Alright, so this is "The Kingdom Parables" class, lesson number eight. The final lesson in our series and
today, we're going to talk about the parables of the seed and then another parable about the mustard seed
and then a third one about the parable of the workers. And these are in Mark chapter 4 and
Matthew chapter 20. And we'll be turning to those at the right time.
So we've said as part of our study that the goal here, for this particular class,
was to understand the nature, the character of
God's Kingdom and to do so from the teachings about the kingdom
that are found in the kingdom parables.
It's a good place to go for concentrated information about this about this topic.
You and I and the church, we are the kingdom.
Every time Jesus says "the kingdom is like"
He's also saying "the church is like".
Or when he is saying,
"In the kingdom" we could just as well say "in the church". In the kingdom
this is the way things happen. Well, in the church this is the way things
happen and take place.
Studying these is really studying ourselves, actually, our life in the kingdom.
How we should act in the kingdom?
How does the kingdom operate? How different is life and the way we relate to each other in the
church or in the kingdom as
opposed to how things operate in the world? And so the study of the kingdom parables gives us some insight
into these into these differences.
So what we've learned, so far, some of the things that we've learned.
First of all the kingdom is small, but powerful.
Although small, when I say small, small in comparison to others in the world, other organizations in the world.
The church has greater
proportional influence even if it is unseen. It's easy for us to become discouraged at times seeing how small,
not just small numerically, but it seems we don't have any power. We have no say, we can't quote
"make things happen" like perhaps
politicians or business people even
entertainers. They can get their message out to 10 million people in a moment.
We have to work very hard to get our message out and yet despite all of this the kingdom is still very
powerful in proportion to its size.
We've also found out that
it's a great privilege to be in the kingdom, a
valuable privilege to be a member of the church, when we consider all the blessings we have, when we consider
the protection that we receive, the protection we're promised. God almighty,
imagine, God almighty has said to us, each one of us personally, I will never forsake you.
I will never leave you. I mean that's quite a privilege to be part of a people that have received that personal
guarantee from God himself.
We've also learned that
people in the church grow at different rates depending
on how they respond to God's word.
And the bottom line actually is the greater the obedience the greater the growth.
Anybody who says to me, I want to grow spiritually, and I don't feel I'm growing spiritually,
quickly enough, or as much as I want to.
And usually if you scratch the surface or if you dig down a little deeper into that person's life you find out that well,
maybe you're not obeying
God's word as much as you need to, ought to.
Because these things are connected. Spiritual growth is connected to obedience.
One other thing we learn or another thing we learn about mercy.
God's mercy is what allows us entry into the kingdom or the church and
our faithfulness towards God and
mercy toward other people is what keeps us in the church, in the kingdom.
Like the graphic says here, "Mercy is First and Mercy is Last."
We get in because of mercy. We stay because of mercy.
And then one other... the big points, the big ideas,
and that is that God will purify his church at the coming of Jesus by removing all the hypocrites and the
disobedience and the unfaithful.
I've talked a lot about this particular point because a lot of the
arguments and divisions and fistfights that take place inside the church, a lot of times,
it's just because one person decides that they will take it upon themselves
to decide who belongs and who doesn't belong and that's not our job. It's not our job.
So in our final lesson today, we're going to add a few more insights to make our study,
well this study anyway, is complete. I'm loathe to say this study completes everything.
There's certainly always more to learn, but as far as I'm concerned, some of the things I've tried to share with you
we're going to finish up today. So let's go to Mark chapter 4 and we're going to read the parable
of the seed, very simple idea.
Jesus says, "And He was saying,
"The kingdom of God is like a man who casts seed upon the soil;
and he goes to bed at night and he gets up by day and the seed sprouts and grows--
how, he himself does not know.
The soil produces crops by itself; first the blade, then the head, then the mature grain in the head.
But when the crop permits, he immediately puts in the sickle, because harvest has come."
So this parable is one of the simplest and most ordinary of the stories that are given.
He simply recounts the
cycle of planting and harvest period.
Once the seed is planted
the Farmer waits. When he said he sleeps, meaning, he waits
for the crop to come, for the harvest to come. The seed in the soil, they do their work
independently of the farmers concern or lack of concern. Him worrying about the crop or not worrying about the crop does not
affect the crop in any way shape or form.
In the end the harvest will announce itself and it will be time for the farmer to do his work of collecting the crop.
And so what Jesus is describing here, a natural cycle with each thing
happening in order and in its own time. Alright?
Now as a parable about the kingdom, okay, here's the point.
