[Machine transcription]
The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed on the ground.
He sleeps at night and day, and the seed sprouts and grows.
He knows not how.
You may be seated.
In the name of Jesus, amen.
Dear saints of God, Jesus in this parable wants us to not know something.
This is different than most parables.
In most parables, Jesus is teaching us something.
He’s teaching us what we don’t know so that we would know it.
In this parable, Jesus is teaching us what we don’t know so that we would never know
it.
He says the kingdom of God is like a farmer who goes out and scatters the seed, and then
he goes to bed.
And he sleeps, and he wakes up, he wanders around the field, goes back to bed, and he
does it again and again, and then one day the seed grows, and it sprouts.
And it keeps growing until it’s ready for the harvest.
And the farmer does not know how it happens.
And that’s how it’s supposed to be.
He’s not supposed to know.
In fact, if the farmer starts to get curious about how it is that this seed is growing,
and he goes and he digs up the seed to see what’s happening is under the dirt, what
does he do?
He kills the seed, and it doesn’t grow.
Or maybe he’s so curious about what’s going on inside of the seed, so he takes the seed
and he cuts it open to see what’s going on in there, and the seed doesn’t grow.
In fact, there’s something here that only by being ignorant of how the seed works will
it work.
I think the same thing is true.
Just to take for an example, I mean, this is the old scientific problem.
It’s the problem of dissection.
You can’t dissect something that’s alive.
You were eating food and digesting your food long before you knew how it happened, long
before you took a biology class, long before you knew about your stomach and all this sort
of thing. And let’s just say that one day you got really curious about how this whole
thing worked, about how the food would come in on the top and go out on the bottom, quite
different, and what was going on inside of there to make all this stuff happen. So you
say, I’m going to check it out. I’m going to get a pair of scissors, just cut myself
open to see what’s going on. Well, you know what happens? You stop digesting food. You
stop living.
And Jesus says that this is how the kingdom of God is. You do not know how it grows. In
fact, it’s not only that you don’t know how it grows, you cannot know how it grows.
Now this might be on my mind because I spent the last week at the convention, and if there’s
anything that’s going on at district and synodical conventions or anything like that,
it’s this business of how does the church grow? How can we grow the church? How can
we get more people? How can we grow the congregations? And all of this sort of stuff. And it’s not
like it’s only there that we ask the question. We ask the question all the time. Our congregation
says how can we grow? How can more people who aren’t Christians become Christians and
people who are out there be in here? We’re asking that question all the time. We got
a voters’ meeting this afternoon. These kind of things come up. And the danger is,
But the temptation is that we try to figure it out, that we try to sort out the mechanics
of it.
There’s a word that’s used in this, in fact, this parable of the seed that grows
on its own while the farmer sleeps is only in the Gospel of Mark, and it’s the only
parable that’s only in Mark.
It’s really quite amazing when you just do a comparative study of all the parables.
It’s very unique.
And it uses a Greek word that I believe is only in this place in the whole Scripture.
It’s the word that we know in English, automatic.
The seed grows, or it says here, the earth produces automatically the first blade.
In other words, it does it on its own.
It doesn’t need your help.
The ground and the seed will produce the grain, the blade, the ear, the grain, all by itself.
It doesn’t need your help.
And the more you try to help it, the worse it is.
Like a guy squeezing the trunk of a lemon tree trying to help the lemons grow faster.
Just doesn’t work.
But we want to do it, right?
We want to figure out how the church grows.
We want to figure out how this whole thing happens.
We want to figure out how more people can become Christians.
And Jesus says, you can’t know it and you shouldn’t try to figure it out.
But there’s danger even in trying to answer the question.
We simply trust that the Word produces fruit, that the Word does what it says, that the
Word of God is powerful.
In fact, we might be laughing at this farmer who’s sleeping and waking up, sleeping and
waking up.
He’s got no idea how the field out behind the house is growing.
We might be laughing at him, but Jesus says this is our example, and I think he tells
the next parable so that we don’t miss the point.
Verse 30, Jesus says, what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable shall
we use for it?
It’s like a grain of mustard seed that’s sown on the ground.
It’s the smallest of the seeds of the earth, and yet when it’s sown, it grows and becomes
is larger than all the garden plants,
and it puts out large branches
so that the birds of the air
can make their nest in its shade.
In other words,
Jesus is comparing the kingdom of God
to this tiny little mustard seed,
that’s the word of God that’s planted,
and it becomes this huge tree
with a lot of shade
so that you and I can rest in it.
Rest.
So that we can sleep like the farmer.
so that the Word and the Word alone will cause the growth.
Paul says to the Corinthians, he says,
I planted, Apollos watered,
but God and God alone gave the growth.
And so it is with the church, and so it is with us too.
This is not just talking about the church.
This is how we find ourselves believing.
You know, it’s not like you can make yourself believe,
but you hear the word of God, you hear the word of God and then all of a sudden you notice
like the farmer who goes out and sees the seeds sprouting, that you actually believe
these words, that you trust in these words and that these words continue to grow and
the word of God continues to flourish in your own heart, in your own mind, in your own conscience.
How?
I don’t know.
Nobody knows and nobody’s supposed to know.
So what do we do?
And what do we do if we can’t know how to grow the church?
What do we do if we don’t know how the thing works?
What do we do if the Holy Spirit works when and where it pleases Him and He refuses to
be coerced or controlled by us?
What do we do?
Dear saints, we rest.
That’s what the text is calling us to do, to rest in the shade of God’s Word, to rejoice
in the truth of His Word, to receive the implanted Word of God with meekness and with joy, to
to hear God’s Word,
and to love God’s Word,
and to delight in God’s Word.
To let God’s Word show you,
like a mirror,
your own sin and your own desperate need for Christ.
And then to let that Word show you
that Jesus does in fact love you
enough to die for you,
that He spreads out His hands on the cross
and He, like a shade tree,
provides shelter for you.
to know that these promises are true and that they cannot be overthrown by sin
death and the devil that nothing can separate us from the love of God which
is in Christ Jesus and to simply delight into that and and I promise you that
you’re delighting in that will mean that you will not be able to hold it to
yourself but you’re gonna want to share it with the people that you love this is
really good you guys should hear about it and the Word of the Lord will do its
work. You can’t make it, you can’t control it, you can’t force it, but you can believe
the promise. You can wake up and go to sleep and wake up and go to sleep again and you
don’t have to understand it but one day the fields are ripe for the harvest and we rejoice
in it. My dad used to tell me there’s four ways of knowing something. You can know what
you know. You can not know what you know. That’s a confusing one. I never quite got
that one. You can not know what you don’t know. That’s pretty easy. But you can know
what you don’t know. This is the wisdom that Jesus is calling us to in this parable, that
we would know and stand firm on our ignorance that we don’t know how it works, but that
God causes the growth and we rejoice in it. May God grant us this wisdom through Christ
our Lord. Amen. And the peace of God which passes all understanding guard your hearts
and your minds through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
