The Sower, the Seed, and the Soil

ReCAST Church of Mattawan

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You are listening to the podcast of Recast Church in Mattawan, Michigan. Have your

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Bibles go ahead and turn with me to Luke chapter 8. Again, Dave mentioned, I'm Zach. I'm filling in for Don.

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Don is normally preaching through, he's usually preaching here, and he's preaching First Corinthians, but last time

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I preached a couple months ago, I did the end of Luke chapter 7. So rather than try to think what

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God wants you to hear, I just, well, let's just keep going in Luke chapter 8, and probably next time you hear from me, it'll be more of Luke.

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So Don had hernia surgery this past week. I don't know if he's here. I haven't seen him yet, but we trust that he's recovering well.

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But pray for him if you think of it for his recovery. This is a parable, a familiar parable, parable of the soul, where it's referred to in Luke chapter 8, verses 1 through 15.

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But the purpose of the parable might not be as familiar. So what is the purpose of this parable for us this morning?

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It's that God would open your eyes, that you would see the mysteries of the kingdom of God, or that they would be hidden from you.

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That's intentionally provocative, but those are Jesus's words. He gave this parable intentionally with two purposes, either to hide something or to reveal something.

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And so my prayer for us this morning is that he would open up our eyes, open up our hearts, our ears, and our eyes to the things of God and what he's doing.

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So many of you know, or perhaps you don't, I work at Charles River Laboratories in Matawan, Michigan. I'm a toxicologist there, and I feel very blessed by God to have that opportunity.

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What we do is alleviate human suffering, extend human life. Our stat from last year was we worked on 90 % of the drugs that were approved by the

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FDA. So I feel very satisfied in that, but that's not only it. It's a mission field.

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In Matawan, maybe the schools are bigger, but there's over 2 ,000 employees there in Matawan. I feel very blessed by God to have an opportunity to share the word of God.

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And that's what we're going to talk about today, is sharing our faith, sharing the word of God with others. So I started there in 1998.

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I know that's hard to believe. I look way younger than that, but I'm dating myself a little bit. It was a much smaller company, 250 employees at that time.

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And it grew to like 2 ,000 in 10 years, and through that growth, there was just growing pains that come with a company.

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Oftentimes, what we'd do is we'd get together different people from different departments. And again, I'm just a regular Joe there. I wasn't the guy making all the decisions.

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But they'd get us together in a room, and we got this problem, and we'd look at it. And here's the problem. What do you guys think we should do?

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And different departments would give ideas, and we would, well, let's try that. But after a couple of years of doing that, just kind of treating the symptom, somebody smarter than me identified a tool that's out there in the industry called

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Lean Six Sigma. And some of you probably have heard of it. It's simply a tool to identify root causes.

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And so they brought in this facilitator for us. So we got together, and I remember the time. I don't remember what we talked about.

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Let's pretend it was we wanted to reduce overtime. And so we'd get together, and like we always did, we would start brainstorming.

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But this facilitator would use a tool that they use in that discipline called Five Whys. And Five Whys is the word,

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W -H -Y. And so we would say that we got too much overtime. And so rather than start jumping to solutions, they would ask, why do you have too much overtime?

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So we'd sift around and think, well, we don't have enough trained staff. Okay. So my thought was, well, let's solve how do we get more trained staff.

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But they'd come back with another type. Why don't you have enough trained staff? And I remember feeling a little bit of, what are we, three?

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Why do you keep asking me why? And so we'd ask again, why don't you have enough trained staff? Well, we don't have somebody dedicated to it.

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Well, why don't you have somebody dedicated? And so, again, we'd do it five times, and by the end, I was ready to fight the person.

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But it was really useful in identifying what was behind.

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We saw something, the symptom. We saw the reality. We don't have enough. We have too much overtime.

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We don't have enough employees. We have too much work, something along those lines. But you got to identify the root cause. You got to see behind it.

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And that's what Jesus does when he gives this parable that we're going to read here in a moment. He gives us a window into what's going on in the spiritual realm.

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Really, all we can see is the physical world with our eyes and our ears. We don't know what God's doing.

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And he's going to pull back the curtain a little bit and show us what's going on, the mysteries of the kingdom of God, what's going on in human hearts when

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God's word goes forth. So, if you don't mind, join with me. We're going to read God's word, Romans, Luke chapter 8.