What is he saying about the kingdom? Well first of all, once the seed of the kingdom is sown the cycle of
reproduction and harvest has been set into motion.
So despite storms and trouble and time delay, the work will eventually come to fruition.
The job of the farmer, the workers, in this case us, the workers, we're the workers,
the job of the workers is not to figure out how the seed grows or worry about its rate of growth or
try to force it to grow but simply to plant the seed, wait for the harvest.
The other thing about the parable
that we can draw is that there will be a harvest. He says it's a natural
cycle. You plant the seed, you wait, the harvest will come. It always comes.
Now in a larger sense, God's plan of sending Jesus to plant the kingdom and then return for it,
this plan will come to fruition.
Nothing will stop it.
Since it has been set into motion
nothing will stop it. And we know if we look through history
there's been plenty of attempts to stop it, but nothing can stop it. In a personal sense,
it promises all the workers that they're planting will be rewarded with a harvest of some kind.
They need not worry or become impatient .
When Jesus, in another, the parable of the soils, it says the harvest comes 30 fold, 60 fold,
100 fold, sometimes people see that as a kind of a rebuke. Oh, you only got 30?
Oh, you got 60. It's not a rebuke
He's explaining how harvests work.
There's never a hundred percent,
every seed produces the maximum amount.
It doesn't work like that, birds come and harm some and
a plant gets too much moisture on this side or some animal eats
half. That's why he says, in a normal harvest, there's 30, 60, 100.
In the same way in the kingdom,
you can work as hard as you want and pray as much as you want the harvest will always be 30, 60, 100.
Sometimes your work that you do with all the best intentions in the world
doesn't bring as much fruit as you had hoped and then other times
you handed somebody a pamphlet or a track or something you don't see him for five years
and that person comes back to you, they went to preaching school
and they become missionaries and they have baptized a thousand people and you're thinking,
all I did was give him a pamphlet. You never know.
You never know.
I told you this story about myself, very briefly, that really underscores this.
The ad in the paper that drew me to come and visit the church
was only put in that newspaper one time and I'm the only person
that responded to it in any way. I was the only fruit of that ad.
And the fellow who put the ad in is no longer a member of the church.
And the church that was there is no longer there.
And yet in 38 years of preaching,
I preach to millions of people.
I'm not saying that as a boast. I boast in the Lord. I'm just saying this tiny little ad that meant
nearly nothing. You know what I'm saying? In some way
God managed to multiply that thing and hopefully do something really wonderful with it. So you never know.
You never know. So the Growth of the kingdom
is imperceptible it seems,
even to those who are within the kingdom.
But the harvest, meaning, the good works, the changed lives, the new Christians,
the gospel being preached, and so on and so forth, it's always visible in the end.
So this parable adds the idea that the church is fruitful if it follows the natural
cycle of planting the seed, the word, and then harvesting the word or
harvesting the result of the planting, good works, saved souls. You go in and do
a review of a church, a diagnostic if you wish, of a church
to see where are the strong points
and where are the weak points to try to help them to grow, I've had to do that at times and the thing
I look at first is, are you planting the seed?
What do you mean?
Are you planting the seed? Is there any way at all that you are managing to proclaim the gospel?
And when I say proclaim the gospel I actually mean proclaim the death burial in Jesus.
Are you actually doing something to get that message outside of the four walls of the church?
Sometimes, well of course we are. And then I say okay, how? Pause.
Well, we have a gospel meeting every April. Okay good. There you go. There's the gospel meeting in April.
What about May? What about June? What are you doing on an ongoing
basis to sow seed? Because you can't expect to have a harvest
unless you sow some seed.
It's kind of simple isn't it? You'd be surprised how many churches
have lost the notion. They're wondering, why aren't we getting new members? Why aren't people coming here?
Well, you're not sowing any seed, whether it be in your own community or in the
larger country or internationally. You gotta plant seed if you're going to get a harvest.
All right.
Next parable. So the next parable is the "Parable of the Mustard Seed". That is also in Mark chapter 4, 30 to 32.
Jesus continues, "And He said, 'How shall we picture the kingdom of God or by what parable shall we present it?
It is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the soil, though
it is smaller than all the seeds that are upon the soil, yet when it is sown, it grows up and becomes
larger than all the garden plants and forms large branches; so that the birds of the air
can nest under its shade." It's interesting that this is the only
parable about the kingdom that is mentioned by three of the four gospels Matthew,
Mark, Luke, there are no kingdom parables in the book of John.
