Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23 A Kingdom of Hearts

You're listening to the podcast of Recast Church in Mattawan, Michigan. This week, Pastor Don Filsack takes us through his series on the book of Matthew called

Not Your Average Savior. Let's listen in. Good morning, Recast Church.

Welcome. I'm glad you're here. I'm Don Filsack. I'm the lead pastor here. And I am glad. First, I'm going to move this over.

I feel like I'm off -center. There we go. I feel a little bit better there. Glad that you're here, and I'm glad that you've joined us on this pretty cold, wintery

Sunday morning. Hopefully, you had no problem on the roads on the way here. I can hardly believe that it's one week before Christmas.

Anybody else feel like it's kind of come up on you pretty quickly? Anybody with me on that? Am I alone? No? Yes? No?

It's next week. Like, next Sunday is Christmas. So, hopefully, you've got most of your shopping done, and you're doing all right in that way.

Next week, we're going to be having a Christmas morning service here, regular time, 10 .30.

It's going to be a bit of a different service, a little bit more informal. About 45 minutes is what we're shooting for next week.

There's going to be no children's program at all, so we're going to make it more of a family -oriented service, more singing, more informal, story time for the kids, that type of thing.

Now, I want to point out, though, in always surrounding these kinds of things, there's a potential for you to feel guilty if you don't make it to this or feel ...

We're not taking attendance or anything like that. Don't feel guilty if you've got your own family traditions or things that you're going to be doing next week.

But do know that we would love to have you here if it works out into your family schedule and works for you.

I believe that you'll be blessed if you take the effort together to remember the birth of our Savior. And what are you going to do at 10 .30

on Christmas morning anyways? By that time, you probably opened all the presents, are looking for something to do anyways. So, come on in, and we look forward to celebrating the birth of Christ together.

This morning, we're going to be jumping into a familiar text that many of us have read or heard many times.

Maybe not everybody, and so I don't want you to feel awkward if this is a new story for you, but I think many of us, it's familiar. And have you ever had a friend tell you a joke that you already knew, and you've ever had that?

I figured that was kind of a common experience, and that's kind of like the privilege that it is as a pastor sometimes to get up and share with you a story that you already know.

And my goal is not necessarily to look for a different angle to make it like, wow, Don did a great job making it come alive.

It's the Word of God, it's truth, and you've probably heard some truth from this before. But the fact of the matter is, when you hear a joke that somebody has already told you before, some of us confront that type of scenario politely and let the person finish.

Maybe you even fake some laughter and go on. Maybe some of you even find it funny the second time around,

I don't know. Some of us let the person know we've heard it before, then you leave it up to them whether or not they continue telling it or not.

And then others either quickly and rudely finish the joke for the person, or even let them know it wasn't funny the first time around.

So it just kind of depends on your personality, how you respond to hearing something multiple times. But let me encourage all of us to sit under God's Word this morning as we read this, as we study it, as we look at it together, and look for what the

Spirit might say to you fresh and new through this text.

I want to point out that the reason this text has been poured over so often by so many, it's been a topic of conversation and the subject of so many sermons in the past, is that it's simply the skill with which

Jesus taught that really draws us in. We're going to see in our text, to an agricultural society, which we are not, we're a technological society, but to an agricultural society,

Jesus used a very common illustration to speak about His kingship. Now, there are so many angles

I could use to introduce this text about the parable of the soils. But the one fact that I think is most important for us to understand before I read this text this morning, is that Jesus came to earth to be a king.

He came to earth to be our king, and to bring for us the seeds of His kingdom.

So those who sat and listened to this teaching on the shores of Galilee 2000 years ago, believed that God was going to send a king who would set

His people free. That was their hope. That was what they were looking for. They had significant expectations on that king, what he was going to be like, how he was going to roll, the things he was going to do.

They were confident he would arrive in power and authority. They even imagined that he would be a powerful military leader who would probably set them free from the oppression of other nations, and set them free from the oppression of the

Roman occupation that they were currently under. But as we all know, and we celebrate year after year after year, that Jesus arrived in humble circumstances, not in the way that the religious leaders were expecting, not in the ways that the

Jews were expecting their messiah to arrive. And then the way he rolled throughout his life, he ministered to the downtrodden and the needy, the lowly.

And here in our text we find his initial teaching from Matthew's perspective about his kingdom.

How he introduces his kingdom to his followers. And we find that he did not come to win battles, he did not come to win wars, he did not come to ascend to political power and authority, but instead he came to bring a message of the kingdom that wins hearts and souls of people, one at a time.

So let's open our Bibles, if you're not already there, to Matthew chapter 13. We're going to be looking at two different sections of scripture,

Matthew 13, 1 -9, and then I'm going to also read verses 18 -23. I'm going to be combining those two, because in the first section

Jesus gives us the teaching, and then in the second section he actually interprets it for us so that we can see how he interpreted, how he taught with parables, and then we'll cover that middle section in a couple of weeks after Christmas.

But please follow along as we read Matthew chapter 13, 1 -9, and then 18 -23.

