Mark 4:20 & Galatians 5:13-26 | A Bountiful Harvest

Let me tell you about the summer I became a farmer.

It was 2020. You remember 2020. Everybody was home. Everybody needed a project.

Mine was raised garden beds.

I bought the lumber. That cost me a house down payment.

I didn't care. I had a vision. I was going to grow food. Real food. With these hands. Like a man!

So I built the beds. Filled them with dirt. And I planted everything. Tomatoes, peppers, squash, beans. Kohlrabi. Rachel didn't even know what kohlrabi was. Sadly she never got to find out…

Here's what nobody tells you about gardening.

Nothing comes on at the same time. You wait and wait, and then one week you've got nine tomatoes and zero peppers.

It is way more work than driving to the store. Way more.

It is slow. Painfully slow. You put a seed in the ground and then you just wait. There's no app that hurries up a tomato.

And then there's the kohlrabi. I did everything right. Same soil. Same water. Same sun as everything else. Nothing came up. Not one.

And when I mentioned it around town, I found out it happened to almost everybody that year. Nobody could tell me why. I never got a straight answer. I still don't have one.

I wanted a garden. What I got was a lesson in how little I actually control.

So I quit. The beds are still out there. They grow weeds now, very successfully.

But here's the thing that bugs me.

Ask somebody who didn't quit. Ask a homesteader, somebody who has been at it for fifteen years, hands cracked, freezer full. Ask them if it's worth it. All that work, when the grocery store is 3 minutes away with everything already washed and bagged.

They'll say yes. Every time.

And if you push them on why, they will not talk about tomatoes.

They'll talk about mornings. Seasons. Their kids knowing where food comes from. The rhythm of it.

Sure fresh veggies taste better, but it was never really just about the vegetables. It's a way of living.

Church, hold onto that, because it's the whole message today.

Here's the one thing I want you to walk out with. Write it down if that helps.

The harvest of God is a lifestyle, not a list.

[MOVEMENT 1: THE HARVEST, DEFINED]

Turn with me to Mark chapter 4. This is week five. This is the last one.

For four weeks Jesus has been giving us a spiritual MRI. The hard path, trampled by trauma, where grace tenderizes what trauma tramples. The rocky ground, where enthusiasm fades and roots remain. The weedy soil, where only the Spirit keeps you out of the chokehold. And last week the good soil, where I held up a bowl of fake cherries and told you surrender produces what striving never can.

Four weeks of digging in our own dirt.

Today we finally get to the part the whole thing has been driving toward.

The harvest.

Mark 4:20.

"Others, like seed sown on good soil, hear the word, accept it, and produce a crop: thirty, sixty, or even a hundred times what was sown."

Three verbs. We spent last week on the first two.

Hear. Accept. Those postures are yours.

Produce. That result is God's.

Today we're asking a question we have not asked yet in five weeks.

Produce what?

Because look carefully at that verse. Jesus tells you a harvest is coming. He tells you how big it is. Thirty, sixty, a hundred times what was planted.

Let me put that number in perspective. A good year for a first century farmer got him maybe four to ten times his seed. Ten was a great year. Ten was tell-your-neighbors.

Jesus says a hundred.

That's not farming. That's not technique. That's not somebody who read the right book or bought the right beds with the right lumber. That is deliberate, ridiculous excess. That's God showing off.

So Jesus tells us the harvest is coming, and he tells us it's enormous.

And then he stops.

He never says what it is.

Read the whole parable again this week. Jesus says nothing about pH balance. Nothing about taking soil samples. Nothing about humidity or microbes or any of the ways we would measure whether something is actually working.

He just says: a crop. Thirty, sixty, a hundred times over.

So what is it? What are we actually growing here?

Because I need you to know, most of us already filled in that blank without realizing we did it.

We assumed the harvest is our output. Our record. What we can point to. Bible read, prayers prayed, tithe given, sins avoided, weeks attended.

A list.

And if that's what the harvest is, then you can measure it. You can win at it. You can also lose at it, badly, by about Tuesday.

Jesus never said that.

For the answer, we have to go where Paul went, because Paul writes it out plainly. Turn with me to Galatians chapter 5.

[MOVEMENT 2: THE FLESH'S LIST, Galatians 5:16-21]

Quick background, because it matters.

Paul is writing to a church with a problem. They got the gospel right. Jesus saved them, by grace, through faith. Done deal.

