Kingdom Come: How Jesus Revealed It In Parables

The Receptive Kingdom

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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 going to be doing over the next five weeks, starting today, is we’re going to 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 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 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 write a definition the best we could, a definition of what the kingdom of heaven is. And so, 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 inaugurated view of the kingdom of heaven. Now here’s the tension.

In chapter 6, he taught them to 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. 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 not the kingdom that they were looking for. And he comes teaching these parables, these stories, for what reason? Well, a parable. What is a parable? It’s an earthly story with a spiritual or heavenly meaning. It uses common everyday stories about farmers, fields, houses 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 two 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 going to be looking at the parable of the sower, the parable also called the parable of the four soils, but we’re going to 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 three ways we can respond receptively to the word of the kingdom. So let’s dig in. Matthew 13:1-23 (ESV) 1 “That same day Jesus went out of the house and sat beside the sea. 2 And great crowds gathered about him, so that he got into a boat and sat down. And the whole crowd stood on the beach. 3 And he told them many things in parables, saying: “A sower went out to sow. 4 And as he sowed, some seeds fell along the path, and the birds came and devoured them.

5 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, 6 but when the sun rose they were scorched. And since they had no root, they withered away. 7 Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them. 8 Other seeds fell on good soil and produced grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. 9 He who has ears, let him hear.” 10 Then the disciples came and said to him, “Why do you speak to them in parables?”

11 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. 12 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. 13 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. 14 Indeed, in their case the prophecy of Isaiah is fulfilled that says: “‘“You will indeed hear but never understand,

and you will indeed see but never perceive.” 15 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.’ 16 But blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear. 17 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. 18 “Hear then the parable of the sower:

19 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. 20 As for what was sown on rocky ground, this is the one who hears the word and immediately receives it with joy, 21 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.

[b] 22 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. 23 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 sixty, and in another thirty.” This is God’s word. We’re looking for three ways that we can respond receptively to the word of the kingdom.

1. By listening attentively to the Word.

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

Has 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 with, verse 1, “That same day Jesus went out of the house and sat beside the sea.” 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, brothers 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 want to see you.’

And he motions like this and he says to his disciples, ‘these are my brothers and sisters. This is my family. Those who receive the word are my family.’ But in this same section in chapter 12, we have this number of people that have rejected Jesus. They’ve been hearing his claims and 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 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, because that’s where their fishing business was. It is like an amphitheater there on the beach. He takes a seat like the rabbis were in the habit of doing. 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. Verse 2 “And great crowds gathered about him, so that he got into a boat and sat down. And the whole crowd stood on the beach.” He told them many things in parables.

Well, this whole chapter for five Sundays, we’re going to be unpacking these parables. 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. Only a few would believe. The word, “parable,” is of interest. It occurs four times in our text here today.

In verses 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, “parabolē.” “Para” meaning alongside of, and “bolē” 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.” I drew a ball on there because you throw a ball. And I needed things like that to remember my Greek vocab. And so “parabolē.” It literally means “a placing (throwing) of one thing by the side of another,” and so it’s a metaphor. It’s a story that runs alongside a deeper story. That’s what it is.

C.H. Dodd says this, “A metaphor or 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; when he gives you the parable, it makes you think, ‘now what does that mean?’ And for those that have ears to hear, they’ll lean way into 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 that there’s a sower. He’s throwing seeds and he’s got four types of soil and only one of them bears fruit. The other three 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 fourth is good soil. So we see the four soils. We find out later, as he explains it, that the soil represents the human heart’s receptivity to spiritual things, that the seed represents the word of the kingdom, which is the gospel, and that the sower is Jesus in this case.

He’s the one teaching. It’s the Lord. He’s the sower. And so we see this, 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. You are too far removed from sowing.

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 if 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; it’s $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 gives us all the word, but only one fourth, one out of four receives it.

It’s important because seed is expensive. There’s a doomsday vault that’s on an island in Norway, a Norwegian island called the “Svalbard Seed Vault.” 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 Svalbard 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. Paul says in Romans 10:17 (ESV) “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. 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 in James 1:22 (ESV) “But be doers of the word, and 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 want to listen because 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 want to listen, but it sneaks up on you and gets you. The thirty or forty 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 husband back from the battlefield 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 was leaving the field of battle. And he said, ‘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 two 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. She 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.

Nathan says, ‘this man deserves to die, and he is going to pay fourfold.’ Who is that man? Nathan says, ‘you are the man because you took another man’s wife. 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 another 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 start by praying like young Samuel did in 1 Samuel 3:10 (NIV) “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. You come to it asking, ‘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:

2. 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. It says in verse 10, “Then the disciples came and said to him, “Why do you speak to them in parables?”

This story, the parable of the sower, is in the synoptic Gospels. It’s in Matthew, Mark and Luke. In Luke chapter 8:9, the disciples come to him and they actually “asked him what this parable meant.” Can you explain it to us? So here are the disciples.

They have ears to hear, but we also see that tension again between God’s sovereignty, that 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 ask, ‘well, Gary, could you alleviate that tension?’ Jesus doesn’t, so I’m not going to alleviate it. I’m going to 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, in verse 11, 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 God’s sovereignty that he gave you understanding. Do I completely understand it?

No, I don’t completely understand that, but God is God and I am not. But he’s given you the understanding. And then here’s the second reason: He says, continuing in verse 11, “but to them it has not been given.”

He didn’t give them understanding. As I said before, these parables have a cutting-edge effect. 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 say, ‘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? 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, in verse 12, “ 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.”

You’ll grow in wisdom, you’ll grow in more and more understanding, but from the one who has not, he has what? No 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:

Verse 13, “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.” There’s that word, “understand.”

Verse 14, Indeed, in their case the prophecy of Isaiah is fulfilled that says: “You will indeed hear but never understand, and you will indeed see but never perceive.” 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 will indeed hear but never understand, and you will indeed see but never perceive.”

15 “For this people’s heart has grown dull…” But do you know why? It’s because your heart is dull. That word, “dull,” could have been translated as calloused or hard.

It’s kind of sad because Isaiah, in chapter 6, was in a vision, he was caught up into the throne room, and he sees this and he says, “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 says, “now your lips are clean.” And then he hears a voice say, “Whom shall I send and who will go for us?” And Isaiah 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 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 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, I like how this starts off – “Tune your ears.”