This is God's word to us. If there's anybody who doesn't have a Bible on their lap or a means to navigate to a

Bible, if you could just raise your hand, Mark's got some back here and he'd just like to bring you a Bible so you can follow along as we dig in.

But recast, I just am in awe every Sunday morning when I get up here and I get a privilege of reading

God's word, because this is God speaking to us through his written word. This is what he desires for us to know this morning.

Matthew 13, 1. That same day Jesus went out of the house and sat beside the sea, and great crowds gathered about him, so that he got into the boat and sat down, and the whole crowd stood on the beach.

And he told them many things in parables, saying, A sower went out to sow, and he sowed some seeds, fell along the path, and the birds came and devoured them.

Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil, and immediately they sprang up, since they had no depth of soil.

But when the sun rose, they were scorched, and since they had no root, they withered away.

Other seeds fell among thorns, and thorns grew up and choked them. Other seeds fell on good soil and produced grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty.

He who has ears, let him hear. Then over to verse 18. Hear then the parable of the sower.

When anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what has been sown in the heart.

This is what was sown along the path. As for what was sown on rocky ground, this is the one who hears the word and immediately receives it with joy.

Yet he has no root in himself, but endures for a while, and when tribulation and persecution arises on account of the word, immediately he falls away.

As for what was sown among thorns, this is the one who hears the word, but the cares of this world and the deceitfulness of riches choke the word, and it proves unfruitful.

As for what was sown on the good soil, this is the one who hears the word and understands it.

He indeed bears fruit and yields, in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty.

Let's go to the Lord in prayer this morning. Father, I thank you just for the opportunity that we have to hear your word,

Father, that you saw fit to put down truth for us in writing, that we can go back to it time and time again and learn from you by the power of your

Spirit that makes these things come alive for us, that you willingly laid stories alongside of our lives for comparison and for contrast, that we might really deal with this on a personal level and not just merely as some great story or some great teaching that happened and even an academic pursuit for us, but Father that you mine down to a desire to communicate to our hearts and to transform us and change us that we would hear this teaching, that we would take it on board and even identify where we stand in relationship to you based on the teaching of Jesus Christ.

Father, I know that there's a lot of busyness going on right now. It's a busy month and there's a lot of things ahead of us this week.

There might even be some busy things going on today that could distract us, that could pull us away and Father, I know that there's a lot of good things out there, but Father I pray that over this next hour or so that you would really grab our attention by your power, by your majesty, by your glory, and that we would be moved to worship you in spirit and in truth this morning, that our emotions would be engaged in the worship of you as we encounter you as you are.

Father, give us a vision, a fresh vision of you this morning that we would rejoice from hearts completely given over to you and I ask this in Jesus' name, amen.

Amen. Yeah, you can go to be seated. I encourage you to get comfortable. If that chair that you're sitting in gets uncomfortable during the message you can get up in the back and stretch out if you need to.

There's more coffee and juice and donuts. As long as those last, feel free to get up and get more of that if you need to.

Keep your Bibles open to Matthew chapter 13 verses 1 through 9 and again 18 through 23.

That's the portion of scripture that we're looking at and I hope that you can see that the things that I'm saying are coming from that and I'm going to walk us right through,

I'm just kind of talking through what God has impressed on my heart from this and thinking through what

I think we all need to take from it. We're going to start off in verses 1 through 3 and really that's just setting the context.

Often in the gospels we're looking at kind of a theological history, a theological biography of the life of Jesus.

So he moves from place to place and sometimes the text tells us that he's changed venue and verses 1 through 3 tell us about that change in venue.

It tells us that it was on the same day, the same day that he was just confronted by the

Pharisees in a house, in a packed out house. He was talking with them and they were challenging him and basically saying that he was performing miracles in the work of Satan and you can go back and hear those previous messages over the last few weeks that I've done talking about chapter 12.

But now there's a shift and that's one of the reasons that they changed the chapter shift here is that he switches locations.

At the same point, the same day that he was talking with the Pharisees in the house, now he goes outside, walks down to the shore of the

Sea of Galilee, which probably it's quite likely that he was in Capernaum during this time and Capernaum is on the north shore of the

Sea of Galilee and a seaside town, a lakeside town if you will, and so he walked out of the house, went down to sit on the shore of the sea.

Maybe he just wanted a little bit of time to reflect, maybe he just wanted to try to get away from the crowds for a moment to pray or whatever, but Jesus had a habit of wherever he went, the crowds went with him and so there sitting on the shore of the

Sea of Galilee, he gathers another crowd and so he sits in a boat and other gospels tell us that they push the boat a little bit out into the water and what they did is they basically created a fairly natural amphitheater for him to be able to speak to large crowds and so the echo coming off the water, he was able to talk to a large crowd standing on the beach and there the text now tells us that he shared many, many parables with the people.

He taught using parables. Now the word parable is not something that we use really outside of scripture, it's not something that we, it's a

Greek word, parable, we just completely took it out, now some of you might blank black out for just a minute when

I say the word parabola because you didn't like math like I didn't like math, I'm like words a lot,

I didn't necessarily like maths and so parabola, does anybody know what I mean when I say that?

