Parables: The Net

Mark: Go to Matthew chapter 13. We've been there for the last couple weeks. We're gonna finish out in that chapter today. looking at the parable of the net. Have you guys been enjoying our series on the parables? Yeah, a few people, that's okay. Sometimes you just got to encourage yourself in the Lord. Matthew chapter 13, verse 47. It's a pretty short parable, and I'm just gonna pull some observations out of this today and Hopefully it's challenging. I don't have a long word, but I got a strong word. So lean in, grab your notebooks. We're gonna take a few minutes in this today and believe that the Holy Spirit's gonna fall on our hearts today, transform the way we see the world. Amen. Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net that was thrown into the sea and gathered fish of every kind. When it was full, men Drew it ashore. You can underline or circle those four words in your Bible if you'd like. I did in mine. When it was full, men drew it ashore, sat down and sorted the good into containers, but threw away the bad. Now get this right in the middle, all this. So it will be at the end of the age. Okay, and then he kind of gives an explanation of a piece of what the parable means. The angels will come out and separate the evil. From the righteous and throw them into the fur f fiery furnace, in that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. This is the word of the Lord. Let's pray today and then we'll talk for a few minutes. Sound good? Would you would you would you pray for me? Don't just let the talking head with the mic do all the work today. Can you stretch your hands up here and let's ask the Holy Spirit to really minister in this room today? Like truly. So, God, we pray in the name of Jesus. Let the word of the Lord go forth today, God. I pray, Lord, that I would move out of the way and that your voice would be the voice that echoes and reverberates in this room. King Jesus, we pray, speak to us. We're hungry for these words of life. We're hungry to be transformed. We're hungry to be renewed in the spirit of our minds. So we ask you that these words would transform us today. We don't want More information and full notebooks. God, we want our hearts transformed by your spirit through this word in Jesus' name. And everybody said amen. Amen. Hey, raise your hand if you've ever been to an old school church potluck. Come on, raise your hand. Yes, we have. These are the real ones. How many's never been to a church potluck? Raise your hand. A few people. Wow. Pastor Josh, we might need to do one of those. These are the real ones. You guys, if you raised your hand, you know, you know all about that old church smell. You know what I'm talking about? It's like part wooden pew, part old hymnal, part coffee that's been sitting in a warmer since 7 a.m. You can smell the spiritual warfare in that carpet. You know what I'm talking about? Potluck Sunday. Can I get a witness? Come on, you head downstairs to the fellowship hall. You remember that? It's got all those wooden folding tables, like they weigh a hundred pounds each, and the metal folding chairs, and people coming through the doors carrying a slow cooker in one hand and a bag of Hawaiian rolls in the other. Yeah. You go downstairs, there's so many crock pots plugged in. The lights are like flickering. Every outlet has a power strip. Every power strip has another power strip. you know, you know what I'm talking about? Every extension cord just taped down everywhere. It's like a it's like a maze. Nobody's paying attention to the pastor's message on Potluck Sunday. Nobody. The whole church smells like golden corral. We might as well, we might as well be at Lambert's. Preacher's like, the kingdom of heaven is like revelation could be dropping, and you're sitting there thinking, dude, I saw one tray of deviled eggs, and there's like 200 people in this room. It's about to be Hunger Games in here. It's potluck Sunday. Bring back Potluck Sunday. Can I get a witness? Bring it back. here's the thing. I don't even know if this makes sense. I was hungry when I did this message. The thing is this: that thing, that potluck thing, o only works if everybody shows up to contribute, not just consume. How many knows the Christian life is designed to flow outwards? Yeah? The New Testament actually has no category for a disciple who indefinitely receives but never contributes. All right. Following Jesus, friends, it was never meant to stop at like personal belief. It was always meant to become participation in heaven's mission. Okay, if we've been brought nearer to Jesus, then we can't be content to live as though his heart for the world has very little to do with us. We we who were once far off have been brought near by the blood of Jesus and then invited to become a part of what he's doing in the world. This thing doesn't work if we only show up to consume, but nobody goes out to contribute. So, last few weeks, Pastor Josh has been in Matthew chapter 13. We've been looking at the parables there, where Jesus has sort of been telling back to back to back stories. You saw you got the farmer scattering seed, you got a treasure hidden in the field, and you've got the wheat and the weeds. And what we've been discovering through the series is that