Mustard Seed

Good morning.

Our verse comes from Mark 4, 30 through 34.

And he said, What can we compare the kingdom of God?

Or what parable shall we use for it?

It is like a grain of mustard seed, which when sown on the ground is the smallest of all the seeds on the earth.

Yet when it is sown, it grows up and becomes larger than all the garden plants, and puts out large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.

With many parables, he spoke the word of to them as they were able to hear it.

He did not speak to them without a parable, but privately to his own disciples, he explained everything.

This is the word of the Lord.

Please be seated.

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Thanks, Paulina.

Hey, we have readers again.

Feels good to have some readers.

Just a little bit less for me to do.

I don't know what I'm gonna do with the extra time in my week.

But thanks for volunteering for that.

If you'd like to volunteer to be a reader as well, uh you can do that in our app under Connect and sign up to volunteer to read on Sunday mornings, which is a wonderful thing for us.

So we are continuing through the gospel of Mark, and we're coming to the conclusion of this particular section in which Jesus is explaining his parables, especially the parables that have to do with sowing seeds and farming and growing.

Uh we're seeing a lot of similarities between these parables that Jesus has shared, and they're giving us eyes to see what the kingdom of God is like.

But before we move into that today, I've got a couple of announcements to make, and then I'll pray.

Uh first off, there is a membership class immediately following the service, probably about like 10 minutes after the service, today.

So if you would like to become a member of Redemption Church Denver, today is the day.

Uh, this is an explanation of what membership at RCD looks like and what we how we understand membership to play out in our church.

And it's worth knowing that membership is really central to our vision for making disciples at Redemption Church Denver.

It is the way that we organize the leadership structure of the church is around membership.

So we have elders, and each elder is over a group of members.

And those group of groups of members we call parishes.

They meet together on a monthly basis in an elder's home or in someone else's in the parish's home.

And so that way our whole church is connected to the biblical leadership structures that we see uh laid out in scripture.

Biblical laid out in scripture, those are pastor-filler terms.

Because it's redundant to say it twice.

But the uh what we see is so that the members of our church can be directly connected to the leadership structures that God has put in place.

And that's really important because it's common to be a part of a church where membership doesn't seem to really mean anything or have any effect, or be a part of a community group that isn't really connected to the leadership structures of the church.

And so we're looking to really wed those in an attempt to really make some deep community in our church so that we are committed to one another in an explicit fashion.

And there's not many relationships, especially with organizations or institutions, where we really commit to one another.

And in a culture like ours, we often develop a lot of really thin relationships where we don't have any actual ability to speak into one another's lives or to know each other with any sort of depth.

And we want to help foster that.

We want to help our church to be a people that are joined together in depth of relationship that is connected to the structures of the church.

So that's why we prioritize membership like we do.

And if you'd like to be a part of that, uh then stick around after the service for the info meeting regarding membership.

I hope many of you do.

Also, coming up this Saturday, we've partnered with an organization called Save Our Youth, which is an organization for, oh no, I shouldn't have mentioned it.

We've uh we're gonna do an acoustic set.

We've partnered with an organization called Save Our Youth, which is a uh a mentoring organization.

It was developed in the early 90s here in Denver, and the goal was to uh connect at-risk youth with adult mentors who can advocate for them, get to know them, and really make a difference at that relational level.

This is an excellent opportunity to uh to really make a difference with some of the most, some of the greatest needs in our city that lasts for literally generations.

So it's a simple thing, uh, but it's uh it's a pretty substantial commitment.

We want to invite you all into that.

And one of the ways, if you're like, oh, this sounds like a wonderful thing, but I don't know if I can commit to two hours a week for the next year uh of mentoring a student.

One way that you could help is by joining us next Saturday.

We're helping them with their fundraiser, which will be right in the park, right next door at Berkeley Lake Park.

And they're having a 0.5K, which you can probably hack it at a 0.5k.

And at Redemption Church, that's us, we're going to have our tent out there and we're gonna be decorating pumpkins.

So if you think you can decorate pumpkins, or if you want to help the youth of Denver, that's gotta cover everybody.