Now the story in this parable is of the mustard seed. Truly a very small speck of a seed
compared to other type of seeds.
If you get ten different seeds in your hand usually the mustard seeds will be the tiniest one of all.
However, the plant or the bush could grow into a
shrub of over 10 feet in just a few weeks in the proper conditions. The idea is it's a fast...
like Bamboo. Have you ever gotten the Bamboo plant?
Man, that just grows in weeks.
You can see the difference. Same idea with the mustard seed, in the mustard shrub and the mustard tree.
People of that place that we're listening to Jesus at the time, they knew of the amazing growth rate of this
particular plant that Jesus described. So the point of the story was that such a small and insignificant
seed could, in short order, provide shelter for birds of the air,
something that took regular trees
years even decades to accomplish. His point is, you plant a tree, an ordinary tree it might take a
decade before it had enough branches strong enough where birds could put nests and so on and so forth.
He's saying the mustard seed plant, in a couple of months, it's able to do the very same thing.
So something that took regular trees a long, long time to do, the mustard tree could do in a short order.
Again, the parallel is with the kingdom. And for those who see this in the context of what happened during and
after Jesus's ministry here on earth, there's a vivid description of the speed and the growth of the church
at the beginning. Think about it for a second.
The parable speaks of a rate of growth and provision for birds in short order meaning,
a mustard tree will grow up real quick, and it'll provide protection fairly quickly for the birds of the air.
Well, what's the comparison to the church? Well, the church began when
3,000 people were converted in a single day on pentecost and
then within a few years there were nearly
50,000 converts in the area.
Within 30 years it had spread throughout the Roman Empire and then after four centuries,
which is historically not a very long time, it was the official religion of the Roman world.
That's pretty fast growth.
Judaism, for example, or any other religion had never grown so big or so fast as Christianity.
The Birds finding shelter
can be the the lost who find shelter and safety in the kingdom or it can refer to the fact that the
gentiles found rest and protection within
Christianity, something they never found in Judaism.
The church began with an
executed leader and twelve apostles
preaching his message. And it overcame every religious and political and military and
philosophical group in its way. So this parable
reinforces an idea about the church, already made in other kingdom parables, that the church is small and
weak in comparison to other things
but it has great proportional influence and growth and
strength. And so if you look at this parable in comparison to other growth type enterprises,
Jesus is saying the kingdom grows very quickly and grows strong very quickly.
And it may not have been true to the people who were listening to him say the parable on that day.
But the people who lived for another 10 or 20 years
could remember this parable and then understand what he was talking about as they saw the rapid growth of
of the church.
Now the third parable. "The Parable of the Workers". You're going to have to go to Matthew chapter
20 in order to read this one.
Matthew chapter 20 beginning in verse 1. Jesus said,
"For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard.
When he had agreed with the laborers for a denarius for the day, he sent them into his vineyard.
And he went out about the third hour and saw others standing
idle in the marketplace; and to those he said, 'You also go into the vineyard, and whatever is right
I will give you.' And so they went.
Again he went out about the sixth and
the ninth hour, and did the same thing.
And about the eleventh hour he went out and found others standing around; and he said to them,
'Why have you been standing here idle all day long? They said to him, 'Because no one hired us.'
He said to them, 'You go into the vineyard too.'
"When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his foreman, 'Call the laborers and pay them their wages,
beginning with the last group to the first.'
When those hired about the eleventh hour came, each one received a denarius. When those hired first came,
they thought that they would receive more; but each of them also received a denarius. When they received it,
they grumbled at the landowner, saying,
'These last men have worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden
and the scorching heat of the day.' But he answered and said to one of them, 'Friend,
I am doing you know wrong; did you not agree with me for a denarius?
Take what is yours and go, but I wish to give to this last man
the same as to you. Is it not lawful for me to do what I wish with
what is my own? Or is your I envious because I am generous? So the last shall be first and the first last."
So this story is an unusual one.
A man hires people at different times of the day to work in his field.
He pays all of them exactly the same wage even though they work different hours.
The first crew grumbled,
feeling that it wasn't fair that they received the same amount for working all day as those received who only
worked one hour. The landowner replies that he has been fair.
He paid the first crew what they agreed upon for the work that they had contracted for.
And we need to understand that a denarius was actually above average as a wage for that time.
He paid the other men the same amount not because of their work, but because he wanted to be generous.
He finishes by warning his audience that not all things will be as they seem.
Sometimes the first end up being last and those who are last are given a better position.
