NEW SLANT ON LEAVEN

NEW SLANT ON LEAVEN Matthew 13:31-32 With grateful acknowledgement of these sources of inspiration and direction: G. Beasley-Murray, The Kingdom of God; Steve Brown, "A Word for the Discouraged"; A. Shephard, The Christ of the Gospels; Charles Colson, Against the Night Sept 8, 2002 Given by: Pastor Rich Bersett [Index of Past Messages] Introductory Jesus always taught using parables. In fact, the scripture even records "…he did not say anything to them without using a parable." (Matthew 13:34). Clearly it was His preferred teaching method. And these little stories He told to communicate spiritual truths do keep our interest, don't they? This morning I'd like us to consider one of those parables-perhaps the shortest parable Jesus ever told. And it has to do with leaven again. Last week's message had to do with the negative effect of worldly thinking and untruths that are all around us. These "lies", we learned, can infiltrate our thinking and affect us negatively. That infiltration, Jesus taught is not unlike the way that leaven penetrates a lump of dough. It creeps quietly and unnoticeably through the dough, changing it chemically. Of course, when the imagery of leaven is used in scripture it is always as a negative illustration. Except in one notable instance--today's parable. A Look at the Text (Matthew 13:31-33) We will look at two mini-parables, actually, beginning with Matthew 13:31 - "He told them another parable: 'The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his field. Though it is the smallest of all your seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and perch in its branches.' He told them still another parable: 'The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into a large amount of flour until it worked all through the dough.'" A little mustard seed grows tall, strong; a little pinch of leaven infiltrates entire lump of dough. These metaphors illustrate to us the grand truth that God is wise, creative and surprising in the way He operates His kingdom. Today, Jesus might use an illustration about Orville and Wilbur Wright's airplane at Kitty Hawk, NC, which sputtered just a few feet in the air, but spawned an explosion of global air travel and even space travel. The main point of this passage is God's KINGDOM is like this. Jesus spoke these parables to the disciples He' had handpicked. Maybe when He looked at them He was thinking that He had called some unlikely little men to an impossibly massive work. A bunch of uneducated fishermen, with a despised tax collector and a couple of scheming revolutionaries thrown in. What a monumental task these guys faced! Yet, through these unlikely evangelists, the world would be changed! The KJV records Jewish opposition as saying that just 20 years later they had "turned the world upside down" (Acts 17:6). What God can do with a little leaven, miniature mustard seeds and twelve dubious disciples! Jesus tells these parables because He knows the spiritual victory they will win in the world for Him will not be easy, but it will come at a great cost. He knew there would be times they would preach and preach and preach and no one would respond. He knew they would pray at times and nothing would happen. He knew they would serve their lives away (literally-all but two died as martyrs for the faith), and they would, for the most part, witness very minor results during their lifetimes Lessons from Leaven 1. Don't be daunted by small beginnings. Frankly, there's not a lot of promise in a small seed, unless there is faith in the God who designed and empowered that seed to grow. Looking at a few granules of yeast and a huge batch of dough, you just wouldn't figure out on your own that that leaven could penetrate and activate the whole lump and cause it to uniformly rise. That is, unless you had faith in the God who says, "I designed it to do that very thing, and it will." Five loaves and two fish can't do much-until God uses them. The same is true with five smooth stones, a cup of flour and a little oil, a cloud the size of a man's fist… A lanky teenager stumbled into a tent meeting in North Carolina. He wanted to be a baseball player, but that night God saved Billy Graham and made that boy an evangelist A baby boy is born in a log cabin and the Lincoln family named him Abraham A shoe salesman who taught Sunday School took time to share Christ with one of the neighborhood boys - his name was Dwight Moody. Moody never finished the third grade, but became one of America's greatest evangelists Booker T. Washington was a slave. So was Samuel Proffer, but he became first bishop of Nigeria just a few years after he was sold as a slave for a roll of tobacco Just because it's small in the beginning, don't despise it. Read Zechariah 4 again and be reminded that when God is in it, nothing is without great potential. 