Luke 8:1-21 - The Soil of Our Hearts

Well, as I said, church, we will be in Luke chapter 8, verses 1 through 21 of Luke 8.

Luke 8:1–21

You know, one of the things that we see all through the Bible, and really you see it a lot in the Gospels, but you see this in all cultures, everywhere, throughout time, is this idea of transformation.

This transformation from one thing to another thing.

And this again isn't a modern phenomenon, although it's very popular in this day and age, I feel like with social media, and just as uh connected as the world is and as consumeristic as the world is, there's all this narrative of going from where we were to where we're going, from victim to conqueror, from weak to strong, from uneducated or uninformed to educated and informed, from broke to wealthy, from lonely to loved, from aimless in life to being driven in life.

And we all kind of, in a sense, want to be transformed.

I think unless you are a pure narcissist, you probably realize your own sin, you realize your own shortcomings, and you want to be transformed.

So many of us want these things, and but we do lack discipline.

We last lack dedication or desire for these things.

We want this transformation, but we don't want to put in the effort.

I think one of the things that's revealed just in our moment in time, in our culture, is how temporary a lot of these transformations can be.

Someone loses a ton of weight, they get in great shape, which is nothing wrong with that.

Someone goes from rags to riches, someone educates themselves, and they go on to be more educated and get a PhD, write books or something.

People start up companies, all these things, which aren't bad things.

These are actually on the whole good things that people are doing.

They're productive, they're genesis, kind of creation mandate kind of things.

But they're also temporary.

They're temporary, and because of that, they're kind of empty.

I don't want to say they're completely meaningless, but they don't have the meaning that we ultimately want to put into them.

We even see this in our relationship with God.

We want to be saints who've memorized so many passages of Scripture.

Saints who have who have gone overseas and done wonderful things for the Lord and who know their Bibles super well and can do apologetics really well and answer questions.

But we also are just kind of, our desire isn't there.

But we want it, but it's not there.

So sometimes we don't see this kind of transformation that we think we should see.

And sometimes we we we're apathetic.

We feel we feel stuck.

We kind of blame it on God.

At times we do.

Well, this is, you know, this is how God's made me.

This is my personality, or this is where God has placed me.

This is the family uh I grew up in.

This is the kind of family sin, if you will, or this is how my parents were, so this is how I am.

We blame something outside of ourselves.

But then when a lot's happening and there's some growth or fruit, and we still feel like we're really seeing a lot change, we want to take credit for it a little bit.

Like, of course it's God.

But I'm the one who set my alarm clock to get up early, and I'm the one who got out of bed, and I'm the one who did all these things.

And with that, I'm just saying, you see the fickledness of the human heart.

We want transformation.

We want God to do it for us because we don't want to do anything.

And if we do do something, we kind of want to take a little bit of credit for this.

But see, what Jesus models and teaches, when he shows us, he teaches this, and then he models and shows us, is what it means to follow God, to trust God's sovereignty, and we have responsibility.

So God is a sovereign God, and yet we are also responsible.

So this morning, we're gonna look at this passage in Luke chapter 8.

Luke 8 · chapter mention

I just want to kind of give a quick outline.

So in verses 1 through 3, we see kind of who's following Jesus.

It's this group of transformed people, people who've been transformed.

At the toward the end, we see this parable about a candle, a light, and family.

And we see how these are this is how these people live.

So we see the transformed people in this first few verses.

Then from 16 to 21, we see kind of how they live.

They're not holding and hiding this light, they're living, and it's different than the culture around them.

And then the middle section reveals how this happens.

How this happens.

So looking at verses 1 through 3, real souls witness the power of Jesus.

Verse 1.

Soon afterward he went on through the cities and villages.

Right, Jesus is proclaiming and bringing good news of the kingdom.

So he's got his twelve disciples.

Then there's these women who have been healed of evil spirits and infirmities.

So Mary called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out, Joanna, the wife of Chusa, Herod's household manager, Susanna, and many other who provided for them out of their means.

And the first thing I want us to notice in chapter 8 of Luke is just the pace of ministry.

The pace of ministry.

Now, I'm not saying like this is Jesus' pace, and we need to all be doing the same thing, but there is something to notice here.

So he goes throughout cities and villages.

He's on the move.

He's active.

He's taking the time he has and using it well.

And what's he doing?

He's proclaiming the good news.

So here, he's not saying, listen, I'll get around to some of those cities and share the gospel sometime.

He's intentional on what he's doing, this pace of ministry.

JC Ryle, commenting on this, says, let us awake to a sense of individual responsibility.

Souls are perishing and time is flying.

