References to Scripture:

(I use the NASB – New American Standard Bible as  “The NASB is an original translation from the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek texts, based on the same principles of translation”.  These were copious Learning Notes taken after listening to Pastor John’s sermon.)

 

Parable of the Sower and Soils
“1 He began to teach again by the sea. And such a very large crowd gathered to Him that He got into a boat in the sea and sat down; and the whole crowd was by the sea on the land. 2 And He was teaching them many things in parables, and was saying to them in His teaching, 3 “Listen to this! Behold, the sower went out to sow; 4 as he was sowing, some seed fell beside the road, and the birds came and ate it up. 5 Other seed fell on the rocky ground where it did not have much soil; and immediately it sprang up because it had no depth of soil. 6 And after the sun had risen, it was scorched; and because it had no root, it withered away. 7 Other seed fell among the thorns, and the thorns came up and choked it, and it yielded no crop. 8 Other seeds fell into the good soil, and as they grew up and increased, they yielded a crop and produced thirty, sixty, and a hundredfold.” – Mark 4:1-8 (NASB)

Everybody would have understood the story. Everybody was familiar with this. This is Galilee, this is around the Sea of Galilee where there were fields as far as the eye could see.

Everybody had experienced this kind of thing as a part of their daily routine all the years of their lives.

The story is simple enough, they all knew that not all the seed that was thrown was going to be productive.

They knew about hard ground and rocky ground and weedy ground and good ground.

So, in that sense it was a very, very simple story about very familiar things.

However, the last statement of Jesus would have been the Wow-factor in the story, where He said, “Other seed fell into the good soil and they grew up and increased and yielded a crop and produced thirty, sixty and a hundred fold.”

That’s the Wow factor because that kind of product would never happen.

No planting every had that kind of return. So that was not ordinary. That was uncommon and that caused them to wonder what is He talking about.

On the one hand, the sower looks like he is very unsuccessful in the first three soils.

But in the last three, the success is beyond comprehension and expectation.

It was not uncommon for Jesus to include in His parables that kind of an element that shocked people,  and this would be that very thing.

Simply enough, it’s a story about soils and their difference.  Some are non-productive, some are very productive, but what’s the point of the story?

This parable is designed to help us understand gospel evangelism.  We’re here to fulfill the great commission to go into all the world, preach the gospel to every creature, make disciples of all nations.

It’s included in Matthew 13, it’s in Luke 8, and it’s here.  It’s given in Matthew, Mark, Luke, it’s so very important it needs to be repeated three times.  We have been called to this mandate.

As the Body of Christ – becoming holy, being obedient, worshiping the Lord, all these things, coming to spiritual maturity, are to make us into the kind of Christians who have an effective witness because our lives back up our testimony.

And so, this is a very, very important parable for us to learn how the responses are going to come.

Here we are left in the world, every generation of Christians, one after the other, after the other, until the Lord comes with this responsibility to proclaim the gospel to the ends of the earth.

For many Christians, the effort seems disappointing, daunting, discouraging.

We even get to the point where we give up.

Maybe that’s because we don’t really understand what this parable is telling us.

There are efforts to fix this dilemma that teachers and preachers and other professed-Christians are in.

We give out the gospel and it’s rejected, or it’s received superficially, or it’s received temporarily.

What’s the problem?

Why is that kind of response so consistently true?

In contemporary evangelical mood would say “it’s our fault”.

“The fault is with us.”

“We’re out of touch with the culture.”

“We’re out of touch with style.”

“We’re out of touch with the psychology of how people think, or the psychology of sales, or the psychology of overcoming consumer resistance.”

“We’re out of touch with popular thinking.”

“We’re not connecting with people.”

“And beside the fact we’re really inept sowers, the seed is offensive, the message is offensive.”

“I mean, if you want to fill your building, if you want to fill your twenty-thousand stadium with all twenty-thousand seats occupied, you’re going to have to come up with another message than the one about hell and damnation and judgment and repentance, etc.”

“We’ve got to start talking about something that appeals to people on the level of their self-desires, their felt needs, their personal longings.”

“We need a more acceptable message and we certainly need more cultural savvy.”

“In other words, in the language of the parable, the problem is with the sower and the problem is with the seed.”

(HUH?!!)

“In the case of the sower, now the sower might need a new wardrobe.”

Really.

“Might need a black T-shirt with skull and crossbones and jeans with holes in the knees.”

That will do it.

“And how about maybe he needs a designer seed bag.”

“And then if you can just look like that and put rock music in the background, consumer resistance will fade away.”

Really.

So feverishly misguided their efforts in this direction that they’re everywhere, trying to fix the sower and the seed.

It’s a waste of time, absolute waste of time.

The seed is perfect, first of all, and if you do anything to alter it, you’ve just corrupted it. A mutated gospel is no gospel. We can’t tamper with the gospel. And any sower with any wardrobe and any seed bag will do as long as he or she is sowing the gospel.

Why?

Because Jesus is telling us here, the issue is not the sower and it’s not the seed, it’s the soil.  The issue is the soil.  The issue is the heart.  That’s the issue.

They are so bent on the style of the sower and creating some kind of synthetic acceptable seed that they have mutated the gospel into such a corrupted form that it no longer has the power to save because it isn’t the true gospel.

“The kind of Christianity that you see on the television with the prosperity gospel and all of that other stuff is not Christianity, it’s not the gospel of Jesus Christ and we want to distance ourselves from it.”

Somebody needs to know that’s not Christianity. That’s not biblical Christianity, that’s not historical Christianity. Biblical, historical Christianity is the true gospel of Jesus Christ preached in its purity and its clarity.

The church won’t do anything about it, seemingly.

Christian leaders don’t want to address the issue, so maybe we can get the world to take a look at it.

So that’s what this is about.

On the one hand, proclamation of the gospel can be a little bit discouraging, right?

You’re going to run into the hard ground.

You’re going to run into the superficial, where somebody responds for a moment, doesn’t last very long and they’re gone.

You’re going to run into the person who makes a temporary commitment but because they never really let go of what they truly love, the things of the world, they also disappear.

It’s very discouraging. We’ve all been there. We’ve done that. We’ve seen that.

But on the other hand, you can’t forget the supernatural half of the story, right?

Where the soil is prepared by God, the results are staggering. There’s enough motivation in the thirty, sixty, one-hundred to keep us going. You’ve got to get to that part of the parable.

The hearers.  Jesus says in verse 9,

“9 And He was saying, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.” – Mark 4:9 (NASB)

A parable unexplained is a riddle. And if you don’t explain this, if you don’t explain what you mean by it, then I can’t even fathom its significance.

But He says it’s limited.  This is limited to those who have the ears to hear.  And then it immediately introduces us to those who do, verse 10,

10 “As soon as He was alone, His followers, along with the Twelve, began asking Him about the parables.” – Mark 4:9 (NASB)

The ones who had the ears to hear were the ones who believed in Him.  He now speaks in parables to the crowd.

Go back to verse 1, the crowd is so large, He has to get off the shore in a boat in order to keep from being crushed, and they all heard the story but not until He was alone with His disciples and the Twelve did they get an explanation.