4:6 - "It is not be might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, says the Lord." Parenting your children may seem like small potatoes, but God is in it, and your work as a parent is sanctified and infused with enormous spiritual potential. Don't let Satan convince you that your halting words of witness in the office or the classroom doesn't amount to much-it is exactly how He wants to work-through your faithful, imperfect words. Every time you give to missions, to the church, to the poor, even if all you have to give doesn't fold but only jingles, do it in the confidence that God does not despise the day of small things. He tells us to be faithful in the little, few things. Why? Because they are the mustard seeds and dynamic leaven of His kingdom work! Don't ever think that those first graders you teach in Kid City are unimportant. You may be giving basic Bible teaching to a future Billy Graham or Chuck Swindoll or Kay Arthur. So, don't be daunted by small beginnings. The next lesson I find in the language of the leaven is… 2. Don't be fooled by outward appearances. When farmers grow winter wheat, they sow the seed in the mid Fall. By late fall or early winter the plants have grown a few inches above the surface of the soil. Then the snow begins to fly and the temperatures drop below freezing. Soon those plants are exposed to overnight temperatures of 20 degrees and are covered with four inches of snow. The uninitiated might say to the farmer, "You were crazy planting that seed in the fall. Look, the freeze of winter is going to kill your wheat months before it's ready for harvest." But the farmer knows that the wheat will survive, even when the freeze and the snow cause the plants to turn brown, wither and crumple to the ground. In fact, the farmer knows that winter wheat must die so that it can survive. Winter wheat has its own protective system in place that keeps it alive and ready to regerminate in late winter, early spring. In fact, if it doesn't experience a freeze in the early winter, it will not survive. Appearances don't always tell the whole story. Jesus gathered twelve men around him whom most of us would not have hired to cut our lawns. In them and through them the gospel did, in fact, turn the first century world upside down. By the third century the mighty Roman Empire fell to its knees before Christ. By the year 2000, every major culture in the world had heard the gospel clearly and had people groups with thriving, missional churches. What would the disciples have thought if they could have seen into the future 2,000 years and witnessed a worldwide church of a billion and a half Christians? All they had at the time were a rag tag team of renegades and a Messiah who was on the Jewish Mafia hit list. But things aren't always what they seem, are they? God is working His mighty program, growing a protective tree for the salvation of the nations out of a tiny speck of a seed. His church is encroaching, saturating the world like leaven in a dough ball. So, don't be daunted by small beginnings, and don't be fooled by outward appearances. Thirdly, 3. Don't be disturbed by the quietness of the Kingdom. An underground stream has not died just because you can't hear its water rushing. It is invisibly busy, fighting its way through soil and rock, and you will not have any evidence of what it went through until it breaks forth fresh and clean out of the ground. Did you ever hear yeast growing a lump of dough? It's even difficult to see the process by watching the dough, but it is rising steadily, almost imperceptibly, without any noise or fanfare. And you can be sure that, chemically speaking, there is a massive amount of change going on unseen. Sometimes the kingdom of God seems very quiet and there doesn't seem to be much going on. And, for all appearances, there is nothing going on-no conversions, little or no mission expansion, and not even much corporate excitement about anything. But rest assured the kingdom is still alive and well, and there is much that God is doing behind the scenes. God is getting some hidden agendas completed and there will be an upcoming harvest. The faithful church must trust that, as long as they are pursuing Him, the "down times" are not really down. They are the apparently dry seasons during which the leaven is quietly infiltrating new areas of the dough. Sometimes the quiet work with no obvious progress is tedious and worrisome for us. We worry about the church; we worry about whether we are being faithful or not; if we are working hard enough; whether we are doing the right things. There is, of course, the possibility that the church may be suffering some spiritual malaise or in need of repentance. In that case, repent! And get back in the program of God! But we must recognize that there are seasons of preparation for the river's rising, times of quiet, imperceptible spiritual growth that will necessarily precede numerical growth. As long as we are serious about seeking the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, all the other things will follow. Even in our personal lives and walk in Christ there are seasons of seeming "down time". God has not left you, and He isn't teasing you-He's doing something quiet. Sometimes I get so excited about the flashy things, the miraculous displays of His power and grace, the thrilling