Parables No.1 The Sower

Spirit enable us to comprehend what it is that needs to be said this evening, and not just intellectually to understand, but from our emotions and from our will to respond for Jesus' sake. Amen. Let's turn to the Word of the Lord as found in Matthew's Gospel in chapter 13.

Well, when I was a lad, they told me that a parable was an earthly story with a heavenly meaning. You all heard that definition? So I looked at the concise Oxford Dictionary, and that said, it's a fictitious narrative used to typify moral relations. Quite frankly, I hadn't got a clue what that meant.

So I go back to what I was taught when I was a kid. It's an earthly story with a heavenly meaning. It's a truth expressed in concrete pictures.

Something thrown beside something else so that you can understand. It's basically a comparison. King David on one occasion was caught by a parable, you remember.

Nathan, a prophet, came on the scene. David had been playing fast and loose with someone else's wife, and he came and he told David a story. And those who listened to the story would only have understood the story at the literal level of a man who actually lost his sheep.

He was a poor man, and a rich man exploited it and took it from him. But Nathan was making the point, and David knew, that actually he was like that rich man robbing the poor man because he had taken another man's wife. By contrast, by comparison, he got across truth.

And the only person who understood what the prophet was getting at on that particular occasion was David. Now our Lord Jesus told parables, many parables actually. It was his genius to be able to conjure out of finesse, so to speak, an illustration that would pack home a message to those who it was particularly directed towards.

It's a truth which may be concealed from some hearers, but it is made plain to those whose ears have been opened by the Spirit of God. Parables make a direct appeal to the imagination, and they involve the hearer in the situation. Jesus wants to make people listen.

I don't think people yawned when Jesus talked. I believe that our Lord would have used modern visual aids had his public ministry been in this day, because he uses picture language in order to get across what he has on his heart to the people who listen to him. He's an outdoor preacher, and that was a sensational thing in those days.

Do you know one of the greatest shocks the Church of England ever had was in the ministry of a man called John Wesley. Do you know what the problem was? He actually preached in the open air. Actually, he was beaten to it by his friend George Whitefield.

Whitefield went to Bristol, started to speak to the minors who didn't go to church, so he waited for them coming up from the pit, started to preach to them, and what he had to say was so powerful that their grimy faces had little white clean marks down the cheeks as tears began to flow and the Word of God had its own effect. Wesley was so impressed, though he said that he preferred for himself an ornate pulpit and a nice cushion to sit on in church before he preached, he nonetheless was so convinced by Whitefield's results of preaching in the open air that Wesley became an open air preacher, and so did Jesus. Many centuries before, it must have seemed sensational to the pharisees, to the religious clergy in his day, but our Saviour would go to where the ordinary people were, and you read in the first verse of chapter thirteen of Matthew that same day, Jesus went out of the house and sat by the lake.

Such large crowds gathered round that he got into a boat and sat in it while all the people stood on the shore. You don't read the word parables until you come to this particular chapter in Matthew's gospel, and now he is going to lace together some eight parables, stories of an earthly character with a heavenly meaning so that he will be able to get across his heart's concerns for the people who are in his audience. When Mark tells the parable of the sower, he does so with a blunter introduction than Matthew.

Matthew has Jesus in the third verse commencing like this, "'Then he told them many things in parables, saying, A farmer went out to sow his seed.'" Mark puts it, "'Behold, here a farmer went out to sow his seed.'" Mark wants, and so does Matthew, the people who are reading their accounts to visualize what probably the folk who were present in the ministry of our Lord Jesus on this occasion, what they actually saw. Out there in the distance, behold, a sower goes forth to sow. Jesus will speak from the earthly, and he will make his way across the plain, the heavenly.

He will come to where men are in their understanding so that he can release them into areas of knowledge of which at this moment in time they are ignorant. That's the way with Jesus. He starts with the concrete, and he goes to the spiritual, and he'll carry his audience with him all the time.

Do you know, I ransacked Songs of Fellowship, or nearly, trying to find harvest songs. Very difficult. So I asked somebody in the tab to help me.

I won't tell you who, but they came up with, "'One man went to mow,' and I didn't really feel that that had any biblical justification. I was tempted to write a parody only on a biblical basis. One man went to sow, but it did seem as though it would be a little bit pedantic trying to teach it.