It's kind of like that arc that you had to graph and all that stuff for who knows why, like maybe someone in the room uses,

I'd like you to come and tell me if you actually use any of those formulas in your work, if you ever like figure out like how a parabola fits on a graph or something.

If you do that, let me know but, and I'd like you to talk to my son too because he's got some questions about why he has to learn some of this stuff too, but anyways, that's another thing altogether.

But the word parable is a related word, do you see the similarities, it's kind of got a similar notion and actually has the idea of throwing something.

Parabola is the idea of the arc of something that's thrown in the air and so does parable, now you're going well what's thrown in the air, the actual word parable has the notion of something that is thrown alongside of something else, that's literally what the word means in Greek.

Something that is thrown aside and the idea is a story that is thrown aside of real life, it's thrown aside your life in a way that you're supposed to look at the story and line it up with your life and go what's the connecting points here, how does this work and what does it look like in association with my life, how does it fit in with the real life stuff and you're supposed to draw some conclusions about your life because you've come in contact with a parable, a story that is teaching you something about the way that life works or something about the way that your life should work.

Jesus used parables extensively, in a couple of weeks we're going to see Jesus giving specific teaching about the reason he used parables, the gap that I'm not covering this morning in the text is a gap in which

Jesus is actually going to talk and teach us about why he taught in parables, I think that's worthy of a sermon in and of itself and so I'm talking about a specific parable this morning but then in a couple of weeks after Christmas we're going to actually cover that and look at that together.

But I want to focus our attention this morning on the first of the stories that Jesus threw alongside the path of our life, he wanted this original crowd and he wanted you and I here where we live to understand this story and then lay it alongside of our lives for comparison and in a sense

I hope that it's not just the parables that you lay alongside of your life, I hope you do that with all of scripture, it's all intended for that for a variety of reasons,

I believe that the main difference between the way that a believer and an unbeliever approaches scripture is not in basic understanding, now can an unbeliever understand the words of scripture, absolutely, anybody who has basic English skills can understand an

English text, they can get the significance, not the significance, they can get the meaning of the words, they can understand that when it says

God so loved the world that he sent his only son, they can understand the mechanics of that and understand what the text is saying, all can understand grammar and syntax, maybe some of you just blacked out on that but with help and maybe you need a little bit of assistance with that but with the right tools you can understand what the text is saying.

But recognizing the message is speaking something into my life is the real difference, recognizing that it means something to me, that I ought to change and transform into the likeness of the story that is thrown alongside versus just me standing above the text, academically analyzing it and going, okay, yeah,

I get it, I can understand that and kind of like an exercise in your brain and that's it but this is meant to be an exercise of our will and an effect in our hearts and in our lives, do you understand that?

That's the purpose of all of scripture in a sense but these parables are specifically designed to try to draw us into a story that we can go, oh,

I can see these connections and there's a little bit more skill and masterful teaching that's involved in Jesus telling us these stories.

How many of you like stories? You just kind of like them, I mean, there's connecting points and there's intrigue and there's maybe you read fiction from time to time just because you like good stories and things like that and I would recommend that,

I think it does broaden our thinking and to try to draw those analogies and those comparisons are beneficial and helpful.

But ironically, this parable is a parable about parables. It's a parable about the way that you receive them, about the way that you receive truth, about the way that you understand what is indeed being taught from scripture.

We cannot be satisfied with mere mental understanding but we must move on to fruitful application and that's what

Jesus is illustrating for us. How do you process a parable? How do you process teaching from God's word?

Well, there's something about the way that our hearts are designed that's going to have an impact on that and that's what the parable is.

Now in ancient times, I want to point out that rather than planting in straight rows like we do today, we've come a long ways in understanding and fertilizing soil and getting it right up to the right content to grow certain crops and all of that stuff and we've got efficiency about how far plants need to be planted apart from each other to grow consistently to have a good yield and good produce.

Back then they would plow up the field, then they would just cast the seeds out by hand walking along and throwing seeds and then they would plow it over again, they'd plow their field twice, once to open the soil, cast the seeds, another time the opposite direction to close it up again and get some of those seeds under the ground, hope that something grows.

That would be the way that it worked. And those of you who maybe, some of you maybe have spread salt already this year but you recognize that it might be difficult sometimes when you're throwing salt out on your driveway or out on your sidewalk or wherever, your place of employment, whatever, when you throw salt out, does it always land exactly where you want it to?

Does the salt always only land exactly on the icy patch that you're trying to dissolve? No, it doesn't, right?

Like it just bounces all over the place and it goes wherever it wants to and you can try your best to get it only in those isolated spots.

Some of you know that little spinner thing, anybody ever use one of those? You guys are all in Michigan, right? Like you've used one of those.

You know what, do you even know what I'm talking about? It's like a tumbler and you spin it and it spins and it throws the salt all over the place.

That thing never gets the salt where you want it to go, right? You know what I'm talking about. You want the salt right there, you got to stand way over here and try to get that thing figured out.

So, if you don't have a clue what I'm talking about, you're not really missing that much so it's okay.

