The Receptive Kingdom

Let’s dig into the sermon. The title of this sermon is Kingdom Come: How Jesus Revealed the Kingdom in Parables. And so what we’re gonna be doing over the next 5 weeks starting today is we’re gonna be digging down into Matthew 13. Matthew 13 has a number of parables of Jesus, but it opens up with the parable of the sower. That’s the one we’ll be covering today.

But we’ve entitled this sermon series Kingdom Come based on Matthew chapter 6 where Jesus taught us to pray. And we know this prayer: Our Father which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. So Jesus taught his disciples to pray kingdom come prayers. Thy kingdom come, not my kingdom come, your kingdom come.

And, and that’s how Jesus taught us. And so every time we pray kingdom come prayers, we’re praying for the rule and reign of God over our world and over our lives. Kingdom come prayers. Now, when Jesus spoke of the kingdom of heaven, he said the kingdom of heaven is near, the kingdom of heaven is at hand, the kingdom of— where is it? Where is the kingdom of heaven?

Because when he talks about the kingdom of heaven, he’s not so much talking about a place as he’s talking about a presence or a person. He’s not just talking about a, uh, a realm but a reign. He’s not talking about castles and crowns as much as he’s talking about a carpenter who came as king. And so this kingdom of heaven that he begins talking about, and there’s at least 30 or 40, it depends on how you number them, that Jesus taught parables. He teaches these parables to give us insight into the kingdom of heaven.

Now, as we were studying this week, we wanted to, to write a definition the best we could, a definition of what the kingdom of heaven is. And so, uh, you’ll see this on the screen. The kingdom of heaven is the saving reign of God that entered history through Jesus the King, is even now breaking into this present age wherever his rule is received, and will one day be fully and visibly established when Christ returns. Now, in theology, this is called the inaugurated view of the kingdom of heaven. The idea is that when Jesus came, the kingdom arrived, the kingdom came.

And as it was believed by the disciples, it grew. And the kingdom of heaven is expanding now, and it’s growing. But it’s not fully present yet until Christ returns. This is the view that of the inaugurated view of the kingdom of heaven. Now here’s the tension.

Chapter 6, he taught them pray kingdom come prayers. He taught them how to pray, thy kingdom come. And now for chapters 6 through 13, the disciples have been praying kingdom come prayers, but the kingdom hasn’t come yet, at least not visibly to them. They probably, you know, what has come? A carpenter in a boat?

No throne, no army. Rome is still standing.

What is this kingdom of God? And instead of the king with a crown and an army and overthrowing Rome, what we get is a farmer scattering seed. The kingdom is like what? Like a seed. And then this seed is cast, and 3/4 of the people who hear about it don’t bear fruit.

This is, this is not the kingdom that they were looking for. And he comes teaching these parables, these stories, for what reason? Well, a parable, what is that? It’s an earthly story with a spiritual or heavenly meaning. It uses common everyday stories about farmers and fields and houses and, and different things, like things that we can understand to point us to something that’s somewhat outside of our understanding, something mysterious, spiritual.

And so he used these parables and they tended to do 2 things, almost like a scalpel that cuts so that what falls on this side, you could say it reveals to those who have receptive hearts, but the parable also conceals spiritual meaning to those who have hard hearts. And so a parable comes and does both at the same time. It both conceals and reveals. And so we’re gonna be looking at the parable of the sower, the parable also called of the 4 soils, but we’re gonna be looking at it through the lens of how Jesus is talking about the kingdom of heaven. And as we look, at this parable of the sower, it illustrates the importance of spiritual receptivity to the word of the kingdom of heaven.

And as we look at the text, I think we’ll see 3 ways we can respond receptively to the word of the kingdom. So let’s dig in. Chapter 13. That same day, Jesus went out of the house and sat beside the sea, and great crowds gathered about him so that he got into a boat and sat down, and the whole crowd stood on the beach. And he told them many things in parables, saying, a sower went out to sow, and as he sowed, some seeds fell along the path, and the birds came and devoured them.

