[AI Generated Transcript]
Well, if you want to take your Bibles and turn, we're going to be in Mark chapter 4.
I'm thankful for Michael coming last week to share the word, and I was so thankful for all those guys who would take time out of their busy lives to come pour into us.
Mark chapter 4, I'm going to read verses 26 to 34.
Jesus speaking, and he said, The kingdom of God
is as if a man should scatter seed on the ground.
He sleeps and he rises night and day, and the seed sprouts and grows.
He knows not how.
The earth produces by itself, first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear.
When the grain is ripe at once he puts in the sickle, because the harvest has come.
And he said, with what can we compare the kingdom of God?
Or what parable shall we use for it?
It is like a grain of mustard seed, which when it is sown in the ground is the smallest of all the seeds on earth.
Yet when it is grown, it grows up and becomes sown.
It grows up and becomes larger than all the garden plants and puts out large branches so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.
With many such parables, he spoke to them as they were able to hear it.
He did not speak to them without a parable, but privately to his own disciples, he explained everything.
Before Andy and I got married, we went through marriage counseling.
And one of the things, probably the only thing that Dave reiterated to us over and over and over again was that it's all about expectations.
And I had no idea what Dave meant by expectations.
Like I've never been married before.
How am I supposed to expect anything from it?
And I think Andy was kind of in the same boat.
We'd have these conversations like, what does he mean by expectations?
But after we got married, we're like, oh, this is what he means by expectations.
I expect things of you and you expect things of me and these things don't line up and this creates conflict.
Nearly all of our angers and disappointments in life come from unmet expectations.
If that's true of marriage, and it's true of marriage, if it's true of work, if it's true of your human relationships in general, how much more true is it
of the Kingdom of God.
That so often the things that cause us to feel disappointed in God or upset with God or frustrated and afraid in the world come because what's happening around us does not meet our expectations for what should be happening around us.
Here in
Mark chapter 4, Jesus has been giving a series of parables, parables about the kingdom.
Verses 33-34 says, He did not speak without a parable.
The people weren't ready really to hear, in general, what Jesus had to say.
But He explained everything to His disciples.
He made it clear for them, and in doing so, as they record it, I think Jesus wants it to be clear for us, the points of these parables.
But He's speaking to the crowds in these parables, wanting it to
sit in their minds and for them to spin over and over thinking about what is the kingdom of God like?
What does Jesus compare the kingdom to?
And as we meditate on these things, Jesus wants to be setting our expectations for what the kingdom of God is like.
If we will meditate on these parables, if we will attend to them carefully, Jesus, through the parables, will realign our expectations.
The first thing that we're going to see, verses 26-29, is that seeds grow.
And the lesson from that is that there is an inevitable and sure growth in the kingdom of God.
Verse 26 says, And the kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed on the ground.
And this should link this parable in our minds with the first parable in chapter 4, the parable of the soils.
Remember verses 3 and 4.
Listen.
A sower went out to sow, and as he sowed, some seed fell along the path.
And as he explains this parable to his disciples, down in verse 13, he says, Do you not understand this parable?
How then will you understand all the parables?
The sower sows the word.
So there's a sowing that takes place, and that sowing is the word of God.
And verse 31 is also going to use the same kind of analogy of a seed being
Sown.
Now, to paraphrase Paul, who says that the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and of drinking, and in Romans he's talking about it's not about days, it's not about festivals, it's not about dietary restrictions, but what the kingdom of God is about, Jesus says, is sowing and reaping.
And what's being sown is the word of God.
It's the gospel.
It's the truth of what God says in his book.
But as we who are given the task as Christians of sowing God's word, Jesus is the ultimate sower of the word, but we are his delegated sowers.
We're the ones he hands the seed to and says, spread it.
How much control do we have over the process?
Verse 27, he sleeps, the man who sows, he sleeps and he rises night and day and the seed sprouts and grows.
He knows not how.
When a farmer goes out into the field and he plants seed, how much control does he have over what happens next?
Precious little.
Even in our day of seed science and soil science and genetic engineering, like we have all of these things that we think we can control.