You can maybe get the little picture in your mind or something. I should have thrown a picture of that up here. So this everyday farmer here in the story that Jesus is telling us has seeds that fall on the pathway.

It falls in places he doesn't want the seed to go but he's okay because he's got plenty of seed to sow.

So he's like, I'll get some seed where it needs to be and some of it's going to be wasted, I recognize that. But as he's casting it out, some of it falls on the pathways, the hard packed soil around the edges of his field.

Well it falls on that surface there and then he has some fall on shallow soil where the rock is close to the surface and although he's tried to plow it up, his plow has probably hit some rock from time to time and it's kind of rocky soil and so the rock is, this is not rocky soil like there's a lot of rocks in it.

This is rocky soil like as in very shallow soil where the bedrock comes right up there and so it's just, there's just rock right beneath the surface.

And then he has some seeds that fall among the unplowed thorny area where there's actually thorns growing and he has a good amount of seed that falls of course on the good plowed and prepared soil that he has plowed up.

So that's the picture, that's the whole imagery. And there's so many ways that we can frame this parable.

I mean as I was studying this week, so many different angles to teach it from, so many different ways and ways to formulate thoughts about it.

We could look just strictly from the perspective of results for example. The seeds that fall on the path never get a chance to grow, instead they are, according to the text, devoured.

A pretty dramatic Greek word that means devoured, like it means totally consumed and taken up.

In this case it's the birds that do the devouring but we can picture what that means. Those seeds are gone, they're plucked away and removed from the whole field, from the scenario.

The seeds that fall on the thin soil sprout up quickly because of the thin warm soil. Because the soil is thin, they grow up quicker.

It's sudden and they grow up faster but without any depth. When the heat of the sun hits them, they bake and they wither away and wither away is again a very strong Greek verb in our text, to wither away.

The seed that falls among the thorns get a chance to grow and they take some root but eventually, as you might know, weeds grow faster.

That's part of what makes them a weed, is they grow faster and they consume more sunlight and they make more shade and they choke out the good plants that the farmer wanted to plant.

Choking out, I don't know if you noticed, choking out, I can't think of a time when that's a good word. It doesn't work really well in agriculture and it doesn't work good in cage fighting either.

So you never want to get choked out. But the seeds that fell on the good soil produce grain in varying measures.

So we can see simply by looking at this opening without even looking at Jesus' interpretation, if you're looking at it from a purely agricultural perspective and understanding what the illustration is, having seeds fall on the path, on the rocky soil, or in the thorns is bad, but having the seed fall on the good soil is good.

You see that and you can get that. So you know that some components, like three quarters of this illustration looks bad, right off the bat, and one quarter of it looks pretty good and it produces a yield and it's beneficial.

So, so far the agricultural lesson is probably not adding a lot to the farmers in the room.

To the people who were in Jesus' time who are listening to this, I don't imagine that anybody there is really learning a lot about good farming practices.

I don't imagine that anybody there had their notebook out, taking copious notes on Jesus, farming, you know, is this planting strategies 101 for the ancient

Jewish college and they're all there for the agricultural college and they're all learning how to plant, oh, okay, so some will fall on the path and it won't grow and the birds will eat it, this is stuff that they knew, you know, he was not teaching them new understanding, they observed these things in their everyday life, they knew this already.

But this is a parable, a story thrown alongside of their lives in a way that would impact them in the way that they understood things, thrown alongside of their life so that they might take something new into them.

And Jesus clarifies as much that this is a parable by verse 9, letting us know that those who have ears need to hear this message.

Now, again, this is a figure of speech, he's not talking like that because people in ancient

Israel lacked ears or something like that, that's not the reason he says this. This is a phrase challenging his listeners to dig a little bit deeper, to try to understand this parable, he wants them to stretch their mind, he knows that not everybody is going to get what he's talking about here.

Now, many of us get it because we've been taught it before, but if you were listening to this for the first time and you didn't have an explanation that has been given to you before, you would have to wrestle with it too, you would have to try to figure out what does he mean by this, what are the components here, what is the seed, what is the soil, what is all of this, and you'd have to think about that.

He knows that not everyone is going to get it, it's a bit like those insider campfire games that people will play where some of the people understand the game and what the rules are to it and others don't and you're trying to figure it out, does anybody even know what

I'm talking about, anybody play those like at camp or whatever? Maybe two of us. But I want everybody to note the difference here, this is kind of significant here, there's a distance between verse 9 and verse 18 where Jesus is going to teach in a gap there of verses 10 through 17, which we're going to take again in a couple of weeks, talking about parables, but I want to talk about that gap, that gap matters, the things that he says in there are significant for us, it's intentional,

I wanted to bring it together because it's not very fair for me to just teach on the parable and then miss Jesus' interpretation later,

I wanted to bring those two together, but in that gap, Jesus taught specifically about the use of parables and why.

And as much as I would like to tell you that Jesus uses parables to stretch the mind of his audience, he's using it as a teaching tool because he just was a good teacher, now many of you have had a good teacher and hopefully you are to some degree a good teacher, but a good teacher kind of puts the cookies up a little bit on the shelf, like if your students are here, then you put things a little bit above them and then let them stretch their minds and reach out to it, right?

