

Paul gave us a helpful framework in his letter to the church in Corinth. He planted. Apollos watered. But God gave the growth (1 Corinthians 3:6). We have distinct roles, all necessary. In the church we want to provide as much opportunity as possible not only for people to hear the word, but for the word to take root and thrive. In other words, we can help keep our soil fertile and rich with nutrients.

The church's job maps fairly well onto the Great Commission (Matthew 28:19-20), when you look at it this way. We tell the good news, that's the planting. We baptize, that's the watering. We teach, that's the fertilizing and pruning. What we're doing, together, is creating the best possible conditions for growth to happen, and then trusting God to give the growth.

I find a random corn stalk in my yard sometimes. A kernel made it from the bird feeder to a spot in the grass, and against all odds, it sprouted. But it doesn't produce corn. It doesn't have what it needs. It's alive, technically, but it's not flourishing.

This is what happens to Christians who separate themselves from the church. They can survive for a while on what they've already received. But they're cut off from the community that helps them dig up the rocks, uproot the weeds, and stay nourished through the dry seasons. You cannot fully thrive in isolation from the people you were meant to grow alongside.

The church helps us identify what's lurking below the surface in our own lives, the hidden obstacles to deep roots. The church helps us reorder our priorities when competing things are starting to crowd out what matters most. The church keeps us fed, engaged, and active in ways that are genuinely difficult to replicate on our own.

God reminded Isaiah of this at the end of his calling. Even though the road ahead would be hard, there would be a faithful remnant who stuck together through it all. "Though a tenth will remain in the land," God said (Isaiah 6:13). Throughout the book of Isaiah, that remnant is a recurring theme. The people who didn't follow their corrupt leaders into destruction. The ones who held on. And from that remnant, from what looked like ashes, God brought new life and fresh growth.

Here's What the Job Description Actually Says

So let's bring it back to practical terms.

Not your job: deciding who deserves to hear the gospel based on how ready you think their heart is.

Your job: scattering seed broadly, generously, without prejudging the soil.

Not your job: producing transformation in someone else through pressure, persistence, or control.

Your job: creating the conditions for growth through faithful teaching, baptism, encouragement, and community.

Not your job: determining who is in and who is out.

Your job: showing up like Isaiah. "Here I am. Send me."

The harvest is real. The workers are needed. Stick together, encourage one another, and cultivate the kind of community where people can actually take root and grow. Do the work God has given you. And trust him to do the work only he can do.