Other seeds fell on rocky ground where they did not have much soil, and immediately they sprang up since they had no depth of soil, but when the sun rose, they were scorched, and since they had no root, they withered away. Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them. Other seeds fell on good soil and produced grain, some a hundredfold, some 60, some 30. He who has ears, let him hear. Then the disciples came and said to him, why do you speak to them in parables?

And he answered them, to you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, But to them it has not been given. For to the one who has, more will be given, and he will have an abundance. But from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away. This is why I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand. Indeed, in their case, the prophecy of Isaiah is fulfilled: That says, you will indeed hear but never understand.

You will indeed see but never perceive. For this people’s heart has grown dull, and with their ears they can barely hear, and their eyes they have closed, lest they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears and understand with their heart and turn, and I would heal them. But blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear. For truly I say to you, many prophets and righteous people longed to see what you see and did not see it, and to hear what you hear and did not hear it. Hear then the parable of the sower.

When anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what has been sown in his heart. This is what was sown along the path. As for what was sown on rocky ground, this is the one who hears the word and immediately receives it with joy. Yet he has no root in himself, but endures for a while. And when tribulation or persecution arises on account of the word, immediately he falls away.

As for what was sown among thorns, this is the one who hears the word, but the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches choke the word, and it proves unfruitful. As for what was sown on good soil, this is the one who hears the word and understands it. He indeed bears fruit and yields in one case a hundredfold, in another 60, and in another 30. This is God’s word. We’re looking for 3 ways that we can respond receptively to the word of the kingdom.

Here’s the first way. It’s by listening attentively to the word, by listening attentively. Look at verse 9. Jesus says, he who has ears to hear, let him hear. Now, was there a problem with ears in Galilee in those days?

Had there been some sort of plague that caused a great number of people to be born without hearing, no ears? No, that doesn’t seem to be what this is about. Remember, a parable is something that uses earthly imagery, metaphor, to teach us spiritual realities. He’s talking about spiritual hearing. He’s talking about spiritual receptivity to the word, which is the word of Christ in this case, the word of God.

And so he’s saying, if you have ears to hear, hear it. Now let’s recognize where Jesus is at. It opens up that says that same day Jesus went out of the house. This is probably Capernaum. He’s probably leaving Peter’s house.

It was just based on the context of the previous chapter. He’s in that area. We know that he often stayed there. A great crowd had gathered around his house to the point that his mother and brothers and sisters and sisters, chapter 12, had come to see him. And someone brought word into the house and said, hey, your family’s out there, they wanna see you.

And he motions like this and he says to his disciples, he said, these are my brothers and sisters. This is my family. Those who receive the word are my family. And so, but in this same section in chapter 12, we have this number of people that have rejected Jesus. They’ve been hearing his claims, hearing his word, but they’ve hardened their hearts to it.

And not only have they hardened their hearts, they’ve come to the point where they’re conspiring to kill him. Now it’s this Jesus who leaves the house, walks out among this great crowd in order to teach them, and the crowd is so great that he pushes out on probably Peter’s boat, ’cause that’s where their fishing business was, and it creates like an amphitheater there on the beach. And he takes a seat like the rabbis were of habit to do. The rabbis would teach and the people are standing. Let’s try that.

I’ll sit down and teach from the stage, you guys stand up, how’d that be? We try to make you as comfortable as possible and me as uncomfortable as possible. That’s what we try to do here. But that’s how he taught. It says, and a whole crowd stood on the beach and he told them many things in parables.

Well, this whole chapter for 5 Sundays, we’re gonna be unpacking these parables, but he opens up with a parable addressing the reality that all of those people in that crowd that are hearing him, only a few would really hear him. Only a few would have spiritual receptivity. They would— only a few believe. The word parable is of interest. It occurs 4 times in our text here today.

Verse 3, 10, 13, and 18, we see it. We’ll see it over and over again. It’s of interest because this word is a transliteration of the Greek word parabole. Parabole. Para meaning alongside of, and bole coming from the root word ballo, which means to throw.

