Seed Pt. 1

The principle/ law of Seed-time-harvest is throughout the creation story and ongoing through the Bible. It predates man and is a direct contributor to our lives and those around us. What does the Bible say is seed in our lives? 

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Alright, why couldn't the pony sing? Because he's a little horse. What did the banana say to the boy? Nothing. Bananas can't talk. And then how do you know a joke becomes a dad joke when it becomes a parent? My boss last week told me to have a good day, so I went home. So this is eternal life, Jesus said. To know you, God, and Jesus Christ, whom you sent. And we have been kind of going over this the past few couple months, and I just want to kind of wrap it up and box it up a little bit right here. And our scripture we've been using, we've been going back to John chapter 15, where it's talking about the vine. Jesus is the vine, we're the branch, and we're we're in him. Through the gospel of Jesus Christ, we can be grafted in to the vine of Jesus Christ, and through that we receive the nature, the spirit, the life of God that now flows through us, that produces fruit. We talked about how we're now in Christ. We are blessed to be a blessing. We are redeemed, we are sanctified, we're adopted, we have an inheritance in Christ. And we've been talking about what that looks like. And then more recently, we've been talking about kind of the other leg of this chair or of this idea of as the Father has loved me, I have loved you, abide in my love. And then the next verse, if you keep my commandments, you abide in my love, just as I've kept my Father's commandments and abide in his love. And again, we talked about how the love of God propels us to want to be to live like Christ. And so I've heard people say, like, I can't live the Christian life. You know, the idea that they are not able to live a perfect life, so they can't come to God. And I would just simply say, true. I can't either, without continually receiving the grace and love of Jesus, which changes me, which empowers me to live like Christ. Now, is it perfect? No. But it is an ongoing journey and a process that we are all on. And if we love God, it propels us to want to live in a way that is congruent with his nature, with his goodness. And so this kind of tension between, well, is it all about love and grace or is it about the commandments and following Jesus? And it's it's kind of like it's actually both, and that it all comes through love. It all comes through this abiding life in God. So abiding requires that we receive and know at some level. Like a child understanding the gospel is going to be different than an older person. It's kind of like we get to unpack this kind of forever, right? But abiding requires that we receive and know at some level the love of God, and the evidence is that we follow his commandments. And so we understand in the Old Testament there were all sorts of commandments, right? We know the Ten Commandments, but there was another like 600 of them that were more detailed and like, well, if if uh I just read one the other day, it's like if uh like a lizard dies and falls on your cup, you need to destroy the cup. But if the cup's made out of stone, then you don't need to, you just wash it and it's okay. But then if it falls on grain, but the grain hasn't gotten wet and sprouted, it's okay if it's clean. But if it's been sprouted, you gotta throw it all away. And if you got mold in your walls, then you've got to burn the whole thing. Well, you try to clean it first. If it comes back, you've got to burn everything down. And it's like, whoa, like all of a sudden you get into these laws, and you're like, this is pretty overwhelming, right? But now Jesus had said that all the law, all the prophets are summed up in this love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself. Upon these, all the law and all the prophets hang. So now we've been, we've Jesus Christ has revealed what the true heart, nature, and spirit of the law is really supposed to be. Love. And so these are the commandments: abide in that love and give it away. Give it back to God and give it to your neighbors. That's the Christian life in a nutshell. So man was created to know the love, joy, and fellowship of God. And we were the perfect image of God in communion with Him. And that's what I'm talking about, like Adam and Eve before the fall. So once the fall happened, there was a separation between God and the carnal nature. We talked about this nature of the enemy, now lives in us. This nature of rebellion, wanting its own way apart from God, now tends to guide the human, the human, the world and the human nature, right? That's the I want to do my own thing, and I don't want anyone, including God, to tell me otherwise. Okay, so then God gave us commandments. One, to reveal the nature and goodness of God. So when God says do not steal, it means he doesn't steal. He's calling us to be like him. When he says do not murder, that means God doesn't murder. Well, God took him. No, that's murder. He doesn't do that. Do not lust. God doesn't lust. You know, God does not lie. And so we understand through these commandments that it's actually revealing the nature of God. When we're supposed to stone somebody who is wearing fabric of two different, you