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God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. In this time, O God, grant that we might have ears open to your still speaking voice, hearts softened and weathered enough to welcome your Spirit into our presence,…

In Matthew 13 Jesus shares several agricultural parables that explain the nature of the Gospel and the Kingdom of Heaven in surprising ways. One of the most surprising is the parable of the wheat and the weeds, which reveals that wheat and weeds are allowed to grow up together, and only separated at the harvest. Why can't the wheat and weeds be separated earlier? Stephen unpacks the agriculture behind the parable's image, and the theology behind its meaning. [NOTE: a digital glitch during recording damaged the last five minutes of the audio, but it is still intelligible, so please perservere if you can.]

This past week, as I was working at weeding our garden, something happened that reminded me of our text for this morning (which, by the way, is ). I was trying to weed the section of our garden where we are growing peas, beans, corn, and tomatoes. This portion of the garden we have fenced in since the…

The proper interpretation of this parable is found when one recognizes what the field is.

Last week we examined Jesus' parable of the soils. In that parable Jesus helped us understand that we can present the message of the gospel to different people and those people will respond differently depending on the way their heart receives the message. In the parable of the Wheat and the Tares Jesus…

Dear friends in Christ. When I was growing up, my mom was an avid follower of the TV show MASH. Each week she made time to watch the new episodes as they came out, and then, when the re-runs began airing each afternoon on channel 9, she could be found watching them as she had the opportunity. It was…

I hate weeds. No, I did not just come to that conclusion, but it was once again reaffirmed as I was pulling them out of my back yard the other afternoon. We are supposed to have a “no maintenance” yard given that it is covered completely in landscaping rocks, under which lies a protective sheet of “weed…

Weeds in God’s Garden Matthew 13:24-43 Intro: Video: The Kingdom is… Parables are like windows that let the soul of man see and understand the things of God. What is God’s kingdom like? The setting: Jesus sitting by the Sea of Galilee. Mark tells us what had been happening (3:20- 21, 31-35): Great crowds…