SPEAKER_00: This sermon was recorded at Faith Evangelical Free Church in Grand Forks, North Dakota.
SPEAKER_01: Charles Dickens' novel, A Tale of Two Cities, begins with the famous line that you can likely quote.
SPEAKER_01: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
SPEAKER_01: The story sets its focus on the cities of London and Paris, just before and during the French Revolution, the end of the 1700s.
SPEAKER_01: The book's opening line is famous, but it is well worth reading more.
SPEAKER_01: Consider, as an example, just the first sentence.
SPEAKER_01: And I'm convinced that Charles Dickens borrowed from the Apostle Paul, because it's a long run-on sentence.
SPEAKER_01: It was the best of times.
SPEAKER_01: It was the worst of times.
SPEAKER_01: It was the age of wisdom.
SPEAKER_01: It was the age of foolishness.
SPEAKER_01: It was the epoch of belief.
SPEAKER_01: It was the epoch of incredulity.
SPEAKER_01: It was the season of light.
SPEAKER_01: It was the season of darkness.
SPEAKER_01: It was a spring of hope.
SPEAKER_01: It was the winter of despair.
SPEAKER_01: We had everything before us.
SPEAKER_01: We had nothing before us.
SPEAKER_01: We were all going direct to heaven.
SPEAKER_01: We were all going direct the other way.
SPEAKER_01: In short, the period was so far like the present period that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received for good or evil in a superlative degree of comparison only.
SPEAKER_01: One of the enduring qualities of Dickens' novel is that it is eerily reminiscent of nearly any period of human history.
SPEAKER_01: And if you listened closely to that sentence I just read, you likely felt at some level as though Dickens was describing our times.
SPEAKER_01: We live in an era of superlatives.
SPEAKER_01: There's no acceptance of a middle position, no middle ground, no mediating place.
SPEAKER_01: It's all in or it's all out.
SPEAKER_01: And we observe regularly people switching extremes.
SPEAKER_01: Well-known people who have claimed Christ and lived as Christians are jumping ship.
SPEAKER_01: People who grew up in the church are realizing they don't hold to those beliefs.
SPEAKER_01: And yet others are finding that the only place for hope in a dark and hopeless world is in Christ alone.
SPEAKER_01: We're in a world of extremes, and there are many similarities in the New Testament world as well.
SPEAKER_01: It was the best of times because Jesus the Messiah was present, and faith in him brought hope and healing.
SPEAKER_01: But it was the worst of times.
SPEAKER_01: Full of darkness and foolishness and despair.
SPEAKER_01: And Jesus told them many things in parables, saying, A sower went out to sow.
SPEAKER_01: And as he sowed, some seeds fell along the path, and the birds came and devoured them.
SPEAKER_01: Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil, and immediately they sprang up, since they had no depth of soil.
SPEAKER_01: But when the sun rose they were scorched, since they had no root, they withered away.
SPEAKER_01: Other seeds fell among thorns, and thorns grew up and choked them.
SPEAKER_01: Other seeds fell on good soil and produced grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty.
SPEAKER_01: He who has ears, let him hear.
SPEAKER_01: Then the disciples came to Jesus and said, Why do you speak to them in parables?
SPEAKER_01: And he answered, To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given.
SPEAKER_01: For to the one who has more will be given, and he will have an abundance, but from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away.
SPEAKER_01: This is why I speak to them in parables.
SPEAKER_01: Because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand.
SPEAKER_01: Indeed, in their case the prophecy of Isaiah is fulfilled, that says, You will indeed hear, but never understand, and you will indeed see, but never perceive.
SPEAKER_01: For this people's heart has grown dull, and with their ears they can barely hear, and their eyes they have closed, lest they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and turn, and I would heal them.
SPEAKER_01: But blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear.
SPEAKER_01: For truly I say to you, many prophets and righteous people longed to see what you see and did not see it, and to hear what you hear and did not hear it.
SPEAKER_01: Hear then the parable of the sower.
SPEAKER_01: When any one hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what has been sown in his heart.