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We're going to read verses 1 through 15. Luke 8 verses 1 through 15.

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Soon afterward, he, Jesus, went on through cities and villages, proclaiming and bringing the good news of the kingdom of God.

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And the twelve were with him, and also some women who had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities, Mary called

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Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out, and Joanna, the wife of Chisa, Herod's household manager, and Susanna, and many others, who provided for them out of their means.

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And when a great crowd was gathering, and people from town after town came to him, and he said in a parable, A sower went out to sow his seed.

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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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And some fell on the rock, and as it grew up, it withered away because it had no moisture. And some fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up with it and choked it.

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And some fell into good soil and grew and yielded a hundredfold. And he, Jesus, said these things.

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He called out, He who has ears to hear, let him hear. And when his disciples asked him what the parable meant, he said,

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To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of God, but for the others they are in parables, so that seeing they may not see, and hearing they may not understand.

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Now the parable is this. The seed is the word of God. The ones along the path are those who have heard.

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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, believe it with joy, but these have no root.

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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.

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But as they go on their way, they are choked by the cares and riches and pleasures of life, and their fruit does not mature.

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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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Let's pray as the band comes. God, thank you for your word, and we thank you for your word and that it doesn't return to void.

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It produces fruit. God, we pray this morning for everyone that's here. God, that you would do a work in our hearts, that you would soften our hearts, that your word would fall on good soil, and that it would be able to, through your spirit, produce fruit in this world and this life.

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God, we love you, and thank you for an opportunity to gather together in like -minded worshipers of you, and I pray now for our time of worship, that it is in spirit and truth.

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God, our hearts and our minds would be focused on you and you alone, and the distractions of this world would fade away.

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In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. Again, keep your Bibles open to Luke 8, verses 1 -15.

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I'll have some verses up there, but if I could just have us pause for a minute and imagine that you just heard that parable that Jesus gave, if you recall what we prayed.

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And so what we read was Jesus gives a parable, and he says, He that has ears, let him hear.

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Now, we got to read beyond that. I want you to imagine you're the shepherd that has the sick child, that you have some infirmity, and you hear

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Jesus is healing people, and you're among the throng that come to visit Jesus, that he could do something for you, and that's what he gives you.

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It seems like a stretch that any of us would understand, because what we see later on is he explains it to the disciples, not everybody got that.

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I don't think many of us would be like, Oh, I get it. I see what you're saying. That's good. Thank you.

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I don't think that's what happens. And so Jesus gives this parable to kind of thin the crowd a little bit.

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People are gathering, and it's not for everybody. So I think the next slide just kind of highlights that fact,

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Mark, just that seeing they may not see and hearing they may not hear. But my desire and God, I pray that God would open up our eyes and our hearts this morning that we would see and hear clearly.

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And so just before we get into it, kind of give us a little background of what's been going on. And if you remember in Luke 7,

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Jesus has been ministering. He was in about 20 miles south of where he normally was, going from town to town, and he came to a village named

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Nine. And in Nine, he met a centurion whose servant was sick. He didn't even see the servant.

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He just healed the servant from afar. And he came to the village, and there's a funeral procession going on, and the widow who had already lost her husband, her son, had died.

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The young man is dead there in front of Jesus, and he speaks to the young man, and the man gets up and comes to life. And then last time in Luke 7, at the end of it, he goes and has a meal with Pharisees.

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And this woman of the city comes and kind of makes a scene, and he forgives her sins in front of all of them to their outrage.

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And so that's what's just happened. And Luke summarizes it in the beginning of Luke. The first couple of verses of this chapter of Luke 8 are given, and it's kind of unique.

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You figure that if you're going to give a gospel account, you have a finite amount of words and pages that you can write, that he takes time to list who was there.

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And he lists out the first he says what Jesus was doing. You go ahead and follow along in your Bibles. He says that Jesus was proclaiming the good news.

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Jesus hasn't died on the cross yet. What is the good news? It's what it's always been through the

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Old Testament, is that we have a problem. What is our problem? Our problem is sin.

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The wages of sin is death. Death's coming. Our relationships are broken. We're broken. What righteousness can we provide to God to forgive us for our sin?