1 ” He began to teach again by the sea. And such a very large crowd gathered to Him that He got into a boat in the sea and sat down; and the whole crowd was by the sea on the land.” – Mark 4:1 (NASB)

The understanding of the truth is not for everyone, it is for His followers.

In verse 11 He explains it,

“11 And He was saying to them, “To you has been given the mystery of the kingdom of God, but those who are outside get everything in parables, 12 so that while seeing, they may see and not perceive, and while hearing, they may hear and not understand, otherwise they might return and be forgiven.”  – Mark 4:11-12 (NASB)

He spoke to them clearly, told them the truth, revealed the gospel, salvation by faith, called for repentance, belief in Him as the Messiah.

But they rejected Him.  Their rejection has reached a final point, as we see in Mark  3:22-28, when they said,

“He does what He does by the power of satan,”

and the leaders said it and the people bought into it?

22 The scribes who came down from Jerusalem were saying, “He is possessed by Beelzebul,” and “He casts out the demons by the ruler of the demons.” 23 And He called them to Himself and began speaking to them in parables, “How can Satan cast out Satan? 24 If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. 25 If a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand. 26 If Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but he is finished! 27 But no one can enter the strong man’s house and plunder his property unless he first binds the strong man, and then he will plunder his house.  28 “Truly I say to you, all sins shall be forgiven the sons of men, and whatever blasphemies they utter; 29 but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin”— 30 because they were saying, “He has an unclean spirit.” – Mark 3:22-28

They are now on the outside and the implication is, they’re fixed on the outside,  because He quotes from Isaiah 6:9,

Isaiah’s Commission
8 Then I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for Us?” Then I said, “Here am I.  Send me!” 9 He said, “Go, and tell this people: ‘Keep on listening, but do not perceive; Keep on looking, but do not understand.’ 10 “Render the hearts of this people insensitive, Their ears dull, And their eyes dim, Otherwise they might see with their eyes, Hear with their ears, Understand with their hearts, And return and be healed.” – Isaiah 6:8-10 (NASB)

And Jesus said:

12 so that while seeing, they may see and not perceive, and while hearing, they may hear and not understand, otherwise they might return and be forgiven.”  – Mark 4:12 (NASB)

Look at this,

“Otherwise they might return and be forgiven.”

Now you know you’ve gone too far, when God Himself prevents you from believing, and being forgiven.

They had gone so far, so far that the door was shut and they were only going to be hearing Him speak in parables that were unexplained.

Now He hides the truth from them.  Matthew chapter 13, it’s worth reading the verses 34 and 35 of that chapter, Matthew’s including these words from Jesus in this same context.  It says in verse 34,

“34 All these things Jesus spoke to the crowds in parables, and He did not speak to them without a parable. 35 This was to fulfill what was spoken through the prophet:  “I will open My mouth in parables;  I will utter things hidden since the foundation of the world.” – Matthew 13:34-35 (NASB)

This is a tremendously important turning point. All they get now are riddles they can’t understand because they won’t understand, they can’t understand. It’s like Pharaoh hardened his heart, now God hardened Pharaoh’s heart.

Why? He didn’t speak to them without a parable,

“To fulfill what was spoken through the prophet.”

This is a fulfillment of prophecy, verse 35,

35 “This was to fulfill what was spoken through the prophet:  “I will open My mouth in parables;  I will utter things hidden since the foundation of the world.” – Matthew 13:35 (NASB)

That’s a prophecy from Psalm 78. That’s Psalm 78 verse 2. Let me tell you something interesting about that.

“2 I will open my mouth in a parable; I will utter dark sayings of old,” – Psalm 78:2 (NASB)

Psalm 78 verse 2 introduces a parable, a dark saying, a hidden saying that is then the basis of a judgment pronounced on Israel.  Now if you follow that idea along in the Old Testament, parables in the Old Testament are connected to judgment.

Parables in the Old Testament are connected to judgment.

Psalm 78 is that illustration.

It is a dark saying, it is a hidden saying, it is a parable.

It’s stated to be a parable in verse 2, the parable is given and the parable then is a picture of Israel’s judgment.

When you come to 2 Samuel chapter 12, Nathan tells David a parable, a parable about a man. A man had some sheep, a neighbor who stole his sheep, etc., etc., and that is a parable that ends up in a pronunciation of judgment on David in Judges chapter 9 verses 1 to 21.

Gideon’s son, Jothan, tells a parable to the men of Shechem because they had chosen the murderous Abimelech to be their king and killed all his brothers.  And the parable is told and then it is explained as divine judgment coming on those sinful people.

In Ezekiel chapter 17, chapter 24, you have Ezekiel giving a parable that is explained as a judgment.

In Isaiah chapter 5 and chapter 6, you have Isaiah giving the parable, it begins in chapter 5 about the vineyard and the question is even asked, “What is this vineyard and who is he talking about? And what’s going on here?” And he pronounces the Babylonian judgment on Israel, their captivity when they were hauled into Babylon is the meaning of the parable.

They don’t understand what the story means spiritually. Its meaning is totally obscure to them. They are oblivious to it. And that is by intention.

They are unbelievers who follow Jesus strictly for the miracles.

They are thrill-seekers.

They’re happy to come along for what is clearly the greatest show on earth, Jesus healing all kinds of diseases, raising dead people, casting out demons, presenting wondrous teaching.

They are the thrill seekers but they have no interest in the teaching of Jesus.

They have no interest in the theology of Jesus.

They’re there for the miracles.

For them, Jesus speaking in parables becomes a judgment.

So what our Lord is doing here, this is a significant turning point in His ministry, when He starts talking in parables, He is saying judgment has come.

They had rejected Him when they could understand, and now they can’t understand.

These parables are judgments on Israel’s rejection, they cannot understand, they cannot comprehend, they cannot then turn, and be forgiven.

And their judgment will come and their judgment did come in 70 A.D. in the destruction of Jerusalem and those who were still alive by then would very likely have been slaughtered and catapulted into a godless hell. This is a very critical moment in the life of the ministry of our Lord Jesus.

And He uses the illustration of Isaiah because that’s such a dramatic parallel because that’s a parable in chapter 5 that ends up in a pronunciation of judgment at the end of chapter 5 and on into chapter 6.

So Jesus is going to speak to His own and explain this parable. It’s critical for them because they need to know what to expect.

You can imagine that having watched Jesus do evangelism, what do you think they would have concluded?

Well what did they conclude?  They came to Him and said,

“Why are so few being saved? What’s going on here? You know, You’re supposed to be the King and this is supposed to be the Kingdom. This is the Kingdom having arrived. The Kingdom is broken in to human history, the Messiah is here. Nothing is happening, what’s going on?”

And the first three kinds of soil, that was nothing new, nothing new at all.

They saw the hard ground in the Pharisees, they saw the superficial ground in a lot of other folks, some disciples who had followed for a little while, then went away.

They saw all that.

What our Lord wants them to see in the story is the thirty-, sixty-, hundred-fold but you can’t see it now, but you are going to see it in the future.

In fact, the next few sections in this chapter in Mark 4 kind of build on this, particularly verses 26 to 29 where it talks about,

“You sow and you go to bed, and the crop comes up,”

because there are powers beyond you that produce it.