And then some teachers showed up and said: that's a great start. Now here's the list.

Get circumcised. Watch these foods. Keep these days. Then you're really in.

And Paul loses his mind about it. This entire letter is Paul saying: no. You did not start with a list and you are not finishing with one.

Look at it with me:

Galatians 5:13–21 NIV

13 You, my brothers and sisters, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the flesh; rather, serve one another humbly in love. 14 For the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” 15 If you bite and devour each other, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other. 16 So I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. 17 For the flesh desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the flesh. They are in conflict with each other, so that you are not to do whatever you want. 18 But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law. 19 The acts of the flesh are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery; 20 idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions 21 and 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.

Now, look back at verse 16 and Verse 18.

Walk. Led. Those are relationship words. Those are words about who you're with, not what you completed.

Now Paul does something interesting. Before he tells us what the harvest is, he tells us what it isn't. He gives us a list. Verse 19.

Now, some of us hear that list and check out. Because we're thinking, well, I haven't been to an orgy this week, so I'm good.

Slow down. Look at the middle of that list.

Hatred. Discord. Jealousy. Fits of rage. Selfish ambition. Envy.

That's not a list of what happens in a bar at two in the morning. That's a list of what happens in a minivan on the way to church.

Let me read it back to you in a translation you'll recognize. Not the Greek one. The Tuesday one.

Not unhurried. Bothered.

Not gentle. Forceful.

Not slow to anger. Set off by the smallest thing.

Not at peace. Wound tight.

Not joyful. Grumpy.

Not content and grateful. Entitled. Discontent.

Now here's what I need you to notice about what Paul actually wrote, because the whole message hangs on it.

He calls those the acts of the flesh. Acts. Plural. A list.

And a list is something you can work item by item. You can go to counseling for the anger. Read a book about the anxiety. Download an app for the impatience. Try a little harder on the jealousy.

A lot of us are doing exactly that right now. Working the list. Item by item. Tired.

And I want to tell you why it isn't working.

You can build a garden that looks incredible from the sidewalk and still be a wreck on the inside of the fence.

You can have every right plant in every right row and be frantic the entire time you're tending it. Hurried. Bothered. Running.

Martha had a spotless house. Mary had Jesus. Luke 10.

Martha's home was ordered. That's not her problem. Her problem is that she got so busy running it that she ended up in a different room than Jesus.

Here's a sentence I want you to sit with.

We can pray for God to give us peace. But if we won't hear and accept his word on how to order our lives, we shouldn't expect to live with much peace.

Gardens are, by their very nature, ordered. Boundaries fixed. Rows straight.

We want the peace without the order that grows it.

Now hear what I am not saying, because this is where people get lost every single time.

I am not telling you to go home and build a better system.

Because think about it. Rows don't grow anything. Boundaries don't grow anything. A fence has never once produced a tomato.

You can lay out the most beautiful garden in Henry County. Straight rows. Clean edges. Everything labeled. And if nobody ever comes back to it, if there's no gardener and no rain, all you've got is very tidy dirt.

Order is not the life. Order is what makes room for the life.

Look back at verse 16. The NLT puts it this way: "let the Holy Spirit guide your lives." Verse 18: "when you are directed by the Spirit."

Guide. Direct. Lead.

Every one of those words needs somebody else in the room.

A list you can take home and run by yourself. That's the appeal of it. Give me the rules and leave me alone, I'll handle it from here.

You cannot do that with being led. Being led means somebody is with you, and you're still listening, and it's not over.

So when God gives you boundaries, he is not handing you a fence so he can leave. He's showing you the shape of a life lived with him.

Take him out of it and those same good boundaries lose all their power. They become one more list you're failing at by Tuesday.

That is the whole argument of this letter. Paul asks these people back in chapter 3: after beginning by means of the Spirit, are you now trying to finish by means of the flesh?

Started with a relationship. Trying to finish with a checklist.

And hear me, this is not a scolding. This is a diagnosis. Most of you are not here because you don't care. You're here because you care a lot, and you are worn out managing a list that keeps getting longer.

Including, some weeks, the guy talking.

So if the harvest isn't the list, what is it?

[MOVEMENT 3: THE SPIRIT'S FRUIT]

Verse 22. Here it is. Here's the harvest.