Jesus didn't really tell parables to make us think as much as he told parables to make us see. Jesus is pulling back the curtain with these stories and going, like, this is actually what's true. This is how my father sees, this is how the kingdom operates. This is how what really matters, and this is where your life is moving towards. This is important. Because how many knows when we don't see the kingdom rightly, we start assigning wrong value to everything else. Right? And so we start holding on to things that won't last, and we start walking right past the treasure in front of us. We need these parables. We need this. Jesus is. Waking us up with these stories before we settle into a life that's spent chasing after vanity. And suddenly these pip these parables, as we've seen, they become windows that help us see beyond the room we're actually standing in. Jesus opens the window into the kingdom of God until we start to see the ordinary two our ordinary Tuesday inside a much larger story. Jesus is inviting us to live with our eyes open. And right here, end of Matthew 19, Matthew 13, we're gonna get one more parable in this series of parables about a net thrown into the sea. Let's look at it one more time. Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net that was thrown into the sea, gathered fish of every kind. When it was full, men drew it ashore, and sat down and sorted the good into containers, but threw away the bad, so it will be. At the end of the age, the angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous and throw them into a fiery furnace. In that place, there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. I like this parable because, in a few short sentences, Jesus takes us from an ordinary fishing boat and to the cosmic realities of the age to come. Now, I don't know about you, but I have a tendency to sort of pull those things apart and put them in two different categories. But from Jesus' perspective, these two things actually go hand in hand. Right? So it will be at the end of the age. How many knows that this present age, with all of its brokenness and rebellion, with all of its heartache and pain, has an ending. The way things are now, friends, is not the way that things will always be. In the fullness of time, God will bring about the end of this current age and the beginning of a brand new age. There's a day coming, church, when the one that the world has dismissed will be impossible to ignore anymore. Behold, he's coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him. It's Revelation 1:7. The same Jesus that walked the dusty roads of Galilee will return to this planet in a resurrected, glorified body. He will put his feet down on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, and that mountain will split in two from the east to the west. He's coming back as a man of war riding on a white horse. With fire in his eyes, with a sword protruding from his mouth, wearing a garment dipped in blood. And on that day, the saints of God will be gathered together in the sky to meet the Lord. The prayers of generations that have been crying out, God, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven, will be fully answered in this man with fire in his eyes. On that day, the Lord will destroy the Antichrist and his army with the breath of his mouth. And he will bring them to nothing by the appearance of his coming. Every knee will bow, every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. And so will begin a brand new 1,000-year age where Jesus will set up his throne in Jerusalem and He will begin to teach the nations his ways. And the glory of the Lord will cover the earth the way the waters cover the sea. The kingdoms of this world will become the kingdoms of our God and of his anointed one, and he will reign forever. Sin will no longer distort what God has made. Injustice will no longer go unanswered, and God will make all the wrong things right. This is our future in Him. This is where your story is going. This is your certain destiny through the blood and body and resurrection of Jesus. We will be fully healed and restored as human beings. With glorious resurrected bodies in a fully renewed earth, with the glory of the Lord touching every area of our life, and so we will forever be with the Lord. All that glory and wonder, the return of Jesus, the resurrection of his saints, the day God makes all things new, and somehow Jesus brings us back to a smelly, salty fishing boat. Where we find men weathered by the sea, calloused hands, laboring for a catch. And again the kingdom of heaven is like a net that will be thrown into the sea that gathers fish of every kind. When it was full, men drew it ashore and sat down and sorted the good into containers, but threw away the bad. So it will be at the end of the age. Jesus bumps eternity right next to calloused hands. Why would Jesus put those two things in the same picture? It's because eternity, friends, is intended to give weight to what is in front of us right now. Jesus reveals where history is going so that it becomes more clear to us what this moment right now is actually for. Rollheiser says it like this We understand our lives best when we see them against the horizon of the infinite. God's promised future, our