Parable Of The Tares - 1 Series

Living Under Grace – 3 – Parable of the Wheat and the Tares - 1

Half acre of 6 foot high thistles in the paddock

• You won’t believe the nice clean solution I came up with to get rid of those thistles – run the trail bike through them to create a path so I could walk through and spray them

• Got stuck in the middle of the thistles – ever tried to back out of 6 foot high thistles or turn the bike around

• So all of a sudden my nice clean solution became a prickly mess

Today we are going to be looking at the Parable of the Wheat and the Tares (Matt 13:24-30)

• If Jesus would have come to me with the advice he gives in this parable, I would have thought He was nuts!

• Gary, leave that half acre of 6 foot high thistles out there

• One of the most striking characteristics that becomes evident as we go through these parables of Jesus is His unpredictable response to the perceived problem

• And in this parable, we see Jesus’ solution to the problem to the weeds is so different from what we would do

• I mean, what is our solution to weeds in the paddock or the garden – rip them out – yet Jesus comes along and says, leave them there!

• Yet He has just told us in the Parable of the Sower that the weeds hinder the Seeds work

This is the third in our series of sermons entitled, “Living under Grace” - Rom 6:14 “No longer under Law but under Grace”

• In the first sermon we learned that, “Because of Grace we have the freedom to fail”. As humans it is impossible to live up to the righteous requirements of the law, so Jesus lived the perfect life you and I could not live, He died the death we should have died and He defeated death and gave us the gift of eternal life so that we could live in eternity with Him

• In other words, Jesus makes up for our failures – so it’s okay to fail, its okay to be human

• In the second sermon we looked at the Parable of the Sower and we learnt that the focus of the parable is not the soil but the Seed

• Luke’s’ account tells us Jesus is the seed and therefore he is the one responsible for producing the fruit

• The soil job is simply to cooperate with the process

• The birds, stony soil, and the thorns are all things that hinder the seed doing its work

• Our own works do the same thing – they hinder what Jesus is trying to do

• And the more we surrender and get out of the way and trust the Seed to do what He was designed to do the greater the harvest the Seed will be able to produce in us – 30, 60 100 fold

• And so we learned that under grace, we can relax and trust the process God has put in place to produce fruit in our lives and in the process conform us into the likeness of His Son

Back to the problem of weeds in the paddock – Matt 13

• As I said, one of the major lessons that we can learn from studying these parables is how different Jesus’ solutions to problems are from ours

• We are going to come back to this parable next time and go through it in more detail but for now I just want to use it to make this point about how differently Jesus responds to the problem than we do

• Matthew 13:24-30 (NKJV) 24 Another parable He put forth to them, saying: “The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field; 25 but while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat and went his way. 26 But when the grain had sprouted and produced a crop, then the tares also appeared. 27 So the servants of the owner came and said to him, ‘Sir, did you not sow good seed in your field? How then does it have tares?’ 28 He said to them, ‘An enemy has done this.’ The servants said to him, ‘Do you want us then to go and gather them up?’

• Here comes the nice clean solution to the problem – our human tough guy solution is to load up the sprayer with “Roundup” and get rid of the weeds – nice clean solution – we humans love a nice clean solution

• Isaiah 55:8-9 (NLT) “My thoughts are completely different from yours,” says the Lord. “And my ways are far beyond anything you could imagine. 9 For just as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts higher than your thoughts