Message Info:
- Text: Mark 4:26-34, NKJV
- Series: Mark (2021-2023), No. 17
- Date: Sunday evening, January 23, 2022
- Venue: Central Baptist Church — Lawton, Oklahoma
- Audio File: Open/Download
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Transcript:
⟦Transcript⟧ One of these little fires that keeps cropping up is COVID. Because I thought we were done months ago. And this latest spike came around and I thought, y’all still playing pandemic?
I was done with that last year. As a matter of fact, there was one day, I think it was last week, and I said, if I have one more COVID-related phone call or text, I’m going to lose it. Not mad at anybody, I’m just mad at COVID.
I’m so tired of hearing about it that I even put an extension in my browser on my computer that anytime it sees the word COVID, I’ve changed it to the word puppies. So Channel 9, and it’s put me in a much better mood. Channel 9 in Oklahoma City is putting out these warnings about the spike in puppies.
And that’s much more fun to read. But part of why it’s so frustrating is it’s been incredibly complicated to know what to do. and people are exposed or they may have been exposed, and the guidelines keep changing, the regulations, and what they expect you to do, it keeps changing.
I know recently, maybe I shouldn’t tell you this, but there was a moment when somebody here was around somebody that tested positive later, and I was with that same person around that person that tested positive, and that person went into quarantine, and I didn’t, and I thought, what’s going on? I think they were told they were supposed to go into quarantine. I looked on the CDC guidelines.
I didn’t have to quarantine. Nobody knows what’s going on. It’s just, I think that’s why we’re all so frustrated.
And where I came to months ago and where I have to keep reminding myself to go is, you know what? Just take the information you’ve got, do the best you can and leave it to God. If you get it, you get it.
I mean, ultimately it’s in his hands. I’m not being reckless with this thing, but I’m just going to do the best I can and let God handle the results. That is literally all I can do.
And I would have been better off if I had arrived at that much earlier in the pandemic. And really, if I’d arrived at that conclusion much earlier in a lot of situations. But that’s why it was so frustrating.
Because I needed to get to that point where I’m saying, God, I’ll do my best. But ultimately, I’m just trusting you to handle this. Because it’s ultimately out of my hands. You and I very much need to get to a place of accepting that premise when it comes to our ministry and evangelism.
Of saying, Lord, I’m going to prepare and I’m going to know what I need to know and I’m going to step out and do my best, but ultimately, I’m leaving this in your hands. I’m trusting you with this because I can’t fix these problems. I can’t fix these people. Only you can do that.
I’m only responsible for what you’ve called me to do. And tonight we’re going to look at a couple of parables where Jesus talks to the disciples about doing just that. I know we have hit on subjects very similar to this in recent days, but if I’m repeating myself, it’s because Jesus repeated himself.
And so I can’t very well go wrong quoting him. So we’re going to be in Mark chapter 4 tonight, as Jesus’ parables talk to his disciples about the need to do your best, but ultimately you have to trust the results in what you’re doing to the Lord. Mark chapter 4, we’re going to start in verse 26.
If you’d stand with me once you find it, it’ll be on the screen or there’s a link in your bulletin. There should be a link in your bulletin where you can get to the text and we’ll stand and read together from God’s Word. We’re going to look at two parables tonight because they’re pretty similar to one another.
We’re going to start in verse 26 and go through verse 34. It says, And he said, The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed on the ground and should sleep by night and rise by day and the seed should sprout and grow. He himself does not know how for the earth yields crops by itself.
First the blade, then the head. After that, the full grain in the head. But when the grain ripens immediately, he puts in the sickle because the harvest has come.
Then he said, to what shall we like in the kingdom of God? Or with what parable shall we picture it? It is like a mustard seed, which when it is sown on the ground is smaller than all the seeds on earth, but when it is sown, it grows up and becomes greater than all herbs and shoots out large branches so that the birds of the air may nest under its shade.
And with many such parables, he spoke the word to them as they were able to hear it. But without a parable, he did not speak to them. And when they were alone, he explained all things to his disciples.
And you may be seated. So in this passage, understand we are still looking at the aftermath of the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit. As a matter of fact, I looked ahead because we keep looking at parable after parable and conversation after conversation, and it reads like it’s that same day.
And so I looked ahead, okay, at what point is there a gap here? And I think it’s not until we get to chapter 6. So this was a pretty eventful day to have started in chapter 3 and gone on for three chapters.