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There's nothing. And the promise is, the good news is that God will make a way. He will provide the

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Messiah. And those that are following him are trusting Jesus is that Messiah. This is the guy that's going to do it.

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So he's proclaiming that good news. He's sharing the gospel through city after city, village after village. That's Jesus has been going.

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And that's what Luke accounts for us in his. But he says he gives specific names of who was there.

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He says there's lots of women were there that had been healed of, you know, demons and infirmities.

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And he also says specific women. If you notice, he says Mary. You'd be like,

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Mary who? Mary Magdalene. Which one? The one whom seven demons went on. Oh, yeah, that one. He says

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Joanna was there. Which Joanna? You know, the wife of Juzah. Who's Juzah? The household manager of Herod.

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That one. And my favorite, Susanna. She was there. Say no more.

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We all know Susanna, right? And he says the 12 were there and many others.

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Why would he give all these names? He's got a finite amount of resources. Because in the beginning of Luke, he starts his account of the gospel of Christ by writing it to Theophilus.

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Theophilus is just a guy. Some regard him as a non -Jew. And he says, so the things you've heard, you may know with certainty.

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This is a bibliography. This is, as they say, this is the receipts. You hear, it wasn't just, there was a guy and he was doing some crazy things.

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It's specific. What was he doing? You just heard all that stuff in Luke 7. You want to check it? Joanna, Susanna, the 12.

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Go talk to them. I gave you where they live. I told you who they were. You want to know them for certain? This is how you do it.

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So there's something to be said about Jesus' life and it wasn't just some ethereal idea.

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It was flesh and blood. And you can go check it. And so I think it's encouraging from that perspective. But also, what do we see going on there?

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We see these people are with Jesus. Jesus isn't just out traveling from city to city on his own doing great things.

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People are following him. But he's got a group of people. And what are those people doing? He says they're providing for one another.

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And I think that's sort of representative of the Christian faith from Abraham to now is that it's never been this solo adventure.

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The peak of Christianity is not up in isolation or, you know, quiet retreat with just you and God.

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It's like Don said last week. We need the gifts and skills and talents of one another, the Holy Spirit working through one of us to build one another up.

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And that's what we see here. The God man is there. He can turn rocks into bread.

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He can get money out of fish. He did that. But he's relying on these people.

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And they're from all demographics. It's not just women. It's not just men. It's all walks of society, all, you know, levels of society, different income levels.

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They're all there providing for one another. I think that's instructive and helpful to describe how that early church existed.

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And so then he gives this parable in Luke chapter 8 after that intro. And when you read parables, there's two kind of ditches that historically we've fallen into.

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Like you read a parable, and Jesus does a good job. He uses things that are relatable.

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It wasn't just some weird idea, notion that nobody would understand. But he gave, you know, sowing and reaping and harvest.

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Those are ideas that they were familiar with. But the risk that you can make or the mistake that you can make is that you sort of analogize every element of the parable for something.

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And I think the rule of thumb to make sure you don't make a mistake there in interpretation is it needed to be understood by the people, the original hearers of this.

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And so you wouldn't say that, well, the seed is Israel and the thorns are

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Nazi Germany. And maybe you can make some kind of analogy, and it seems prophetic, but you're on really thin ice because they wouldn't have understood that.

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And the other extreme would be every parable has one main idea that Jesus is trying to communicate.

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And that's useful. That's helpful. But today's parable, I think, is somewhere in between in that I think the overarching idea is that God wants to reveal mysteries of the kingdom of God to us.

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But we're going to look at it from three different perspectives. The seed, the soil, and the sower.

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And through each of those, we'll get some new insight and some applications. But in all, in total, this is,

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I'll say this repeatedly, this is a description. This is a description of what's going on in the spiritual realm in human hearts.

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This is not a prescription. This is not what you should be doing. This is what is going on. And there's a wrinkle there in the application of the text.

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And so if we start with the, we'll start with the seed. I don't know if there is a slide there. Sometimes it can be helpful just to see it up there.

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But the seed, Jesus gives us real quick instruction. What is the seed? It is the word of God.

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He explains the seed. Maybe they wouldn't have understood that, but the seed is the word of God. So maybe, I don't know if it's the next slide or that was previously.