Proverbs 2:2-6 (NLT) “Tune your ears to wisdom, and 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.” Two students go to a lecture, and after the lecture is over, one student 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?

Is it 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, in verse 10, “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 the disciples wade out into the water and say, ‘psst, hey, I don’t think they’re getting the parable thing. Why are you doing that?’ He had three reasons; He tells them.

I don’t know; 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.

3. By bearing the fruit of the Word.

We must hear, we 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.” 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 as 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 where a lot of people that sit in the church building on Sunday are. And then there’s that fourth 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 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 when you get there, you ask, ‘hey, what did y’all get out of this? Whenever the pastor was talking about this, I was thinking he was…’ You dig down and you get yourself a commentary. You start getting some Bible books and you get yourself a library together. You start getting serious about being a student of the Word of God. You might be thinking, yeah, I was not a very good student in school. I’m not talking about school.

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 you want to bear fruit.

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 are here you go, now go have fun.

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. He teaches you how to understand a parable. He 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 15:8 (ESV): “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 who 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. Philippians, chapter 2 tells us that you’ll put others ahead of yourself. And, 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 and understands it. He indeed bears fruit and yields, in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty.” 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 I bought too many. I bought seven varieties of tomato plants from Lowe’s. Actually, it was six; my neighbor across the street raised them from seed and he gave me one. So I had seven and Robin said, “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 was the worst season.

And then the worms hit, the moths hit. I won’t go into all the details — I got a little PTSD over my tomatoes.

We barely got any tomatoes this year. Early on, they were popping. Wow, look at it. And then they started dying.

All seven of them died. Now I went back and bought two more 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 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 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. 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 he wasn’t finished.

Jesus said, John 12:23-24 (ESV) And Jesus answered them, “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 third 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 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— a 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 fruitfulness is the mark of my life.

In Jesus’ name, Amen.

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Good morning, church. Glad to be here today. I’m thankful to see all of your wonderful faces. I’m thankful to be starting a new sermon series today on really specifically the parables of Jesus from Matthew chapter 13 in a series we’re calling Kingdom Come. But before I start, I want to just describe something.

If you got a bulletin this morning, you saw something extra in there today that you might be going, what is that? What’s that about? I just want to give you an opportunity over the next couple weeks to be in prayer and to be considering who you may invite to church. We’re going to try to have kind of a big day here in a few weeks that we’re calling Back to Church Sunday. We’ve kind of noticed a trend, at least in our church’s history, that people start kind of getting back into the swing of things this time of year.

It’s school, it’s various things, so people have a tendency to kind of start coming back to church. And so at the end of September, when everything’s kind of set in motion, we want to give you an opportunity to invite your friends. So here’s— this exercise is over the next couple of weeks that you would be praying for someone in your life and maybe even put their name on this little tab and bring it back next week and say, hey, here’s the person I’m praying for that I’m asking God to give me a chance to invite. Maybe it’s a coworker, maybe it’s a family member, a dear friend. Someone that you’ve really had on your heart maybe for a long time.

But over the next few weeks, we’re gonna be praying together as a church that we would be able to be invitational. And our goal is really simple, like let’s all try to bring one. And so even me, I’m sitting here going, all right, who am I gonna get after with this thing? It’s a little more intimidating when the pastor invites you, but I’m trying, all right? So I’m doing it right there with you that we might bring one more and we’re praying together over this.

And so consider this week as you pray, Write a name there. If you’re willing, bring it back next week, throw it in the bucket so that our staff, our prayer team can be praying over these people, that God would give you an opportunity. And we’re going to make you a promise on that Sunday. It might sound a little silly, but it’s, I think, kind of important. Every Sunday here at church, we are very, very careful to include the gospel in every single message, that Christ died on the cross and resurrected, It’s going to find its way in every single sermon, as well it should, but that particular sermon we’re going to make sure is very clear for your lost friends and loved ones.

The worship, everything will really point to that. Also, Josh mentioned this earlier, but if you’re new around here and you want to know more about our church, the eSkater’s coming up really soon. Stop by the little table he’s got set up out there on your way out and just, hey, ask those questions there. We’d love to see you out that day. All right, so let’s dig in.

We’re going to be in these parables in this series called Kingdom Come. If you got your we’re going to be in Matthew chapter 13. And what we’re going to see in these 5 sermons, these 5 weeks, is that Jesus has got a very clear plan, a very clear idea that he’s trying to teach, and it’s this idea of the kingdom of heaven has come, is coming, and has and will one day be coming. And so this kingdom of heaven is really a theme of the book of Matthew, and it really hinges around a famous prayer that we all know that you might have grew— you might have grown up hearing it at sporting events even. I know I— some of my sports teams, we would say the Lord’s Prayer, which is kind of wild, but I grew up with that.

And so you know this verse out of Matthew chapter 6. It says, Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. And then it goes on to say, Thy kingdom come. Kingdom of heaven come is a theme throughout Matthew, and certainly so as we dig into the parables of Matthew chapter 13. Know that when we pray, kingdom come, thy kingdom come, we’re praying a couple of things that must be true.

We are no longer praying, my kingdom come. We are changing our verbiage in such a way that I want what God wants in my life. I am changing who is king. I heard this saying famously growing up. I don’t know if my dad came up with it, but I heard it a lot as a kid, that anywhere where Christ is King, there is His Kingdom.

Anywhere where Christ is King, there His Kingdom reigns. And so, if He’s King of your life, then His Kingdom is in your life. If He’s King of your marriage, if He’s King in your workplace, then those are places where the Kingdom of God is present. It’s not just necessarily a place, although in eternity it will be so, but right now it’s more than a place. I want to define this for you for just a moment.

This will be on the screen. It says, the Kingdom of Heaven is the saving reign of God that entered history through Jesus the King, is even now breaking into the present age wherever His rule is received, and will one day be fully and visibly established when Christ returns. So we’re in this, like, in-between before He has come back and made it completely visible, but already His rule is being received. So here’s the tension. Here’s the tension point for the disciples and really for us is we are in this in-between time.

We see Jesus teaching them in Matthew 6 and now in Matthew 13 where we’re going to be today, He’s praying, Thy kingdom come. What does it mean that Christ’s kingdom is coming, that He will be King? Our expectations are pretty important here. I think the disciples were pretty confused about what He meant by this. Certainly, Peter and some of the others thought that He’s bringing in a physical worldly kingdom.

