OPEN: A man walked into a flower shop and asked for some potted red geraniums.
"I’m sorry," said the clerk in flower shop, "we are completely sold out of all of our potted geraniums. But I’d be more than happy to give you a deal on something else. Could you use African violets instead?"
Replied the customer sadly, "No, it was geraniums my wife told me to water while she was gone."
APPLY: You’d think that a simple task like watering the plants wouldn’t be too hard for a guy. But speaking from experience, I can sympathize with this man. I realize there are people here that really like gardening, but I don’t. Watering plants just doesn’t make it for me. If I want some vegetables, I’ll go down to the grocery store and get some.
But – of course – somebody had to grow that vegetable that I bought at the store. And our nation has some of the finest farmers that have ever walked the face of the earth. They have the finest tractors and plows and combines, and because of their skill and the tools they can use… America literally feeds the world.
Back in the days of Jesus, however, farmers had a lot less to work with. And the picture we see here in Matthew 13 is that of the common farmer. He doesn’t have the tools to properly fit the ground and prepare for seed, so he simply reaches into his bag, takes out handful after handful of seed and flings it across the ground.
Because of the haphazard way he’s throwing the seed…
· Some of it falls on a nearby hard-packed pathway
· Some falls amongst the rocks
· Some falls on weedy ground…
· But then, some of it falls on fertile ground and the seed takes root and gives a bountiful crop
Now Jesus is telling a story, and He’s telling this story to illustrate how God intended to spread the Gospel across the land and bring people to salvation.
But there were a couple of things about this story that struck me as odd:
1st – The parable seems to give the impression that God isn’t all that concerned about which soil He allows His seed to take root in.
Just think about that for a minute:
The Seed is the Word of God.
The Seed belongs to God.
Now, since the Seed belongs to God… don’t you think He’d be a little more selective about which soil even gets to receive this gift?
But that’s not how it plays out.
The footpath and the rocky soil and weedy soil… they all get a shot at this seed… WHY?
Well, I got to thinking about that.
ILLUS: A couple of weeks ago, you folks sent a team of us to Mexico to help Garnet Calzeda and her missionary team plant churches in Zaragoza and Salitre. As we were driving across the desert and up into the mountains we couldn’t help noticing all the rocks scattered across the land. There were millions of them.
Rocks the size of your fist,
the size of softballs
the size of watermelons
and the size small buildings.
There were rocks everywhere.
When I asked Garnet about it, she laughed and said “yes, they say that the one thing this land grows well is rocks… it’s literally a rock garden.”
When we got to Zaragoza we passed by one of the few gardens I saw there. It had corn growing in a plot the size of a big back yard but there too, there were rocks scattered throughout the garden plot.
Why would the farmer plant corn in such a rock filled yard? Well, if the man wanted a crop… he had to scatter his seed in the land that he had… and then trust that the seed would bear fruit.
And the farmer in Jesus’ parable did the same thing.
He’s scattering His seed over all the land He had… trusting that the seed would bear fruit.
In Isaiah 55:10-11 God declares
“As the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return to it without watering the earth and making it bud and flourish, so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater, so is my word that goes out from my mouth: It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.”
You see that’s the power of God’s SEED - the Word of God
God scatters it all over the earth, because it has power to take root in the harshest ground. And once it takes root, it can bear fruit.
God doesn’t care about the condition of the soil.
Of course, the harsher the soil, the harder it becomes to get a crop… but you can still get a crop.
Just as an example: Preparing for this sermon I ran across this passage out of Scripture:
"For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him." Isa.53:2
Anybody have an idea about who that prophecy referred to???? (Jesus)
Jesus was a root out of DRY GROUND
The soil shouldn’t have yielded a harvest - but it did. It gave us OUR SAVIOR
Now, this is how I want to see this:
There are churches who only want people in their building that are good soil
They only want children from good homes
They only want couples that dress nice
They only want young people rather than old
They want people that will make them look good and pay the bills.
But that wasn’t the kind of people Jesus spent His time with was it?
Jesus spent time with prostitutes, tax collectors… sinners
(pause…) remember that.
So God doesn’t seem to be concerned about which soil His seed falls. He’s confident of the power of the seed. The soil doesn’t matter, it’s the harvest He’s looking for.
The best soils were the ones that yielded a harvest of 30 to 100x’s more than what was sown.
The question to ask yourself today is: “what kind of harvest have you been yielding for Jesus?
How deeply has the seed taken root in your souls?
Besides being faithful on Sunday morning worship (and I want you to know how grateful I am to have someone to talk to on Sunday mornings) what are you doing for Jesus right now?
ILLUS: Henry Ford gave away millions of dollars to many different causes in his lifetime, but he was notorious for the fact that he refused to give any money at all to schools. He felt that well-meaning but nonbusiness-like people frequently mishandled those gifts.
Now, there was a woman named Martha Berry who had begun a school in Mt. Berry, Georgia. She’d started the school because she was shocked to discover that many of rural children attended neither a church nor school and were unfamiliar with stories from the Bible. So she decided to start a school where the poor could learn to read and write and do arithmetic and to know basic Bible stories.