Parable of the Seed
“26 And He was saying, “The kingdom of God is like a man who casts seed upon the soil; 27 and he goes to bed at night and gets up by day, and the seed sprouts and grows – how, he himself does not know. 28 The soil produces crops by itself; first the blade, then the head, then the mature grain in the head. 29 But when the crop permits, he immediately puts in the sickle, because the harvest has come.” – Mark 4:26-29

And it’s going to grow, it’s even going to grow in the next parable, the mustard seed, starting small, becoming huge.

So this is a parable meant to encourage.

It’s meant to explain the resistance and the rejection, but to encourage with the great inexplicable results.

So let’s go to the explanation in verse 14, the explanation.  In verse 13,

13 And He said to them, “Do you not understand this parable? How will you understand all the parables? – Mark 4:13 (NASB)

Of course no, it needed to be explained and how will you understand all the parables? You have to have an explanation for everything. Verse 14,

14 “The sower sows the Word.” – Mark 4:13 (NASB)

Now let’s, first of all, look at the sower.

What does it say about the sower?

Nothing, absolutely nothing.

It doesn’t say what kind of clothes he wore, what kind of bag he had, it was just anybody who sows, anybody faithful to proclaim the Word, is a sower.

All of us do that, we’re commanded to do that.

And if you for any minute think that it’s connected to your style, or it’s connected to your personality, or it’s connected to your wardrobe, or it’s connected to the music, you better think again.

This is just the sower and the sower is defined as simply somebody who sows the Word, anybody who throws the seed, the Word.

What is the issue then? The seed, the seed is the Word.

The seed, says Luke 8:11, Luke’s parallel, “is the Word of God”, it is the Word from God, the saving gospel, the Word of the Kingdom, if you will, the gospel of the Kingdom, the message that God has sent, the biblical gospel.

11 “Now the parable is this: the seed is the word of God.” – Luke 8:11 (NASB)

Can we say that?

It’s the biblical message.

Faith comes by hearing the Word, Romans 10.

“17 So faith comes from hearing, and hearing by the Word of Christ.” – Romans 10:17 NASB)

We’re begotten again, 1 Peter 1:23, by the Word.

23 “for you have been born again not of seed which is perishable but imperishable, that is, through the living and enduring word of God.” – 1 Peter 1:23 (NASB)

In 2 Peter 1 it says that everything pertaining to life and godliness has been granted to us through the true knowledge of Him. And that true knowledge of Him is revealed in Scripture.

22 Since you have in obedience to the truth purified your souls for a sincere love of the brethren, fervently love one another from the heart, 23 for you have been born again not of seed which is perishable but imperishable, that is, through the living and enduring word of God. 24 For, “All flesh is like grass, And all its glory like the flower of grass.  The grass withers, And the flower falls off, 25 But the word of the Lord endures forever.” And this is the word which was preached to you.“ – 1 Peter 1:22-25 (NASB)

So, the sower is anybody who sows the seed. The seed is the Word of God.

In 1 Thessalonians 2:13, Paul says concerning the Thessalonian believers that he is so grateful he is rejoicing in the Lord because they received, he says in chapter 2 verse 13,

13 “For this reason we also constantly thank God that when you received the word of God which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men, but for what it really is, the word of God, which also performs its work in you who believe.” – 1 Thessalonians 2:13 (NASB)

It’s the Word that has the power.

Paul says in Romans, “I’m not ashamed of the gospel because it is the power of God unto salvation.”

16 “For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. 17 For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith; as it is written, “But the righteous man shall live by faith.” – Romans 1:16-17 (NASB)

The power is in the Word.  Any sower who sows the Word therefore wields the power.

If you follow this through the book of Acts, you come in to chapter 4 verse 31, what do they do?

They proclaim the Word of God.

Chapter 6 verse 7, what do they do?

They proclaim the Word of God.

Chapter 8 verse 14, they proclaim the Word of God.

Chapter 11 verse 1, chapter 12 verse 24, chapter 13 verse 5, verse 44, on and on.

They said,

“Nothing but the Word of God.”

The Word that came from God, the biblical gospel.

This is the seed, the living and abiding Word of God by which we are given life.   So the issue in the story here is not the sower.

It doesn’t do any good to tamper with the sower. And you certainly don’t want to tamper with the seed.

To say something is foolish as,

“Well we’d be much more effective if we changed our style, or if we changed our message,”

…  is ludicrous when compared with the simplicity of this parable.

The issue does not lie with the sower, it is irrelevant.

The sower’s personality, the sower’s wardrobe, the sower’s style, there’s only one possible seed containing the power and that’s the true gospel.

So the issue in the variables here is, what?

The soil … the soil.

Matthew 13:19 tells us that the soil is the heart in the parallel passage in Matthew, the soil is the heart. Man’s heart, or man’s mind, the gospel going in to the mind of the person.

19 “When anyone 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. This is the one on whom seed was sown beside the road.” – Matthew 13:19 (NASB)

So the basic truth of the parable is this, the result of all gospel proclamation by anybody and everybody is dependent on the condition of the heart.

Did you get that?

It depends on the condition of the heart.

Don’t pat yourself on the back, it’s not you.

It’s the heart and if you think you can do something about the heart, guess again.  Because you can’t.

I can throw seed, but only God can plow soil.

Only God by the Holy Spirit can plow the heart.

Now that’s a foundational truth to understand.  “No man comes unto Me except the Father draws him.”

44 “No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him; and I will raise him up on the last day.” – John 6:44 (NASB)

And by the way, in that John 6 passage, Jesus repeats that same statement in another form in the sixth chapter, and it’s worth being reminded. John 6:65,

65 And He was saying, “For this reason I have said to you, that no one can come to Me, unless it has been granted him from the Father.” – John 6:65 (NASB)

Unless it’s been granted him from the Father.

So the only way that there’s going to be good soil is that it’s divinely prepared by God, chosen, prepared, the Spirit of God has come and done conviction. The heart is made ready and there’s a response.

You couldn’t possibly imagine that it would be any kind of human ingenuity that could make this happen.

Certainly if you’re talking about thirty-, sixty-, a hundred-fold because what’s happening in the hearts that are responsive is a massive explosion of a harvest, something that just would have to be by divine power and that has to be by divine preparation.

So you starting to get a feel for what this is about?

This is both clarifying to us and encouraging, is it not?

Now we’re going to understand why people respond the way they respond and we’re going to be encouraged that when people do respond, it is supernatural and their lives explode in a spiritual harvest.

Let me talk about influence.

When somebody becomes a Christian, comes to know the Lord Jesus Christ, that person has such power coming through them by the Spirit of God resident in them and the truth that they proclaim that God will use them to bring others to Christ and others to Christ and it just becomes exponential and it spreads, doesn’t it?

That’s the thirty-, sixty-, one-hundred, not all of us are going to have the same spiritual impact, but we’re all going to have an impact that could never be explained as human.

That’s the point. It can’t be explained. That’s why Paul says, I read it to you in 2 Corinthians 3, “We’re not adequate for these things. This can’t be human.”

“4 Such confidence we have through Christ toward God. 5 Not that we are adequate in ourselves to consider anything as coming from ourselves, but our adequacy is from God, 6 who also made us adequate as servants of a new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.” – 2 Corinthians 3:4-6 (NASB)

So the bad news is, expect rejection.