blessed hope should do more than give us some kind of beautiful story to believe in at the end. This is intended to judge our present priorities. This moment we're living in. It's not empty space between his first and second coming, where we sort of fill our week with like a church service and then kind of do whatever we want and whatever makes us comfortable. This time that we're living in right now, church, is for witness. It's for harvest. At some point, following Jesus means his direction becomes our direction. His burden becomes our burden, his heart becomes our heart, and his mission actually becomes our mission. Look at what Jesus said, Matthew 24, 14. He said, This gospel of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come. He bumps mission and eternity right up against each other. He places the mission of the church inside the story of where history is going. He shows us the shore so that we would understand the urgency of our witness while we are still on the water. Make no mistake, friends, there is a day when that net will be fully drawn into the shore, but we are not at the shore yet. And while we're still on the water, the church has work to do. Church, we have work to do. The kingdom of heaven is like a net that was thrown into the sea that gathered fish of every kind when it was full. Men drew it to shore. God comes and he fills our ordinary lives with himself, with his presence, with his spirit. And then he turns those same lives outward toward the people he loves. So if people like matter so much to Jesus, in my life, here's the question I've been asking in my life, why do people, why can they become so easy to sort of overlook? 'Cause may I rearrange an entire week for a meeting that might advance my career. I'll cross the city for something I really want. I'll make the phone call, I'll change the plans, and I'll figure out some way when the thing matters to me. But when it comes to moving towards somebody who needs Jesus, I can spend months waiting for a more convenient moment. And the truth is, man, we generally will make a way for what's important to us and we'll make excuses for what's not that important. Problem isn't that I don't know how to make room in my life. I know how to make room. Yeah? I make room all the time. The question is what we believe is worth making room for. Yeah, I mean help. That's hard to say out loud because I can stand here and tell you that every person matters to God, and I believe that deeply in my heart, but I want my life to tell the same story that my mouth is saying. I want the people Jesus loves to have more than a place in my theology. I want them to have an actual place in the way that I spend my days. Do you? I do. So much energy flows inward. Right? And so, like, I'm not preaching to you. this is for me too. This is what we do, though, right? Church, we come to church, we serve at church, we're part of a whole family with other people from church. We fill our schedules with church activities, we spend our free time with church friends. We put our kids in Christian schools with other Christian kids and other Christian families. None of that is wrong. All of those are good things. We need the church. Do you hear me say we need the church? We need each other, but somewhere along the way, if we aren't watchful, friends, our world can unintentionally become really small. Our conversations are rich and our community is healthy, but our proximity to people who don't know Jesus keeps getting smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller. It's not that we stop believing in the mission, right? We all believe in the mission. We want people to meet Jesus. It's not like we wake up one day and go, you know what, I just I don't care about that. But what happens is we just build our lives around what's familiar. Our routines get settled, our friendships get established, our schedules fill up, and reaching people. become seep something that we would raise our hands and say, I believe in that, but we make almost no room to do it. Listen, I'm I am beyond grateful for this church. I was in worship, thinking about when me and my wife first got here, and I sat right over there, broken, hurting, wounded, and a lady turned around and said, I see a picture in my heart. You got like a thousand hats stacked on your head, and Lord's taking one off at a time, and one's left, and the only one left says son. God has deeply, deeply healed our hearts through the presence of God and the people in this house. We want you to have the same, the same strong, lasting friendships here. We want your kids to be surrounded by kids who burn for Jesus. It's the whole thing we do back there. That's a gift, but listen to me. God did not give us this family, so his love would only circulate among us. Jesus said it like this to his disciples, Matthew 10 Freely you have received, now freely give. Grace is always looking for another address. When the nets were full, men drew it ashore. The mission Jesus gave us is gonna require more than agreeing with the idea that people need God. It's gonna require us to actually move towards them. The net doesn't come in because the fishermen stand on the boat and agree that there's fish in the sea that need to be caught. Someone has to reach down, take