know, that's mixed threads. You know, they're supposed to, that's sin. Well, yeah, because it's revealing that God has no mixture. There's no darkness around. Like it's revealing his nature, right? It's not about the shirt. It's about this is who God is. This is a pic another picture of his nature and his goodness. Okay? So, one, the law revealed the goodness and nature of God. And two, it was to keep mankind away from all that would cause pain and destruction. It would guide us away from that which would destroy and kill us and into dependency on the relationship upon God. But it didn't work that way. We understand that the Old Testament's quite the roller coaster of the human existence, right? So God comes in in the form of a man. And this God man, Jesus Christ, fulfills all the commandments, reveals the love and nature of God, and then dies so that his spirit can now live in us and through us to empower us to know the love and nature of God, that we may live in the stream of his love. So I've just kind of encapsulated not only the gospel, but what we've been talking about over the past couple months. And I kept getting this picture, and it's an imperfect one, obviously, but I want you to just kind of imagine it with me that maybe this kind of helps solidify some things. Alright, all Josiah's not here. Where do fish live? In water, right? So fish are made to live in water. Now imagine like we're made to live in the river of God's love and his nature. And that's where Adam and Eve lived. It's really interesting. Sometimes we we can't think of a world without sin, decay, destruction. And we wondered, you know, well, if we didn't, if we didn't have to fight evil, if there wasn't sin, if there wasn't all this stuff, what would we do? Well, Adam and Eve did it for however long before there was sin. They were with God and they had things to do. Life was full. And they were made, humans were made to live in that channel, in that clear river of the love of God. And so the enemy has come in and deceived Eve. They ate of the fruit, Adam and Eve, and now there's this desire, this innate desire in them to live outside of the water. And so now you got these fish flying out of the water onto the land and like flopping around and dying, and birds are coming down and eating them. Like this is a pretty good picture of the world, right? Everybody's wanting to go their own way, even if it means off a cliff. But dog on it, no one's telling me what to do. And so God comes in and he gives the commandments and these laws, and they're like afloating little buoys in the water. Like they're like he puts a line along this side of the stream and a line on this side of the stream, and it's kind of like these fish start to realize, oh, if I go past this, I end up on the land and I die. So let's like try to stay in between, but people are still going off, and it's not working super well, right? But there are certain fish that kind of try as hard as they can, and they ultimately realize, God, I need your help. I need you, just like David does in the Psalms, like help. He says, I, you know, save me, essentially. And these fish realize they can't do this, and so they rely on God and his grace. But a lot of people think that these laws are just too restrictive, right? I don't like these laws. They are inconvenient to the life I want to live, so I'm gonna go straight past them, end up on land, and get eaten by an eagle, right? This is, again, a picture of life without Christ. And it and these buoys, these commandments are kind of here to save you from what you were never meant to live in. They're to show you this is actually the nature of God, and this is how you were meant to thrive and to live with me. So now Jesus comes along and he swims it perfectly. He goes from point A to point B where they're trying, we're all trying to get, he does it perfectly. And then he gives us his spirit and power to now swim this river as he did. Alright, so here's the river is the love and nature, the goodness of God. And it causes us to live in and give away his love as well. So now it's like now that you're in this river, through faith in Jesus Christ, he gives you the strength and ability to swim this, and yet it's not about, okay, we're saying sin essentially is getting out of that river, right? Instead of putting up all these boundaries and trying to keep you in, he just says, just stay in this river of my love. Abide in this river. How do we know from John 15, 10, how do we know if we're in the river if we're keeping his commandments? Which is what? To give his love away. We only know we're receiving God's love when we have love to give away. When you can't find it in yourself to give that love away, you know there's a connection problem and you're getting out of the river. But the river's there, and that's what we're made to live in. That's what we're made to survive in and thrive in. And the commandments of God showed us at one level those banks. But now he's just saying, live in this river of love. How do we know? By love. How do we know if we're in it? If we love. It becomes very simple. And that's why if you understand that, you will walk in those commandments, even though they're not the point anymore. The point is the love of God. Not to just not sin. Okay? Trying to like trying to guide your life in a way to not