And I still remember that word from my little flashcard when I took elementary Greek in seminary, that it’s ballo, and I drew a ball on there ’cause you throw a ball. And I needed things like that to remember my Greek vocab. And so parabole, parable literally means to throw something beside of something. And so it’s a metaphor, it’s a story that runs alongside a deeper story. That’s what it is.

And C.H. Dodd says this, he said it’s a metaphor or a simile drawn from nature or common life, arresting the hearer by its vividness or strangeness and leaving the mind in sufficient doubt about its precise application to tease it into active thought. And that’s what parables do, because he doesn’t— when he, when he gives you the parable, it makes you go, now what, what does that mean? And for those that that have ears to hear, they’ll lean way in to the story and try to figure it out. And those who have hard hearts have the opposite response.

A parable causes you to think about it more deeply. Now, as we look at this story, we see at the beginning, just looking at verses 1 through 9 for a moment, he hasn’t explained the parable to us yet, but we can kind of guess almost right away there’s a sower And he’s throwing seeds and he’s got 4 types of soil which represent only one of them bears fruit. The other 3 don’t for various reasons. One of them is because it’s on the path. The other is because it’s on rocky soil and it gets no depth.

The soil’s not deep enough. And then the other is among weeds, it’s choked. And then finally the other, the 4th is good soil. So we see the 4 soils. We find out later, as he explains it, that the soil represents the human’s heart receptivity to spiritual things, that the seed represents the word of the kingdom, which is the gospel, and that the sower, well, that’s Jesus in this case.

He’s the one teaching. It’s the Lord. He’s the sower. And so we see this. Now, but there’s something about this story that sounds weird, and maybe it doesn’t to your ears because maybe you’re too far removed from the farm, too far removed from sowing.

But those of us who have sowed, I used to spend summers on the farm with my grandfather, my Pawpaw, and I know about sowing. And I also have a little raised bed garden in my backyard that I love to do. It reminds me of growing up, and it’s something I can do. And I can plant seeds and see fruit, and it doesn’t talk back to me like some of y’all do. And plus, it takes so long when you’re sowing seed as a pastor.

It takes years and years often to see life change, but sometimes just in one summer you can see some fruit when you plant seed. But you go to Lowe’s, you get a little packet of seed, and it’s not even full. There’s just a few seeds in there, like $2.25 for a little packet of seed. Seed’s expensive, and you can’t make it yourself. No one can.

It’s invaluable. It’s priceless. Now here’s this sower, and he’s throwing it on the path. When I sow grass seed, I don’t throw it on my driveway. Grass seed’s expensive.

I don’t throw it on my driveway. This sower, he’s extravagantly generous with his seed. He throws it at every kind. He throws it on hard soil, on the path. He throws it in shallow soils, people who have shallow hearts.

He throws it among those who have weeds growing, thorns growing, so that they’re surrounded by the cares of life and distracted. We see here A tension between God’s sovereignty that he puts out his word and human responsibility. He he gives us all the word, but only some in his story only one fourth, one out of four receives it.

It’s important because seed is expensive. I remember. That there’s a— they call it a doomsday vault that’s on an island in Norway, a Norwegian island called the Svalbard Seed Vault. And they’re collecting seed here in the side of a mountain that has a constant temperature, and they have seed from every nation in the world because if there were a terrible thing that happened in the world, some kind of terrible catastrophic thing, we could start over from the fallboard seed vault, because you can’t make seed. It’s invaluable.

But this sower, this God, this Lord Jesus, he’s extravagantly generous, but only a few of us will hear.

And hearing is important. It’s fundamental to faith. And so Paul says, so faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ. And so we’re doing this Who’s Your One right now because, believe it or not, there are still people in the United States who don’t know the gospel. They haven’t heard the gospel.

So they haven’t had a chance to respond. There’s people in Wilson County. You’re like, this is the Bible Belt, Pastor. Yeah, but it’s a rusty belt.

