Two Journeys

Persecution grows, Peter is arrested and God miraculously frees him from prison. Conversely, Herod was struck down for his vainglory.

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In this episode, Andy and Wes discuss the advance of the Gospel among Gentiles in Antioch and some aspects of their church life and ministry

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Pastor Andy Davis unfolds an episode of Jesus' life that expands our comprehension of him as the Son of God and alerts us to not underestimate him.

Turn in your Bibles to Mark 4:35-41. We continue this incredible study in the Gospel of Mark. There's something deeply unsettling to most of us when it comes to the sea, a primordial fear of its power, and its unpredictability, and its mystery. We cannot see below the surface or beyond the horizon, and we can never know for sure what's coming at us. There is, of course, the simple fear of drowning that can seizes us all. The fact is, we cannot survive for long underwater, and death by drowning is a terrifying way to go. Beyond that is the fear of the weather, a sudden storm that can turn the once placid sea into a raging inferno of power, mighty white-capped breakers coming at us, and wave upon wave, utterly beyond our ability to withstand or subdue. Then there's the irrational terror of creatures of the deep. The summer of 1975, the summer that Jaws came out, I was in Lake Winnipesaukee. I was on an Astroturf-covered floating raft, unwilling to dive into the lake and swim back to shore for fear of a great white shark. Having no idea that that was a saltwater creature, and I was in fresh water, and there was zero chance of being eaten by a shark. That didn't matter, I was terrified. We read the accounts of the sailors that sailed with Columbus, and they were afraid of the terrifying monsters of the deep, of great whales with their immense size, and their powerful tails and their powerful mouths, or even a giant squid with their long undulating tentacles. All of these things are terrors. The sea represents the darkest side of man's terrors, and it can quickly reduce even the most courageous man to a trembling child. 

That's why this account of Jesus' effortless power over the wind and the waves is so compelling. It asks the fundamental question that's before us, when we read all four of the Gospels, “Who is this man?” The fundamental answer, that's so clear, only Almighty God can control the wind and the waves with the simple word of His command. This story adds more vital information to the quest of our faith, to understand the basic thesis of the Gospel of Mark, that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. What does that mean? What does that mean that He's the Son of God? What does that mean for each of us individually, personally? Beyond this, this amazing account gives us a sense of the total control of Jesus over the hardest moments of our lives, and His ability to speak peace to our souls when we need it the most. That's what we're looking at today. 

Now, we need to set this storm, the setting of the storm and its sudden severity, and the personal setting, Jesus' ongoing, amazing ministry, his overwhelming ministry. Jesus had had a very long day of ministry just like every day. So in Mark 4:1-2, it says, “Jesus began to teach by the sea. The crowd that gathered around Him was so large that He got into a boat and sat in it out on the sea while all the people were along the shore at the water's edge. He taught them many things by parables.” Though Mark 4 doesn't mention any healings or demon possessed people being set free, that was of course the norm, the huge crowd that was there almost certainly were there to be healed as well as taught. So it was that same busy day, it was the end of a very overwhelming, busy day, in verse 35-36, “That day, when evening came, He said to His disciples, ‘Let us go over to the other side.’ Leaving the crowd behind, they took Him along just as He was in the boat. There were also other boats with Him,” so it was absolutely exhausting, long day. The text says that they left the crowd and took Jesus along just as He was. What does that mean?  He didn't have the chance to change his clothes or refresh himself in any way, it's just there it is. It's time to go to get into the boat and go across the lake, right on the heels of a very hard day. The boat that they were in seemed to have been powered by wind and sail, not by oar. These boats generally could hold about 15 people. So we would imagine, and the text confirms, a kind of a flotilla of boats, not just one, but a group of boats going across, carrying the twelve apostles and other disciples that were following Jesus. 

Now, we need to look at the physical setting, which is the Sea of Galilee. Mark 4:1 mentions the Sea of Galilee. The Sea of Galilee is one of the most fascinating bodies of water in the world. It's a freshwater lake that is, at the lowest altitude of any such lake in the world, approximately 690 feet below sea level. It measures about 13 miles long, 7 miles wide, about 150 feet deep at its deepest point. It's fed partially by underwater springs, but mostly by the Jordan River, which flows north to south from Mount Hermon, which stands 9,200 feet above sea level. It's a marvelous source of fresh water, supplying, even today, much of the nation of Israel with drinking water. Over the centuries, it provided an amazingly, abundant supply of fish. Although fishing is now banned in the Sea of Galilee because the stocks got to a dangerously low level, but even in our lifetime, it still was a source of sardines that were caught there every year.  

The biggest issues with the Sea of Galilee are the geography and the weather. The lake is in the center of a deep geological rift that cuts a gash in the surface of the Earth, running 4,500 miles long down through Africa, as far south as Mozambique. I myself have been in that rift in the nation of Kenya, I was in the Rift Valley Academy, the same gash. It makes that area vulnerable to earthquakes, seismic activity. The rift causes steep hills and cliffs on each side of the Sea of Galilee, making it effectively sit down in a deep bowl. It is therefore vulnerable to high winds, which can cause staggeringly dramatic storms to rise up. The narrow confines of the lake multiply exponentially the effect of these winds and storms, making the Sea of Galilee, a very dangerous place in a storm. The record shows in March of 1992, one storm in the Sea of Galilee generated a 10-foot wave that overwhelmed and flooded the city of Tiberius. 

The storm comes up with sudden severity, look at verse 37, “A furious squall came up, and the waves broke over the boat so that it was nearly swamped.” The suddenness of the storm is more clear from the Gospel of Matthew, as if the storm just came up out of nowhere, without any warning at all. Matthew 8:24 says, "And behold there are arose a great tempest in the sea.” The Greek word for the storm used here is also used for a hurricane, an overpowering wind of gale force, maybe as high as 80 miles an hour. The word is intensified by the additional Greek word “megale”, a mega storm, a great storm. This is a great hurricane. Matthew 8:24 uses the Greek word “seismos”, from which we get seismic, like a seismic event, an earthquake. Luke 8:24 says the waters were raging, dashing and pummeling the boat. The effect of this hurricane wind and these raging, thrashing waves was that the boat was quickly filling with water. These men, we need to understand are professional fishermen who grew up on the Sea of Galilee. In their professional opinion, their boat was about to go down — it was going down. Those conditions meant certain death for them all. 

We see Jesus in this account, Jesus' perfect humanity contrasted with the disciples' faithless terror. Jesus' humanity is on display in that He was physically exhausted and asleep on a cushion, Jesus was fully man and fully God. This is the great mystery of theology, the mystery of the incarnation. His attributes as both fully human and fully God are on full display in this amazing account. First, we see the humanity of Jesus in His physical exhaustion. Verse 38, “Jesus was in the stern, sleeping on a cushion.”  Jesus' physical limitations are part of the mystery. He got tired, just like the rest of us. He got very little rest. The needs of the crowd were relentless, and so also was His compassion on the crowd, relentless. It's fascinating that Mark alone gives us the detail of the cushion, Jesus sleeping on a cushion. You may ask, why did Jesus sleep on a cushion, and I would answer because it's more comfortable. There's no great mystery here. What it shows is that Jesus is no ascetic, seeking out intentionally harsh treatment for his body. If there was a cushion around, He's going to use it and support his head, it's just more comfortable. So He's not an ascetic, but at the same time, He was willing to live a very difficult physical life. He said to one man who wanted to follow Him, "Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay His head,” [Matthew 8:20], so He was used to a difficult life. But in this particular case, He found a place to lay His head on a cushion. He must have been extremely tired because the wind and the waves, and the boat filling with water don't wake Him. That's Jesus in His humanity. We know that Almighty God needs no rest at all, ever. It says in Psalm 121: 3-4, "He who watches over you will not slumber. Indeed, He who watches over Israel will neither slumber nor sleep." Or again, Isaiah 40:28, it says, "God's power is limitless. The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth, he will not grow tired or weary." But Jesus in His humanity did grow tired and did get weary.  

We also see Jesus' perfect humanity in His complete trust in His heavenly Father. Here, by his sleep in the storm, He is commending a life of faith to each one of us. He was perfectly at rest in His Father's hands. He knew there was literally no chance whatsoever He was going to die by drowning in the Sea of Galilee. Imagine the heavenly newspaper with the headline, "Son of God dies tragically in a boating accident. All of heaven, shocked prophecy's not fulfilled.” You know about piercing hands and feet and things like that, Psalm 22. Impossible. So Jesus thought it was a good chance for a nap. Jesus lived out every moment of His life in complete trust in His Father. Psalm 22, that same Psalm says, "You brought me out of the womb. You made me trust in you even at my mother's breast. From birth, I was cast upon you, from my mother's womb you have been my God." So He knew He could sleep, and God would watch over Him. I love Psalm 4:8 on this very matter, "I will lie down and sleep in peace, for you alone, oh Lord, make me dwell in safety." Wouldn't you love to live your life like that? In the midst of the deepest troubles of your life, just be able to go to sleep and know that God is going to take care of you, He's going to protect you. This is what the disciples had to learn to do, to so trust in their heavenly Father, that there's never any cause for mindless, unreasoning terror. So that's Jesus' humanity. 

We also see Jesus' infinite majesty as the incarnate Son of God. We have a combination, therefore, of normal weakness and infinite power. In one passage, we have Jesus' weakness and His weariness and His fatigue, but we also have Him give the display of, I would say arguably, the most physically powerful thing that any human being has ever done on Planet Earth. We have, by contrast, the disciples' faithless terror. Jesus gives us the plain example of a man completely trusting in His heavenly Father. But by contrast, the disciples are wild with terror, they're out of their minds. They wake him, verse 38, and say to him, "Teacher, don't you care if we perish?"  Big picture is that Jesus came into the world because He cared that we were perishing, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” [John 3:16]  So He cares. No one has cared more than Jesus. The disciples' faith needs to be strengthened so that they would not ever doubt Jesus' love or power, and they must also trust God's plan. They must lose their fear of dying, and Christ's resurrection will do that for them. Now, the question comes, why did they wake Jesus at all? What were they thinking when they woke Him? They certainly weren't expecting Him to do what He got up and did. They were stunned by it. Maybe they just thought it was good manners, "If we're going down, it'd be good that Jesus were awake when it happens." Or maybe they felt that He had, which He clearly did,  a specific “in” with God, and that God would affect some kind of protection for them  though they didn't know how.