Let us resolve by God's grace to do something for God's glory before we die.

Let us resolve by God's grace to do something for God's glory before we die.

So this pace of ministry is happening.

And then the places of ministry, the cities and the villages.

And you get from the cities to the villages, there's all the country side that's in between.

So he's covering all the territory.

It's interesting because I think in our hearts, sometimes we uh we look to big cities, we look to New York or Philadelphia, Chicago, and we think, man, those people need Jesus.

And they do.

So who's gonna go?

Who's going there?

Who's going to the cities of the world where billions of people are to share the good news?

Is that something you're praying for?

That the Lord would send workers to the cities?

The places of ministry.

He's going to the cities, he's going to the villages.

Oftentimes in big cities, there's this kind of mentality like this is where it happens, this is where it's at, and everything else kind of doesn't matter.

You know, they talk about flyover states.

You have the East Coast, you have the West Coast, and everything in between, it's a flyover state.

It's cornfields, it's grass, doesn't matter.

But even in Jesus' earthly ministry, he almost ministered exclusively in Israel.

But yet he's going from cities through the countryside to villages.

He's sharing the good news in all of these places.

And then the third thing here is the people of ministry.

It's amazing.

You have this collection.

You have the disciples with him, we know that.

And you have these women who are healed of evil spirits and infirmities.

And it just names some of these, some of these women who were at the cross watching Jesus be crucified.

We're in a cultural moment where people want to kind of elevate women to this place that women have been kind of stepped down on for centuries, and it's now kind of their turn to run things for a while.

And I'm not denying any of the ways that women have been oppressed historically.

But you're doing the same thing in the opposite way.

We believe that God has designed his creation, men and women, equal value, equal worth, distinctive responsibilities, sure.

But even in Jesus' ministry, he reveals this.

He's not elevating one gender over another.

But he is revealing that he has come for all people.

He's come for men, he's come for women, he's healing, freeing them.

What a unique but special passage that reveals this to us.

Sometimes it's easy to just fall into cultural thinking on this.

If you're really conservative, you kind of just fall into conservative thinking.

If you're more liberal, you fall into kind of liberal thinking on this.

Instead of saying, well, what's God's word say about these things?

The Lord loved these women who served and gave, and as it says, provided for them out of their means.

The dedication of these people.

We know that the twelve all forsook Jesus.

They fled.

Jesus was gracious and humble, gracious to them.

And they were humble and repented, except for Judas, obviously.

These women followed him, served him, helped meet his needs, providing for them.

So these are real souls that witness the power of Jesus.

This wasn't some kind of group of people who were trying to get in and say, hey, this is something's going on, let's just follow this guy, and maybe we'll get some free food out of it.

Maybe we'll get something out, you know, he'll provide for us, as we know.

Many people were just kind of after a free meal.

But it's interesting.

Here, Jesus could have made bread appear out of nothing anytime he wanted.

But is that what he didn't?

It would seem not.

It would seem that even as Jesus walked the earth and ministered on the earth, he was looking to people to provide.

Or food, bread, place to sleep.

It reveals a little bit of God's economy, if you will.

You wonder.

I don't know if I wonder this sometimes.

I'm like, Lord, you know the need.

You know, you could just a check in the mail, pile of cash on the table.

And those things do happen.

I just want to say, there's many people in this room who can tell stories about things like that.

But it usually doesn't just appear out of nowhere.

God uses his people to accomplish accomplish his means, his purpose.

God uses his people to accomplish his purposes.

So even in the humility of Christ, dependent in a sense upon these people.

The Lord uses the church to provide.

Another commentator put it this way: in short, the visible church of Christ may be divided into two great parties: those who minister to Christ and those who do not.

Those who seek to serve and give for the ministry of Christ and those who do not.

So these real souls witness the power of Jesus.

And you have real soils that hear the message.

This parable is given.

Jesus shares about a sower who went out.

And then later he teaches, because the disciples in verse 9 say, What's this mean?

Teach us these things.

Jesus begins in verse 10.

To you has been given, to you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of God.

But for others they are parables, so that seeing they may not see, and hearing they may not understand.

That phrase is used a lot by Jesus in his earthly ministry.

And it's kind of perplexing.

What do you mean by this?

Are there people that he doesn't want to hear?

He doesn't want them to understand and see?

Well, in a sense, there are.

There are people who have hardened their hearts.

And they're not looking to Jesus for salvation.

They're not wanting a Messiah.

They don't want a king.

They don't want a Lord.

They don't want a master.

They don't want God over them.

They want what they want.

They're selfish things.

