The Best Wheat

“Does he not… put in the wheat in rows…?” — Isaiah 28:25. Spurgeon reads it: does the wise farmer not make his best wheat his chief crop?

A good farmer doesn’t treat every crop the same. He decides what matters most — the wheat, the bread crop, the thing his family actually lives on — and he gives that the best field, the most care, the first place. The little side crops get the leftovers. He ranks things. He knows what his main crop is.

Spurgeon’s question to you is exactly that: what’s your main crop? Everybody is growing something as the big organising thing of their life — how they look, how they’re doing at school or sport, how many people like them, some goal or hobby or relationship. Something sits in the best field of your attention. The question isn’t whether you have a main crop. It’s what it is — and whether you actually chose it or just let it grow there by default.

His answer for what belongs in the best field is: knowing God. Being right with him. And he argues it’s the “principal wheat” for solid reasons, not just because a preacher says so. It’s the most necessary thing — bread is the one crop you can’t live without, and being right with God is the one thing your soul can’t live without. And it’s the most profitable, because, as the Bible puts it, godliness is worth having “for the present life, and for the life to come.” It’s the only crop that pays off in both worlds. Everything else you’re chasing has a shelf life measured in years at most.

What Spurgeon is really after isn’t that you add God to your list. It’s that you give him the best spot — the “principal place.” Your best thinking, not the tired leftover minutes. Real love, not polite box-ticking. And no fake line between “religious stuff” and “real life,” as if God gets Sunday and you get the rest. A farmer doesn’t farm the good field on weekends only.

He tells a small story that stings in the gentlest way. Someone asks a kid, “Is your dad a Christian?” And the kid says, “Yeah… but he hasn’t worked much at it lately.” That’s the whole danger in one sentence. Not someone who rejected God — someone who technically kept him, but stopped tending the field, until faith became the weediest, most neglected corner of the farm while everything else got the water and the sun. You can absolutely do that with your best crop: keep it, and quietly starve it.

Spurgeon’s pushback on the “live for the world” plan is memorable. He calls worldly success “only smoke” — like little kids scrambling in the street for coins or shells, thrilled with treasure that’s worth almost nothing. He’s not saying school or friends or goals don’t matter. He’s saying: don’t make smoke your main crop. Don’t give the best field to the thing that blows away.

And there’s a reason it’s worth this much care: you were made for it. Spurgeon says a person trying to find real life in the world is like a fish out of water flopping on the bank — built for a different element. You’re built to know God. That’s why nothing smaller ever quite fills the space; it’s the wrong element for the size of you.

One thing to figure out this week: name your actual main crop — not the one you’d say, the one your time and attention prove. Then ask the honest follow-up: is that the thing you want in the best field of your one life? If knowing God isn’t getting your best soil, this is the week to start moving it there.