But not with not much crossover, though, I've noticed.

That people who think they can decorate pumpkins typically don't care about the youth.

But if you're one or the other, uh please join us next Saturday at 9 a.m.

We'll be meeting here to volunteer with Save Our Youth.

Final announcement.

We are hosting a study that moves through the book of Mark, and it's called Christianity Explored.

Now, many of our studies that we've done before in our church are like designed by me, and so they're super geeky and very highly like theoretical, and if they apply to your life in any way, it's a act of God.

But you will get some pretty sweet doctrine out of it.

Now, this is really geared towards someone who desires to know more about Christianity, but doesn't have a space where they can comfortably ask their real questions.

So this is we want this to be available to you to invite friends to.

If there's someone who's in your life, you're like, there, I can't seem to uh meet them at the space where their questions really are, I could use help in that conversation, invite them and attend Christianity explored with them.

If you are at a place in your life where you're like, you know, I I had this glimpse of Christianity when I was younger, and I'm thinking about kind of coming back into the church a bit, or this kind of seems less strange than it did six months ago, then uh come to this class.

It's a it's a dinner and conversation through the book of Mark.

So this is as unmediated as it gets.

Uh, you're just going to be able to look directly at the scripture with folks in the room who know the scripture really well and ask questions and be able to explore.

Uh in conversations, I've heard just such a need for something like this.

Now, here's the difficulty.

There's a real need for it, right?

But getting there, you know, is extremely uncomfortable.

Amen.

Hey, would you like to come to my Jesus class with me?

You know, so you so here's what I recommend.

Start praying.

Be praying.

And this is just next week, right?

Yeah, a week from Wednesday.

So be praying and have those conversations.

You know, move in faith courageously.

Here's a good rule of thumb when you're talking with non-Christian friends that you have with regards to your faith.

Oftentimes we let our non-Christian friends outpace us in their vulnerability with us.

We allow them to share in a non-judgmental way the most intimate spiritual aspects of their lives.

But as Christians, we don't feel like we can match that same level of vulnerability.

As though we couldn't trust our friends, for us to say, you know, the most important feature in my life is my faith in Christ.

And it's been transformative for me.

And for many of you, that is true.

It really has been, and it really is the most fundamental aspect of your life.

And yet we we feel like we can't share that same level of intimacy with our non-Christian friends that we would allow and expect and encourage them to share with us.

So here's my advice: don't be outpaced.

Match that level of vulnerability that you are receiving and share Christ with them.

This is a great opportunity to do that.

All right, you guys ready to pray and get into the text?

Holy Father, we thank you for gathering us together as your church.

Lord, we thank you that we can worship you and that you're you embody our praises, that we do this week in and week out, and you attend each Sunday morning by your grace.

We praise you for the work that you've done in our church and for the work that you're doing in each of our lives and our hearts.

Lord, I pray that we would be able to see your scripture and be given a vision for your kingdom today, Lord.

We lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.

So we've seen a lot of Kingdom of God parables.

And I think that the parables that we've seen over these uh past three or four weeks, about four weeks, I guess, um, the parable of the sower, where someone goes, the farmer goes out and sows the seed and it falls on four different types of soil.

And uh on three types of soil, it doesn't really grow up or bear any fruit, but on the fourth type of soil, it bears fruit in multiples of tens and hundreds, this incredible yield.

Then the next parable that Jesus explained to us was uh that same sort of image of the parable of a sower who goes out and sows, and then Jesus draws our attention saying, What does the sower do?

Then he just goes to sleep and he rises, and he he doesn't know how the growth takes place, but the growth takes place.

And then in this parable today, we see the same thing.

A seed is sown, and then it it grows into something that's far larger than the seed.

In fact, it grows into the largest garden plant.

Now, I was thinking about this uh the way that Mark stacks these particular parables right next to each other in his gospel.

And I was thinking, what if we were to film each of these parables?

I think you probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference.

If you were to just watch these events take place on film, they would all look exactly the same.

You could you could, in fact, cover all of these parables if you were to, you know, take a video of them happening in just one video.

It would just be like a guy throwing seed, and then you do one of like the planet Earth time lapses of plants growing.

