READY HEARTS

The Parables of Jesus  •  Sermon  •  Submitted
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Introduction

-{Matthew 13}
-In looking into my genealogy, both sides of my family had farmers working the land in Wisconsin, and both my parents worked some on the farms in their younger days. I’ve never worked on farms myself, but I have a lot of respect for those who do—the hard work that is put in from sun-up to sun-down to bring forth a crop is worthy of honor.
~There are so many factors to consider when trying to grow crops. Is there enough rainfall? Is the soil fertile? Are there pests trying to destroy the crop? There’s a lot more than that that goes into it. But if you are going to have something to reap at the harvest, it takes a lot of work and preparation.
-We’ve been looking at Jesus’ parables, and in the parable that I want to look at today Jesus uses farming as a picture. Through this parable Jesus taught His hearers that their reception of His message about God’s Kingdom depended on the readiness of their heart for it. The people had to prepare their hearts like a farmer works the land to ready it for the crops.
-What we learn is that our eternal state and our usefulness to God depends on how receptive our hearts are to the truths of Christ’s message about God’s Kingdom.
~My prayer is that we leave here today with hearts that are open to the message of the Kingdom, prepared for fruitful service to our King, Jesus Christ.
READ Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23
-I want to give just a bit of context. Before this passage, Jesus had been going through towns and villages preaching and teaching and doing miracles, and you would think that He would have found a receptive audience; but He did not.
~Some of the people in the towns and cities looked on with indifference. Some really hardened their heart toward Him and His message.
~The religious leaders became openly hostile toward Him. They accused Him of breaking the law. They accused Him of using the power of Satan to do the miracles that He did. Then they conspired against Him to find a way to destroy Him.
~Even His mother and brothers tried to get Him out of the public spotlight because they thought that He was nuts. There was not a wide acceptance of Jesus or His message.
-So, Jesus began to teach in parables. And Matthew begins this section of parables with this one that, in a sense, is a reaction to the reception that Jesus received because it really talks about how ready people’s hearts are to receive it.
-You’ve heard it referred to as the parable of the sower, the parable of the seed, or the parable of the soils. These are the three elements that are given here. And since these are the three elements that bear the meaning of what Jesus is driving at, I want to consider these three:

1) The Sower

-Jesus begins by saying that a SOWER WENT OUT TO SOW. We don’t usually use that kind of terminology, so we might could say that a farmer went out to plant seed.
~However, they didn’t plant see like we think of planting seed. A field would have various patches of ground that would be plowed or cultivated to prepare it for the seed. There would be footpaths that would go in between and around these patches. The farmer or sower would walk the paths and would throw or cast the seed around into these areas.
-Now, although Jesus gives His disciples an explanation of the parable, He doesn’t necessarily mention who or what the sower represents, and I think it is left vague because it represents a couple of things.
-First, the sower is Jesus Himself. In the one of the following parables (The parable of the wheat and the tares) He says that THE ONE WHO SOWS THE GOOD SEED IS THE SON OF MAN.
~Jesus had been going out to the towns and villages teaching and preaching. He was the farmer throwing around the seed.
-But then Jesus would commission the apostles to continue His ministry of teaching and preaching; and then, by extension, Jesus commissions us to go out and preach and teach. And that’s something that we have to consider. Those who belong to Christ are commissioned to go out and sow the seed. The seed won’t grow if it isn’t planted. Seeds don’t plant themselves. A farmer or sower has to scatter the seed. Now, the farmer doesn’t cause the seed to grow. All the farmer does is get the seed out there so that if it finds a place to grow, then it will grow. The farmer needs to do his or her part of planting/sowing.
~So, the sower represents the one that goes out teaching and preaching and sharing the message. Just like farming, that means there is work and labor involved—but it’s an investment into the future. Go out and plant/sow some seed. This then naturally leads to the next element of the parable:

2) The Seed

-So, if the sower is Jesus and then the apostles and then us going out and teaching and preaching and sharing the seed, what is then is the seed? According to v. 19 the seed is the word of the kingdom. Mark’s version just says that it is the word, and Luke’s version says that it is the word of God.
~The seed represents that gospel message about Jesus inaugurating the Kingdom of God—God’s rule and reign in the hearts of those who would repent and believe in who Jesus is and what He would accomplish through His death and resurrection.
-The sower/farmer is scattering the seed, he or she is sharing the gospel message to anybody and everybody with the hopes that some of the seed will be implanted and grow into a great crop.
-If the gospel message is allowed to do its work, it will completely and utterly change someone’s life. The gospel message of the Kingdom is able to transform something that is dead and lifeless and turn it into something that will glorify God and be a blessing to others.
~But there is a condition for that to happen. That is why the main focus of the parable is on the third element, so let’s spend time looking at:

3) The Soil

-Jesus describes 4 different types of soil upon which the seed falls. In the explanation of the parable, Jesus makes it clear that each type of soil represents the human heart. And what the soil does with the seed (or maybe, better yet, what the seed is able to do in that type of soil) is representative of different responses to the gospel message—but it is all dependent on what the heart does with the message (what the soil does with the seed).
-Now, some teachers have tried to stretch the parable to say that since 1 out of 4 types of soil actually allows something to grow, that means 25% of people who hear the message will respond favorably. That’s just stretching things too far. That’s not the point. Jesus is describing the human heart and its readiness to respond. There are a vast majority more of people who will not respond favorably to the message than those who do—those whose hearts aren’t ready. However, that doesn’t stop the sowers from scattering seed.
-Jesus is describing how and why people do or do not respond to the message of the Kingdom, and then it is a cause of reflection for everybody who hears this parable—what type of soil is your heart? Will it allow the seed of the gospel to grow, or will it keep the message from bringing about any change?
~Let’s consider the four different soils. He begins by describing three different types of soil where the seed is not able to take root, grow, and become fruitful.
~We need to picture a 1st century farmer scattering seed; as he throws the seed not all of it falls in the plots that were prepared for it. Seed is flying everywhere and lands on places that aren’t prepared for growth.
(1) Jesus says that some of the seed fell on the footpaths that go throughout the field. The footpaths are places where the ground has been packed down from people constantly walking over it. It’s just hard, solid ground, and the seeds just bounce on top of it and sits there.
-Because it sits on top of the ground, it is laying there exposed, and the birds see it and start eating all the seeds up. The hard ground could not receive the seed.
~If you’ve ever gone hiking, the trails have been walked over thousands of times and the ground is solid and you can walk that path without fear of your feet sinking into the ground. If you were to just throw seeds on it, the seeds would just sit there, and the forest animals will find a meal.
-Jesus says that this is the state of some human hearts. They hear the gospel message, but their heart is so hard that it refuses the gospel any access. It’s not that they can’t understand, it’s that they don’t want to understand it.
~But if the Word of God were to just sit there, there might be a chance that it could try to burrow its way into someone’s heart, and they might finally get it and be saved. So, to prevent that from happening, before the Word has a chance to do anything, the evil one comes and steals the Word away. The person’s hard heart already prevented penetration, and the devil is going to do whatever He can to keep it that way. The devil knows the power of the Word, so he wants to help people along in their hardness.
-This represents someone who is hardened to the things of God and indifferent to what it means for their eternal soul. They hear the gospel and merely dismiss it as fables or superstition, and they go into eternity without belief.
(2) The next soil is described as rocky ground. What it describes is something found quite often in Israel where there was a bedrock of limestone just underneath the surface with a very thin layer of soil laying on top of it. Seed might fall on this type of ground and sit in the thin layer of soil, and so it starts to grow. The beginning months of sowing in the Israel had a lot of rain, so the seed would begin to germinate.
~The problem is that the bedrock underneath the surface prevented the plant from getting any sort of root system into the ground. All of the plant was right there at the surface level. Later in the hotter months, because the plant had no root system to get to any water source, the blazing sun would just burn the plant up before there was any real growth.
-Jesus likens this type of soil to someone who hears the Word of God and receives it with joy. We might liken it to someone who hears a rousing testimony or sermon, and they are caught up in the emotions of it all. Or maybe they just happen to be going through a hard time in life and they hear about Jesus and they’re like, well, I’ve tried everything else, might as well try this. And so, they make an emotional response.
-But then trials and tribulations and persecutions happen, and because they don’t have genuine faith (they don’t have a solid root system of faith and belief to help them stand strong), they fall away. Once life starts to become hard, and the initial fix of Jesus no longer gives the same high as it did before, they decide that this Jesus thing doesn’t really work, so they step away.
-It’s not that they believed and backslid. These are folks who never really believed. In another parable and teaching, Jesus warned about not counting the cost. Once these folks realize that belief in Jesus takes you out of comfort zones and actually requires something from you, they’re like: NO THANKS; THAT’S NOT WHAT I SIGNED UP FOR.
~When living in the faith no longer gives the emotional high, they fall away to return to where they had been before.
(3) Jesus said that other seed fell in soil that would eventually also grow thorns. The soil at first may have looked good, but somewhere underneath were the seeds or root systems of thorny weeds. These weren’t small, tiny, pesky little weeds, but large sturdy plants that would grow several feet tall. While the good grain would grow, these large thornbushes would grow right along with it, competing for space and nutrients and water. Eventually, the thornbushes would overcome the good grain, choking them out and the grain would die.
-Jesus likens this soil to men and women who might again seem to have a positive disposition toward the Christ and the Word, but Jesus says that the cares of the world and the love of money choke out the Word from ever truly growing and bearing fruit in someone’s life. As Jesus warned elsewhere, these people find out that you cannot serve both God and mammon. You will have to choose your master.
-These are people who are confronted with the gospel, but the love of worldly matters chokes out the possibility of spiritual life. They would rather gain the whole world, only to lose their soul.
-These are people who find their worth and value from what the world says is important, and they pursue it with wild abandon. They also find that it’s easier to follow the world’s definition of moral and ethics. So, as Christ’s ethics say the opposite of the world, they become offended by Christ and His Word.
~You see this even among people who claim a form of Christianity. These are the liberal, woke folks who ignore the parts of God’s Word that they don’t like and instead fall in lockstep with what the world says is good and evil.
~They find it easier to go with the crowds than to go with God.
(4) But, thankfully, not all types of soil are bad. There is the good soil where the seed is able to grow and flourish. It has a healthy root system, there is nothing trying to crowd it out—it is able to grow until it bears much fruit.
~Scholars say that if a crop was able to produce tenfold of grain that it was a prosperous crop. But Jesus says that this grain was able to produce thirty, sixty, and even a hundredfold over what was initially planted. Much fruit is born.
-Jesus likens this to people whose hearts are receptive to the gospel, and it changes their lives, and the Word of God dwells in them richly, and they live out the Word of God. Jesus says that they bear fruit.
~It’s obvious from the different numbers that some people will bear more spiritual fruit than others, but the point is that at least some fruit is being born. What do we mean by fruit?
~There is the fruit of winning souls; there is the fruit of living in holiness; there is the fruits of the Spirit (a Christ-like character marked by love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control); there is the fruit of good works; there is the fruit of praise & thanksgiving; and so much more.

