[AI Generated transcript]
If you want to take your Bibles and turn, we're going to be in Mark 4.
It's a pretty short text this morning, and with communion it'll probably be a shorter than normal sermon.
Just so you're not surprised at the end, I'm not trying to get your hopes up too high about a short sermon.
James chapter 1, beginning in verse 19.
You can turn to Mark 4, but I'm going to begin by reading in James chapter 1.
Verses 19-25 says this, Know this, my beloved brothers.
Let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger.
For the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God.
Therefore, put away all filthiness and rampant wickedness and receive with meekness the implanted Word, which is able to save your souls.
But be doers of the Word, not hearers only, deceiving yourselves.
For if anyone is a hearer of the word, and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror.
For he looks at himself and goes away, and at once forgets what he was like.
But the one who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and perseveres, being no hearer who forgets, but a doer who acts, he will be blessed in his doing.
From the Old Testament, Joshua chapter 1 and verse 8 says, Why is it important to hear from God?
Why is it important to hear the Word of God?
According to those verses that we just read, it's important to hear God's Word in order that we might obey God's Word.
That seems straightforward enough, right?
We hear it so that we can do it.
One of my favorite quotes from the Puritan writer John Owen, he says, the first part of it is, we learn all to practice.
We learn in order to obey.
Simply listening to God's word doesn't have magical properties.
It is the living and abiding word of God.
It's sharper than any two-edged sword.
But James tells us that we must receive it with meekness.
We have to have humble hearts.
Joshua is told to meditate on it day and night in order that we might obey and please the Lord.
But have you ever thought about the reverse?
The rest of that quote from Owen is, As we learn all to practice, so we learn much by practice.
Have you ever considered the absolute necessity of obedience in order to keep hearing the Word of God?
That's the point of the parable that Jesus tells us in Mark 421-25.
Beginning in verse 21, he says, And he said to them, Is a lamp brought in to be put under a basket, or under a bed, and not on a stand?
For nothing is hidden except to be made manifest, nor is anything secret except to come to light.
If anyone has ears to hear, let him hear.
And he said to them, pay attention to what you hear.
For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you, and still more will be added to you.
For to the one who has, more will be given.
And from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away.
Now, I referred to that just a second ago as a parable, and most of your Bibles have it under the heading of a single parable, a lamp under a basket, it says here in my ESV.
But if you read it carefully, those verses actually have two parables on either side, and they're linked in the middle by one explicit command from Jesus.
So the first parable and its explanation can be found in verses 21 to 22.
And the point of this parable is, the light came to reveal.
And he said to them, Is a lamp brought in to be put under a basket, or under a bed, and not on a stand?
For nothing is hidden except to be made manifest, nor is anything secret except to come to light.
When we think of a lamp, we don't think of the same thing that Jesus is thinking of.
We tend to think of something that we put on a shelf or over in a corner, gives us nice ambiance, or maybe it's got a specific purpose, like it's a reading lamp.
It's not filling the room with light.
It's supposed to be more of a subdued type of light.
But in the ancient world, they would have used a single oil lamp in order to light up an entire room.
And so you would put it in a prominent place where that light could filter out to everywhere around it.
So you didn't stick it under a basket and you didn't tuck it under your bed because in addition to defeating the whole purpose of the lamp, that would also have been a fire hazard.
Jesus says it's the same thing with him.
He will not be hidden in a corner.
He will not be ignored.
He's not going to be shoved under a bed or under a basket.
As we look at these two verses, I do think it's important to make one translation note, and that has to do with verse 21.
Virtually all of our English Bibles say this, is a lamp brought in to be put under a basket?
And so my point is about that word a.
In English, we have two kinds of articles.
Sorry, this is gonna be a little bit of a grammar lesson here, but I think it's important for understanding what's going on here.
We have two kinds of articles.
We have the definite article, the word the, which refers to something specific, as in the chair.
The chair that Lorelai is sitting on refers to a single chair, a specific chair.
We also have an indefinite article.
It's not referring to something specific.
It's more general, a or an.
So I could say Lorelei sits on a chair, and it doesn't necessarily mean that chair.
It means any of the chairs that the bookworm decided to plop down on that day with her various books.
But in that respect, Greek and English are different.
In Greek, there is no indefinite article.
There's no a or an.
Only definite.
So you could have a chair, but you would just say chair.
You wouldn't say a chair, or you wouldn't say an chair anyway in English, but you would just say chair.
Now you can add the article, the definite article, and make it specific, but that's a different thing.
And while that is sounding kind of down in the weeds, I'm sure, it's important in this parable because while most of our English translations say a lamp, which would imply that there's no article present, Mark puts the definite article in here.
He says, he doesn't say a lamp or just lamp.
He says the lamp.
You don't bring the lamp into the room in order to hide it.
Now, translating it that way would make for very clunky English.
And in the version of this story told in Luke and Matthew, the article isn't present.
So I understand why the translators did it this way.
But I think Mark is making a specific point.
He's not talking about a lamp in some general sense.
He's talking about a specific lamp, a specific light that is brought into the world, into the room.
