O great and glorious God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, giver of the Holy Spirit who spoke by the apostles and prophets, pour out now that same Spirit upon us as we come to the pages of Your Word. Open to us Your most precious truths. Shine Your light upon us. Grant to us understanding, simple as we are. Give us wisdom to enjoy and obey the fruit of this Word, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Imagine you’re one of the 12 disciples and you’ve been expecting a kingdom. After all, your people have had kings before, great military kings like David, great prosperous kings like Solomon, and you think to yourself those were the days, those were some glorious kings, and oh, what a grand kingdom they had.

And then Jesus comes along and He announces the time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand, the kingdom. Jesus is going to bring the kingdom. He’s going to be the king. He’s going to reign right here in Jerusalem. He is going to kick some Roman tail.

And then as Jesus talks about the kingdom, I mean, it is going to be a good kingdom. It’s like a precious pearl. It’s like a great treasure. And it’s going to be big. It’s going to be really big. It’s like the biggest plant in the garden, something that spreads across the whole world. And you get excited to think about this kingdom, you look around you and realize, um, including yourself, there’s 12 of you. And you’re not rich. An in fact you have to rely on the donations of others to help keep your trips going. And no one in your group is particularly powerful or influential. You aren’t politically important. You’re probably not even Roman citizens. You are not owners of great stretches of land or titles.

You look behind you, you don’t have an army. You don’t have weapons. And the man you’re following is barely 30 years old and He comes from even a bigger group of nobodies than you do, from a know-nothing town.

So how exactly is this great kingdom going to come? And if you were one of the 12 disciples and you could see what would transpire over the next few years of your lives, you would be even more confused. Okay, so let me get this straight. We got 12 of us, barely any more than our two hands, and one of them is a betrayer, and one guy tried to carry a sword and Jesus said uh uh, we don’t do swords here, and the man we’re following is going to die, and once He’s gone, our great strategy to change the world, to have this amazing kingdom come and grow and cover the whole earth, are you ready for it? You ready for the great kingdom strategy? You’re going to talk and you’re going to tell people stories, and you’ll explain things to them and you’ll make some announcements to them. There it is. You would be forgiven for thinking really? So that’s how the kingdom is going to come?

We’ve been thinking our way through Matthew 13 and before we finish this series next week, there’s one other parable of the kingdom here, and the parallel account in Mark chapter 4. So we’re going to read from Mark chapter 4, verses 26 through 29.

“And He said,” that is, Jesus, “the kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed on the ground. He sleeps and 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, but when the grain is ripe, at once he puts in the sickle because the harvest has come.”

It is surprising how the kingdom grows. And as you’ve heard before in this series, the kingdom growing is, is what it looks like to us and it’s the sort of analogy that Jesus uses, but in a strictly theological sense, the kingdom comes, or the kingdom breaks in. It’s like the sun. The sun isn’t growing, as you know,