The Story of Us | More or Less | Pastor Joe Coffey

Matthew 13:1–9

Matthew 13:1–9

That same day, Jesus went out of the house

and sat beside the sea, and great crowds gathered about him,

so that he got into a boat and sat down, and the whole crowd stood on the beach,

and he told them many things in parables, saying, "A sower went out to sow,

and as he sowed,

some seeds fell along the path, and the birds came and devoured them.

Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil,

and they immediately sprang up, since they had no depth of soil.

But when the sun rose, they were scorched, and since they had no root,

they withered away.

Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them.

Other seeds fell on good soil

and produced grain some hundredfold, some sixty, some some thirty.

He who has ears, let him hear."

Matthew 13:18–23

Matthew 13:18–23

Hear then the parable of the sower:

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 what was sown along the path.

As for what was sown on rocky ground.

This is the one who hears the word and immediately receives it with joy.

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

And when tribulation or persecution

arises on account of the word, immediately he falls away.

As for what was sown among thorns.

This is the one who hears the word.

But the cares of the world

and deceitfulness of riches choke the word, and it proves unfruitful.

As for what was sown on good soil, this is the one who hears

the word and understands it.

He indeed bears fruit, and yields in one case

a hundredfold, and another sixty, and in another thirty."

Hey everyone, good morning and welcome to CCC,

n this crisp May morning.

My name is Joe,

I'm one of the pastors here,

and thanks for coming.

This morning we kick off a new series,

It's a four week series,

We're actually call it our Breathe Out series.

We believe there's a basic rhythm to the Christian life,

basic rhythm to life in general.

Kind of like breathing.

Breathing in, breathing out.

Inhaling, exhaling.

When we say breathe in when we're talking about the Christian life.

There are times when God wants us to focus

on what he is doing inside of us. And then breathing out,

there are times when God wants us to focus on the impact

we're having on the world around us.

And of course, those two things are connected.

The more you are growing in your understanding of Jesus,

the more natural it will be for you to impact

the people around you, the way Jesus wants you to impact them.

This is our Breathe Out series, and we're starting it

by looking at a story that Jesus tells in Matthew chapter 13

Matthew 13 · chapter mention

called The Parable of the sower and the seed.

And we just heard it read to us.

Jesus tells the story

and then he gives the explanation of the story to his disciples.

And let me reread the explanation.

Then I'll give you my three points.

that I want to get into this morning.

It's what Jesus says. Hear

then the parable of the sower.

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 what was sowing along the path

as what was sown on rocky ground.

This is one who hears the word and immediately receives it with joy.

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

And then, when tribulation or persecution

arises on account of the word, immediately he falls away.

As for what was sown among thorns, this is the one who hears the word.

But the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches

choke the word, and it proves unfruitful.

As for what was sown on good soil, this is one who hears

the word and understands it.

He indeed bears fruit and yields in one case a hundred fold,

and another 60, and in another 30.

Okay, here are my three points to really simple

I want to talk about the seed, the soil and the story.

That's it.

The seed, the soil and the story.

First the seed.

So Jesus begins this story by saying,

the kingdom of God is like a sower who goes out to sow his seed.

Let me stop there.

I don't want you to miss how weird that sentences.

It's easy to, you know, get familiar with Jesus teaching

and miss how strange some of the things he said actually were.

This one is very strange.

He says the kingdom of God is like a sow goes out to so his.

See, that's not the way kingdoms move and take over other kingdoms.

Not in our world.

I mean, right now our nation is at war with the nation of Iran.

We didn't go in like a sower sowing seed.

We went in his epic fury with fire and destruction

and overwhelming force.

That makes sense.

But here Jesus says the kingdom of God is different.

Very different.

The kingdom of God is like a seed.

You know, seed is interesting.

It's it's tiny.

This is a seed that I saved from an apple I ate this week.

No one is afraid of a seed.

Let me ask you this.

If you were God and you had all power,

and you wanted to make some changes in this world,

which you undoubtedly would, but not just little changes.

You wanted to make sweeping changes.

So it become like your kingdom,

where everything happens the way you want it to happen.

How would you come?

I can tell you I'd come.

Come like a hammer.