He’s going to be king. He’s going to have a throne. There might be armies. The nation of Rome will be pushed out of Israel. This was some of the expectations of the kingdom that they thought He was bringing.

In spite of all of that, the kingdom that He brings in is something far better, and it came in a far stranger way. He brings in a kingdom by His death. He brings in a kingdom, as He’ll describe today, in a very small seed called the gospel. Rather than this miraculous victory with armies, He brings a miraculous victory with crucifixion and resurrection. So this is a beautiful picture here, and the way in which He begins to tell this truth to His people, that His kingdom of— the kingdom of heaven is coming, He does it in the form of, of a parable.

And we don’t get a lot of modern parables, let’s be honest. It’s probably a term you’ve heard, but let me just define it for those who haven’t really spent a lot of time on this. This idea of parables— the word literally means to throw alongside. It’s the idea that you would tell a story in parallel with a truth, and sometimes it’s helpful, other times it’s confusing. Jesus, I think, as we’ll see today, intends to do both, and there are reasons for that because a parable is meant to draw stories— draw us to everyday stories that will reveal the kingdom of heaven to us unless, of course, our hearts are hardened towards Him, and then they actually conceal the truth, and I’m going to get into that today.

So it raises a really personal question for each and every one of us: How receptive am I to the kingdom of God? We’re going to dig into the 4 soils. You’ve probably heard this before. A lot of you churchgoers in the room, you’ve probably heard sermons on this, but I want to dig into the idea here of this question that Christ asked, which is, do you have ears to hear? He who has ears, let him hear.

And that’s the big question, and it raises a personal question for us. When I sit in church, when I hear the Word, maybe I sing the songs, I might know the prayers, when I read my Word, Do I have a heart that’s somewhat resistant to what’s being taught or what I’m reading, or do I have an openness, a receptivity, if you will, to Christ’s kingdom and His Word? The problem, friends, I want you to hear this, the problem has never been, it’s never going to be, that God is silent. That’s not the problem. The problem is that we’re often not listening.

So as we dig in today, I pray as you see these 4 soils, that the same sower is sowing the seed, it’s the same seed, but the results are dramatically different. And the reason for that is this big question: do you have ears to hear? Now I want to say this is kind of a silly thing because I haven’t noticed a single person in here today who’s missing any ears. It didn’t happen in first service either. I was kind of— I don’t know, I was looking around the room trying to make sure.

I mean, somebody could have had an injury, but y’all showed up with ears. Looks to me so far like 2 of them. All of you showed up with 2. And so when Jesus says, do you have ears to hear? What in the world does he mean?

I think you and I get that he must be talking about something more than physical. He’s talking about, do you have a desire to know? Are you simply in the seat because somebody drug you in here? That might be the case. I pray that God would push right through that today in his word.

But it might also be the case that you’re thinking about a lot of other stuff right now. Maybe you intended to hear— I pray today that you would have ears to hear— that maybe you brought in some drama. Don’t feel bad. Don’t feel ashamed or guilty of that. There might be some hardship in life.

Maybe it’s something in your marriage, something in your parenting, something with your parents, something in your finances, some kind of addiction. It could be a list of things. That you brought in here that might cause you to not hear. I pray now— deep breath together— God, let me, let me just hear what you’re trying to teach and push aside all these extra thoughts that I might truly hear you. As we dig into Matthew 13, I pray that’ll be the case.

Jesus here teaches the parable of the sower and reveals this really important reality that some are receptive to the gospel and others aren’t, and it has everything to do with the heart. I pray today that you might be Receptive to the Word of God. Let’s dig in. We’re reading a few verses out of chapter 13, this first parable and its explanation. Hear this, church.

Here we go. Chapter 13, verse 1. It says, that same day Jesus went out of the house and he sat beside the sea, and great crowds were gathered about him so that he got into a boat and he sat down, and the whole crowd stood on the beach. So he’s pushed away from shore so he can talk to everybody because it’s too many people to just sit on the shore with, so He’s pulled away, and then He says this, verse 3, He told them many things in parables, saying, a sower went out to sow, and as he sowed, some seeds fell on the path, and the birds came and devoured them. Other seeds fell on rocky soil, 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. Here’s us, church.

We’re like the disciples here, hopefully. Then the disciples, and they came and said to him, why do you speak to them? Why do you speak to us 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 have— they can barely hear. With 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 guess what, church?

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. So here’s the explanation. Hear 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 was 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 and persecution arises on account of the word, immediately 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, they 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. Amen? I pray this encourages and challenges you where you need it today because this is for all of us. None of us get to step aside here All of us are hearing the Word and choosing whether to be attentive to it, to understand it, to bear fruit by it.

So let’s dig in. Matthew 13. We can respond receptively to the Word of the Kingdom first by listening attentively to the Word. By listening attentively to the Word. There’s a difference between, like, it going in the ear and you actually hearing it.

I know this very well because I have 4 children, and some of you in the room with children, you know this too. You can literally have eyeballs from your child and be saying words to them, but you can see as you look into those eyes, no one’s home. You can see the lights are off inside. I don’t know how it happens, but you can be saying words and they’re literally just passing right through because they’re completely on shutdown. Now, to be fair, we as adults do this sometimes.

We do, we do. We’ll be talking to someone and perhaps someone is long-winded and they start saying things that begin to disinterest us, so then we’re making eye contact, but there’s nobody home. There’s nobody home. You’re thinking about what’s for dinner. You’re thinking about how long you got to drive home after this conversation.

I mean, you’re thinking about something else and you don’t mean ill by it, but you just lost interest. Jesus here says, hey, you might have ears, but do you hear? You might have come out to this crowd who’s come out, who’s getting really excited about this Jesus who they’re hearing about, who’s— we’ve heard he’s healing people and he’s making miraculous things happen and he’s feeding big numbers of people and we’re hearing all this incredible stuff and his teachings are really surprising and they’re challenging people and so they all come out to the beach crowding around Him, so Jesus pushes out onto the boat so He can speak to them all, kind of using the ocean almost as a— the sea as an amphitheater, if you will. And so the people now hear, okay, this is gonna be good, it’s gonna be good. Now He’s talking about seeds and a crazy farmer, and the people without ears to hear are going to walk away going, what in the world was that?