But she needed more money than she had.
Now, she was aware of the fact that Ford never gave money to schools but she went to him anyway and asked for an endowment. As expected, Ford refused.
So Miss Berry, said “Well, then, would you give me a dime to but a sack of raw peanuts?”
Ford was a little taken back and he asked why she wanted just a dime. She replied: “A dime is all I want, Mr. Ford, but I do want to show you what I can do with 10 cents”
Berry returned to her school and she and her students planted and replanted the peanuts. Then she sold the crop for $600 and took the money to Ford.
She stood face-to-face with Henry Ford, and said, “See how practical we are in the use of money at the Martha Berry School?”
Mr. Ford was so pleased with what she’d done, he gave Miss Berry the $600 back… and added $2 million to it. Martha Berry took the money and built the buildings that became Berry College in Mt. Berry, GA.
The difference between God and Henry Ford is – God believes we are capable of making good use of what He’s given us. He believes in us, and He trusts us to be faithful.
The question for us today… what have we done with the seed God gave us?
Well, enough about that… there was one more thing that bothered me about this story.
2nd – Jesus tells this parable to the crowd… but He doesn’t explain what it means
(pause…) Why would He do that?
Well some have speculated that Jesus used parables to get the people’s attention. That’s why I use stories in my sermons. I know they keep you interested and they help illustrate what I’m trying to get you to understand. But there’s an even deeper reason why Jesus told the people parables.
Look again with me to Matthew 13:10-16
“The disciples came to him and asked, ‘Why do you speak to the people in parables?’
He replied, ‘The knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of heaven has been given to you, but not to them. Whoever has will be given more, and he will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him.
This is why I speak to them in parables: Though seeing, they do not see; though hearing, they do not hear or understand. In them is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah: “You will be ever hearing but never understanding; you will be ever seeing but never perceiving. For this people’s heart has become calloused; they hardly hear with their ears, and they have closed their eyes. Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts and turn, and I would heal them.”
But blessed are your eyes because they see, and your ears because they hear.’”
Now at first glance you might think Jesus told parables because He didn’t want everybody to understand what He was saying. But that’s not actually what that passage in Matthew is telling us. He’s not saying He didn’t want people to hear or see God’s truth… He was just being realistic. Jesus knew that there are people out there who really don’t want to understand what God is trying to say. He could explain Himself to those folks until He was blue in the face… but they’d just given Him a blank stare.
ILLUS: About 10 yrs ago Time magazine had an article on something called the “Jesus Seminar.” Apparently some self-appointed scholars got together and questioned the authenticity of the Gospels we find in the Bible. So they had been meeting together twice a year to vote on which sections of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John they felt actually recorded the true history of Jesus. When it came to the parables… the article explained that “these ‘scholars’ decided that they preferred parables without explicit applications.
In other words, these heretics liked the parables - they just didn’t want to be told what they meant. They had eyes to see, but they refused to see… ears to hear, but they didn’t want to hear it.
Now besides that very real rejection of God’s truth by people, there is another reason why Jesus didn’t explain the parables to the crowds: they wouldn’t have understood them anyway. The parables were merely told by Jesus to peak their interest and get them to want more, but they would never comprehended the spiritual truth in them… because they couldn’t
It’s impossible for unspiritual people to fully understand spiritual truths.
1 Corinthians 2:12-14 “We have not received the spirit of the world but the Spirit who is from God, that we may understand what God has freely given us. This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, expressing spiritual truths in spiritual words. The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned.”
Until we become Christians, the stories of Jesus can catch our attention but we can never FULLY comprehend what those truths mean… until we God’s Spirit dwells within us.
Acts 2 tells us how we can lay hold of God’s Spirit
In that chapter, we’re told that Peter preached such a powerful sermon that the crowd interrupted his message to ask him what they could do. And in Acts 2:38 tells us that
“Peter said unto them, ‘Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of sins, and you shall receive (what???) the gift of the Holy Ghost.’”
Notice what it says:
When you repent of your sins
And your baptized in the name of Jesus for the forgiveness of your sins…
Then God gives you His Holy Spirit to dwell inside you.
It’s like signing a contract.
When we bought our house, Diana and I went into a bank office and sat down at a long table across from the sellers. Between us, on the table, was a contract, listing the physical description of the house and some legal jargon. But down at the bottom of that contract were two sets of lines. One set of lines was for us (as the buyers) to sell, and the other set of lines was for the sellers.
So also with salvation. We “sign” the contract by our faith, repentance, confession of Jesus, and baptism. But then God signs the contract. He signs it by placing His Spirit inside of us.
The Spirit is not a dormant thing that sets inside like some inanimate object on a wall. No! The Spirit of God is a living active force that not only marks us as belonging to God, but works within us to comfort us and help us… and to “teach us” spiritual truths. And one of the tools that Spirit uses to teach us with is God’s Word (the seed). That’s why it is so critical for us to constantly expose ourselves to scripture on Sunday mornings, and in Sunday School, and in Bible studies, and in personal study time. The more we study God’s Bible, the more material God’s Spirit can work with to teach us more and deeper spiritual truths about God and our relationship with Him.
