The Secret to Exponential Increase in Your Life Part 1: Matthew 13:1-23 - Matthew: Kingdom of God Revolution

You're listening to the road with Pastor Teacher Steve Holt.

If you're not planting your seed in good soil, through God's word, you will not see a harvest.

You will not see a harvest if you're not planting the seed of God's word in the good soil of your heart.

If you keep planting, even when it's bad, even when everything's going south, you just keep spending time with God.

You spend hours doing that sometimes because you have nothing else to rely on.

You will see a harvest.

Don't quit.

Don't quit.

At The Road, our mission is to empower people to change the world.

For more information on The Road, visit theroad.org.

We hope you are encouraged by today's message from Pastor Teacher Steve Holt.

Guys, in our passage, we're in Matthew 13.

And if you've been following us in Matthew, you know that Jesus is getting more and more and more pressure.

The Pharisees are really starting to come after him.

The Sadducees are coming after him, the scribes, the lawyers, they're coming after him.

And what happens in Matthew 13 onward in this beautiful book is Jesus starts to communicate differently from being very obvious.

The stuff he said before is very obvious.

He's not going to be obvious anymore.

He's going to move into mystery, and the route he's going to choose is parables.

He's going to begin to start telling parables.

John chapter 9 follows kind of around Matthew 13.

John 9 · chapter mention

You start seeing Jesus go into parables.

You're going to see it now in Matthew 13 onward.

And he's going to do a lot of teaching from now on in parables.

And in Matthew 13, he's going to give us the parable.

This is the parable of parables.

In Mark chapter 4, Mark says that he records Jesus different than Matthew, and he says, if you don't understand this parable, you can't understand all the other parables.

Mark 4 · chapter mention

And he has 40 parables.

Jesus has 40 parables, over 40 parables.

And Mark's description is, as he heard Jesus say this, he said, if you don't understand this parable, then you're not going to get any of the other parables.

So this is the parable, capital P.

And I'm going to spend two weeks on this because it's that important.

So today I'm going to talk about the seed, and next week I'm going to talk about the soil.

Because there's really two different dynamics happening in this parable.

One is about the seed, and the other is about the soil where the seed gets planted.

So turn in your Bibles to Matthew 13 and listen carefully, guys.

If we get this, if you really get this, and I think most of you in this room already get it, but I'm going to try to take you maybe a step further than you've been.

So leave now if you really don't want a big challenge in your life.

Because I'm challenging you, listen, because I'm looking in the mirror myself.

Do you guys hear what I'm saying?

I need a challenge.

I live for challenge.

But some of you don't.

Some of you live for comfort.

Some of us live for security.

I don't.

And I'm not saying it in a bragging way, it's just, I just never have.

I think even if I didn't know the Lord, I wouldn't live that way.

So the reality is, is that what God's done in my life, I'm going to present to you, and you can say, man, Steve is the weirdest pastor ever.

I don't like what he says.

And let's go home and let's forget about that sermon because that one we'll we'll never listen to again.

Well, that's okay.

I'm totally cool with that.

A lot of my sermons are like that.

A lot of them I don't listen to again.

So it's all right.

You know, if you ever say Steve wasn't on today, Steve will be the first to say Steve wasn't on today.

Okay, but I'm gonna be on today because I love this.

This has been brewing for a long time.

I've been so excited for this day.

I'm pumped for today.

So read it with me.

We're gonna read the whole thing.

On the same day, Jesus went out of the house and sat by the sea, and a great multitude were gathered together to him, so that he got into a boat and he sat, and the whole multitude stood on the shore.

Then he spoke many things to them and parables.

As he sowed, some seed fell by the wayside, and the birds came and devoured them.

Some fell on stony places where they did not have much earth, and they immediately sprang up because they had no depth of earth.

But when the sun was up, they were scorched, and because they had no root, they withered away.