Like that's kind of what a good teacher does and so is that what Jesus is doing, just kind of trying to cover the truth just a little bit so that they have to really exercise their brains to get to this.

Well I would like to think that that's what he's doing because that's kind of just like, oh yeah, he's the master teacher, he's amazing, look at how he stretches the minds of his people and that it just isn't the case and we'll talk about that again more in detail in a couple of weeks, but Jesus teaches in parables as a sort of sorting out the soils.

Good soil will get it. Good soil will apprehend the teaching.

Good soil will wrestle with it and seek fervently after understanding. Good soil will reach out to the seed and will embrace the seed and will figure out the seed and will nurture the seed.

And we're going to talk in just a moment about what the seed is, that it will seek understanding, will come under the teaching and will apply the teaching and will grow and the seed in their lives will produce a harvest.

That's a good soil, but notice that there are three other types of soils and Jesus is highlighting that many will not accept the seed and there's a variety of reasons why people do not embrace the seed and grow to maturity and grow to replication, which is one of our core values at Recast, right?

The R and the E in Recast is replication, that we would reproduce in the lives and replicate in the lives of others' faith and belief.

And our goal is in the long run to plant other churches that would replicate the cause of the kingdom in other places.

But in verse 18, Jesus now alone with his disciples, there's been a movement again and by the time we get to 18, he's alone with his disciples and he walks through with them the explanation of this very parable.

And in this, we have the only explanation of a parable and I believe that Jesus gives to us and he tells the story and then interprets it for us and I believe that it serves as a model for us to understand how he used parables in his teaching.

The seed is the message of the kingdom, he tells us directly. The seed is the message of the kingdom.

Now to our modern ears, message of the kingdom may be a bit foreign or even mysterious to us.

We don't think in terms of king, we've got a president and we've got congress and judges and all of that stuff, but we don't really have a king and so what is the message of the kingdom?

What is that meaning? What is the seed? But a simple way to clarify in your mind, whenever you hear kingdom mentioned in the

New Testament, when you see that word, I want you to think kingdom, what does it start with?

It starts with king. This is a message about the coming king. Who is the king?

Jesus. Jesus is the king. The kingdom message is about, it's a message about King Jesus.

The seed then is the message of the good news that we have a king who is in the process of bringing forth his reign in righteousness, in grace, and in justice.

The seed is the gospel that salvation is found in the king that God has appointed for us.

The one that he sent 2 ,000 years ago that we celebrate at Christmas. What is the soil then?

The soil is the heart of individuals hearing that message of the kingdom. It's our hearts.

It's your heart and mine and he's drawing out an illustration for each one of us in the room. Everybody here he's identifying is like this.

I don't know that he's exhaustive in his potential responses to the kingdom and I'm not sure that he intended to be, but he's definitely showing us four common responses to the gospel message.

The soil is the heart of individuals hearing that message. Remember that the heart in Jewish understanding was the place of the will, the emotions, the thought.

I even a couple of weeks ago, or maybe it was just last week, made an association or a difference between the head and the heart about believing in your head and trusting in your heart.

I'm not sure that that's a particularly helpful differentiation because we know that there is this organ in our chest that pumps blood and we use the word heart, like I love you with all of my heart or whatever, and we'll use that as a figure of speech, but to differentiate too much between the head and the heart is

I think a little bit confusing because the fact of the matter is we are one immaterial unit going on in here and in that unity there is thinking, there is will, there is desire, there is emotion.

A lot of times we'd like to push off our sin on our heart, oh you naughty heart, you're doing bad right now, but in our minds boy, in my mind

I'm doing okay, I'm pretty solid here or vice versa. And we like to play off parts of ourselves when in fact we have no freedom to blame the other ourselves because we're all one and so our will and our emotions, the heart is all of that rolled up together.

How we make decisions, what decisions we make, what we think about, how we feel things, all a part of us, and that's the heart, that's the soil that Jesus is talking about.

And there are four different types of soils, meaning there are four different types of hearts that result in different responses to the message of salvation and we are meant to throw this alongside and say as I go through this, thinking carefully and as honestly as you can with introspection say, which am

I? This is thrown alongside of your life to say, compare this to you, where do you fall in this?

So the first type of soil is the hard packed soil of the pathway.

Some people have a hard heart that refuses to seek understanding, that is hardened to spiritual things, is hardened to the message of the king, is hardened maybe even to the king himself.

And when some people hear the message of salvation offered by the king, by Christ, it doesn't penetrate into the depth of their hearts, it just bounces right off and the evil one is all too eager to snatch that message away and the seed is devoured by the evil one which just for Jesus' purposes was used as an illustration of birds, not that birds are evil, even though Alfred Hitchcock had that one movie thing, but that was creepy.

But the seed is devoured by the evil one. Now we traditionally think,

I mean you can get in your mind an image of what you think of when you hear hard hearted person and a lot of times we think maybe stubborn or willfully defiant or you have in your mind an image of hard hearted that might not be equivalent to what

Jesus is getting at here. Jesus indicts this person as a person being without understanding.