The Old Testament actually speaks much of God's protection in the midst of storms, perhaps the clearest is Psalm 107:23-29 which says,  "Others went out on the sea in ships, they were merchants on the mighty waters. They saw the works of the Lord, His wonderful deeds in the deep. For He spoke and stirred up a tempest that lifted high the waves. They mounted up to the heavens, they went down to the depths. In their peril, their courage melted away, they reeled and staggered like drunken men. They were at their wits' end. Then they cried out to the Lord in their trouble and He brought them out of their distress. He stilled the storm to a whisper, the waves of the sea were hushed.”  So God spoke and the storm came, and then God spoke and the storm went away. He brings it, then He ends it. So perhaps they thought, in waking Jesus up, that He would call on His Father and that God would deliver them in the same pattern. I don't know what they were thinking, they certainly didn't expect what was about to happen. Now, as I'm walking through the account, I also want to ask, what did the disciples do wrong? They're professional fishermen who are bred and raised on this very sea. They knew it like the back of their hands. They saw the magnitude of the wind, the size of the waves, the swamping of the boat, they were bailing, they were trying to save their lives. In their expert opinion, they're going down, they're all going to drown. They didn't wake Jesus immediately, but sought to use all of their skills to survive. At the last moment, they went to Jesus and woke Him up, and He rebuked them. So why did He rebuke them? What did they do wrong? We'll get to that at the end of the sermon. Hold on to that thought.  

Now, I want to talk about Jesus' stunning power over creation. Now we know the wind is beyond all human control. No one can control the wind. As a matter of fact, scripture says it openly. Ecclesiastes 8:8, "No man has power over the wind to contain it."  Or again, John 3:8, "The wind blows wherever it wishes. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it's going." That's the wind. But Jesus, Jesus is the master of all creation. John 1:3, "Through Him, all things were made, and without Him, nothing was made that has been made." And again, Hebrews 1:3, "He is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of His being, sustaining all things by His powerful Word." He made it and He sustains it, that's Jesus. Again, He has effortless power over the wind and the waves, verse 39, "He got up, rebuked the wind, and said of the waves, 'Peace be still.'" Then the wind died down and it was completely calm, by the Word of the Lord alone. No striving, no effort, just sheer power, absolute authority. The power of the Word of Jesus. Now that's the miracle. It's a simple matter of cause and effect. There's nothing miraculous about a storm ending, all storms end, eventually, thank God. But the circumstances here directly link the end of the storm, the sudden end of the storm with Jesus' Word — cause and effect. It was because He said 'Peace be still' that everything was completely calm. That's the miracle. Note both aspects, the wind and the waves died down instantly. This is a miracle beyond all description. The wind instantly stopped this gale force, hurricane wind stops, a staggering amount of power ,just stopped in its tracks. In the text, there's not even a breeze or a gentle zephyr at the end, nothing, it's done. But for me, being more kind of mechanically engineering minded, the stilling of the waves is even more remarkable. How long would that take? The undulating white-capped waves crashing back and forth instantly leveled. Ordinarily, they would've undulated for hours, but it became as flat as a millpond on a still day, all of that at the Word of Jesus' power. 

Why the word “rebuke” in Matthew and Luke? Why does He rebuke the wind and the waves? Matthew 8:26, "He got up and rebuked the wind and the waves, and it was completely calm." Luke 8:24, "He got up and rebuked the wind and the raging waters, the storms subsided and always gone." Why this word “rebuke”? As if the wind and the waves were living beings who were doing something wrong rather than inanimate objects, air molecules or water molecules just doing what physics was telling them to do. There is a sense in which that storm, that devastating hurricane storm is part of this sin-cursed world. It's part of the cursing of nature, that's part of man's sin. And Jesus is Lord of heaven and earth, and He came, we're told in Ephesians 1, as the  plan of God for the consummation of the ages to bring all things in heaven and on earth together under one head, even Christ. So they represent evil and curse, and He came to put it to an end. I think that's why it says “rebuke”. Unruly, wild nature will be subdued, brought into peaceful order in the New Heavens, in the New Earth — more on that at the very end of the sermon. I believe this is the most visually stunning miracle of Jesus' life. No other miracle is as spectacular as this. It's similar to the Red Sea crossing, it's just simply spectacular. Most of Jesus' miracles are quiet, subtle healings, they're not really much to look at. I do not say that the distilling of the storm is His most significant miracle, that's His own resurrection, far more significant than the distilling of the storm. But I'm just saying it was the most spectacular. The healings are just subtle. You think about the paralyzed man. There's nothing spectacular about a paralyzed man getting up off of His pallet and walking home. There's nothing spectacular about a blind man, a man born blind, washing mud off His eyes. Now, it's very significant for those who knew Him, or for those men themselves, it’s very significant, it's just not spectacular. This would've been spectacular, this is entirely different. If you had been there, the sheer spectacle would've taken your breath away. 

Then Jesus rebuked His disciples. He turns to them and rebukes them. He rebukes their lack of faith. He said to His disciples, "Why are you so afraid? Do you still have no faith?" I mean, this is the whole point of the miracle, and indeed of all miracles. It's the point of having the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit having Mark write this down. The lesson is that we, the readers, we who hear about this would have faith in Christ, that we would believe in Jesus as the Son of God. That's the reason for the miracle and the account. The rebuke of His disciples' lack of faith is sharp. He never coddled unbelief,  He never said, "It's okay to not believe in me." Notice also the clear contrast in this account. We'll see it again with Jairus,  and at other times, the clear contrast between faith and fear. Faith and fear  often seem to be opposites in the Bible. Faith drives out fear. If there is this kind of fear, it's because there's a lack of faith.  

Now, after the rebuke, the disciples have another reaction, and what is it? Fear. But it's even greater now. They seem to be more afraid of Jesus in the boat than they were of the storm outside of the boat, and with good reason. This is the presence of Almighty God, the incarnate God in the boat with you. Look at verse 41, “They were terrified and asked each other, ‘Who is this? Even the wind in the waves obey Him.’” Fear is the constant right reaction to the display of the omnipotent Holy God, to us as sinners, as creatures. For example, Elijah and his contest with the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel. Elijah prayed a simple prayer and fire fell from heaven, and burned up the sacrifice and the alter and everything there. And when the people saw this, they fell prostrate and cried, "The Lord, he is God. The Lord, he is God." There's a fear that was filling them at that moment, and so it was with these disciples, fear of the Lord.

The text ends with these two lasting questions that just kind of stand over, and they're timeless questions. Jesus, to His disciples, "Why are you so afraid? Do you still have no faith?" The questioning of Jesus to us and our faith, and then the disciples, to one another, and to the world, "Who is this man? Even the wind and the waves obey Him." So we take those questions and we translate this account into our lives. The point of the Gospel of Mark is to answer the question, “Who is this man?” He is the Son of God, He is your savior. That's who He is, He and no other. Along with that is the constant expansion of our comprehension of what that means. So what does it mean that Jesus is the Son of God? It means this, He can speak to the wind and the waves and they obey Him, that's what it means. He can drive out any demon and they're terrified of Him. He's not afraid of them, they're afraid of Him. There's no disease or sickness He cannot cure instantly with a Word or a touch. He can raise the dead, He can raise you from the dead. That's what it means that Jesus is the Son of God. He can look at you and tell you, based on your faith in Him, your sins are forgiven, and they are. That's who this is, that's who Jesus is. But even more is to apply that faith directly to our lives, and to drive out faithless fears, wherever they may be. Many people readily connect with this account, speaking metaphorically of the storms of our lives. I think that's right actually. All of us have challenges, deeply distressing issues that cause us to writhe and roll and churn like we're being tossed about in a storm. But when we have those storms, we can turn to Christ, the one who stilled the storm to quiet this storm around us, and even more importantly, inside of us. Many songs and hymns capture the sense of Christ's power over the storms of life. I like this one by Casting Crowns, Praise You In This Storm. The lyrics go like this, "I was sure by now, God, you would've reached down and wiped our tears away, stepped in and saved the day. And once again, I say, 'Amen,' and it's still raining. But as the thunder rolls, I barely hear your whisper through the rain, 'I'm with you.' And as your mercy falls, I'll raise my hands and praise the God who gives and takes away. And I'll praise you in this storm. And I will lift my hands, for you are who you are, no matter where I am. And every tear I've cried, you hold in your hand, you never left my side. And though my heart is torn, I will praise you in this storm." Or this one, It Is Well With My Soul. "When peace, like a river, attendeth my way. When sorrows like sea billows roll, whatever my lot thou hast taught me to say, it is well, it is well with my soul." Or one of my favorites, Be Still, My Soul. "Be still, my soul” [second stanza], "Thy God doth undertake to guide the future as He has the past, thy hope, thy confidence, let nothing shake. All now mysterious shall be bright at last. Be still, my soul, the waves and winds still know His voice who ruled them while He dwelt below." Oh, I could multiply these songs. 

 What kind of storm are you going through? I don't know. Maybe you've been through some, or you're just getting ready for the one that's coming and you don't even know what's coming. I don't have a problem with this storms of life approach at all. In fact, it's normal biblical speech. The Bible often uses metaphors to speak of painful trials we endure, of the saving work that God has for His people. Isaiah 4:6 says this, "That saving work will be a shelter and a shade from the heat of the day, and a refuge and a hiding place from the storm and rain." Of the trials we endure in life, the metaphor of passing through water, river, fire, Isaiah 43:1- 2 begins with the simple command, "Fear not. Fear not, for I have redeemed you, I have summoned you by name, you are mine. And when you pass through the waters, I will be with you. And when you pass through the rivers, they will not sweep over you." This seems to be a lasting image, this storms of life approach. Yes, Jesus' miracle was physical, absolutely. I believe that, the account says it. But His ability to bring a peaceful end to our trials is taught again and again, as well as His ability to give us peace in the middle of the storm. So the lasting lesson of this miracle is to trust Jesus and not give way to fear when you're going through a storm.  

