The Big Picture - Mark 4:1-20 - January 13, 2013
Series: I Want To Follow Jesus - #1
I’ll invite you to open your Bibles with me this morning to the Gospel of Mark – Mark chapter 4, beginning in verse 1. Jesus is teaching the people and He is going to tell them a series of parables about the kingdom of God. The word “parable” literally means “to throw alongside.” As Jesus is speaking to the people, He is throwing God’s truth alongside the reality they know in their daily lives, in order that they may begin to discern deeper spiritual truths. He wants them to begin to understand the “Big Picture” of what God is doing and of what is taking place in their day. So let’s begin reading in chapter 4, verse 1 and see if we can’t catch a glimpse of the “Big Picture,” ourselves. This is what we read …
“Again Jesus began to teach by the lake. The crowd that gathered around Him was so large that He got into a boat and sat in it out on the lake, while all the people were along the shore at the water’s edge. He taught them many things by parables, and in His teaching said:
“Listen! A farmer went out to sow his seed. As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants, so that they did not bear grain. Still other seed fell on good soil. It came up, grew and produced a crop, multiplying thirty, sixty, or even a hundred times.” Then Jesus said, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”” (Mark 4:1–9, NIV84)
“He who has ears to hear, let him hear.” That’s an unusual phrase - but one we find several times in the pages of God’s word; it’s an admonition to not just hear the words themselves but to listen to them and to take them to heart. It’s something we often struggle to do. Here’s a case in point:
At one time, Sir William Osler was a professor of medicine at Oxford University. One day he had a class full of students seated before him, and, wanting to emphasize the importance of observing details, he reached down to his desk and picked up a bottle labelled, “urine.”
Holding it high, he announced, "This bottle contains a sample for analysis. It’s often possible by tasting it to determine the disease from which the patient suffers.”
Suiting actions to words, he dipped a finger, first, into the fluid, and then into his mouth. Then he continued to speak, saying, "Now, I am going to pass the bottle around. Each of you do exactly as I did. Perhaps we can learn the importance of this technique and diagnose the case".
The bottle made its way from row to row, each student gingerly poking his finger in, and sampling the contents with a frown.
When all were done, Dr. Osler retrieved the bottle, and then startled his students with these words: "Gentlemen, now you will understand what I mean when I speak about details. Had you been observant you would have seen that I put my index finger into the bottle, but my middle finger into my mouth!"
Folks, those students – each of them saw what Dr. Osler did - and yet they missed the point completely! I wonder how many of us do exactly the same when it comes to the things of God? We can be like those described in verse 12 of our passage this morning, "Ever seeing but never perceiving, ever hearing but never understanding." There are times we see, but do not perceive, times we hear but have not heard.
A fellow by the name of Gordon Curley has said it this way: And so it might be that we sit in church each Sunday morning, listening to sermons about God, but never hearing the voice of God. At home we open our Bibles, which fills “a few minutes of your time; but [does] not fill the need in your heart.” (Gordon Curley, “The Parable of the Sower,” Adapted, www.sermoncentral.com) And we wonder what’s missing, we wonder why our faith seems so empty, why God seems so far away? May it be that we are seeing, yet not perceiving, hearing, but never understanding?
In the book of Amos we find these words, ““The days are coming,” declares the Sovereign LORD, “when I will send a famine through the land— not a famine of food or a thirst for water, but a famine of hearing the words of the LORD.” (Amos 8:11, NIV84) Because of the hardness of people’s hearts in their time of plenty, because of their continual rejecting of God’s word day by day as they knowingly made choices out of sync with God’s will, in their time of need they would not hear the words of the Lord that they suddenly longed for.
And so Jesus is going to speak to the people about the kingdom of God in a series of parables and even His disciples are going to struggle to understand what He is getting at - and yet we need not have the same problem, for we have been given the meaning of the parable by Jesus Himself, if only we have ears to hear with. So I invite you to listen closely this morning, not just hearing God’s word, but understanding it, and not just understanding it, but taking it to heart for His words are words of life.