But when you go into the realm of the parables that our Lord related, you will discover that there's a lot to do with farming and agriculture and the pastoral life. Why? Well, because as I was trying to tell you this morning, the people in his day were saturated with these concepts. This was the world in which they lived.

Behold, a sower went forth to sow, and they know what the Lord Jesus is on about. He starts with what they know in order to teach them what they don't know. And our Lord saw the nature.

God's not adrift from this world. He allows men in some areas to despoil it. But the earth is still the Lord's and the fullness thereof.

When I look round this tab sanctuary and I see these lovely flowers and these displays, not only am I grateful to the ladies and indeed to the gentlemen who helped to make the displays, but I'm grateful to the God who is behind the beauty of a flower and the miracle of the production of fruit. So our Lord Jesus, when he looks on the earth, he sees it as God's canopy. Behold, a sower goes out to sow, and in the very act of sowing and germination and fruition, he will deduce not only physical, natural principles, but he'll carry them through into the heavenlies, and he will teach about heaven from the perspective of earth.

So men who understand earth and sowing shall understand heaven and spiritual reaping. Behold, a sower, a farmer, verse 3, went out to sow his seed, and he scattered the seed. I want to defend him from the charge of carelessness.

This man was abandoned, takes his seed at the one hand and on the left hand, and with generous distribution he allows the seed to fall on a variety of soils. In those days you didn't have the flint stone walls that you find up on the downs. In those days land was, well if not commonly owned, there was not the fencing nor the walls, the brickwork.

Paths could come as a result of villages going from A to B, but the seed would be scattered on those paths. Some of the terrain would be rocky, but it wouldn't be seen to be rocky at the point of sowing because there would be a thin layer of soil. Some of the ground was actually filled with weeds.

And yet the sowing goes on still on the weed ridden ground, as well as on good soil with lots of room for possible germination. You see, the problem with you is you've got your gardening technique wrong. You say, what do I mean? Well in Palestine the sowing came before the ploughing.

You didn't know that, did you? Neither did I until I checked it in a commentary about an hour or so ago. But that makes sense of the verse that I gave you from Hosea. Sow to yourselves in righteousness, break up your fallow ground, the seed of sowing before the plough.

And as the plough comes down, you see, it churns over the path. It discovers what was not seen at the point of sowing, that some of the earth actually is flinty underneath and it's just a very thin layer of soil. And as the seed is spread so generously, so there will be areas of the land which is already thickly producing weeds, and so forth.

Behold, a farmer, a sower went forth to sow and he wasn't engaged in careless action. And there is nothing abnormal about the conditions that our Lord has in mind. This could be any tract of ground, because these varieties of soils could be present within a half or a third of an acre.

But why? Why does Jesus start to tell stories about farmers? This isn't a sort of attempted Hebrew equivalent of the archers. That unending serial on the BBC, which is the best definition I've got this side of glory as to what eternity will be like. There are lots of people with our Savior, aren't there? Look at verse two.

Such large crowds gathered round Him. That was sometimes the case. Lots and lots of people.

And if you were to read the eleventh chapter and the twelfth chapter, you'll find that packed in there is narrative about our Lord going about preaching, and His disciples as well, and sometimes what He has to say is greedily accepted. On other occasions it's not. Now some of you engage in evangelism here on a Thursday, and I hope many of you do on other days besides the Thursday.

Isn't it rather curious the way in which some people respond? You make a beeline for one person. You don't know that person at all and yet you feel the impulse of the Spirit to go there and to give them a traction. They receive it.

You go somewhere else and they give you a rude reply. One family come and hear the gospel and two people make a commitment and the rest don't. You start to ask yourself, why? Why the response there and not there? Why a negligible response in that area and a fantastic response in this area? Why is it in Korea that they've got at least 25% moving to 30% of the population Christian, yet 100 years ago there was not one Christian in Korea? Why? Why on the streets of Leningrad when you go distributing literature do they queue up to get it from you? You try handing it out on Montague's Precinct down here in our South Coast resort and you find that people just do not, by and large, want to know.

Well you see, this is one of the reasons why our Lord is telling this parable. He too has had a sort of piecemeal response to what He's had to say as He's moved around His native villages in Galilee, and He tells of this in the eleventh, or the gospel does in the eleventh and twelfth chapters. But here you come to the thirteenth chapter and here is our Lord and He's talking to a large crowd of people, and then eventually He will tell the meaning of the parable to His disciples, but He'll do that in private, won't He? I mean drop down to the tenth verse.