And yet floods still come, droughts still come, hail still comes.
There's all these things that are totally outside of our control.
And even if you take out those like acts of God, quote unquote, the actual act of the seed sprouting is a process we don't control.
We know that it happens and we anticipate it, but we don't make it happen.
It happens on its own.
Seeds sprout because they're seeds, not because of anything special that we have done.
There's a control of this process that is totally beyond human reach, and yet that lack of control does not mean a lack of effectiveness.
Verse 28 says, The earth produces by itself.
It literally means that automatically, the earth just does the work.
You put the seed in, the seed sprouts.
I had a hard time understanding this analogy growing up in North Idaho where we had all clay soil.
It was like clay and rocks.
Things don't naturally grow in clay and rocks.
Although it wasn't... I won't go down that rabbit trail.
It's amazing where things do grow.
I was just on the side of a very rocky, steep mountain and there's trees just like popping out all over the place.
No old trees.
They get old and then they topple.
But things grow.
And I moved to Iowa and I was like, wow, things just want to grow here.
Where our garden sits was a driveway at one point.
There's gravel all over in it, but that dirt is so rich.
Things just want to grow in it.
I was actually just listening to a story about Chernobyl yesterday and here scientists thought when that catastrophe happened, nothing's going to grow here for hundreds of years.
The forest immediately took over when people left.
Things want to grow.
The Earth produces automatically when seed is introduced.
Well, what do we glean from that in terms of the kingdom of God?
We should have a rock-solid confidence in the growth of God's kingdom.
When the seed is planted, when the word goes out, the kingdom grows.
Period.
This is not a question.
This is not a maybe.
This is not a hopefully.
When God's word goes forward, God's kingdom advances.
Without Fail.
This is the pattern that we see in the early church in the book of Acts.
And it's interesting how Luke phrases it in Acts.
Acts chapter 6, after there's this dispute
between the Hellenistic Jews, those who have adopted more Greek culture, and those who are traditional Jews.
And these people have become Christians, they've gotten saved, but there's a discrepancy in how their widows are being treated.
And the Hellenistic Jews are saying, we're not getting our fair share.
And so the early church leaders say, we need to appoint seven men to take care of this.
And the first kind of deacon ministry is started there in Acts chapter 6.
And as these men take care of the issues and the people have their needs met so that the apostles can devote themselves to ministry of the word and prayer, verse 7 says, The word of God continued to increase, and the number of disciples multiplied greatly in Jerusalem, and many of the priests became obedient to the faith.
The word of God continued to increase.
Over in Acts chapter 12,
Here, Herod has just stood up and he's delivered this great oration.
And the people are crying out, the voice of a God and not a man.
So Herod's word is shown to be very beautiful and eloquent and the people are praising him.
And he basks in this praise as if, yes, I am a God.
And God sends worms to eat him, kill him.
and He Dies.
Immediately an angel of the Lord struck him down because he did not give God the glory and he was eaten by worms and breathed his last.
But verse 24 says, But the word of God increased and multiplied.
The word of Herod was praised and God killed him.
God's word increased and multiplied.
And then over in Acts 19,
Verse 20, the sons of Sceva, they're trying to cast out demons and it doesn't go so well for them.
Verse 20 says the word of the Lord continued to increase and prevail mightily.
God's Word increased, God's Word multiplied, and there was nothing anyone could do to stop it.
They tried to jail the apostles, they tried killing apostles, they tried persecuting them, they did everything they could, and yet God's Word increased and multiplied, and as the Word increased, disciples increased in number, and the kingdom advanced.
Do you have this same confidence in God's Word?
in His Kingdom, that God surely is at work building His kingdom, that the Lord Jesus will fulfill His promise to build His church and not allow the gates of Hades to prevail against it.
We can get busy hand-wringing over how bad things are in this world.
And you look around and things are pretty obviously bad, right?
It's not that we're seeing something that isn't there.
But the tone of the New Testament is not to worry about that.
It's to have confidence that the word of God will prevail.
Greater is he who is in you than he who is in the world.
The spirit of God is more powerful than the spirit of the prince of the power of the air.