Unlike the parables of the harvest or the mustard seed, this parable has no easy or natural
application or parallel in the everyday world. And let's face it
I don't know about you, but when I read this parable,
I kind of sympathize with the guys who worked all day long.
It just doesn't seem fair. Even though they agreed for a denarius, things kind of change.
I'm thinking well, if it were me maybe I would have topped it up a little bit.
Give them a tip because they worked all day. It just doesn't strike us as fair I guess.
Now, for the kingdom the parable teaches us several things that
explain, I think, this sense of unfairness, that we may think
that is happening here. A couple of things that it teaches us about the kingdom.
It's the easiest thing to forget that the parables here are teaching about the kingdom. If we just remember that
everything does fall into context.
OK, some of the things we learn. Number one, being in the kingdom is a matter of grace.
Being in the kingdom is a matter of grace.
The workers, let's face it, the workers had no jobs, any of them. They were unemployed and
the money was more than any of them, even the first group, would
normally receive. So right off the bat the money they were going to get for their work was going to be more
than they could have made anywhere else.
So where's the parallel? Well, being in the church is also a matter of God's grace.
He finds us through his gospel. We enter in through the blood of Christ.
We remain because of God's grace. We receive more than we ever deserve in material and physical blessings.
So God initiates our entry into the church how? Well, He calls us.
We don't find him he finds us and
He enables us to remain and blesses us
every moment of our lives, forever.
Why? All because of His grace. All because he wants to do something loving for us.
Okay, so there's the first parallel.
Being in the kingdom is a matter of grace.
Just like these workers, the fact that they got a job was a matter of grace.
Another parallel, the order of the kingdom is different than the order of the world.
The first crews attitude was indicative of a worldly... not an immoral,
they were not immoral, they were not even being ungrateful actually.
Their attitude was the attitude of the world. What is the attitude of the world? Well, I was first.
I worked the longest. I worked the hardest.
I deserve the best. I deserve to get more than everybody else. That's the attitude in the world.
Now, this may be logical and it may be just in many ways,
but this is not the way that things work in the kingdom. That's why we're uncomfortable with it.
In the kingdom or in the church,
the prize goes to the one who believes not the one who deserves.
In the kingdom or the church the reward is for the one who trusts God,
not the one who trusts in his work.
I worked the hardest. I worked the longest. No.
That's not what counts in the kingdom.
In the Kingdom, the currency in the kingdom is faith,
trust. Things work based on faith and trust not on who deserves this and who deserves that.
And in the kingdom or the church the one who pays his workers
does so based on his goodness not the goodness or the value of the work of his workers.
I have received what I have received from God not because of what I have done in the kingdom.
I receive what I received from God because He's good, because He's generous to me and to you, of course.
This is why some who think that they are first in God's eyes,
like the Jews in the first century or some self-righteous people of today,
they may end up being last in God's eyes and those who seem to be last,
sinners, those who struggle. How about those who come to God late in life?
A modern example here, some young woman
comes to know Christ when she's 10 years old, and she's baptized at a very young age and never looks back,
never looks back,
becomes a wonderful young woman, a young Christian woman, ultimately
marries and has a family and raises a marvelous
Christian family, maintaining a home,
offering hospitality to the saints and so on, just a wonderful life.
And then you have somebody else who
is a worldly person, never gave a thought to Christ and all of a sudden at
69 years old with a bad liver and a bad heart they finally get it and
cry out to God for help and for forgiveness
and they receive that forgiveness and they become Christians and three and a half months later having gone
to church maybe six times they die.
And where is that young woman, where she going to go, who has lived
till the ripe old age of 90 and all her good works,
where's she going? She's going to heaven.
And where's this old boy here who just made it by the skin of his teeth, where is he going?
He's going to heaven too.
Is it fair, worldly-wise? Well, no
But is it of God's grace?
Yeah
It reminds me of the old joke. At medical school in
the graduating class of 500 students,
the person who came in five hundredths of that class, what do they call him?
Doctor
What do they call the guy who came in first?
Doctor. Yeah
In the church, the rules of the world are turned upside down.
The first are last, the last are first. The weak are strong, the strong are weak.
The leaders are servants
and the servants are leaders.
So as we finish the series we add two last
ideas to the five major ones that we have drawn from the parables about the kingdom.
One idea, the church will continue to grow until its final harvest when Jesus comes.
Nothing will stop it because God is the one who began it and he will be there for the end.
Don't worry about the destruction or the failure of the church.
Sometimes congregations fail for whatever reason, a population shift. I've seen it happen all the time.