And that that would be that would cover them.

So what Jesus is doing here by sharing with us these three is he's not just relaying the event, he's guiding our attention.

Here's a simple event, and then he in each parable, he guides our attention to a different aspect of this simple moment of a seed being sown and growing.

So Jesus is teaching us how to view the world with an attention that is framed by his purposes.

He wants us to see things the way that he sees them.

And the way that he does that is he shows this simple event over and over again.

And he says, look, look at this aspect of sowing.

See how it doesn't grow everywhere?

It needs these proper conditions and then it grows.

See how mysterious the growth is?

Yeah, that's another thing to notice, isn't it?

The kingdom's like that too.

And see how it's this tiny seed, the mustard seed, that grows up into the largest plant?

So what we need to notice in these parables is not just that Jesus likes seeds and growth.

We need to see what is he guiding our attention to in each of these particular parables.

Today, what he is guiding our attention to is the growth.

This is a parable of growth.

What is the kingdom of God like?

It is a kingdom that starts small and then ends at the stage of incredible growth.

So today we're going to look at the parable, and then we're going to see how this pattern that is described in the parable manifests throughout the New Testament.

How this pattern for the kingdom we can look at scripture and see unfolding.

And then we're going to take that as a type of practice.

We're going to say, okay, we've seen this pattern of the kingdom show itself through scripture.

Well, how could we take that same capability of viewing the world through the lens of the patterns that Jesus has shown us?

And how can we use that to interpret our own lives today?

So that's the pattern that we're going to do.

That's what we're going to do.

We're going to see the parable.

We're going to see that pattern in scripture.

We're going to see what that means for our lives today.

Make sense?

All right, here we go.

Hope this works.

Mark 430, the parable.

And he said, with what can we compare the kingdom of God?

Or what parable shall we use for it?

Once again, Jesus is sharing a parable with the crowds.

Now we have the other three parables at this point that we're able to draw on.

And so we're able to understand that Jesus, by sharing another parable, is scattering seed.

That's what Jesus is doing.

He is the farmer sowing his seed, which is the word.

And so we can expect the parable to have these different results based on our heart's ability to receive it.

And then likewise, we should expect that when this parable takes root, it will, in a mysterious way, a way that we don't totally know, it will grow in an orderly fashion, just like we saw with last week's parable.

And it will grow in an orderly fashion towards a purpose.

Now, with this week's parable, as I said, we are looking at the growth.

So here is the parable of the mustard seed.

In Mark 431, Jesus says, 31 to 32, actually, it says, It is like a grain of mustard seed.

The kingdom of God is like a grain of mustard seed, which when sown on the ground is the smallest of all the seeds on earth.

Yet when it is sown, it grows up and becomes larger than all the garden plants, and puts out large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.

Now, like I said, if you were to film any of these, they would all look the same.

But this one, Jesus draws our attention to a particular type of seed.

It's the mustard seed.

And then what does he draw our attention to about the mustard seed?

It's tiny.

He says this is the smallest seed that there is.

Now it's there are smaller seeds.

But of the seeds that would be sown in these gardens, this is the smallest one that would be sown.

And so he draws our attention to this tiny mustard seed and then shows the strangeness of how this tiny mustard seed results in the largest plant in the garden.

One that's so large that it's actually able to sh send out branches and have birds of the air come and make nests into that plant.

And so he's drawing our attention to the improbability of the scale.

The smallest thing becomes the largest thing in the garden.

How unlikely is that?

The smallest beginning contains the pattern for the largest ending.

Now, it's not just a size comparison for the kingdom of God.

It's not just as though he's saying, like, look, the kingdom of God is like there's a really small thing and there's also a really big thing, and that's what the kingdom of God is like.

That wouldn't make much sense.

What's interesting about the seed and the mustard plant when it's finally grown up is that in some way they are the same thing.

They're connected to one another.

That seed somehow contains the pattern for the whole plant to develop and grow into the largest plant in the garden.

It's in there.

Now, in our modern scientific way of talking, we'd say, like, what is it?

What's the pattern in the seed that it has that becomes the plant?