The good news is, when the soil is prepared by God, there’s going to be an explosion of spiritual fruit and the harvest will go on and on and on and on and on and on.

All of our lives intersect and that’s the good news in the story and the disciples needed to hear that because it all basically looked like it wasn’t going anywhere.

Let’s go back and look at the individual soils.

The first soil, we’ll just call it the Roadside Soil

15 “These are the ones who are beside the road where the word is sown; and when they hear, immediately Satan comes and takes away the word which has been sown in them.” – Mark 4:15 (NASB)

They’re just hard-hearted.

It just bounces and satan is the birds, depicted in the birds back in verse 4 that come along and see the seed and snatch it away.

It never penetrates, it makes no impact at all

Hard, beaten path, nothing penetrates, nothing absorbed, preach the gospel again and again and again and again, give the gospel again and again and again and by continual self-destroying rejection, they go long past the place of grace, long past the hope of faith and forgiveness and Satan just snatches it away.

It’s powerful analogy that this is the condition of a human heart, the heart of a man or a woman.

In the case of the parable, Jesus is talking about the leaders of Israel. They’re the hard-hearts.

You might think because they were religious they were the soft hearts.

No, not even close.

They were the hard impenetrable apostate unbelieving God-hating, Christ-rejecting hard ground.

It’s the condition of the heart that corresponds to the smooth hardness of the footpath that crosses the plowed field, the heart is a thoroughfare, criss-crossed by the mixed multitude of sins day after day after day.

The fields weren’t fenced and neither is this heart.

It’s an unprotected heart.

It lies exposed.

It lies unprotected.

It lies open for all the evil stompings of all comers.

It’s never broken up by the softening of conviction and repentance, soul-searching, holy fear or even the sweet winsome realities of grace and forgiveness.

This is a calloused heart.

It is impenetrable from the terrors of the Lord or from the wooings of His love.

It responds to neither.

The Old Testament would say, “This is a hard-hearted, stiff-necked people.”

Nothing new for Israel, that was used to refer to them in the Old Testament.

The sower is good and a sower is just a sower.

Seed is the seed, but the issue is the heart.

And this may be “the fool” referred to in the book of Proverbs, read Proverbs, first chapter, “the fool who doesn’t take the truth, will not receive the wisdom of God”.

And this is the Jews, this is the leaders and the people who followed them who eventually killed their Messiah.

Any thought of truth, any thought of gospel is just snatched, never lasts at all.

We’ve all seen people like that. We know people like that.

I know a number of people like that, some even come to mind. They’re like the people in Acts 17:32 it says,

“They sneered at the resurrection.”

They’re out there. You’re going to see them. They’re a reality.

Even more important, look at your own heart.

Is that you?

Have you heard this message again and again and again?

But you just live out there and let sins just stomp you hard day after day after day, week after week, after week, you live this unfenced unprotected life where it’s just overrun by the trampling of iniquity?

Is that you?

And you come and need to deposit some seeds and before you’ve gone a mile out of here, they’re gone.

Are you so comfortable where you are in your unbelief that you’re impenetrable?

That’s a scary place to be.

It may have been that you passed the point of grace and you will not believe and you cannot believe.

Maybe you need to cry out to God to plow deeply your hard heart.

The second soil, is the stony soil, verses 16 and 17.

16 “In a similar way there are the ones on whom seed was sown on the rocky places, who, when they hear the word, immediately receive it with joy; 17 and they have no firm root in themselves, but are only temporary; then, when affliction or persecution arises because of the word, immediately they fall away.” – Mark 4:16-17(NASB)

Now we already know these are people who have superficial dirt at the top but there’s rock bed underneath just below where the plow was, so when the seed goes in, starts to grow a little bit, everything pushes up because the roots can’t go down, and so you have this artificial idea that, “Oh, this is wonderful, look it’s growing, it’s going everywhere,” but because the roots can’t get pass that hard rock bed, they can’t get to the water and when the sun comes out, it burns the plant before it ever produces anything.

That’s this kind of person.

This is the person depicted as the one who receives the Word with joy.

This defines for me an emotional response, an emotional response with joy.

And we all look at that and we say, “Ah, you know, I talked to So-and-so, gave them the gospel and I don’t understand it, they’re not around, they don’t come to church, they don’t confess the Lord and they were so happy when it happened.”

Let me give you a simple principle:  joy is not the distinguishing factor of true conversion.  Joy is an emotion!  It is not the distinguishing factor of true conversion.

In fact, a more likely distinguishing factor of true conversion would be sadness, brokenness, mourning.

What does James tell us in James 4:6 to 10? “Weep, mourn,” that’s what conviction produces. “Blessed are the ones who mourn,” Matthew 5.

Don’t ever assume that because somebody is demonstrating joy after having prayed a prayer or whatever they did to assume they were making a commitment to Christ that that signals reality. It does not.

In fact, more often than not, it may be a giveaway that that’s not a real conversion at all.

Joy comes in the wonderful relief and release of true conversion.

Let me tell you something. Never make a gospel appeal to people’s emotions.

One can notice it in churches these days who have some kind of an emotional appeal and play all kinds of smaltzy music in the background.

There are those who fall for this because some church or pastor has worked your emotions up. Never appeal to people with any kind of gospel appeal that is directed at their emotions. Why? Because you can manipulate people’s emotions.

And, frankly, most people have issues in their lives that make them sad and if you work well enough on their emotions, you’re clever enough at it, you can promise them happiness and when they make some kind of superficial step, they’ll have a momentary kind of relief.

They’ll be a kind of newly stirred up feeling that they have.

“Oh now, God’s on my side. Now I”m going to heaven. This is wonderful and you’ve accepted me and you’ve embraced me.”

And that doesn’t signify anything at all.

The world is full of people who would like to be happy.

The world is full of people who would love to be accepted and loved and go to heaven.

If you appeal to the emotions, you’re going to get emotional reactions.  Emotional reactions are not necessarily consistent with true conversion.

Warm affections, newly stirred up, look, there are so many people who have gone through this route, I’m telling you, this is what we all grew up with kind of in churches, a lot of us, you know, where they play this music.

Turn on television, watch how these TV preachers and evangelists deal with crowds. They get an organ, they crank the music up somehow they get these people to a fever-pitch emotionally, then they play at their feelings. This is an illegitimate thing, it’s tragic. Don’t ever appeal to people’s emotions.

The approach to evangelism should be – here’s the truth, you drive it at the mind because all things pertaining to life and godliness, pertain to the true knowledge of Him.

So here’s the truth.

Shut down the organ.

Shut down the humming.

We don’t need that.

Let’s talk about the truth of your condition and Christ’s provision, and emotion will take care of itself.

When Christians sing hymns, there’s  a lot of joy and encouragement in the heart

But that’s the emotion that comes out of the true conversion, not the emotion that substitutes for it.

No, we don’t need to do all that, all that kind of emotional manipulation.

There’s a second thing you never want to do, you never want to appeal directly to people’s will cause the world is full of weak-willed people.

Are you aware of that?

If you’re not, then you tell me how those phony evangelists get people to send them enough millions of dollars they can buy three jets.  You can manipulate people’s will to do anything, anything if you’re clever enough.

And if you create enough self-interest, right?