The disciples came to Him and asked, why do you speak to the people in parables? And then in the eighteenth verse He goes on to interpret the parable for the disciples. You see these men are very close to Him, aren't they? They are men who have begun to understand a little bit about the kingdom of heaven. Now do you understand anything about the kingdom of heaven at all? What is referred to here as the word of the kingdom? I think that's the A.V. The nineteenth verse of Matthew's gospel in the NIV says, when anyone hears the message about the kingdom.

Jesus is very concerned that people hear about the message of the kingdom. Earlier on in the gospel you will discover from the fifth to the seventh chapter He set up the principles of kingdom life. Now here's my question once more.

Do you understand about the kingdom? You see, the kingdom of heaven is the kingdom to which ordinary folk like you and me are invited to enter, and the only way of entering it is by acknowledging who Jesus is and what He has done in this world. And that is another way of expressing the gospel. Now do you understand the gospel? What does the gospel mean? Well, I so often use this illustration in the tab.

The gospel means that the sins that were Tony Sargent's have been transferred by the grace of God to the account of Jesus Christ, and he, Tony Sargent, has been pronounced sinless because of what the Lord has done. Now having been pronounced forgiven, you then commence entry into the kingdom of God. There is one sense in which the kingdom of heaven has already arrived on the earth.

There is another sense in which the kingdom of heaven is still future as you look forward to experiencing the joys of the presence of Jesus more intimately. So, here are the disciples, and they are concerned, as you ought to be concerned, not only in understanding more about the kingdom themselves, but why it is that you tell people in a very excited fashion as to what God has done, and some respond, and some just don't want to know, or they show differing levels of interest. Listen, says our Lord, and he starts to tell us about what is an inadequate response to the message of the kingdom, and that is why he is back with the farmer or the sower.

The nineteenth verse, he explains what we might call the lesson of the path. When anyone hears the message about the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what was sown in his heart. This, says Jesus, is the seed sown along the path.

Now let's unscramble that for a moment, let's unpack it. To hear is not to obey. That's unfortunate, but it is the case.

Jesus says the sower who was scattering seed on the path was in effect sowing news of the gospel to those who heard, but did not obey. Coming to the tab and learning about the gospel will not save you. Jesus said, it's not every man who hears, but it's every man who does the work of my Father who will enter into the kingdom.

The lesson of the path to hear is not to obey, and therefore entry into the kingdom is prohibited. What about the lesson of the rocky places? Verse twenty, the one who received the seed that fell on rocky places is the man who hears the word and at once receives it with joy. To start is not to finish.

Did you hear that? To start is not to finish. Here's the seed and it falls onto the rocky terrain. There's just a thin level of soil.

There's the commencement of growth. It might look for the first or the second day that this is going to be part of a bumper harvest, but it's not, it's an illusion. And even the joy that seemed to be registered on the heart of the person who was responding to the message is actually a spurious joy.

It won't last. It's a little corny, but I must share it because it made me chuckle. I've got a northern sense of humor, not as sophisticated as the southerners.

That's just blown it, my relationships with the northerners here. Harvest festival, Anglican church. Some kid has brought a lettuce, right? Plunks it down on the front.

When the vicar's talking, the lettuce falls off and scoops down the aisle. So he picks it up and he puts it back again. And later on in his talk, in his address, the lettuce falls off and goes down the aisle.

And so the vicar says, well that's obviously a case of lettuce with a gladsome mind. It's fairly awful, isn't it? Superficial humor. But there is a superficial joy.

A superficial joy coming from those who have heard the Word, who seem to respond that actually there is no depth at all. There is no genuine growth. The lesson of the path is to hear is not to obey.

The lesson of the rocky place is to start is not to finish. The man who hears the Word at once receives it with joy, but since he has no root, he only lasts a short time. When trouble or persecution comes because of the Word, he quickly falls away.

In the first instance, on hearing the seed that goes on the path, the person like that is interfered with by the evil one. He snatches away what has been heard. To hear is not to obey.

In this instance, it's the pressures that build up and trip. And Jesus says the start is not to finish. What about the thorns? Verse twenty-two.