The DNA, right?

That's what we'd say.

Dino DNA.

And that's the pattern for the plant to grow.

It would have the DNA of this particular plant, and that contains all the information that we would need to be able to determine the plant would grow in this sort of way.

That's why this particular seed with this DNA grows up.

Now, if you'll allow me some interpretive fun for a second, uh what is DNA?

It's a language, right?

And this language, it's almost like a word.

And this word goes into the earth and then it grows up into this greater pattern as it's demonstrated in the world.

And we see it's that same, that's the same thing that we see happen with Jesus, who is the true word.

He is the pattern of what the kingdom of God is.

And then he dies and is resurrected, and then his pattern goes out into the whole world.

It sprouts and spreads into the whole world.

Now, we know that he's talking about the kingdom spreading into the whole of creation because of this image that he gives of the branches shooting out and the birds coming in to land on the branches.

Now, he's borrowing some image from Daniel, in which the king Darius has a dream, and in his dream, a tree that all the birds of the world gathered to is cut down.

Now, that tree, in that sense, is Babylon that is cut down.

But what we see is a kingdom with incredible reach that reaches to the ends of the world as it was known, is demonstrated, the reach of that is demonstrated by big branches that the birds of the air come and land in.

So what is this seed that we're seeing?

What does it become?

It becomes a kingdom that starts off incredibly small, but stretches out into the ends of the whole world.

So what we're getting in this parable, where we have the seed and then the growth, and then the full plant and its realization, is an image that the that theologians refer to as the nature of the kingdom that is described as already, but not yet.

Have y'all heard that phrase?

Already, but not yet.

This is the nature of the kingdom of God.

It is already here.

It is here in a real way.

And at Christ's coming, he comes and he proclaims the kingdom of God's arrival.

That is what he comes to proclaim.

And so when Jesus arrives, the kingdom of God is here in a real way.

Just because, like the seed is really here.

But in another way, it's not yet here.

Because if you look at a seed, if you were to hold out a seed and say, the mustard plant is here, in a way you would be like, yeah, that's true.

The mustard plant is here, at least the potential for the mustard plant or the seed form of the mustard plant.

But we'd say, but it's also at the same time, it's not yet here because the plant hasn't been fully realized.

It's just not yet taken the form that this is pointing us towards.

And so this is what we see happen.

This same framework is true of the kingdom of God.

It is here because Christ has inaugurated it.

He has laid down the pattern, but it is not yet fully realized.

The kingdom has not spread out into the whole world.

It has not moved into every nook and cranny of our lives.

Instead, it is still growing.

And so we are in a stage in between the already and the not yet of the kingdom of God.

The kingdom of God is here.

We can announce it.

And yet we know that it hasn't been fully realized.

And it won't be fully realized until Christ's second coming.

That is the nature of the kingdom of God.

And this is this pattern of, and so what should we expect while we're here in this stage of already but not yet?

Well, by this parable, we ought to expect growth of the kingdom.

This is the stage where we ought to expect growth of the kingdom of God.

So we're going to look at this and we're going to see how this parable, how this structure of the seed that grows up into the plant manifests itself throughout scripture.

So here's one of them.

And it's this is actually just the next two verses we start to see Jesus operating in this very pattern.

In Mark 4, 33 through 34, right after he explains this parable, Mark closes this section of parables and he says, with many such parables, he spoke the word to them as they were able to hear it.

But privately to his own disciples, he explained everything.

So Mark shows us these two groups, these two different ways that Jesus spoke.

When he spoke to the crowds out on the street, everything was in a parable.

If you were to talk to Jesus, he would be like, let me tell you about sowing seeds.

But to his disciples, privately afterwards, when they gathered together, he explained explicitly the nature of the parables.

He gives them the pattern language of the parables.

This refers to this.

This soil is the type of heart that shoots up quickly and then withers away.

This type of soil is actually a heart that receives the word and bears much fruit.

So what we see here, where he says he did not speak to them without a parable, but privately to his own disciples, he explained everything.

Do you see what this private space is with the disciples?

It's the seed.