hold of the net, and pull. Hands on the net, feet planted, shoulders leaning into that work. Look at this, Matthew chapter 9, 35, and I've circulated this with our students and our young adults and our DTS, and I just wanted to bring it into this context. And Jesus went throughout all the cities and villages teaching in their synagogues. Jesus went throughout all the cities and villages teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and every affliction. When he saw the crowds. He had compassion on them because they were like they were helpless and harassed like sheep with no shepherd. Then he said to the disciples, The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few. Therefore, in light of that, pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into the harvest. The Gospel of Matthew, it's one of the clearest windows we have into the heart of Jesus for people. And this passage right here is sort of like the epicenter, it's the emotional center of Jesus' ministry. When Jesus saw the crowds, he had compassion on them because they were harassed and helpless like sheep that had no shepherd. When Jesus looked at people, he felt something. He didn't look at the crowds and see an interruption to his busy schedule. He saw people who were harassed and helpless like sheep with no shepherd. I don't know about you guys, but I leave the house every morning knowing where I need to go, what I need to do, and how quickly those things need to get done. I can move through an entire week from one task to another, call it a productive week at the end. I answered the messages, I went to the meetings, I checked every box, but the question is, did I actually see anyone? Did we actually see anybody along the way? Jesus saw what life was doing to people. And it moved his heart. He saw the weight people were carrying. And that weariness reached his heart. There's something, friends, that we need more than great and a great evangelistic strategy to meet our city the meet the lost people in our city. What we need, friends, is our hearts shattered in a million pieces for people. The greatest barrier to mission is not the method, it's lack of God's heart. Because I didn't teach you how to share the gospel in 10 minutes and give you some talking points, but only God can place his burden for people inside the human heart. Holy Spirit, drop that on us today, I pray. Drop it on me. Evangelism, it's not about speaking first, it's about seeing. Seeing people the way God sees people. He saw the crowds, he had compassion because they were harassed and helpless like sheep. And then Jesus said to his disciples, The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few. The harvest is, but the laborers are. So we all understand Jesus isn't giving us, you know, a lesson about fishing and an agriculture lesson, right? He's giving us a new way to see the world. Harvest laborer. Okay, so let's walk through this. What is harvest? Harvest in the Bible, or the fish in the sea, whatever metaphor you want to choose, represents people who are far away from God that are ready to come to God. They don't necessarily know that they're ready to come to God, but the Holy Spirit nonetheless is already working and drawing them. Jesus says the harvest is plentiful. Will you throw that first slide up there? Thank you, Chat GPT, for my incredibly dynamic graph. The harvest is plentiful. Okay? Notice what he doesn't say. He doesn't say the harvest is impossible. He doesn't say the harvest is resistant. He doesn't say the harvest is too dark, the culture's too dark, nobody wants God. He said the harvest is plentiful. That's actually an astonishing statement. Because what Jesus is describing is not the world as it appears. He's describing the world as the Father sees it. He's not giving his disciples optimism. Right? He's revealing heaven's perspective. Which means, friends, there are far more spiritually hungry people than we realize. Everywhere, at the coffee shops, on your college campus, at your workplace. When you hit Planet Fitness tomorrow morning, at the family gathering, when you sit down to eat food this afternoon and at the grocery store, everywhere we go, the Holy Spirit is already there before you were stirring hearts, creating questions, exposing emptiness, and preparing people to encounter God. The harvest is plentiful. People say. Jesus said there's people everywhere who are hungry for God, people searching for meaning, people exhausted by sin, people that are d tired of pretending. People who feel six look successful on the outside but are empty on the inside. People who are secretly wondering if there's more to life. People praying desperate prayers that they've never told a soul that they prayed. People who are asking God to reveal Himself without even knowing if He's listening. Which means Instead of assuming that people don't want to hear about Jesus, which is our default, it's actually safer according to Jesus to assume that they do. That's a completely different way to walk through the world. The harvest is plentiful, the laborers are few. What Jesus is doing is incredible. He's placing people into two categories: harvest or. Harvester laborer. That's it. Two categories. It's easy to read past, but it's significant that Jesus