Not like a seed.

Hey, like let me see this.

Which is scarier?

A hammer or a seed?

Which is more powerful?

A hammer?

It depends. It depends.

It's a guy named John Chapman, who, in the early 1800s,

left his home in Le Meester, Massachusetts, with a bag of seeds.

And he began to plant those seeds as he walked through Pennsylvania

and West Virginia and Ohio and Indiana and Illinois

and Ontario, he would travel back and forth,

sometimes to orchards that he had planted before,

and make cuttings of them and bring them and plant them other places.

We know him as his moniker, Johnny Appleseed.

He because of him, there were

whole counties that became orchards.

By the end of his life, there were hundreds of thousands of apples.

And even today, generations later,

millions of apples because of Johnny Appleseed,

which is more powerful,

a hammer or a seed or depends.

A hammer can do something right away,

but inside of a seed is the potential

to fill whole counties with trees,

to feed hundreds of thousands of people apples generations later.

Because inside of a seed is life,

and that's power.

That's the seed.

Jesus says, the kingdom of God is like a sower

who goes out to sow his seed.

The kingdom of God.

Actually, when it comes into the world or into your life,

it can seem underwhelming at first

because it's

a seed in the seed, he says, is the word of the kingdom.

So the kingdom of God starts as a message.

It's information.

And and this is the message.

It's a crazy message.

The message is, is that the God of the universe became a human

being and allowed himself to be tortured and hung on a cross, and somehow that paid

a cosmic debt that you had to God

with your sin and reconciled you to God.

And then he rose from the dead.

And when you believe that

there is life, that enters into you like a seed

with the power to change everything about you,

and you sit across from somebody and you,

you tell them the message and you say, do you believe this message?

Do you want this seed?

And they look at you and they think, I don't know how that's going to

change my life.

I mean,

if you want to change my life, then give me a better job,

give me more opportunities, give me a better marriage, right.

What they're saying is, if you want to change my life,

I need a hammer.

I need something to do it right away.

Jesus holds up a seed and he said, no.

Trust me. Swallow this.

And if you believe in,

then there's life

and the power to change everything about you.

That's the seed.

And the question is,

how do we get it?

And that brings me to my second point.

The soil.

So Jesus says that the the kingdom of God is like a

so he goes out to sow a seed, and the seed falls on different types of soil.

And since the seed is a message, his information,

what he's saying really spends the most the majority of this story

saying how we can miss the seed, how we can miss the kingdom

because it comes through listening.

And of course, there are different ways to listen.

If you've ever talked to somebody while they were texting,

while they were receiving a text, you realize there are different ways

to listen.

And so one of the drawbacks are,

well, let me say this, that listening

with a deep understanding,

listening with a receptive heart

is one of the primary skills of the Kingdom of God.

One of the drawbacks to being a preacher is that I'm more of a talker

than a listener.

Even when I when I'm preparing for a message

like I did today, whenever I'm doing that, I'm thinking about how I can

communicate it to you in such a way

that you'll be able to hear it, that it will be interesting and

and will be something where it's easy for you to understand.

So I, I'm thinking about props, and I'm saving seeds from apples and

all kinds of stuff.

But I need to be careful

because Jesus says how I listen will determine

how much life I really have.

That's one of the reasons that I love team teaching with Pastors Act,

because that means every other week I get to sit and listen like you listen.

I get to be here.

But I want you to know, too, that,

we even when I preach, I am a a listener, too.

Sometimes people ask me, how do I preach without notes in the way that I do?

It is I preach this out loud to myself several times so I can hear it.

And because if it doesn't have the power to change me,

it won't have the power to change you.

But because the kingdom of God comes

as a seed and comes through listening, it's very easy to miss.

So Jesus ends up telling us

three ways that people can listen and miss the kingdom of God.

And this is super important because later on in the Gospel of Matthew,

Jesus will say, at the end of time, there'll be people who thought they got it

and didn't, and you don't want to be there.

Okay,

so the first way to listen and miss it, I'm going to call a hard listening.

This is what Jesus says. Verse four.

It says, and as he sowed, some seeds fell

along the path, and the birds came and devoured them.

This is how he explains it.

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 what was.

