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INTRODUCTION

SLIDE 1 In John 15 Jesus says that he is the vine and we are the branches. Jesus also tells us that we’re expected to “bear fruit.” What does that mean? According to the Bible here are three areas in our lives that we can produce fruit.

SLIDE 2 First, we’re expected to bear fruit in our attitudes. In his letter to the Galatians Paul talks about the fruit of the Spirit.

22But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law. (Galatians 5:22-23)

In the previous verses he described the kind of life not led by the Spirit. It’s a life of conflict and sin.

19The acts of the flesh are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery; 20idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions 21and envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the like. I warn you, as I did before, that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God. (Galatians 4:19-20)

Therefore, if we’re bearing fruit – specifically the fruit of the Spirit – then we will have these qualities in our lives – love, joy, peace, forbearance . . . – and we won’t have those qualities he described earlier. And as Jesus said, you will know a tree by it’s fruit. What kind of fruit are we producing?

Second, your attitudes will lead to your actions. Paul wrote to the Colossians:

9For this reason, since the day we heard about you, we have not stopped praying for you. We continually ask God to fill you with the knowledge of his will through all the wisdom and understanding that the Spirit gives, 10so that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and please him in every way: bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God, 11being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might so that you may have great endurance and patience, 12and giving joyful thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of his holy people in the kingdom of light. (Colossians 1:9-12)

In others words, when you bear fruit you will be doing things. You’ll be doing “good works,” good things for Jesus. These “good works” don’t save you (you’re already saved). Nor should you think of them as actions you can do to “get something out of” God. You don’t use “good works” to barter with God. Instead, these “good works” are just the by-products of a grateful heart. These are the things you do because you love Jesus.

And third, those attitudes and actions will hopefully lead to the last aspect of how we can “bear fruit” for God, you will see souls won for Christ. That’s our major goal. SLIDE 3

The fruit of the righteous is a tree of life, and the one who is wise saves souls. (Proverbs 11:30)

How do we win people to Christ? We win them by inviting them to church. We win them by talking to them about Jesus. But ultimately we win souls by my attitudes and my actions; by the fruit of our hearts that they see in our lives.

Are we bearing fruit in our lives?

SERMON

Tonight we start the third section of five in book of Matthew. In this section we come to seven different parables. As you know, parables are short stories intended to teach a lesson.

The parables Jesus told had a way of separating people. Some heard and some did not; that is, some caught the meaning and some missed it. Jesus chose the parable as a teaching method, a strategy by which he separated those who were honest and sincere about understanding the kingdom from those who were only curious or were critical of his ministry. Are we ready to hear the message Jesus has for us? I ask that because it’s a whole lot easier to study and explain it than it is to listen to it and put the lesson into practice.

VIDEO

SLIDE 1 A man and his wife were driving to through Cape Cod, when they spotted a field loaded with blueberries. They stopped and proceeded to eat their fill. As they turned back to the car, the husband noticed that the rear door was open. In the back sat a farmer munching away on the cantaloupe that they had bought at a fruit stand. “Hey,” shouted the husband, “that’s my cantaloupe!” The old man swallowed the bite he had in his mouth and, with a nod in the direction of the field replied, “Them’s my blueberries.”

The tourists had treated that field of blueberries as if it belonged to them. But the field didn’t belong to them and the blueberries didn’t belong to them.

Likewise, there are people who forget that God is like that farmer: he owns everything. He owns everything because he created everything. And, even more importantly, he owns us.

When we became Christians we gave ourselves over to him. When we confessed that he was now our Lord and Savior, we were declaring that we now belonged to Jesus. When we were buried in the waters of Christians baptism, we “put on Christ.” We said to Christ – “you own me.” “You own every part of me.” We are to bear fruit for him.

In this parable Jesus describes a farmer at work. He had a lot less to work with than farmers do today. He didn’t have the tools to prepare the ground for seed and then carefully plant each seed in its proper row. So, he simply reached into his bag, took out handful after handful of seed and flung it across the ground.

Because of the haphazard way he threw the seed:

Some of it fell on a nearby hard-packed pathway

Some fell amongst the rocks

Some fell on weedy ground

But some of it fell on fertile ground and that seed took root and gave a bountiful crop

Jesus is telling a story to illustrate how God intends to spread the gospel across the land and bring people to salvation. But even if we’re not farmers there are a couple of questions about this story that may strike us as odd.