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So the word of God. So what observations can we make about the word of God? The first is, you see, it can be snatched from the hearts of hearers by the devil.

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That's not obvious. We wouldn't have, by some scientific method, determined that. That's revealed.

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That's God showing us some mysteries of what's going on behind the curtain. That you can share God's word with somebody and the devil just takes it.

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The hearer, the soil had no agency. It just happened to them. The word of God came and went. They had nothing to do with it.

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The second one I think that you can see in there, and this is not an exhaustive list, but I think it's an important list. By the hearer, they can believe it and be saved.

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That is miraculous, and that's not a small thing. Our number one problem in eternity is sin, and you can be saved from that.

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That's the save that we're talking about. The word of God can save you from an eternity of destruction and even save you in this present life from harm and destruction.

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It can be heard, received, but not take root. So these are just descriptions of what can happen, and we might arrive at these conclusions, but maybe not.

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But this is God's revealed word to us. He's shown us what's going on. It can be heard, received, but not take root. It can be heard again, but choked out by the cares and riches and pleasures of this life.

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I think we can think of examples of that, and it can be heard. Lastly, it bears fruit. That's really what this is about. It's about God's word bearing fruit.

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So those are, again, just brutal, just really straightforward observations you can make about the word of God that may not have been obvious to us just examining.

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When we're out sharing God's word, we see what's happening, but there's no fruit. What's going on? And we'll kind of get to more of that.

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So then we look at it from the perspective of the sower. And so the sower is anybody sharing the word of God.

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But ultimately, the sower is God. He's sharing his word through us.

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We are the means. We're the vehicle through which God's word gets shared.

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And so I don't really know much about agriculture. I don't know much about sowing seeds.

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I've planted some gardens. I've never done anything industrial on a scale, never really worked on a farm.

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I grew up in rural Michigan and just avoided it, apparently. But here's some things that I saw that didn't seem consistent with my experience.

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And so if I planted a garden, I was pretty intentional. I either read something, talked to somebody, read the back of the packet to how to plant the seeds.

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And where you put the seeds was very specific and deliberate and intentional with specific instruction.

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I talked to two farmers this week. How do they do it? And it's very calculated. But what do we see the sower doing here?

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He seems to be just chucking the seed like he just went outside. And it said he went.

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So note that. It went. And he says someone on the path just threw it in the road, threw some in the rocks, threw it in the bushes, and then threw some in the soil.

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And I think to the original hearers, they would have been like, what is this? Who's doing this?

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It seems haphazard that they would do this. And notice how the seed gets souped up and made better before it gets sown.

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There's some adjuvant. No, there's nothing. They just sow the seed. There's nothing added to it.

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It's just the Word of God that's being sown. I think that's a description of how we should share the

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Word of God. And so where it goes, how you share it, it's not as important.

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The sower here is really simple. And definitely what you do notice, what he didn't do, he went.

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He did do that. What he didn't do was just stay. He didn't just dump it out on his floor in his house. Seed in its bag, in its satchel doesn't do any good.

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Word of God sitting in your Bible, sitting in your hearts is of little value. It's meant to be sown. It's meant to be shared.

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So that's the sower, what we can see there about the sower and how he did. It has a minimal role in this parable.

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And so you look at the four different outcomes and the variables that are in this story.

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There's the seed, the sower, and the soil. The seed is always the same. The sower is always the same.

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It's a really good experiment. It's really clear of what is causing the different outcomes. And it is the soil.

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So we look at the soil and the different outcomes. One thing that's clear, it's not whether or not they heard.

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In each of the scenarios, it might be the next slide I highlighted, but every scenario, somebody heard it.

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So that's a key wrinkle. The Word of God is not going to find good hearts unless it's heard.

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That's number one. It's kind of obvious, but it has to be heard. How will they hear without somebody preaching?

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And so we look at the three different scenarios where there is no fruit, and we can kind of relate to them a little bit.

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And what I want to emphasize is this is not meant to be a diagnostic tool.

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Like we had a mega sports camp a couple weeks ago, and right here on these steps,

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I shared the gospel with basketball players in that group. I thought super clear, but again,

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I'm just the sower. And immediately, a kid comes up to me, and he's like, you know, actually, and that's never good when they say that.

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He says, I heard God and Satan are like friends and blah, blah, blah, blah.

