Jesus' Kingdom Parables

Introduction

If you have your Bible with you this morning, I invite you to turn with me to Mark’s Gospel. We’re still in chapter 4, and Lord willing next week we will exit chapter 4! But today, we are looking at two final parables of our Lord Jesus in Mark chapter 4 verses 26 to 34. These parables are typically referred to as, “Jesus’ Kingdom Parables”. In them, we see Jesus teaching about:

Theme: The growth of God’s kingdom

That theme unites both of these parables as Jesus compares the kingdom of God to growing seed and to a mustard seed.

Hear now the Word of God.

Mark 4:26–29 ESV

And he said, “The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed on the ground. He sleeps and rises night and day, and the seed sprouts and grows; he knows not how. The earth produces by itself, first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear. But when the grain is ripe, at once he puts in the sickle, because the harvest has come.”

Mark 4:30–32 ESV

And he said, “With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable shall we use for it? It is like a grain of mustard seed, which, when sown on the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth, yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes larger than all the garden plants and puts out large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.”

Mark 4:33–34 ESV

With many such parables he spoke the word to them, as they were able to hear it. He did not speak to them without a parable, but privately to his own disciples he explained everything.

Here ends the reading of the Word of the Lord.

We find in these two parables much encouragement, I think. In the midst of a corrupt culture where darkness seems to be prevailing, Jesus tells us otherwise. He reveals that the kingdom of God, a kingdom full of perfect light and pure hope, is growing and shall one day be fully manifest for all to see. While the growth of this kingdom remains mysterious, we can take heart that its increase is inevitable and invincible.

Mark summarizes this section of his Gospel account by essentially communicating that one’s proximity to Jesus will determine whether we understand this blessed truth or not. It is only when we draw near to Jesus, when we are in close communion and connection with Jesus that we may understand the secret of the kingdom of God. To His disciples, Jesus explained everything. What a conference that would have been! And we can have that too through the illumination of the Spirit, shinning through the Word this morning.

We’re going to consider the growth of God’s kingdom, as taught by Jesus in these parables, in two parts. The first parable teaches us how the kingdom grows and the second parable reveals the proportion to which it grows.

1. The means of the kingdom’s growth

Let’s take a look at Jesus’ first kingdom parable in verses 26 to 29. The emphasis of this parable is on how the kingdom of God grows or the means of the kingdom’s growth. And it is worth mentioning that this is the only place in all four Gospels where this parable appears. That makes this parable quite unique. Out of the many parables Jesus would have spoken that day at the Sea of Galilee, the Holy Spirit inspired Mark to mention this teaching of our Lord. So, this parable in particular calls for careful attention and we will spend most of our time on it.

Mark 4:26–29 ESV

And he said, “The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed on the ground. He sleeps and rises night and day, and the seed sprouts and grows; he knows not how. The earth produces by itself, first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear. But when the grain is ripe, at once he puts in the sickle, because the harvest has come.”

Jesus returns to using the familiar elements of His first parable in this chapter. Once again, we see this parable centers on a sower, scattered seed, and soil. However, as we read this parable in contrast to the Parable of the Soils, we can easily spot some differences. In Jesus’ first parable in verses 1 to 20, the primary focus was on the nature and receptivity of the soil to the scattered seed. The four different soils represented how a person listened and responded to God’s Word through Jesus’ teaching.

But now, in verses 26 to 29, the primary focus shifts away from the soil onto the seed. Even the sower is not intended to be at the front and center of the story. He is seen scattering the seed in the beginning of the parable and then at the end he collects the grain once it is ripe. But, what is it the man has done to make the seed to grow? Verse 27, “He sleeps and rises night and day, and the seed sprouts and grows; he knows not how.” Ultimately, Jesus made no mention of activities the sower might perform to ensure he will have a healthy, successful crop. In the story, the sower doesn’t till the soil, he doesn’t fertilize, he doesn’t water, or even pull weeds. Perhaps those activities are assumed to have been carried out by the sower. And yet, the only activity Jesus said the man had done after sowing the seed is sleep, wake, watch, and wait.

