The most faithful-looking man in your church has been there for years.
He has never caused a problem. He gives. He serves. He knows every hymn by heart and could probably teach the class if you asked him.
Yet Christ says he has produced nothing.
This is the third soil in the series. The first two are here: the hard path, where the seed never gets below the surface, and the rocky ground, where it comes up fast and dies faster. The series opener is here.
What Matthew 13:22 Actually Says
“As for what was sown among thorns, this is the one who hears the word, but the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches choke the word, and it proves unfruitful” (Matthew 13:22).
Luke adds a third thorn:
“they are choked by the cares and riches and pleasures of life, and their fruit does not mature” (Luke 8:14).
Mark adds a fourth:
“the desires for other things enter in and choke the word” (Mark 4:19).
Cares. Riches. Pleasures. Desires for other things.
Not one of those is a sin the church disciplines. Every one of them is a normal part of being alive.
Nothing Dies Here
Read the verse carefully, because the wording matters more than it appears.
Christ does not say this man’s faith dies. He does not say the plant withers, as He said of the rocky ground. He says the word is choked, and the result proves unfruitful.
Luke is even gentler in language and harsher in substance: “their fruit does not mature.” Something grows. It just never becomes anything.
That is the thorny ground. Not a collapse. A long, quiet failure to produce.
Why The Thorny Soil Is the Hardest to Spot
The rocky-ground man declares himself when he walks away. Everyone notices. Someone might even go after him. We looked at him last week.
The thorny-ground man never gives you a reason to look twice. And the man most likely to be deceived is the man himself.
He is in his seat. He gives. He serves on a committee. He knows the vocabulary and has held the same pew for thirty years. He blends in completely, which is exactly what a tare does.
Christ told that parable in the same chapter. The field holds sons of the kingdom and sons of the evil one together, and nobody separates them until the harvest at the close of the age (Matthew 13:24–30, decoded in 13:36–43). The defining feature of a tare is not that it looks impressive.
It is that it looks like everything else.
And Christ tells us how it ends. “On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord’... And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you’” (Matthew 7:22–23).
Not you lost Me. “I never knew you.”
Many, He said. Not a few.
What Chokes: Cares, Riches and Pleasures, and Desires
Three thorns, and none of them announce themselves as rivals to Christ.
Cares. Anxiety about the ordinary: the job, the mortgage, the doctor’s call, the kids. Christ addressed this directly in the Sermon on the Mount and located the problem precisely: “seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you” (Matthew 6:33). The cares are real. The question is what sits first.
Riches and pleasures. Christ calls it the deceitfulness of riches, and deceit is the operative word. Money does not announce that it is taking the place of God. It presents itself as security, and the man who has it stops feeling his need. Luke pairs riches with pleasures for a reason: what wealth buys is comfort, and comfort removes the last thing that drove a man to his knees. Paul is blunt about the mechanism: “the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils” (1 Timothy 6:10).
Desires for other things. Mark’s phrase is the broadest and, I think, the most convicting. Not evil things. Other things. A hobby, a project, a team to follow, a second career. The thorn does not have to be wicked to choke. It only has to grow faster.
Scripture’s Example:
Demas
Paul names one man twice as a fellow worker: Demas, greeted alongside Mark, Aristarchus, and Luke (Philemon 24), and again in Colossians 4:14.
Then, years later, from the second Roman imprisonment:
“Demas, in love with this present world, has deserted me and gone to Thessalonica” (2 Timothy 4:10).
In love with this present world. That is Matthew 13:22 in Paul’s own vocabulary.
Notice that Demas did not have a theological crisis. There is no recorded argument, no scandal, no public renunciation. He served for years, and then something he loved more pulled him away.
A caution, because I will not overstate what Scripture says. The text tells us Demas deserted Paul and names the cause. It does not tell us the state of his soul, and neither will I. What it gives us is the mechanism, and the mechanism is exactly the thorns:
Demas loved the present world.
The Rich Young Ruler
There is another, and Christ let him walk.
He asked the right question, addressed Christ respectfully, and claimed to have kept the commandments from his youth. “And Jesus, looking at him, loved him” (Mark 10:21). Then came the one instruction that touched the thorn: sell what you have and come follow Me.
“Disheartened by the saying, he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions” (Mark 10:22).
Christ did not chase him. He did not soften the terms or offer a smaller version of the invitation. He let the thorn reveal itself.
The ruler loved his possessions.
How to Examine Your Own Ground
The thorny ground is the soil most likely to be reading this very post, because the rocky-ground man left years ago, and the path never stayed long enough to read it.
So ask harder questions than whether you believe.
What has grown in the last five years, your fruit or your holdings?
When Scripture and your schedule collide, which one yields?
Is there an instruction of Christ you have quietly decided does not apply to your situation?
If following Him cost you the thing you are most reluctant to name right now, would you still follow?
That last question is the rich young ruler’s question. He answered it by walking away, which is at least an honest answer.
One Word of Comfort
If those questions alarmed you, hear this carefully.
Thorny ground does not examine itself. The choked plant has no idea it is being choked; that is the nature of a slow strangling. The man whose fruit never matures is not lying awake over it.
You are awake. That is not the behavior of thorny soil.
“Examine yourselves, to see whether you are in the faith” (2 Corinthians 13:5).
Paul gave that command to people he expected to pass it.
The thorns are real. The question is whether you can name yours.
Next week: the good soil, and the yields Christ names that no first-century farmer would ever have believed.
To His Glory,
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