Examining Your Soil 4/6/2025

Mark 4:1-9

I last preached on Acts 17 where Paul & Silas where bonded out of Thessalonica and then sent to Berea. They preached there and those who were there searched the Scriptures because Paul reasoned with them 'from' the Scriptures 'to see if these things were so'. This will buttress up against that idea. If we hear the Word of God proclaimed, and it 'is' sound doctrine, what is our response? Scripture says there are various things that can happen to prevent it from taking root in us but only one way for it to be fruitful, meaningful, and evident. This is the parable of the sower.

Prayer

For those of you who don’t know, I grew up as a Free Will Baptist, that is a baptist who is under the assumption that you can lose your salvation, and once lost it can never be regained or reattained. I have heard it preached over and over again the doctrine of “dynamic omniscience”, that is that God knows out of a myriad of possibilities what could happen, or I’ve heard that one pastor I know personally had lost his salvation as a teenager and regained. I have also heard as a Free Will Baptist, that the Bible is silent on the issue of Predestination and God “wouldn’t do such a thing because of His character”.

Why is it that there are all these beliefs surrounding salvation in Christ? Some people live in utter fear of slipping up while on the other extreme you have people calling themselves Christian, and yet, are living like devils.

The two are not the same.

On one hand you have a strong and stern hand of legalism and on the other you have antinomianism.

Legalism is concerned simply with external conformity and is blind to internal motivation.

R. C. Sproul

So, how do we reconcile the two? We have people who on one hand live like animals, and are saved by word of mouth only, and on the other hand there are people who are so afraid of the world, they refuse to engage in any kind of dialogue - think Amish.

Mark 4:1–9 “Again he began to teach beside the sea. And a very large crowd gathered about him, so that he got into a boat and sat in it on the sea, and the whole crowd was beside the sea on the land. And he was teaching them many things in parables, and in his teaching he said to them: “Listen! Behold, a sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seed fell along the path, and the birds came and devoured it. Other seed fell on rocky ground, where it did not have much soil, and immediately it sprang up, since it had no depth of soil. And when the sun rose, it was scorched, and since it had no root, it withered away. Other seed fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked it, and it yielded no grain. And other seeds fell into good soil and produced grain, growing up and increasing and yielding thirtyfold and sixtyfold and a hundredfold.” And he said, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.””