This is a place where the seed form of the gospel message is being delivered, being given over to this tiny group, just the twelve that are with Jesus.

And this tiny group becomes something like a seed form of what the kingdom of God will ultimately look like.

And then what happens from this tiny group, just this little seed of twelve, that Jesus relays explicitly the kingdom of God to, it grows from them.

It grows throughout the whole world until now, starting from Jesus, the you know, the true seed, and then moving into this other little seed form, we see this growth until now Christianity, Jesus, like we're talking about Jesus here today, you know, it's the largest religion in the world.

I looked it up to make this point.

It's like 2.3 billion people.

That's insane.

Those are almost Facebook numbers.

It's a really good, those are really good, uh, really good numbers.

So from 12, we see it, and if we're gonna be frank, if we're gonna think about the world as like a garden and the other religions as other plants in it, this is the largest plant in the garden.

From twelve.

You see that pattern?

But can consider this those twelve did not understand the pattern that they were receiving while they were receiving it.

Uh, they didn't understand the nature of the kingdom that was being delivered to them.

And we can see that as we move into example number two.

So, example number two is coming in at the beginning of Acts in Acts chapter one, Jesus is standing with the disciples, and he's just about to ascend into heaven.

Wild moment where Jesus flies up and is hidden by the clouds as he ascends into heaven.

And the uh in before that, the disciples are like, great, you know, the resurrection, that was really unexpected.

We were pretty nervous there for those couple of days, but you're back.

And so this kingdom of God thing, you must be ready to make this kingdom of God happen, because it's all you've been talking about.

So we're ready.

And then here's what they ask in Acts 1.6.

It says, it's it's dry out now, my throat.

It says, so when they had come together, excuse, sorry, I mic'd and it's just a thing.

Acts one six.

So when they had come together, they asked him, Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?

John Calvin has one of my one of my favorite bits of commentary that he ever wrote is on this verse.

And he says, There are as many flaws in that question as there are words in the sentence.

What a dig.

That's unreal.

That's like an air, that's like a like the way Aaron Sorkin would write a dig of like somebody in a courtroom.

But uh he says, so why are there so many flaws?

Will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?

You see, the disciples were still thinking of Jesus primarily as a socio-political movement.

They still had this expectation that the kingdom of God would be primarily manifest in the overthrow of the occupation of Rome and the bringing in, wow, Krista, thank you.

That's everybody give Krista a hand, she's wonderful.

Really?

That's really sweet.

Um, so I got distracted by the water.

I'm gonna get another sip.

Remember the Marco Rubio video of him getting the water?

Little Marco.

So when they had come together, they asked him, Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?

They still thought of Jesus and his kingdom as primarily a socio-political movement.

They thought that it would move forward by force, that we would finally be able to overthrow Rome, and then Israel, the the nation itself, would then grow up just to be the next greatest Babylon.

Now, listen to Jesus' response to that.

He's a very gentle leader.

He said to them in verse seven and eight, it is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority, but you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth.

Now there's this wonderful thing we see happening here.

It's it's almost like just another level of expression of these last two parables that we've seen Jesus describe.

The parable just before the one we're looking at today, remember, is where the farmer sows the seed and then it sprouts and grows.

He knows not how.

There is some sort of other power that animates the growth of the kingdom that isn't intrinsic to human nature.

It doesn't grow by our own abilities or efforts, but instead it is empowered by the Spirit of God.

That's what makes this kingdom unique among all other kingdoms in the world.

This is why not only is Christianity the largest by sheer numbers, but it's the largest geographically.

It has no particular geographical bounds.

There is no nation or aesthetic that holds Christianity.

It spread through the whole world.

And part of the reason for this is because it is not animated by some particular culture, it is animated by the Spirit of God.

And we see that in this parable, which is in this parable just before this one, it's animated by something mysterious.

You know, Jesus doesn't make it explicit then, but he makes it explicit now.

It is the Spirit of God which empowers the disciples to become that seed which then grows.

And then so there's the that parable about the mystery of it.

And then here we see what comes first.

It's the Spirit of God will come upon you.

And then what's right after that?

It's just like this next parable, which is it's like a tiny seed that grows into a mustard plant.