This is what was sown along the path.

Like the path is packed down.

This is hard, like cement.

First thing I want you to notice is that the sower of the seed

throws the seed indiscriminately,

like he throws it all willy nilly.

Like if I'm planning grass seed in my yard, I make sure I don't waste the seed.

I don't throw it on my parking, on my driveway or anything. I.

I make sure that there's good soil and I try to tilt it up.

And then I put some seeds in there, you know?

But that's not the way the sower, the sower throws seed everywhere.

And I tell you that

because sometimes people will ask me what happens, what happens to those

who've never heard the gospel, who've never heard the message?

And I want you to know a lot more people have heard the message

than you probably think. I've heard it.

You'd be very it'd be very difficult

for you to find somebody that you know in your neighborhood at work, at school,

anywhere that doesn't know the basic message of the gospel.

If you ask them, what does the Bible teach about Jesus?

Eventually they would say,

I think he died on a cross, supposedly rose a rose again.

That's it. That's the seed.

But there are some people, when they hear the seed,

it just sits on their heart because their heart is hard.

There are a couple of ways.

There's an obvious way, in a more subtle way, the obvious way

is people who have objections they don't want to believe.

Anyways,

I've sat across from people who say, well, this is my problem with the Bible,

or this is my problem with Christianity, and they'll give me their problem.

And there's a good answer

to that particular question, and I'll give them that answer.

And before I even get the answer out, they're off to another to another

objection going, yeah, okay. Okay. What about this?

What about that?

And it's almost like, you know, going to a fair and playing that game,

whack a mole where one problem pops up as soon as you knock down the other one.

That's the obvious way to be a hard listener.

Just decide. You don't want to believe.

But there's a more subtle way, and that's to sit in a church

like this and hear the message.

And we think, you think you believe it.

But it's never become personal.

You've

never come to the place where you realize

that you're the one Jesus came for,

that you're the one that Jesus

loves, that you're the one that Jesus

is calling by name.

And you can sit here your whole life

and never really make it personal, and you don't realize it.

But you've been listening for years

with a hard heart.

That's one way.

The second way is what I call shallow listening.

Sweet Jesus says.

And as for what was sown on rocky ground, this is the one who hears

the word immediately receives it with joy.

It has no root in himself, but endures for a while.

And when tribulation or persecution arises on account of the word,

immediately he falls away.

Know I told you before that you can sit across from somebody,

give them the message,

and they'll say, I don't see how that's going to change my life.

If you want to change my life, I want I need a better job or a better marriage.

Your life, my circumstances to get better.

Sometimes when someone does hear the message

and they bring Jesus into their life, their life does get better right away.

But then

they start to think of Jesus as a life enhancer.

And when things go south or life gets hard,

they say to themselves, this is not what I signed up for.

And they bail.

That's a shallow listener, and I want you to hear that

because some of you are going through a really difficult time.

If you're not, you might have a difficult time right around the corner.

All of us go through hard times and I want you to be prepared for it.

Somebody who's a shallow listener hasn't really come to grips

with the idea of their sin and the holiness of God.

Because if you ever really understand

the depth of your sin and the holiness of God, your separation,

what Jesus did on the cross for you, you will never feel

like you're getting the short end of the stick with Jesus.

You just never will.

But if you think you are, you're a pretty good person

and God owes you a good life,

then the son won't have to get very hot

before you wilt.

That's a shallow listener.

The third kind of listener

that misses it is what I call the thorny listener.

He says that as what was sown among the thorns,

this is the one who hears the word.

But the cares of the world, the deceitfulness of riches

choke the word, and it proves unfruitful.

If hard listening is a hard

heart and shallow listening is a shallow heart,

then a then thorny listening is a divided heart.

A divided heart is somebody who who goes to church and is involved in church.

But when they're at work or in their neighborhood or at school,

they're not really any different than somebody who doesn't believe in Jesus.

That's somebody who has kind of a foot in both kingdoms.

And when that happens, what Jesus says

is that you are you become unfruitful.

Now when the

Bible talks about fruit, it talks usually about two different

types of fruit a fruit on the inside and a fruit on the outside.

The fruit on the inside.