Galatians 5:22–26 NIV

22 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law. 24 Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. 25 Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit. 26 Let us not become conceited, provoking and envying each other.

Your Bible might say patience instead of forbearance. Same thing. It means you don't blow up, and you don't quit.

Now. Look at the very first word after "the."

Fruit.

Not fruits.

Paul just wrote a list of the flesh, plural, acts, many things. And now, when he turns to the Spirit, he changes the grammar on purpose.

Singular. One fruit.

This is not a nine item menu where you pick your three strongest and hope nobody checks the other six. It's one tree growing nine kinds of goodness at the same time.

Which means you don't get self-control without gentleness. You don't get joy without love. They're not nine separate projects. They're one life, showing up nine different ways.

And then Paul says something that sounds like a throwaway line and isn't.

"Against such things there is no law."

Think about that. Laws exist to fence in things that can be misused or overdone. That's why we have speed limits.

Nobody has ever needed a law capping how much kindness a person is allowed. Nobody's ever been pulled over for excessive patience.

Here's why that matters: a list needs a law to enforce it. A lifestyle doesn't.

Because a list is managed from the outside. A lifestyle grows from the inside.

The harvest of God is a lifestyle, not a list.

And that changes how you measure your life, which is good, because most of us are measuring it wrong.

We're grading ourselves by the hour. Did I read it today. Was I patient this afternoon. Am I up or down since lunch.

You cannot evaluate a harvest on a Tuesday.

Seeds spend most of their life buried in the dark where nothing looks like it's happening. Ask my kohlrabi. Actually, don't.

When the work is cultivation instead of box checking, success stops looking like a scorecard and starts looking like faithful repetition. Showing up at the same dinner table. Listening when you're tired. Repairing the small fracture with your wife instead of letting it sit. Doing honest work when nobody is watching.

None of those feel like anything on the day you do them.

But string them together across twenty years and they become a person, a character. A life. A legacy.

Now, before we go any further, I have to shut a door, because I know exactly where some of you just went.

You just heard nine words and started making a list.

Love. Check. Working on joy. Peace, needs improvement. Better get after that self-control.

Stop. That is the exact opposite of what Paul just said. If this is a to-do list, you have read this passage backwards.

You do not produce fruit by gritting your teeth at nine virtues.

Ask my raised beds. I did everything right and got no kohlrabi. And I have never once in my life made a tomato. Not one. The best I have ever done is not kill the plant that made it.

So where does this come from?

Look at verse 24.

Verse 24.

"Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires."

Read that again and notice the tense.

Have crucified. Past tense. Finished. Done.

Not "should try to." Not "are working on." Done.

That grip the flesh had on you, that engine underneath the whole exhausting list, was executed at a cross two thousand years ago by a man who did for you what you could not do for yourself.

You are not the one this harvest depends on.

Say that back to yourself when you get in the car today. I am not the one this harvest depends on.

So then what is left for me to do?

Verse 25.

"Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit."

Not produce. Not manufacture. Not carve.

Keep in step.

Stay close. Stay in the row. Walk beside somebody who's already moving.

Three weeks ago I told you the Spirit is the gardener Jesus sent into your field. I meant it. He is not just pulling weeds out of you. This is what he is growing in you.

You don't make the fruit. You stay attached to the one who does.

That's the whole thing. That's a lifestyle.

The harvest of God is a lifestyle, not a list.

[THE HARVEST FEEDS PEOPLE]

Now here's something I said last week and left hanging on purpose.

I told you the whole point of a harvest is that it feeds people. And that we would talk about it this week.

Let's do that.

Because here's what happens when this fruit actually grows in a person. It doesn't stay in them.

Nobody grows a hundredfold crop and eats it alone.

Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness. Every single one of those words requires another human being to exist. You cannot be patient by yourself in a room. Patience needs somebody who is late.

Which means the harvest changes how you see people.

And Paul already told us that's where this was headed. Back up eight verses to verse 14. "For the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command: love your neighbor as yourself."

The whole thing. All of it. It comes out in how you treat the person sitting next to you.

Church, we just spent five weeks learning to read the dirt.

Here's what nobody tells you about that: once you can see the soil in your own heart, you start being able to see it in everybody else's.