He doesn't say that they're particularly hostile or violent or have a lot of vitriol against spiritual things, he's saying that they don't have understanding, as if to say they are ignorant of spiritual things.

And we may at first glance think that that's a harsh indictment, come on Jesus, I mean just if a person's a little bit thicker, a little bit harder to get into the meaning, if there's a little bit less cognitive capability there, then is that who he's talking about?

They just don't have understanding and so they're a hard hearted individual, the soil is bounced off them.

But we're not intended here, I believe, to picture a person with a simple mind who just is a little too simple minded to understand the gospel,

I don't think that's what he's getting at here. This is a person who refuses to seek understanding, they hear the message, they get the message and they won't take it any further.

I would liken this to a person who has, think about it, no informed opinion about Jesus. Okay, they've heard about him a lot, they've probably heard him used as a curse word in their workplace, they've heard about him, but they just don't have any informed opinion about him at all.

They haven't even dug in at all, or maybe they have an opinion of him that isn't informed at all, it's just kind of like an off the, a shoot from the hip kind of opinion about spiritual things.

Or maybe they have no informed opinion about the Bible at all, no solid search for what life is about, no coherent world view that explains why there even exists anything.

Why the world seems to be broken, or where history is going.

This category of soil covers a vast array of human motivations. I would suggest it goes on one end from mental laziness, an unwillingness to do the work of seeking understanding, of researching, of coming to conclusions, of really reading the

Bible and really digging in. It would also, I think, cover the realm of willful defiance. It would also cover,

I think, in this lack of understanding is the realm of pseudo -intellectual doubt that is willing to run with the very shallow stream of our media, willing to run with the very shallow stream of what new science is showing, or the data here or the data there, but isn't willing to really dig in for themselves, but is willing to take what others would say and memorize those answers and regurgitate them or spit them out.

You getting what I'm saying in this? No real desire or drive to learn. This is the soil of the pathway, the hard heart that doesn't seek understanding.

But there's a different kind of heart. The second one, the heart of some people appears on the surface to be eager to receive the message of salvation.

It's been plowed up. It looks ready. It looks like they are ready to receive and they respond to the word and appear to be on target to maturity and growth.

They grow quickly. Suddenly the seed just sprouts up. But in reality, they just don't go very deep.

There's no room for roots to take hold. They respond with joy at the thought of what they might gain from salvation, but they are misled to some degree by all promises of good things without the reality of the service and hardship that followers of King Jesus will indeed endure.

So when the heat turns up in their lives and when persecution comes or when sacrifice comes or when giving something up for the king comes, they fall away, the text says.

The word for fall away, by the way, is a very unique Greek word that could be translated a couple of different ways. We actually obtain a very rare English word from this

Greek word. It is scandalized. The word fall away there, it could be translated, they are scandalized.

It implies that they feel as though they have been misled. And I fear that many of them have, especially in our current culture.

Many are misled into thinking that it's going to be all gumdrops and rainbows if they give their life to Jesus.

And when the going gets tough and hard things come into their life, they are scandalized, they fall away, they are broken on the broken promises that others have taught them to trust in and believe in.

In our modern context, I'm mindful that we have dangerously drawn near to scandalizing people on purpose in the global church.

Some of it has, I believe, been intentional. The prosperity gospel is one example of the way that we could lead people to a joyful, really quick, fast decision to follow

Jesus. It's scandalized them in the end. Think about what the promises of the prosperity gospel is simply this, if I accept

Jesus, he will fix my health issues. If I accept Jesus, he will make me wealthy.

Where do we sign up for that, right? How many of you aren't going to sign up for something like that? If that's true, man, sign me up today.

David's already on, he's got his name on the list back there. I mean, we, you know, that appeals to a part of us and I think you'd be lying to say that there's not an appeal to stay healthy and get rich.

I think that appeals to our flesh very well and in the shallowness of soil that is so easily developed in our lives through culture and through upbringing and through all of these things, we can remain in that shallow state where we accept those promises, but man, when tough times come, what happens when poor health hits, what happens when poverty hits or when just the routine problems of everyday life on a fallen planet hit us and suddenly people are scandalized and they're open to falling away because they have had no depth of teaching and they have been issued, in many cases, a false trust.

Now the same risk applies to many evangelical churches like ours who have taught and could potentially teach an easy believism.

Maybe some of you have heard that phrase, but it's just simply just put your faith in Jesus and he will give you a good life.

Many of you have heard this phrase, God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life. That's often the opening line to some gospel presentations.

God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life and in small print under that ought to be and that wonderful plan for your life could be sacrificing yourself in a tribe in Africa for the cause of Christ or dying in a foreign field or sacrificing everything for the cause of Jesus or having your child move away to a foreign field or who knows what that sacrifice might look like for each and every one of us.

God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life, sign me up for that, but the road of being a disciple of Christ is one in which he told his followers to take up their crosses and follow him.

There are days when the sun burns down hot, scorches and withers those seeds without depth of root.

