[AI Generated Transcript]
Mark chapter 4, beginning in verse 1.
Actually, I'm just going to read verse 1 to start with.
It says, And he began to teach beside the sea.
And a very large crowd gathered about him, so that he got into a boat and sat in it on the sea.
And the whole crowd was beside the sea on the land.
So as we open up Mark chapter 4, we see a really familiar setting.
Jesus is once again being crowded by the crowds such that he has no place to go.
You know, we read, twice we've read where the house is so crowded that they can't move.
The guys in chapter 2 couldn't bring the paralytic to Jesus so they had to unroof the roof to get the paralytic to him.
And then in chapter 3 we just read where there were so many people crowded into the house
where Jesus, they couldn't even move around, they couldn't eat and so that's how tightly it was packed and now they're outside and the crowd has pressed Jesus so tightly to the shore he decides the only way that we're going to be able to teach these people is for him to get out into a boat and remove himself from shore a little bit and which would essentially create like a natural amphitheater if the people are on the ground as it slopes towards the shore and he's out in the boat and he's got the ability to sit in the boat and to teach them
And what we're going to read here is the beginning of four parables.
We're going to read the first parable today.
There's four parables in Mark chapter 4, verses 1 through 34.
And this is a little bit of a unique section in Mark's gospel, because Mark only has, unlike the other gospels, Mark only has three times where he gives us any extended teaching of Jesus.
Here in chapter 4, Mark chapter 7, and in Mark chapter 13, we get sections of Jesus' teaching.
You know, this is just totally unlike the other Gospels where we think of Matthew has the Sermon on the Mount, three chapters, 5, 6, and 7, and several other teaching sections of similar length.
John has the Upper Room Discourse, three chapters, 14, 15, and 16, followed by the High Priestly Prayer, which really is still more teaching, in chapter 17.
So, usually the Gospel writers give us huge amounts of Jesus' teaching,
Mark shows us mostly Jesus's actions and will tell us that he's teaching and will maybe give a snippet here and there of what he says.
But here in Mark 4, we have one of the three times he slows down to tell us what Jesus had to say.
And which means, if it's so unusual for him to do this, he thinks it's really important for us to understand it.
He thinks it's really important for us to hear what Jesus is going to say in these four parables.
And this parable in particular, Jesus will say, is the key to understanding the other parables.
If you can understand this parable, the other parables will come with it.
Almost all of Jesus' parables have to do with the kingdom of God, either how to get into the kingdom, the nature of the kingdom, or how to live as a citizen of the kingdom.
And this parable is going to help us understand all of those things.
So what does Jesus say in this parable?
Verse two, he was teaching them many things in parables.
And in teaching them, he said to them, in his teaching, he said to them, listen, behold, a sower went out to sow.
And as he sowed, some seed fell along the path and the birds came and devoured it.
Other seed fell along rocky ground where it did not have much soil.
And immediately it sprang up since it had no depth of soil.
And when the sun rose, it was scorched, and since it had no root, it withered away.
Other seed fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked it, and it yielded no grain.
And other seeds fell into good soil and produced grain, growing up and increasing and yielding thirtyfold and sixtyfold and a hundredfold.
And he said, He who has ears to hear, let him hear.
What is Jesus doing with parables?
And we often think of parables as these really simple stories, these agricultural analogies that make it easy to remember and understand what Jesus had to say.
But what we're going to see here right away in verse 10 is that the disciples didn't think it was so easy to understand what Jesus was saying with parables.
And almost none of the parables have a point that is so blatantly obvious that the disciples or the hearers around grasped it right away.
They are easy stories to remember.
They're very memorable.
That's why Jesus used narrative in his teaching, is because we remember stories.
We're story creatures as humans.
We love books.
We love movies.
We love documentaries, depending on your personality.
We all love different kinds of stories.
And so Jesus used stories in his teaching, but that wasn't necessarily because they were immediately easy to understand.
but they were memorable and then they would stick with people, but it would stick with them like a burr under the saddle or like a pebble in your shoe.
