ReflectionsTuesday airs each week on GospelBellsRadio.com, where Pastor Ayo Agunloye reflects on current themes from Your Potter’s House, the daily devotional he writes and publishes. This report is an edited summary of the broadcast, faithful to the teaching as delivered and prepared so that listeners and readers may revisit it, study it, and pass it on. Added Scripture references are provided to aid personal study.Continuing October’s Your Potter’s House reflection, Pastor Ayo Agunloye turns last week’s diagnosis into a prescription. “Why There Are More Works Than Fruit” traced our fruitlessness back through a chain in Genesis 2:5—no fruit because no plants, no plants because the seed had not sprouted, no sprouting because God had sent no rain, and no rain because “there was no one to cultivate the land.” This week fastens on that last link:
The ground God is waiting for someone to cultivate is not your ministry, your work, or your circumstances. It is your heart.
Until the heart is tilled, the pastor argues, no amount of religious activity will yield the fruit God can eat—and the long-awaited rain of revival will keep waiting.🎧 Listen to the Full Episode Below
A practical, inward-turning message, closing with a thoughtful exchange on telling a merciful delay from spiritual opposition, and on how to actually measure whether our works are bearing fruit. Worth an unhurried, honest listen.
🌾 The Problem of Unprepared Ground
The pastor’s anchor is Jeremiah 4:3: “Break up your fallow ground, and sow not among thorns.” Fallow ground is land left uncultivated so long that weeds and thorns have taken it over. No farmer scatters seed into an unbroken bush—without clearing, ploughing, and harrowing first, he wastes his seed, his money, and his time.And the thorns are named plainly. Matthew 13:22—“he also that received seed among the thorns is he that heareth the word, and the care of this world, and the deceitfulness of riches, choke the word, and he becometh unfruitful.” Since “the seed is the word of God” and the soil is the human heart (Luke 8:15), the command to break up fallow ground is not about a farm at all.
Thorns are the competing interests of the heart—bitterness, unforgiveness, worldly cares, the deceitfulness of riches, and misplaced desires. They do not need to be planted; left alone, they simply grow.
This is why a heart running after money cannot safely receive the rain of blessing it prays for: the downpour would only swell the thorns, until love of money chokes everything and the person ends up serving Mammon. God’s withholding, here, is mercy.📒 More Seed Cannot Fix Choked Ground
Here the pastor presses a conviction clearly weighing on him:
We would rather receive another word from God than remove what is already hindering the words we have received.
How much of the word have we heard, written down, and filed away—without ever praying it in or practising it? We become forgetful hearers, accumulating messages we are careless about, while little bears fruit. The remedy is not to stop hearing, but to go back to the notes and intentionally begin to live what we already know. He reaches for a businessman’s logic: profit means nothing if you ignore your costs; the take-home is what matters. So in the Spirit—increase the fruit of what you hear, rather than merely increasing what you hear.⏳ When Delay Is Mercy
Because the ground is not ready, God withholds the rain—and that withholding, the pastor insists, is not punishment but kindness. Were He to pour blessing onto a thorn-choked heart, He would only feed the weeds.The posture He seeks is in Hosea 10:12: “Sow to yourselves in righteousness, reap in mercy; break up your fallow ground: for it is time to seek the LORD, till he come and rain righteousness upon you.” And the patience in James 5:7: “the husbandman waiteth for the precious fruit of the earth… until he receive the early and latter rain.”
Rather than reading every delay as rejection, ask God what He wants you to learn. Many divine delays are mercy, not punishment—a season of waiting turned into one of repentance, cultivation, and deeper dependence.
Whether the wait is for a child, a spouse, admission, a job, or provision for a business, the better prayer is: “Lord, what am I to cultivate here before I move on?”🍞 Fed to Work, Not Working to Be Fed
A striking aside corrects a reversal many live by. God feeds His children because they are His children—not as wages for their labour. A father provides for his child simply as his child; the child then serves in the home because he is fed.
We do not work in order to eat; we eat in order to work. God is our source—He may use our job to provide, but the job is not the source.
Get this backwards, the pastor warns, and the job moves to the front: you begin to pursue it, and you cannot obey God freely when obedience might cost you that job. (Paul’s rule that “if any would not work, neither should he eat” corrects the lazy who ate without working—not the order of source and provision.) When God is your source, you can stand for righteousness without fear, because your bread does not depend on compromise.💓 The Ground Is the Heart
The heart of the message is Proverbs 4:23: “Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life.” The heart is the soil from which everything grows—both the good fruit and the thorns. In the Parable of the Sower, the pastor reminds, Jesus Himself identifies the soil as the human heart (Luke 8:15).