And what do we see here?

It's that same outward trajectory of growth, but this time explained geographically.

It begins, you'll be my witnesses in Jerusalem.

Where are they when they're talking about this?

They're in Jerusalem.

Man.

And then it goes into Judea.

That's the region that they're in, and then into Samaria.

It's the next one over.

And then to the end of the world.

Do you see that trajectory of growth?

Where does the seed start?

Where does the seed take place?

It's right where you are, and then it spreads from there by the power of the Holy Spirit.

This is the way we should expect the kingdom of God to move, and history bears witness to it.

This happens.

It does, they are empowered by the Holy Spirit.

The seed form of the gospel in these disciples is empowered by the Holy Spirit.

It spreads into Jerusalem, and then it spreads into Samaria, and then it goes to the ends of the earth.

Example number three.

This is Paul's intro to Col in his letter to the Colossians, verses five through six.

He says, Of this you have heard before in the word of the truth, the gospel, which has come to you, as indeed in the whole world it is bearing fruit and increasing, as it also does among you, since the day you heard it and understood the grace of God in truth.

Now, this is one of my favorite verses, and I love this particularly because I want you to see what we're doing.

Uh do you see we're in the scriptures that we're following, in the order that we're following them, we're moving through this same pattern.

Okay, we see Jesus as as tending the seed with his disciples, and then we see the disciples themselves given this pattern of growth out into the world.

And then in this, uh Paul has not been to Colossi, Colossae, whatever.

He he instead, do you know who witnessed to the church in Colossi, why there is a church there?

It's a man named Epaphras.

Do you know who Epaphras is?

Exactly.

Isn't that wonderful?

It's the first century, but what did Epaphras do to this church here?

He he gave them the gospel.

He says, You've heard before the word of the truth, the gospel, which has come to you, Colossians, as indeed in the whole world it is bearing fruit and increasing, as it also does among you since the day you heard it and understood the grace of God in truth.

What is the seed?

Well, what is it?

What is this pattern that gets relayed?

It's it's the gospel.

What is the gospel?

It's it's the announcement of Jesus as our Lord and Savior that goes out into the world.

And when this seed of the gospel takes root, when this seed is sown, it bears fruit and it multiplies.

And Paul, you can see he's so internalized this way of understanding Jesus' parables and his understanding of the kingdom that he just he talks about it at every level, right?

Because you can see the multiple levels that he's thinking of it here.

He says, it it like step out, zoom out.

This got this same gospel, look at the world.

It's caught fire, it's bearing fruit and increasing all over the whole world.

And we can say that same thing now.

This gospel is bearing fruit and increasing all over the whole world.

It's the same pattern.

And then you zoom in, and he says, as it also does among you, what is it that that bears fruit and increases in a in just a local church?

What makes that happen?

Hearing and understanding the grace of God in truth.

What is it, what is it that bears fruit and multiplies?

It's when you get, when you understand the gospel.

And insofar as you understand the grace of Jesus towards you, this bears fruit and it multiplies.

It has to.

It can't not.

It's the very pattern of uh it's the very pattern of the seed.

You know, it can't grow up into anything else.

It has to, it has to grow.

That's what a mustard plant does.

The kingdom of God is the same way.

And we see that revealed here.

The kingdom of God advances by the power of the Spirit, enabling us to understand the grace of God in truth towards us, where we see what is what is the essence of this whole thing.

It is that Christ was crucified.

The gospel is the announcement of that.

And this works out at a global level.

This kingdom grows at a at a local level, like at the level of a local church, and it is the same gospel which transforms you.

As Paul, to use Paul's other language, you're transformed by the renewing of your mind.

This same gospel, this same seed is is working itself out into every nook and cranny of your life.

Oh, somebody for Pastor Appreciation Month, which it is.

I mean, not that I mean who's asking for it.

I wasn't asking for it.

It's good to see that spontaneous gave me a plaque, and it's somebody who was in some class that I taught, because otherwise I don't know how you'd know that I loved this.

But it's an Abraham Kuyper quote that says, There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Lord of all, does not cry, mine.

This is the nature of the gospel.