What was that? We heard he’s doing cool stuff. We came out here, apparently he’s having an off day. That’s what they start thinking because he’s going to get up and tell us about a farmer who’s a really foolish farmer. Now I’m going to get into that before you start judging me.

It’s a foolishness to throw seeds on all these places. Look, for— throughout all of human history, seed has come at a pretty good cost. Go, go try to buy grass seed right now. You’ll find out that junk’s expensive. You go trying to have a big garden seed and the maintenance of that is expensive.

And yet this crazy farmer’s out just throwing it everywhere. Never ever in my life have I ever thought, I’m gonna fill up my little seed dispenser and I’m just gonna drive it over the carport. I’m just gonna drive it out on the road and see what happens. Never once have I thought to do that. But this farmer is interesting.

He’s throwing it on all the soil types. You would never expect to grow anything on the path. Now, I’ll make an aside just for a minute for some of you in the room, because I think we’re called to be like the sower. And Jesus Christ, the sower, the one here that’s telling the story, is kind of the sower of the story. And he is so loving and so generous that he doesn’t look at you, even though he knows your heart, and knows that you might resist him, he still throws seed there.

And I think he’s telling us this in part because we are called to be sowers too, and we should never see a person and go, that’s probably hard soil, I’m not going to waste my seed there. That’s not, that’s not the way we’ve been called. In fact, here’s what I’ve observed, church. I want you to hear this. Sometimes those people you swore up and down were hard soil were good soil, and the ones that you thought were good were hard.

We don’t get this right very much because we can’t see the heart. We just see the activity. We assume, man, this guy is so far from God, there’s no way he could hear it. But he’s so far from God that he’s so desperate to hear it. So that’s a little aside for you.

So Jesus the farmer, God the farmer, he’s throwing seed everywhere, and he’s teaching them now in parables that they might hear it. Why is he doing this? He’s doing it because he’s trying to see who Who in the room has a heart of understanding? Who in the room, who in this crowd actually is going to stick around and say, hey Jesus, that was kind of strange. What you talking about?

Why do you teach us like this? Because Jesus is going to tell them why. Those who asked questions got answers. Imagine that. So when you come to the Word of God, when you come into the fellowship of God’s people and something rubs you the wrong way and you walk away rather than ask questions, know that you’re like the crowd.

And I know that hurts to hear, but it’s a fact. The difference between disciples and crowd are those who stick around and ask for more. Because Jesus isn’t trying to be hidden. He’s trying to test the heart. And so here he’s got, oh, here are these parables, and here it is.

He says there’s a path, there’s rocky soil, there’s thorns, and there’s good soil. And he’s going to explain that in a little while. And he tells it all in this word picture called a parable. One commentator— I really like the way he phrases it— he says, a parable is a metaphor or a simile drawn from nature or common life that arrests the attention of the hearer by its vividness or even its strangeness and leaves the mind with sufficient doubt about its precise application. So Jesus is purposely telling a strange or vivid story and leaving out some details that you might come and do what?

Say, God, what was that? Jesus, what was that? But those who are lacking an ear to hear just walk off saying, that’s not what we signed up for. We wanted to see him do cool stuff. We thought he was healing people out here.

We thought he would tell us something we wanted to hear. Instead, he tells us a story that we don’t understand. Do you have ears to hear? Do you have attention to hear. All throughout Scripture, hearing is this fundamental kind of posture of faith.

Listen to what Paul writes to the Romans. He says, faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ. James goes on to say that the one who hears, the one who receives this by hearing, goes beyond to doing. James 1:22, be doers of the word, not hearers only, and so deceive yourselves. This is powerful.

Just know this, church, a parable in a sense is kind of a word trap. So I’m sorry today you’ve come into a series on parables where it’s a bit of a trap. Here’s why. Because as you get drawn in and start asking questions, you start going, well, which soil am I? And friend, I got great news.

That’s the right question. That is the right question. Because if you’re asking that question, you’re already seeking understanding. You’re already not walking away, and I have such exciting news for you: you’re on the right path. You’re heading in the right direction because parables are often kind of a trap to arrest our attention.

One of my favorite parables actually happens in the Old Testament. David does this really wicked thing. I bet most of you have probably heard this story. David, at a time where the Bible says kings were supposed to be at war, David has stayed home. So he’s in the wrong place at the wrong time, and he steps off his balcony and he sees a beautiful woman bathing.

What she was up to is unknown to me. Did she know? Maybe she knew. That’s neither here nor there to me. He commits a sin in this moment.

He sees her, he wants her, he takes her, he has her husband sent into the front lines of battle, and he is killed, and he does all of this that he might have another man’s wife. And he thinks to some degree maybe that he’s gotten away with this. Now, David, at least from the Psalms and from his previous life, has a pretty solid understanding of this all-knowing and all-powerful God. So he had to in his heart have thought, I don’t know if I’m going to get away with this. But at this point, he’s thought he’s gotten away, and so Nathan the prophet comes really to accuse him, but he does it in a very cool way.

I got to admit, I think this would be maybe the coolest way to approach somebody as a pastor. Like, normally I would come and just say, hey, you’re doing dumb stuff. Stop doing dumb stuff. And I can kind of get away with that sometimes, but I guess if I was approaching a king, I might think I need to kind of come at this with a little bit more, you know, fear maybe. So Nathan doesn’t come and say, hey David, you had a man killed and you took his wife.

Even though Nathan knows this. Instead, he comes and tells him a story. He tells him a story of this rich man who has all this stuff, lambs and all this cattle, he has all of this, and yet for some reason, he is jealous of this poor man and this poor man’s lamb, and it’s all this poor man has. And so he mistreats the poor man and takes the lamb for himself, and it’s a really nice and vivid story, go check it out in 2 Samuel 12. And so David gets furious because he obviously, he thinks, is this real?

Is this really happening? Let’s absolutely wreck the rich man. And Nathan said, you’re the rich man. And David is destroyed by it. David actually comes to repentance by this.

A parable moves him to where he goes, you’re the rich man. Uriah had nothing and you took his lamb. You took his wife and then you took his life. So David is repentant and is moved by it. This is the way in which parables are meant to work.

They arrest your attention so that you go, I want to be the good soil. Friend, so do I. I want to be the good soil. How do you then come as you approach God’s Word? As you sit in a room like this and try to hear from God’s Word, Is your mind everywhere else? Are you able to attentively hear it?