“Oh, I know what’s going to happen when I send in my money, I’m going to get rich, I’m going to get healthy, I’m going to be successful. God’s going to pour out all kinds of goodies on me.”

All that driving self-interest is behind all of that. And if you want to, if you want to go after people’s emotions, you can get them.

And if you want to go after their weak wills, you can get them.

But if you’re going to proclaim the gospel, you have to go after the mind.

And it has to be a true understanding of the gospel.

It’s about knowledge and how you respond to the knowledge.

The church of Jesus Christ is flooded with tares, who came in emotionally and from a weak-willed response. But they’re not the real thing.  And it shows up.

Verse 17, “They have no firm root, so they’re just temporary.”

17 and they have no firm root in themselves, but are only temporary; then, when affliction or persecution arises because of the word, immediately they fall away.” – Mark 4:17(NASB)

Temporary converts.  And even when you preach the gospel to the mind, you still get superficial converts.

What finally does it for them?

What chases them away?

First, affliction.

“Well guess what, you told me I’d get rich. You told me I’d get healed. You told me that Jesus would make me successful.  Guess what.  I have cancer and my husband left me. I’m out.”

Any kind of pressure.

If it’s not real, the pressure will prove it.

That’s why Peter says, and it’s so important, that trials prove your faith. That’s why you long for trials because when you come out of a trial and you have experienced an enduring faith, that’s giving you assurance.

If you ask me how I know I’m a Christian, I can’t tell you there’s some mystical way. You know how I know I’m a Christian? Because I’ve been through enough trials in my own life and enough trials in the lives of people around me for enough years and I have seen that no matter what the trial is and no matter how it comes, my faith never wavers.

That’s not credit to me, that’s the faith that God gives that saves.

It’s like a rock.

The false faith, when the trial comes and you can’t cash in and you don’t get what you were told you were going to get and Jesus doesn’t do what you thought He was going to do, you’re gone.

Even worse, persecution.

You’re not going to take that.

That wasn’t in the bargain because you came in on self-interest.

People who appeal to the will and appeal to the emotion, appeal on the level of self-interest and self-interest is going to lead you down a very, very dead end street because life’s not going to be like that.

God isn’t going to promise you to make you healthy, wealthy and prosperous the rest of your days, no way.

So when the trouble comes, you’re going to bail, or when the persecution comes you’re going to say, “I didn’t bargain for this.”

And Jesus was talking to the people right there sitting there with Him named disciples.

How do I know that? Because in John 6 it says,

“Many of His disciples walked no more with Him.”

Gone.

Why?

They weren’t going to suffer.

He was just talking about the fact they were going to have to eat His flesh and drink His blood.

Starts talking about death.

They say, “We’re out of here.”

And He says to the other disciples, the Apostles,

“Will you also go away?”

And you hear that triumphant statement of Peter,

“To whom shall we go? You and You alone have the words of eternal life and we know You are the Holy One of God.”

We’re hanging in here.

It’s because they were given the gift of the real faith.

And this is like building the house on the sand, isn’t it?  If it’s built on emotion and the weakness of the human will, purely predicated on self-interest.  Trouble in life, persecution in life will reveal all of that.

These people who have rejected Christ under the leadership of the apostate Pharisees and scribes and rabbis and the rest, these people now are past the point where they can return and be forgiven.

This is a tragic moment in the history of Israel.

So in Galilee where He is ministering, He never again speaks in any teaching without parables and for the crowd, He never gives them an explanation. This is a divine judgment on their fixed unbelief.

On the other hand, however, our Lord gives a full explanation to His followers, the disciples, the Apostles, the believers.

They are preeminently privileged to know the mysteries of the Kingdom of God. They know the divine spiritual truth that the Lord has revealed to them in these wonderful stories.

This is critical for them because how are they going to be used to build the Kingdom?

How are they going to be used to proclaim the gospel?

How are they going to be used when the church is established to build the church and strengthen the church and carry the message of the church, the gospel to the ends of the earth if they don’t understand these things?

They must understand them.

One of the most beautiful portions of Scripture is John 15 where Jesus says,

“You’re My friends and I call you My friends because I have revealed all things that My Father has disclosed to Me to you.”

If you’re a friend of the Lord Jesus Christ, what marks that friendship is full disclosure, complete revelation.

So, on the one hand, our Lord speaking in parables is a judgment to the non-believers who are fixed in their rejection.

On the other hand, it is an invitation to revelation to His friends to whom the great mysteries of the Kingdom will be disclosed in full so that they can have the privilege of knowing this truth and carry out the responsibility of proclaiming it.

Failure to understand this, failure to interpret it correctly, failure to imply the truths in this parable has blighted the church in a very serious way. It has allowed the church to engage in all kinds of foolish and illegitimate strategies for evangelism that are very effective in producing false converts.

Maybe never in the history of the church has it been any more efficient as it is now in producing false converts.

The church is really good at making hypocrites and even apostates. False conversions abound in the church. The church is very adept at sowing its own tares in the midst of the field.

The last thing you want to do, the last thing you ever want to do in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ is produce a false conversion by using some illegitimate means of manipulating people.  So I cannot stress how important the instruction of this parable is because it regulates our understanding of evangelism.

Back to the explanation. The explanation comes then starting in verse 13,

“Jesus says, ‘Do you understand this parable? How will you understand all the parables?’”

The point is,

“No, we don’t understand, how can we understand? There’s only one way, You have to explain them to us.”

So He does in verse 14.

“The sower sows the Word.”

Pretty obvious that He doesn’t say anything about the sower, there is no adjective in front of sower.

He doesn’t say,

“The good sower, the clever sower, the adept sower, the savvy sower, the culturally acute sower,”

He doesn’t say any of that,

“The sower…”

no description, this is every believer, folks, this is us.

This is you, every believer, every believer, we proclaim the gospel.

Nothing more needs to be said about the sower, it’s not about the sower.

It’s not about the technique of the sower, the skill of the sower.

Then it says, “Sows the Word.”

Well the Word is the seed.

There’s only one seed.

That’s the gospel.

Paul says, “I’m not ashamed of the gospel of Christ,”

Romans 1, “it is the power of God unto salvation to whoever believes, Jew or Greek.”

The power is in the gospel, the gospel is the seed.

Faith comes by hearing the Word concerning Christ, Romans 10.

First Corinthians 15,

“This is the gospel, that Jesus died and rose again.”

We understand the gospel. The gospel simply summarized is preaching Christ. The Great Commission at the end of Luke, our Lord says,

“These are the words which I spoke to you while I was still with you, and all the things which are written about Me in the Law of Moses and the prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.”

So He opened their minds to understand the scriptures.

The gospel starts in the Law, the prophets and the holy writings, the Old Testament. You start with the story of Christ all the way back with the Law and with the prophets and the Psalms. And then He said,

“Thus it is written that Christ would suffer and rise again from the dead the third day and that repentance for forgiveness of sins would be proclaimed in His name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You’re a witness to these things, so go do it, preach Christ, preach Christ, preach the whole history of Christ.”

As is connection to the Law and the prophets and the Psalms is the beginning of it all and the fulfillment of it comes in the New Testament:

Preach Christ, that’s the seed, it’s the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, the one who fulfills all Old Testament prophecy.

So there’s really no discussion here about the sower.