SPEAKER_01: This is what was sown along the path.
SPEAKER_01: As for what was sown on the rocky ground, this is the one who hears the word and immediately receives it with joy, yet has no root in himself, but endures for a while, and when tribulation or persecution arises on account of the word, immediately he falls away.
SPEAKER_01: As for what was sown among thorns, this is the one who hears the word, but the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches choke the word, and it proves unfruitful.
SPEAKER_01: As for what was sown on good soil, this is the one who hears the word and understands it.
SPEAKER_01: He indeed bears fruit and yields, in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty.
SPEAKER_01: Amen.
SPEAKER_01: You can see that this is all one section, with the parable at the beginning and the explanation of the parable at the end.
SPEAKER_01: Verse 19 gives us the interpretive key to all that we've just read.
SPEAKER_01: Verse 19 says that the parable is about the word of Christ's kingdom.
SPEAKER_01: See, the word of the kingdom, Jesus said, is planted, is sown into the hearts and the souls of people, just as a farmer would take seed and sow it into the soil of his fields.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus gave a title himself to this parable in verse 18.
SPEAKER_01: He calls it the parable of the sower.
SPEAKER_01: So as much as we want to know about other details in the parable, we have to understand that Jesus tells us right off the bat, this is what it's about.
SPEAKER_01: It's about me, it's about Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: He is the sower, he says later in verse 37.
SPEAKER_01: He is the one who is putting out the seed.
SPEAKER_01: So, whatever takeaways we might have from this passage of Scripture, it's important to see that it's not about us, it's about Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: It's about the person and the work of Jesus, the king, proclaiming the good news about his kingdom.
SPEAKER_01: And it's about the result of that work of sowing the seed of his kingdom.
SPEAKER_01: Now, here's how we're going to approach this.
SPEAKER_01: It's been so long since we've been in Matthew that we're going to need to take a few moments and recount where we are.
SPEAKER_01: Then we're going to look at the proclaimed word, then at the planted word, and finally at the productive word.
SPEAKER_01: But I'm going to make you come back next week because we're only going to be able to cover the first point this morning.
SPEAKER_01: Going to be able to cover the proclaimed word, then we'll finish it next Sunday with the planted word and the productive word.
SPEAKER_01: Now think with me, where have we been so far in the Gospel of Matthew?
SPEAKER_01: Well, first, we need to understand that Matthew, like the other Gospels, is written kind of like a biography.
SPEAKER_01: It's someone writing a story about the life of somebody else.
SPEAKER_01: So the former tax collector ditched his financially lucrative employment with the foreign government occupying his people's land, all because he became personally convinced that Jesus was the promised Messiah.
SPEAKER_01: At some point in his life, he wrote all about it.
SPEAKER_01: Except it's not about Matthew, it's about Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: That's why Matthew took great pains in the first four chapters to tell us all about Jesus' background.
SPEAKER_01: We were shown first Jesus' royal lineage, right?
SPEAKER_01: In that list of names in the first chapter, Matthew showing by proof that this individual has the right to rule on the throne of David.
SPEAKER_01: We're shown his divine conception and birth.
SPEAKER_01: There were some stories about a handful of foreigners believing in his birth announcement.
SPEAKER_01: All while local royalty tried to have him killed.
SPEAKER_01: All because God sent his promised Messiah to save his people from their sins.
SPEAKER_01: And that's only the beginning.
SPEAKER_01: Matthew's biography then jumps near the time of Jesus being 30 years old.
SPEAKER_01: And it was then, Matthew wrote, that Jesus announced that the promised kingdom of the Messiah was present and that he was king.
SPEAKER_01: And he said, Repent, for the kingdom is here.
SPEAKER_01: Now, if you're Jewish, you would understand that an announcement like that comes with all kinds of qualifications.
SPEAKER_01: Hundreds of years had passed since God had finished detailing all that would be fulfilled in the Messiah.
SPEAKER_01: So his people had had some idea of what to expect.
SPEAKER_01: So what does Matthew do?