And so what Jesus is doing is he's speaking so that those who have ears to hear, those who are actually trying to learn, they're trying to understand what it means, what's this Messiah saying?

What's he teaching?

They have ears, they're listening, that they might hear.

He goes on to explain this parable.

It's a very agrarian parable about a farmer sowing seed, planting, casting out seed.

We have these four kinds of soil.

The first is it's a path.

It's hardened.

People walking across it, maybe animals or carts even.

And they hear, and they hear this message, the good news, the word of God, the enemy comes and snatches it up away from them.

Then you have this rocky soil, and they receive with joy, but there's no root.

And they when testing comes, they they fall away.

And then you have this thorny soil.

They hear, they're excited, this is cool, but then the cares of the world, the riches of the world, the pleasures of the world begin to pull at them.

There's no maturing, there's no fruit.

It pulls and kills their desire.

And then there is the good soil.

They hear, they hold fast, and have good hearts, and they bear fruit.

And you can do several things with this passage.

You can read it and say, okay, that makes sense.

Praise the Lord, I have good soil.

And you go on your way.

You can read it and say, Amen.

Well, I'm the path.

That's the hard soil.

What can I say?

The devil came and took the seed away.

Just is what it is.

So you can have this kind of is what it is attitude when you read a passage like this.

You can have a almost a blind attitude.

Just assuming yourself to have good soil because, I mean, to be honest, you haven't done anything real bad in your life.

I mean, you've sinned here or there, but you've never, maybe you've never gotten like drunk.

Ever had sex outside of marriage.

So of course you have good soil.

Jesus is reminding and he's teaching.

Keep in mind all the people that are with him, the disciples, the rest of the crowd, and these women who were sick and had demons and all these things.

Is that good soil?

Is that someone you're like, yeah, that's good soil?

They're gonna hear the gospel, repent, believe, and bear fruit.

Not really.

That's not our natural human thinking.

But see, this soil is the posture of our hearts.

And so we look to God, and our prayer should be Lord, help me to have good soil.

Reveal to me, God.

If I have if I'm loving the things of the world, if it's thorny soil and the passions of the world, these kinds of things, if I'm loving these things, reveal that to me.

There's times of testing in your heart, in your life, where you feel like the reality is you love Jesus.

You're here at church, you want to be a good Christian, but don't ask me to face hardship.

Don't ask me to stand up publicly for my faith.

Don't ask me to face persecution.

I love Jesus, and he'll understand, but I'm not gonna do that.

And you need to repent.

Pray that God would grant you good soil.

Maybe you're here and you're like, man, I'm just on the path.

Like, I probably would have believed in God at some point.

I probably would have given him a shot, but it's just too late.

Is what it is.

I've I've lived too much, I've I've sinned in ways, or I just don't really care anymore.

Right?

That's your excuse.

That's kind of your out.

Hey, what am I gonna say?

I got path soil.

Preacher, it just is what it is.

Well, the people that were following Jesus had seven demons in them.

One woman did.

And Jesus healed her and gave her good soil.

So Jesus isn't saying, here's the four soils, figure out which one you are, and then just go.

He's asking them, examine yourselves to a religious people who assume themselves to be God's people.

They followed the law, they did all the things they're supposed to do.

You're supposed to get baptized at this age, we did that.

You're supposed to do all these answers to these questions, we did that.

You do all these things, we did, we checked the boxes.

We did everything so we're good.

And Jesus is saying, No.

What is the posture of your heart?

Does your heart want Jesus?

Does it want the Word of God?

Does it want to be transformed?

Do you want to be a follower of Jesus?

Or is your heart too hardened for that?

Or do you want to be a follower of Jesus as long as it doesn't cost you anything?

You know, if you have enough money, maybe you'll give a little bit to the church.

But you're not going to sacrifice for the church.

If you have some extra time, you might donate a little bit to help clean up the building or do some kind of program, but you're not going to sacrifice time for the things of the Lord.

You're willing to follow Jesus as long as it's comfortable.

Are you someone who you want Jesus?

But man, you also just want the things of the world.

You really do want to go to heaven.

You really do want to follow Jesus, but you also want to follow.

The thinking of man.

You also want to follow religiosity and obedience to some kind of creed or confession that's heartless.

You know, your heart's not in it.

You want to follow man-made religion?

You want to follow man-made pleasures?

You want to gather for yourself man-made riches.

See, this parable is here for us to reflect and think.

Well, who am I and where am I at?

That we might repent and follow Jesus.

We might repent and follow Jesus and take real steps to follow Jesus.

Real steps to follow Jesus.

Look at verse 16 through 21.

