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Grace, mercy, and peace be unto you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen. The text for this morning comes from the Gospel reading about the two parables.
To all of you daddies, happy Father’s Day. What a great gift. Enjoy and enjoy your children. I met a young lady, though, who didn’t have quite as good of an experience as maybe you had with your father. She told me she grew up in a home where her father wasn’t in the home, but a stepfather was. The stepfather, though, was an avid drug addict. And as she grew up in this home, she would have this dream to herself that kind of gave her hope for the future, that someday she would meet her real father. And when she met her real biological father, he would rescue her and take her away from this place in which she had found herself.
Well, she graduated from high school and joined the army, and then later on she did meet her father, her biological father. Sadly, he too was an addict. Now, it seems like a hopeless story, but bear with me. It does have a happy ending, and I will tell you that at the end of the sermon. But not everybody grows up in the way that you and I grew up. In fact, we can even listen to that story and almost divorce ourselves from that person and go, “Wow, I have no experience of that whatsoever.”
The temptation when you speak to someone or when someone tells you that story is to think that they were cut from a different rock than you or I. They fell from a totally different tree than you or I, and they were cut from a different bolt of cloth than you or I. And the answer is, no, they weren’t. What God’s Word has already done in your life, God’s Word does in people like her life. And when we think that we’re cut from a totally different rock than you or I, it’s pretty bold and arrogant to think such thoughts. When we think we know what God’s Word needs in order to accomplish a task in someone’s life, we are denying the very power of Christ in them.
That seed. The first parable of the two parables compares God’s kingdom to a seed. And it’s an interesting story, that first parable. In it, there is a very anonymous man whose job is to sow and scatter the seed. Notice the text. It doesn’t tell how he scattered the seed. It doesn’t say that he looked at the Farmer’s Almanac to determine the right time to plant the seed. He didn’t go to the county agent to determine the soil content in order to get the right fertilizer for that seed. He scattered the seed. And then, in his almost obliviousness to the seed and its power, he rises and sleeps, it says in the text, and the seed grows, and he marvels. “How is this done?”
And then a little later, he was brought back into the picture again where all he does is harvest. The focus of this first parable is not on the man, but on the seed and its power. The focus of the man is only that he scattered seed, sowed it, and then harvested it, and that’s it. The miracle and the power lies in that seed. Who then and what then is that seed? Our Lord Jesus Christ, the most powerful seed of all, who dwells in you. If he can grow in you and make you who you are, bought back from death and destruction into life, he can do it to that girl in whose house she knew not what a good father was, because you both are one and the same.
Now, it’s interesting, isn’t it? Paul talks about this in the you-ness of Christ in his epistle reading that Pastor read to you. He says, “Anyone who is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.” Now, remember back. You’ve got to think back to when you were a little boy or a little girl. And your mommy and daddy planted a seed with you, and they showed you how to plant the seed, and they watered it. And every day they told you to go look at that seed and see if it’s grown.
And you were amazed. You came in full of amazement, telling everybody you saw, “Look at what I did. Look at what happened to that seed. I sowed it. I put water on it, and it’s growing.” The kid knows, and you knew then, it wasn’t you that did anything. It was the seed. It was the seed. The remarkable thing is that inanimate object that looks as dead as dead can be has life in it. That’s Christ in you.
The world looks upon the idea of a seed and gives all kinds of explanations as to why that seed grew. And as you and I grow up, we were fed that information. Nothing wrong with being fed that information. The wrong part of that information is when we begin to think that’s why that seed grew and not the great miracle of its growth to begin with.
Then we make that application to our Christian faith. “Well, if this person grew up in this environment, there’s no hope for their Christian faith.” Or “if this person, like you and me, grew up in a different environment, well, then we’ve got better odds of becoming and staying in the church, in the faith, than that other person.” Really? That’s us trying to explain things too much. That’s the temptation of this world.
Really? You and I know we live in a world that is continually thrusting into our face that if it doesn’t produce a result, then it’s not true and effective. And if it doesn’t produce that result, then stop. Funny, if you were to look at your own life, you don’t always see results being brought about by God’s Word, and yet you continually come back to the same place that planted it in the first place. Because you do know God’s Word is at work in your life.
You can tell me stories and you can tell other people stories of God’s great miraculous things that He has done in your heart. Because only you know the dark corners of it, and only you know what God has done throughout that cold and dead thing known as your and my heart. And we marvel at it. Just like a little kid looking at a seed that sprouts up. We marvel at it. The point of this is that Christ is the seed that has been preached into your hearts and scattered around, baptized into you, fed to you at the altar regularly.
And you know, you know, though you and I struggle, you know it has produced because God has done it. And we marvel at how. You and I have been shown enough in our life, when we think we are the ones who are doing it because of our fidelity or some sort of misconceived notion of our work in this process, yes. God always reveals to us how utterly black and sinful our heart is. And when we listen to someone like this young lady, we think, “Well, I’m surely not as bad as that young lady. I at least grew up with a better household than that lady.” We both came from the same Adam and Eve, mind you. There is no difference.