So what are the storms of life? It's anything that buffets you and causes you pain, anything. Any trial that rocks your world, knocks you around, maybe even threatens your life itself. We think about the three trials we walk through with Job again and again, remember? Loss of possessions, loss of loved ones, loss of health, those three. To expand, it could be for you a chronic illness. And the treatment, it's just not responding to the treatment. It could be the loss of a child through death, it could be the long goodbye of Alzheimer's with a beloved parent or spouse. It could be a wayward, grown child that just will not submit to Christ. Any news that rocks your world and staggers you and brings you to your knees and brings tears to your eyes and causes you to cry out to God, "Why, Oh Lord?" And then all the more, if that news causes a significant change in the way you have to live your life from that point on, it’s permanent, that's a storm. This text tells us Jesus controls that storm. He wisely brings it, decides how long it's going to last and how severe it will be, and then He is able to bring it to an end.  He's telling you, in the middle of that storm, He is with you. He's speaking to you in the midst of the storm, just like Job, “and God appearing in a whirlwind and speaking in the midst of the storm” to Job, saying, "I'm right in the middle of whatever storm is buffeting you." When He says, "Peace, be still," He's not first and foremost, speaking to your circumstances, He's speaking first and foremost to your soul. Philippians 4:6 and 7, "Be anxious for nothing, but in everything with prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your request to God, and the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus." That's Him saying, "Peace, be still," to your soul.  God has the power to bring supernatural peace to your heart in the midst of the worst storms of your life.

Now, the question I want to ask you is, how are you displaying faithless fear in your life? Where is the faithless fear? I don't know where that is, you have to answer that yourself. Be honest with yourself, where am I displaying a faithless fear? The whole world just went through this COVID pandemic. I wonder if it's possible that there's some people that have been scarred by the experience, and have developed a faithless fear in the midst of it. I don't know, I'm not judging people, I just am asking for people to judge themselves. Where is there an inappropriate fear of death, or fear of disease, or fear of pain or loss that is gripping your soul? Jesus would say, "Why are you so afraid? Where is your faith?" And if that's not it, there are other places. We're susceptible to faithless fears everywhere. He wants us to use our faith to drive away our fear. 

Now, let's circle back on this question. How could the disciples have done better? I mean, it’s a little hard on these guys; the boat's filling with water, what did you want them to do? They didn't know what they're talking about. Yes, they did. They knew better than you, that boat's going down. So why does Jesus rebuke them? Should they have waited longer to wake Jesus? Was God pushing them right to the very brink? I mean, they'd done everything they could, the bailing, all of that. I don't know what they did, but no, God wasn't pushing them to the brink. First of all, they should not been afraid that God would let Jesus drown. I mean, that's not going to happen. By extension, he's not going to let His apostles drown either. Beyond that, they should not have been terrified of death at all, but that won't really come until He conquers death with His resurrection. From then on, they would be delivered a fear of death. But this is where I'm going to land on this one. I think they should have woken Jesus earlier. Why do I say that?  They tried everything they knew to do, everything in their own strength, and at the last resort, they bring Jesus in.  I think that's a bad model for the storm. What do you say? “I’ll do everything I can, and when all else fails, as my last resort, I'm going to bring Jesus in.” Don't do that. Get Him up immediately. "Looking like a storm's brewing, Lord, what do you think?” I think that's what they should have done.  

We're going to end with Jesus' final and eternal power over creation. This awesome miracle shows Jesus' power over all creation. By that power, He's going to bring in a new heaven and a new earth, and the turbulent world of evil will finally be subdued. I want you to contrast these two statements in Isaiah. Isaiah 17:12, "Oh the raging of many nations, they rage like the raging sea. Oh the uproar of the peoples, they roar like the roaring of great waters," along with Isaiah 57:20-21, "The wicked are like the tossing sea which cannot rest, whose waves cast up mire and mud. There is no peace says my God for the wicked." That, with Revelation 4:6, the vision of the throne of God, Almighty God,  “Before the throne of God, there was what looked like a sea of glass, clear as crystal.” A placid sea, there's no hurricanes, no storms in heaven. Jesus, by the power that enables Him to bring everything under His control will transform the universe and get rid of all storms. You can look forward to that. In the meantime, if He wills to bring you through a storm, He does it because He loves you and because He's wise, and He knows how long to make it last.

 Close with me in prayer. Father, we thank you for the time that we've had to look at your Word. And we thank you for the power of your Word, and we thank you for your power over every storm. And now, Lord, as we turn to the ordinance of the Lord's Supper, we pray that you would bless us with your presence through the Holy Spirit. Lord, we pray, Lord, that you would minister in this room through this ordinance. We know that there's nothing special about the bread or the juice, but there's something powerful about the combination of these elements, and the Word of God, and the Spirit of God, and the people of God. So be in our midst now, as we observe this ordinance of the Lord's Supper, in Jesus name. Amen.

Jesus speaks the same message to the destructive storm as He does to our sinful, turbulent souls: "Peace! Be still!"

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Peter recounts the events of Acts 10, defending his action considering the obvious sign of the baptism of the Holy Spirit on the Gentiles.

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Pastor Andy Davis preaches on the Parable of the Mustard Seed, Mark 4:30-34, and unfolds Jesus’ developed manifesto for his plan of worldwide gospel advance.

Prayer: Father, we thank you for the life that we have together, the life that we share. I thank you for the way that we are a family of families and singles who know and love you. And we are involved in each other's lives. I thank you for the Monteros and just the things that we just heard. I'm grateful for their example, role models on how we can use our home as a basis for the gospel. I'm grateful for that. Lord, we thank you for this opportunity in our secular society, this is a designated Father's Day, but we know what a rich, full, beautiful theme fatherhood is. And the fatherhood of God is in the Bible. And Lord, for me, I always think about the father of the prodigal son, who is so filled with love and delight at his sinful son, repenting and coming back and wanting to be with his father. In this cycle of parables that Jesus told of the joy in heaven, over one sinner who repents. Lord, I pray that we who are fathers would be that kind of a father, a loving, merciful, strong, godly man pointing to the fatherhood of God. God, who is a loving and tender hearted father, who is the perfect father. And I pray Lord that we who are fathers would be recommitted to that powerful ministry. Lord, we know that we can't be perfect, but as Jesus himself said, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” And Jesus' whole ministry is to bring people to the Father. We also know that the sign of the new covenant is the spirit of adoption by which we cry out “Abba Father” within us. And we look forward more and more to the delight of that relationship with you, our heavenly Father. And now Lord, we ask that you would send forth that same spirit who ministers to us, testifying with our spirits, that we are children of God. But I pray that now that specific ministry would be in the illumination of the Scripture, the enlightenment, that the eyes of our hearts would be enlightened so that we would understand this parable of the mustard seed, and that we'd be able to understand how it applies to the growing kingdom of God around the world. I pray that you give me special insight and special clarity and special ability to speak in a way that brings about that illumination, that enlightenment. So Lord, speak to us by the Spirit. May the eyes of our hearts be enlightened to understand this passage. And Lord, help us to put into practice the things that we can do in terms of the spreading of the gospel. You've given us a role to play in this cycle of parables in Mark four helps prepare us for that, to help us today to understand. In Jesus' name, amen. 

Turn in your Bibles to Mark 4. What an incredible journey we're making through the Gospel of Mark. It's the great privilege of my life to be able to get up here week after week and exalt Jesus Christ in front of you, to speak of the greatness of our savior of Jesus Christ based on the words of the Gospel of Mark. It's just a great privilege of my life and I'm delighted to do it. Today we're going to look at this Parable of the Mustard Seed. Think in your mind, go back in time to a day, I don't know what month it would've been, maybe April, maybe May, 1989 years ago, maybe almost 2000 years ago, to the most powerful man on earth, the Roman Emperor Tiberius. Imagine him having a meal with some of his close friends or maybe family members. Suddenly, a messenger comes rushing in breathlessly and begs for immediate attention. The room becomes eerily silent. The guests apprehensively put down their goblets to listen to this vital message. Tiberius Caesar Augustus beckons the man forward. The man bows and says, "I have news, almighty Caesar. A Jewish carpenter was crucified in Judea. Furthermore, a small group of 120 Jews who were following him are praying in a small upper room in the city of Jerusalem." Imagine the mighty emperor staring blankly at him. That's it? His Roman empire was the largest the world had ever seen, almost 2 million square miles; as much as one quarter of the world's population, perhaps as many as 60 million people under his daily domination. He commanded the mightiest and most dominant military the world had ever seen, over 300,000 Roman legions that kept a forced peace and Roman rule on all those conquered territories. At Tiberius' slightest word, the world trembled. His policy shaped the lives of all the people who lived under his crushing domination. Why would he possibly care about something so insignificant as the death of a single Jewish man in one of his smaller provinces 1,450 miles away from Rome? Why would he have any interest at all in some tiny band of 120 Jewish fanatics who were praying and waiting in some shabby, second story room in a dusty city of the far east? Why would he possibly care about that? Yet, from that tiny beginning, from a small black granule called a mustard seed, He has spread a mighty kingdom that will outlast every human empire. It came from a microscopic beginning and has come into vast immeasurable glory. That's what today's parable is all about.

Jesus' death was the mustard seed, as were the sacrifices of all his courageous servants to advance the gospel step by step from Jerusalem through Judea and Samaria to the Gentile worlds north, south, east, west from Jerusalem, so that's my approach to this parable. Centrally, it is about Jesus and his death and his growing kingdom. But secondarily, also as a pattern that Christianity follows again and again and again, of small seeds planted that start out insignificantly and grow explosively. Mustard seed after mustard seed dying and causing growth, all of that mysteriously building a spiritual kingdom of genuinely converted souls so vast you can scarcely imagine it. Within three short centuries, and the world moved a lot more slowly back then than it does now, Christianity would explode from the upper room in Jerusalem and conquer, spiritually conquer the mighty Roman empire. So vast and powerful and rapid was that spread that a Roman emperor, Constantine, declared himself to be a worshiper of that Jewish carpenter three short centuries later. Now that would've been inconceivable to Tiberius, but Constantine, whatever he actually believes saw it beneficial. But King Jesus had much bigger designs than the confines of the Roman empire and the limits of just a few centuries. The kingdom of God has grown in every generation, vast, hidden, powerful, eternal life and growth surging through it, so vast it's almost inconceivable how big his kingdom really is. We can't even picture what a multitude greater than anyone could count would look like from every tribe, language, people, and nation.

Today's parable predicted that staggering, stunning, glorious earth-shaking growth, the Parable of the Mustard Seed. Simply put, the lesson of this parable is this, the kingdom of God starts small and grows large. In the words of Zechariah 4:10, “we should not despise the day of small things.” Before I go on into the rest of the sermon, I just wonder if we could take a poll worldwide of 7 billion people plus. How many do you think know Tiberius today? How many people know Jesus Christ today? How would you compare the fame on those two? Just an interesting question. You ought to do that this week. Ask 20, or 30 people that you know, and say, "Have you ever heard of Tiberius", and  see what they say. Come back and give me some stories on those conversations. It'd be interesting where they lead. 