No one after lighting a lamp covers it with a jar or puts it under a bed, but puts it on a stand, not be those who enter may see the light.

For nothing is hidden that will not be made manifest.

Nor is anything secret that will not be known and come to light.

Take care then how you hear, for to the one who has more will be given, and from the one who has not, even what he thinks he has will be taken away.

So Jesus finishes this kind of teaching on this parable on the soils, and then he explains it to his disciples.

And then he gives this really evident or clear, simple illustration.

Nobody lights a candle and then covers it up.

Puts it under a bed.

What do they do with it?

They put it out in a prominent place so that the candle, the light can illuminate everything around them.

So that things can be illuminated and they can see.

I think this is one of the verses as Christians should cause us a little trepidation, a little fear.

Not fear like, is God does God hate me or am I that kind of fear?

Because God already knows all that stuff.

But it will be brought to light.

Everything that's hidden will be made manifest.

It's easy for you and for me to go through our life thinking, well, there's these little things, and we're just gonna keep those hidden, and no one's gonna know about that.

But the amazing thing in the gospel is that the gospel doesn't say, listen, come to Jesus and surrender 85 or 90%.

Everyone's got 10 or 15% they want to keep to themselves.

That's fine.

That's fine.

You keep that.

But 85, 90% come, and then Jesus will save you and transform you.

But Jesus says is come and die to yourself.

Come and die to all those worldly desires, those selfish desires.

Come and forsake those things because it's death.

Sin is death.

And it's all gonna be brought to light.

It's all gonna be revealed.

So come follow me.

So much of the secret sin is done in darkness.

So much of this secret sin keeps us in our affections from the Lord.

Down, it dampens, kills our desire for Him.

You read verse 16, you think that makes perfect sense.

Like obviously, no one's gonna take a candle, light it, and put it under a basket, right?

But then what do we do?

What's sin do to us?

I'll tell you what sin does.

It takes your affections for Jesus.

It takes your love for Jesus.

It takes the desire you have to obey him.

It takes the excitement you have in sharing the good news, the gospel with others, and evangelizing, and all those things.

It takes it all and it puts it under a basket.

It covers it up.

That's what sin does to us.

Take care then, verse 18, how you hear.

To the one who has, more will be given, and from the one who has not, even what he thinks he has will be taken away.

Take care then how you hear.

Which is an interesting question.

What are you listening for?

If you're a Christian, are you listening for God's word?

Are you listening for maybe a continued affirmation of your perspective on things?

If you're not a Christian, what are you listening for?

What are you hearing?

Jesus is teaching, he's saying, listen, take care how you hear.

For the one who has, the one who has the good news, who believes, who's seeking after truth, more will be given, more will be revealed, more will be, he will have more understanding.

She will have more clarity.

The one who has not, the one who is not seeking to know the truth, is not falling after the ways of Jesus, who is not learning and trying to submit their life to the Lord, even what he thinks he has will be taken away.

See, Jesus is saying, in the end, in the end, everything will be revealed.

And if you're with Christ, if you've submitted your life to Jesus Christ, you're following him, and you're you're in him, not because you've been baptized, not because you've taken communion, not because you've gone to church for so many years, none of those things.

You're in Christ because Jesus Christ has paid for your sin, and your hope and your faith is in him alone for your salvation.

If you're in Christ, and it's all said and done, you will have all things.

You will have Christ, you will have God for eternity.

But for the one who has rejected all those things, even what you think you have, the wisdom you think you have, the understanding you think you have will be taken from you.

And Jesus teaches this idea, this principle of the kingdom.

Look at verse 19.

Then his mother and his brothers came to him, but they could not reach him because of the crowd.

And he was told, Your mother and your brothers are standing outside and desiring to see you.

But Jesus answered them, My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it.

Jesus is teaching us that family, in a sense, is redefined.

See, the first thing he's revealing in this passage, these real steps to following Jesus, is this seeing, right?

A lamp is used for illumination.

So we're gonna see what God is doing and the witnesses and understand.

We're hearing, we're gonna hear what he's teaching and follow that.

And those who walk in obedience are those who belong then to his family.

And it's referring to baptism.

That just because someone's baptized, listen, we're family.

Blood is thicker than water.

Well, Jesus is saying no, it's not.

He's saying, if you hear the word of God and do it.

If you hear the word of God and do it, then you are a part of God's family.

It isn't that you grew up in the right family, you know the right verses, your lineage, your heritage, your bloodline, none of those things.

My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it.

Now, Jesus is not teaching, we'll be clear about this, that the nuclear family doesn't matter.

