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
• We need to be very careful we are not to hasty to jump to the conclusion that the way we think is necessarily how God thinks
• And here we see Jesus offering a totally illogical (to the farming mind that is) solution to the problem
• 29 But he said, ‘No, lest while you gather up the tares you also uproot the wheat with them. 30 Let both grow together until the harvest and at the time of harvest I will say to the reapers, “First gather together the tares and bind them in bundles to burn them, but gather the wheat into my barn.” ’ ”
• The servants must have been stunned, “You mean let the evil exist beside the good”
Let me ask you, if you were given the challenge of getting rid of sin in the world, how would you do it? Think about that for a moment
• Comedian Bill Cosby used to have a routine where he had this imaginary place where he could send all these problem people to –
• Bad neighbors, Just ship them off; rowdy teenagers, just ship them off
• And it sounds like a good clean solution to get rid of the problems in the world
• Take these terrorists for instance, just ship them off (and we all cheer), pedophiles (and we all cheer), drug addicts, drunk drivers, homosexuals, pornographers
• Sometimes we Christians have been even less charitable than Bill Cosby, about what we ought to do with some of these hard core sinners
• After all it was the very disciples of Jesus, James and John, the Sons of Thunder who had a great strong arm solution to the Samaritan village who simply ignored Jesus because He was heading for Jerusalem (Luke 9:51-56)
• Luke 9:54-56 (NKJV) 54 And when His disciples James and John saw this, they said, “Lord, do You want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them, just as Elijah did?”
• Here’s a nice clean strong arm solution to the problem, and what’s more, it’s a Biblical solution – Elijah did it!
• 55 But He turned and rebuked them, and said, “You do not know what manner of spirit you are of.
• Ouch, how would you like Jesus saying that to you, message is getting a little personal now
• So here James and John offer their strong arm solution to the problem of the Samaritans, now Jesus reveals what He thinks of the Samaritans
• 56 For the Son of Man did not come to destroy men’s lives but to save them.”
• But sometimes the modern Christian response is not a lot different from James and John’s, Let’s take care of these abortion doctors, let’s lock up drunk drivers and throw away the key
• Or, we resort to the Ten commandments. Ever heard this one, “If only these people would keep the ten commandments the world would be such a better place - that would get rid of all our problems”
• Here’s a news flash – it won’t! Did 613 laws in the Torah get rid of the evil in the lives of the Israelites? Did the “final solution of the flood” get rid of evil in the world?
• Paul, a Pharisee of the Pharisees, who tells us he kept the law perfectly, went around murdering people in the name of God
• Philippians 3:5-6 (NKJV)5 circumcised the eighth day, of the stock of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of the Hebrews; concerning the law, a Pharisee; 6 concerning zeal, persecuting the church; concerning the righteousness which is in the law, blameless
• There is a huge difference between the righteous that comes from the Law and the righteousness that grows from the Spirit of God living in you
• There is not a courtroom in the world that will convict you of hatred, but the court of heaven will
• So there is an external righteousness that one can attain from keeping the law but its the internal one, the one Jesus came to magnify that trips us up and this is the distinction that Paul is making
• So more force and more laws simply do not work
• And if Jesus though they would have, he would have found the perfect recruits to be his disciples down at the Temple Mount – they had already added many thousands of laws to the Torah with the Mishnah
• I’m sure like the servants in our story, they would have been very eager to help Jesus clean up the world with their strong arm solutions – after all they wanted an all conquering Messiah
• And it seems the Christian community today hasn’t learned the lesson of the OT as some still think the church’s primary business is to march around the country teaching morality as though that would somehow make the world a better place
• If we would take two seconds to check the beam in our own eye before we roar off on our righteous crusade, we would discover that if we were serious about the Law we would all be shipped off to Bill Cosby’s imaginary place
• It not just the terrorists, the pedophiles, the drug addicts, the drunk drivers, homosexuals, pornographers who are shipped to this place
• But also those who speed, those who tell little white lies, those who cheat on their income tax, those husbands and wives who yell at each other….we all belong there
• As Jesus said, “Let him who is without sin throw the first stone”
• We all have a little bit of “tare” in us don’t we? And if they ripped out all the tares, not sure how much wheat would be left
• And guess what, Bill Cosby was closer to the truth than he thought – this imaginary place somewhere already exists – it’s our own world
• As one person put it, “This earth is the insane asylum of the universe”
• You and I are the misfits who inhabit this insane asylum, we are the inmates, we’re the Jack Nicholsons’
But back to the question, “How would you get rid of sin?”
• Is the answer, more commandments? More laws? More force? Harsher penalties? More death? Is it really going to change anything?
• It is precisely this reason that Jesus had to institute the New Covenant – because the Old with its strong arm tactics simply does not work
Let’s change the question, “How did God choose to rid the world of sin?
• Well He chose to send his only Son into this insane asylum we call our world to take care of the problem of sin once for all
• And what does He do, He climbs up there on the cross and through His own blood, the blood of the New covenant, He says, “Enough force, enough laws, enough dying, and turns the guns on Himself
• And his body becomes the target upon which every sin ever committed is unleashed
• And His hope is when you and I see, and when those “tares” see, his bloodied pulp that it will remind us of the ultimate consequence of sin, the death of God, and the extent to which God will go to save a rebellious mankind from our sins
• Grace is when God turned the guns on Himself. Grace is when God said, “Enough law, enough religion, enough force, enough death” it’s going to end with me! From now on we going to deal with “life” – a new life, a new creation, a new birth
• Who of us in a million years would have ever suggested a solution like this to rid the world of sin? Do we begin to comprehend the vast difference between the way God thinks and the way we think
• So Jesus in this parable may sound like a pretty lousy farmer giving this sort of advice
• But fortunately for us Jesus is not in the farming business, He is in the saving business. He may make a lousy farmer but He makes a great Messiah or Savior
• This is the Savior the world needs to hear about, the one who turns the gun on himself rather than on them
• They need to hear about the Son of Man who did not come to destroy men’s lives but to save them
• They need to hear about the “glad tidings of great joy for all peoples”
• The party has already begun, the music has started to play, we need to start enjoying the experience
• So the lesson we add to the two we have already learned about living under grace is this - to live under grace means to be included and to be inclusive
• Even tares are given the chance to change, and its just as well as we too were once tares