It would keep coming back to you like, I wonder what that means.
I wonder what that means.
I wonder what that means.
And they would have to think about it.
Jesus did not always make his teaching super simple on the surface right there for everybody to grasp.
He's going to tell us why.
But I think that's important as we think about parables.
And this parable is a little bit unique.
Usually the parables do have like a single simple point.
Most of the time with parables, you shouldn't be trying to figure out what every detail means.
You should be trying to figure out the point.
But this parable, when Jesus interprets it for us, he gives us essentially an allegory and shows us how each part of the story means something.
It's almost a series of parables all tied together as one.
As we think about this parable and what Jesus says about it, we're going to kind of lump all of our thoughts with three S's and two of them go together.
The first two S's are the Sower and the seed.
The Sower and the seed.
And then this last S will be the soils.
So the Sower.
Who is the Sower?
Well, verse 14 tells us the Sower is the one who sows the word.
And what we're going to see
is that the Word that's being sown is the Word of God.
It's the Word particularly concerning Jesus' kingdom.
And so who is sowing the Word of the kingdom in this setting?
Who's teaching the parable?
Jesus is.
So Jesus is the sower.
God the Father is speaking through.
He's spreading the Word.
Jesus is the incarnate Word of God.
And so God is the one who is sowing the Word.
He's sowing it
Specifically, he's giving this message of the kingdom, this word, to his disciples.
Verse 11 says, To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside, everything is in parables.
What does that word secret mean?
That's an interesting thing to say, that to you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God.
That word secret is the Greek word mysterion, which we get our word
Mystery From.
It's only used in the Gospels right here in Mark, and then the two parallel passages to this story in Luke and Matthew.
That's the only time Jesus uses that phrase, secret.
It comes up four times in the book of Revelation, and Paul uses it 20-some times in his writings.
But what it means is not like a secret that's hidden and nobody can find out what it means.
What it means in the New Testament is, in Paul's writings, it's usually translated as mystery.
and the way that he uses it I think a good example is in Colossians chapter 1.
Colossians chapter 1, we'll begin in verse, that was a really long sentence, we'll start reading in verse 25, of which I became, he's talking about the church, of which I became a minister
to the stewardship from God that was given to me for you to make the Word of God fully known, the mystery hidden for ages and generations but now revealed to His saints.
To them God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.
Well, in this case, Paul's not talking about a mystery that's something they don't know.
The mystery is something that was hidden and now has been revealed.
Old Testament prophets had prophesied about the incoming of the Gentiles into the family of God.
The Old Testament prophets had prophesied about the Messiah who was to come.
But these things weren't fully understood.
They were still a mystery in the Old Testament in the sense that nobody could see how they were fulfilled.
But in the New Testament, with the coming of Christ, His salvation
The person of who he was as the Savior, and then his work in salvation, and part of that being the bringing of the Gentiles into the church.
That mystery was revealed in Christ.
And so, in the New Testament, when we read about a secret or a mystery, it's not something that nobody can understand.
It's something that God has made known through Christ.
and what was hidden is now revealed.
And he says, okay, who has been given this secret of the kingdom?
Who's had this mystery revealed to them?
Well, it's the, at first here, it's just the 12.
He's speaking to the 12 and they asked him about the parables.
He says, to you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God.
But for those outside, everything is in parables, which
which means that part of the function of the parables is to keep that mystery hidden from those who don't want to receive it.
Now, when Paul talks about that mystery in Colossians 1, he said that the mystery hidden for ages and generations was now revealed to the saints.
Well, how did they have it revealed to them?
How did they come to understand it?
They understood it by faith.
by trusting in Christ.
And so here, Jesus is saying this secret of the kingdom is only given to those who are willing to receive it.
Those who are outside, those who are not part of his immediate followers at this point, get it in parables so that, verse 12, they may indeed see but not perceive.
They may indeed hear but not understand, lest they should turn and be forgiven.
And that's a
Quotation from the book of Isaiah, Isaiah chapter 6.
