WWUTT 2347 The Parable of the Sower (Luke 8:4-8)

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Jesus spoke to the people in parables and he explained to them why he spoke to them in parables

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Because to you it's given to know the secrets of the kingdom of God But there are others to whom it has not been given when we understand the text

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This is when we understand the text studying God's Word to reach all the riches of full assurance in Christ Thank you for subscribing.

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And if this is minister to you, please let others know about our program here Once again is pastor Gabe Hughes.

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Thank you Becky. My voice is a little rough today. So we'll see how far we get I'm in Luke chapter 8

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Where Jesus is now going to begin teaching in parables and we have first of all the parable of the sower so let me start reading in verse 4 and we'll go through verse 15 here the word of the

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Lord and when a great crowd was gathering and people from town after town came to him he said in a parable a

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Sower went out to sow his seed and as he sowed some fell along the path and was trampled underfoot and the birds of the air devoured it and some fell on the rock and as it grew it withered away because it had no moisture and some fell among thorns and the thorns grew up with it and choked it and some fell into good soil and grew and yielded a hundredfold as He said these things he called out he who has ears to hear let him hear and When his disciples asked him what this parable meant

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He said to you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of God But for others they are in parables so that seeing they may not see and hearing they may not

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Understand now the parable is this the seed is the Word of God The ones along the path are those who have heard then the devil comes and takes away the word from their hearts so that they may not believe and be saved and The ones on the rock are those who when they hear the word receive it with joy but these have no root they believe for a while and in time of testing fall away and As for what fell among the thorns they are those who hear but as they go on their way they are choked by the cares and riches and pleasures of this life and their fruit does not mature as For that in the good soil they are those who hearing the word hold it fast in an honest and good heart and bear fruit with patience

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Now this parable is That is very familiar to this broadcast because it's the first one

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I ever taught through even before I got to teaching through the Gospels I don't know if you realize but this year 2025 is now 10 years

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Coming up in August it will have been 10 years since I started This podcast and the first book that I taught through was

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Philippians I believe it was either after I finished for lip Philippians, or it could have been when I finished Colossians But I decided to teach through the parable of the sower

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I took kind of a break from Going through a book and taught through the first parable of Jesus as it was written in Matthew chapter 13

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So that was the first time I taught through this parable and then in the last couple of years We've been through Matthew and Mark so I've taught through it again

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And now we come to it here in Luke so this may be at least the fourth time now

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That I've been through some version of the parable of the sower here on when we understand the text and it is such a

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It's a powerful parable, which is one of the reasons why it appears in all three

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Gospels It speaks of who genuinely believes who is

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Genuinely part of the kingdom of God and that there are going to be others who may look like they are followers but then after a time they fall away and Evidence themselves as having not truly been followers of Christ at all

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And so that may be a caution to us that our faith our confession our

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Practicing would be real it would be genuine that when a day of testing comes we're able to stand fast

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We're holding fast to Christ. We're not gonna let go because in the power of the

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Spirit our faith is steadfast and strong But for those whose faith is not genuine this just kind of becomes a passing opinion and When a day of testing does come or persecution arises somebody ridicules you for your faith

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You may abandon it altogether or what I've most commonly seen is somebody changes

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The Christianity that they say that they have into something that doesn't actually look like biblical

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Christianity That's leaving the faith too They may say that they still have faith

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But what they say is their faith does not look like what the Bible says should be our faith they instead create something that it's it either allows them to have their sin or It's something that they won't be made fun of as much for it will bow the knee to the world

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Allowing the culture the world their friends to have their sin And and I just don't want to be seen as those people who are too judgy, you know

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The God that I worship he loves everybody no matter what just had a conversation with a universalist the other day

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Who acknowledged that even though there is? There are very very wicked people in the world who are gonna do awful abhorrent things yet God is gonna save them anyway and bring them into heaven no matter how much they hated

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God in life That's just incredible and goes completely against biblical Christianity. It's not

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Christianity at all So there will be those who will profess faith and they may look like genuine

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Christians for a time But then something happens they fall away Because they were never really rooted in it in the first place.