In this parable we have a farmer, we have the seed he sows, and we have four different soils that that seed is sown upon. The seed is easy – it is the word of God. God’s word is like a seed that is planted in the soil. It is meant to take root, it’s meant to grow, and then it’s meant to abundantly reproduce itself. Think of a kernel of corn. You plant it in your garden and during the ensuing months it begins to grow, first a shoot, then a stalk, then an ear or two of corn. Each of those ears consists of approximately 250 individual kernels. What’s happened? The seed did the very thing it was meant to do – it took root, it grew, and it brought forth more life. In a similar way, Scripture often speaks of the sowing of God’s word, and then the harvest that is produced from what has been planted.
In the Gospel of Matthew we read of how Jesus was lead into the desert to be tempted by the devil. After 40 days and 40 nights of fasting, Jesus is, understandably, famished. “The tempter came to Him and said, “If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread.” Jesus answered, “It is written: ‘Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”” (Matthew 4:3–4, NIV84)
You are not meant to live on bread alone. In other words, while physical food may feed our bodies, the soul needs something more. True life consists of more than just the physical – it consists of the spiritual as well. God’s word is food for the soul – we are meant to feed upon, to take in, to digest, every word that comes from the mouth of God, for God’s word is life!
We’ve all heard that saying, “You are what you eat!” haven’t we? Let me challenge you this morning – what are you feeding your soul? What are you trying to nourish your spirit with? Some are trying to exist on a junk food diet – self-help books, trash magazines, sound bites from the 6:00 news, the latest gossip, scandals – you name it – they want to hear about it – until it comes to the Word of God. Seems to be time for everything else in life, but never, or only rarely, for God’s Word. And the soul is starving. God seems distant and far away; faith seems irrelevant to daily life, life itself may seem empty and meaningless – why? Because we haven’t nourished the soul with God’s own words. Friends, “Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.”
Just how important is God’s word for us? Well according to the Scriptures it is of paramount importance for, “faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word of Christ.” (Romans 10:17) I had heard God’s word a plenty when I was growing up – we read the Bible every night. Friends, I heard it, but I did not have ears to really hear it.
In his first letter to the Thessalonians Paul writes to them saying, “And we also thank God continually because, when you received the word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men, but as it actually is, the word of God, which is at work in you who believe.” (1 Thessalonians 2:13, NIV84) I had heard the word of God just as I would hear the words of any human author – as mere words of mortals. But on the night that I attended my first Bible study I heard the word of God as I had never heard it before – not as the word of men – but as God’s own words, and I received it as such, and so started a journey of faith that has transformed my life, and which has brought me here with you today.
Such is the power of God’s word, for, having heard the word and believed, Scripture says we are included in Christ, and marked with a seal – which is the Holy Spirit promised long ago. (Ephesians 1:13-14). And now having been sealed we are to “Let the word of Christ dwell” in us “richly.” (Colossians 3:16) We are to let the roots of the seed of God’s word go deep into our lives, into our hearts, to be “transformed by the renewing of our minds.” (Romans 12:2)
For the word of God is spirit and life (John 6:63) and blessed are those who hear the word and obey it (Luke 11:28) for we are sanctified by the truth and the word of God is truth (John 17:17). Whoever has heard the word and believed will not be condemned (John 5:24) but for those who have rejected God’s word there awaits a fearful judgment in the day of the Lord (John 12:47).
Jesus preached the word of God for God’s word is where truth and hope and healing are to be found (Mark 2:2). The teachings of man will come, and the teachings of man will go, but the word of the Lord will stand forever (Matthew 24:35) – forever unchanging, forever true, forever life-giving! Therefore it is the wise man or woman who hears the word of the God and then lives that same word out in their lives; who puts into practice the things that God has spoken (Matthew 7:24).
All these things I’ve just shared come from the pages of the Bible. This is the truth about God’s word – but there’s more! We’re also told that, “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.” (2 Timothy 3:16–17, NIV84) The word of God is to inform our lives, to transform our hearts, to renew our minds, to guide our steps, to train us and to prepare us for service in God’s kingdom. “For the word of God is living and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.” (Hebrews 4:12, NIV84) It separates those who are seeking to live for God from those who are playing around the edges of Christianity, for if we claim to believe the word of God, yet do not do what it says, we prove the futility of our faith and the reality of our self-deception (James 1:22-23).
Is it any wonder then that Jesus says, “Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God!”? His word is truth; His word is life; and His word is for us today! Brothers and sisters, are we a people of the Word? Are you getting into God’s word on a regular basis? Have you read God’s word through even once? If not, then what are you feeding on? How are you growing? What place does God’s word have in your life?