This is one of the most famous passages in Isaiah.
Isaiah has been given this vision of the throne room of God, and he sees the seraphim circling the throne, crying out, Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty who was.
The whole earth is full of his glory.
and the Seraphim are circling, crying out, and Isaiah, who has this vision, and he sees the Lord, the train of His robe fills the temple with glory, and Isaiah falls down on his face and says, Woe is me, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I come from a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts.
He realizes, I am sinful, I am a wicked man in comparison to this glorious and holy Lord,
And I deserve to be punished.
I deserve God's wrath.
But then God sends a seraphim.
One of the seraphim, verse 6, flew to me having in his hand a burning coal that he had taken with tongs from the altar.
And he touched my mouth and said, Behold, this has touched your lips.
Your guilt is taken away.
Your sin is atoned for.
And so there's this picture of God cleansing Isaiah from his sins so that he could minister on God's behalf.
In verse 8, I heard the voice of the Lord saying, Whom shall I send and who will go for us?
And I said, Here I am, send me.
If you've ever been to like a missions conference or something, somebody probably preached this text and was like, Here, we need to be willing like Isaiah to go out and do what God wants us to do.
There's a mission that needs taking care of, and we need to be willing like Isaiah was to say, Here I am, send me.
But nobody in the world wants Isaiah's ministry.
Verse 9, and he said, Go and say to this people, Keep on hearing, but do not understand.
Keep on seeing, but do not perceive.
Make the heart of this people dull, and their ears heavy, and blind their eyes, lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their hearts, and turn and be healed.
Then I said, How long, O Lord?
I mean, you say, God, I'll go for you.
I'll be your messenger.
And the next thing God says is, here's the message.
You go and you talk to them, and they're not going to listen to you.
You make them dull of hearing, blind, hard-hearted.
That word, make this people dull, it literally means to make their hearts fat.
like so fat that the sword of the word won't even penetrate and get to their heart.
They're just going to be dull.
They can't hear it.
And Isaiah's like, man, this is not what I was signing up for.
How long does this have to go on, God?
And he says, Until cities lie waste without inhabitant, and houses without people, and the land is a desolate waste, and the Lord removes people far away, and the forsaken places are many in the midst of the land.
And though a tenth remain in it, it will be burned again like a terebinth or an oak whose stump remains when it is felled.
The holy seed is in its stump.
Isaiah ministered for a long time and he never saw the end of the make desolate, make hard hearts prophecies.
He prophesied for, I think it's some 50 years.
And in that time, this was the time when Assyria was very strong and they had taken the northern kingdom, Israel, captive.
And while Israel was spared from that in Isaiah's time, a hundred years later, the Babylonians would come in and would carry off Judah captive.
And their cities would lie waste.
They would be without inhabitant except the small remnant that was left.
And God punished his people for their hardness of heart towards him.
But how did their hearts get hard?
Their hearts got hard because they heard the word and they refused to believe.
They heard the word, and they would not turn and be healed.
They heard the message that Isaiah was bringing to them over and over again, and they did not hear.
And Jesus says he's speaking in parables for a reason like unto what Isaiah was speaking to the people of Israel.
So that as they heard, it was clear enough that if they had faith, if they wanted to understand, they would get it.
But they didn't want to understand.
And so they couldn't perceive it.
I know I quoted him last week, but I read a lot of C.S.
Lewis lately.
And in his book, The Abolition of Man, he has, the third chapter is on what he calls the Tao.
It's basically his idea of natural law.
In Christian tradition, we call it natural law.
What he's trying to demonstrate in that chapter is that this
actually lines up, he's arguing that there's a basic sense of right and wrong that's shared across all of humanity.
That whether you look at Christianity, Judaism, he's not making this like a religious truth claim, he's just saying that there's basic principles of right and wrong that pretty much the whole world agrees on, from Christianity and Judaism to Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, all of it.
There's just like, pretty much everybody's gonna say, don't murder, don't steal, etc, etc.
But then when you start looking at those systems that have truth claims, you are going to find places where they disagree with one another.