 The context here in Mark 4 is a series of parables. At the end of the section that you just heard read, this was a strategy that Jesus gave of teaching in parables. He did not say anything without using a parable, but when He was alone with his disciples, He would explain everything. So again, as with all the gospels, we're only getting a small sampling of Jesus' teaching, ministry, and of his works. John said that he didn't share everything in his writing because if he did the whole world couldn't contain the books that would be written. So we just have a small sampling of Jesus' teaching ministry and much smaller in Mark than in Matthew and Luke and John. Less of the verbiage of Mark's gospel is given to Jesus's teachings than to any of the other gospels. But we have this in Mark 4, this cycle of parables.

In Mark 1-3, we have the growing spread of the kingdom of God through the ministry of Jesus Christ resulting in huge crowds, overwhelming crowds, crushing, pressing in on him. They're attracted by Jesus' message, but especially by his stunning power over demons and disease and death. But very few of that huge crowd are genuinely converted, very few were there for the true food of the word with hearts and fire for Christ, entering the kingdom of God by faith. Very few. To make matters worse, the official Jewish religious leaders position on him was that He was doing all of these amazing signs by the power of Satan, that He was a blasphemer and a fraud. Jesus says this is blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. The authorities hated Jesus. He certainly was not winning them as friends or influencing them as people, not at all. As an act of judgment then, Jesus taught the crowds in parables that He never explains, then He withdraws in secret with his tiny band of followers. The parables themselves were not the judgment, the lack of explanation of the parables, that was the judgment, just giving the parable and walking away. 

 Along with this was the seeming failure of Jesus' kingdom to take genuine root in very many hearts. Jesus didn't seem to be winning, the kingdom didn't seem to be working.  Jesus' disciples, reading various key passages in the Old Testament, had every reason to expect a vast worldwide messianic domain.  Isaiah 9:7 spoke of a kingdom that would last forever, “Of the increase of his government and peace there will be no end. He will reign on David's throne and over his kingdom, establishing and upholding it with justice and righteousness from that time on and forever. The zeal of the Lord almighty will accomplish this, an eternal kingdom.” Isaiah 49 speaks of a worldwide dominion that would extend to the ends of the earth. Isaiah 49:6, God says to Christ, “It is too smaller thing for you to be my servant, to restore the tribes of Jacob and bring back those of Israel I have kept. I will make you a light for the Gentiles that you may bring my salvation to the ends of the earth.” —so to the end of time, Isaiah 9:7, to the ends of the earth, Isaiah 49:6. 

Isaiah 60 also speaks in glowing terms of the wealth, the richness of the worldwide dominion of Messiah. In Isaiah 60: 3-5, “Nations will come to your light and kings to the brightness of your dawn. Lift up your eyes and look around you. All assemble and come to you. Your sons come from afar. Your daughters are carried on the arm. Then you will look and be radiant. Your heart will throb and swell with joy. The wealth on the seas will be brought to you. To you, the riches of the nations will come.”  Solomon's majestic Psalm 72, a messianic Psalm, exults in the eternal glorious reign of the Messiah. In Psalm 72: 5-11, speaking of the Messiah, the Christ, “He will endure as long as the sun, as long as the moon, through all generations. He will be like rain falling on a mown field, like showers watering the earth. In his days, the righteous will flourish. Prosperity will abound until the moon is no more. He will rule from sea to sea and from the river to the ends of the earth. The desert tribes will bow down before him. His enemies will lick the dust. The kings of Tarshish and of distant shores will bring tribute to him. The kings of Sheba and Seba will present him gifts. All kings will bow down to him and all nations will serve him.” These are just some of the Old Testament prophecies that gave the Jews a very powerful expectation of what the messianic kingdom would be like. There are many others I could read. But instead of this glorious kingdom, most of the Jews at that time, led by their unbelieving jealous, power-hungry leaders were rejecting Jesus as the Messiah. 

Jesus responds by telling these parables with no explanation, leading many of his enemies to say He was demon possessed or out of his mind since these unexplained stories made no sense. Now, privately his disciples were probably wondering similar things. If we just boil it down to, “Is this really it? Is this it? I mean us?” In Luke 13:23, “Someone asked him, ‘Lord, are only a few people going to be saved?’” Think about that question. What's behind that question? “Lord, are only a few people going to be saved? Is it going to be a real small kind of ragged band here?  Even John the Baptist at the end of his life, wondered the same thing. He's in prison waiting to die, and “When John heard in prison, what Christ was doing [Matthew 11:2-3] he sent his disciples to ask him, "Are you the one who is to come, or should we expect someone else?” What is motivating that question? A number of things. But some of it must have been a sense of disappointment at what was happening. It didn't seem like it was big. It didn't seem glorious. Jesus is in some house surrounded by a small, weak band of common people who loved his teachings, and those were the best of the vast crowd that surrounded him and mobbed him day after day for healings. This hardly seemed like the beginning of a vast, glorious Davidic kingdom, a messianic kingdom in which the Gentiles would come and bow down before him. 

In  Mark 4, all of the parables taken together are a glorious, very efficient manifesto on what's going to happen with the kingdom and with the gospel. It includes explanations for people's rejection of the gospel, as well as their acceptance of it. It begins with the parable, the seed and the soils, which we went through. In this most important parable, Jesus gives indications that it's really a gateway parable, that if you understand that parable, you'll understand them all. If you don't understand this parable, you won't understand any of them. So the kingdom of God is like seed that's spread on different soils. Three of the soils produce no final harvest at all. The path, the rocky soil, the thorny soil, they produce no final harvest. Three of the soils produce a harvest of varying levels, 30, 60, even a hundred times what was sown, so do not despise the day of small things, we're getting to that with the mustard seed, instead be very careful what kind of soil, your own soul, your own heart is. That's what matters. Be very careful what kind of soil your heart is. Jesus says the explanations are for the insiders, not for the outsiders at the present time. But the day will come, when the light of the word of God will shine brightly for all to see. Jesus is the light of the world and God did not bring that light into the world to hide under a bowl or a bed. Look at verses 22-23, “Whatever is hidden is meant to be disclosed and whatever is concealed is meant to be brought out in the open. If anyone has ears to hear, let him hear.” In other words, for now, in the context of Mark 4, “for now, my teachings are secret and hidden, but they're not meant to be that way ultimately. We're going to bring them out and it's going to be shining throughout the world. So the real issue is, you better look after yourself. Look after how you hear the word of God. You better be very careful what's going on inside of you when you hear the gospel.” Verse 24-25, “Consider carefully how you hear. With the measure you use, it will be measured to you and even more. Whoever has, will be given more. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him.” If you receive the word of God, the gospel, if you grow in it, you're going to accelerate in that growth, you're going to produce more and more fruit. The measure you use will be measured to you and even more. But for those who hear and do nothing with the word, even what they have is going to be taken from them. So they may have some early understanding of the gospel, some basic understanding but after a while, their hearts will be so hard they won't get anything out of it. 

Last week again, in verses 26-29, we had an agricultural parable and there the sower is scattering seed everywhere. We end up focusing on one plant and the dynamics of the growth of that one plant, this was last week.  He said this is what the kingdom of God is like. A man scattered seed on the ground. Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows though, he does not know how. All by itself, the soil produces grain. First, the stalk, then the head, then the full kernel in the head. Then as soon as the grain is right, he puts the sickle to it because the harvest has come. The basic idea is this, people are responsible to spread the word of God, but God alone can make it grow. They can't do anything to the actual individual inside their heart to bring them to faith in Christ. They can't save them. They can't bring about life. They don't know how that happens, they can't make it happen. They're limited in knowledge, they don't understand the process. They're limited in power. They can't make it happen. But what they can do is they can scatter the seed and then they can take part in the harvest of bringing somebody to Christ. So that was last week.

 Now in today's parable, Jesus is saying, no matter how apparently small the beginnings, the kingdom of God in the end will be immense and spectacular. Wait for it. Don't give up on it just because it appears small. So that's what we're getting to now. Let's dig in and look at it, the Parable of the Mustard Seed, verses 30- 32. Again, He said, what should we say the kingdom of God is like, or what parable shall we use to describe it? It's like a mustard seed, which is the smallest seed you plant in the ground. Yet when planted, it grows and becomes the largest of garden plants with such big branches that the birds of the air can perch its shade. So what is a parable? What does that mean? The Greek word means “to lay alongside,” simply put, it's “this is like that.” We're taking the invisible, mysterious, difficult to understand kingdom of God and we're explaining some aspect of it by something in everyday life that you are very familiar with. So it means to “lay alongside”, the kingdom is like this thing.  Jesus was fond of agricultural parables. He used a lot of them. They weren't the only type, but they were the most dominant type, seeds and soils and plants and things growing.  In general, in terms of interpretation of scripture, parables are best when you focus on the main idea and don't go down rabbit trails of details. Although, I think we can even take that idea too far and say the details are in no way important. You still want to be careful with the details. Don't allegorize, them something like that. So the details are important, but really you want to start with the main idea. 

 And what's the main idea of the parable of the mustard seed? It starts small and gets big. That's the basic idea. Don't worry about the apparent failure of the gospel. The kingdom of God has a small beginning, but in a measurably, glorious and big way, it's going to be really big. Friends, this thing's going to be big. I'm trying to picture. Can you picture what hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions of genuine born again people look like in radiant robes? What's the biggest crowd you've ever seen? It's not hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions. So it's going to be really big, but there's going to be a temptation to be discouraged, because it so frequently looks so small and unimpressive. That's what we're getting at here. 