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And I'm like, I don't think this is an instruction. Then, well, obviously, Satan took the word there. We don't know what's going on.

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It takes time to figure out what's going on. But if we look at our own hearts over the course of time,

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I think we can see our hearts in all of these situations. We can see where we've been tested, and we may feel like we're losing our faith, and maybe you know some people, they were really on fire for Jesus, and they were at church, and then some death came into their family, and then it seemed like they fell away.

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And so all these people are following Jesus around, and His inner group there that we saw listed, they might be asking, like, what is going on?

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This is the Messiah. He has eternal life. Why isn't everybody responding the way we are?

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And that would be, this is meant to encourage us, and this is to give us a peek behind the curtain.

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And so you could also notice, like, people you've known before where they're super on fire, they start coming to church, and then, you know, life just gets busy.

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They start having kids, or they start having, you know, taking care of parents, or they got sports, and then they just seem to not be around anymore.

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And so maybe you could think, well, God lost. God's not powerful.

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But this gives us a window into what's really going on of why they didn't produce fruit. And so where I want to spend the majority of our time is on the last one, and that is hearing the

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Word. They hold it fast in an honest and good heart. And so that seems problematic to me.

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Because who's doing the work there, it seems like? It seems like the soil is doing the work because they're holding the

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Word fast. And I think I can relate to that. Like spiritual discipline and just will or grace -fueled effort they describe it as,

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I can hold on to God's Word, and I think I can do some of that. It says an honest and good heart.

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And here's where I kind of choke. Whenever I hear Christians anywhere talk about the heart,

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Scripture uses the word heart all the time, and it's a legit use, but how we understand heart is who knows.

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If I say heart, you might say it's, like, bless his heart. What are we saying? Is that different than bless his body?

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Is that different than bless his mind? What are we saying? Maybe you have some ideas. And Scripture even says it, and there's been good books written about, you know,

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Jesus is gentle and lowly in heart. That's Scripture. Is that different than Jesus is gentle and lowly in mind?

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Jesus is gentle and lowly in spirit? What's the difference? Is that important? Is that what's important here is the heart?

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What are we talking about? So I'm just going to spend a moment on that because somebody would say, well, holding it fast and an honest and good heart is about deep understanding.

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It's about understanding it, not just head knowledge like they do in academia or in seminary. It's about understanding it in your soul, understanding it in your spirit.

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That's the heart, what God's talking about here. Or maybe it's talking about the will.

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That's kind of part of the human experience, right? You receive the Word of God with a will.

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You're not receiving it and accepting Christ because of the cutie next to you or because your parents want you to or because you'll be accepted and thought of good by the people around you.

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It's with a pure motive and a pure, you know, heart, and we'll use it in that sense as what's behind it.

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We understand things in the heart of hearts, that kind of concept. Or maybe someone else would say it's not about understanding or will, it's about the passion, about the affections.

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That's what Jesus is after, that we taste and see that the Word and Jesus is good, and that's the only thing that satisfies our innermost desires.

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That's what God's after, that everything else is idolatry. We can chase after things that I want and I need, and none of them satisfied, but we need to find

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Jesus and His Word to be the thing that satisfies, and that's what we're talking about here with a good and honest heart.

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Or maybe another part of the human experience is the conscience, this sort of agency that humans seem to have, this mind's eye that's super intense and we can see inside ourselves and see

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I have wills and intents and wants and competing influences, and we can choose and pick those.

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And to receive and hold it fast in an honest and good heart is referring to having a clear conscience. We can accept the free gift of Jesus' righteousness as forgiveness for our sins and payment for our sins, and it's all there, but if we don't do it with a clear conscience, that's this thing that I did when

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I was eight or was done to me, or there's just stuff in my life that's too bad, and I can't bring it all to Jesus.

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And that's what we're talking about, the clear conscience. And some would say, no, it's the whole soul. Hopefully you're not clear on what we're talking about, because it's not clear to me.

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But I find that I'm not the only one that's wrestled with this, so there's an author by the name of John Owen, and he describes it this way.

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If you want to walk through this, he says it's variously used. He says, sometimes, the word heart, for the mind and understanding, sometimes for the will, sometimes for the affections, sometimes for the conscience, and sometimes for the whole soul.