How deep are you? What is the depth of your roots into the word of God and into trust in his goodness and kindness toward you that what difficulty comes in your life is his kindness and goodness to you.

As for your sharpening is that you might draw closer to him which is your greatest good, which is his greatest glory that you would walk closer with him day by day.

It's hard to preach to an individual, it's easier when it's a crowd of people, right?

I don't recommend you preach it to individuals in the hospital. Mourn with those who are mourning, but it is a message that we need to take in now before those times hit that God is indeed good even when tragedy strikes our lives.

I would suggest to you that what I've been talking about right now has been the quality of the seed which isn't necessarily what

Jesus is addressing. The quality of the seed, I want to point out just in kind of wrapping up this second one, the shallow soil, the rocky soil, that there are some who when confronted with the true gospel, the accurate gospel where the sacrifice and the difficulty of discipleship is indeed brought forward, where the cost is clearly communicated, that it's a life of sacrifice where Jesus said take up your cross and follow him is communicated, there are some who will still respond with selfish motives.

They will still only hear what they want to hear. They will still start off excited, but they will give up when the going gets tough.

These are not people that I believe have lost their salvation. Jesus isn't addressing that, he's not getting into that.

Instead, they have ceased to grow and have withered away. I believe that it's quite possible for a person to be a believer and be in a state of shrinking back from the difficult calling of the cost of discipleship.

The third type of soil is already growing stuff. As a matter of fact, it's growing lots of stuff.

It is chocked full of all kinds of stuff growing in it. This soil could be rightly called busy soil.

It is so busy growing stuff. It has very little room for the seed of the word to begin with, but man, this type of soil likes to grow stuff, so introduce some seed in it and it'll grow that too.

It's eager to grow. It's eager and it's ready and it's ripe and it wants to grow more, and so it takes in the word.

But in this type of soil that is trying to grow everything, the seed of the good news takes root, starts to grow, but it comes up shy of maturity and replication.

In verse 22, Jesus declares that it was choked out by the cares of this world and the deceitfulness of riches.

He tells us what those thorns look like in people's lives, and so it proves to be unfruitful.

And if that isn't a bit convicting to think about your life and your spiritual life and your connection with Christ being choked out by the cares of this world, then you're doing better than me if this doesn't convict you, if you're going, well,

I've got that sewn up. I've got that taken care of. The cares of this world and the deceitfulness of riches nearly define the culture in which

I was raised. The life in the world that I live in now, how could the cares of this world choke out spiritual growth?

I could be too scared to share Christ with my co -workers or with my friend or my neighbor or my family member

I'm going to be seeing over the holidays. I could be too busy to pray to get to know

God through His word. I could be so stressed in my work that I respond in harsh ways with my immediate family, choking out the chance that I will be a godly influence on those young lives.

There are countless ways that the cares of this world choke out spiritual fruitfulness in us.

Please don't misunderstand what the cares of this world are. It's very easy and very important that we get this right.

The cares of this world are not taking care of your family. Well, God, I could serve you better if I just didn't have this family to take care of or being a responsible member of civil society.

Well, the neighbors keep calling and making the village mow my lawn because I refuse to because I don't want to bother with the cares of this world, right?

I'm sure that's nobody in the room. Maybe we could take it the other way. I'm mowing my lawn all the time. I don't know. Whatever. Doing a good job for your employer.

Oh, yeah, I just skate by because I gotta have a quiet time every day. I gotta get in the word.

I just barely have time for the responsibilities that I have or whatever. I'm sure that's nobody's problem here.

The cares of this world are not doing the things that we need to be doing on a daily basis, the calling of God to the responsibilities that we have.

The cares of this world that Jesus is reflecting on here that will choke out your spiritual life are sinful things.

Anxieties, fears, specific sins, faithless concerns of will

I have enough or will I be enough? Are you hearing me?

These are sinful things that choke it out. Loving your family is a pathway to spiritual growth.

It's a pathway to being sharper, a pathway to sanctification. Your family is not getting in the way of your spiritual growth.

Your selfishness is getting in the way of your spiritual growth. Your concerns about when you're gonna next get to binge watch that next season on Netflix of whatever show you're into and you're like, man, when am

I gonna get the time? When am I gonna get that all in? We've invented ways to choke out spiritual growth in our lives.

And I don't even feel like I need to address very heavily the deceitfulness of riches in this and choking out spiritual life.

I think you can see how the promises of riches can get in the way of our growth.

It's one thing to do a great job for your employer and call it a day. That's another thing to find all of your identity in your employment, to find all of your identity in your work and to work for your significance.

I think some of us probably are close to that right now. Let's take that on as conviction because that will choke out your spiritual influence in your family, your spiritual influence on others around you.

It will choke out all kinds of things if you're turning to that for your significance rather than turning to Christ.

Again, I don't believe this is about whether or not a person with a heart like this is in or out of the kingdom.

It is primarily about productivity and Jesus says as much. This kind of person proves to be unfruitful.

They don't yield any product for the kingdom because they're so caught up in the world and the things of the world and the sinful things that corrupt.

There's a final type of soil. The Word of God lands in this good soil and the listener hears, they understand and they work to understand and then they bear fruit.