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And that's what this parable demonstrates They never really had Christ They just liked it.

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It was convenient for them at the time But then when it became difficult, they either abandoned it altogether or changed it into something else entirely

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So this parable even though we've been through it before I'm not gonna rush through it This is what we're gonna be looking at between today and tomorrow coming back to the parable of the sower

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And remember this is this is right after that kind of a brief introduction that we got to chapter 8, which we looked at yesterday

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Jesus went through cities and villages Proclaiming and bringing the good news of the kingdom of God and then the parable of the sower is gonna be one of those teachings

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About the kingdom of God also in those first three verses of chapter 8 We read about the 12 being with Jesus as he traveled throughout these places

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But then there were also women that went along with them and were ministering to them The first of whom that is named is

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Mary called Magdalene from whom seven demons had gone out Then you have Joanna the wife of Chusa Who was

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Herod's household manager and then Susanna and many others who provided for them out of their means

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One of the things I pointed out about this yesterday is that these women were likely wealthy and that's something that whenever you watch the different cinematic and TV show depictions of Jesus and his disciples you never see

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Mary Magdalene as as Presented as potentially wealthy that she actually came from a wealthy background

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Because these are women who were obviously influential and provided for Jesus and the disciples out of their means

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They may have had a lot of money obviously Who was the second one that was mentioned there?

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Joanna the wife of Chusa Herod's household manager That's not only somebody who likely had a lot of money, but was even very politically influential

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Mary Magdalene is often Depicted as a as a poor peasant woman often depicted as a prostitute as I said yesterday

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And there's nothing in the Gospels that says that she was ever a prostitute, but she was somebody who had

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Potentially had great wealth and used that money to support Jesus and the disciples in the ministry that they did and So we go from that statement in verse 1

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About Jesus and his disciples going through cities and villages Proclaiming and bringing the good news of the kingdom of God Jump from that right to verse 4 and when a great crowd was gathered and people from town after town came to him

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He said in a parable so as they are going from place to place more and more people seem to be

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Following along and finally when a big crowd is gathered Jesus begins teaching in a parable now

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He explains the purpose of the parables. That's the section. We're going to look at tomorrow beginning in verse 9 but here's the parable itself so a great crowd is gathered and they come to him and he says to him in a parable he says to them in a parable a

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Sower went out to sow his seed now. Let me stop there for a moment

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So you have in this parable a man who was a farmer who is casting seed and I've given this picture before if you've heard me

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Teach on the parable of the sower or as it's often called out of Mark's gospel the parable of the soils

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I think soils is probably better Because the soils are the emphasis in this parable

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That's really what Jesus is teaching on. It's not the sower itself So it or himself rather so that is that's the emphasis of the parable what these different soils?

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Represent the path the rocks the thorns and then of course the good soil So this is really the parable of the soils, but this sower this is a farmer

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This is a man who after the ground has been tilled has gone out with a seed bag

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And he's got this bag that is, you know around one shoulder kind of sits on one side and it's it's probably a pretty hefty bag

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That's no reference to the trash bag It's just a big bulky bag full of seed

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He needs enough seed in that sack that he can go through Casting seed and he wants to make as few stops as possible in going back and refilling his seed bag

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So he's got a pretty full bag when he starts out and he's dipping his hand into that bag and and he's taking a handful of seed and then he casts his hand across his body and Throwing the seed out into the tilled soil that has been turned up to receive the seed into the rich ground

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He's already been through with a plow probably with a you know Some sort of draft animal whether it was a donkey an oxen even to oxen could be pulling a larger plow or two plows

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However is most efficient for him and whatever he can afford to till up the ground Maybe he's done it by hand even if it's a if it's a small plot

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But with most of these land plots large fields He would have tilled up the soil with an animal and now he has he's walking along the path and he's casting seed