But the only way you can evaluate which one of them is correct is if you start with the premise that there is truth to be found.
And what he's arguing against in that book is
In our modern world, we don't want to believe that that truth exists.
We want to stand outside of all truth claims and say, well, I'm just going to, as a neutral third party observer, decide if I think any of these things might have some claim on me.
But if you're starting with the premise that there is no truth,
You can't evaluate truth claims.
You have to have the premise of truth exists and I need to know what it is, and then I can evaluate these competing truth claims to see which ones are most consistent and which line up with reality.
Anyway, what his point is, is essentially the same thing that Jesus is saying here.
That unless you're willing to say, I know truth exists and I will submit to it, you can't understand it.
It will go right past you.
And unless you're willing to say, if the people of Israel were willing to say, God has spoken and we are willing to hear what he has to say.
If they had hearts like that, they would have heard what Jesus had to say in his parables.
But their hearts were, no, we have what we want to do, what our tradition is, and we aren't going to listen to what God is revealing through Christ.
And so, because they had hearts that chose not to listen to the teaching, to not contemplate the parables, and not ask Jesus for help understanding what he was saying, the disciples went and asked Jesus for help.
Please help us understand.
And the people at large didn't.
They didn't.
And so they did not understand, they did not perceive, and they didn't turn and get forgiveness.
The only way to get forgiveness from Jesus is to be humble enough to ask him for help understanding what your need is.
So the Sower is God.
The seed that he sows is his word, but it's only received by those who are willing to receive it, which takes us to the four kinds of soil.
The four kinds of soil.
First of all, there is the soil that falls along the path.
Verse 13, Jesus says, Do you not understand this parable?
How then will you understand all the parables?
The sower sows the word, and it probably is helpful.
I'm sure some of you guys know this, but like in their day, they weren't planting with like complicated seed drills, right?
The sower, the farmer is, he's got a bag of seed on his side and he reaches in and he scatters it, which to us seems incredibly inefficient, which is why we don't do it that way anymore.
But it makes for a perfect analogy.
for what is going on here in Jesus's parable.
The sower is taking it and he scatters that seed out as he walks, kind of in a swinging motion.
He sows the word and these are the ones along the path where the word is sown, which in the parable Jesus said the birds came and they ate that seed up.
Well what is that like?
Satan.
Satan's like the birds and immediately comes
and takes away the Word that is sown in them.
So the first kind of soil is the hard path where the soil never gets to sink into any soil at all.
It just lays there and Satan comes and he snatches up the Word.
Now it's not probable that in a church you probably have a whole lot of people like this, but maybe.
Maybe you are fooling everybody.
The idea here is simply that you hear it, yep it's there, and then it's gone.
Like you don't think about it, you don't meditate on God's Word.
As it comes to you, or as you open it up, it just passes right off of you, and it's in one ear and out the other.
You never are changed by it because you've never even stopped to think about it.
Satan distracted you, he turned your mind to something else before you ever had time to contemplate it.
The second kind
of Soil is in verse 16 and these are the ones sown on the rocky ground.
Remember that seed, it sprang up but then the sunshine hit it and it withered away.
These are the ones sown on rocky ground, the ones who when they hear the word immediately receive it with joy and they have no root in themselves but endure for a little while
Then when tribulation or persecution arises on account of the word, immediately they fall away or immediately they stumble.
And this, you see it in all kinds of places.
I think of somebody I knew growing up who was living an awful life, like by any objective standard, her life was a train wreck and had
An experience where she described as coming to faith in Jesus and it seemed like her life did a 180.
She quit hanging out at the bar, she quit going home with random guys, like her life changed radically.
And it lasted for about six months and then she was right back.
to that exact same thing.
The pressures, there was no root, there was nothing deep and steadfast that would hold growth in place.
And Andy calls this the YFC curse.
You see this with like, and I saw it, it's not a YFC thing, it was just, that was her experience of watching it.