We don't need to be afraid.
A lot of people who focus a lot on
The End Times.
There's like this tone of fear and it always strikes me as puzzling because when you read Revelation, the whole point of Revelation is to strengthen those first century churches with a deep confidence that Jesus wins this thing.
that Jesus is the lamb who was slain, who is seated in power and in glory, that the slain lamb is the lion of the tribe of Judah, the one who has all power and all authority in heaven and on earth.
He's not afraid.
He's not worried.
Why should his people be afraid and worried?
So brothers and sisters, we need to be confident.
Jesus's kingdom is growing and we should therefore be full
of Faith, verses 30 and 32.
Read another parable.
The kingdom of God is like a mustard seed.
The kingdom is surely growing, but that growth will sometimes be slow and surprising.
He said, with what can we compare the kingdom of God?
Or what parable shall we use for it?
is like a grain of mustard seed, which when sown in the ground is the smallest of all the seeds on the earth.
Yet when it is sown, it grows up and becomes larger than all the garden plants and puts out large branches so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.
Now quick note, if you have looked at a mustard seed and have looked at other seeds, you will know that a mustard seed is not actually the smallest seed on the earth.
So some people get hung up on that, like, well, is Jesus wrong?
But it's just a proverbial saying.
in First Century Palestine that when you think about a small seed, you think about a mustard seed because it was the smallest of all of the common seeds, the seeds that people were readily familiar with.
The mustard seed is the smallest one that they would have had just like in mind.
So you see this elsewhere in Jesus' teaching when he's reaching for something that's small.
So he says, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed.
It's just a common way of saying, think about something itty bitty.
Well, we're going to think about a mustard seed.
And so that's what he's saying here.
It also doesn't grow.
Some people read this.
And if you watch like movies made for kids that are based on Bible stories, or sometimes in children's books, they'll show the mustard tree as some like great giant tree.
And it's not a great giant tree.
It gets to like eight or 10 feet.
But when you look at a mustard seed and you look at a mustard tree,
That's pretty remarkable growth.
It's not what you expect.
The point of this parable isn't that Jesus is saying literally the smallest seed into literally the largest tree.
He's saying no, a very small thing into something that's bigger than all of the garden plants, bigger than all of the plants that come from seeds like this.
It's an unusual, it's not from the smallest to the biggest, but rather it's the surprisingness of the trajectory.
Though the seed is small, like we saw with the grain, it grows inevitably, but it doesn't necessarily grow quickly.
When you think about a tree, though some trees do grow with surprising speed, for how big they get, the speed is still relatively slow.
But again, does that slow growth imply failure?
That's very often how church experts or just casual observers will judge churches, will judge how anything is going.
Is it growing quickly?
Is there speed?
Is there momentum?
But that's not how God does things.
God is not into scalable businesses.
It's not opposed to them, but like that's not how he grows his church.
It's not through scalable business models.
It's through slow plant-like growth, the growth of a mustard tree.
I was just in Idaho this last week.
And so a lot of the places we were going were places that had been clear cut, like logging.
And they cut down these trees and they take them and they process them in a lumber mill.
And if you've got a responsible timber company, they're thinking about the future.
And so then they send out crews of guys to go out and plant these little saplings.
And those saplings, depending on the species of tree and what they're going to be used for, aren't going to be ready to be used again for another 40, 60, maybe 80 years.
The life cycle on this business model is really long compared to most other things, right?
But they're thinking about the future and they say, if we put this tree on the ground now, it's a, it's just a cost output.
It doesn't bring us any money in the, in the immediate future, but long-term that investment comes back.
And that's more, that's a, that's a better analogy than, than most things that we think of for how God does his work.
He's planting seeds that are going to take oftentimes a really long time to grow.
to Show a Return on Investment.
I think about those who were involved in the early days of the modern missionary movement, guys like William Carey and Adoniram Judson, who spent seven years, 15 years, 30 years laboring and seeing no converts, one convert, four converts, very small, slow growth, probably to an extent where today,
If a mission agency saw that, they'd pull him off the field.