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And so the last thing, he kind of gives a concluding sentence, generally denotes the whole soul of a man and all the faculties of it, not absolutely, but as they are all one principle of moral operations, as they all concur in doing, argo, doing good or evil.

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I know those are some big words and big ideas. Here's the point. It's all of you.

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I don't find much utility in dividing. Well, I understood it, but I didn't have it in my heart.

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My spirit was wanting, but my flesh was against it. We're broken in all faculties of our experience.

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Since the fall, our heart is in shambles. We're divided. And there's not one part of us that's good and one part of us that's bad.

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There's some gnostic, you know, some kind of opinion like that. God wants all of us.

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And to understand, to hold God in our heart is all of you. And I understand Scripture seems to use different terms, but in the end, it's heart, soul, mind, strength.

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There's no benefit in saying, my flesh is what's evil, but my heart's really good. You're going to struggle with Scripture.

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The next one, I think, Jeremiah the prophet kind of gives us a window into what our hearts are like, and he says it this way.

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The heart is more deceitful than all else. More deceitful than all else.

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You want to lean on your heart? Yeah, I've got a good heart. You're being deceived. It's desperately sick.

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Who can understand? And God says, this is Jeremiah speaking on behalf of God. I, the Lord, search the heart. I test the mind.

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Even he's kind of conflating the terms. Even to give to each man according to his ways, according to the results of his deeds.

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And so, we're hustling through it this morning, but what then are we to do? You might be thinking, well,

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I've got to get my heart right before the, so I've got to get a good soil in here. So that God's word can land on my good soil.

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That would be a prescriptive reading of the text. This is descriptive. This is what's going on. So how can you get a good heart?

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How do you get the good heart? So the seed can land in and produce fruit.

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I think the key is in the intermediate. When Jesus says to the people, he said,

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He who has ears to hear, let him hear. This isn't him just like, you know, if you've got ears, hear.

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I think it's an echo of what we see in the creation account in Genesis 1. If you recall, how did

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God bring this universe into existence? He didn't say, today I'm going to make some light.

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Or I make light. Or, voila. He said, let there be light.

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And was there light? There was. He said, let there be day. And there was. Let there be night. In the whole

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Genesis 1 account, let there be. Let there be. Let there be. This is him saying to these followers, let them hear.

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And they will hear. God's doing something. God's the one changing hearts. God's the one making sure his word is falling on parts of flesh.

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And even more, if you look in verse 9, he gives a little bit more of a window into it. He says, when his disciples asked him, what does this mean?

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Like, what are you talking about? He says, to you it has been because you studied hard, you went to seminary, or you prayed and you fasted.

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To you, because you've reached a new ethereal plane of enlightenment in the spiritual.

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No, he says, to you it's been given. It's just been given. It's a grace. You didn't earn it.

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You didn't change your heart. I invite you. Search your, if you know

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Christ as your Savior, search when you started cleaning your life up and then Christ showed up. He pursued you.

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While you were still sinning, he died for you. And that's how you change. You got to a point. Me, for me, it was at the age of 13 in a small church in Bertrand, Michigan.

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I came forward and made a decision for Christ. But I had been warring with God for a while.

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And I can see my heart. I can see it when it was originally hard and when I was kind of, yeah, maybe someday. And I can see it softening.

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And that's a work of God. This is not a description of, my number one point is not for us to now start working on our hearts.

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That's not it. To see God and see what he's done for us. And then Ezekiel gives it pretty plainly as an

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Old Testament prophet in chapter 11, verse 9. He says, I will give them one heart and a new spirit and I will put it within them.

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I will remove the heart of stone from their flesh and give them a heart of flesh. Who's doing it? God's the one that does that.

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So that they may walk in my statutes, keep my rules. It's not that they walk in my statutes, keep my rules, and then I give them a heart of flesh.

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That's not the sequence. And they shall be my people and I will be their God. That's the invitation.

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That's what God wants from us. And that's a description of what God does for us.

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And this account, this parable is in other gospels. It's also in Matthew and Mark's account.

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And it's interesting that they both give the account and they show that the fruit comes back as 30, 60, or 100 -fold.

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But in Luke's account, he just says 100 -fold. And I don't think there's a conflict there, but there's a difference in emphasis.