SPEAKER_01: Well, any good biographer, he gives us great detail about how Jesus fulfilled one prophetic expectation after another, after another, after another, and so on.
SPEAKER_01: But things started getting a little rocky along the way.
SPEAKER_01: Because over time people had started to develop their own ideas about what a Messiah should and should not look like.
SPEAKER_01: They started to have their own convictions about what a Messiah should do and what a Messiah should be.
SPEAKER_01: And Matthew shows us that the common perspective was that while Jesus did many, many great things, in the minds of most people, it just wasn't conclusive that Jesus was the Messiah.
SPEAKER_01: But many still wondered.
SPEAKER_01: And that began to lead to pushback, especially among the religious rulers, the religious elite of the Jewish people.
SPEAKER_01: And we have to understand that for them, that meant not just religious leaders in the sense of you go to the synagogue and you see your religious leaders there.
SPEAKER_01: But the religious leaders in the New Testament were also political leaders.
SPEAKER_01: They were judicial leaders.
SPEAKER_01: The scribes, the Pharisees, and the Sadducees functioned all across the spectrum from religious to judicial to political elements.
SPEAKER_01: So while King Herod tried to have Jesus killed, the combined Jewish leaders worked to debunk Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: And you thought fact-checkers were new.
SPEAKER_01: They were the biblical version of today's fact-checkers.
SPEAKER_01: But at every turn, Jesus outwitted them by pointing back to their scriptures.
SPEAKER_01: Again and again, Jesus said, Open up your Bible and let the scriptures decide.
SPEAKER_01: At one point, Jesus sent his disciples out on a training exercise.
SPEAKER_01: You can see that in chapter 10.
SPEAKER_01: He told them to go out and proclaim the good news of his kingdom, saying that the king is here, but he warned them that the reception that they would receive would be less than stellar.
SPEAKER_01: Maybe even worse than a one-star hotel.
SPEAKER_01: You're going to be dragged away, and you're going to be beaten.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus said that his ambassadors, his followers, his disciples should expect to receive the same kind of treatment that he received.
SPEAKER_01: Now, if we're paying attention in Matthew's biography along the way, we might begin to feel that increase of tension inside of us.
SPEAKER_01: That's especially apparent when we get to chapter 11 and verse 6, where Jesus says to his disciples, And blessed is anyone who is not offended by me.
SPEAKER_01: Now wait a minute.
SPEAKER_01: Offended by Jesus?
SPEAKER_01: This is the guy who feeds 5,000 people, just drop of a hat.
SPEAKER_01: How can anybody be offended by that?
SPEAKER_01: We might ask, why would anyone be offended by Jesus?
SPEAKER_01: Sure, some didn't like him, some didn't think he met the expectations that they wanted, and many didn't think he acted like a Messiah or did what Messiah should do.
SPEAKER_01: But still, Jesus says that the ones who are not offended, the ones who are not stumbling because of him, receive a blessing.
SPEAKER_01: And those who who are offended do not receive a blessing.
SPEAKER_01: Just a little later, after that, Jesus made an astounding statement in chapter 11, verse 27.
SPEAKER_01: Actually, beginning back further than that in verse 25.
SPEAKER_01: At that time Jesus declared, I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children.
SPEAKER_01: So he's flipping the script, right?
SPEAKER_01: Yes, Father, for such was your gracious will.
SPEAKER_01: Literally, this was well pleasing to you.
SPEAKER_01: All things have been handed over to me, Jesus says, by my Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son, and to anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus is the Son of God, not a mere human Messiah.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus possesses all authority, such that the only ones who are not offended by him are those to whom he chooses to reveal the Father.
SPEAKER_01: And then Jesus says, Come to me.
SPEAKER_01: That's a command.
SPEAKER_01: Come to me.
SPEAKER_01: All who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.
SPEAKER_01: Another command, take my yoke upon you.
SPEAKER_01: And a third command, and learn from me.
SPEAKER_01: Be my disciple, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.
SPEAKER_01: For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.