 Now we have a problem with this whole mustard seed thing. R.C. Sproul spoke of his involvement with the Council for Biblical Inerrancy and he said in that process, he interacted with a former evangelical scholar who is no longer evangelical. He had abandoned his commitment to biblical inerrancy, specifically on the issue of the mustard seed. Jesus was wrong about the mustard seed, so He must be wrong about everything else. I'm like, “oh my goodness.”  All seeds are small, but they weren't impressively, staggeringly small. So I get it. I get the problem.However, I think we should be astounded that an scholar would give up his commitment to inerrancy on this issue. Would you agree with me on that? First of all, what Sproul says is we should not take Jesus' words and extend them to some universal laser accurate statement in every case. They don't work like that. Jesus' statements don't work like that. The gospels don't work like that. For example, in Mark 1:45, it says people came to him from everywhere. Stop right there. Did anybody come from Durham, North Carolina? How about Antarctica? Anybody from the moon? There, that's a place. Look, nobody reads it like that. It says people came to him from everywhere, we kind of just know what that means, from wide areas around. It wasn't just that one town. I think we get it. Secondly, we don't actually know for sure what species of mustard seed he was talking about. We don't know that the seeds in my wife's spice cabinet are the same as what he was dealing with. They probably weren't. Maybe a completely different genetic category.  An expert on YouTube was saying that there are different types of mustard plants, and he actually had in his hand, a cluster of black mustard seeds. They were unbelievably tiny. They look like black powder. They would be the smallest seeds I've ever seen. They didn't look like seeds. Like I said, they just looked like black powder. He pulled a seed off to the side or a little cluster of them because you couldn't get just one. And the camera zoomed in and I'm telling you, these seeds were smaller than the tip of a pin. It was not smaller than the head of the pin, it was smaller than the pointy tip. That's how small the seed was. So I'm going with that. Thirdly, we need to understand in Jewish rabbinic speech, this was a common aphorism. It's like “small as a mustard seed.” It was actually known, Jesus wasn't the first to use it, it’s something really small. So there's like small, smaller and smallest and the mustard seed was how the rabbis talked about smallest, so this was actually common.  The point here is it starts small and grows, the growth of the seed. Jesus says it grows and becomes a small tree, the largest of all garden plants. So no, it does not get as big as a Cedar of Lebanon, but it gets really big. We're talking about the kind of plants that a family would have in a family garden. You can imagine something like that. Research shows that these types of mustard plants would grow as tall as a man, or taller.  That's very big for a small garden patch. Jesus says that they become a tree with such big branches that the birds of the air can settle down perhaps or nest or at least perch in the shade. So they're very big, strong branches. Translated, the kingdom of God is going to start very small, almost microscopic, very small and grow to something vast and broad and dramatic and amazing. 

In my mind, I connect this to the story of Nebuchadnezzar's dream in Daniel 4.  What happens is Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, has a dream. Let me read Daniel 4:10- 12, “I looked and there before me stood a tree in the middle of the land, its height was enormous. The tree grew large and strong and its top touched the sky. It was visible to the ends of the earth. Its leaves were beautiful, its fruit abundant. And on it was food for all. Under it, the beasts of the field found shelter and the birds of the air lived in its branches. From it, every creature was fed.” It's a dream, a vast fruit tree, but very tall, very strong, with big branches and lots of shade. Animals were coming in the shade on the ground, birds on the branches, people eating from the fruit of the tree. Daniel then interpreted the dream. Daniel 4:20- 22, “The tree you saw,” [he's speaking to King Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonian empire], which grew large and strong with its top touching the sky, visible to the whole earth with beautiful leaves and abundant fruit, providing food for all, giving shelter to the beast of the field and having nesting places in its branches for the birds of the air. You, oh king, are that tree. You have become great and strong and your greatness is grown until it reaches the sky. And your dominion extends to the distant parts of the earth.” So Nebuchadnezzar as the head or the king of the Babylonian empire is represented by a vast fruitful, huge leafy tree and everything is clustered around it. In the dream, that tree is condemned to be chopped down, its branches stripped off, the fruits stripped off. The whole thing's laid to waste in that dream. But the tree of the kingdom of God will never be chopped down, it'll never be stripped or laid to waste. Going back two chapters before that in Daniel 2, a different image of the statue with the head of gold, and chest and arms of silver, belly and thighs of bronze, and legs of iron feet,  that whole thing represents a series of empires. Then a stone comes, cut out, but not by human hands, strikes that statue, crushes it, and then it becomes a mountain that fills a whole earth, the kingdom of God. It says in Daniel 2:44, “In the time of those kings, the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that will never be destroyed nor will it be left to another people.” Or as Nebuchadnezzar would say himself, as he wrote chapter 4, as he gave his testimony in Daniel 4, speaking of the kingdom of God, “His dominion is an eternal dominion, his kingdom endures from generation and generation.” So here's the thing, back to the mustard seed. The kingdom of God will be a mighty tree with a vast root system with innumerable leafy fruitful branches that will last forever.  It represents people who come together and bring all of their riches and their glories and all of their salvation stories and all that together in one place, the kingdom of God, the new Jerusalem, the new heaven, new earth. That's what we're talking about here.

Now, what is the mustard seed?  I believe we'll start with Jesus. Jesus is the first mustard seed, his life, his death, his resurrection represents that. We see this again and again with the lamp. Jesus is the lamp, and then we are the lamp. And so again, my approach on this parable is Jesus is the mustard seed,  then we are the mustard seed. But first and foremost, we start with Jesus. We see that with the lamp in Mark 4:21, “Do you bring in a lamp and put it under a bowl or a bed? Instead, don't you put it up on its stand?” What's the lamp? Jesus is the lamp. He says in John 8:12, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” Or again, Isaiah 9:2, “The people walking in darkness have seen a great light and those living the land of the shadow of death, a light has dawned.” But then Jesus said, we are the light of the world. So He's the light of the world, and we’re the light of the world. Matthew 5:14-16, “You are the light of the world. City on a hill cannot be hidden, neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.” So Jesus is the first great light of the world. Then we, following his example, we are also are light to the world. Same thing with the seed, the mustard seed. Or again in John 12:24-26, Jesus said this. “I tell you the truth. Unless a kernel of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains by itself a single seed. But if it dies, it brings forth much fruit.” What is the seed that falls in the ground and dies, and if it dies, it brings forth much fruit? Jesus' own death is the first fulfillment of that. But you know this is a pattern that He is commending, that we would all follow going forward. He makes that plain by the next few verses in John 12. “Unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains a single seed. But if it dies, it brings forth much fruit. The man who loves his life will lose it while the man who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, my servant also will be. My Father will honor the one who serves me.” That's pretty obvious. He's calling us to be seeds that fall in the ground and die. If you're willing to do that, if you're willing to fall into the ground and die, you're going to bear much fruit.  I'm thinking about hospitality. You say, "But Pastor, I'm an introvert." Well, just practice saying that to Jesus on Judgment Day. “Jesus, you know I'm an introvert.  I couldn't do that hospitality thing.” Just picture how that will wash on that day. Once you conclude that will not wash on that day, then be hospitable. “It feels like death to walk across the street and meet my neighbor.” We’ve got to talk about that at a lot of levels. I understand that feeling, but the fact of the matter is I believe John 12:24-26 is talking first about Jesus and then about all of us. It's pretty obvious. He died and rose again and look at all the fruit that's come from that. Therefore, if we die, fall into the ground and die, look at the fruit that'll come from our lives.  

Let's bring that back to the mustard seed. Jesus lived a life, very short ministry time, could have easily never been noticed, falls in the ground and dies, rises again from the dead and establishes the beginning of the kingdom. One hundred twenty believers, a little mustard seed. Then he is calling on us to do the same thing. Guess what's going to happen? We're going to go and minister and the stuff we do is not going to be very impressive initially. But don't be disappointed, don't be discouraged, don't despise the day of small things. Those things start small, but they can get really big. Jesus is going to use the mustard seed analogy later to talk about small acts of faith. They come to him and say, “Oh Lord, increase our faith.” Jesus said in Matthew 17:20, “I tell you the truth, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, move from here to there and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.” The smallest things we do can have an eternal impact. Church history's full of seemingly minor movements and moments that end up having a massive impact even for all eternity. We can easily become discouraged and say what difference does anything I do make at all. We can despise the day of small things[ Zachariah 4:10]. The Jews had come back after the exile, they're in rubble-filled Jerusalem. They got to rebuild the wall, but they also have to rebuild the temple. It's the center of the Jewish religion, the old covenant religion. They eventually do rebuild the temple, but the old timers remembered Solomon's temple in all of its glory, and they weeped and moaned and lamented over this small shabby looking substitute temple.  Zachariah 4:10 says, “Do not despise the day of small things. God has the power to take small acts of obedience and make something great of it.”

What are some examples of mustard seeds that we can plant? I think about the daily work of a mother singing, “Jesus Loves Me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so,” to her baby, and just doing that night after night, after night, after night, singing that song. Then all the other things that the mom does to pour the gospel into the growing child over the years. I'm telling you, she has some hard days.  It doesn't look like the kingdom of God is growing inside this child. But don't despise the day of small things, the little beginning, you don't know what that child's going to grow to become. Or imagine a man who just makes it a habit to go to a certain coffee shop and get to know the baristas there and has a particular relationship with one of the baristas and  feels led to just keep saturating that relationship, that conversation with gospel things like something we heard in church, or I'm praying for you or just different things. You can imagine one time making a comment and you don't have any idea that comment reminds that person of something that was said to them by a Christian relative or by a Christian roommate or friend years ago. You had no way of knowing what that comment would do. You had no way of knowing that they couldn't get to sleep that night because they knew something was up and the person comes to faith in Christ. But it's just some comment you made, you didn't even know the power of it, the impact of it. Little moments of faithful service, write an encouraging note on the bill and leave a good tip. You can leave a generous tip with something that you write to encourage the person. You never know if that comes at precisely at a time somebody's hurting for cash. You follow an inner-prompting from the Spirit, calling a lost friend from college, just to say hi, and you didn't realize that she was sliding toward suicide, toward depression. You had no idea. You didn't know what was going on. You just wanted to call and say, hello. A little thing, a little act of obedience. Or secret patterns of prayer for missionaries. We have missionaries that are serving on the field. You could just say on that day, I'm going to pray for this missionary family. We're going to lift them up and pray for them. You don't know, but that is exactly the moment they needed prayer, where there's something going on in their city, something with the security. Maybe their position's compromised or they're in some danger from persecution, or it could be just an opportunity like coffee shop or a person that they're meeting., and that's the time that you are praying for them. 

Like the widow giving her two tiny copper coins and then together make up a fraction of a penny. How many children put in money in the offering plates going by? You don't have any idea what that pattern of giving is going to grow to in their lives, how generous they're going to be when they're adults, because they early on had that pattern of giving. The mustard seeds of faith, mustard seeds of sacrificial service, growing into big things later. A word, a prayer, a gift, an act of kindness, a gesture, encouraging note, or a Bible study you start and there's two people that show up. Don't worry about the numbers, just be faithful and teach God's word to the people that show up. Don't despise the day of small things. 