sin is like driving down the highway 100 miles an hour looking in the rear view mirror. It's not the way. It doesn't work. Alright? So that is the summary of all we've been talking about for the past few months. And why do I why do I review these things? Because one, it's good for me. So it makes me summarize what I was trying to get across in previous week. But I also feel like God is always building upon last week's stuff. Like we're going somewhere. That's what I feel like the Christian life is a journey. It's not just a mental attainment. We're actually going somewhere with him. So now I want to talk about something that I actually wanted to share a year ago. And I've had it in the back of my mind for like months and months, and finally I just forgot about it because I just didn't feel like God wanted me to talk about it yet, even though it's true. And that's because it really is hitting upon a principle of the kingdom, a principle, a law, if you will, of how the world runs, how the kingdom of God operates. But what we have to be careful of is when we live by these principles, without the Prince of Peace, it's witchcraft. What does that mean? It means that there are principles in here that the world takes and uses and writes books about, and then Christians buy them and think they're so novel, that the world operates in to be successful, to be influential, but they don't take in the Son of God. They don't even have a place for him. He's not the point or the purpose of the principle. And so what we've been doing, if you've noticed over the past year, we've extensively talked about the gospel and about Jesus Christ because he's the foundation. And as it says in Corinthians, we're not going to lay any other foundation which is already, which, other than which has already been laid, Jesus Christ. So now that the foundation, I feel like, we've gone over, and now these principles are like the pillars that we can start constructing to build the house of your life. If you don't have it anchored in relationship and abiding in the love of Jesus Christ, you will get off. And the principles will work. And you will think that somehow God is favoring you or that you're in the right place because it's working, but it's working because it's a principle, not because you necessarily have a relationship with God. So that's why I'm just saying what I'm what I'm sharing with you will change your life and can change your community, but it needs to be in the context of Jesus Christ and his love first. Okay. There's my soapbox. We're going to go to Genesis 1, verse 11 and 12. This is uh during creation, it says, God said, Let the earth bring forth forth grass, the herb that yields seed, and the fruit tree that yields fruit according to its kind, whose seed is in itself on the earth, and it was sow. And the earth brought forth grass, the herb that yields seed according to its kind, and the tree that yields fruit, whose seed is in itself according to its kind, and God saw that it was good. It's really interesting if you start looking at the word seed, it's all over in Genesis. It's all over throughout the Bible, but particularly in these verses, it's like, okay, he brought forth grass and herb that yield seed according to its kind. Why does it say like seed according to its kind? He keeps reiterating. And then, I don't have it on the slides, but in the next few verses, uh, in verse 20 to 21, it's talking about the seed creatures, and they will, once he creates, then they will all reproduce according to their kind. We understand this in reproduction of every species in the world, including plants. There's seed and there are offspring. So God creates out of nothing, but He creates, what He creates will reproduce after its kind forever until the end of time. And so we take that for granted because that's how our whole economy here works, right? We plant seeds, they grow, we harvest. But it's isn't it crazy to think that the first seed ever created had the DNA that's still in the plants in general right now? In college, I took a plant science course, and the genome of a plant, like the genetic DNA sequence of a plant, is roughly twice that of an animal. Because if you think about it, a plant has to react to every environmental change while staying in place. An animal could just go in a hole, right? Or get away from it and find food somewhere else. So it's just, it's fascinating to think of that genetic potential that we are experiencing now in our plants and animals was there even at creation. And then it talks about in verses 24 and 25, the living creatures on the land, they would also produce after their own kind, cattle after their own kind. And it keeps coming back to this. So let's go to verse 26. It says, Then God said, Let us create man in our image. Now God is creating after his own kind. So he's created all these animals and these plants that are going to reproduce after their kind. And now his magnum obus, mankind, he's going to create after his own self. So now it's like God's putting his own image, his DNA, into mankind. It's just it's so fascinating. And so we'll go back to verse 26. Then God said, Let us make man in our image according to our likeness. Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, over the cattle, over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth. We have dominion over creeps. Okay? So God created man in his own image, in the image of God, he created him, male and female. I think one just wanting to say it's because it's right here. God created the male and female. The simplicity of the gospel, of the word of God at times, is offensive to the world. And if God is your God, and this is what he gave you to believe, then we are stuck with either having taking his opinion of things or having our own. And if we think of that river, and God is love, and there's no love outside of him, if you're choosing something outside of him, then it's utterly evil and dark and destructive. Following the word of God is countercultural, true, but it's also simple. It says, well, you believe so you believe there's only two genders? It doesn't matter what I believe. I don't have an opinion outside of his. God, who created all things, who is the head of all the universe, and my life, so there's only two. That's the end of the discussion in my heart. I don't know, or I'm not trying to be political. It's just, this is like the, it's right here, right? If he's really God, then I don't have an opinion. I choose to not have an opinion outside of his. That's what it means to follow Jesus. I don't, I don't have, I choose not to have an opinion outside of his. If I do, then he's not really God. And then we're we're creating, now we're creating God in our image, and everything gets really backwards. It's really simple. Okay. Then God blessed them, and God said to them, Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, subdue it, have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth. And God said, See, I've given you every herb that yields what? Seed, which is on the face of the earth, and every tree whose fruit yields seed. To you it shall be for food. This idea of seed, time, and harvest. Predates man. This is a law that is like written into all of creation, both physical and spiritual. Seed, time, harvest. What you do, how you make a living, planting seeds, growing crops, harvesting them, is the way that everything operates at its basal level. Alright? So God establishes this concept of DNA and reproduction, and he also commands man to be fruitful and multiply. And he does it again with Noah. Everything's supposed to be fruitful and multiply. And do what? Reproduce after itself, after it's kind. This begins to um you begin to see this not only in your own personal life, but also throughout scripture. As a man thinketh, so is he. What's the seed? What he thinks? What's the fruit or the harvest? His life. As a man thinketh, so is he. He will become what he thinks. Now the world takes this, again, this is a principle of um law of attraction. Okay. I'm not getting into all that. I'm just I'm keeping this as scriptural. But I will say there's a level to which they're using a principle without the Prince of Peace, and it works, and it's not holy. Okay? It's all based in Jesus Christ. Let's go to Genesis chapter 3. So this is where Eve eats of the fruit. So when the woman saw that the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was good for food, that it was pleasant to the eye, and a tree desirable to make one wise, she took the fruit. What's in a fruit? Seed. And ate. She also gave to her husband with her, and he ate. I've touched on this before, but speaking of this seed, this is the beginning of the carnal nature. Why? Because a seed always reproduces after its own kind. What was this seed? It was independence from God to know right and wrong. Right? I think I know better what right and wrong is than this. Guess what? That's the same seed they ate back then. So now it has produced a life form after its own kind called the carnal nature. The fleshly nature, rebellion against God. And guess what? It's still reproducing every generation. Guess when we get to be free of that? When we die and go to heaven. It gets to go to the earth. Alright? Interesting that when we start looking for the seed idea, it's all over the place. It's all through the scripture. Okay, now verse 15. I find it really interesting, at least in my translation. You know, after Adam and Eve fall, and God's trying to find them and they're hiding because they feel shame, which is also comes from this seed, the carnal nature, the fallen nature. They have shame, they want to distance themselves from God because they realize they're out of the river. They are not what God is, and they realize it. Okay? It's interesting in my translation, it says God said, So the Lord said to the serpent, because you have done this, this is what's going to happen. We say God cursed man because of that. God is telling him what curse they've now brought upon themselves and the earth. I do not believe that God cursed man. Man ate of this seed, and now the repercussion, the spiritual DNA is now released on the earth, and this is what it's like. He's just telling them the facts. Okay? So in verse 15, he's talking to the snake, and he says, I will put enmity between you and the woman, between your what? Seed and her seed. He shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel. This is talking about Jesus. Why? Because we lost the true identity that God had given man, Adam and Eve in the garden, and the only way to get a new DNA was a new seed. The seed of Jesus Christ. What did Jesus say? Unless a