Paul describes in Galatians chapter five

the fruit of the spirit and it's love, joy,

peace, patience, goodness, kindness,

gentleness, faithfulness, self-control.

And what Paul says is the deeper the love of Jesus goes inside of you,

the more that will become part of who you are.

Those those characteristics of love and joy and peace.

But if you have a divided heart,

you don't experience that.

In some ways, you're you're the most miserable of all people

because you experience the guilt of sin, because you come to a place like this

and you know what Jesus wants from you,

but you never experience the real benefit

of walking with Jesus because you don't have love and joy and peace.

Deep down, that's a fruit that happens on the inside.

Then there's fruit that happens on the outside

where the Bible say that when Jesus takes control of you

and begins to transform you, you become like a light

in the midst of darkness, and you have people coming up to you

and saying, wait, there is something different about you.

What is that difference?

Right?

But what Jesus says here is,

if you have a foot in both kingdoms, no one comes up to you.

No one asked you why you're so different.

Because you're not different at all.

Jesus says that the the sower goes out to sow a seed,

and the seed has the power to change everything about you.

But it falls on different soil.

It falls on hard soil,

on shallow soil, on thorny soil.

But then the question is what happens

when it falls on good soil?

And that brings me to a third point.

The story.

This parable is the first of seven parables that Jesus tells in

Matthew chapter 13.

Matthew 13 · chapter mention

They're called the parables of the Kingdom.

Listen, this is important.

Jesus didn't come just to forgive your sins.

Jesus didn't.

You know he forgives your sins.

But that's not all he came for.

He came to bring a kingdom.

And this is the way the kingdom comes.

There's a great word in Greek.

It's only used twice in the New Testament.

One of my all time favorite words, the word is in Genesis.

In Genesis, for the first time, it's used.

It's used in the Gospel of Matthew.

Jesus uses it when he's describing what will happen

to the world when his kingdom comes in all of its fullness.

Palin. Genesis.

It means a remaking, a renewal of all things

you have to think of like HGTV, where, you know, you see this house

that's just a dump, and then people descend on the house

and they make it into something that you can hardly recognize.

It's just glorious. That's a Palin genesis.

That's what Jesus is going to do, but it's going to do it to the whole world.

That's the power of the kingdom of God.

The other times it's used as in Titus chapter three,

when Paul the Apostle uses it to describe what happens when the Spirit of God

begins to change a person like you or a person like me,

that God's desire

and his plan is to make me into something

glorious, to make me into a person

that fits in his Kingdom,

who actually ushers his kingdom in.

So when I say the story, I mean this is the story of God.

This is the way God's going to take over this world.

This is the way.

This is the story of God's kingdom coming.

This is also your story.

Listen, your whole life is going to be determined

by how the seed takes root in your heart.

It will be determined on the kind of soil

you are.

But if you have good soil,

if you receive, if you hear, if you believe,

then the seed has the power of life

to change everything about you,

to make you one that is like a light

that God uses to usher in his kingdom.

Finally, it's the story of our church.

Like our church is exploding right now.

We baptized 40 people last week.

We have more people in a baptism class this week.

It is just one.

People ask me what's going on with the church

and now I have a new answer.

What I tell them now is in Genesis,

what God

is doing is there are more and more people

who are hearing, listening well,

and they're taking the seed into this beginning to change them in such a way

that the people that they live around

are saying, what's what's different about you?

How can I know what you know?

And you're bringing them here?

This is the whole world

is going to be changed, not with a hammer,

not with a hammer,

with a seed, with a message.

And the message is this that God so loved

the world that he came for you,

that the seed of the kingdom take root in all of us,

so that it bears fruit inside and outside.

And the kingdom of God grows here

because it's growing in us.

You pray with me,

father in heaven, we come to you.

And I'm so grateful.

I'm grateful that you came into this world

not as a hammer, but as a sower sowing seed.

And that your plan is to change.

People like me, people like the people here in such a way

that we begin to live as citizens of your kingdom.

And your kingdom comes and your will is done

here on earth as it is in heaven.

That's our prayer.

Turn us into people,

that the seed is not only changed, but we become sowers of the seed as well.

We pray this in Jesus name. Amen.