testimonies and the unbridled enthusiasm of revival. It's just about the time I get addicted to these things that a new season of quiet descends on me. It's then I don't see any of the exciting evidences of God's working around me any more. God stops speaking in the wind and the thunder and His voice settles into a whisper. It's then I have to quiet my soul and listen more carefully. He is teaching me something, correcting something in me, leading me in some new thing. And it is always something I later find out I will need for the next chapter of my spiritual walk. I am usually surprised to find out that God is more interested in DIRECTION than PACE. The words of the New Testament intend to encourage believers that, though things may seem spiritually dead, God is at work, getting His heavenly purposes accomplished in us. And so, let me encourage you this morning. If your heart is for God and His kingdom and his righteousness, but you see no current outward evidence that anything significant is happening in your life, stand firm and know that the leaven is working. God's purposes never die. "He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus." (Philippians 1:6) Did you ever wait for a butterfly to come out of its cocoon? It takes forever! And what a boring thing to watch-that dumb, brown bag, hanging there, doing nothing. But what the biology student knows is that inside that ugly chrysalis there is an incredible amount of energy being expended as God works a miraculous metamorphosis, transforming a fuzzy crawler through a process of gooey disintegration, into a powder-light, multi-colored flier. It may not look like it on the outside, but inside that quiet crusty casing, it is a busy place! Never look at a chrysalis and say, "There's nothing going on in there!" Archbishop of Calcutta Henry D'Souza knows that at times in her life, Mother Teresa felt abandoned by God. He said that in one letter, she wrote that she had been walking the streets of Calcutta searching for a house where she could start her work. At the end of the day, she wrote in her diary, "I wandered the streets the whole day. My feet are aching, and I have not been able to find a home. And I also get the Tempter telling me, 'Leave all this, go back to the convent from which you came.'" She found her home, and the rest is history. The Missionaries of Charity feeds 500,000 families a year in Calcutta alone, treats 90,000 leprosy patients annually, and educates 20,000 children every year. A man stopped to watch a Little League baseball game. He asked one of the youngsters what the score was. "We're losing 18-0," was the answer. "Well," said the man. "I must say you don't look discouraged." "Discouraged?" the boy said, puzzled. "Why should I be discouraged? We haven't come to bat yet." Never look at a church congregation in a quiet season of divine transformation and say, "God isn't at work in there!" Never smugly judge another Christian who, at the moment doesn't 'appear' to be bearing much fruit for God, and say something spiritual ignorant like, "She must not love the Lord!" Recognize there are seasons of testing, healing, teaching, repentance, and preparation for whatever the Lord has around the corner. Leaven is quiet, hidden, non-frenetic-but it is always productive. Sometimes there is even martyrdom for the cause of Christ. At first, when people die for the cause of Christ, it feels like the kingdom stepped backward. We feel like, "Oh, no! God lost one!" Didn't it shake you when Martin Burnham was killed in the Philippines, after all that prayer and waiting in hope? But the fact is that the blood of martyrs has always advanced the gospel in hostile territories. And frankly, the martyrs themselves are with the Lord, receiving their reward! The kingdom grows in sometimes strange, quiet, hidden ways. We'll never figure out all that God is doing. His wisdom is beyond finding out. But we know that the Kingdom of heaven is like mustard seed and leaven. Small, obscure and hidden, it will pervade society and permeate the whole world. When it appears that things are not going or growing like they ought to, check your devotion to God, make sure you are obeying everything you know you re to do, and TRUST GOD. I believe this parable means to teach us to not be daunted by small beginnings, to not be fooled by outward appearances, and to not be disturbed by the quietness of the Kingdom. Conclusion I would like to close with two personal encouragements. 