When you approach His Word on your day-to-day basis, is it a matter of checking a box off? Because some of you are so Type A like me that you’re like, all right, I can’t miss my Bible study today, otherwise I’m going to let me down. Well, that’s a good idea, but a wrong intention, a bad motive. I’m going to make sure to be at church because I got to be at church. I’m thankful you’re here.

I’m glad you’re here. And your neighbors sitting around you, we’re glad to be in fellowship with you, but I want you to know there’s a better way. That I want to be in the fellowship of the Word. I want to hear from it because I desperately need it. Because this has become more than a checkbox.

It has become literally, as Jesus says, it has become the bread of life to me. And that if I don’t spend time here, I feel distant. That when I don’t spend time here, I start to approach people and life and work, I start to approach it in my effort, and I got to tell y’all, that’s not great. It’s not. The way I feel about people, the way I interact with them, the way that I treat work is not of God.

Maybe you’re not like this, but I’d very much like to not work.

So approaching work as godly is not what I would naturally do. I very much— I, I don’t know what will happen to me in my late years, but I can tell you this, I’m unlikely to get bored. I don’t bore easy. I will think of the most dumb stuff to do when I don’t have to work. There’s going to be a ton of us my age probably in a resting home, uh, like in our 80s, and we’re all going to be in there going, no, I got him.

No, I got him. You know, it’s gonna be the strangest resting homes one day because my kids are gonna get sick of that. They’re gonna put me off. I know they are. But this is, this is not the way in which God would approach my life.

He has a purpose and it has real meaning, has real value. So I can’t do this as a checkbox. I’m coming saying, Lord, speak. I’m desperate for you. I pray constantly, church.

I pray these words over and over. Lord, I want to hear your voice. I want to see your face. Please show me in your word and in our time together. Do you hear that today?

Do you respond to that attentively? That’s the first. The second way is this: by seeking to understand the Word. I think this is the most important piece of the whole sermon, so I pray you can hear this, that the word that’s really the catalyst of the whole conversation is the word understand. Because when Jesus says, hey, he who has ears, let him hear, He’s really saying, he who hears this and seeks to understand this.

That is the one that will go on to bear fruit because they’re not just trying to sit in knowledge, they’re trying to do something with it. I love that the disciples, they come and ask the question that I would ask, friend. I’m just telling you right now, I’d be one of those guys walking up to Jesus and saying, huh? What are you talking about? Please help me.

Why do you talk to us like this? Hey Jesus, for some time now, we literally said, Jesus, teach us how to pray, and you just did it. That was great. Can you do more of that instead of dropping these word bombs on us that we don’t understand? Why are you doing it this way?

And Jesus gives them an answer, and this answer’s— it’s tough. Let’s call it what it is. He gives them really 3 reasons. Go to verses 11 through 17 there as you’re looking back over your text. He says First reason is this: because understanding is a gift.

He says, you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven. The secret word secrets here is the Greek word mysterion. It’s where we get the word mystery. To you has been given a desire to understand. Not all will have this desire.

They’ve hardened their hearts towards it. Number 2, He tells us the reason is because it both reveals and it conceals. I think this is what He means by saying— and this is a hard saying— He says, to those who have been given, more will be given, to an abundance, and to those who have little, even what they have will be taken. That’s a harsh saying from Jesus, and I believe what He’s arguing for there is that those of you who hear this and seek understanding, even more will be given. To the point of eternity, really, you will be given not only the enlightenment of this good news, which is Christ has come and saved and we are no longer lost, you will get that, which will lead to eternal privilege in the Kingdom of God.

That’s all true. And to those who have little, which is no understanding, a hard heart, even what they have, which is this finite life, even that will be taken. Now, is this true? Yes, it’s true. Is it hard?

Yes, it’s hard. He is saying that by teaching them in parables, those who are open, it will reveal them, and those who aren’t, it will conceal.

He says some other hard stuff in another passage. He says, hey, don’t cast your pearls before swine.

And what he means by that is, I’m not going to give the secrets of the kingdom of heaven to people who would rather just stomp on it. I’m not wasting my time there. I’m going to instead do it in parables so that those who are hungry will come. And that’s what happens in this story. Those who are hungry and thirsty for something true, they come and say, Jesus, what in the world?

What is this? Third reason is this: because it’s fulfilling a prophecy. Now Isaiah, when he makes this prophecy in Isaiah chapter 6, I have no doubt he thought he was making it for his people, and he certainly was. This is not only a a present prophecy for Isaiah, but also a future one. At the time Isaiah’s writing this, the people of God were very much the way He’s described them.

Jesus is saying, this is how the people have continued to be. Notice the characteristics: their heart has grown dull, they can’t hear, and their eyes are closed. If these things weren’t true, I would heal them. Now, I want you to hear this. These are— I think the English, at least the ESV, which I’m using, I think it’s trying to be kind of kind here.

I’m not sure why. Because these words are way harsher than what it’s actually gotten on the page. It says that their hearts have grown dull. Now, I got to admit, being dull is not something I’m interested in being. That’s a pretty harsh thing.

Like, I would hate for one of you to come to me and say, hey, you know, I would hang out with you, but you’re pretty dull. That would really hurt my feelings because I would like to think I’m a pretty fun guy to be around. You might be thinking, well, he’s a pastor, he probably is dull, he don’t do nothing fun. Then you’d be wrong. I have a great time.

It might just not be your kind of great time, but I have a great time. So don’t call me dull, that would hurt my feelings. What would be worse, I think, is if you called me and said something like, man, I would love to try to explain this to you, but you’re dull. That would be a different kind of dull because now you’re calling me dumb, and both of those are bad, and I don’t like either one of them. But this word is actually even harder in a way.

It’s not just that they’re dull. This Greek and Hebrew idea has to do with the idea that over time your heart has become a callus. You’re not just dull, you’ve become completely thick. You’ve been rendered— a wall has been put around your heart. This is why the Bible talks over and over again about, God, give us a heart of flesh and not a heart of stone.

So here Isaiah is prophesying that’s true of these people. They come out, oh, Jesus is going to teach. But their hearts are rocks, and they can’t hear what he has to say. It goes on to say they can barely hear. This is the idea of not just that, hey, they’re deaf.

That’s not what it’s saying. They can barely hear because they’re walking around like this.