I watched it a lot in the youth groups I was around growing up, where you'd see like a high school kid get saved, at least supposedly get saved,
They would pray a prayer, trust in Christ, and you would see a big change in their life for a few months.
And inevitably, what would happen was somebody would decide, we need to put this kid in front of the church or in front of a group of people at some kind of banquet or meeting or whatever so they can share their testimony of how God changed their life.
And right after that would happen, you would have
Something happened in their life where there was more peer pressure or friends say, hey if you're gonna be like that I'm not gonna be around you and and Almost immediately after there was any kind of public profession of faith They would feel pressure and they would go back to their former way of life.
It was like usually never to see any positive fruit again
And that seems to be what Jesus is talking about here is there is like at first this immediate reception with joy and then nothing after that.
One of my favorite books is R.C.
Sproul's The Holiness of God and I think it's in there where he talks about his conversion experience in college and the same night that he got saved, he had a friend who had the same experience.
They both trusted Christ at the same time.
They both, they sat down, they wrote long letters to their families, to their girlfriends.
And that was a total pivot point in Sproul's life, where he turned towards Christ.
And the other guy, the next morning, was like, no.
He just repudiated all of it, like it was just an emotional experience.
It's very possible to have somebody who, the first time they hear it, or maybe it's not even the first time they hear it, but to have an experience with God.
or an experience of emotions that they associate with God and have it not last.
I think this is why it's really important for us to weigh and understand the Bible's understanding of what it means to be a Christian as something that perseveres, something that lasts.
A lot of churches will talk about
Conversion just being, just being that prayer you pray one time or just that emotional experience that you have at some point or other.
But the thing about emotional experiences is that they don't last, right?
They can come and they can go.
In the Bible, faith is not just like a warm fuzzy feeling inside.
It's a conscious trust in Jesus Christ to be the one who is sufficient to pay for my sins, whether I feel
Whether I feel that in the moment or not, I know it's true.
And that knowing will lead to an acting that walks towards them, not perfectly, but faithfully.
The third soil that we see, after those who have no root and then persecution arises and they fall away or there's any kind of tribulation, they say, nope, not worth it.
I'm going back to my old way of life.
Others are those who are sown among the thorns.
They are those who hear the word.
And it seems that they are actually growing, verse 19 says, but the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches and desires for other things enter in and choke the word and it proves unfruitful.
And this to me is probably for people who are consistently in church, like the biggest danger is the idea that you're growing, you're
You're coming up, there's roots and you're going up, but then other things just over time crowd in and shove out.
Have you ever watched someone's life where it seems like for years they're on the right trajectory?
They're going to church, they're going to Bible studies, they're trying to raise their families in a way that honors the Lord.
And then there just hits a point like,
15-20 years in, where it seems like it drops off to the deep end.
And you're like, what happened?
Where did that person go?
Like, why was this person who was faithful in church, or maybe was in some kind of church leadership, they're not even going to church now.
They're not walking with the Lord.
What happened in their life?
And it's the small things that eventually crowd out that first love
for Christ.
What Jesus calls, as he speaks to the Church of Ephesus in Revelation, your first love, the love of Christ who died for you and wanting to honor him with your life.
There's just all these little things that at the moment seem more important.
It might be, he says, the desire for riches.
It could be, man, work's just really busy, I don't have time for church right now.
Or, man, you know,
Having little kids is hectic.
Like I don't have time ever to sit down and pray or read my Bible.
Uh, I mean, to be honest, like thinking about this, this soil type was really convicting for me the last couple of days.
Cause I think about my last several weeks and boy, my, my standard of how often I pray and read my Bible is never to the point where I want it to be, but even to the point where it normally was lately has not been what it should be, not been what it
I would want it to be.
And it's those little decisions.
Nobody decides to just walk away from Christ in a day.
That's not something that happens.
It's little things here and there to where you come to a point where ultimately it just seems more plausible to live like that's not the central thing anymore.
You've made small decisions over time that lead you away from Christ.
Those weeds, like weeds in a garden,
Sometimes it seems like they come in overnight, but they don't grow up to the point where they're choking out your garden overnight.