Every believer is a sower.

And there’s no discussion about the seed, there’s only one possible seed and that’s the story of Christ.

That’s the story of Christ.

It is Christ, the gospel is Christ.

We preach Christ.

Paul says, “I’m determined to know nothing among you, except Christ and Him crucified.”

And they said about Paul his speech was contemptible.

He lacked personal charm.

He had nothing going for him.

He was boring.

He didn’t get in to any of the philosophical labyrinths that teased the minds of people.

He had this consistent simplistic message about a crucified Jew, that’s all he preached.

He didn’t try to embellish it, it was the pure gospel.

And as we all know, God used him mightily.

So all of us are sowers and we have the seed which is the gospel concerning Jesus Christ.

“Drive everyone to Christ.”

The only hope of salvation is found in Christ.

Don’t offer a counselor.

Don’t offer the byproducts of Christ. 

Offer Christ and Christ only.

“That’s the gospel:  preach Christ.”

And so the sower is every believer.

The seed is the gospel of Christ.

So the issue left for us is the soils, right? This is the key.

Soils represent the human heart.

Matthew 13:19, the parallel passage refers to the seed going into the soil as the gospel being sowed in the heart, in the heart.

So here we have hearts that we’re going to face as we go to preach the gospel to the ends of the earth. Very, very important.

First of all, verse 15 is the roadside heart.

These are the ones who are beside the road where the seed is sown, when they hear immediately satan comes and takes away the Word which has been sown in them.

This is the seed that falls on hard beaten path, it’s like concrete, no response at all.

They’re described in 2 Corinthians 4, whose minds are blinded by satan – he comes along and snatches the truth away before it can ever penetrate.

This is not some oblique group of people, this is Israel. They are the hard-hearted and stiff-necked.  You remember when Jesus went into the synagogue in Nazareth and preached one sermon, according to Luke 4 they tried to throw Him off the cliff and stone Him to death because He attacked their hard-heartedness.

He reminded them of the story in the past that God wanted to benefit a widow in Israel but couldn’t find a righteous widow so He had to go and take care of a Gentile widow, and He wanted to heal a leper but there were none worthy of being healed in Israel, so He went and healed a border terrorist who pillaged and raped the Jews by the name of Neman.

They were so infuriated by being reminded of how stiff-necked and hard-hearted they were that they wanted to kill Jesus. But that was the way they were – hard, impenitent heart. So He’s describing the vast population of Israel.

The Jews and the religious leaders who had rejected Him for whom it was now too late and He was speaking to them in stories without an explanation because He was hiding the truth from them. He was no longer going to cast pearls before swine.

Then you remember the rocky here in verses 16 and 17.

In a similar way, they’re the ones on whom the seed was thrown in the rocky places who when they hear the Word immediately receive it with joy, they have no firm root in themselves but are only temporary. Then when affliction or persecution arises because of the Word, immediately they fall away.

Get ready to expect temporary converts.

These are shallow responders, false converts, who respond emotionally without counting the cost, selfishly seeking personal satisfaction.

This rises, frankly, out of self-love. There are people who say, “Oh yeah, I certainly want that. I want Jesus if He can take care of my life and forgive my sin and take me to heaven.” But it’s all very self-centered.

That dominates evangelicalism today, a self-centered, self-love, fleshly religiosity, an impious spirituality that wants Jesus only because Jesus will deliver what this person emotionally needs.

Who does the Lord seek?

He seeks those who “are of a broken and contrite spirit who tremble at My Word, who literally shudder under the authority of God.”

Now false conversions happen all the time and the issue is not that people don’t believe in Jesus Christ.  That’s not the part that creates false conversions.

There are lots of falsely converted people who will tell you Jesus lived, they believed Jesus died, they believe Jesus rose again. That is relatively easier to accept.

What makes a false conversion is a failure at genuine repentance.

The quote/unquote Christian church is full of all kinds of people who believe in Jesus Christ.  The devils believe, James 2:19, devil faith.

But it’s about the holy hatred of sin.

It’s about brokenness.

It’s about self-denial.

It’s about repentance.

It’s always this temptation in the church to cheapen evangelism and all it does is create superficiality.  Look, false converts are going to happen any way.  Aiding and abetting them is not acceptable.

There’s going to be rocky soil even under the correct presentation of the gospel.

Accommodating the gospel to that, is a gross sin.

Mere emotion has nothing to do with evangelism.

Look, they had seen that too. They had seen the hard-hearted populace, they also knew there had been disciples as recorded in John 6:61 to 71 who followed for awhile and then turned around and left.

And Jesus gave a reverse invitation.

“Will you also go? Why don’t you all leave?”

There’s a new approach to an invitation. Why don’t you all just reject Me? All of you leave.

The ones who remained stood up and said:

“We’re not going to go anywhere, You’re the one with eternal life. We know who You are, the Holy One of God.”

So they had seen the kinds of people who when there’s any kind of pressure or anything they don’t believe, or anything they don’t want to submit to, or any kind of persecution arising on the horizon, they disappear.

And they’re still with us.

We don’t aid and abet that by superficial emotional approaches in evangelism.

If someone’s confession of Christ doesn’t come from a deep inner contrition, a broken and contrite heart, a desire to be delivered from sin and come under the holy Lordship of Jesus Christ in a life of self-denial and sacrifice and service and even suffering, then you have no root.

The third kind of soil, thorny hearers, verses 18 and 19.

“And others are the ones on whom seed was sown among the thorns. These are the ones who heard the Word but the worries of the world and the deceitfulness of riches and the desires for other things enter  in and choke the Word and it becomes unfruitful.”

Thorns is a Greek word, akanthas, that’s actually the name of a thorny weed, very common in the Middle East, found frequently in cultivated soil.

It’s the same word used in Matthew 27:29 to refer to the crown of thorns placed on our Lord’s head.  It was made out of those same thorny weeds.

So this is what occupies this heart.  This is not the response of shallow emotion.  This is not the response of self-will, driven by self-love and self-interest.

This is a double minded person whose repentance is not complete.

This is the person who wants salvation, wants Christ, wants the Kingdom but wants the world and wants riches and wants things.

This is the double minded.

He wants to serve God and money and Jesus said, “You can’t serve God and money.”

This is the rich young ruler, remember him in Luke, in Matthew 19?

Comes to Jesus, “What do I have to do to enter the Kingdom?”

And He says, “Give up all your money because that’s obviously the idol that rules your heart.”

And he was not willing to do that.  And he was also not willing to admit his own sinfulness.  He wanted to hang on to the illusion of his own pride and his own riches.

Literally when it says at the beginning of verse 19, “worries of the world,” it is literally the distractions of the age. Whatever they are, whatever occupies the age, this is the preoccupied heart.

This is the heart that unfortunately loves the world and all the things that are in the world, according to 1 John 2, and therefore the love of God is not in him.

This is the heart that is the enemy of God, James 4:4, because it loves the world. This is the kind of heart that says, as Jesus points out in Luke chapter 9,

“Yeah, I’m going to follow You, Lord, I‘m going to follow You but I can’t follow You now, you know, I’ve got to go home and wait till I get my inheritance from my father so I have some money. Well I can’t follow You now, I’ve got to go home and say goodbye to everybody so I can raise some money to take with me.”