I don’t want to hear anything. That’s the—that’s why they can barely hear. That—that’s why—that’s why that when Jesus starts talking, they just.

That happens sometimes here around church. This is a shameless aside, but sometimes people come up later and they’re like, hey, I didn’t hear about A, B, or C. I just, I wish that somebody would have told me. And here’s what I know, that it was probably in the bulletin, it was on the screen, and we put it in the church e-zine. It was everywhere. And for some reason you didn’t hear it.

And it’s partially because you were going around going, la la la, rather than hear it. But Jonathan, you didn’t personally tell me. My bad. It’s getting harder to personally tell everybody everything. It’s getting hard to do.

Praise God, our church is growing. We’re gonna need some other people to tell people stuff. Y’all do me a favor, if you find out stuff, tell other people stuff. That’s good. But this is how they’re approaching not only Isaiah the prophet, but Jesus.

I would hear you, but nah, I got earplugs in. And not only that, I would be able to see you, but notice the words here. It doesn’t say they’re blind. It said their eyes are closed. It’s a big difference.

There’s nothing wrong with these people. They’re plugging their ears and they’ve closed their eyes. Don’t say you’re blind when you’re bumping into things in your house because you’ve got your eyes closed. And don’t say you’re blind to the fact that Jesus is speaking because you’ve said, but if I listen to Him, if I open up my eyes to this, then it might mean I need to change. And the answer is yes, you probably do.

Open up your eyes and see the kingdom of heaven is here. And the way you’ve been living is not the way in which you’ve been called. And if you could just unplug your ears and open up your eyes, then Jesus says, I would heal them. Verse 16, he says, but blessed are your eyes. Why?

Church, here’s the really good news. Why are the disciples’ eyes blessed? Because they’re open. Not because their eyes work better. Not because the disciples are smarter.

Go back and read the Gospels. They say and do some pretty dull stuff. It’s not because of that. It’s because their ears are unplugged and their eyes are open. Friend, you want to know which soil you are?

Are you the soil that has open ears and eyes open and says, God, speak to me. I want to understand your word. I want to walk in your presence. It’s not that I know everything. It’s that I want to know.

That’s huge. The Lord, in fact, promises again and again to give understanding to those who would seek Him. The difference between the disciples and the crowd is, do you seek or do you not? In Proverbs chapter 2, the Lord says, 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— here at church— the Lord grants wisdom.

From His mouth come knowledge and understanding. He’s not hiding from you. He’s not trying to hide wisdom or any of this from you. He’s wondering, will you seek Him? Jeremiah says plainly, you will seek Me and you will find Me when you seek Me with your whole heart.

So no more halfway seeking. No more, hey Lord, when it’s convenient. Do you really want to understand? Then be running towards him. Now I want y’all to know something about this idea that, that really challenged me this week.

It might come as a surprise to you, but I was not a particularly good student growing up. I’m a bit of a goofball, if you haven’t figured that out yet, and I really like to make people laugh, and that was really all I was interested in in school. I was really not interested in, uh, you know, being the top of my class. Some of my— my son seems to be kind of interested in that, although over time that seems to be changing. Uh, he’s becoming a bit too much like me in these final years.

I’m worried about him. Y’all be praying for Nate. Um, he’s loving all of this right now. He’s in the room. But I was not a particularly good student, and here’s why.

Because what makes a good student is, is wanting to actually understand the information. It’s not just being able to make a good grade on the test, it’s actually learning. And I didn’t really want to have a relationship with any of my teachers, okay? I know there’s some teachers in the room. I got to admit something to you.

I wanted to have the minimum amount of conversation with you growing up. I wanted to get in and out of your classroom as expediently as I could. And so guess what? Those, those kids that would come up after class after you just taught and they would say, hey, I didn’t quite understand that, would you walk me through that? That.

Those are the kids that went on to often make A’s, and I was the one who did not. And I would walk out of the classroom with my book bag— I would basically be running out of your classroom looking back going, what a bunch of nerds, you know, what a bunch of dorks. I have real friends. I’m gonna go hang out with them now. Like, that’s how I felt about this.

And in the end, I learned less, I did poorer, but that’s how I felt about it. I was not a particularly good student. Here’s what I know is true for us as Christians, that some of us are just walking out of the room having heard a truth or read a truth or come into contact with some convicting truth in our fellowship with other believers, and rather than say, hey, give me more, no, we pack it up and we walk away and say, hey, you know what, y’all have fun, you bunch of nerds. That’s how we deal with Christianity when we have complete access to the Holy of Holies where by the blood of Jesus we can walk right in and say, God, explain it. Help me understand it.

Show me where you’re moving. And instead of doing that, we walk out of the room going, I don’t need this.

And that F on that test feels a lot different. It ain’t like the stuff we did when we were in high school. It’s way more dramatic. And so we walk out of the room rather than being right there where we could be. We’ve been invited in, and instead of that, we choose to walk away.

There’s this beautiful interplay happening here between God’s grace and human response. The question is, God, I’m seeking you. I want to know more. Grant me this understanding. Do I have that kind of heart?

And then thirdly, thirdly, by bearing the fruit of the word. Do you listen attentively? Do you seek understanding? And then do you bear fruit. This is where it ends.

Notice there’s a progression to this. It’s not immediately— God has no expectation that the moment that you come into the gospel, that the moment you receive it and believe it, that immediately you start producing. No, it’s more like, hey, I heard it, I’m understanding it, and then it is beginning to produce fruit in me, that the more that I walk with Christ, the more I understand the purposes, the more that fruit begins to be the obvious expression of my faith. He gives these 4 pictures in the end and He clarifies them. I want you to know something.

There’s— depending on how you decide what a parable is or not— there’s somewhere between 30 and 40 parables in the Gospels. Most of them are in Matthew. And I can tell you this, of those many, many parables, there’s only about 2 or 3 that He explicitly explains. Most of them He leaves in the mystery. This one is maybe the most explicit explanation He gives for any of His parables, and I would tell you I think there’s a reason for that, because first of all, you shouldn’t be thinking, hey, this is for someone else.

He gives us this explanation that you might think, okay, where am I? Which soil am I? Am I receptive? And then if I know that in Christ Jesus I am the good soil, it’s also meant to be an encouragement to me That when I go into the field sowing, I don’t have to be discouraged because the soil is not up to me. The casting of seed is up to me.