They say, this guy isn't gifted.
This guy probably doesn't know what he's doing.
The Lord's just not blessing him.
We'll move him someplace where he'll be more fruitful.
But that's not what God did.
He left him there.
And in the case of William Carey, like in India, the presence of Christianity in India today is largely due to the fact of his decades of faithful labor.
As a small church, we have to have a future orientation.
How can we trust God for the future and think about and invest in that future?
What does that look like for us?
To have that kind of hopeful mindset.
Though the growth of the kingdom can be slow, we have to remember it is sure, it is absolute, it is certainly going to happen.
If a man had a handful of seeds and he went out into his garden, he didn't know what they were.
They're just a bunch of little seeds and he plants them and they're mostly, they turn out to mostly be like carrots and radishes and beets.
But somewhere in there, he had a mustard seed and all of a sudden, five years down the road, 10 years down the road, all these other things, they were ready and they got pulled out and they're gone.
He ate them eight years ago, but he's also got this one tree.
It's a mustard tree where the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.
Small creatures take delight in its shade.
That would be a surprise to him, but it would be just the way God works.
Likewise, the growth of God's kingdom can defy human expectations.
God's kingdom growth is sure, it's slow, and it's surprising.
And this is not something that's new to the New Testament.
This isn't just something that Jesus came up with, pulled it out of his hat when he got here to earth.
This is something God's been promising for a long time.
If you look back in Daniel, Daniel chapter 2, Nebuchadnezzar has this dream.
We'll cut through most of the story.
Things are not looking good for Daniel and his friends who had been brought into his court to be magicians or wise men because the men that Nebuchadnezzar had tasked with telling him his dream and then interpreting it couldn't do it.
He didn't want them to just give an interpretation because he knew they'd make something up.
So he says, tell me my dream and interpret it for me.
They can't do it.
And so he says, I'm killing everybody like you guys.
And Daniel says, wait, give me a chance.
Let me pray about this and see if God will give an answer.
Well, God does give an answer.
God tells Daniel what the dream was, and then he gives him an interpretation for the dream.
And that comes in Daniel chapter 2, beginning in verse 31.
You saw, O king, and behold, a great image.
This image, mighty and of exceeding brightness, stood before you.
and its appearance was frightening.
The head of this image was of fine gold, its chest and arms of silver, its middle and thighs of bronze, its legs of iron, its feet partly of iron and partly of clay.
As you look, the stone was cut out by no human hand and it struck the image on its feet of iron and clay and broke them in pieces.
Then the iron, the clay, the bronze, the silver, and the gold
All together were broken in pieces and became like the chaff of the summer threshing floors, and the wind carried them away so that not a trace of them could be found.
But the stone that struck the image became a great mountain and filled the whole earth.
This was the dream.
Now we will tell the king its interpretation.
You, O king, the king of kings, to whom God, the God of heaven, has given the kingdom, the power, and the might, and the glory, and into whose hand he has given, wherever they dwell, the children of man, the beasts of the field, and the birds of the heavens, making you rule over them all.
You are the head of gold.
Another kingdom inferior to you shall arise after you, and yet a third kingdom of bronze, which shall rule over all the earth.
There shall be a fourth kingdom, strong as iron, because iron breaks to pieces and shatters all things.
And like iron that crushes, it shall break and crush all these.
As you saw the feet and the toes, partly of potter's clay and partly of iron, it shall be a divided kingdom.
But some of the firmness of the iron shall be in it, just as you saw iron mixed with the soft clay.
And as the toes of the feet were partly iron and partly clay, so the kingdom shall be partly strong and partly brittle.
And you saw the iron mixed with soft clay, so they will mix with one another in marriage, but they will not hold together, just as iron does not mix with clay.
And in the days of those kings, the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that shall never be destroyed, nor shall the kingdom be left to another people.
It shall break in pieces all these kingdoms and bring them to an end, and it shall stand forever, just as you saw that a stone was cut from a mountain by no human hand.
and that it broke in pieces of iron, the bronze, the clay, the silver, and the gold.
A great God has made known to the king what shall be after this.