SPEAKER_01: Who would be offended by that?
SPEAKER_01: Why would you take offense at that?
SPEAKER_01: But when we put it with verse 27, we begin to see that those to whom Jesus reveals the Father are the ones who hear the commands to come, to take his yoke, and to learn.
SPEAKER_01: These are the ones who experience his gentleness and his lowliness, the heart of Jesus, the Messiah, the Son of God.
SPEAKER_01: Isn't that wonderful?
SPEAKER_01: It is wonderful.
SPEAKER_01: That's the grace of God in action.
SPEAKER_01: Because the grace of God steps into a Romans chapter 1 world where everyone is trouncing on the truth, the revelation of God, and he says, I'm not going to let all of you do that.
SPEAKER_01: Well, most of you are offended by me.
SPEAKER_01: I'm going to rescue some of you, but the reality is that many still stumble.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus revealed himself as the Son of God and the Lord of the Sabbath in chapter 12, but the reaction of the leadership was to seek to destroy him.
SPEAKER_01: Chapter 12, verse 41.
SPEAKER_01: Sorry, verse 14.
SPEAKER_01: Flipped it around there.
SPEAKER_01: Pharisees went out and conspired against Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: How to destroy him.
SPEAKER_01: But Matthew's biographical response to that is to say, wait a minute, but Scripture says this, this, this, and this from Isaiah chapter 42.
SPEAKER_01: That's chapter 12 of Matthew, verse 18 and following.
SPEAKER_01: Matthew shows from Isaiah how Jesus is the one that Isaiah said to expect.
SPEAKER_01: The one in whom even non-Jewish people would find their hope.
SPEAKER_01: So how do the people respond to that?
SPEAKER_01: Verse 23 of chapter 12, can this be the Son of David?
SPEAKER_01: Is this really the one we've been waiting for?
SPEAKER_01: Is this Jesus the Messiah?
SPEAKER_01: But but the Pharisees come along and say, ha, hardly.
SPEAKER_01: He's colluding with Satan.
SPEAKER_01: Sure, he casts out demons, but he but he doesn't do it our way, which shows that he's working with Satan.
SPEAKER_01: Really?
SPEAKER_01: How does that make sense?
SPEAKER_01: You see the polarization?
SPEAKER_01: We're in extremes here.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus then shows his authority with some condemning statements beginning in verse 34 You brood of vipers.
SPEAKER_01: How can you speak good when you are evil?
SPEAKER_01: Notice it's the one who has all authority from the Father, who possesses all authority, who makes a declaration, you are evil.
SPEAKER_01: To these people.
SPEAKER_01: And then as if it couldn't get any worse, Jesus calls those who refuse to believe in him in verse 39 an evil, an adulterous generation.
SPEAKER_01: If they were listening, that would have been a stab.
SPEAKER_01: See that phrase, evil and adulterous generation, is taken directly from the Old Testament book of Hosea.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus quotes the Greek translation of God's words to Hosea.
SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
SPEAKER_01: Do you remember the story of Hosea's life and ministry?
SPEAKER_01: Hosea was a prophet.
SPEAKER_01: And he was given a command by God to go out and to marry a prostitute.
SPEAKER_01: And God told Hosea, this woman that you're going to marry will not be faithful to you or to your marriage.
SPEAKER_01: She would not be faithful, Hosea was told, because she loved evil and adultery.
SPEAKER_01: So that woman, her name was Gomer, pictured Israel at the time.
SPEAKER_01: God's relationship to the nation of Israel was pictured like a marriage.
SPEAKER_01: And Israel was not faithful to her husband, to God, because she loved evil more than God.
SPEAKER_01: She loved prostituting herself to false gods more than she loved God Himself.
SPEAKER_01: So Jesus deliberately quotes that phrase from Hosea as a picture of those who refused to believe in him.
SPEAKER_01: They refused him because they loved evil and spiritual adultery more than they loved the God who sent his Son to save them from their sin.
SPEAKER_01: They chose their sin over Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: Now it's important to see the whole picture here.