A man once went to pastor D.L. Moody and said, "I have been through the Bible 10 times and it has not made any difference.” To which Moody replied, "If you allow it to go through you once, you will be a completely different person!" (Gordon Curley, “The Parable of the Sower, www.sermoncentral.com”) And the temptation is for us to go through God’s word as we would a novel, or a newspaper, or any other thing written by man, and as we do so we find it makes not one bit of difference in our lives. But to go through it, to see and perceive it as God’s word to us, to have ears to hear it with, to allow it to go through us, leads to change, transformation, and new life, for it is living and active and it does judge the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.
The word of God is the seed of life and that brings us back to our parable this morning. For Jesus says that that seed will be spread abroad into this world and it will be sown by the farmer on all kinds of soil. Who is the farmer? Ultimately it is God, it is Jesus, but it is also everyone who proclaims the word of God, who shares the good news of the gospel. When you sit and share the word of God with a friend in the coffee shop, when you visit the sick or the elderly and share the word with them, as you minister to your hurting neighbour and tell them about God’s love for a broken world, you are as the farmer sowing the seed of God’s word.
And just as Jesus says, that seed will fall upon different soils. Some will fall upon the path and be quickly eaten by the birds before it could ever take root. See, in Jesus’ day they didn’t tend to have sidewalks like we do. They followed paths through the fields to get from one place to another. Those paths would get beaten down, the ground would get hard. Nothing would grow there. At seeding time, the farmer would come along, and they didn’t do it like farmers tend to do it today, instead of plowing and then seeding, they would cast the seed over the field and then plow it into the ground afterwards. And so some of that seed would fall onto the hardened path, and even though that path would eventually get plowed up, it did no good because before it could be plowed under, the birds would come along and eat the seed that had been sown.
Jesus says that some people are like the seed that falls on the hard path. They have heard the word but it hasn’t taken root; Satan has come and stolen it away. The heart, like the ground of the path, is hard. 2 Corinthians 4:4 says that “The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.” (2 Corinthians 4:4, NIV84) Satan comes along and steals the word from their hearts before it can take root; he blinds their eyes so that they do not see. They despise the word, they oppose the word, because to them it does not make sense. As it says in Scripture, “the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” (1 Corinthians 1:18, NIV84) For “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.” (1 Corinthians 2:14, NIV84)
There is a second soil that Jesus mentions as well. Some of the seed falls upon rocky soil. This isn’t dirt mixed with rocks; instead this is a thin covering of soil over a solid bed of rock. When we were camping this past summer in Cyprus Hills the first tent pegs I hammered in went in easy; they bit deeply into the dirt. But when I got to the last three pegs, on the other side of the tent, I ran into a problem. The soil looked the same, but under a thin layer of dirt, was nothing but solid rock, and there was nothing I could do to get those pegs into the ground. That’s the type of ground that is being pictured here. The seed falls on this soil and it quickly begins to grow but in the heat of the sun the plant withers and dies because the roots haven’t gone deep.
Jesus says these are the people who receive the word with joy. They get excited about it, worked up about it even – but it’s nothing more than an emotional response. When trouble or persecution comes because of the word, their true colours are shown and they quickly fall away. They have no roots and so they last only a short time. In the 6th chapter of the Gospel of John, Jesus shares some hard truths with those who would follow Him. He shared with them things that would bring them into conflict with society at large; because of Him and His word they would face hardship and persecution, and the Bible tells us that “From this time many of His disciples turned back and no longer followed Him.” (John 6:66, NIV84) The cost was too high, the roots didn’t go deep enough.
As we look to the text we see that there is yet a third type of soil on which the seed falls. This time the seed falls amongst the thorns and as they begin to grow together the thorns choke the life out of the good seed so that it does not bear any grain. It’s got the appearance of life but there is no life in it.
There are some people who are like rocky soil – hard to the word of God, and there are some who are like the shallow soil and who will fall away when troubles come because of the word, but I would say the greater numbers of people fall into the category of this third soil, and it is by far the more treacherous, because it is so deceptive that many find themselves here without even realizing it. Jesus says these are the ones who have heard God’s word, but for whom the worries of this life, the deceitfulness of wealth, and the desires for other things come in and choke the word, making it unfruitful. (Mark 4:18-19)
These are those who think they are walking with God. They may or may not attend church. They know bits and pieces of God’s word or even whole swaths of it – but they’re not allowing it to transform their lives. They have the appearance of spiritual life but not the reality of it. They may be consumed by worry about many things and because their minds are consumed by worry, there is no room for God’s word to grow.