They haven’t heard the word, and so they need to hear it because faith comes by hearing. What’s our job? Can we save people? No. Can we make the seed?

No. We get the gospel, we receive the gospel, we bear fruit, we give out the gospel. The gospel— that’s the seed of the gospel— has the power.

And so receptive hearts matter. James says this: be doers of the word, not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. Be those that take the Word in and let it change you. A parable’s like a trap. It’s got a hook to it that makes you wanna listen ’cause it’s an interesting story.

It has a vividness or a strangeness to it, like a sower who sows everywhere. It’s a strange story, it makes you wanna listen, but it sneaks up on you and gets you. And the 30 or 40 parables that Jesus told, and it depends on how you number them, aren’t the only parables. There are parables in the Old Testament. In fact, there’s a parable told by a prophet named Nathan to a king named David.

Maybe you remember it from 2 Samuel chapter 12. David had committed adultery with a woman named Bathsheba. And in order to cover up his crime, he brought the the husband back in order to have him spend the night with his own wife so it would cover up the pregnancy. But the man was too honorable to do that because he didn’t want to come back and do that because he was leaving the field of battle. And he says, who am I to sleep with my wife and enjoy my wife when my brothers are sleeping on the ground?

So he slept on the ground outside the king’s palace and it blew David’s plan. Long story short, David conspires with his general Joab to have this man murdered, this man killed. God tells Nathan about it, and Nathan decides to go in there not with a straight-up accusation but with a parable. He goes in and he goes to the king and he says, there were 2 men who lived in a city. One was rich, one was poor.

The rich man owned many flocks of sheep and cattle, and the poor man had one little lamb that he had purchased, and he used to feed it from his own cup. He used to hold it in his arms. He was like a daughter to the poor man. Well, a visitor came to the rich man’s house, and instead of killing one of his own lambs, he killed the lamb that belonged to the poor man. And David, you could just see the steam come out of his ears.

He said, this man deserves to die, and he’s going— That rich man is going to pay fourfold. Who is that man? And Nathan says, you are the man because you took another man’s wife. And you have this whole harem as king, and you took this one and you murdered him. And David tore his clothes and repented.

It was like a trap. That parable was like a trap. It snuck up on David. He thought that Nathan was talking about somebody other man, but he was talking about him. And that’s what parables do to us if we have receptive hearts.

They sneak up on us and they show us that some of us have weeds growing in our hearts— the cares of this life, the cares of this world. There are other kingdoms trying to set up kingdoms in our heart. And so this parable sneaks up on us and it exposes— what do we do? How do we have receptive, listening hearts. Maybe, maybe start by praying like young Samuel did: Speak, for your servant is listening.

You come to church not just to check off the box. You read God’s word not just to finish your yearly reading plan, but you come to it going, Lord, speak to me. Your servant is listening. That leads us to the second way that we can respond receptively to the word of the kingdom. It’s by seeking to understand the word.

We can hear, we can listen attentively, but it’s not enough just to hear. We have to understand, and we have to seek understanding. We’re at verses 10 through 17 now, and we come to a hinge in the story where the disciples enter into the story and ask a question Says verse 10, then the disciples came and said to him, why do you speak to them in parables? Why do you speak to them in parables?

This story, the— of the parable of the sower, is in the synoptic Gospels. It’s in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. And in Luke chapter 8, the disciples come to him and they actually ask, can you explain it to us? So here are the disciples.

They, they have ears to hear, but we see also that tension again between God’s sovereignty, that he, he gives us understanding, and man’s responsibility. Yet having given us the grace of understanding, we’re to seek understanding like that. Some of you might be like, well, Gary, could you Could you alleviate that tension? So no, Jesus doesn’t, so I’m not gonna alleviate it. I’m gonna leave it right there.

Who’s responsible? Well, we’re to seek understanding. Let’s leave it like that. If you have ears to hear, God’s given you the grace of hearing the gospel, of hearing the Word of God. So now you’re responsible for it.

And so they asked this question, Why do you do this, Lord? Why are you speaking in parables? And he gives them 3 reasons why. The first reason he gives them, he says, and he answered them, to you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven. So that’s the first reason.