You start noticing the guy who's gruff and hard and completely unreachable. Everything bounces off him. He's a hard path, and somebody walked across him a thousand times to make him that way. And now you know what he needs, and it isn't your argument. It's tenderness. Presence that proves safe. Persistence of welcome. Somebody who keeps showing up without an agenda.

You notice your friend who loves Jesus and loves his career and would honestly have a hard time telling you which one is actually in charge. Weedy soil. And what he needs from you is not a shrug. It's grace, and truth, and somebody who loves him enough to say the word Lord out loud.

And hear me on this, because it matters. Many soils grow in one field. Yours too. You might have deep, rich ground in your marriage and a trampled path in your finances. Don't take one sample and condemn the whole farm. Not in yourself, and not in anybody else.

That's what maturity looks like out loud. Not a report card. Eyes that can finally see people, and a heart soft enough to respond to what you see.

Now, the hard part, and I'm not going to dress it up.

Not everybody has ears to hear. Jesus said so, right there in the parable. Some seed lands and nothing happens.

That is sad. It is also true. And it is not yours to fix.

You are not the sower's boss. You're just somebody who has been given seed.

So we keep sowing.

[THE LONG GAME]

Which brings me to the last thing, and honestly the thing I can't shake this week.

A list wants an answer today. Did I do it, yes or no.

A lifestyle… a life and a legacy asks a slower and heavier question. What kind of soil am I leaving for whoever walks across this ground after me?

Let me tell you about a fourth grade Sunday school teacher.

I don't know her name. I've never met her. She taught my wife Rachel as a 4th grader, decades ago, in a church I've never been in.

And for two weeks straight, she taught these kids about having a secret place. A place to meet with Jesus. And she was clear that it did not have to be a literal closet. It could be a closet. It could be a bunk bed with blankets strung up around it. For Rachel it was a corner of her bedroom with glow in the dark stars on the ceiling.

A secret place where you go and tell Jesus your secrets and your fears.

And then all year long, every single week on Sunday, alongside the Bible lesson, those kids went home with a little journal. Draw a picture. Write a sentence. What did you talk to Jesus about this week in your secret place?

Come back next Sunday with three of the seven days filled in, you got a prize.

That's it. That's the whole strategy. A cheap journal and a prize.

Here's what I want you to know. My wife does not miss many mornings with Jesus. Not many at all. And she will tell you flat out where that came from.

Not from her parents making her. From a fourth grade teacher who made it feel like an adventure instead of an assignment.

That teacher did not hand a nine year old a list.

She planted a lifestyle. And it's still bearing fruit in my house, in my marriage, in my kids' mother, thirty years later.

That teacher, she has no idea.

Church, ninety three kids under fourth grade walked through this building last week.

Ninety three.

And somebody sitting in this room right now is that teacher for one of them, and you will not find out for 20, 30 years, if ever.

That's not childcare. That's not a shift you cover so parents can hear a sermon. That is the slow, unglamorous, thirty-fold, sixty-fold, hundred-fold work of the Kingdom of God, happening one hour at a time on a Sunday morning.

We had our Children's Worker training this week and some of you were there, and thank you. Some of you couldn't make it, and I'm sure the reasons were good ones.

But I want what's in that training to be in your hands. So if you missed it, see Lynne after the service out in the fellowship hall.. Don't put it off. There is important stuff we need to get to you about the privilege you have here to help train our kids not in lists but in the way of life with Jesus!

If we don't train up this next generation, church, somebody else will and we might not like what they cultivate!

[COMMUNION]

Now we're going to come to the table.

And I want you to notice what you're about to do with your hands.

You're not going to earn anything up here. You're not going to produce anything. You're not going to check anything off.

You're going to open your hands and receive something that was already given.

That's the same word Jesus used in Mark 4:20. The good soil hears the word and accepts it. Welcomes it. Receives it like you'd receive a guest into your home.

Bread, broken for you. A cup, poured out for you. Before you ever cleaned up your field. While the ground was still hard.

Verse 24 said the flesh has already been crucified. This table is that sentence you can hold in your hand.

So come. Not because your week went well. Come because it was finished long before your week started.

[CLOSE]

I'm still not going to get a straight answer about my kohlrabi. Some things don't come up and nobody can tell you why.

But I know this.

I never made a tomato in my life. The best I ever did was not kill the plant that made it.

Stay attached. Keep in step. Let the Gardener do the growing.

The harvest of God is a lifestyle, not a list.

Let's pray.