The point Jesus was making was that the sower does not and cannot cause the seed to grow. No amount of coercion, positive affirmation, or threat of violence will make the seed sprout and ripen. This is the wonder and beauty of God’s design and creation. It is the seed itself that carries within it the power to produce life. Of course, the seed requires the right environment and conditions: good soil, sunlight, irrigation, and what not.

But, overall, it is the seed that possesses generative power. “All by itself,” Jesus says. “Automate” is the Greek word, from which we derive our English word, “automatic”. That is to say, independently and without external control, apart from the farmer, the seed sprouts, grows, and ripens.

What is Jesus communicating here? Well, just as with the previous “farming” parable, the elements in this parable carry the same interpretation. The sower is the one who proclaims the Word. And the seed is likened to the kingdom of God, which grows on account of the Word being sown. And the soil in this parable could be a further amplification of the fourth, good and fruitful soil from before. So, what Jesus is teaching now is meant to reveal how it is that the Kingdom of God grows according to the implanted Word, or gospel, in the receptive, responsive heart of a believer. Before, Jesus stressed the responsibility of man to receive the Word or the gospel. Now, Jesus is highlighting the work of God through the power of His Word in the souls of men. The power of God in His Word is the means of kingdom-growth. On an individual scale as believers, on a corporate scale as a local church, and even on a universal scale, the growth of God’s kingdom is supremely and solely the work of God through the power of His implanted Word.

I don’t know about you, but I find that extremely encouraging and comforting! Sunday after Sunday, I stand here and scatter the seed of the Word. On many occasions I broadcast the gospel, scattering its seed out into the soil in the pews, so to speak. And some Sunday’s I leave this pulpit feeling discouraged or disappointed. Did I do enough, I wonder? Did I say the right thing, I worry? Was I clear and convincing?

Really, my worries are washed away when I read this parable of Jesus. It reminds me that the burden of heart-level change, kingdom-growth, and fruit is not upon my shoulders. I can broadcast the seed, and I’ve been called by God to do so. But, I cannot bring the growth. I must leave that up to the Lord. He has guaranteed us that it is the power of His Word and it is His prerogative to bring new life, change, and growth. The language of the Bible is very interesting when it comes to our part as believers in the kingdom of God. We are never said to be the ones who build or advance or grow the kingdom. We are only ever told to enter it, enjoy it, experience it, and invite others into it. The growth, building, and advance of the kingdom is left to the work of God, for it is only a work He can do. And He has promised He will do it.

This should encourage all of us in our personal evangelism and in the ministry and outreach of this church. The results are not dependent upon us. It’s not about how convincing our words are or how captivating our presentation of the gospel is.

James reminds and assures us:

James 1:18 ESV

Of his own will he brought us forth by the word of truth, that we should be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures.

This is the key to our own spiritual growth, to successful evangelism, and to a healthy local church ministry. It is God who begets or brings forth life by the power of His Word.

And so, I think we are left with an important question. If the means of the growth of God’s kingdom, on an individual scale and universal scale, is totally dependent upon God’s powerful, life-giving Word, then what can and should we do? To answer that, I want to direct your attention to the sower and what he does in this parable, where we can glean at least three applications.

Release the Word

First, because God’s Word is the powerful means by which God grows His kingdom, we can and must release the Word. The sower cannot expect a harvest if he doesn’t first scatter the seed. Likewise, we must plant the Word if we hope to see any harvest at all. This principle is true in our own spiritual lives, isn’t it? That is part of what we considered last week. We must first put in the effort and energy to read, study, and listen to God’s Word if our heads, hearts, and hands are to be positively impacted.