How big is this thing going to get? Really big. The glorious consummation of Christ kingdom. Of course, there's this famous verse Revelation 7:9-10, “After this, I looked and there before me was a multitude greater than anyone could count, from every nation, tribe, people, and language standing before the throne in front of the lamb wearing white robes and they're holding palm branches in their hands. And they were saying, ‘Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne and to the lamb.’” Awesome. Picture it. It started shabby and small, one hundred twenty people in an upper room. That's it. Look how big it's going to be. In the language of Daniel 4 and Nebuchadnezzar's dream, “these are the fruit and the animals and the birds from the ends of the earth that come to live under the shade of Christ forever.” You know what I think? It's never going to stop growing.  I think procreation will end, there won't be new people added to the kingdom, but it does say in Isaiah 97 of the increase of his government and peace, there will be no end. So just go with increase that never ends. How is that? In the estimation of the greatness of Christ in what he did to build his kingdom forever, that's a dynamic heaven. That's what I would commend to you.

From Jerusalem to the ends of the earth, the death of one man, Jesus Christ, changed all of human history. So also the tiny cluster of ordinary people, twelve apostles, and a few other people there in the upper room. Then the Holy Spirit poured out on them in the day of Pentecost, and they poured out in the streets to change the world. They moved out in Jerusalem. They spread out boldly from there through Judea. Philip and some others brought the gospel to the Samaritans and they won the Samaritans to Christ. Then Philip was led by the Spirit to go talk to an Ethiopian eunuch and led him to faith in Christ. He goes down the Nile river, the upper Nile and lives out his Christian life there in Ethiopia. Merchants and tradesmen and travelers and caravans and soldiers posted to different places in the distant places in the Roman empire, going along ancient trade routes, coastal traders poking along the inlets and cliffs and coastlines of the Mediterranean Sea and the east coast of Africa. Apostles took the gospel as far as India and probably as far west as Spain. The tiny mustard seed of one hundred twenty believers began to turn the world upside down for Christ, and this amazing pattern has continued to our day. You got Moravians that have the idea of winning slaves on plantations. In the early 18th century, they began the Protestant missions movement. William Carey, a Baptist, took the gospel to India. Just one man, Adoniram Judson, and his wife, Nancy brought the gospel to Burma, and led tens of thousands of Burmese Christians. Just one person getting off a boat, starting small. Hudson Taylor, going to the inland regions of China. By the end of his life, the China inland mission was responsible for 50,000 -75,000 Chinese believers. Just the vision of one individual. David Livingston in the heart of the dark continent, an explorer and missionary. Christianity claims hundreds of millions of converts from every nation on earth. The church of Jesus Christ is bigger than you think it is. And it's not just famous missionaries, unnamed evangelists have walked courageously across the street or across the office space. You're like, “Man, that takes courage. You don't know my boss.” No, I don't know your boss, but I had one of those bosses, and you feel led by the Lord to go share your faith with your boss. It takes courage, but the Lord can bless it. 

So what lessons, first and foremost, come to Christ. If you don't know Christ, if you haven't trusted in him, just let me tell you simply, your sins can be forgiven right now. All you have to do is call on the name of the Lord. Jesus. You've heard the basic facts of the gospel. Jesus died. He rose again. If you repent and believe, your sins are forgiven. So come to Christ, let the gospel start in your life and then spread and take over. 

What about you Christians? Don't despise the day of small things here in Durham. As we look at our city of Durham, it's easy to get discouraged. I mean, we're greatly outnumbered. Have you noticed? We are greatly outnumbered here, but it's an opportunity. People are pouring in. God's bringing them here. They're living, they're putting up apartments and houses and condos and they're pouring in. Don't you want our church to be part of God's solution to that? Don't you want us to be among the answers that He knows we are going to not just have people come here and they'll hear the gospel, but that we pour out like they did in Pentecost, out into the streets and they'll hear it from us. Let's not despise the day of small things. Finally, look forward to the consummation of the kingdom, feed your heart. Read Revelation 21 and 22, read it regularly. Feed your heart with how big this whole thing's going to get.

Close with me in prayer. Lord, thank you for the power of the word of God. We thank you for the Gospel of Mark for what it teaches us about Jesus as the son of God and the kingdom of the son of God. And I pray that we would learn this parable of the mustard seed, that though the seed was so tiny, you could barely see it, it had an amazing impact in the end. I pray that we would trust you for big things, that we would pray that you would work big things in our midst. Give us courage to be hospitable, courage to share the gospel at work, at home, in different places. And we pray in Jesus' name, amen.

The parable of the mustard seed shows the power of faith. God can use even small actions to do great things for the kingdom.

The post The Mustard Seed: From Tiny Beginnings to an Immeasurable Empire (Mark Sermon 20) appeared first on Two Journeys.

In this episode, Andy and Wes discuss the beginning of the gospel advance into the Gentile world, with the encounter of Peter and Cornelius.

The post Acts Episode 20: The First Gentile Converts to Christ appeared first on Two Journeys.

Pastor Andy Davis preaches a sermon on Mark 4: 26-29 and explains what Christians can and cannot do for the advance of the gospel of Christ.

 Turn in your Bibles to Mark 4. We're going to be looking at this incredible little parable, a parable only found in the Gospel of Mark, not found in Matthew or Luke or John. I'm going to begin with a story from church history which I find fascinating. Luke Short was a healthy farmer who lived in colonial New England had reached his hundredth year. He was a hundred years old, but as yet he had not been converted, he had not trusted in Christ for the salvation of his soul. One afternoon, there in Colonial New England, he sat in a field and his mind went back over his long life, back to his boyhood years in Dartmouth, England, before he sailed for America. At the age of 15, he heard a sermon preached by the great puritan preacher, John Flavel. He was preaching on the text, "If any man loved not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be a cursed." [1 Corinthians 16:22]. Flavel focused on the horror of dying under God's curse. Eighty-five years later, Luke Short, sitting in that field under a tree, felt the fear of God come on him and repented and trusted in Christ; he found forgiveness.  I wonder what was going on for those 85 years, don't you? I feel that in part this little parable that we're going to study today, addresses that, a secret working of the Spirit of God within the hearts of individuals, after they have received the seed of the gospel, that eventually produces the harvest of salvation in that person's life. A secret working of God that we cannot understand, and we cannot affect, we cannot bring it about, but only God can. That's what this parable is about.

Now in this, I believe that the Lord Jesus is alleviating from us a crushing burden that none of us can bear. Mark 4 is an incredible chapter. It begins with the parable of the seed and the soils, various soil types and various outcomes. Then he continues to teach other aspects of the spreading of the seed and of the spread of the gospel.

At that point, the Twelve apostles did not know that they were going to be given the responsibility of the great commission and through them also, we, all of us, every generation of Christian, the responsibility of the great commission, given in each of the four gospels and also in the Book of Acts. That we are to take the gospel and go to the ends of the Earth and spread the gospel everywhere and make disciples and baptize them in the name of the Father and the Son of the Holy Spirit and then teach them to obey everything that Christ has commanded. We are given that responsibility. But in the midst of that, we must understand our limitations, our limited role. Jesus would lift from us a crushing burden that we cannot bear. Matthew 23 talks about the Scribes and Pharisees in many ways, their judgmental ways. One of the first things Jesus says about the Scribes and Pharisees is that they lay crushing burdens on people and they are not willing to lift a finger to move them [Matthew 23:4]. In Acts 15, Peter talks about a yolk, or a burden, that neither we nor our fathers have been able to bear, a crushing burden. 

What is the burden here? Suppose that you believe that the eternal destiny of specific people, or a specific person, was completely up to you. You had to devise a way to win a person or a set of lost people. You had to pick the locks of their personalities, of their particular perspectives and their culture, so that the locked gates of their hearts would swing open to Christ. You had to figure that out and that if you failed, they would spend eternity in hell, wailing and gnashing their teeth, crying in agony, ultimately, because you failed to deliver the gospel, the perfect work of Christ. You failed to deliver it to them and find a way to win them to Christ. That I tell you is a crushing burden that no one can bear. Getting more specific, imagine if the Lord pointed to some coworker, or a neighbor, or a group of neighbors, or for a missionary, let's say an unreached people group assigned to you. You're the only missionary unit working on that unreached people group or a massive city in Asia with 20 million people, and the Lord were to say to you, "Their eternal destiny depends on you finding a way to actually bring them to Christ. I have done my part, shed my blood. Now it's up to you to do your part." Well, if that doesn't crush your spirit, I don't know what would. Perhaps just as bad would be somebody that says, "I can do that." You rise to the occasion, and you do find a way and you do bring in someone to Christ, and then you arrogantly boast as though somehow you had achieved some great thing. That you are in some way, just as responsible for their salvation as Jesus was. That would be insufferable to listen to that for all eternity up in heaven. Both sides are bad, as with any faithless self-reliance, it brings you to either despair or arrogance, depending on whether you think you can meet the challenge. 

To cut all of that off, Jesus gives us this little parable, this beautiful little parable. It's extremely humbling actually, but it's also incredibly encouraging. If you look at it properly, listen to the words again. Mark 4:26-29, "He also said, this is what the kingdom of God is like. A man scatters seed in the ground. Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how. All by itself, the soil produces grain. First, the stalk, then the head, then the full kernel in the head. As soon as the grain is ripe, he puts the sickle to it because the harvest has come."

This is kind of a simple restatement of the parable. As evangelists, as spreaders of the word of God, as farmers of the gospel, we have a limited role, we scatter the seed on the ground. Then we do nothing else within this parable. We cannot give life. Life comes apart from anything we possibly can do. Whether we are awake or asleep, the word of God does it all. All by itself, the soil produces grain. But we, who have scattered the seed, have no idea how it happens. It has nothing to do with our power or our knowledge. It is God alone that gives life. God alone that gives spiritual growth. We get to scatter the seed and then we get to go to bed and sleep. God does everything else. What really matters? God gives life. We cannot. 

 God's reason, it seems to me for all of this, is very plain. He alone gets the glory for this salvation of souls, that He alone takes responsibility for the condemnation of souls. God is everything. He's absolutely sovereign in salvation, as I Corinthians 1:31 says, "As it is written, let him who boasts, boast in the Lord." We are humbled by this. We're also greatly encouraged as well. We're going to talk now about what we gospel farmers can do and what we cannot do. Then I'm just going to go over the same thing again and just intensify it and speak about what we gospel farmers must do and what we must not do.  