SPEAKER_01: So we put this in the context of our whole Bible.
SPEAKER_01: This is the point towards which all of earth history has been moving.
SPEAKER_01: This is the time of which God spoke when he told Eve that one would come who would crush the head of the serpent.
SPEAKER_01: This is the one of whom Moses spoke when he said that a scepter, an item of rule would rise out of Judah.
SPEAKER_01: One to rule over Israel.
SPEAKER_01: One who would be a prophet like Moses.
SPEAKER_01: This is the son of God of whom David sang.
SPEAKER_01: This is the one of whom Solomon opined in his wisdom.
SPEAKER_01: This is Isaiah's servant.
SPEAKER_01: This is Jeremiah's shepherd, come to redeem his people.
SPEAKER_01: This is the greater Hosea come to take his people home for good.
SPEAKER_01: God sent his son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law of sin and death.
SPEAKER_01: And they said, You've got to be crazy.
SPEAKER_01: No, we want our evil and adulterous lifestyle.
SPEAKER_01: You must be working with Satan.
SPEAKER_01: You might think that the cross and the crucifixion is the low point of the gospel account.
SPEAKER_01: But it's not.
SPEAKER_01: The cross is divine victory.
SPEAKER_01: It's the payment of the sin debt.
SPEAKER_01: It's the releasing of the chains of slavery to sin and death because Christ rose from the dead.
SPEAKER_01: No, that's not the low point of the gospel account.
SPEAKER_01: This is the low point of the gospel account.
SPEAKER_01: Israel is Gomer.
SPEAKER_01: Her husband had come to forgive her sins and take her home and give her a new heart that would love him.
SPEAKER_01: And she said no.
SPEAKER_01: Horace, John puts it in his gospel.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus came to his own, and his own people did not receive him.
SPEAKER_01: But that's not the end of the story, is it?
SPEAKER_01: The biography continues, and John himself would say in the very next sentence in John chapter 1, but to all who did receive him.
SPEAKER_01: What does it mean to receive him?
SPEAKER_01: Who believed in his name.
SPEAKER_01: He gave authority.
SPEAKER_01: How can he give authority?
SPEAKER_01: Because all authority has been given to him.
SPEAKER_01: He gives the authority to all who believe in him to become, to be, in reality, children of God.
SPEAKER_01: And that's what the end of Matthew chapter 12 shows us.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus says forever, whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.
SPEAKER_01: The will of God is to believe in Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: The will of God is to hear the command of Jesus to come, to take up his yoke, and to follow him and to be his disciple, to learn from him.
SPEAKER_01: But the picture in the biography is bleak.
SPEAKER_01: Few are believing.
SPEAKER_01: Most are rejecting.
SPEAKER_01: It was the best of times.
SPEAKER_01: It was the worst of times.
SPEAKER_01: It was the age of wisdom and the age of foolishness.
SPEAKER_01: So Jesus takes a seat in a boat, anchored just a few feet out from shore, while the beach fills up with people eager to see what this miracle machine would put out next.
SPEAKER_01: And Jesus preaches.
SPEAKER_01: He tells stories called parables about the Word of God, the Word of the Kingdom, the good news of Jesus, the King.
SPEAKER_01: And as these parables come from the lips of the King, it separates people.
SPEAKER_01: It causes division.
SPEAKER_01: It's like a truth that splits friends and families.
SPEAKER_01: Some people have a sense of interest that leads them closer.
SPEAKER_01: They hear what Jesus says and they want to know more.
SPEAKER_01: They want to understand more.
SPEAKER_01: It's like being drawn in by the reel of a fisherman.
SPEAKER_01: And eventually they are led to faith in Jesus, to believe in him, to become a child of God.
SPEAKER_01: Others have a sense of interest that draws them closer until the miracle machine stops producing and then they go home.
SPEAKER_01: Others have a sense of interest that leads them closer to Jesus until they conclude that he's just a madman, claiming to be the Son of God, and then they leave.