And this is equally true in our personal evangelism. Our calling as Christians is to proclaim the gospel. God’s Word grows on its own, but it will not grow if it is never sown! This is a great mystery to us. That God is entirely capable of growing His kingdom without us, and yet He has determined and ordained that we, imperfect and sinful people, are to be apart of this work.

Any and every believer is able to do this. Anyone of us, who have understood the gospel by God’s grace enough to receive and believe it for ourselves, can impart it to others. It is encouraging that Jesus compared the kingdom of God to a seed and not to an oak tree or mountain! Evangelism is likened to planting a seed, even a small mustard seed as we shall see. It is not the moving of mountains or the transplanting of oak trees! It isn’t Rocket Science! Just as a small child can hold and plant a seed, so even the smallest in faith can carry the seed of the gospel to the field and scatter it.

We should also be careful and diligent to sow the Word of God and only the Word of God. The Bible tells us that kind produces kind. You reap what you sow. Plant an apple seed and you can expect an apple tree. If you sow love and kindness, expect to experience love and kindness in return. That’s a general rule.

So, we need to be careful to sow the pure gospel and not our opinions and preferences. If you want to see gospel fruit, then sow gospel seed. Don’t plant a hybrid gospel, watered down or edited to exclude the difficult doctrines. Proclaim the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

Let us be industrious and wise in spreading the gospel. Release the Word.

Rest in the Power of God

Second, once we have released the seed of the Word, we should and can only rest in the power of God. This is what is represented by the sower in the parable. “He sleeps and rises night and day, and the seed sprouts and grows; he knows not how” (v. 27). He had done all he could do. Now, all there was left for him to do was wait and watch. He had to trust that the seed would do what it was designed to do.

So it is with us who scatter the seed of the gospel. There will almost never be immediate results. We think of our own experiences and find this to be true. Some of us have loved ones that we’ve been sharing the gospel with for years. By all appearances, we aren’t sure that what we’ve said has taken root. And in some cases, it never will take root or grow to full maturity to bear fruit. That’s just the way it goes.

But in other cases, some of you have experienced the opposite. You’ve shared the gospel regularly with a friend, family member, or co-worker. And for some time it appeared that nothing was happening. Until one day, they came to you or you hear from someone else that this person has committed themselves to Christ and are on fire for Him! Maybe you were such a person yourself! For years the gospel seed that someone had planted lay dormant in your heart until God by His Spirit breathed new life into you.

It is during this season of incubation, while we wait for the gospel seed to sprout and grow, that we must practice a patient and praying faith. We ought to rest in the power of the Sovereign God, who alone possesses the power to regenerate and save dead sinners. Think again of the sower in the parable. We don’t see him fretting or worried, biting his fingernails that there won’t be a crop once he has planted the seed. He knows that germination and growth will require time. He may not understand all the details of how the seed will grow; he doesn’t even see the growth taking place underneath the soil, but he remains confident that what he has planted will one day push through the surface of the soil to bring a harvest. And so, he is able to find sleep at night.

Don’t overlook this piece of the parable. I think it is absolutely crucial that we not miss the fact that Jesus said this man slept. Sleep is the great reminder that we all have limitations; that we are insufficient, and dependent, created beings. There is only so much we can do. And we often discover that there is much we cannot do!

But, we have a God who “never slumbers nor sleeps”, as the psalmist says. He is totally self-sufficient, independent, uncreated, and infinitely limitless in power, knowledge and wisdom. And that’s why we can rest and sleep. We believe that He is working when and where we are unable to work. We can rest once we have resigned the work into God’s almighty, omnipotent hands. But, that’s the trouble, isn’t it? Resigning the work of growth into God’s hands!

So, we need to practice a patient faith. Spiritual growth is gradual, not instantaneous. The kingdom of God was not instantly and fully manifested in the first advent of Jesus Christ! It had small beginnings and even after the death and resurrection of our Lord, the kingdom was still a young shoot growing out of Jesse’s stump. It would continue to grow as the apostles witnessed and proclaimed the gospel in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, then Asia and Asia Minor, even Africa. And this kingdom, we must recognize has not fully matured on a grand scale yet in our day. There are still places full of unreached peoples where the seed of the gospel must be planted. There are still places where the gospel has already been planted, but has yet to reach maturity.