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What would Luke be emphasizing by only giving the 100? He doesn't want us to get bogged down in the details of why there's a variability in fruit, but that there is fruit and it's a lot.

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Now, we probably have some farmers here. I know we do. And again, I tried to do some research. 100 -fold seems to be a pretty solid return.

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I get bogged down in like bushels per acre and I don't even know what I'm talking about now. And so, it was hard to understand.

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Is that a good? But I found like wheat, like 3 - to 5 -fold yield was pretty good. And I would gather that those that are listening to this, the original hearers, would be like, 100 -fold is pretty solid.

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Even though this guy was just willy -nilly with the Word, 100 -fold is pretty solid. That's actually remarkable.

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I think that's important for us to understand that God's Word does not return void. He brings forth fruit.

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And so, what is that fruit? What is the fruit that He wants? Our minds might go to, and I think it's fair, to the fruit of the

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Spirit. God is one, three in one. The fruit of the Spirit, is that different than the Word of God? Love, joy, peace.

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Love is solid. We could just have love in this world, unconditional agape love for one another.

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That would be good. He goes on, the fruit of the Spirit. But this particular parable is about salvation.

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What do we see the fruit bearing? It's that they might be saved. This is about God's Word falling on good heart, transforming those hearts to bring about more believers.

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That's the fruit that we're after. I think it's pretty helpful to see that as we go out and we share the

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Word of God, we need to be sharing the Word of God. If we're not sharing the Word of God, we might not be connected to the roots.

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We might not be in the kingdom. We might not be sitting in the house with a satchel full of the Word of God.

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And again, it doesn't require any skill. There's no expertise that you need to have.

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But it will bring forth fruit. And so, a couple weeks ago, we had a lunch with a pastor.

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And I was asked a question there, and just maybe to pause there, a little bunny trail. We've been meeting, we've always been organized with having a plurality of elders.

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We've had multiple elders, and we all have the similar role. There's seven of us. But obviously, Don is the one that's vocationally trained.

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He's paid to study and teach. And we've always had, you know, we have the same role in principle.

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We all have one vote. If we want to make a decision by God's grace, we've always been united. For the most part, there's never been like a four or three really tough vote or anything.

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We just kind of see things the same way, and that's a grace. But then we've always been doing lunch with the pastor.

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And I get it, because people come to this church. And a lot of times, you've been going to a church, or you might not know the distinctives of this church.

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What is the philosophy of ministry here? And you want to kind of, let's get that out of the way. Like, how do you feel about this issue?

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Baptism, or women in ministry, or whatever it might be. And this would be a way to get that out of the way. If this is going to be a problem for you, it might not come up for two years, and you can, you know, get that process expedited.

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And so, finally we thought, like, lunch with the pastor might not be the most consistent with the way we're organized, so any of us elders.

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And so, blah, blah, blah. We met a couple weeks ago at lunch with a pastor. So we had people over, and I got a really good question.

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Somebody asked me, and I didn't, it wasn't exactly like this, but it was something to the effect that, is

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Recast more focused on building up the saints and equipping the believers, or is it more focused on outreach?

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I think that's a good question, because when we, those of us that helped plant this church, we left a church, most of us left a church called

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Berean Baptist Church on 12th Street. Great church. Nothing bad to say about that, but what we did, that church, what we did experience there was that we could find, most nights of the week, we could be at church.

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There was something going on. There was a wanna, there was a Sunday night service, there was small groups, there was a thing for teens, you could, men's group, there was evangelistic studies, tons of things that you could do.

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But what we found is it was really hard to live our lives and then still be witnesses and to be sharing the gospel.

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And so when we started Recast, we wanted to appeal and be more outreach focused so that the people that wouldn't darken the door of a church that had

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Baptist in the name would feel comfortable here. But more than that, we would have opportunity to be in our community, that we would be going to the work parties, that we would be having the neighborhood get -togethers.

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We would be spearheading those, and we would be going to those, and we would be involved with our kids' sports teams, not just on the fence, but we would be, you know, the dugout moms.

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We would be coaching those teams. We would be blessing our community and having opportunity to share the word of God.

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I think it's one thing to share the word of God here in these walls. That's great, but God's calling us to share the word of God.