It's when you leave them for weeks and weeks on end that then you walk out and you go, what happened here?
But if you're constantly trying to pull them as they come up day by day, at least a few times a week, you can stay on top of them and there's room for things to take root and to grow.
The fourth kind of soil, the soil that we want to be, the soil that I want to be,
Soil that we should desire others to be is the good soil.
There were those who were sown on good soil.
They're the ones who hear the word and accept it and bear fruit 30 fold and 60 fold and 100 fold.
And there's no
There's nothing here in what Jesus is saying that says, yeah, everything's going to look the same for everybody.
Because even in the good soil, the results are going to be different.
God gives us different gifts.
We have different backgrounds.
And so what the fruit looks like is going to be different.
But good soil hears the word of God, meditates on it.
And like, as I was thinking about this, I couldn't get Psalm 1 out of my head.
Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked nor stands in the way of sinners.
nor sits in the seat of scoffers, but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night.
He is like a tree, planted by streams of water, which bears its fruit in its season.
Like that's what we want to be, is the kind of soil that when that seed of the word is planted, it goes down deep and bears fruit for a long time.
Bears fruit that lasts.
So, in summary.
Another S. Summary.
I think there's two main lessons to walk away from this with.
Number one is that Christ is the sower, and he sows the Word all over the place.
And the way that he sows the Word, like Jesus isn't walking around right now sowing the Word, right?
How is he doing it?
He does it through us.
And so we are to sow the Word, and we sow the Word, apparently, all over the place.
Because we can't see into people's hearts, and we don't know who's a path, and who's rocky soil, and who's thorny soil, and who's good soil.
We have no idea.
And so we, as Christ's ministers, I mean, chapter one, when he calls Andrew and Peter, he tells them, I'm going to make you fishers of men.
And that's just another analogy to say, you're the ones that I'm sending my message out through.
And so as Christians,
Matthew 28 says that we are all to go make disciples, and the way that we do that is by spreading the word.
And just like that ancient farmer who's just taking the seed and going like this, that's our job.
We just scatter all over the place.
That's through inviting people to church, it's through having conversations where you share the gospel, it's through having conversations where you just, you're not sitting down necessarily and having like a four-part gospel conversation, you just insert God's word.
You're planting that seed of the word.
You know, somebody says, says something about, Oh, I, I think God wants me to be happy.
I'm going to leave my husband cause he's kind of a jerk.
And I think God wants me to be happy.
And you can say, well, actually God considers marriage to be a covenant.
And that you just, you drop in what God actually says.
And that's planting a seed.
We have these opportunities all throughout our life to plant seeds of the word.
And we can trust that God is going to, if we're faithful in spreading the seed, sometimes that seed is going to land on good soil and it's going to bear fruit.
So we can have joy and we can have, I don't know if courage is the right word.
We can just have confidence that if we are faithful in spreading his word, sometimes that's going to land on good soil and it is going to bear fruit for eternity.
And the second thing to see is that we do need to examine ourselves and say like, what kind of soil am I like?
And while we can't go out and sample everybody else's soil, that's God's job.
We should look at the soil in our hearts and know that the only one who has the power to amend the soil, to change the soil type, is God himself.
And so we ask him for help to make our hearts soft to his word.
to cut away the fattiness from our hearts and to remove the heaviness from our ears and to remove the plaster from our eyes so that we can see what he has done in the past and what he's willing to do in our lives right now so that we can trust him and follow him for the rest of our lives and be with him for all of eternity.
Would you pray with me?
Father God, we need your help.
Naturally, our hearts are all hard as a rock.
There's not any soil in our hearts naturally.
And yet you, by the power of your Holy Spirit, can take that rocky soil and make it deep, rich Iowa soil.
Lord, you can do that.
And so we ask that you would do it for us in our hearts.
Make us good soil for your word and help us to be faithful sowers of the word.
with confidence that you have many around us who will respond.
Help us to trust you in that we pray, in Jesus name, Amen.