Our job is to let loose the Word and watch it work. Martin Luther once said,

“After I preach my sermon on Sunday, I return home and just let the gospel run its course.”

And if anyone came to Christ, Luther would gift them two items - a Bible, so that they could read the Word of God, and a hymnal, so that they could sing the Word of God. And Luther would say concerning the Bible and the hymnal,

“Let them loose and like fire they will spread on their own.”

Once we’ve scattered the seed of the gospel, we resign the work over to God to bring the growth. We are to wait. And in the meantime while we wait, the best work we can do is to pray. Pray for the seed you have planted to grow. Pray for the person, with whom you have shared the gospel, to come to a saving knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. If the prayer of the righteous person has great power to heal the sick, surely the prayers of God’s people, made righteous by the life and death of Christ, has great power to bring others into the kingdom. That is not say our prayers have power to save, but that the One to Whom we pray has the only power to save.

And what better opportunity do we have to pray for those we have proclaimed the gospel to than on Wednesday evenings when we gather as a church to pray! Every Wednesday night at 6:30 a small group of us sit down and pray for those people who need salvation. Some nights that list of names becomes so long that not all of us can possibly pray for each person adequately. But I am confident that with more people, we can bathe the lost in such prayer like never before.

I can tell you of at least one person we had continually prayed for when I first came two years ago, who has within the past year come to Christ. We prayed for the 5 Day Club a few weeks ago, that children would be saved, and I’ve heard that a couple of them committed their lives to the Lord.

All this to say, when there is nothing left for us to do, we put it in God’s hands and we practice a patient, praying faith, trusting in the sovereign work of the Spirit to move and do as He pleases.

Release the Word. Rest in the power of God.

Reap the Harvest

And third, reap the harvest. “When the grain is ripe, at once…put in the sickle, because the harvest has come” (Mk. 4:29). If we are faithful to proclaim the gospel, then eventually we will encounter mature fruit. Then the time of patience and prayer will be over and it is time to bring in the crop.

This will require readiness and diligent work. A wise farmer knows that there is no time to delay once a field is ready to be harvested. Wait too long and the crop will rot. In other words, we must be prepared before and active in bringing in the ripe fruit. Evangelism is over, discipleship can begin.

Of course, on a grand scale, one Day, the Lord shall return for His harvest and will put in the sickle to gather His people. Right now, the kingdom of God and the reign of Christ is an internal reality for the believer. But, one Day the kingdom of God shall finally and visibly be manifested for all to see. And every knee shall bow, and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord of all to the glory of the Father. And to that we say, “Come, Almighty King, come rule and reign over us!”

2. The magnitude of the kingdom’s growth

Now, let’s briefly look at the final parable in Mark chapter 4. In this Kingdom Parable, Jesus illustrates the magnitude of the kingdom’s growth. Despite the kingdom’s small beginnings, Jesus says the kingdom will grow to encompass and bless many. Take a look again at the parable of the mustard seed in verses 30 to 32.

Mark 4:30–32 ESV

And he said, “With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable shall we use for it? It is like a grain of mustard seed, which, when sown on the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth, yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes larger than all the garden plants and puts out large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.”

The point of the parable is that nobody would expect such an insignificantly small seed, like the mustard seed, to produce such a large plant. A typical mustard seed is about the size of a fleck of pepper in your hand. And yet, the end result is a species of shrub, which grows about 8 to 12 feet tall!