The first reason why he speaks in parables is because understanding is a gift from God.

He gives them the knowledge. If you understand today, you’ve been given a great gift. If you understand, that’s a gift. Now, that’s, that’s God’s sovereignty that he gave you understanding. Do I completely understand it?

No, I don’t completely understand that, but God’s God and I’m not. But he, he’s given you the understanding. And then here’s the second reason. He says, um, but to them it has not been given.

I didn’t— he didn’t give them understanding. And so this parable, as I said before, these parables have a cutting-edge effect. For, for those that God has given understanding, it’s revealing. But to those who God has not given understanding, it’s concealing. It comes doing both at the same time, and so it divides.

And the Word of God does that today, not just this parable, but to every one of us. Some of us lean in and we’re like the disciples, can you explain this to us? Why do you speak in parables? Those are hard to understand. Can you explain it?

But then others go, yeah, I don’t get anything out of this. Why do you guys go to church and hear this guy up there waving his arms? Like, there’s so many other things we could be doing. But for those of us who it’s been given to, we want to grow in understanding, and he talks about that. He says, for to the one who has understanding, that’s what he’s talking about, for the one who has understanding, more will be given, and he will have an abundance.

You’ll grow in wisdom, you’ll grow in more and more understanding, but from the one who has not, has what? Not understanding, Even what he has will be taken away. They’ll live in steadily more unwise conditions. So that’s the second reason. And then here’s the third one.

This is why I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand. There’s that word understand.

Indeed, in their case, the prophecy of Isaiah is fulfilled. So that’s the third reason. The third reason I’m preaching and teaching in parables is because God spoke through the prophet Isaiah hundreds of years ago and said this would happen, and I’m fulfilling every prophecy of the Old Testament. There are over 300 prophecies in the Old Testament concerning the Messiah, and I’m fulfilling every one. And this is the one from Isaiah chapter 6 where Isaiah said, you’ll hear but not understand, you’ll see but not perceive.

But you know why? Because your hearts dull. That word dull could have been translated calloused, hard.

It’s kind of sad because Isaiah chapter 6— I say it’s kind of sad because Isaiah saw God. He was in a vision, he was caught up into the throne room, and he sees this and he goes, oh, oh, I’m a man of unclean lips and I’m from a people of unclean lips. And an angel comes up and puts a hot coal from the altar on his lips and he says, now your lips are clean. And then he hears a voice say, saying, whom shall I send and who will go for us? And he says, here I am, send me.

And God sends him back to Israel, but then he warns him that they will hear and not really hear, and they’ll see and not really see. And but it wasn’t just for Isaiah’s time. It came true in Isaiah’s time. It was for that time when Jesus came. And Jesus said, that’s the third reason I’m teaching in parables, because it’s a fulfillment of of what God said through Isaiah.

And so he taught in parables. To you the secrets, the mysteries of the kingdom are revealed, but not to them because they have hard hearts.

Their hearts have grown dull. They can barely hear. In the book of Proverbs, it says that the Lord gives understanding to those who seek him. I like how this starts off. Tune your ears.

Tune your ears to wisdom. Concentrate on understanding. Cry out for insight and ask for understanding. Search for them as you would for silver. Seek them like hidden treasures.

For the Lord grants wisdom. From his mouth come knowledge and understanding. 2 students go to a lecture, and after the lecture is over, one student, he picks up his books and his notebook and he heads out because he’s trying to get back to the dorm for some party that’s about to happen. He’s in a big hurry. Another student lingers afterwards and says, Professor, could I ask you a question?

Well, sure. Follow me to my office. And before he knows it, in that particular semester, that professor becomes like a mentor to him. At the end of the semester, they get their grades. Who do you think scores highest?

The one who sticks around and seeks understanding from the teacher? Well, certainly it must be that one. And so it is. It’s a rule of life. And so it’s true for us too.