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Now if it's a large plot of land, obviously, he can't cast his seed from the road into the entire field so when a farmer is

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Tilling up this soil. He might do several rows, you know something five to ten rows or something like that He's tilling up these rows of soil and then in between lines of ten

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There will be a narrow path and it won't be very large, you know, maybe a couple feet wide

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Just so he can walk on that path and cast seed into the turned up soil And then those those paths are also good for when the crop is growing he's able to walk up and down the aisles and And check the the plants as it's growing make sure that everything is healthy and good

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Weed out any weeds or shoo away any vermin, you know anything like that.

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So he's walking along this path he's casting seed out like this and the seed is is

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Cast into the air falls into the soil if it falls into the good soil

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It produces a crop and grows Now this this act itself of casting seed the way he sweeps his arm across his body and Cast seed into the air to fall into the soil.

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This was called broadcasting and When we use that term today, how do how do we use that term?

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Broadcasting it's in reference to what goes out over the radio waves or what is broadcast on TV Now this is not as popular anymore as it used to be or not as well known as it used to be because now you can

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Stream everything so everything is coming through internet It's not the same as you know, beaming out radio signals or two

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At least we don't think about it that way as much Internet signals can still be beamed if you've got

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Starlink for example Which is Elon's company then you've got signals that are being beamed up into space and back down into your home

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But the internet company like the one that we use is cable So it's cable that goes through the ground

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We plug it into the wall and then it beams out into the wireless into our house

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But it's cable that's been laid around the community and then we pay that particular company to to use their internet

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So it's kind of different than it used to be This was a little easier to understand back at the time of television and radio to radio days

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I mean, it's still those days It's just not as commonly done as it was, you know, what 30 40 years ago plus a hundred years ago

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This whole thing of sending out a radio signal a message over the airwaves is referred to as broadcasting

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Now, what do we call it? Like this what you're listening to. This is not a broadcast.

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It's a Podcast. Yes. Thank you Apple. So Apple was the one that really changed that because they came out with the the iPod

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And then the talk programs that you could create and download onto your iPod, which you don't even download them anymore

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Now it's all just through streaming But that became known as a podcast. So it was a pun

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It was a play off of the whole concept of the broadcast and now it is a podcast It's already right there on your device

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Which now is pretty much just your phone so that you can listen to it whenever you want You don't have to pick up the program when it airs at a certain time

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It's just right there on your phone for you to listen to whenever you feel like listening to it so that whole concept of broadcasting came from the sowing of seed and when it came about that Messages were being sent out over radio and TV waves

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That they called it broadcasting because it was like sowing a seed it was like casting a message that would fall on ears and Would plant into the mind and heart for people to hear the word and understand what was being spoken

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Maybe even believe something and change and alter their lives because of it. This is the very same

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Illustration that Jesus is using here in the parable of the sower when the message of the kingdom goes out as he goes to explain

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The parable the seed represents the message of the kingdom It's being broadcast even before there were radio and TV waves to broadcast over I mean the radio waves were always there

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But people had not yet created the devices to cast messages over those radio waves

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But when the when the disciples would go out and they would preach the message shouting into a crowd

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Drawing crowds of themselves and then preaching the gospel as we have in Acts 2 and then from that point on they were broadcasting a message and It's the same thing as what this sower is doing here

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Broadcasting seed a sower went out to sow his seed to broadcast and as he sowed some fell along the path and Was trampled underfoot and the birds of the air devoured it

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Okay, so you got the picture of what I was talking about regarding how these fields were made, right?

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So you got the path just this narrow path there doesn't mean that he's out on a roadside And then there's a ditch and there's a fence and he's throwing seed over the fence into the field

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I remember I think it was the very first illustration that I ever saw of The parable of the sower when

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I was a kid, it was my Sunday school teacher You know, I had a Sunday school teacher that used flannel graphs.