And that lamp is Jesus himself.
I think Jesus' point is that he is the lamp brought into the room and he is not going to be hidden under a bed or tucked under a basket.
John 1 verses 4 and 5, In him was life and the life was the light of men.
The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.
Now that's no small matter because that
That light, that Jesus being the light, is tied to His being the perfect revelation of the Father.
John 1, 16-17 says, For from His fullness, Jesus' fullness, we have all received grace upon grace.
For the law was given through Moses, grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.
No one has ever seen God.
The only God who is at the Father's side, He has made Him known.
So Jesus came to reveal the Father, to shine the light of the Father in this dark world, to stand in the middle of the dark room and to light it up with his presence, power, and prophetic word.
He is the light of God who has come to light up this sin-drenched world.
In Simeon's prophecy in the book of Luke, we're told that the sunrise from on high has dawned upon us.
Now Jesus didn't do that in a way that we might expect, right?
He didn't just burst onto the scene in a way that everybody immediately understood who he was.
That's part of the point of the kingdom parables in verses 26-34 that we'll, Lord willing, get to in a couple of weeks.
The light dawns slowly, like a sunrise.
The kingdom grows gradually.
But he did come, and even to the extent that his ministry seemed small and out of the way, taking place in small towns in Galilee and the rural countryside of Judea, it nonetheless set the whole world aflame.
Jesus' person was temporarily veiled from people, but what veiled it was not that he was hiding, but it was their own sinful refusal to see what was right in front of them.
Jesus came proclaiming the kingdom of God and silencing the demons who called him God in the flesh.
He came teaching and healing, but speaking in such a way as to not always immediately be understood by those who didn't care to understand.
Jesus was contrary to popular belief, not always putting the cookies on the bottom shelf for everybody.
He could be heard and understood by those who wanted to hear and understand.
To the extent that his ministry was secret or quiet, the silence and the secrecy were short-lived.
Again, what Jesus says here, nothing is hidden except to be made manifest, nor anything secret except to come to light.
Those Old Testament expectations that we talked about last week, the mystery of God's work in bringing salvation to all the nations through the sacrifice and kingdom of his Son, that work was hidden for a long time.
But in these last days, these days after the incarnation of Jesus, that mystery has been made known.
So how has he made it known?
If Jesus didn't come to hide under the bed, what does it mean that he now stands at the center of the room?
Well, verse 23 tells us.
This is the command at the center of these two parables.
Verse 23, we get the explicit command that links the two parables together, and it's this.
It's short and it's sweet.
If anyone has ears to hear, let him hear.
That's the command.
Listen up.
This is a common phrase in the scriptures, but I just want to dwell on it for a moment.
Do you have ears?
Apart from some tragic birth defect or accident later in your life, yeah, you have ears.
And ears are by their very nature intended for hearing.
Jesus is clearly not speaking about just physically hearing words
He's not just talking about sound waves going into your ear, turning into a, however it works, electronic signals that go to your brain and then are interpreted as language.
Our brains are a miracle, but the rest of our body is a miracle too.
But that's not what Jesus is talking about.
He's not talking about anything that simple.
As complex as that is, if we start to understand it, Jesus isn't talking about anything that simple.
Rather, there's a clear implication that you can hear and comprehend
Understand the words either as you read them or as they're spoken and still fail entirely to have heard in the sense that Jesus means.
True hearing of the scriptures is not content with the simple apprehension of the idea or even the ability to spit the right answer back out on a test or when somebody asks you.
Instead, the scriptures demand that if we hear, we change.
True hearing implies repentance, faith, and a change of direction.
So Jesus is saying, listen up.
Then we get to the second parable, the point of which is, the more you hear, the more you hear.
And he said to them, pay attention to what you hear.
With the measure you use, it will be measured to you, and still more will be added to you.
For to the one who has, more will be given, and from the one who has not,
Even what he has will be taken away.
Notice first the wording in verse 24.
Pay attention to what you hear.
To what you hear.
That's really significant.
That's important.
Here in this section, Jesus is exhorting us to listen carefully, to pay attention, and to do what we've learned.
But this also means that you have to be incredibly careful as to what you're listening to.
What is the input that you're hearing and then responding to?
In the context of the parable, it's obvious that what Jesus wants us to hear are His words, His instructions.
And we can expand that to include the words of all of Scripture, which Jesus says, all of Scripture testifies to me, talking about the Old Testament.
And 2 Peter tells us that all of Scripture was written by inspiration of the Holy Spirit.
So it's all God's Word, and it's all meant for us to hear and obey.
So that Jesus is talking about the Scriptures.
To listen carefully to Jesus is to listen carefully to the Bible.
But
Okay, how far do we take that?
Does that mean that the Bible is the only thing that we consume?
Do we stop talking to other people?
Stop hearing other words?
Does that mean we shut off the news, quit watching our favorite shows, hunting shows, sports, drop movies and books out of the window and into the trash?
Is Jesus calling us to be Bible-only people?
Should I quit preaching sermons and just read straight out of the Bible the entire time, every time?