First, Jesus tells this parable to the crowd, but he doesn’t explain what it means. Why would He do that? He explains it to the disciples after they ask, but not to the crowds. Why?

Some have speculated that Jesus only used parables to get the people’s attention. That’s one reason why preachers use stories in their sermons. They keep the congregations interested and they help illustrate what the preacher is trying to get them to understand. But I think there’s a deeper reason why Jesus told the people parables. Look again at verses 10-16.

At first glance you might think Jesus told parables because he didn’t want everybody to understand what he was saying. But that’s not actually what that passage in Matthew is telling us. Jesus isn’t saying he didn’t want people to hear or see God’s truth, he was just being realistic. Jesus knew that there are people out there who really don’t want to understand what God is trying to say. He could explain himself to those folks until he was blue in the face, but they’d just given him a blank stare.

About ten years ago Time Magazine had an article on something called the Jesus Seminar. Apparently some self-appointed scholars got together and questioned the authenticity of the gospels we find in the Bible. So they had been meeting together twice a year to vote on which sections of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John they felt actually recorded the true history of Jesus. When it came to the parables the article explained that “these scholars decided that they preferred parables without explicit applications.”

In other words, these heretics liked the parables, they just didn’t want to be told what they meant. They had eyes to see, but they refused to see and ears to hear, but they didn’t want to hear it.

SLIDE 2 Turn with me to 1 Corinthians 2. Now besides that very real rejection of God’s truth by people, there is another reason why Jesus didn’t explain the parables to the crowds: they wouldn’t have understood them anyway. The parables were merely told by Jesus to peak their interest and get them to want more, but they would never comprehended the spiritual truth in them because they couldn’t. It’s impossible for unspiritual people to fully understand spiritual truths.

12What we have received is not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may understand what God has freely given us. 13This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, explaining spiritual realities with Spirit-taught words. 14The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit. (1 Corinthians 2:12-14)

The stories of Jesus can catch our attention, but we can never fully comprehend what those truths mean until God’s Spirit dwells within us. Acts 2 tells us how we can lay hold of God’s Spirit. In that chapter we’re told that Peter preached such a powerful sermon that the crowd interrupted his message to ask him what they could do. And in Acts 2:38 we have Peter’s reply. SLIDE 3

Peter replied, “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.” (Acts 2:38)

Notice what it says. When you repent of your sins and are baptized in the name of Jesus for the forgiveness of your sins then God gives his Holy Spirit to dwell inside you helping you to understand the meaning of God’s word.

SLIDE 4 There’s an old story about a man named William Wilberforce. William Wilberforce was a Christian and the man most responsible for ending slavery in England during the late 1700’s. Wilberforce was a member of Parliament and good friends with William Pitt, who was the Prime Minister of England at the time. William Pitt also happened to be an atheist. One day Wilberforce took Pitt to hear a well-known preacher named Richard Cecil. Cecil happened to be on fire that Sunday and delivered one of his best sermons ever. After the sermon Wilberforce was so excited and turned to Pitt asking him what he thought. William Pitt replied, “I haven’t the slightest idea what that man was talking about.” Now understand, Richard Cecil was an excellent preacher and the gospel he preached was crystal clear. William Pitt was an intelligent man and by most accounts a political genius, but on that day he didn’t have ears to hear. It hadn’t been given him to know the mysteries of the kingdom.

So what’s that mean? Unless we want to understand we never will. They say that seeing is believing, but the truth is believing is seeing. Most in the crowd would never understand even if he explained it.

There’s one more thing that might bother us about this story.

The parable seems to give the impression that God isn’t all that concerned about which soil he allows his seed to take root in. Just think about that for a minute. The seed is the word of God. The seed belongs to God. Since the seed belongs to God don’t you think he’d be a little more selective about which soil even gets to receive this gift? But that’s not how it plays out. The footpath and the rocky soil and weedy soil all get a shot at this seed. Why?

Jeff Strite wrote about taking a mission trip to Mexico. He says as they were driving across the desert and up into the mountains he couldn’t help noticing all the rocks scattered across the land. There were millions of them. He says there were rocks the size of your fist, rocks the size of softballs, rocks the size of watermelons, and even rocks the size small buildings. There were rocks everywhere. When he asked one of the missionaries about it, she laughed and said that the one thing the land grows well is rocks. It’s literally a rock garden.