 Let's begin with what gospel farmers can do. One of the key interpretation principles for me for this parable is the insight that the one who sows the seed here is not Christ. It's not Jesus here. It is true in the parable of the wheat and the tares. The one who sows the wheat and the weeds is Jesus. The one who sows the good seed is the Son of Man [Matthew 13:37]. But here, this man who sowed knows nothing about how the seed grows. Friends, that's not Jesus. Jesus knows everything about how the seed grows. But this man doesn't know anything about it and he can do nothing about it. He cannot make it grow and he sleeps. The gospel farmer is anyone who scatters the word. So, what can ordinary gospel farmers like you and me do? First, they can scatter the seed of the word. Look at verse 26, “This is what the kingdom of God is like. A man scattered seed in the ground." Jesus began most of his parables with this kind of introduction. Like, “The kingdom of heaven is like…” Or, "This is what the kingdom of God is like," something like that. What does that mean? The kingdom of heaven in Matthew, the kingdom of God in Mark and Luke, the same thing, is this spiritual domain where God rules over subjects who are delighted to have him ruling over them. We enter the kingdom of God by repentance and faith in Christ. That's what the kingdom of God is like. When Jesus is telling parables, he's saying, "This is how the king does his business. This is how the kingdom works. This is an aspect of the way that the king does his work in his kingdom. That's how the parables work."

He begins by saying, “A man scatter seed on the ground.” We already talked about the seed and the soils. The seed is the word of God, more specifically, especially the Gospel. It could be any teaching from scripture but I think especially it focuses on the Gospel, the pinnacle of scripture teaching. So the seed is the word of God. There is almost nothing said about the person who scatters the seed. It could be a man, could be a woman, could be a boy, could be a girl. It doesn't matter, it’s not really addressed. He or she is unremarkable. There's nothing special about this person at all and the role is simple, scatter the seed on the ground. There's no plowing mentioned. There's no preparation of the soil here. There's no building of a protective wall or a watch tower or a wine press or any of that equipment. Those are mentioned in other parables, not here. Simply put, this sower speaks the word of God to another human being. They just speak the Gospel to another person.

It could be a pastor preaching a sermon like I am right now, or it could be a neighbor speaking the gospel to another neighbor over tea, some hospitality and chance to share the gospel. It could be a passenger sitting in next to another passenger on a plane and talking about the gospel. It could be a coworker with another coworker at a coffee break, speaking the gospel. It could be a mother speaking the gospel to her growing children in their home. Gospel workers can do this as much as they like, and I will exhort you at the end of the sermon to do it more than you've ever done it before. But Jesus makes very little of the process. There's nothing simpler than scattering seed on the ground. So picture yourself within the parable. You're walking through the field, you have a bag slung across, crosswise on your chest, and a bag of seed on your hip and you reach in and you pull a fist full of seed and you just scatter it. I mean, if you have any intelligence, you're going to go in an organized pattern through the field. You don't want to dump it all in one area. That wouldn't take long, but that would be pretty stupid. So there'd be an intelligence moving through, but you're just reaching in throwing seed. Reaching in, scattering seed. You do it again and again.  You go through and scatter the seed, and then you've sown the entire field. This is the first thing that the parable says that we gospel farmers can do.

Next, it says a gospel farmer can harvest the crop. Verse 29 for me is a very important key to this parable, so listen carefully here. "As soon as the grain is ripe, he puts the sickle to it because the harvest has come." So the same one that scattered the seed and the parable does the harvesting too. When the grain is right, it is ready to be harvested. What is that harvest? That's the important question here. What is the harvest? It's one of two possibilities. The growth and development of the seed could be the entire Christian life, including all of the fruitfulness that comes through that entire life, like in the parable of the seed and the soils in the 30, 60, a hundred times, what was sown, that kind of thing. Full life. Full fruit. Full growth, whatever. But if that's true, what is the harvest? That would be death, or the second coming. Can I just tell you simply, you're not going to do that, you're not the grim reaper. You don't have any role in ending someone else's life. You're not the Lord coming in the clouds.  So the harvest must be something else, and it's the other option which is the bringing of a person to an initial clear profession of faith in Christ. They are now a Christian. They've come into the kingdom. This is the exact kind of language that Jesus uses in John 4. You remember the conversation he had with the Samaritan woman. They have an incredible conversation, just the two of them, and she finally concludes that Jesus is the Messiah that they've been waiting for all those centuries. He's the one. So she leaves her water jar there and runs into the Samaritan village and she rouses all of her fellow villagers to come out and see Jesus, come out and see this man that I've been talking to, told me everything I've ever done. Could this be the Christ? She is effective in bringing them all out.

Meanwhile, the disciples who are in the Samaritan village had been buying lunch to go.  They brought lunch, to go out to Jesus. They said, "It's time to eat,” and Jesus said, "I have food to eat that you know nothing about." Could somebody have brought him lunch? What's going on in the minds of the disciples?  They're in this whole Samaritan village with a bunch of lost people and all they do is buy food. Jesus, I think, effectively rebukes them. "I have food to eat you know nothing about. My food is to do the will of Him who sent me and finish his work. Do you not say four months more and then comes the harvest? I tell you, lift up your fields and look at them. They're ripe for harvest. Even now the reaper draws his wages. Even now he harvests the crop for eternal life, so that the sower and the reaper may be glad together, thus the saying, one sows and another reaps is true. I sent you to reap, what you have not worked for. Others have done the hard work and you reaped the benefit of their labor.” [John 4:35-38] We have a reaping we can do in this life, and what is that reaping? It is to be present when that person crosses over from death to life. You've done all that work, they're at the response, and you're pleading with them to repent and believe and they do. They become Christians and you get to do the reaping in that sense. The Samaritans say[John 4], talking to this woman who says because of Jesus’ words, many more became believers, they said to the woman, "We no longer believe just because of what you said. We have now heard for ourselves and we know, we know that this man is the Savior of the world." They have been reaped.  They've been brought into the barn spiritually, they're Christians. 

Who did the reaping that day? Jesus did, in that sense, but we have the possibility also of doing some reaping.  Wouldn't you love to be part of that reaping? When you confirm that a person who has heard the word of the Gospel, the word of Christ, and has believed it as it says in John 5:24, "Whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me, has eternal life, and will not be condemned. He has crossed over from death to life." When you're there watching them cross over and they get to the other side and like, "Did I make it? Am I on the other side?" You get to say, "You are. You are now alive. Your sins are forgiven. Hallelujah. You are a Christian." As it says in John 20, "If you forgive anyone their sins, they are forgiven. If you do not forgive, they're not forgiven." That's messenger language. We're not the God of all the world, but we get to declare to people, “You are forgiven. You're a Christian. Welcome to the kingdom of God.” That's the reaping. Soon after that, I think as Christians, we would call for water baptism, make disciples, baptize them and teach them to obey. That'd be part of confirming the reaping. As it says, in Acts 2:40-41, "With many other words, you warn them and pleaded with them, save yourselves from this corrupt generation." That's Peter on the day of Pentecost. He's warning them, pleading with them.  Three thousand accepted his message and were baptized and became members of the church that day. 

Gospel farmers can scatter the seed of the word, and they can reap. They can bring in the harvest. What else can they do? They can sleep, and they can get up. It's like, do we really have permission to sleep? You do. That's what this guy in the parable does. After he scattered the seed, he went to bed. In verse 27, "Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how." In other words, they can live their ordinary lives. They can go about their business. They can lie down knowing they've done their job and not be panicked about the outcome. The weight of their eternity does not rest on them. They can rest confidently, they can wake up, and they can get up and make breakfast and go about their work and maybe they'll do more seed sewing that next day. But the secret growth belongs to God. That's what the gospel farmers can do. 

What can the gospel farmers not do? They cannot give life, they cannot give growth. In verse 27-28, "Night and day, that whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how. All by itself, the soil produces grain. First, the stalk, then the head then the full kernel in the head." Life itself may be the greatest mystery in this physical world. The most skilled farmer has no idea how the apparently lifeless seed germinates, puts forth the first shoot in the soil, the root. He doesn't have any idea how that happens. Even the most brilliant botanist or biologist who has spent hundreds, thousands of hours studying the germination of seeds and can describe with interesting terminology step-by-step what happens, but doesn't know really, because life is a mystery. It's a mystery of life. We cannot create life, only God can do that. The farmer, once he's scattered the seed all over the field, takes off the bag. He hangs it up in his barn. He washes up and eats dinner with his wife and kids. He goes to bed, wakes up the next morning, and he knows enough to leave the seed alone because there's nothing he can do to make the seeds grow, to germinate, to do all the amazing things that seeds do in the ground. He can't give that initial life, he can't make it grow. Imagine he goes out later, and there's all these little shiny green things coming up, row upon row. He's like, "Come on. Come on. Grow." He gets down and starts tugging on it. Leave it alone, you can't make it grow. He can do nothing. The man can do nothing. He knows nothing. Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how. The farmer's power and skill contribute nothing to the life. He does not understand the process.  The soil does everything. Look at verse 28. "All by itself, the soil produces grain. First the stalk, then the head, then the full kernel in the head.”  It's automatic or by itself. The same word is used in Acts 12:10, when Peter is rescued miraculously from prison and from being killed. “They passed through the first and second guards and they came to the iron gate, leading to the city. It opened for them automatically, just by itself, and they went through it.” The use of the word by Jesus here means the farmer contributes nothing to the life and growth of the seed. The soil seems to do it by itself. That's actually not true. We know the real truth is God gives the growth. Here is the humbling parallel passage. In 1 Corinthians 3:6-7 the apostle Paul is speaking to the Corinthian church, "I planted the seed. Apollos watered. But God made it grow. So neither he who plants, nor he who waters is anything, but only God who makes things grow." What does it mean if we are not anything? It means we are nothing. God is everything. That's humbling, isn't it? But it's also encouraging. God makes things grow. God is everything. 

Let's connect this to gospel work. Romans 1:16 says, "The gospel is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes." But that's only true if God adds the secret work of the Spirit to those who hear it. You know it's true. It's not all by itself, automatic. Many people hear the gospel and never repent and believe. But it's when God adds the second, the secret work of the Spirit within the heart of the individual, that life comes. How does that happen? If the harvest is the person's coming to Christ and if the planting of the seed is their first hearing of the gospel, that's the process between those two moments. That's very interesting. Look what it says, verse 28, "First the stalk, then the head, then the full kernel in the head, then that harvest comes." That must mean that there are unconverted, elect people, who have heard the word, have not yet trusted in Christ and stuff's going on inside them. They're thinking about it. I planted the seed and Apollos watered. There's things going on in the secret of their heart in the recesses of their heart. Like what? Conviction of sin starts to grow. Fear of hell starts to grow. A yearning for heaven starts to grow. Most importantly, the beauty of Christ and the sufficiency of Christ death on the cross and his resurrection starts to grow. Christ becomes more and more meaningful, but the person is still not yet converted. That sense of the beauty and a yearning for heaven and a rising terror of the judgment of God, all of that, is part of it. There are secret inducements, secret persuasions, coming to the mind, maybe even some sleepless nights.