Conclusion

-Now the question becomes, what soil are you? How ready is your heart for the seed of the Word of God, the gospel? Don’t think that just because you come to church automatically means you are a fruitful Christian.
-Are you like the soil in the path? Have you hardened your heart to the true gospel message of repenting and believing in Jesus? Do you think you know a better way to get to God? Do you hear the true Word but then Satan steals it away?
-Or maybe you are like the rocky ground where the seed can’t take root? You want the feel-good parts of Christianity, but you don’t want the hard parts. You are good with getting what you can get from Jesus, but when Jesus says to take up your cross and follow Him even if it means hardship, you would rather pass.
-Maybe the soil of your heart has a lot of thornbushes in it. You love the riches and pleasures of the world, and you don’t want a Jesus who would take that away from you. You want the things of the world more than you want the life of Christ. You’d rather follow the crowd rather than deny yourself and follow Jesus.
-Or is your heart like good soil? Do you have a good and noble heart that understands the Word of God and what it requires of you, and have you been keeping it with patience?
-So, which is it? Are you bearing spiritual fruit or if your life was put under the microscope would it be lacking?
~If your heart is represented by first three soils, you are lost and you need to repent and believe in Jesus….
~If you are bearing fruit, why not come to the altar and pray that God would bring even more spiritual fruit in your life?
-Is your heart ready for God’s Word to do a work in your life?
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