And some fell among thorns, and the thorns sprang up and choked them, but others fell on good ground, good ground, and yielded a crop, some a hundredfold, some sixty, and some thirty.

He who has ears to hear, let him hear.

So when he says that, I mean he's basically saying, not everybody has ears to hear.

So do you guys have ears to hear this morning?

All right, good.

And the disciples came and said to him, Why do you speak to them in parables?

So they don't get it.

Like you, you haven't done this before.

Now you're starting to do this.

What's going on?

Jesus says this.

He answered and said to them, Because it has been given to you, and I would say, This has been given to you, Rhod, this has been given to you, believers in Christ, to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven.

But to them it has not been given.

For whoever has, to him more will be given, and he will have an abundance, but whoever does not have, even what he has, will be taken away from him.

Therefore I speak to them in parables.

Because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, and nor do they understand.

Verse 14.

And in them the prophecy of Isaiah is fulfilled, which says, Hearing you will hear and shall not understand, and seeing you will see and you will not perceive.

From the hearts of this people have grown dull.

Their ears are hard of hearing, and their eyes they have closed, lest they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, lest they should understand with their hearts, and turn, so that I should heal them.

But blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your eyes for they hear.

For assuredly I say to you that many prophets and righteous men desired to see what you see and did not see it, and to hear what you hear and did not hear it.

Therefore hear the parable.

Now he gives the explanation.

The sower, when anyone hear, the parable of the sower, verse 19, when anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it, then the wicked one comes and snatches away what has been sown in his heart.

This is he who receives seed by the wayside, verse 20.

But he who received the seed on stony places, this is he who hears the word and immediately receives it with joy.

Yet he has no root in himself, but endures only for a while.

For when tribulation or persecution arises because of the word, immediately he stumbles.

Verse 22.

Now he who received the seed among the thorns is he who hears the word and the cares of this world and the deceitfulness of riches.

Choke the word and it becomes and it becomes, or he becomes unfruitful.

Verse 23.

Underline this, highlight it.

But he who received seed on the good ground is he who hears the word and understands it.

He or she gets it, who indeed bears fruit and produces some a hundredfold, some sixty, and some thirty.

All right, we're talking here about exponential growth.

Exponential growth.

If I was giving this a title, I'd say The Secret to Exponential Increase in Your Life.

The secret to exponential increase in your life.

Who would like to know the least that you have to do to get in shape?

To be physically in shape?

How many of you would like to know the least that you need to do that has the most increase in you getting in shape?

What is something that you know that if you do this, if you eat this way, if you do these things, you have the least chance of getting COVID-19?

What wouldn't everybody like to know in your finances that if you did this, the exponential increase would be tremendous?

Right?

Well, that's what's being taught here.

Jesus saying there is a way to an exponential increase in your heart, and it's through the Word of God, and it should, by its very DNA, produce in anyone who lands or allows that seed upon the good soil of the heart to have a 30, 60, and a hundredfold increase in your life.

Here's a definition of exponential growth.

Definition of exponential growth.

Exponential growth is growth whose rate becomes ever more rapid in proportion to the growing total number of the size.

In other words, exponential growth is not just multiplication and addition.

It's not just growing something.

It is actually growing on the growing something.

Does that make sense?

So we we we call it the miracle.

How many have heard the term?

The miracle of compounding interest.

The miracle of compounding interest is a great example of exponential growth.

In other words, you invest your money in stocks or you invest your money at a bank, and it tells you this percentage of interest will be given to you because you deposited this amount of money into that account, and you not only get an exponential increase by the interest of what you put in, but then what happens, gang, is that you start getting interest off your interest.

And that's why it's called the miracle of compounding interest.

That's what God does in our lives.

God, as we begin to place his seed into the good soul of our heart, has this exponential increase over our lives.

It's interesting looking at a pathology test in a hospital.

Listen to what I'm about to say.

During a pathology test in a hospital, a pathologist follows the concept of exponential growth to grow a microorganism extracted from a sample.