Whether I do that or not is up to me, but the soil isn’t. And so I shouldn’t be disheartened when sometimes I run into the path, when sometimes I run into the thorns. Oh, I’ve interacted with so many people in my life that they’re rocky or they’re thorns. I don’t run into a ton of path people, at least not that’s obvious to me, because normally people are generally open, somewhat receptive, but there’s all these other reasons that happen later. Like they may even seem like they really get this thing and then hardship shows up.

And as soon as things get hard, all of a sudden they bounce. And that’s how I know, okay, that was a rocky soil. I’m going to keep praying for that person. If God gives me the opportunity, I’m going to keep speaking into their life. But what I’m not going to do is be discouraged that they walked away from the faith.

Because they never really had it, the Bible says. The rocky soil is the person that the roots never dug deep, and the moment tribulation arises, it says they fell away. The word there in verse 21, fall away, is the Greek word skandalizo. It’s where we get the word scandal. That the— in fact, the, the troubles of life have become a scandal, a trip-up for them.

And you’ve interacted with so many like that. Maybe you yourself have been there, that you thought this Christianity thing was going to fix everything, and there’s a couple of things that still happened. Some people come with that expectation, oh, life is going to be easy now.

No, no, in some ways life will be trickier. I might even argue more difficult, because now you stick out like a sore thumb. Now you start being generous and kind and gentle, and your thoughts and your ways are no longer your own. You start to realize, I was bought with a price, so I’ve got to live as Christ lives. And that makes things challenging.

No, no, it doesn’t make your life easier, but it does make your life better. It makes it purposeful and meaningful in a way that you would never have imagined. So, okay, so when tribulation arises, I’m not to fall away because that shows there was no depth to my faith. The thorny soil is extremely common. In fact, I love that he defines it this way.

He says there are some who heard it, received it, but as soon as the cares of the world show up, as soon as the deceitfulness of riches show up, this is the kind of person that Christianity is just the next thing. Oh, it was convenient right now, it helped me in this situation, but now, now I got this. You know, I have people sometimes they come praying for finances and then the finances get better and then they go over here and say, I’m good now, I’ve got it now, and then they fall right back into the same financial pit and they go, well, I guess I better come back over here. What if— maybe this is going to sound crazy— what if you don’t have to fall in the pit? What if you don’t have to?

What if you could stay over here in the fellowship of believers, in the Word, hearing truth, hearing from others who love you and care for you that might share hard things sometimes sometimes, because guess what? You need to hear them. And so instead of falling into the pit, you say, you know what? I’m going to stay the course. I got well.

I moved from, all right, these people helped me with my marriage. They helped me with my kids. They helped me with my finances. But now I got this. This is the very language of the enemy.

And I’m guilty of it too, church. That, oh, I got well. These people helped me get well. Now I’m going to go about my business. Some of you are physicians and stuff like that in the room.

This is the nature of humankind. Oh, you fixed me, you helped me get over this disease, you helped me get over this injury. Now guess what I’m going to do? I’m going to go start doing the same dumb stuff that got me here. Excellent.

And that’s how we live life. Oh, I got this now, things are well. This is the thorny soil that this chokes out and makes unfruitful the people who claim to have heard it. And then lastly, you’ve got the good soil, and it’s described very carefully as those that produce a hundredfold, 60, 30. The only way that we can know whether something is good fruit is by what it produces.

This is meant to be an encouragement to you too, those of you in the room who are trying to scatter seed, that it’s not in our job description at all to be making assessments about who’s what. What soils they are, but we can have some confidence when we see fruit that we can say, all right, everything’s not perfect, and nor should it be, but there’s fruit. I didn’t do a garden this year, y’all. I’ve been doing a garden the past couple years. I’ll be honest with you, I just didn’t want to this year, and I know why.

I’ll tell you why. My wife’s in the room. She’s not heard me put it quite so frankly. I don’t actually like planting things. I don’t like planting it, tending it.

I don’t like dealing in the mud and buying all that, that black cow manuring mess. I don’t like any of that. I don’t know. You know what I like? Eating.

So I garden so that I can come out there every once in a while and just pull it right off the vine because that’s kind of cool. I like that part, but I don’t really like the planting so much. I don’t know if she does. She obviously didn’t have enough oomph to get that done this year because normally she’s like, let’s garden. And then, okay, I love you.

I don’t love planting, but I love you. So here we go.

But I’ve noticed something about the way I feel about my garden that you would feel too. I feel like I’m particularly good with cherry tomatoes. Do you know why? Because my cherry tomatoes grow a lot of cherry tomatoes. I don’t feel particularly good about cucumbers.

Do you know why? Because I can’t figure out why they don’t grow cucumbers. They grow vines, and every once in a while they grow so many vines that they will hide a baseball bat of a cucumber under there somewhere that was stealing life from the whole vine, and I forgot about it. And then I pulled that thing off and tried that. I got news for y’all, if y’all have ever tried a cucumber that’s that big around, that thing is gross.

It is not good. But I grew it and I felt like I needed to eat it. But the way I feel about cucumbers is all I managed to grow was a really crummy cucumber and, and not many other than that. But I feel great about cherry tomatoes. You know why?

Because they grew fruit. Friends, let’s be very careful when we’re the sowers that Christ has called us to be. He says, go and make disciples of all nations. He’s called us to sow as he sowed, that we don’t get discouraged when some people are like cucumbers, and we don’t get overly encouraged by the cherry tomatoes, because the way in which we feel about that is really outcomes. And the Lord’s in charge of those outcomes.

So let’s keep courageous. Let’s keep our hopes up knowing that the Father’s getting glorified, that he’s doing the work. I love what Jesus writes in John 15. He says, by this my Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit and prove to be my disciples. So friends, if I’m observing you, if we’re in close connection and maybe we’re in a discipleship kind of relationship, and I’m seeing in your life the fruit begin to diminish, or maybe there’s no fruit, just know that I’m in more prayer for you, and I’m going to be in more deep conversation with you, knowing that I want to see that the Lord is working in your life, but I’m not going to let that discourage me, as well as I’m not going to try to be discouraged in myself, and sometimes I’m not as fruitful.

Those are the moments where I come seeking understanding again. So what fruit am I producing? This is for somebody in the room today. I want you to hear this. It’s not about how much Bible knowledge you have.