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But as I've studied this text and reflected on my answer, that's what I told the person that asked,

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I think it's a false dichotomy. It's not one or the other. The paradox is that it's both and that we can't just bear fruit.

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You know, the fruit of God is that it's a miraculous thing that someone comes to Christ and accepts Jesus as their

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Savior where there was once, you know, dirt and humidity and mosquitoes and thick air is all of a sudden a strawberry, blueberry, apple.

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That's a miraculous thing even from an agricultural standpoint. Thinking about the spiritual realm is altogether unbelievable, but there's no such thing as an apple tree that's just kind of laying on the ground with no roots just blowing around.

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Likewise, there's not a tree that's just all roots. You know, even like you think about roots of potatoes or carrots or whatever, they still have something above ground.

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And so we can't just be focused completely on the word of God without bringing forth some kind of fruit. Those things just don't exist.

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That's the paradox. So we need to be digging into the word of God and the fruit comes out of that.

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And we can't just be focused on the fruit without the word of God. Otherwise, our fruit is just us. We're just sharing me. Here's some good ideas.

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And when we share the word of God, it's the word of God. That's some synthesized opinion you have on, you know,

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LGBTQ. You can share the word of God with your coworkers, but unlike where what we found there in the early days is that our current culture is not sympathetic or they're not open to us just knocking on the door and sharing

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Christ. And maybe there was an era in the U .S. where that was a way to share

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Christ and it wasn't effective. Probably could still do it, but I think the Jehovah Witnesses and the Mormons have just beat that to death, and so nobody can do that anymore.

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What it does work is that when you have a relationship with somebody, and so the invitation then is that we would have relationships with those people in our lives, wherever we're at, that we're all in for the people, that we're getting to know them and love them, because in that context, people really are receptive to the word of God.

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And so I shared that I came to Christ as a 13 -year -old.

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I made a decision. The Christian faith isn't just about a decision.

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We're not here to have people decide to follow Christ. Jesus, the commission is to make disciples.

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He wants people that are connected. We're just the conduit. He would use us. He doesn't use the animals.

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He doesn't use the plants. He doesn't use the rest of creation to convey his word of God to the world.

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It's through us. And so there is a point where we make a decision, and there is a point where that soil might get cracked.

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There's the illustration, maybe concrete, where something finally does happen, and that grows up, and that concrete yields away, and God gives you a new heart.

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But it's abiding. It's continuing to abide in Christ that that fruit might be born through us.

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And so I'm going to wrap us up with communion, but it's going to be a little bit different. And so we do communion here as an opportunity for us, those that are followers of Christ and connected with him, to celebrate what he did for us.

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The fruit of the word of God is that we would be saved from our sin. There's a sin problem that we all have. There's nothing we can do about it except Jesus Christ, and we celebrate that together with one another as for an encouragement.

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That's why we do gather. And so we're going to do that. But I'm going to do something a little bit different because I know not all of us, this many people, not all of us have made that decision.

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And so I'm just going to sit down here and give you an opportunity while everybody's getting up to come down here and just pray with me.

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Today might be an opportunity for you for that seed to land in your heart and start germinating. So it might be connected to God.

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This might be an opportunity for you to make that decision. Again, we, you know, historically

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Baptist churches have had altar calls, and it's an opportunity. Everybody raised their hand if you accepted Christ, and that's the number one thing. We want to make disciples, but this is where it starts.

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If you look back at your life, most of the time you can identify a point in your life. And I just give you the invitation to come forward and pray with me.

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While many of us are taking part in communion, if you're new here, we have stations set up throughout. Just feel free at your convenience to get up and take part.

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But if you don't know Christ as your Savior, please come pray with me. It'll be a simple prayer, and I'll just pray with you that you might know

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Jesus as your Savior. So let's pray. Father God in heaven,

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I thank you for your word. I thank you for this opportunity to gather together, and I pray that your word would continue to transform us, that we would become more like you, that we would yield fruit,

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God, that we would be the conduits, that we would be the part, that it wouldn't be us that they hear, that people hear, but they see you and how beautiful you are.

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We thank you for your beautiful gift in Christ and salvation. And as we celebrate that in communion,

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God, that that would be our hearts, that it's nothing that we did or said, not our righteous deeds, but you did it all for us.