The answer is a resounding no.
For different reasons on some of these different examples I just gave, but the biblical writers themselves make use of other writings, current events, informational material, which were not themselves part of the scriptures.
Paul quotes from pagan prophets, pagan poets rather.
From at least the time of Moses forward, the scriptures have not only been read, but then explained by those who've been trained to teach them.
So we should embrace writing stories, information beyond the Bible.
But, and here, hear this clearly, we must judge all of those other sources as being less important and subject to the scriptures.
The Reformers, one of the five solos of the Reformation was Sola Scriptura.
And what was meant by that is that the Bible alone is the highest authority.
It's not solo scriptura.
It's not over here all by itself.
Things like tradition and human reason, like those things still matter, but they are underneath the Bible.
The Bible, solo scriptura, is the only final standard for faith and practice and life.
So, we evaluate what we read or what we see or what we hear in light of what God has revealed in His Word.
We don't just evaluate the explicit didactic content what's being taught by the scriptures, we also evaluate the responses that those things create in us.
Yesterday I was over at a conference at a friend's church in Yankton talking about C.S.
Lewis's view of education, but one of the things that as I was reading the scriptures trying to get ready for that and reading Lewis, the emphasis that is placed in a classic understanding of
Christianity and of education of not just shaping what goes on in our heads, but our whole life, our character, our gut responses to things, how we feel about things.
God cares about not just what's in your head.
He cares about your responses to things emotionally and viscerally.
If the more we are conformed to Christ, the more our whole being will be shaped by him.
So,
Is watching this movie or reading this book or scrolling through this news feed moving me closer to Jesus or pulling me away from him?
Oh, be careful, little ears, what you hear.
This sort of hearing demands a lot more work than we're comfortable with most of the time.
We want to take in things as entertainment or just passively receive information.
We want to zone out, vegetate, mindlessly take things in.
But there's really no room in scripture for that kind of consumption of words.
Articles, tweets, books, movies, music, these things are all using words, and words, by their very nature, either testify to the truth or contradict it.
There really is no neutrality.
So if you want mindless enjoyment, go sit outside and watch the rainfall.
Or go sit in the sunshine.
But pay careful attention to the words in your life.
If you're going to obey Jesus, you must pay careful attention to what you hear.
And what measure do you use?
The parable continues with a funny statement about measuring.
I'll read it again.
With the measure you use, it will be measured to you, and still more will be added to you.
For to the one who has, more will be given.
From the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away.
I want you to imagine two people.
This might get a little Alice in Wonderland-y for a minute, but stick with me.
The first person is a tiny child who has a one teaspoon measure.
And this is filled with water, and he drinks it, and he grows.
So he receives a tablespoon, which is filled, and he drinks, and he grows.
And then he's given a half cup, which he drinks, and he grows.
And then he's given a cup, and he drinks it, and he grows.
He looks full grown now, but then he keeps drinking and drinking and ultimately he becomes a giant, which he needs to be because now he's got a 55 gallon drum that he's been given full of water to consume.
That's the first guy.
The second one is a man.
He's full grown.
He's given a one liter measure.
I don't know why I switched from standard to metric, but here I did.
Maybe that's like a subliminal message in here.
He gets the one liter bottle, and the bottle gets filled.
But instead of drinking it, he dumps it out on the ground.
And so he shrinks, and he's given another bottle, and we're back to standard measurement.
Now it's 16.9 fluid ounces.
And he instead, again, of drinking it, he dumps it out on the ground.
And he shrinks again.
And then he's handed a one cup, and he
takes it and he dumps it out on the ground and he shrinks and this keeps going and going until both the measure and the man are visible, invisible, they disappear.
Jesus says, for through the one who has more will be given and from the one who has not even what he has will be taken away.
Jesus is saying that if you hear his word and demonstrate your hearing by obedience your capacity for understanding will grow.
And he will keep handing you a bigger measure because there will always be more and more to learn and to obey.
But on the other hand, if you take what he's given you and dumped it out, said, I don't care, Jesus.
Sure, I heard it.
I'm done with it.
It's like our kids sometimes, like you get something you haven't even tried it.
I don't like it.
We do that a lot with when scripture tells us to do things.
We like,
That doesn't sound good to me and dump it out without ever actually trying it.
If we keep doing that, if you do that over and over again, if you refuse to obey the truth you know, then your ability to understand will grow less and less until it's gone altogether.
Your ability to hear will disappear.
Is that you this morning?
Friends, let us pay careful attention to the words Jesus speaks.
Don't just listen with your ears.
Obey him with your life.
And so your capacity to grow and love him and enjoy him will grow day by day.
Would you pray with me?
Father God, we need your help in that.
Our hearts are resistant naturally to your truth.
And so we need your help.
Father, as we turn now to communion, we
We're going to ask for your help to understand you.
We're going to sing to you and we pray that we have hearts that truly do delight in you and want to obey you.
And then as we move from there into communion, would you prepare our hearts to remember what Christ has done for us and help us to then live in light of what he has done for us.
We pray in Jesus name.
Amen.