The second parable. The second parable is about the kingdom of God and a seed as well, but the seed here isn’t all about Christ in you. The seed here is about the church. You see, it’s the smallest seed of the garden, and the garden is as if the world, because the world looks at all the seeds that are sown in the garden, and all the seeds that are sown in the garden, this one is the smallest. So the idea and the thought is it’s the least significant, and you know that’s how the world looks at the church.
The church has no relevancy to this world. The church has no benefit to this world. It’s more of a thorn in the world’s side, is how the world views it. And yet, when this church, unbeknownst to the world, grows, the world is benefited by its long branches. The birds who find shade in its branches are unbelievers. The governments of this world, the countries of this world, the corporations and businesses of this world, the armies of this world, and all in between. Everything that this world enjoys, enjoys because Christ is in His body, the church, in this world.
The small little mustard seed that the world looks upon as being insignificant is really the main thing in the garden. But the world’s all about the glory of the crop that it produces. The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of the Lord endures forever. Crops come and grow, but the mustard seed that produced that tree is what blesses this world, and that’s the church. It’s interesting, Paul talks a little bit about this in his Corinthians, but really Ezekiel picks it up.
One of the things that Paul says is in the first part of that epistle reading when he says… “While we are still in this tent, our earthly body, and even this structure known as the church, while we are in this tent, we groan, being burdened. Not that we would be unclothed, but that we would be further clothed, meaning with glory, finally rid of the sin in this world, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life, like a seed. It has to die, and out of death comes life.” Amen.
He who has prepared us for this very thing is God, Paul says, who has given us the Spirit as a guarantee, our guarantee. That’s why God gave us these two beautiful parables. The first reason that He gave these two beautiful parables is to stimulate your and my reliance upon Christ in you, that seed that has been planted in your heart. And the seed that’s been planted in your loved one’s heart. The one about whom you pray about regularly and are concerned.
And you who are prayed over by loved ones of you who are concerned for you. To rely upon that God’s seed will and has produced that powerful fruit. And God will harvest it at the right time. Whether that time is at six months, or 89 years, or further. God will harvest it when He is finished. Trust in that. That’s why He gave us these parables to see that His Word is powerful. The seed in you is powerful. The branches of this mustard tree of which we are a part are powerful. But it’s not seen that way by the world.
The second reason that God gave us these beautiful parables is to encourage us in our work of sowing the seed. This man that sowed the seed in the first parable didn’t care. He didn’t care. Like Christ described the seed and the sower in the different parable. He scattered the seed. Scatter the seed. Do not think that you’ve got to package it in a different way for this person as opposed to this person. Do not think that because you are somewhat normal in this world, it was packaged a certain way for you. And someone like that young woman who grew up with drug addicts has to be packaged a different way for her.
You’re the same. You are identical to that young lady. How are you different? You tell me and let’s tell God because he’s going to laugh. We’re not different. The message isn’t needing to be different. It will accomplish it. This parable was given to us to encourage us in our sowing of this seed because your mom and daddy sure did be encouraged by this word of God as they sowed it in your heart. And as a daddy, it sure was my encouragement as I sowed it in our children’s hearts.
The third reason that God gave us these parables is to fill us with hope and joy because the world is continually accosting you, yes, accosting you, with the uselessness of this religion known as Christianity and the unbeneficial benefit of this great gift to us. And you and I are poster children of God’s Word at work.
Now, a poster child is never perfect, are they? They are merely a representation of something that’s been done to them. That’s you and me. Isn’t God good? Surely you can look at your own life and marvel at God’s seed in you. Surely you can look at you being grafted into the beautiful church that gives all kinds of benefit to this world, and the world scorns her, and we cling close to our mother, the church.
This is what Ezekiel spoke of when he said, “Under it, the big cedar, the church, will dwell every kind of bird. In the shade of its branches, birds of every sort will nest. And all the trees of the field shall know that I am the Lord, because I bring low the high tree, and I make high the low. I dry up the green tree, and I make flourish the dry tree.” You are that dry tree that has been flourished. You are that low tree that is and will be lifted up.
But we dwell in a world that glorifies big, bold, and brazenness of this world, and yet God uses clay pots to be planted in because this isn’t our home. We’re going to be transplanted, brothers and sisters, into the fertile garden of heaven itself. And the clay pot in which we dwell now, it’s but for a time.
Now that young lady with whom I spoke and with whom I tell you about testified to me of what God has done in her life. She will not deny the fact that she was dealt horrible fathers. And yet God, her heavenly Father, is now her Father. A good and godly Father, from whom all her good gifts come. And she has said very clearly, not because of all of her great abilities to overcome her horrible past, but because of what God did in her, just like of what God did in you. There is no difference between.
Both are the same dirtiness, and both have been cleansed the same by the same Christ. There is no difference. And we marveled at this together as I pray you are marveling with me, as Christ marveled with his disciples as he explained this parable to them in secret, that they too would know marvel at what God is doing and has done, and have that great reliance on him, and encouragement and know of hope and joy that is yours.
In the name of Jesus, who is in you and in us as the church. This is all understanding. Keep your hearts and your minds on Christ Jesus to life everlasting. Amen.