It’s what is changing in me because of it. How is this actually impacting my living? Some of you know very much and you do very little. That’s essentially this idea here of being an unfruitful, bad soil. I want to ask you, is this This word that’s come to you by the person of Jesus Christ, has it taken root in your heart to cause a greater love, a greater holiness, a willingness to look inside and say, I’m not perfect and there’s some areas I need to grow?

The heart that says, I’m good, that’s not of God. The heart that says, there’s some areas where I can really grow, I can have greater obedience and greater love and greater generosity and greater mercy, That is the word taking root in you. So, friend, when you read this week, not as a checkbox, when you hear these words today, not as a checkbox, but Lord, how, how can this drive deeper my relationship with you and the fruit that I would bear of greater love, of greater mercy, of greater grace for others? As we close now, I want to close with this thought. What I want every week is to make careful that you don’t hear the gospel means I have to try harder.

That would be an offense to the gospel, my friend. That’s not what it means. When Jesus prays, Thy kingdom come, He sets the tone that what we’re asking for is, Lord, Your will be done. Christ, You be King. Be King of my life.

Be king of my mouth, the words that come out of it. Be king of my mind, because there’s a darkness in there that I need you to eradicate. Be king. Be king of my marriage. Be king of my parenting.

Be king. Thy kingdom come. And it’s no longer about, I’ve got to pull myself up and I’ve got to be right. No, Lord, in every single way of my life, would you Would you reign and let me serve you? I just want to come under complete lordship.

Then maybe I can be the soil that can produce fruit because thy kingdom come. I want you to hear this, church. Jesus, he paints this wonderful picture of a sower casting seed, but in the end, he calls himself the seed. John chapter 12, Jesus says, 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. Jesus said, I have come to die that you might be alive, that you might be free. And then He’s raised from death to tell us it’s not about trying harder, become good soil. It’s about Lord, you can have complete kingship over my life. Do you believe this today, church?

Thy kingdom come. Can you pray that prayer wholeheartedly today? Christ, you’re king over everything. Nothing is out of bounds anymore. You want to know what it looks like to be good soil?

For you to say, Christ, even that spot I didn’t want to talk about with you, You’re king there too. I know what you’re thinking. If I make him king there, he’s going to move some, some pieces around. He’s going to change some stuff. Great news.

Yes, he definitely is. Because the reason you need to pray there is because it’s a mess there. If I let him into that closet, all that closet needs tidying. Is Christ king? Thy kingdom come.

Let’s pray now together, church. I want to start with this prayer. King Jesus, King Jesus, you’re King of all things, not just all things in all creation, but all things in my life. I may at times challenge that, but in actuality, you are on the throne of all things, all places. King Jesus, would you give me ears to hear A heart to understand.

Would you let my life bear fruit, the fruit that glorifies you and no one else? Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Christ be King of my life. Friend, today if you’ve come, Christ is not King in some places. Would you make him king today? Maybe you’ve come in here with a broken marriage.

Can Christ be king of your marriage today? Would you allow him in? Oh, it might make you think and speak and act differently around your spouse. Yes, yes, yes, it will. I pray you would pray that.

Lord, be king of my marriage. Be king of me as a mom. Be king of me as a dad. I don’t want to just raise good kids. I want to, I want to raise gospel kids.

I want to raise kids that I get to spend eternity with. I don’t want them to just do good things in this life. I want them to do eternal things in this life. I want their lives to matter. Lord, would you do that?

Would you be king of my parenting? Would you be king over my finances? Lord, I have to admit to you, I want things and do things with my money that do not honor you.

I’m selfish. I’m struggling. Lord, would you be king over my finances? God, this addiction I’ve said over— I’ve come back and forth, Lord, whether or not I think I can overcome it. Lord, would you be king over my appetites, my desires?

I lay them at your feet. I want to want what you want. God, would you be king over my workplace? I’ve been fearful to talk about you in that place, Lord, but you’re to be king. Would you give me the right way to think about my coworkers, about my work itself?

Would you be king over my conversations?

Christ, would you be king in every area of our lives? We long for you, dear friend. If you came today and Christ is, is not king of anything in your life, And you’re humbled by that truth. You’re feeling right now, man, I really want this. I want to know what it’s like to live in real peace and joy and comfort knowing that Christ has saved and rescued me, and yet I’ve not made Him King in any way.

Friend, you don’t have to wait another minute. There’s a reason you’re here today. It’s not accidental. You might have thought someone dragged you in. That ain’t the case.

Christ set up an appointment for you this morning. I pray, I pray you would have ears To hear. And if you do, you feel the Spirit’s tugging, pulling you towards himself. Would you pray simply with me, a prayer of confession? Jesus, I believe today.

I believe you died on the cross for me, that you rose from the grave to conquer sin and death in my life. I believe it. And Jesus, you are Lord of my life. You are King. God, I don’t know how to make you King of everything, but would you show me?

Would you guide me? I’m asking first, be King of my whole life. Begin to guide me at work and in the conversations, the things I say, the way I feel, the way I think. Take kingship, reign in all of those places, and then guide me in everywhere else that I might know how to love others, Be kind to my wife and kids, my husband, my spouse. Lord, help me in every way that you might be king and rule on that throne.

Lord, we thank you for that. We thank you for that person that prayed that today. Welcome to God’s family. We love so much and are so thankful that you are a part of this, that we got to humbly be a part of seeing you come to faith, and we’re praying with you. Lord, be King of everything.

Help our soils to be good because we are seeking understanding and desiring to bear fruit. Lord, be King. Let your kingdom be very evident at Eastgate Church and evident in every city street that we live on, that it would get harder and harder for people to escape the truth that we, we serve a great King. We pray all these things in Jesus’ name. Amen.

A parable is more than an earthly story with a heavenly meaning. Jesus’ parables were simple stories drawn from everyday life that revealed the mysteries of the kingdom to receptive hearts.

Parables don’t merely illustrate truth. They expose our response to truth. They reveal our spiritual receptivity.

And that raises a very personal question for us: How receptive are we to the King and His kingdom? We can sit in church, hear the Word, sing the songs, know the prayers, and still have a heart that is resistant to what God is saying. The problem is not that God is silent. The problem is that sometimes we aren’t really listening.

Jesus will describe four people who all hear the same message. The same sower. The same seed. But dramatically different results. The difference is not the seed. The difference is the soil. And the condition of the soil represents the spiritual receptivity of the heart.

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