We spend our energy trying to change our circumstances while neglecting the condition of our hearts. External changes cannot substitute for inward transformation.
So the honest question is: am I spending more energy trying to change my circumstances than allowing God to change me? The heart is the starting point of all lasting fruitfulness.🔦 Who Can Know the Heart?
Cultivation, though, runs into a problem: “The heart is deceitful above all things… who can know it?” (Jeremiah 17:9). The answer comes in the next verse—“I the LORD search the heart” (17:10)—which is why David prayed, “Search me, O God, and know my heart… and see if there be any wicked way in me” (Psalm 139:23–24).
Guard your heart diligently, but never trust your own assessment of it. The heart can tell you it is fine while it is actually dying.
He likens it to high blood pressure—a silent killer that shows no symptoms until the stroke; many who died of it were “healthy” minutes before. Guarding the heart therefore means watching what enters it: what we watch on our phones, on the internet, what we read. Such seeds may seem to affect nothing at first—“nothing is even happening to me”—but a seed has been sown, and by the time it matures into lust or greed, every defence to say no has quietly eroded. True cultivation needs more than self-examination; it needs God’s searching light and the Spirit’s transforming work.🧭 What Is Your Heart Cultivated After?
Finally, the direction of the heart. David declared, “I have set the LORD always before me” (Psalm 16:8). When Satan paraded the kingdoms and splendour of the world before Jesus, He answered, “Get thee hence, Satan” (Matthew 4:10)—sending those things behind Him, which is exactly where they belong.
We do need the things of this world—money and provision included—but they must never stand in front of us. “Seek ye first the kingdom of God… and all these things shall be added” (Matthew 6:33).
The call, from Colossians 3:1–2, is to set our affections on things above, where Christ is. Every heart is shaped by something, and whatever repeatedly commands our attention gradually governs our desires and decisions. Even legitimate pursuits—family, ministry, career, comfort, ambition—become rivals to God when they take His rightful place. The searching questions he leaves: What competes most strongly for first place in my heart? What provokes a stronger reaction in me—an offence against my own interest, or dishonour toward Christ? What must I remove, and what must I deliberately set in its place?❓ Two Closing Questions
Is this delay God’s mercy, or spiritual opposition? The pastor points to prayer. Because “we know not what we should pray for… but the Spirit itself maketh intercession” (Romans 8:26), it is in Spirit-led prayer that God reveals what—or who—is behind a delay. When it is the enemy, “submit yourselves… to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee” (James 4:7)—and the resistance is rarely the hard part. When it is God Himself, the posture is surrender and rest. He warns against judging by the physical alone, recalling Balaam’s donkey (Numbers 22): the master beat the animal for refusing to go, not knowing it was saving his life from the angel’s sword. “Many times we may be fighting what God is using to save us.”How do I measure whether my works are bearing fruit? Fruit, he explains, comes in dimensions—righteousness produced in you, and righteousness produced in others. You know a message has borne fruit when your life begins to live in accordance with it: you cannot sit under teaching on prayer and still have no real quiet time. The tests are simple and personal: Is it producing righteousness in me? Is it making me more like Christ? Is it drawing me closer to God and fulfilling His purpose?
Fruitfulness is achieving the result God expects. Ask of each thing: this is what God is looking for—can He find it in my life? You yourself will know when you are bearing fruit, because the Spirit testifies within you.
🌟 Final Reflection
“Cultivating Your Heart for Fruitfulness” moves the whole series from diagnosis to responsibility. The shortage was never of seed, preaching, or activity; it was of prepared ground. And the ground is nearer than we think—it is the heart we so easily neglect while busying ourselves with everything external.So the burden becomes a daily discipline: break up the fallow ground, pull the thorns, guard what goes in, set the Lord before us, and practise the word already received—so that when the rain comes, it finds soil ready to bear.
A prepared heart is worth more than a prepared message. Cultivate the heart, and the rain of revival will have somewhere to fall.
The episode closes in prayer:“Father, Your word has come again, showing us that our heart is the ground You ask us to cultivate—not primarily the external things. We cannot even search out the thorns in our own hearts; we deceive ourselves, thinking we are right when we are rotten. Search us, show us mercy, and help us to cultivate our hearts—that we may experience revival rain, personal and national, in Jesus’ name. Amen.”
This is a message to act on, not merely admire.Listen again. Break up the fallow ground. And ask God to search the soil of your heart—so that what He plants there can finally bear.