God gives us the grace of understanding, but do we seek understanding so that it becomes abundant? Do we lean in and we go up to the Lord afterwards? It says, then the disciples came. Well, I don’t know what that looks like. He’s sitting on the edge of the boat.

Everybody’s on the shore. Did they wade out into the water and go, psst, hey, I don’t think they’re getting the parable thing. Why are you doing that? He goes, I got 3 reasons. He tells them.

I don’t know. I don’t know. Maybe, maybe he’d gone to shore at this point. I don’t know. Maybe he went back to the house.

It’s not clear. But the disciples, they wanted to get more out of it. And that’s the mark of every disciple. Are you a disciple of Jesus? So you pursue him to seek understanding.

Spiritual understanding is a gift of grace. Yet the disciples did not passively receive. They didn’t just sit back. They came to Jesus and listened and sought understanding. That leads us to the third way.

We said we must hear, must listen attentively, we must seek to understand, but ultimately by bearing the fruit of the word. This proves that we have received the word, that we have life change, that we begin to bear fruit. It starts at verse 18. Now he’s going to explain the meaning of the parable. And if you look all the way to verse 23, you see the one who bears fruit.

And so we see this as the ultimate display of the one who has received the word of God. He talks about the hard path, the one who the word of God had landed upon the hard path. That person has a hard heart, like the book of Isaiah said, a calloused heart. Heart, a dull heart. And so it lands there and it doesn’t even penetrate.

It just sits there. And the evil one— he names what the birds represented now— the evil one snatches it away, snatches that seed away. And then the second one was the rocky soil, the shallow soil. It went in, but soon as trouble came, it had no root, so it didn’t endure. Then the third one, the third soil— I think this is the American church soil, by the way— the third soil is choked with weeds.

So the cares of this life, the desire for things and stuff and all the distractions that we have because of living in a wealthy country, all the things that compete. So there are many thrones instead of one throne. That chokes out the Word of God in that person’s heart. I think that’s, that’s where a lot of people that sit in the church building on Sunday are. And then there’s that 4th one, and that’s that person— is this you?

That person that hears the Word of God, and you don’t just hear it, but you, you go to community group during the week, and you take notes in your bulletin, you take your bulletin with you to community group, you mark up your Bible, And you get there, hey, what did y’all get out of this? Whenever the pastor was talking about this, I was thinking he was— and you dig down and you get yourself a commentary and some— you start getting you some Bible books and get yourself a library together. You start getting serious about being a student of the Word of God. You might be like, yeah, I was not a very good student in school. I’m not talking about school, y’all.

I’m talking about life. And you got serious about the Word of God because he’s given you the grace of understanding. So now I’m going to— I want to bear fruit.

And you’re like, what is this fruit? Jesus doesn’t explain that part. What’s amazing about this parable is that he explains it at all. Because so many of his parables, he just, here you go. Now go have fun.

Like, you and the Holy Spirit get together and figure that one out. That’s what he does with most of his parables. But this one, it’s like his introductory parable. Into this chapter and he tells you, in a way he kind of teaches you how to understand a parable. He kind of does, he kind of gives you a key.

But what does he say about fruit? So where else could we look in the Bible to find out what fruit means? So we can look to John chapter 15 where I’ve got this in your text, I think. By this my Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit and so prove to be my disciples. And so proven to be his disciples, I think, has to do with people will see the character of Christ in you.

Well, what’s that look like? Well, go over to Galatians chapter 5, and he says that the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. That’s what your life will look like, the character of Christ. You’ll have the mind of Christ, he says in 1 Corinthians chapter 2, that you’ll be able to have the mind of Christ, which Philippians chapter 2 tells us that you’ll put others ahead of yourself. And, and you will also, because this seed is growing in you, you will speak the gospel so that others come to Christ.

So fruitfulness is character, it’s mindset, it’s also proclaiming. It’s all of those.

And so the person who hears and understands— look at it again in verse 23. As for what was sown on good soil, this is the one who hears the word— that was our first point— and understands it— that was our second point. See, preaching’s not so hard. You just tell people what it says.