Now listen to what he says here.

Microbes grow at a fast rate when they're provided, listen to this, with unlimited resources and a suitable environment.

Let me say that again.

Microbes grow exponentially when they are provided with unlimited resources and a suitable environment.

Mark, in his description of Matthew 13, so Mark 4, he specifically says the seed is the word of God.

Then look back.

Look at verse, like if you look at 18 through 23, verse 18 says the word.

21 says the word.

23 says, here's the word.

Here's the problem.

Most of us like God's word, but we really don't love it.

Most of us would say that the Bible is really important, but listen, it's not really essential.

It's not really essential in our lives, and we would say we're Bible-believing believers, but I would say without a doubt, Christians across America, Christians in Colorado Springs, Christians across the world that I've known, they like God's word, they have a devotional with God's word, and God's word is very special.

But is it essential?

I want to challenge us today that God wants the word to be so essential in your life that you begin to live with victory like you've never known before.

Because it is essential in our lives to understand the exponential growth that's possible.

How many of you remember the Shroud of Turin?

Remember the Shroud of Turin?

That was like a big deal probably 20, 25 years ago.

And I watched a special on the Shroud of Turin by one of these TV stations back then.

And everybody they interviewed had all these different concepts about the Shroud of Turin, whether it was actually the shroud that was around Jesus when he rose from the grave, and there was all kinds of carbon dating and things that they did.

The only problem was they never used the word.

The word was never used, it wasn't essential in their study.

Every year we have this thing called Easter, Resurrection Day.

This year was kind of unique, right?

Because we stayed home and we enjoyed it through a telecast and stuff.

That's fine.

But back in my day, there used to be magazines called Time.

Nobody reads them now, but there was Time magazine and Newsweek magazine and US News and World Report and stuff like that.

And they're still out there, but I mean their followership is shrinking every year.

But every year at Easter, they always came out with something about the resurrection of Christ.

And there'd always it'd be headlines, like you'd be going through Safeway or King Supers, and you'll see, you'd see time or news or whatever.

And it would always be something like can anyone really prove that Jesus rose from the grave?

It's like every year.

And it's like, I'm listening, I'm like, this is I'm I've been living long enough.

Don't they have any better way to look at this?

And the reason is because they never would use the word.

There's more evidence for the resurrection of Jesus Christ than Napoleon fought the Battle of Waterloo by all the testimonies here.

And they bring in all these quote-unquote experts who would always kind of have this philosophical look.

Like, hmm, it's a really tough question.

We grapple with this all the time.

Do we?

Really?

But that's because we as Americans have not made God's word essential.

And here's why that's a struggle for them.

Look at verse 11.

Verse 11 is a struggle.

He answered, he said to them, because it has been given to you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given.

You see, until we receive the imperishable seed of the word in the kingdom, everything's a big mystery.

It's always a big mystery.

But for we that know God's word and call ourselves wholehearted Jesus followers, it's no longer a mystery.

There's clarity now.

And the word, the seed growing in us should be, and I should say should be, oftentimes it's not, but it should be giving us greater and greater clarity in our lives.

Write this down.

Jot this down.

The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

Look what he says next.

Jesus is the one who says it.

He says, verse 12, for whoever has, now listen, here's what he means by this, not has the book or has Jesus.

He's not saying that.

He's saying, he who has it on good soil.

So remember the context.

The good soil is verse 23.

That's where the whole thing's leading.

That's why if you don't get this parable, you won't get any other parable.

You gotta get this parable because all the other parables are built on the idea of the seed being on good soul.

So he says this, verse 12.

Forever has, to him more will be given, and he will have abundance.

Man, have you guys noticed that everything about God is about abundance?

But whoever does not have, even what he has, will be taken away from him.

The rich get richer, the poor get poorer.

That's the point of the four soils.

Is everybody got it, everybody had a chance.