The one who received the seed that fell among the thorns is the man who hears the Word. But the worries of this life and the deceitfulness of wealth choke it. What's one of the big problems in a lot of people's gardens? You try to get too much into a relatively small area.

Plants need to breathe. So the reception of seed, even if the soil seems to be okay, is not the only thing. The seed needs space.

And the only way that space can come with a garden that is packed with thistles and weeds is to get rid of the weeds and the thistles. Becoming a Christian is not just simply a passive thing. It's an active thing.

It's not just receiving the Word of the Lord. It is seeing that on reception certain things are evacuated from your life. You are understanding me.

To plant is not to clear the secular concerns, the pleasures of life, the deceitfulness of wealth, handling things that you can't really cope with spiritually, not being prepared to abandon them. This chokes the seed. This is why our Lord Jesus said, using very strong language, hyperbole, no doubt, exaggerated, if your right hand offends you, cut it off.

If your wealth stumbles, you get rid of it. Whatever there is that is preventing growth, it is not worth the stunting growth to retain the things that have had previous attraction. The lesson of the path to here is not to obey.

The lesson of the rocky places to start is not to finish. The lesson of the thorns to plant is not to clear. But come happily to the twenty-third verse because there you discover the lesson of the good ground.

The one who received the seed that fell on good soil is a man who hears the Word and understands it. To hear is to understand. Here is an explanation, you see, of the varied responses that there are to the ministries of our Lord Jesus.

There is never anything wrong with the seed. We want to make that very clear. The gospel remains, the power of God unto salvation.

It is that indestructible thing. There is nothing wrong with the seed, but there could be everything wrong with the soil. And hear me, the wonder of it is that the seed is ever received and brought to the point of germination.

Let me unpackage that statement. The wonder is that God saves anybody. But He does.

Now here we are in difficulty because Jesus says in the verses that you didn't read earlier because Alan skipped them, Jesus says to the disciples that there are certain people who hear but they never really understand. There are certain people to whom the mysteries of their kingdom are never revealed, they are never opened. And yet to the disciples, well, they are, so to speak, let into the family secret.

And they have begun to understand increasingly who Jesus is and what He has come to establish on this earth. And here we are up against a question that I do not have the ability to answer. Why is it that the soil in my life became receptive to the gospel? I don't know, apart from saying this, that God in His grace allowed it to happen.

Oh, to grace how great a debtor, daily I am constrained to be. You say, Mr. Preacher, that doesn't sound fair. My friend, that I can't help.

But this I do know, having an insight into something of the character of God, that if there is the slightest inkling in your heart towards the Lord Jesus, if you are encouraged at all, if you are stimulated, if you are brought to tears, if you feel a little unhappy when you hear of the death of Jesus and His mighty resurrection and the fact that those two events have to do with your sin, it is the beginning of God telling you that the soil of your life is capable of receiving gospel seed and it germinating and becoming the fruit of salvation. Behold, says Jesus, to a spellbound audience, the sower went forth to sow. We absolve Him from the charge of carelessness.

Jesus generously distributes the seeds of the gospel and He wants them this evening not to be on the path as far as your category of reception is concerned, nor on rocky ground, nor choked by already wild luxuriant growth. He wants the ground to be clear and for you to be receptive to the gospel message. So Jesus says, He who has ears to hear, let him hear.

So here is my question. Have you heard? Will you respond right now? Let's pray. Father, we are grateful that you come to us by your Word through the power of your Spirit and in the words of your Son.

From the simple analogy of the sower and seed and the variety of soils, you make the issues very plain. Lord, grant that the ground here may be good, that the Word might take effect and that people may embrace the Lord Jesus as their Saviour. And then will you cause us the proof of such a reception to be indicated as we bring forth fruit thirtyfold, sixtyfold, a hundredfold.

May our lives increasingly count for something as we duplicate amongst others what we have received of yourself, having been seeds, received seeds. Enable us to be skillful sowers of your Word. So bless this parable to whoever it was addressed in this audience this evening.

And this we pray for the Saviour's sake. Amen. Lord Jesus is Lord.

In flesh he came to thy reign. Jesus is Lord. Born here in the life of sin.

Shepherds like a ransom, ascending up free. Jesus is Lord. Jesus is Lord.

Praise him and praise him and praise him.