seed dies and falls into the ground, it remains single. If it falls in the ground and dies, it will produce a harvest. Seed and time and harvest. And today I'm just wanting to touch on a seed. What is seed? What does it look like? Let me go to Genesis 8. Sorry, this is a lot. I recorded so you can listen to it if you need to later. So Genesis 8, 20 and 22. This is after the ark has rested upon the mountain and they're coming out, and it says, Noah built an altar to the Lord and took of every clean animal and of every clean bird and offered burnt offerings on the altar. And the Lord smelled a soothing aroma. Then the Lord said in his heart, I will never again curse the ground for man's sake, although the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth, nor will I again destroy every living thing as I've done. While the earth remains, seed time and harvest, coal and heat, winter and summer, day and night shall not cease. What's the first thing he mentions? Seed time and harvest. This is a law that is established at the end of time. Not only physically, but spiritually. We are seeing both the physical and the spiritual ramifications of C in these scriptures. Okay? So we're gonna unpack this more over the next few weeks. Again, I don't know how long it's gonna take, but I don't know. But what I want to begin to articulate a little bit, or to create a picture in our minds, that our our lives are like a garden, a field, and there's seed in our field. And unlike here, there's no limitation of nutrients or water, limitless. Perfect. Balance, pH, and everything. We all have a field. The question is, do you like your field? Do you like your garden? Because you planted it. What you're living in now is a harvest from something that was planted before. Now it might have been planted decades ago or it might have been planted weeks ago. Life operates in seed time and harvest. So if you don't like where your life's heading or what's going on right now, you need to start selling different seed. And you probably need to dig up other seed that you've already sown. What can be seed? Thoughts can be seed, words can be seed, the word of God is a seed, the opinion of others can be seed, but ultimately it all flows through the filter of your mind and your mouth. Death says death first. Death and life are in the power of the tongue, and you will eat the what? Fruit thereof. What's in fruit? Seed. But the precursor to that is what you're speaking. What you're speaking is creating seed that creates fruit, but then guess what? You tend to eat and reproduce. And many of us, the seed that we started as young kids, that first seed bank has come from our parents. It's coming from you fathers. Seed that your kids are going to start sowing into their lives most likely, most often comes from your own seed bank. What kind of seed are we giving our families? What kind of seed are we producing in our communities? If you don't like what you're eating in your life, you need to start sowing different seed. And you gotta be intentional about it. This stuff comes down to life and death, I will tell you. Because it says so in the scripture. We think we can play this game with stuff. It's like we sow some good seeds like one day a week or something, and then we go to sow a whole bunch of other stuff. And then our weed bank is so bad, and we wonder why. It would be very interesting if we just did like a sweeping survey of farmers and ranchers if you could get into all their secret conversations, you know. How many times you would hear a farmer and rancher say, Man, this year I really think it's gonna rain. It's gonna be timely. It's gonna be a really good year. I'm talking in I'm talking in March. Let's take a survey. You know, you if you if I put out there two different websites and one says, oh, it's gonna be a bumper, you know, perfect rains this year, lots of rains, and you have this other one that says all this negative stuff. People would quote the negative one probably eight times out of ten, right? Well, I heard it's supposed to. And if somebody's positive, you better put them in the right place. Because then, you know, don't want anybody getting higher expectations, right? I just think it'd be very interesting to do a true survey of how many people think it's gonna be a drought and how many think it's gonna be a good year. And guess what? I would not be surprised if within 10% it's how often we have a drought in that good year. I wouldn't be surprised. So that's what the scripture says. I either have to believe it or I don't. So if I have an opinion outside of this, well, I must be smarter than God, right? But if he's saying this, I actually have to listen to it and I have to start taking responsibility for my own life. Now, are you saying we can control the weather? I don't know. But I'm saying I think we can. But I'm saying, how often do we tend to speak death instead of life? We go down the route of agreeing with the seed of the enemy and the fruit that we keep eating there, then the seed of life and the seed of peace. Because it's even, I I can even tell like if you pre, if if I say something about like God wants us to prosper and be in health, it's like a oh, maybe, yeah. I think, yeah, that's probably right. Until you show them the scripture and it says, I pray that we can prosper and be in health.