I mean, we walk out of this sanctuary today, you walk out of your house today, and you're gonna see creation.

And Romans 1 says, everybody knows there's a God through creation.

And we live in Colorado, you couldn't be in a more beautifully creative state than right here.

Everybody gets the word, everybody can see it.

But some don't receive it, they get poorer.

Those that do receive it, they get more and more wealthy.

Verse 14, and in them the prophecy of Isaiah is fulfilled.

Hearing you, hearing you shall not understand, seeing you see, can't perceive.

The hearts of this people, I'm gonna talk about that more next week.

The hearts of this people have grown dull, their ears are hard of hearing, their eyes have been closed.

That's some of you here.

That's so many Jesus followers.

Their hearts have become hardened.

Their hearts have become dull.

You're getting poorer when you should be getting richer.

It's almost like, it's almost, I'm gonna use finances for an example.

Like, it's like me taking ten thousand dollars and I plant it into a stock guaranteed with 100% fold increase.

And then every day I come in and I take out a thousand, and then I take out five hundred, and then I take out three hundred, and then I take out two thousand, and I don't know why God's not blessing me.

I don't know why I don't see power in my life, I don't understand why my marriage is falling apart.

I follow Jesus.

Really?

So either Jesus is a liar, or there's some kind of a disconnect with you.

There's some kind of a disconnect between the reality of your life that you're living and the promises that he's promising you for abundance.

And I personally believe that that should be emotional, mental, spiritual, financial, and I'm not talking about get rich quick schemes or something like that.

I'm not talking about the prosperity gospel from the perspective of that's how you measure success.

I'm not saying that.

Here's what I am saying, though.

I'm saying God cares about those things.

God cares about everything in your life.

And if we will put his seed Into our lives, we will see increase.

So let's take the example again.

So you've got$10,000 and you put it in, and every week or every month, you put in another thousand.

And then you put in another thousand.

You keep depositing in the belief of the increase, the exponential growth of God's word in your life.

And you tell me of those two people, who's going to experience abundance?

I mean, this is like not rocket science.

Because Jesus is promising that what happens in our lives is we let our hearts become dull.

We quit spending time in God's word.

Look at verse 23, but he receives seed on the good ground.

More on that next week.

Is he who hears the word and understands it?

Who indeed bears fruit and produces some a hundredfold, some sixty, and some thirty.

You guys, it's this idea of seed.

So jot this down in your notes.

Um, put down Genesis 8.22.

We won't go there, but Genesis 8.22.

The flood has occurred.

Noah comes out of the ark, and God gives him one of the great kingdom principles of our time.

God gives him one of the kingdom principles of all time, and listen to what it is.

I'm just gonna read part of it.

Genesis 8.22.

As long as the earth endures, seed time and harvest.

Seed time and harvest will never cease.

Listen, seed, time, and harvest.

God did not plant a million trees.

He gave us seeds, and seeds grow a million trees.

Seed, time and harvest.

I used to drive down the road with my grandfather on his ranch, on his farm, going 15 miles an hour on a 55 mile an hour highway with lines of traffic and other trucks behind him, and he's just whistling how great thou art or something like that.

He always didn't seem like how great thou art were somewhere in there.

And he'd be looking and he makes comments about everybody's farm.

And there, some of them were somewhat pejorative.

And he would just go along doing that, and then the cars are lining up, and they're obviously they're trying to pass him, right?

And then he would open up his Chevy truck door and spit chewing to back out.

So you see these people, they're they're getting ready to move.

They start to make their move, and then he opens his door and he spits and close it and they all come back.

And then they're all trying to move again and they all come back.

And I think usually about five minutes down, people start to figure out okay, there's a timing to this.

There's a time, whoever this old guy is, there's a timing to this.

And so when they see him close his door like the third time, they'd all go because they didn't want to get hit with his open door.

If you were to tell my grandfather that, man, I I really believe in a God of miracles.