Or they may be consumed, like the rich young ruler, with wealth and the pursuit of wealth, and while they like the idea of God, and they want to follow Christ on one level, they don’t want to do it at the expense of their true god - which is their money. Jesus says it is “hard for the rich to enter the kingdom of God.” (Mark 10:23) Why? Because we cannot serve both God and money. The heart will always be torn and the flesh likely to win out. We like our comfort, we like our things, and as long as they have a greater place in our heart then does God Himself, we will never have life in Christ. That’s why the rich young ruler went away “sad,” – his riches, his comfort, his wealth, were more important to him than was Jesus. And, like many today, he would not have known that tension even existed until Jesus asked him to give up that which was dearest to him.
Or, if it is not wealth, it may be that the desire for some other thing, some other person, comes in and overwhelms any desire that they have for God. They may go through all the motions of godliness but have none of the reality of it. They may be as those who worship Jesus with their lips but whose hearts are far from Him. (Matthew 15:8) They may fool those around them, they may fool even themselves, but the one they cannot fool is God Himself - for from Him there is nothing that is hidden; God even knows every motive of our hearts!
Worry, the deceitfulness of wealth, the desire for other things – even good things, all these choke out the word of God in our hearts. Jesus makes it very clear, saying, “If anyone does not remain in Me, he is like a branch that is thrown away and withers; such branches are picked up, thrown into the fire and burned.” (John 15:6, NIV84) And, “Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.” (Matthew 7:19, NIV84) See friends, seeds are meant to produce something whether it be fruit or grain or whatnot, but the seed that’s being choked out does not produce anything! When the word of God is choked in our hearts it is made to be unfruitful in our lives.
There is one final soil that Jesus speaks of here. It stands in stark contrast to the other three because it brings forth life. This is the seed that falls on good soil. It grows, produces a crop, multiplying itself many times over. Understand this – this is the “Big Picture” in this parable - in all four cases the farmer and the seed are exactly the same. The only thing that changes is the nature of the soil. And that soil represents different states of the human heart. In verse 18 Jesus says the good soil consists of those who hear the word, who accept the word, and who thereby produce a crop – those who bear fruit with their lives.
Friends, it’s not enough to simply hear the word of God. Everyone who is here today has heard the word, but even here, in the church, not all the soils of our heart are going to be the same. Some seed may have fallen on the hard path, the hard heart, and you haven’t been willing to hear what God has to say in His word this morning. Some will fall on shallow soil and you will be excited about living for God and getting into His word until trouble comes because of it. Others will find that the worries of this life, the deceitfulness of wealth, or the desire for other things will fill their hearts rather than the word of God. And then there are some that have had ears to hear and who have heard this morning. The good soil – they will hear, and accept, and seek to move forward in obedience to God’s word. They will put that same word into practice in their lives and God will bring forth a harvest of righteousness, in them and through them, for the harvest that is reaped is directly proportional to the soil in which it takes root! Which soil are you?
Let me close this morning with a poem by Max Lucado …
Once there was a man who dared God to speak.
Burn the bush like you did for Moses, God
And I will follow.
Collapse the walls like you did for Joshua, God
And I will fight.
Still the waves like you did on Galilee, God
And I will listen.
And so the man sat by a bush, near a wall, close to the sea and waited for God to speak.
And God heard the man, so God answered.
He sent fire, not for a bush, but for a church.
He brought down a wall, not of brick, but of sin.
He stilled a storm, not of the sea, but of a soul.
And God waited for the man to respond,
And he waited... And he waited... And waited.
But because the man was looking at bushes, not hearts; bricks and not lives, seas and not souls,
he decided that God had done nothing.
Finally he looked to God and asked,
Have you lost your power?
And God looked at him and said,
Have you lost your hearing?
(Christian Cheong, “Are You Listening Well,” www.sermoncentral.com, Max Lucado, “A Gentle Thunder”)
Friends, may we have ears to hear and eyes to see that the word of God may bring forth life and fruit in our day.
Let’s pray …