Now, we understand that Jesus is speaking in hyperbole. He is not literally saying the mustard seed is the smallest seed in the world. Nor was He saying it was the smallest seed in Israel at the time. It wasn’t. It’s a figure of speech. After all, this is only a parable! And the Bible is filled with such statements that must be interpreted and taken as figures of speech. For example, we’ve already seen such a hyperbolic statement in Mark’s Gospel. In Mark chapter 1, Mark says:

Mark 1:33 ESV

And the whole city was gathered together at the door.

We understand that the entire city of Capernaum, with a population at the time the size of Taylorville, were not all literally gathered at the door of Peter’s home! Mark is employing a figure of speech to communicate that a very large crowd had come to Jesus for healing and to have their demons cast out. And Jesus is using the same literary device in this parable to illustrate how “superlatively small” (Sproul, Mark, 76) the mustard seed was and how surprising the size of its growth ends up being. Its growth is disproportionate to the size of the seed. It grows so large, Jesus says, that the birds of the air can find shade and shelter in its branches.

In this image, Jesus is teaching that despite the meager and small beginnings of God’s kingdom, one day it will explode in growth for all to see. Think about it. At Christ’s first advent, Jesus declared, “The kingdom of God is at hand.” This would have sounded totally bizarre to those who heard this. All they saw was a man who came from the small, insignificant town of Nazareth. The Jews were anticipating the kingdom of God to come in pomp and circumstance! This kingdom is supposed to be glorious, majestic, and powerful! It is the kingdom to end all kingdoms. The kingdom that would, by their estimation, overthrow Rome.

But Jesus is teaching, once again, that God’s kingdom does not fit the expectations of man. Everything about this kingdom is not what we would expect. Its King came, not to immediately reign, but to sacrificially die on behalf of His subjects. This kingdom does not come at first with trumpets blaring or angels shouting for all to see and understand. Rather, the message of this kingdom was entrusted to a small group of men, who would, by the power of the Holy Spirit, turn the world upside down. It is a kingdom that is spread through a message about the damning effects of sin and the delivering power of a Savior. It’s a kingdom that is available to all, but few will enter. And those who do enter are the most odd and unlikely of people, so that it is clear that only God could have brought this about and He alone receives the glory.

Consider the unexpected growth of the kingdom of God. It is like a mustard seed, yet when it is sown, it outgrows all the garden plants, its branches offer a home for the birds of the air. That, I believe, was Jesus’ way of saying the kingdom will include not only the Jews who receive and believe in Him as the Messiah, but also any Gentiles. Birds are often used in the Old Testament to refer to the nations. Such, I think, is the case with the passage we read earlier in Ezekiel 17. God Himself promises to take a “sprig” and plant it on a high and lofty mountain in Israel, where it will thrive, bear fruit, and become a haven for every kind of bird [Gospel Transformation Bible, ESV, 1075]. This is what I believe Jesus was alluding to in His parable, comparing the kingdom of God to a mustard seed. The branches of this kingdom would spread so wide that even the Gentiles, who would receive and believe the gospel, would find a place to build a nest.

Perhaps this offers us another application to walk away with today. And that application is for us to rejoice that we who believe have become fellow heirs with God’s chosen people, members of the same body, partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel. Like the birds of the air with the mustard tree, we can find shelter in the cross of Jesus Christ from God’s wrath against our sin. At the cross, we find shade that offers us relief from the heat of Satan and the scourge of our flesh. Through Christ we may enter, enjoy, and experience a sweet haven of grace and mercy. His is a kingdom that secures us with an eternal hope, everlasting peace, and steadfast love. And it is a kingdom that only continues to grow until it will encompass and bless many from every tribe, and language, and people, and nation.

Let this encourage us and motivate us to faithfully take the seed of the kingdom in the message of the gospel, and scatter it and sow it. Let us trust in the Spirit of God, who by His power will produce a bountiful harvest. And let us rejoice that the Father has graciously opened up a way for us to enjoy the shelter and shade of His kingdom through the life, death, and resurrection of His Beloved Son, our Savior and King, Jesus Christ.