And Jesus says,

“No, no, no, if you look back you’re not fit for the Kingdom.”

These are those who are under the terrible temptation of the love of money becoming the root of all kinds of evil, 1 Timothy chapter 6.  These are people consumed with the stuff of the world.

Now let me tell you something that you need to know that’s very, very important.

The gospel calls for a break from the worries of the world, or the distractions of the age, the deceitfulness of riches, and the desires for other things. This chokes out the true seed.

Is it not amazing to you that the prosperity gospel promises all these things and Christ?

Isn’t that what it does?

Doesn’t the prosperity gospel say, “You can have all the world has to offer, you can have riches and you can have all the other things you want, and Jesus?” That is a lie right out of hell.

Let me tell you something about the gospel.

The gospel does not promise to you what your unconverted, corrupted, fallen, wretched, sinful heart already wants.  That’s not what the gospel offers you.

The gospel doesn’t say it will give you the world, it will give you riches, it will give you every other thing you desire, it will give you a new house and a new car, etc., etc., etc.  That’s a lie.  That’s saying it’s fine to have weeds in the soil.

This is a horrendous perversion.

When you come to Christ, you have to let go of the world and the love of riches and all the other things this world has to offer.

You deny yourself.

You deny all that you are, all that you possess.

You hate your life, your family, your father, your sister, your mother, perhaps. And you come and follow Me, take up your cross, it may mean your death.

Oh they were going to become familiar later on with somebody who never could make that break, follow Jesus, said he believed in Jesus, preached, but he loved money and he loved the world and he loved all the things the world offered and his name is Judas.  And then in 2 Timothy 4:10 there was Demas, the associate of the Apostle Paul who abandoned Paul because of his love for this present age.

There are people like this.

They want Christ but they don’t want to let go of anything.

It isn’t that you won’t have anything, the Lord will give you whatever He chooses to give you in blessing you. The Lord will give you food to eat and a place to stay. You don’t see God’s people begging bread. He’ll be your provision.

But the distinguishing mark of a true believer is not the love for those things and the desire for those things but a consuming love for God that’s borne out in the testimony of Scripture in the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus says seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness and all these things  shall be added. It’s a matter of what your heart desires.

So what is the chief evidence of conversion?

So far we’ve seen emotion, we’ve seen quick response, we’ve seen interest.

Speed of response doesn’t prove anything, people can respond because their wills and emotions have been moved superficially.

Joy isn’t the evidence.

There are many people who have an emotional experience, a temporary emotional satisfaction because they have some feeling induced.

It’s not a desire to be blessed.

Oh there are a lot of people who want to be blessed.

They want everything God can possibly give them.

That’s the devil’s message, that’s the prosperity gospel.

What is the distinguishing mark of true conversion?

Salvation is a regeneration.

It is a real transformation.

Turning a person from loving self, to loving God.

From pride to humility.

From the reigning power of sin to the reigning power of righteousness.

That’s the bottom line. “A holy life is the chief sign of grace.”

How sad it is that contemporary evangelism lowers the standard so terribly, so terribly. You know, it all comes down to the sinner’s pride.

Just to help you a little bit with that, the garden, satan comes to Eve and what is the temptation?

“God said, Don’t eat, I’m telling you, you can eat and if you eat you will be as God.”

That’s it.

You’ll be as God and what will happen when you are like God? You will know good or evil.”

Not in terms of information but you’ll be able to choose.

You’ll become the sovereign of your own life.

You can get out from under this, this leadership you’re submitting yourself to in the Garden to God.

You can take over.

You’ll be as God and you can determine for yourself good and evil, you can choose to do good, you can choose to do evil, you will be the master of your own life, you will do whatever you want.

That was satan’s temptation and it was true to his nature because why did satan get kicked out of heaven? Why did he fall? Because he wanted to be equal to God.

He would no longer submit himself to the sovereign rule of God, he wanted sovereign rule himself and so that is what launches the great Fall and sin into the universe.

All sinners then are the sons of satan, they manifest the same need to be sovereign over their lives. They will not submit themselves to God. They will choose their own good and their own evil.

Now that has a problem, because once those two made that decision in the Garden, they were thrown out of the Garden and a flaming sword was placed at the Garden to keep them from ever going back because nobody who lives like that can have any relationship to God.

You can’t get back into the fellowship of God if that’s how you live, no possibility of reconciliation because according to the words of James, God resists the proud.

Man’s only hope is to humble himself because God gives grace to the humble and so God is looking for the humble and broken and contrite heart that trembles at His great authority.

Salvation only comes to the humble.

The sinner renouncing his own independence, his own will, his own wisdom and totally submitting to the lordship of Christ.

And for sinners, such submission and such abandonment of self-will is far too much to ask. That’s why there are people, Jesus said, who want to get into the Kingdom and they go at it but they can’t do it because they can’t make the sacrifice of their own sovereignty.

The only sinner who comes back to God and is reconciled is the one who stoops, who hates himself, confesses Jesus as Lord. Failure to do that dooms and damns the sinner to hell, partial commitment is useless.

There are people who do respond that way, the right way. They’re indicated in the final kind of soil. Verse 20,

“Those are the ones on whom seed was sown on the good soil and they hear the Word and accept it and bear fruit, thirty-, sixty- and a hundred-fold.”

They’re willing to humble themselves.

They’re willing to be broken and contrite in heart.

They desire heaven, yes.

They desire salvation, yes.

They desire forgiveness.

But underlying all of it is, they desire to be delivered from the dominating power of sin, they want a life of righteousness and holiness.

That’s the good soil.

That’s not natural.

Good soil is not natural.

Hard soil is natural.

Just leave the ground and that’s what it will be.

Rocky soil, that’s natural, leaving it the way it is.

Weedy soil, that’s natural that’s the way it is.

Something has to happen to this soil.

To make it good soil, the stone has to be broken up.

The hard ground has to be broken up.

The weeds have to be taken out.

Who can do that?

Only God can do that.

He alone can do that.

Deuteronomy 30 verse 6,

“The Lord your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your descendants to love the Lord your God with all your heart that you may live.”

Proverbs 20 and verse 9 says,

“Who can say I have made my heart clean, pure from sin?”

Nobody can do that on his own.

So what does this good soil sinner do? He cries out to God, like David in Psalm 51:10:

“Create in me a clean heart, O God.”

This is the sinner who comes to God in the invitation of Hebrews 10:22,

“Draws near with a pure heart, a cleansed conscience.”

This is the one of whom Jeremiah writes,

“I’ll make an everlasting covenant with them, I will not turn away from them, from doing good. I will put My fear in their hearts so that they will never depart from Me.”

So James says, “Purify your hearts, you sinners.”

How can you do that?

You can’t do that on your own, you go to God and you ask God to purify your heart.

You know, when you’re talking about a true conversion, you’re not talking about somebody who wants an emotional fix in their life or wants a new direction, or wants what their corrupted flesh wants.

You’re talking about someone who wants to be rescued from the power and the penalty of sin.

You say, “Well…wow, that’s not going to happen naturally.”

No, I just read that from 2 Corinthians 4, only God can do that.

That’s why we say, you plead with Him.

If our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing, in whose case the God of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelieving so that they might not see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ who is the image of God.