He indeed bears fruit— and that was our third point right there. They weren’t my points really, were they? They were his.

I raised a lot of tomatoes this year. My wife said too many. I bought 7 varieties of tomato plants from Lowe’s. Actually, it was 6, but my neighbor across the street raises them from seed and he gave me one. So I had 7, and Robin goes, you’ve gone nuts for tomatoes this year.

We’ll never be able to eat all these tomatoes. And I said, trust me, this is going to be good. It was the worst season. It started with a drought that ran and ran and ran. It’s the worst season.

And then the worms hit, the moths hit. I won’t go into all the detail because it’s still— I got a little PTSD over my tomatoes.

We barely got tomatoes. This year. It was early on, they were popping. I was like, wow, look at it. And then they started dying, and I don’t have one.

All 7 of them died. Now I went back and bought 2 more that I’m just like loving on, like, please. And they’re not looking great. I don’t know what it is. I’m usually pretty good at this.

I usually have a pretty good green thumb, but this year I don’t know what I did wrong. It’s very disappointing. I was looking forward to those fresh tomatoes.

I wonder how the Lord feels about your heart today. It’s not the seed. The seed’s not the problem. It’s not the sower. That’s not the problem.

It’s your heart. And this parable, I hope it snuck on— snuck up on you today. What’s the state of your heart? Is it settling in your heart? What’s the word producing in you?

How many sermons have you heard? Have they been just sitting on top? How how much Bible knowledge do you still need? It’s not the sower. It’s not the seed.

It’s the soil. Are you receptive? We started this morning with a prayer that you’ve prayed probably a hundred times. Thy kingdom come. Come on, Lord, thy kingdom come.

Matthew 13 tells us that the kingdom does not come the way we expected. It doesn’t come with thrones and headlines and armies and thrones and kings, and it comes like a seed— small, hidden, concealed. Starts off, you can’t even see it, and then it grows, yet powerful enough to produce a harvest. So when you pray, thy kingdom come, you’re praying a very dangerous prayer because all of us have weeds that need to be plucked. All of us have thrones that need to be overthrown in order to make room for the true King.

So if you pray, thy kingdom come, and mean it, you’re saying, thy kingdom come in me. And there’s only room for one king.

And this sower is extravagantly generous. He’s scary. He scatters the seed everywhere, and he scattered it on your heart today.

And that’s his part. He’s done his part. What will you do with it? That’s your part. And but he wasn’t finished.

Jesus said, the hour has come For the Son of Man to be glorified. Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone. But if it dies, it bears much fruit. And so he became a seed.

He died for our sins on a cruel cross, and he was buried like a seed, and he burst forth from the grave on the 3rd day to give us eternal life.

He’s the seed. He’s the sower.

And so the gospel is not this: try harder to become good soil. That’s not, that’s not the purpose of this.

The gospel is this: do you have ears to hear?

Has the seed been sown in your heart? And has it given you the fruit of new life in Christ Jesus? Perhaps the prayer we pray today is, King Jesus, give me ears to hear, a heart to understand, and fruit— fruitful life that shows other people that you live in me. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. In me, Lord.

Thy kingdom come. Let’s pray.

Lord, I pray first for the person that’s here today, and today they heard, maybe for the first time they really heard. Is that you? Would you declare Jesus King of your life? You can do it right now by making a declaration in prayer. Pray like this.

Dear Lord Jesus, I’m a sinner. I’ve been living with myself on the throne. I’ve been doing life my own way, but today I surrender my heart to you. I surrender the throne of my life to you. Come into my life.

I believe you died on the cross for me, that you were raised from the grave, and that you live today. I believe that. Come and live in me. I want you to be Lord and Savior of my life.

Others are praying, you’ve already received Jesus, but you’ve been getting dull of heart. You feel distant, you feel dry.

Lord, set me afire afresh. Fan into flame the faith that’s in me, Lord. Help me to seek deeper understanding and to know you better so that fruit That fruitfulness is the mark of my life.

In Jesus’ name, amen.