I believe in a God of miracles.

And I I'm not gonna plant, I'm not gonna plant my corn, you know, in the uh in the spring.

I'm gonna I'm gonna plant it a week before the harvest.

Watch what God's gonna do.

He'd say, You're nuts! Are you crazy?

Well, Jesus is speaking to an agrarian culture here, gang, and he's saying that the sower goes out and he throws the seeds, he throws the seeds, and he's planting on a harvest because of the kingdom principle of seed time and harvest.

So, church, listen to what I'm gonna say next.

If you're not planting your seed in good soil through God's word, listen, hate to be bear bad news this morning, you will not, can you spell not, N-O-T, you will not see a harvest.

I don't care how nice you look, how many times you go to church, how many things that you do to serve the church, or how much money you get to the church, you will not see a harvest if you're not planting the seed of God's word in the good soil of your heart.

But now listen to what I'm gonna say next.

If you keep planting, even when it's bad, even when everything's going south, even if you're sick, even if you're you just got all kinds of issues and struggles and you're going through a divorce or whatever the situation might be, you keep planting the seed.

You just keep spending time with God, you keep worshiping him.

You spend hours doing that sometimes because you have nothing else to rely on.

Listen, you will, W I L, you will see a harvest.

I promise you, that's what Jesus is promising here.

You will see a harvest, and it will be 30, 60, and 100 fold.

Don't quit.

Don't quit.

Don't quit.

Because this is the nature of the kingdom.

And these other parables in Matthew 13 keep hitting it and hitting it.

Everything in Matthew 13 and all the other parables are about a little tiny, little tiny seed, a little tiny, a little tiny leaven.

It starts to leaven the whole thing, it takes over.

But you gotta keep feeding it, folks.

The word has to become essential in your life, and it's not for most people.

It breaks my heart.

So someone comes up and they've got a marriage problem, or someone comes up and they're struggling with depression and all this stuff, and they got all these different things and everything, and then I'm I'm listening and I'm listening, and all I want to hear him say is I've been spending time in God's word.

God gave me a promise, and I'm gonna cling to that promise.

Now we're talking.

Now we're talking.

I don't want people's opinions, I don't care about how you feel about it.

Have you got God's word?

Are you standing on the word?

Are you believing God and his word?

Because if you don't, you can't see a harvest.

But here's what it's like.

Everybody look at me.

It's see time and harvest.

It is.

It's see time harvest.

I mean, it's sometimes it takes a long time.

I mean, it takes like three, it takes like five months for the corn to come up.

Come on, you guys.

Come on.

And so there's gonna be things in your marriage, there's gonna be things in your job situation, there's gonna be stuff where God's testing you.

Are you gonna believe see time and quit?

Oh, see time and watch a lot of movies.

Oh, see time and become Broncos fan.

Oh, see time and become a great fisherman.

Now, am I against those things?

No.

But I'm saying right now, some of us in this room know more about movies than we know about God's word.

We know more names of actors than we know names in the Bible.

We know more about sports figures and how much money they signed for when they got drafted than we know about God's word.

Hello?

So, guys, if it's essential in our life, if you want to see increase, and nobody can answer that but you, you gotta spend time in God's word.

And it's not like five minutes a day.

And it's not like ten minutes a day.

I mean, sometimes you gotta, I mean, I've loved this break with the coronavirus in a way.

I mean, I don't love that people are dying, that's not what I mean.

Of course we don't love that.

But I I think it's been fine to be at home and kind of do a restart on some things in our lives.

That's a good time to rethink some stuff.

I don't know about you guys, but man, the Holtz, man, we've been working our tail off.

We didn't know anything about movies and stuff like we do now.

I mean, we just had to do so much and learn so much.

Your whole team here, your pastors here, man, we've been learning and growing and making mistakes left and right because when this thing starts again, we we really want to have a greater impact, right?