Churches, they're planted in 1929 doing great for 50 years and then all of a sudden, whoops,
that area of town becomes a different language.
Maybe people of another country begin to congregate in that area and that white
Anglo-Saxon English-speaking
church is no longer relevant to the Hispanic,
multicultural neighborhood in which it it lives.
And so the elderly folks that are still hanging on eventually sell the building that church is done.
But what happens?
God raises up a young Hispanic man who loves God,
hears the call to ministry, who's saying to himself,
there are 26,000 people that live in this community, and there's no church here.
And there's no one here to preach the gospel to them in their own language.
And he rents a storefront and he starts
bible school and classes. That church doesn't look anything like the stone, nicely appointed
carpeted church that stood on the corner of sixth and main for 50 years. Doesn't look anything like it.
But it's a church. I mean if it's based on God's word, obviously.
So church, not the church, but congregations they come and go for a bunch of reasons.
When I have this discussion with
people about what's going to happen if the church... you heard about such and such a congregation is gone now,
doesn't exist anymore. I tell people don't worry about the church. It's God's church.
He's the head of the body not us.
What would we do if Mr.. Trump... we talked about Islamic threats.
What would we do is terrorists somehow took over the United States?
I don't know about you, but I just keep doing my job.
It would be a lot harder.
We couldn't put up a billboard on 23rd saying come to the Choctaw Church.
But I believe that I would see the same faces, but we'd be over at Barbara's inside the garage
with the lights down. Why? Because we know what our job is. We just continue preaching the gospel.
We continue sharing the faith. We continue taking the Lord's supper on the Lord's day.
Same job, same objectives.
The church belongs to God, if we've learned anything about the kingdom parables, He's the one that provides
the growth. So the church continues until Jesus comes.
Second point.
The church operates differently than the world.
In its best mode the world operates on a principle of justice and fairness.
That's in its best mode.
Like Mr. Trump said to the other night, we want to be a land
where we respect the rule of law. Well, as a Christian I can amen that all night long.
I wasn't expecting him to make a witness for Christ or preach the gospel. That's not what he's there for.
At best he or anyone else that takes his place, is therefore what?
To uphold the rule of law so that we don't live in chaos.
And as Paul says, so that we can live in peace in
order to do what? Well, in order to do what we do and that is to preach the gospel and to spread the kingdom.
In the kingdom however, everything operates on a principle of grace.
God's grace for us and our grace towards one another.
So Jesus provides the conclusion and the encouragement for these kingdom parables in
Matthew 13 verse 51 and 52 when he says, "Have you understood all these things?
They said to Him, 'Yes.' And Jesus said to them, 'Therefore every
scribe who has become a disciple of the kingdom of heaven is like a head of a household,
who brings out of his treasure things new and old."
So if you understand these things... What are these things? Well, the kingdom parables.
If you understand these things you are now like scribes and
scribes, of course, were those who taught, they were the teachers and also those who copied the scriptures.
You've become like the scribes able to teach not only the old things, what was out of the old testament,
you're not able only to teach what the old testament said and meant
but now you can add this new knowledge,
concerning the fulfillment of the old testament in the person of Jesus and His kingdom.
That's what he's talking about there.
If someone knows these things,
he knows the full gospel,
he knows the revelation of God in Christ and now, according to Jesus,
is qualified to teach the bible accurately.
He knows the old, well, the prophecies and what it was about, like Brother North teaches on Wednesday night,
the story of the gospel as it begins in Genesis and works its way through the old testament
to the new testament.
And I've said many times, the Jewish nation and the history and all of that,
all of that was simply to establish a historical stage
upon which Christ could enter.
So if you understand that and you can explain all of that to someone and then, as the Lord says here,
you can then explain, from the kingdom parables, what the kingdom is about and
how to enter into the kingdom and how to stay in the kingdom and what will
eventually happen when Jesus returns, well then you are qualified
to teach out of the old and
to teach out of the new and to also teach about what will come and what will happen at the end.
You're fully qualified now as a scribe, as a teacher,
to teach anyone about the full message of
the gospel. Okay, so I hope that each person here will find encouragement and
security and the knowledge of these things about the kingdom, about the church, and hopefully you'll feel
more confident and secure in the knowledge and more appreciative of
what we have and where we are and who we are, we are members of the kingdom.
We're part of the kingdom and
these are the instructions to us as to how we should live and hope and the kind of confidence
we should have in the kingdom of God. Okay. That's our final class. Thank you for your attention