Mark 4:1-9

Living Bible

4 Once again an immense crowd gathered around him on the beach as he was teaching, so he got into a boat and sat down and talked from there. ² His usual method of teaching was to tell the people stories. One of them went like this:

³ “Listen! A farmer decided to sow some grain. As he scattered it across his field, ⁴ some of it fell on a path, and the birds came and picked it off the hard ground and ate it. ^5-6 Some fell on thin soil with underlying rock. It grew up quickly enough, but soon wilted beneath the hot sun and died because the roots had no nourishment in the shallow soil. ⁷ Other seeds fell among thorns that shot up and crowded the young plants so that they produced no grain. ⁸ But some of the seeds fell into good soil and yielded thirty times as much as he had planted—some of it even sixty or a hundred times as much! ⁹ If you have ears, listen!”