SPEAKER_01: Then there are those who think that he's delusional from the very beginning.
SPEAKER_01: And those who leave him all return to their evil and adulterous lives, saying no to the husband who would forgive their sins, relieve their bonds, give them new hearts to love him, and take them home forever.
SPEAKER_01: You see, the parables confirm, on the one hand, the hard-heartedness of those who refuse to believe, those who choose their evil and adulterous lives, and the parables also confirm those to whom the Son has revealed the Father.
SPEAKER_01: And he told them many things in parables, saying, A sower went out to sow, and as he sowed, some seeds fell along the path, and the birds came and devoured them.
SPEAKER_01: Other seeds fell on rocky ground where they did not have much soil.
SPEAKER_01: And immediately they sprang up, since they had no depth of soil, but when the sun rose they were scorched, and since they had no root, they withered away.
SPEAKER_01: Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them.
SPEAKER_01: Other seeds fell on good soil and produced fruit, grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty.
SPEAKER_01: See, the word of God is sown by the sower.
SPEAKER_01: But as the harvest nears and the plants grow, the farmer is interested only in the plants that produce fruit.
SPEAKER_01: As a farmer, as as a sower, your livelihood is in the fruit and the produce.
SPEAKER_01: You needed the produce from that seed to live, to have seed for next year's planting.
SPEAKER_01: Your life depended on the output of the seed that you planted.
SPEAKER_01: And in that situation and in those circumstances that Jesus is describing, which set or sets of sown seed are what the farmer is looking for?
SPEAKER_01: Only the last one, right?
SPEAKER_01: Only the one that actually produces fruit.
SPEAKER_01: The farmer isn't interested in the seed that sprouts up and dies without producing grain.
SPEAKER_01: And we're not talking here about the process of growing, we're talking about just the end result.
SPEAKER_01: He's not interested in the stock in the midst of the thorns if it has no head of grain.
SPEAKER_01: All he cares about is the seed that produces more grain.
SPEAKER_01: If that's not what he cares about, then he's not going to be a farmer for very long, nor will he be alive for very long.
SPEAKER_01: In the parable, there are two general types of soil.
SPEAKER_01: There's soil that produces fruitful grain and soil that does not, and all that matters to the farmer is the soil that produces more grain.
SPEAKER_01: He who has ears to hear.
SPEAKER_01: Let him hear.
SPEAKER_01: Now that's a motivating response.
SPEAKER_01: The four gospels detail mostly negative responses to Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: Many hear the word of the kingdom that comes into their ears, and the end result is they want to kill the Son of God.
SPEAKER_01: They want him destroyed.
SPEAKER_01: They want him gone because he interrupts their evil and adulterous lifestyle.
SPEAKER_01: But those who do hear and are interested pursue more.
SPEAKER_01: They want more.
SPEAKER_01: They seek the kingdom of heaven.
SPEAKER_01: They seek to know more, beginning to believe that these things are true, and they begin to understand, and so the word divides.
SPEAKER_01: That's why Jesus says in verse 14, some will indeed hear, but never understand.
SPEAKER_01: And some will be blessed because they hear and understand it.
SPEAKER_01: The good soil, then, in verse 23, is the person who hears the word of God and understands it.
SPEAKER_01: That's very clear.
SPEAKER_01: But what does it mean to understand it?
SPEAKER_01: It means to see Jesus in Matthew's biography as the fulfillment of all that God promised.
SPEAKER_01: And to come, and to take his yoke upon you and to learn from him.
SPEAKER_01: What does that mean?
SPEAKER_01: It means to let the proclaimed word of God, that seed that Jesus puts out, to lead you to know and understand Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: He is the one who was not content to let you wallow in your evil and adulterous hearts, but who came to seek you out, to call you to himself, to reveal the Father to you, so that you might believe in him, receive forgiveness in his name, and follow him home where there is rest forever.
SPEAKER_01: That is what the sown seed of the Word of God is empowered to do.