When they got to mission station they passed by one of the few gardens he saw there. It had corn growing in a plot the size of a big back yard but there too, there were rocks scattered throughout the garden plot. Strite wondered why would the farmer would plant corn in such a rock filled yard. The answer is if the man wanted a crop he had to scatter his seed in the land that he had and then trust that the seed would bear fruit.

That’s what the farmer in Jesus’ parable did. He scattered his seed over all the land he had trusting that the seed would bear fruit.

God declares in Isaiah 55: SLIDE 5

10As the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return to it without watering the earth and making it bud and flourish, so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater, SLIDE 6 11so is my word that goes out from my mouth: It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it. (Isaiah 55:10-11)

That’s the power of God’s seed – the word of God. God scatters it all over the earth, because it has power to take root in the harshest ground. And once it takes root, it can bear fruit. God doesn’t care about the condition of the soil. Of course, the harsher the soil, the harder it becomes to get a crop, but you can still get a crop.

In fact, Isaiah wrote about just such a plant growing from dry ground. SLIDE 7

He grew up before him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of dry ground. He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. (Isaiah53:2)

Who was that prophecy referring to? Isaiah was writing about Jesus. Jesus was a root that grew out of dry ground. The soil shouldn’t have yielded a harvest, but it did. It gave us our Savior.

SLIDE 8 There are churches who only want people in their building that are good soil. They only want children from good homes. They only want couples that dress nice. They want people that will make them look good and pay the bills. But that wasn’t the kind of people Jesus spent His time with was it? Jesus spent time with prostitutes, tax collectors, and sinners. We need to remember that. So God doesn’t seem to be concerned about which soil into which his seed falls. He’s confident of the power of the seed. The soil doesn’t matter; it’s the harvest he’s looking for.

One commentator pointed out:

Reaping more than we sow is fundamental law of the harvest. Every farmer lives by this principle. If his work only returned exactly what he had planted in the ground, his labor would be futile. He would never gain anything extra from his efforts so that he could use it to feed his family or sell it for a profit.

Consider the potential of one kernel of corn. One kernel of corn will produce one corn stalk. Each stalk produces at least one ear of corn. The average ear of corn has two hundred and fifty kernels, so that a single kernel of corn will yield more than a 250% increase.

Different plants will have a different numbers of kernels or seeds depending upon what type of plants they are, but they will all produce a crop that is more than what was planted. So Jesus is telling us if the true seed of the kingdom has been planted in our hearts we will bear fruit. And when we bear fruit, it will be yield far more than the single seed that was planted in our heart. That is what God expects of us. He expects us to bear fruit.

The best soils were the ones that yielded a harvest of thirty to one hundred times more than what was sown. The question you need to ask is: “what kind of harvest have you been yielding for Jesus?” How deeply has the seed taken root in your soul? Besides being faithful attending worship tonight, what are you doing for Jesus right now?

Henry Ford gave away millions of dollars to many different causes in his lifetime, but he was notorious for the fact that he refused to give any money at all to schools. He felt that well-meaning but nonbusiness-like people frequently mishandled those gifts.

There was a woman named Martha Berry who had begun a school in Mt. Berry, Georgia. She’d started the school because she was shocked to discover that many of the rural children attended neither a church nor school and were unfamiliar with stories from the Bible. So she decided to start a school where the poor could learn to read and write and do arithmetic and to know basic Bible stories. But she needed more money than she had.

She was aware of the fact that Ford never gave money to schools, but she went to him anyway and asked for an endowment. As expected, Ford refused. So Miss Berry, said “Well, then, would you give me a dime to buy a sack of raw peanuts?” Ford was a little taken back and he asked why she wanted just a dime. She replied: “A dime is all I want, Mr. Ford, but I do want to show you what I can do with ten cents.”

Berry returned to her school and she and her students planted and replanted the peanuts. Then she sold the crop for $600 and took the money to Ford. She then stood face-to-face with Henry Ford, and said, “See how practical we are in the use of money at the Martha Berry School?” Mr. Ford was so pleased with what she’d done, he gave Miss Berry the $600 back and added two million to it. Martha Berry took the money and built the buildings that became Berry College in Mt. Berry, GA.

The difference between God and Henry Ford is God believes we are capable of making good use of what he’s given us. He believes in us, and he trusts us to be faithful. The question for us today what have we done with the seed God gave us? Are our lives producing fruit for God?