only gives two categories. So if the harvest are people who are far away from God that are ready to come to God, then a laborer is a person who will go into the harvest and reap the harvest, or go to the people who are far from God that are ready to come to God and tell them about the love of God. A laborer somebody says, God, if you're working in somebody's life, I want in on that. I'll join you in that. A laborer is somebody who understands my life is not my own. I've been brought into God's redemptive mission. And now everything I do has a greater purpose. I'm not just living my story. I've been invited into his greater story. And Jesus says those people are few. You throw that next one up? The harvest is plentiful, the laborers are few. So think through this with me. If Jesus sees people through this lens, that they're either harvest or laborer, why would that be important for us to know? Because if you are no longer in the harvest category, If you are no longer far away from God, friends, there's only one other category you fall into from God's perspective. laborer. Someone who will go to the people who are far from God and share the love of God. Jesus only mentions harvest and laborer. That's it. But many believers, myself included, we kind of create this third imaginary category. Can you throw that one up there? But how many knows? Jesus does not offer a third option. Not really harvest anymore, but not really living like a laborer either. We're in the church, but not really on mission. We stay close enough to Jesus, we enjoy the benefits, we enjoy the community, but not engaged enough in the mission of Jesus to carry his burden for lost and hurting people. So what Jesus is not teaching is you should evangelize more. That's not what this is. This is way deeper. What he's teaching is that you are actually a laborer. It's who you are. Who you are. These verses are meant to give us courage. Because if Jesus sees us as a laborer, it means that you have everything you need to do to accomplish that mission, even if you don't feel like you have everything you need to do. The harvest is plentiful, the laborers are few. Notice that Jesus didn't say the harvest is plentiful and the experts are few. He didn't say that the Bible scholars are few. He didn't say that the talented are few. He just said the laborers. There are people ready for God everywhere. The harvest is not the problem. Problem is the laborers. Tyler, you you can come on up. Let's close here. Did you know that there are The church has fourzen times the finances. and thirty six thousand times the people to finish the Great Commission. Which means we got the people, we got the money. We have the buildings and the technology. We got more ways to communicate than any generation before us. The issue is not God's willingness to move, the issue is a shortage of people who are willing to go. This is one of the most convicting missionary passages in the New Testament. What Jesus is essentially saying is there are more spiritually hungry people than there are workers that are willing to reach them. Think about that. There's more people searching. There's more people asking questions. There's more people ready to hear than there are people willing to share, people willing to engage, and people willing to speak. That's Heartbreaking. It should be. It should be. The harvest isn't waiting for a superstar. The harvest is waiting for a laborer. That's it. And according to Jesus, that's who you are. Jesus isn't asking you to become a professional preacher. He's inviting you to let your heart wake up. He's not trying to create people who randomly like force awkward spiritual conversations all day, every day. He's just wanting to form people who actually care about people. Therefore Pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest that he would send forth laborers into the harvest. Before mission becomes activity, it starts as a burden. And I'm just be honest with you guys. I'm a pastor. Teaching the word of God is my I mean, for lack of better words, my profession. I just threw up a little bit in my mouth when I said that. It's what we do. But I'm just gonna be honest. My heart's a little bit callous to what goes on outside these walls. Zoombike. My way to church activities. Not even it doesn't even click. It doesn't even click. God I want that to change. And that is not the work of man, that is the work of the Spirit of God in the place of our hearts. You stand and I Just wanna invite the Holy Spirit to come and drop that burden on us. I mean Did you just kinda tune out me and just Mm-hmm. Drop this burden on the heart of your body. Some of you need to cry out to God, pray, the Lord of the harvest. God, I ask you to fall on us with your love and your burden for hurting people. Don't let us become indifferent. Don't let us become so comfortable inside our padded pews, inside the house of God that we don't reach outward. God, I pray for this. I pray. Do it in me. God, we don't want to see people the way the same way. We want to see them with your burden in your heart, in your eyes, God. I pray. Leave us in indifference, fall on our hearts, and let us

Matthew 13 · chapter mention Matthew 13:47 Matthew 13 · chapter mention Revelation 1:7 Matthew 9 · chapter mention