Where later that same day, this is all in response, they had the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit, where the Jewish religious authorities looked at Jesus and in spite of what they knew, did not acknowledge that what he did was by the power of the Holy Spirit and instead attributed that to Satan. And Jesus said, if you’ve dug in that hard, if you are that hardened in your unbelief, you are never going to turn around, and so you cannot be forgiven. And after that, he taught the parable of the sower to prepare his disciples for the fact that some people were going to reject them.
Because if we’re not prepared for that, we’re going to be surprised when it happens. We’re going to think there’s something wrong with us and we’re just not very good at it and we’re not going to do it. The disciples are humans or were humans just like us and they’re subject to that same thing.
And so he prepared them for that. And then he taught the parable of the lamp to remind them that they were supposed to spread the word anyway. The truth was not meant to be hidden.
And with another pair of parables about seeds. And these parables are intended to encourage the disciples. Because first of all, they show that the kingdom’s growth does not depend on its workers.
Now the work needs workers. That doesn’t mean God needs workers. He chooses to use us.
God could have devised any means He wanted to of spreading the gospel, but He chose to use us. He chose to use you. But that doesn’t mean that the work and the results of the work depend on us.
See, in verse 26, the man scattered the seed. And then verse 27 tells us he went to bed. He slept.
And the seed grew without his intervention. It says in verse 27, he himself does not know how. And that’s true.
I can plant seeds. And when I plant seeds, usually some of them will come up. But I can’t explain.
I can’t explain why two seeds planted next to each other in the same soil with the same nutrients and the same watering and the same care. Seriously, I’m talking about two okra seeds planted six inches apart. There’s not a big climatic difference between those two okra seeds.
I can’t explain why one grows and the other doesn’t. But one does. Now, and I can walk you through, I don’t know all the technical terminology, but I can walk you through how the seed pod is planted and then it softens up and we know that it breaks open and the little sprout comes through and then it shoots up.
I’m good with that. I understand all that. I can’t explain why.
And I can’t make it happen. I just plant the seeds, usually okra. I plant the okra and pray that it comes up, and some of it does, but I am not in control of what comes up where.
And so it says here in verse 27, it grew and he himself did not know how. Sometimes it just seems to be random, doesn’t it? After I talked about the parable of the sower, I believe it was Tommy came up to me and talked about a discarded tomato that grew a tomato plant the next year that just produced tomatoes like he’s never seen before or since, when all the ones that they had planted just did what most of ours do.
It just seems to be so random. He did his job. Even though he didn’t know which seeds were going to grow, he didn’t understand what it is inside the seed that really makes it do what it does, he just did his job.
His job was in verse 26 to plant, in verses 27 and 28 to wait, and then in verse 29 to harvest. So he just did what he was supposed to do. And it says in verse 28, the earth yields its crops by itself. First the blade, then the head, and after that, the full grain in the head.
And it tells us that that’s true of the kingdom as well. He’s comparing this to the kingdom of God. And Paul writes about this a little bit in 1 Corinthians chapter 3.
Just like the man sowing the seed in the kingdom, we’re supposed to plant and water but ultimately it’s God who gives the increase. Paul talked about that. There was this dispute between his followers and the followers of Apollos.
And Paul’s attitude was basically, why are you divided? Who is Paul? Who is Apollos?
It’s not like we saved you. Some of us plant, some of us water. God gives the increase.
God is responsible for the growth. This morning in Sunday school, Brother Rick asked a question. you do?
What’s your response? How do you handle it? If you minister to somebody, you help them, you do all these things and they don’t change.
I’ll tell you what I do. I get frustrated. I try to double down on fixing them.
That doesn’t work. I learned something just a couple weeks ago that fits right in with this that I wish I had learned early on in my ministry. They should be teaching this stuff in seminaries.
I learned it as part of the training at the Pregnancy Resource center. They were talking about the difference between ministry goals and ministry desires. And I thought, okay, this is all just fun wordplay.
All right, until they explain the difference. See, ministry goals are things we set out to do that we can make happen, that we can be responsible for. Ministry desires are the things we want to see, but ultimately we’re not responsible for whether they happen or not because they’re out of our control.
Because they talked about in this training that especially the female counselors, the ladies will come in and they’ll talk to them about their situation. And these female counselors will minister to them, will pray with them, will give them the information. And the hope is that they will make the right choice about that unborn baby.
But the sad reality is we can’t force them to make the right choice. We can’t force them to make the choice we know they ought to make. And so it was explained that if your goal is that you’re going to save every baby of everybody, of every client that walks in there, you’re going to get burned out.
You’re going to get frustrated. You’re not going to last in doing this. Now that is a perfectly acceptable desire.