SPEAKER_01: It divides because it confirms some in unbelief and it leads others into further fruitfulness and knowledge of Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: Now, before we conclude, I'd like to spend just a moment considering the significance for us.
SPEAKER_01: If you haven't jettisoned your sinful life to follow Jesus, do so right now.
SPEAKER_01: Believe in him.
SPEAKER_01: Confess him as your Lord and Savior.
SPEAKER_01: Come.
SPEAKER_01: Take his yoke upon you and learn from him.
SPEAKER_01: Because he's gentle and lowly in heart.
SPEAKER_01: Now most here this morning are likely already followers of Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: And you've been so for many years, some of you for multiple decades.
SPEAKER_01: The most direct significance of this text to you is the significance of the Lord's grace.
SPEAKER_01: Like Hosea with Gomer.
SPEAKER_01: Christ came to to seek us out and to save us from our wretchedness.
SPEAKER_01: He called our names.
SPEAKER_01: He gave us life.
SPEAKER_01: He forgave our sins.
SPEAKER_01: And he renewed our hearts to love him and to know him.
SPEAKER_01: And to walk with him.
SPEAKER_01: What grace.
SPEAKER_01: You will never know that grace fully.
SPEAKER_01: Just let it pour over you.
SPEAKER_01: Yet at the same time, our hearts can still mirror the kinds of soils that are listed here, can't they?
SPEAKER_01: Yes, we are.
SPEAKER_01: We are forgiven.
SPEAKER_01: We stand before Him in faith, forgiven, cleansed.
SPEAKER_01: There is therefore now no condemnation.
SPEAKER_01: But even though our faith rests firmly in Jesus, our hearts can still be hard to the Word of God, can't they?
SPEAKER_01: Oh, preacher, now you're meddling.
SPEAKER_01: We start to squirm, don't we?
SPEAKER_01: Maybe we let the cares of the world creep in and steal away the effectiveness of the Word of God in the soil of our souls.
SPEAKER_01: We squirm a little bit more, don't we?
SPEAKER_01: Maybe we're letting Satan speak lies to our souls that like those weeds that grow up around the stock of wheat and leach away the nutrients, Satan's lies begin to leach the power of the word so that we hear it, but there's not effectiveness left for us.
SPEAKER_01: Maybe we're holding back some secret area of pleasure or sin from the Lord's work.
SPEAKER_01: See, this is why we need the Lord to come back.
SPEAKER_01: Because he's not done with his redeeming work yet.
SPEAKER_01: The kingdom has begun.
SPEAKER_01: It's started, he's doing his work.
SPEAKER_01: The fact that you're here is evidence of that.
SPEAKER_01: But he's still working in us, isn't he?
SPEAKER_01: And this is why we need to gather together to hear the word of God preached, because it's when the word of God is proclaimed that Christ takes that seed and he puts it in the soil, and he brings out effective fruit from it.
SPEAKER_01: So glad you're here today.
SPEAKER_01: To participate in that, to grow together in the Lord's grace as we seek to know him more, as we seek to understand him more clearly.
SPEAKER_01: Because that is evidence that we hear the word of God.
SPEAKER_01: And as we hear and we understand, that grows and begins to produce fruit.
SPEAKER_01: May our prayer be that the sower of the seed gives us ears to hear.
SPEAKER_01: Lord Jesus, we come and we bow before you, seeking your grace and your mercy.
SPEAKER_01: So thankful.
SPEAKER_01: So thankful that you did not consider the glories of heaven something to be held on to at all costs, but you you set it aside to take on the form of a human being, to die a death on a cross, to be a condemned person, so that we may be made right before you.
SPEAKER_01: What grace, what mercy.
SPEAKER_01: We come before you seeking to know you more, asking that your spirit would, through our fellowship, through our opening of your word, to cause us to grow, to fruitfulness from the implanted word that saves our souls.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.
SPEAKER_00: That concludes this sermon from Faith Evangelical Free Church.
SPEAKER_00: Our mission is to declare the Word of God and disciple believers into mature, devoted followers of Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: You can learn more by visiting our website at faithfree.com.