We don’t preach ourselves, but Christ Jesus as Lord. And then we know that God who said,

“Light shall shine out of darkness is the one who was shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.”

If there’s ever going to be any hope for these people, God has to turn on the light so we cry out to God on behalf of the sinner, behalf of the sinner’s heart condition. The sinner who comes and says,

“I want a clean heart, I want a pure heart, I want to repent of sin, I want to be delivered from sin, will have the benefit of the great New Covenant promise, “I will give you a new heart, I will take the heart out of your flesh and give you a heart…stony heart out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.”

This is the best part of the story, the last line.

The results are really phenomenal. Verse 20,

“They that hear the Word and accept it and bear fruit, thirty-, sixty- and a hundred-fold.”

Nobody ever heard of 30, 60, a 100 fold.

So the point here is simply this, that while the results immediately on the surface look pretty bad, pretty bleak as we launch into this evangelism, the disciples are saying to the Lord, “Why are so few believing?”

They see the mass of people who have rejected, they see the superficial disciples who come and leave. They see those who never break from the world and eventually turn out to be false converts, their interest in Christ is superficial. They love the world too much. They see the types like the rich young ruler and they must wonder.  Is it ever going to get beyond that? Is it always going to be the little flock? The few?

Here’s the great lesson of this parable.

The results are going to be supernatural.

All the hard ground, all the rocky ground, all the weedy rejecters of the gospel will not thwart, will not thwart the divine purpose.

In the face of very discouraging early results, very discouraging early response in Israel, they need to know that the Lord was going to do absolutely staggering and explicable exponential things.

There is, in spite of rejection, an irrepressible empowerment in these lives.  They can’t see it.  The disciples are timid, hard-headed, ignorant, selfish.  They’re a work in progress.  They can’t see it but the results are going to be exponential.

Now this is not trying to convey that if you’re a thirty-er, you should be a sixty-er. And if you’re a sixty-er, you should be a hundred.  That’s not the point.  You can’t determine that, okay?  This is not about that.

This is simply saying that God is going to do things through the lives of His people to build His Kingdom.

Some are going to be less than others by His design. Okay? By His design.

It reminds me of the parable in Matthew 20 where some people worked twelve hours, some people worked, you remember, nine, some worked six, some worked three, and some worked one and they all got the same reward.

When we all get to heaven, we’re all going to get the same eternal reward and it’s not about the numbers of people we influenced with the gospel, it’s about our faithfulness to the calling God gave us.

And the calling’s vary…30, 60, 100. That’s God’s to determine.

But backing up a little bit, there’s no such thing as a fruitless Christian.

Look at John 15 for just a moment, we have a few minutes to kind of wrap up with some of these verses. John 15,

“I’m the vine, My Father is the vine dresser. Every branch in Me that doesn’t bear fruit, He takes away.”

So if you have a superficial connection to Jesus, you’re going to be taken away. And what happens to the ones who get taken away?  Verse 6, “They get burned,” that’s hell.

There’s some of that weedy soil, some of that rocky ground. But if you’re a branch that is in Me and remains in Me, verse 2 says,

“He takes every branch that bears fruit and prunes it so that it may bear more fruit.”

It doesn’t say He would like to do that, it says He does it. Your life becomes exponentially impactful.

Verse 5 says, “He who abides in Me and I in him bears much fruit. Apart from Me, you can do nothing.”

Verse 8, “My Father is glorified by this that you bear much fruit and so prove to be My disciples.”

The point is, if you’re a true disciple, you bear fruit.  It’s inevitable.

Ephesians 2:10 says:

“This was foreordained by God in your salvation for we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works which God beforehand prepared so that we would walk in them.”

It’s a foregone conclusion. We’re going to bear fruit. Our lives as true believers are going to have an impact.

You say, “Well even if we’re sinful?”

We’re all sinful.

We all fail.

I’m sure we can diminish our fruitfulness, of course.

But there’s going to be fruit born by the irrepressible power of the gospel and the dwelling of the Spirit of God that is in us.

This is a promise.

And it’s not trying to say, “Well, if you’re 30 be 60, if you’re 60 be a hundred.”

The Lord knows what He will do to build His Kingdom.

He knows the soil that is going to produce 30 and 60 and a hundred.

But mark this, they’re all supernaturally powerful because they’re all beyond the capability of soil in the analogy. That’s why the only explanation for us is the power of God.

Look at 1 Corinthians chapter 1 verse 26,

“Consider your calling. There were not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble.”

That’s us, we’re just the common folks, we’re just the foolish, the weak, the base, verse 28, the despised, the nobodies.

You say, “Well how can we have any effect?”

Verse 30,

“By His doing you’re in Christ Jesus who became to us wisdom from God and righteousness and sanctification and redemption.”

Here we are in the world, this collection of nobodies, who of all people in the world alone have the wisdom of God, righteousness, sanctification and redemption, but it’s all the work of God.  It’s by His doing so that it is written,

“Let him who boasts, boast in the Lord.”

We can take no credit for it. Second Corinthians 2 says,

“Who is adequate for these things?”

Now go back to Mark and I’m going to close with just a reference to coming parables in this same chapter that explain the exponential divine empowerment and the impact of our lives. Look at verse 26,

“The Kingdom of God is like a man who casts seed upon the soil, goes to bed at night, gets up by day, the seed sprouts and grows. How he himself doesn’t know.”

I love that.

That’s how evangelism works, some sow, some water and what?

God gives the increase.

We don’t make it happen.

We go to bed.

And it happens.

Or verse 30,

“How can we picture the Kingdom of God. What kind of parable should we use to present it. It’s like a mustard seed, when sewn in the soil, smaller than all the seeds upon the soil, when its grown, it grows up and becomes larger than all the garden plant and forms large branches so that the birds of the air can nest under its shade.”

The Lord is saying it’s going to start so small but it’s going to explode and it’s going to do so through you.

Well it happened fast, didn’t it?

The Day of Pentecost, three thousand, another week later, five thousand.

You’ve got over 20 thousand in a few weeks and pretty soon it turned the world upside down.

And here we are two centuries later and millions and millions and millions and millions of people have come into the Kingdom of God and are now either in the church militant on earth or the church triumphant in heaven and the power of the gospel keeps moving through those who are the sowers.

That’s us.

God is still using us to turn the world upside down.

This is our great privileged calling.

We do what we can do and go to sleep and it happens.

And that’s just a parable way of saying the power doesn’t come from you, it comes through you, it’s in the gospel itself and the work of the Holy Spirit.

Prayer:

“Father, first our heart goes out to those who may be in our midst who fall into the category of these two soils, hard, resistant, sin-stomped heart, that superficial, only temporarily soft, self-centered, self-indulgent, self-seeking heart. Lord, we pray for those people. We pray that the gospel may come to them, that there still may be time for them to come in true faith in the wonderful work of Christ on the cross and through the resurrection.  Would You with Your grace woo them, plow hearts, soften that soil all the way down deep so that the seed can go in and truly produce life.  May we eagerly proclaim the gospel, live the gospel, to the end that You would be glorified and that our faithfulness would cause many to give glory to You that, as Paul put it, it would redound to Your glory as we see many come to Christ. We pray in Christ’s Name. Amen.”