Of course, anybody that works in that ministry is going to want to see every baby saved that’s possible. But your goals are things that you’re responsible for that you can make happen. And so they talked about ministry goals like loving the person.
My goal is for everybody that walks in here to feel loved unconditionally. My goal is to speak the truth to that person, to every person that walks in here in a loving way. My goal is to build a relationship that even if they make the wrong decision, that later on I may have the opportunity to speak truth into their life and point them to Jesus Christ. See, those are goals that we can, those are goals we can set.
But anything where we’re having to control the outcome with other people, that’s out of our hands. And I think, where was this information years ago when I started in ministry? Because if you’d asked me early on, what are my goals in ministry?
I want to see everybody get saved. That is out of my hands, unfortunately. I want, I want to see people grow in Christ and act right and do what they’re supposed to do and be faithful and all these things.
That’s my desire for all of you. That’s my desire for everybody connected to this church. That’s my desire to everybody we would reach.
But I can’t make any of you act right, right? I have a full-time job just making me act right. As my wife can attest, it’s okay to laugh at that.
So that’s my ministry desire is to reach everybody for Christ and disciple everybody so that they grow closer to him. But my goal is to speak the truth and love to people, to equip you with the truth to understand God’s word in hopes that you’ll apply it, to give you the tools necessary to be faithful followers of Jesus Christ and to go do ministry. It’s my job to plant and to water, but ultimately the growth that happens is God’s responsibility.
And by the way, anybody in this room that is involved in ministry, which should be all of you, the same is true for you. I did not realize until I started reading through this how much that difference between ministry goals and ministry desires lines up with what Jesus is talking about here. You and I are called to be faithful in the ministry God’s given us to do.
But if we try to take the part that’s his and we try to force growth on people, then we’re going to end up frustrated. Then we’re going to end up burned out. Then we’re going to end up dropping out and sitting out because we’re trying to take on a job that’s God’s.
When the growth happens, it’s because he did it, not because we know or even can. . .
And I know it’s true from looking back at years of ministry. The people that I thought were going to hang in there and be faithful and were going to grow. And I just knew they were going to be genuine disciples.
Many of them, I don’t know where they went. But then there were those people that showed up the first time at church and I didn’t know what to think. And they’ve been on fire for the Lord for years and years.
I couldn’t make either group of people grow closer to Jesus Christ. It’s just my job to provide them with the tools He’s called me to. And our job as Christians is to plant the seed, is to tell others about Jesus. It’s to tell them His Word.
In whatever context that looks like, in whatever, however that looks like for your context, however you’re doing ministry. Maybe you’re working in the clothes closet and you have the opportunity to talk to people who are down and out. Maybe you’re involved in teaching a Sunday school class and you get to pour God’s Word into the lives of small children.
Maybe you’re involved in the music. Whatever your ministry, you may be doing something outside of these four walls. You may be doing things I didn’t even know about for ministry.
Your job is to be faithful in that and leave the results, leave the change, leave the growth in other people to God because He’s ultimately the only one who can grow His kingdom. And then we see from this second story that the kingdom’s growth is not determined, it’s not limited by its circumstances. He gives this parable of the mustard seed and the mustard seed was the smallest seed in Israel.
now here he does say it’s the smallest seed on earth and I’ve seen skeptics say that’s an error in the bible not really I have started saying something the last week at my house that imprecision is not an error what I mean by that is if I say oh yeah I you know I’m leaving for work at 7 o’clock and one of the kids were saying, you don’t leave until 7 10. Okay, I was rounding. That wasn’t really the point of what I was saying.
Making the point, got to be ready by 7 o’clock. You know, imprecision is not an error. Or if I say, you know, I’ve told you dozens of times to clean your room.
You’ve only told me 18 times. Stop it. Stuff like that happens at my house all the time.
I’m so fortunate to live with small humans who know so much more than I do. And I finally got frustrated in the last week and said, stop doing that to me. Imprecision is not an error.
When I’m rounding, when I’m speaking in general terms, that is not an error that you have to jump in and correct. One of them, I said, stop being so pedantic. What’s pedantic mean?
Oh, so I do know more than you, right? it’s not an error jesus is speaking to israelites if jesus had said there’s a seed in the andes mountains way on the other side of the world that’s smaller than this but you know the the mustard seed is still pretty small too the disciples would have looked at him and said the andes what on the where jesus is making a general point the bible is not a science book the Bible does speak to scientific issues, but the Bible is not a science book. Jesus’s point here is not to make a precise statement about the size of seeds.