There's some thinking in our society today that even in the New Testament, Jesus is trying to kind of deconstruct the nuclear family.

And that we should somehow kind of live in communes, and mothers and fathers, there's multiples of those.

And Jesus is not taking apart the nuclear family in any sense.

You still are literally born because you have a mother and a father, and you're you're raised up, you're reared by parents, and all those things.

When it comes to the kingdom of God, though, who belongs?

It's not your birthright, you're just born into it.

It's those who hear the word of God and do it.

You hear and you respond.

R.C.

Sproul puts it this way: with Christ and with the words of Christ, there's no neutrality.

You either respond and move from faith to faith, from grace to grace, from life to life, or you move in a negative direction, from darkness to darkness, from unbelief to unbelief, from death to death.

So you have these real souls that witness the power of Jesus' ministry.

And then you have these real soils of the heart that hear the message of Jesus.

And then we have these real steps to following Jesus.

And in no point in that do we look to ourselves and say, hey, we're doing a pretty good job thanks to ourselves and our own intuition and our own instincts.

From beginning to end, it is a work of God's grace.

I want to say this as a pastor, as an elder, with the authority that that office holds.

Those who hear, who sit under this teaching, are hearing the word of God.

I clearly, as you know, am not God, but we have opened God's word, put here by God's Spirit.

You are hearing God's word.

And now you are commanded to do it.

It's a heavy thing, but I want it to be clear on everyone's consciences.

So you cannot go off and say, Well, I never heard God's word.

I didn't know that I was supposed to repent.

I was supposed to like turn from sin and follow Jesus.

I didn't know those things.

Jesus was clear.

Sometimes we way overcomplicate things, don't we?

We can way overcomplicate this.

There's all kinds of intricacies about scripture and theology and faith and all those things.

That's great.

Jesus says, hear it and do it.

Hear the word and obey it.

So we trust the Lord in his grace and his mercy, that he has brought us his word.

And he sent Jesus Christ to die for us.

To die for my sin and for your sin.

There's a price.

Romans 6 says that the wages of sin is death.

There is a price that had to be paid for your sin.

And Jesus paid that price.

It's a free gift, Romans 6 says, that he has given.

Free gift paid the price for you.

Again, it's not your church attendance.

It's not you doing certain things.

It's not you keeping certain things.

It's that Jesus Christ has done this.

And now that he's done this, we walk in joyful obedience because of what he has done for you.

So as you witness the power of Jesus' ministry, that should drive us to a different kind of living.

Our time now is intentionally used.

We take the gospel from places and to people who have not heard.

As we share the gospel, as we literally take the gospel and share with our neighbor, our coworkers, people around us, we understand that there's different soils of the heart.

There's going to be different responses, but we keep sharing.

We keep spreading seeds.

For years, Jesus kept ministering again and again, knowing that these were the people who were going to crucify him.

These are the people who are going to abandon him.

He didn't stop.

He kept ministering, kept going, kept going.

We also need to evaluate our own hearts.

Do we have good soil?

Are we seeking to follow Jesus, submit our lives to him?

Are we caught up with the passions and the love of the world?

We're too concerned about testing and hardship and difficulties.

Do we even want Jesus?

Following Jesus means that we take action.

We actually follow Him.

Because we're born again, we have a new understanding, a new light by which we see everything.

The good news of the gospel takes us.

We're dead in our sin.

We're blind.

It brings us to life.

It removes the scales from our eyes.

The light of the gospel does shines forth.

And by that we see everything else.

Our lives are different.

The way we parent is different.

The way we share the good news is different.

It's not task-oriented, it's joyful because what the Lord has done for us.

So we praise the Lord.

That just as the disciples followed him, he did miracle after miracle.

You see the testimony of these women who he's delivered and healed.

We see Christians in our own lives freed from sin, from bondage.

We don't serve a stale and cold God.

We serve a God who's active and living, who has come to save people from their sins.

To save those who are looking, who want to be saved?

It's easy to again hear this and assume.

Amen.

We're good.

I've been a Christian many, many years.

I prayed a prayer back when I was in high school or back in college, baptized.

It's good, it's good.

We're good.

Is there fruit in your life?

Is there any evidence when someone else look at your life and think, man, that person isn't like the rest of the world.

There's something different about them.

Maybe we have hard hearts.

I'm glad Jesus is cool and it works for you guys.

That's that's awesome.

I'm glad it works for you.

Just not my thing.

But Jesus has come to save sinners.

And that's you, and that's me.

He's come to save us so that we do not spend eternity in hell, so that we can rejoice, worship our Creator, and enjoy him forever.

Church, let us pray.