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Anybody have a Sunday school teacher with the flannel graphs. I had several teachers that would do this to this day

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I still know Sunday school teachers that use the flannel graph, but with regard to the parable of the sower

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It wasn't the flannel graph that she showed us It was a it was a picture something that came along with the lesson that she was teaching

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So a painted picture on like a eight and a half by eleven piece of paper or something, you know

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Cardboard whatever and she holds that up as she's telling us the parable of the sower. I still remember this

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I remember this vividly and it's a picture of a guy walking on a road Like you would see a man walking on a dirt road today

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With a ditch to the side and a fence and he's throwing seed over the fence and I even as a kid

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I even remember looking at that going why is he sowing his seed into some strange person's field?

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From a roadway. He's just throwing seed over there. That doesn't make any sense to me So it's not somebody who's walking along a dirt road and throwing seed into the field

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The path is a path that has been made through the tilled rows So that he can walk carefully there not trampled down the soil that he's already tilled up But walking along the path and casting seed now, of course as he's taking a big handful of seed

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He's not able to hold all that seed in his hand and when he broadcasts some of it You know trickles down right on to the path that he's walking on and so he gets trampled under his feet and then birds of The air they'll come down and they'll devour the seed

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Growing up in Kansas You always had those farm trucks driving around all over the place I mean

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I even grew up in a farming town in Kansas You can always tell when the farmers were out either gathering up the crop or they were out there sowing seed

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Because there would be birds all over the road I knew it was either planting or harvesting time because there's birds all over the road

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Those birds are there either eating up the grain that has fallen out of a harvest truck or they are on the road

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Eating the seed that has trickled out of a truck that is going to go take it so that the seed could be planted in the fields

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So here you've got birds that are eating up this seed that has fallen out of the hand of the sower

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They've devoured it and some fell on the rock Some of the seed fell on the rock and as it grew up it withered away

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Because it had no moisture It was growing up on the dry rocks There was no wet moist soil to receive nutrients from So something kind of grew up there for a little bit, but then it just it withers away and dies verse 7 some fell among thorns and the thorns grew up and choked it and some fell into good soil and Grew and yielded a hundredfold and as he said these things he called out

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He who has ears to hear Let him hear so Jesus is speaking a parable for a very specific reason and he gives this illustration

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So that some will hear it and understand and others may not be able to understand there are many who will say of the parables that the that parables were

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Jesus giving an illustration or a metaphor some sort of word picture to help people understand something more clearly and The response to that is yes, and no,

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I Mean he certainly did give illustrations of the kingdom of God so that people may understand the kingdom of God better, but only

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Those to whom the kingdom of God was being given was being shown The flip side to that is

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Jesus is speaking in parables so that those who are not going to receive the kingdom of God Would not understand what he was talking about So it's not just speaking in parables to help people understand better It's also speaking in parables to keep the truth and the glory of the message of the key kingdom hidden from those people who will not inherit it and Jesus says that in verse 9 when his disciples asked him what this parable meant

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He said to you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of God, but to others it's in parables

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So that they may not understand And that's what we're gonna come back to tomorrow as we pick up on the teaching of this parable

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I'm gonna preserve my voice and end right there And then we'll hear the explanation of the parable for tomorrow's lesson in Luke chapter 8.

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Let's finish here with prayer Heavenly Father we thank you for making these things Understandable to us and the way we come to understand your word according to what said in 1st

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Corinthians 2 14 is The Holy Spirit that lives within us and so I pray that we hear your words and we desire to do what they say

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It's not just something that we're you know, we're doing our religious duty listening to Bible teaching

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But we desire to know you more deeply knowing what is pleasing in your sight and walk in those things

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Guide us in your truth sanctify us in your truth Your word is truth as said in John 17 17 and may we remain

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Steadfast in it to the very end bring us into your kingdom in Jesus name.

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Amen pastor Gabe keeps a regular blog sharing personal thoughts alerting readers to false teachers and Offering commentary on the church and social issues.