He’s talking about something that they would recognize as being a tiny seed, something that is almost unbelievably small for what it grows into. Because the mustard seed is just about the smallest seed that they would have known and recognized, and yet it grows into one of the largest plants. There are some species of the mustard plant that grow into nine feet tall or higher.
And that’s not a, those aren’t mustard greens at that point. That’s a tree. And that was Jesus’s point.
You look at this massive plant and you realize that it came from this impossibly small seed. And you think, how did that happen? And he says, the kingdom is like that.
The kingdom is like that. The kingdom starts small. The kingdom starts small, but you don’t even begin to realize how big it’s going to get.
And I’m sure there was some discouragement for them in the early days as they were preaching the gospel and the kingdom just may not have been growing that fast at times. We’re off to a very slow start. I’ve been researching early historical evidence for the existence of Jesus.
Early historical evidence that talks about the origins of Christianity from outside of Christianity. And one of the things that people ask is why is there not more evidence? Why do more Roman historians not write about Jesus?
Why do more Jewish historians not talk about the early days of Christianity? If this is all true, why isn’t there more evidence? One of the reasons is that Christianity started out as this fringe movement.
Christianity started out as this tiny little band of misfits that nobody really paid attention to until hundreds of years later, until Christianity grew so big that they couldn’t ignore it anymore. That gives us some idea of where things started. It started with Jesus and this group of 12 men who were nobody important, and one of them was a traitor.
On top of that, all of them abandoned him at some point. On paper, that doesn’t seem to be a grand start, and yet from that, from that small start, emerged what we see today. Are we as Christians perfect globally?
No. Are there some of us who do and say stupid things? Yes, I am sometimes in that category, right?
Does everybody that claims the name of Jesus actually belong to him? No. But from that start, there are around the world over 2 billion people who profess the name of Jesus Christ. That’s incredible.
Even if you spread it out over 2,000 years, that’s incredible growth. I mean, that’s just amazing that it would start from something that small, something that from a human standpoint looks so insignificant, and to have grown to the point where there is no country on this planet where there are not people who worship Jesus Christ. There are very few languages in which His name is not praised. There are very few people groups that have never heard of Him.
It all started from that humble beginning. And I think that was an encouragement to them too. That if you really are going to give this to God, you’ve got to understand that it’s going to start small, and it may be slow for a while, but eventually it’s going to grow bigger than you can possibly comprehend.
And it doesn’t depend on how it started. It doesn’t depend on everything you can do. It depends on what God is going to do.
So it’s a reminder not to lose heart, to trust that God is going to grow His kingdom in His time as He sees fit. Because ultimately the kingdom’s growth relies on the power of God and on the excellence of the message. It relies on how powerful God is and this incredible gospel message that He works through.
as the seed is sown it takes root because the gospel is powerful as we read this morning in Romans chapter 1 it says the gospel of Jesus Christ is the power of God unto salvation to all who believe oh we’ve got to have these programs to convince people and bring them in we’ve got to we’ve got to figure out how to say it just the right way we’ve got to have all these gimmicks to get people no the gospel is the power of God unto salvation it’s the preaching of the cross and when I say preaching, I don’t just mean from a platform like this. It’s the preaching of the cross. As you speak the truth of Jesus into the lives of your friends and your family and your co-workers and your neighbors and even people you don’t like from time to time, as you speak that message of Jesus Christ to people, the gospel is the power of God into salvation.
The gospel is an incredibly powerful seed that starts out small in somebody’s life and grows by the power of God into something that we could never conceive of. Now, does the gospel sprout and take root like that in everybody’s life everywhere we sow it? No, but we sow it anyway.
And we wait and we let God do what He can do. What only He can do. When the gospel is sown, God works through that message.
I know it seems like it shouldn’t be that simple. It seems like there should be more to it than that. But that’s the truth.
The gospel, as God works through it, is able to do something in the lives of people that we can’t make happen. But when that message is given to people that Jesus Christ died to pay for their sins because there was no other way they could be forgiven and reconciled to a holy God, and then He rose again three days later to prove it, and He offers salvation, He offers forgiveness if they’ll simply believe in Him, put their trust in Him, they have that salvation as a free gift because God is kind enough to offer it. When that message is sown into the lives of people and God helps them make sense of it, That message does incredible things.
So our job is to sow the word, sow the seed, and trust the growth of the kingdom to Him. Do our best with the small part He’s called us to and then say, Lord, it’s in Your hands. So don’t get discouraged when you don’t see the results that you’re looking for that you think you ought to have.
Just understand that your obedience and your faithfulness is your success and all the results are His anyway.
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