Now to back this up, there's a lot of verses I could use, but you remember the third telling of the conversion of Saul of Tarsus in the book of Acts, adds a piece of information the other two didn't give us and that's where you remember the light strikes Saul of Tarsus to the ground, and from heaven comes a voice [Acts 26:14], "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?" And then He says, "This is Jesus. It is hard for you to kick against the goads." That's interesting. What are goads? They are sharpened stakes, put behind a beast of burden that's yolked up and pulling a plow, let's say, to keep it from kicking back at the master. They're sharp and the animal learns not to do that.  Saul, pre-conversion Saul, was kicking against the goads. What are they? Secret inducements, persuasions, maybe some of the doctrine of Stephen. How Stephen died, how his face looked like the face of an angel and Saul was there giving consent to his death. But one preacher said Stephen's doctrine, his persuasions, his sermon and his manner of death, put a ticking time bomb inside the mind of Saul of Tarsus that went off on the Road to Damascus, in a good way, bringing him to salvation. That's the stalk the head, the full kernel. There's a process going on inside them, and yet amazingly there's still dead in their transgressions and sins, even while they live. So it's just not that simple. There are things that are going on inside that will eventually lead them to faith in Christ.

We can't do it. We cannot affect that conversion. Like it says in John 1: 12-13, "To all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God. Children that were born not of the blood or of the will of the flesh, or of the will of man, but born of God." That means that you can't do it. Only God can do it. Also, a few chapters later in John 3 Jesus says to Nicodemus, verses 6-8, "Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the spirit gives birth to spirit. You should not be surprised at my saying you must be born again. "The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from and where it is going. So it is with everyone who is born of the spirit." It’s interesting. He's telling those words to an unconverted man. To the end, he would be converted. There's internal truth and processes going on, so the Spirit moves wherever He chooses. People scatter the seed of the word but it is the Spirit that gives life. Two people could be sitting side by side, hearing the same message. One is converted and the other is not. There is nothing the evangelist can do to make it happen. He must simply deliver the word and leave the rest to the secret inner working of the spirit of God.

What gospel farmers must do. We must diligently, diligently scatter the seed. Though the parable is meant to humble us and put us in our place, to give all praise and glory to God for all spiritual life and growth, yet we have a vital role to play. We must scatter the seed. We must preach the gospel to lost people. We must do this more than we have ever done it before. Some have one role, some have another. I'm called on to preach in this manner. Most people aren't. But others can share in the workplace, in the neighborhood, at family gatherings, at supermarkets, at your kids' little league games, at the doctor's office, at coffee shops. We have the ability to do this. We have the calling to do this. What some called “broadcast seed sowing.”  What does that mean? Scattering it widely, lots of seed. I have a broadcast seed sower in my crawl space. I bring it out at certain times to scatter seed on my lawn.  It's got a little hopper and you walk and it just spews them everywhere, so it saves me from having doing this, by hand, like the guy in the parable.  I don't mean when I say broadcast using radio or the internet or social media. You can do all that, but that's not what I mean now. I mean lots and lots and lots of gospel encounters, not one or two. That it actually would be an odd day in which you don't say something to a lost person about Christ. Wouldn't you love to get to that point where you're just consistently saying something about Christ? Ask the Lord to work it in you. We must do this, for God is committed to us the ministry of reconciliation. 2 Corinthians 5:20, "As though God himself, we're making his appeal through us, we implore you, we beg you be reconciled to God." Can you imagine saying that to someone this week, “I’m an ambassador of heaven. I want you to know Christ, ”? Find the best words but we are called on for this role, more than ever before. 

 Charles Spurgeon talking about this, saying, "The seed should be sown often. Sow again and again, for many of the foes of the wheat, and if you repeat not your sowing, you may never see a harvest." If you have this one seed and you're just once a week, there it is. I did my job. That's not it. He says, "Sow and sow and sow. Lots. No tribe of man, no peculiar constitution of the human mind may be neglected by us. Not the highly educated or the uneducated, not the rich or the poor. There's no one we can leave out." Then Spurgeon said, "Whenever Captain Cook, the celebrated explorer, landed in whatever part of the earth it might be, he took with him a little packet of English seeds and he was observed to scatter them in suitable places. He would leave the boat and wander up from the shore, go a little inland. He said nothing to anybody, but quietly scattered English seeds, wherever he went, so that he belted the world with flowers and herbs of his native land. So imitate him wherever you go. Sow spiritual seed in every place that your foot shall tread upon. Some of you, before long will be at holiday.” That's vacation at the seaside. I guess this was right before the summer in England. I don't know. “Some of you before long, will be at on holiday at the seaside or amidst the mountains of Switzerland. If that's you, talk to me. At least show me the pictures when you get back. The mountains of Switzerland or some other regions of the earth, in search of the variety and beauty of the world, carry the heavenly seeds with you and be not satisfied unless in every place, you let fall a grain or two that may bring forth fruit onto your God. So we can, we must, scatter seed, broadcast seed.”

Secondly, we must expect God for results. Expect God to bring in a harvest. In the parable, the man sleeps peacefully knowing he's going to have a harvest. He doesn't think, "Gee, I hope we have a harvest." No. I mean, he's a farmer. His family depends on it. He's been a farmer for many years. He's expecting a harvest. Spurgeon said, "I fear that many Christians work without faith. If you have a garden or a field and you sow seed in it, you would be very greatly surprised and grieved if it did not come up at all. But many Christian people seem quite content to work on and they never reckon upon results, so much as to look for it expectantly. This is a pitiful kind of working. Pulling up empty buckets, year after year. Surely I must either see a result for my labor and be glad, or else failing to see it, I must be ready to break my heart." We ought to expect results. If we had expected more, we should have seen more. But a lack of expectation has been a great cause of failure in God's workers. I think they go together. If you really expect to harvest you're going to sow more seed. If you really don't expect to harvest, you're not going to sow much.

Now, what gospel farmers must never do. We covered this a few weeks ago, but I'm going to say it again. We must never re-engineer the seed if it doesn't give the harvest we think it should give. That's not for us to do. If we take the seed of the gospel and do a feedback loop with audience reaction and we start taking out offensive elements like the blood, the atoning blood, or the exclusivity of Christ, the need for repentance and faith in Jesus, the law with its moral stipulations condemning us, apart from the work of Christ to hell. If we take out things like that and make the message more popular. If we re-engineer the seed and make a manmade gospel, Paul tells us in Galatians, "That is no gospel at all. It'd be better for you to be condemned than to preach a manmade gospel." We must never re-engineer the seed. 

Secondly, we must not question the approach. I'm not saying that we can't do better, make certain that we didn't give offense where we should. I'm not saying that, but I mean the general approach of evangelism. Some people think to come up with techniques like within a church service, if you get the lighting right, and the music right, and the whole experience right, and the architecture right and all that, you set up all that things, you can get the response. Like they're engineering the whole thing. Or the prosperity gospel that seeks to bribe converts. We don't have enough money in our budget to bribe converts here in the Raleigh-Durham area—$500 for each convert. It's not just that they won't be genuine converts. They were called “rice bowl Christians” in other ages. They're coming for different reasons. That's the prosperity gospel. That's not the true gospel. We're not called on to do that. We must never re-engineer the gospel message or question the basic simple approach of evangelism. 

Thirdly, we must not sleep, the sleep of the lazy.  Yes, this man sleeps after he has done his work—after he is done his work. There is a confident, holy sleep that we can take when we have done the work God's called on us to do. As Ecclesiastes, 5:12 says, "The sleep of a labor is sweet, whether he eats little or much.” But there is also the sleep of the gospel sluggard in which we are asleep to the perishing all around us, sinfully asleep to their condition. As it says in Proverbs 10:5, "He who gathers crops in summer is a wise son, but he who sleeps during harvest is a disgraceful son." Let's not sleep during the harvest, now is the harvest time. 

Let me make a final appeal and then we'll be done. Really the whole sermon's been an appeal, but I must conclude by appealing directly to you who came to church this morning, lost. You came to church this morning, knowing yourself to be unconverted. You've heard the gospel, multiple times today.  There it was, A to Z, the gospel. Wes had the gospel, a simple summary of the gospel when he introduced one of the songs. The gospel is simple and straightforward. The God of heaven is king of all the earth, created all things, and gives us laws by which we are to govern our life. We have broken those laws. We have violated his commands. We are sinners, and we cannot save ourselves. So God sent his son, who lived a sinless life, died in our place under the wrath of God, the punishment we deserve was laid on him. He died for us and He was risen from the dead on the third day and if we repent and believe in him, we'll be forgiven. You've heard it.

The danger of me giving you that Luke Short story, remember that guy that waited 85 years to be converted, is that you don't know that you have 85 days or 85 minutes. You don't know how much longer you have. While there's time, if today you hear his voice, don't harden your heart, come to Christ. And you Christians who came in here, and you are Christians, and you know that you're Christians, I'm just going to ask you, what are your habits of seed sowing? Are you scattering seed or not? And if not, ask the Lord to transform. Ask the Lord to give you opportunities to reach your hand into the bag and start scattering seed.

I want to say a final word to Christian parents. This is a fascinating parable for Christian parents. You sowed the seed in your kids a long time ago, and now something's going on inside them and it's mysterious, isn’t it? The stalk is growing up. Then the head, then the full kernel in the head. At some point, you get the privilege of harvesting. I don't know when that is. It might be when they are very young, or it might be a little bit older. But that secret working of the gospel, going on, trust in that. Pray for God to do that working and then go to sleep at night. It's not up to you to save your kids. It is something only God can do, so saturate them with the gospel, pray for them, and then let God do that secret work in their hearts. 

Close with me in prayer. Father, thank you for the time we've had in your word today. Thank you for this incredible parable, how beautiful it is, how insightful. Whereas the parable the seed and the soils talked about all of the different outcomes and the whole big picture, this focused on one individual plant and I thank you for what we learned today that we don't know how that growth comes. It comes no matter what we do, after we've sewn the seed. Lord, thank you for humbling us, but also thank you for encouraging us that if we are faithful and if we scatter the seed, you're going to do this incredible work and we pray in Jesus' name. Amen.

Through the parable of the sower, we learn what Christians can do to spread the gospel and what is only under God's control.

The post What Gospel Laborers Can Do, and What They Cannot (Mark Sermon 19) appeared first on Two Journeys.