The dream is certain and its interpretation is sure.
God shows Nebuchadnezzar this dream and he says, you're the gold head, okay, but there's someone coming after you and we know if you keep reading in Daniel, the Medes and the Persians, they come in and they conquer Babylonia.
If you keep reading your history, you know the Greeks come in, this bronze kingdom.
They come in and they conquer the Medes and the Persians.
And eventually, this strong nation of iron, the Romans, comes and crushes the Greeks.
And when Rome falls, it all crumbles apart.
There's all these little bits and pieces of clay and iron that are cobbled together.
But running into that statue, running into those nations, is a stone uncut by human hands.
And that stones in uncut stones in the Old Testament Generally belong in an altar that they're part of the worship of God and here the stone seems to be Jesus himself Who comes and he crushes?
The statue and his kingdom grows and it takes over the whole earth it grows and grows and grows Isaiah 9 7 says of the
Increase of his government and peace, there will be no end.
His influence and his power grows throughout history.
Sometimes we don't see that, right?
We don't see it in its fullness yet, and yet we, in its seed form or maybe even in the blade form, to go back to Jesus' analogy, the seed and then the blade and then the full grain, we're not at the full grain yet.
Like, he hasn't come and harvested.
We're somewhere in that process of the seed becoming the blade on its way to the full grain.
And it keeps on growing.
And one day the knowledge of the glory of the Lord will cover the earth as the waters cover the face of the sea.
In the Old Testament, there's a connection between the mountain of the Lord, like it says here in Daniel, and the temple or the tabernacle as the meeting place of God and man.
In the New Testament, Jesus says that the physical location, the Bethel, the meeting place of God and man, the physical location, the mountain, is replaced, John 4, and instead we meet with God in spirit and in truth.
What does that mean?
Well, Peter tells us, 1 Peter 2, that we are being built into a spiritual house.
We who hear the truth of the Word
and believe in it and are made new and indwelt by his spirit.
And so as God's people gather in corporate worship week by week, we both represent that mountain.
We are the closest thing that anyone on earth can see to the kingdom of God is the church.
And we also ascend that mountain to worship.
As we come together, we go up the mountain in spirit and in truth to worship Christ together.
In Christ, we join and receive a kingdom that cannot be shaken.
In Christ, we inherit the kingdom of God.
So despite what our eyes may see around us, despite the pain and the suffering in this world, despite the setbacks that Christianity may seem to face in different times and places, the kingdom invincibly grows.
And therefore, Hebrews 12 is going to tell us we should be grateful, faithful, and full of awe.
So I just want to close by reading Hebrews chapter 12, verses 25 to 29.
Hebrews 12, beginning in verse 25.
See that you do not refuse him who is speaking.
For if they did not escape when they refused him who warned them on earth, much less will we escape if we reject him who warns from heaven.
At that time his voice shook the earth.
The kids and I were just reading this morning in Exodus 19 and 20.
God spoke on Mount Sinai and it shook everything around them and they were terrified.
But now he has promised, yet once more,
I will shake not only the earth but also the heavens.
And this phrase, once more, indicates the removal of the things that are shaken, that is, things that have been made, in order that the things that cannot be shaken remain.
Therefore, let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire.
The God who spoke on the mountain to the people of Israel and terrified them with His mighty power has graciously in His Son given us entry into and possession of His Kingdom.
That's a gift we can't even imagine the scope and magnitude of and it should create in us
A genuine fear of the Lord that produces a joyful worship with reverence and awe.
That the God who is a consuming fire, that the God who will shake away all of the shakable things, has chosen in His Son to give us an unshakable, lasting hope in knowing that we are His.
And if you've trusted in Christ, you are part of this invincible kingdom, and that should give us joy.
Would you pray with me?
Father God, we thank you that we look at the world around us and sometimes these things are hard for us to believe.
And yet we can have confidence that you are mightier than everything that we see.
And we should not trust our eyes, the eyes of our flesh.
We should trust in your word that you are on the throne.
you will win everything.
And if we are in you, we are safe and we are secure.
And for this, we thank you in Jesus name.
Amen.