1. Trust God's choices. The Bible says that the Lord deliberately and intentionally chooses the weak and despised things of this world-things that have not obvious potential at all-to get his work done. He uses weak and foolish things, for example, according to 1 Corinthians 1. I want you to remember the next time you think you are useless or you think God could never do anything of any importance through you. The only one who wants you to believe that is the Devil. And it is a lie. You may not think you're a failure or you have nothing to offer God, but God's opinion of you is much different. "Little is much when God is in it." So goes the song lyric. He set in you and sees in you enormous potential, in spite of your supposed shortcomings. Don't you love to see people who have difficulties use them to their advantage? • Jay Leno has this huge pointed chin, and when he laughs about it, he's even funnier. • Woody Stevens was a little man, but he became a jockey, then a horse trainer, and won the Belmont five times. • Mel Tillis is a stutterer, but instead of going into hibernation, he comes out to laugh at himself, and it endears him to us even more. I read somewhere that high heels were invented by a woman who got tired of her boyfriend kissing her on the forehead. Don't you love it when people look for creative ways to deal with their discouragement? For years William Wilberforce pushed Britain's Parliament to abolish slavery. Discouraged, he was about to give up. His elderly friend, John Wesley, heard of it and from his deathbed called for pen and paper. With trembling hand, Wesley wrote: "Unless God has raised you up for this very thing, you will be worn out by the opposition of men and devils. But if God be for you, who can be against you? Are all of them stronger than God? "Oh be not weary of well-doing! Go on, in the name of God and in the power of his might, till even American slavery shall vanish away before it." Wesley died six days later. But Wilberforce fought for forty-five more years and in 1833, three days before his own death, saw slavery abolished in Britain. Even the greatest ones need encouragement. When Handel wrote the "Hallelujah Chorus," his health and his fortunes had reached the lowest possible ebb. His right side had become paralyzed, and all his money was gone. He was heavily in debt and threatened with imprisonment. He was tempted to give up the fight. The odds seemed entirely too great. And it was then he composed his greatest work--Messiah. 2. Trust God's processes. The parable of leaven teaches us that there is in process a spiritual law of influence. And it is quite simple. If we will do simply what God has given us to do, no matter how simple or small, He will accomplish great things through it-even if we never see the great results. It's all about you and me working steadily in concert with God's Spirit to influence, not the whole world at once-not even a huge crowd, but the one person He's brought to mind or across our path. One soul at a time, each Christian influences for Christ the next contiguous person or organization for His sake. Quietly, without a lot of fanfare, invisibly, the influence of the Kingdom will penetrate and pervade our culture.     Madeleine L'Engle, in an article entitled "A Stone for a Pillow" said, "Perhaps what we are called to do may not seem like much. But consider what one scientist has called 'the butterfly effect': even a butterfly moving its wings has an effect on galaxies thousands of light-years away." Trust His processes - He will use you to His glory. Don't give up. Continually and consistently give yourself 100% into His care and His will. Somebody asked Winston Churchill one time, "What most prepared you to lead Great Britain through World War II?" For a period of time, Great Britain stood virtually alone against Nazi Germany as it dominated the Western World. This was Churchill's response: "It was the time I repeated a class in grade school." The questioner said, "You mean you flunked a grade?" Churchill said, "I never flunked in my life. I was given a second opportunity to get it right." Jonas Salk attempted 200 unsuccessful vaccines for polio before he came up with one that worked. Somebody asked him one time, "How did it feel to fail 200 times trying to invent a vaccine for polio?" This was his response: "I never failed 200 times at anything in my life. My family taught me never to use that word. I simply discovered 200 ways how not to make a vaccine for polio." During his ministry John Wesley rode over 250,000 miles on horseback, a distance equal to ten circuits of the globe along the equator. He preached over 40,000 sermons! A single page from the journal of John Wesley reads: Sunday a.m., May 5 - Preached in St. Ann's; was asked not to come back any more. Sunday p.m., May 5 - Preached at St. John's; deacons said, "Get out and stay out." Sunday a.m., May 12 - Preached at St. Jude's; can't go back there either. Sunday p.m., May 12 - Preached at St. George's; kicked out again. Sunday a.m., May 19 - Preached at St. Somebody Else's; deacons called special mtg., said I couldn't return. Sunday p.m., May 19 - Preached on the street; kicked off the street. Sunday a.m., May 26 - Preached out in a meadow; chased out of meadow when a bull was turned loose during the service. Sunday a.m., June 2 - Preached out at the edge of town; kicked off the highway. Sunday p.m., June 2 - Afternoon service, preached in pasture; 10,000 people came. The word today for leaven-people in the Kingdom of God - don't give up. Keep on keeping on. You are part of a majestic process. You are helping to saturate God's prodigal world with a message of light and salvation. Be encouraged. Don't give up!     [Back to Top]