I mean, it's gonna be powerful what God's doing.

I hope you've been doing that, God's been doing that in your life.

Because this seed time and harvest is tough, man.

So it's progressive, though.

It's progressive.

I think when you first get saved and you start, you know, you get introduced to God's word, it's a 30-fold increase.

And then as you spin and you get to know Him more and you turn God's word into interaction with the Lord, then it's a 60-fold increase.

And then you go through times where you see God do miracles that you never thought were possible, it's a hundredfold increase.

That's what I think it's supposed to be.

But for some of us, and by the way, it's all of us at times, we'll get 30, 60, 80, 10, 0, 15, 20, 30.

That's normal, ebb and flow.

But folks, I want the direction and the focus of our lives to be the seed of God's word.

One time I was on a hunt.

I was in an area not far from Gunnison many years ago, and I had gone up into an area where there's boulders.

And I came to this boulder, and it had a split.

I mean, this boulder was half the size of this stage up here, and there was a split down the middle with a tree growing in it.

I mean, about that big a tree had split the rock.

What's that?

Well, somewhere years before a bird or wind had drifted a seed that landed maybe in a little pocket in the rock, and the seed started to get some root, right?

And that seed got more and more root, and those roots got stronger and stronger and stronger, and it split the rock.

One seed, but it took years, but it split the rock.

Men and women, God's word is stronger than that.

God can take your depression, God can take your struggles, God can take your despondency, God can take your lust.

And if you will believe what I'm saying, just a little bit, if you'll start to read God's word and read God's word and read God's word, and every time you're tempted to do stuff you know you shouldn't do, go to God's word and say, God, speak to me.

I need a promise from you that I can hang on to for this situation, God.

I'm believing you for that.

He promises 30, 60, hundredfold increase.

That's the DNA of the seed.

When you plant a tomato seed and you never water it and you never do anything to the ground, you never have any sunshine, everybody knows it dies.

But then we somehow think it's different because we got saved at some meeting that we went to, and so it's supposed to get all better.

No, you have to exercise the good soil, we'll talk about that next week, so that that seed has the soil to grow, and by its very DNA, you will see exponential increase.

Six years ago, Liz and I had resigned from you know Mountain Springs, and we were, we were, we had a lot of things on our plate, we had a lot of struggles in our life.

You guys know many of you were with me at that time, but one of the things that we did is we started looking at our finances.

And we decided that we're never ever gonna find ourselves in a position where everything comes from one stream of income.

We're gonna start learning about stocks, we're gonna start learning about real estate, we're gonna start learning about a lot of different things.

And as we did, we put in time.

Seed time, seed time.

And then we went to God's word and we began to see, oh my goodness, especially Deuteronomy 27 and 28 were powerful in our lives, that if we obey God, God's gonna promise an abundance of blessing.

And that was based off John 10, 10.

So it's not just Old Testament, New Testament.

I came that you might have life and might have it abundantly.

But I didn't want to put another church, if we planted a church in the future, I didn't want that church to feel the pressure of meeting all of my needs.

I was gonna also have other streams of income.

And we've seen phenomenal growth in that.

But you gotta work it.

It took, and it didn't happen overnight, it took, it took a long time.

But amazing miracles.

I want a hundredfold increase in this life.

I'm not satisfied with 30, I'm not satisfied with 60.

Some of you here have so much ability, so much gifting.

It's phenomenal, and you're squandering it.

You're squandering it.

I want to challenge you.

Go to God's word, get up each morning, PBJ, prayer, Bible, and journal.

Get in there.

And if you want it, if you are passionate for it, then dig in and begin to ask God to give you passages that you can claim as your own.

And you'll begin to see tremendous increase.

You've been listening to The Road with Pastor Teacher Steve Holt.

We hope you have been blessed by today's message.

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Thanks again for tuning in today, and be sure to listen to the next edition of The Road with Pastor Teacher Steve Holt.