Some will bear 100 times what is sown, some 60 and others 30. Not everyone who grows to maturity will replicate at the same rate.

But notice that all who grow to maturity will indeed have a yield.

So let's conclude by considering what type of soil are you? Are you like the hard soil who isn't really allowing the message of salvation in?

Are you like the shallow soil that started out strong but gave up when the going got tough?

Are you like the thorny soil who has been choked out by the worldly cares and deceitfulness of riches?

Or are you like the good soil who is producing a harvest by spreading the word to others?

By the way, what does a seed get when it's sown? You plant a kernel of corn.

What do you expect the product to be months later? Rice, soybeans, corn.

What is sown? In Jesus' story, what's sown? The word of the kingdom, the message of the kingdom.

What does a hundredfold response look like for a servant of the king, the one who the seeds of the message of the kingdom have been planted in our hearts?

What is the outcome of that? What do we expect to be produced? What does 100 or 60 or 30 fold look like?

A hundredfold of sharing the word with others. A hundredfold of, not necessarily that every single time you share, does somebody come to faith in Christ, but you're sharing it.

You're getting out and declaring it. You're a messenger of the king and planting more seeds.

What is our calling? Our primary calling as Christians? Casting seeds, throwing out the message of the kingdom.

Is it up to you where it lands? No, just like I said with the salt. You don't always get to define where it lands, but you throw it out there.

Are there times where it's going to bounce back to you and bite you in the ankle because it's going to bounce off of somebody who's hard soil and they don't want to have anything to do with you anymore?

Sometimes. Are you sometimes going to cast it out and watch somebody grow only to wither away because they're not embracing the message that you've shared and they've got the shallow soil?

Yes, sometimes it's going to be disappointing, but I can tell you from experience what a joy and a delight it is to be used to cast out soil and watch it stick in good soil.

Have you had that privilege? Have you had that opportunity? I would suggest to you, yes, you have had the opportunity.

Have you taken that opportunity? It is a delight. It is not going to be discouraging.

It's going to be a delight to be a farmer out in his field casting his seed. My prayer is that everybody in this room has the privilege, the statistics show that the average person who calls themselves a born -again believer will not lead another person to faith in Christ in their lifetime.

My prayer for everybody in this room is that you have the privilege of leading someone else to Christ.

And man, set it higher than that. But just at least one, it just, and that's going to come through spreading seeds.

I don't know, I don't want to make too much of it, but three quarters of the illustration didn't land on good soil.

Now, I don't know if that's a percentage or not, but I mean, in the story, but he's just casting out, just throwing the seeds, get the message out.

If you find yourself personally in one of the first three categories, let me encourage you to hear the gospel, seek to understand the gospel, believe it, and stick with it.

Let nothing deter you from embracing the salvation that is available to you through Jesus Christ.

For some of us, it may require dramatic measures to cast aside the thorns. You know what those thorns are that have entangled you and choked out your growth.

There are things that maybe have caused you to plateau in your walk with Christ, or even caused you to take steps back because there's addiction, or there's problem, or there's sin that's owning you, that's entangled you, that's holding you down.

Some of us need to cast off fear and spread the message of salvation. Some of us need to endure hardship with our eyes on Jesus.

He is the hope that we remember each week when we take communion. If he is your king and your heart has embraced the message of his kingdom, then come to one of the four tables in the corner of this room to remember his sacrifice for you.

Please skip communion this morning if you've not asked Jesus Christ to save you. But the message of the kingdom is simply this.

The king came in humility. We celebrate that a week from today. He came in humility to die for his people.

He took on himself the punishment that we deserved and he died for our sins.

But he rose from the grave three days later victorious over sin and death. And when that message hits a heart of good soil, it takes root and grows and results in a fruitful life of replication.

Let's pray. Father, I thank you so much for the message of salvation that was spoken to me years ago by someone faithful in a children's program on Wednesday night.

And I'm sure everybody in this room can reflect to some degree on that. The messenger that was used to sow the seed that hit their heart at the right time.

But Father, I believe that even in our gathering this morning, there may be some who are identifying with those other soils.

They're identifying that they grew up quick and then fell away, or they've been choked out by the cares of this world, or they've had a hard heart and not sought deeper understanding and have just let it bounce off of them.

Father, I pray that as only you can, that you would be preparing hearts, that you'd be preparing soil.

Father, if there's anybody here that this Christmas season would be a time of life transformation for anybody in this room who does not know you as Savior.

Father, for those of us who do, that we would be like the good soil who produces 30, 60, even 100 fold in return.

Give us boldness. Give us a recognition of your calling on our lives to spread this message with faithfulness, with integrity, with intensity, with love for others.

That we would be fueled by love over this holiday season as we get an opportunity to interact with a whole variety of people, including family and neighbors and others.

Father, that you would work in our hearts and work through our voices and work through our love and our actions to lead others to faith in you.

As we come to communion, I thank you for the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. It's only in him that we have hope.

And I pray that you would be with us in this week leading up to Christmas, that we would have a meaningful time to reflect on the glory that has been given to us in your son,