unknown 33:47

Oh.

SPEAKER_02 33:49

Oh, okay. Maybe it is scriptural. But you know, it might come about through, you know, he beats you down first, right? Yeah, that's called abuse. We put people in prison for that, and yet we attribute that to God. If you want to live in suffering and you think that's how it's supposed to be, the enemy is full-on happy to help you plant that seed and water it. But what if we start to believe that God wants to show his goodness through us to those around us? And in order for us to be able to give something away, we've got to have enough for ourselves and for them. And that he's able to do that. And that he wants to bless us. And that when he formed this ground at the beginning of time, God had something in mind that he wanted Circle to be a great place to live. And not blow away. And not be dry. Maybe we should start believing that that's really what he wants here. That he wants people to not die young of cancer, suicide. But if we just kind of take the fruit that we've already been given here and we just keep eating it and planting the same seeds, it's just going to keep being the same. But we can't do that and then blame God for it. That's where that's where it kind of rubbed me throat. And that's why I think God's had me preach on Jesus Christ for a year, because we start to see what he's really like. And we have a different, a different flavor, a different idea of what life could look like. How good God could really be. How much he could really want to see life and peace and joy in your life, but you keep planting that cruddy seed. Like a perennial kosher. Plant leafy spurred. You wonder why I got leafy spurred on? Alright. Well, sorry if it's too straight and blunt, maybe just don't come for a while. So I'm just gonna be really real. And I'm not saying I've attained it, but I've seen it in my life, and I've really tried to change the seed I'm planting in my own heart and mind. And I'll tell you, if you fill yourself up on the news of this world and the ideas of this world, you're gonna have a hard time thinking of some other way God could do things or a good God and all of that. You start filling your whatever you fill your mind with is the direction you're gonna, your thoughts are gonna go and the impressions of your life, and then you just recycle that junk over and over. You gotta get a new seed bank. You gotta buy seed from somebody else or the devil. We're gonna have communion if let's just sing this as a handoff communion. So the night before Jesus was planted in the ground as a seed, as a life-giving seed, he took a bread and cup, and he told his disciples we do this in remembrance of him. There's a lot of imagery in it, and we've talked some about that, but also just the practical mess of in that day and age wine and bread were just a staple. And as often as you eat what you eat every day, remember me. Remember what I've done for you. Remember that I die on your behalf, and I'm calling you to come follow me. And that sometimes that looks to us like we're dying to our own dreams, our own thoughts, our own ways, so that we can receive and live in that river of his love. And we have to have faith for that. We have to have faith that when we say no to the things we want, and we're saying yes to him, that's actually for ultimately for his glory and his goodness. Even if it costs us, it's better. Because he's worthy of it. And because he's not at all asking us to do something he hasn't already done for us times a million. With this, it just encourages you just if you don't believe in Jesus Christ, at least ask him in this moment. If you're really that real, if you're really that good, show it, show it to me. Because I want to know. And if you do know him, then just remember what he's done for us. Coming back to the gospel is the high point of the Christian walk. It's not the basic step that you get over so you can go on. This is like this is everything. And this is why you say remember it. Because when we come back to it, we realize that we're already on top of that mountain, and that we're not gonna leave. So, Lord, we just thank you for this breath that represents your body, how it was just one blood. And this wine, this juice, that represents your blood that was poured out, that you signed a new contract for us written in your own blood, and we think, and we receive it by faith that you will accomplish in us the things that you set for us to accomplish because we want to be obedient, because we give our lives to you as you gave yours to us. So just partake of it now. Lord, I pray that you would begin convicting and speaking to each of our hearts of the ways in which we have been planting seed in our lives that are not in alignment with really nature and their seed. And we we recognize true seed by the life of Jesus Christ. We recognize the true nature of God through the life lived out in Jesus Christ. And we say, yes, Lord, and amen. Do that in us. And God, I just thank you for the people here and for what's been spoken. I pray that the good seed would find good ground, and that which just needs to be forgotten, that will be. Jesus' name amen.