Jesus, the crucified one, how tiny of a seed is that, dead, you know, buried, is the Lord of all, whose kingdom, empowered by the Holy Spirit, will spread through the whole world and into every nook and cranny of existence, so that the Lord who created everything, but then by our sin was cast off, will say and does say once again, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.

It's already happened.

Go, therefore.

Make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Wait, if you already have all authority, why do we need to go?

Because it's all because it's already here, yes.

But it's not yet here.

It grows like a seed, grows into a plant.

And so you'll need to be working this out into your life from here on.

Parables uh this is when we're kind of closing our section on parables.

Parables aren't riddles.

Okay, that's one thing I want us to get.

Uh, it's not like you crack the parable code and are able to say, this parable just means this, and then you get like a parable coin or something that you can keep.

Within parables are the teachings of the creator of the universe, who's teaching us how to see and understand the world.

And so we need to have our minds transformed by them, just like Paul, who's able to speak with the same language of his own ministry, grasping that the gospel is the seed that grows.

And then we need to be able to think with this as we interpret our own lives.

And so I'm going to give you three principles for how to think with this.

Principle number one, don't despise the seed because of the plant.

Don't despise the smallness of the beginnings of the gospel.

Don't despise that you'll you'll often look out and see a gospel that seems like it's barely in mid-growth.

There is an inevitability of the gospel's growth.

And what happens is we'll get deceived into following some other plant because it looks larger right now.

And we'll say, you know what, I'm just gonna I'll switch to a different seed because that one grows better.

The seed is the gospel.

The seed is the gospel.

So what that looks like for us is patience.

You patiently move forward with the ministry of the gospel.

Point two, and I'm realizing maybe there's only one point, because my point two is don't neglect the gospel.

Something that's really important to be able to do when you don't neglect the gospel.

And this is this is a mistake that we that we often make, is we this is a a distinction that uh I'm stealing from Tim Keller, that he makes this distinction often, which is really good.

The gospel is not the results of the gospel.

The results of the gospel transformed lives, transformed communities, you know, more just societies.

Those that when the gospel takes root, those results take place.

But those results aren't the gospel.

The gospel is Jesus Christ is Lord, he became incarnate according to the scriptures, that he was crucified, died, and buried according to the scriptures, and then he rose again on the third day according to the scriptures, and by him we are renewed, atoned for, brought in.

His work, Jesus' work is the gospel.

If you aim at it, you get the results of the gospel thrown in.

If you aim primarily at the results of the gospel, you're not gonna get either.

You're gonna find yourself you've actually just switched seeds, you've switched plants.

It is not naive to think the gospel is primary.

Last, moving in faith is moving for growth.

The gospel does not retreat.

There is no place of culture, there is no place in your life which Jesus Christ, over which Jesus Christ does not claim mine.

So that means your identity, your career, your relationships, your child rearing, all of those things, all of those different levers of s of control that God has placed into your life, all of those Jesus Christ claims as.

His.

And that means that there is no retreat.

You haven't met someone who is too hard to hear the gospel.

You haven't encountered a culture that you need to retreat from because the gospel can't press forward there.

Imagine if you began to think like that.

Our culture's too far gone.

It's time to stop advancing and hunker down and retreat for a time.

Do you know what that's saying?

That's saying I wasn't that bad when I was saved.

So part of me being saved really is me being not that bad.

That is not the gospel.

The gospel is we are dead in our trespasses and sins.

Christ saves us.

So the gospel is always aiming towards movement forward.

It's always growing.

That's what we should anticipate.

Growth by the gospel.

All right, see if there are any questions.

Does the part so the birds of the air can make nests in its shade?

The end of verse 32 refer to Jesus' returning to reign on a redeemed earth.

No, I don't I don't think that's the reference there, although that will happen, but I don't think that's what that is particularly referring to.

I think that's referring to uh if we were to put something particular on it, I'd put my money on the inclusion of the Gentiles.

So the birds uh represent the inclusion of the Gentiles, as we saw in that Daniel, as shown in that Daniel 4 passage, where the same analogy is used of a kingdom whose branches bring in other nations, which are like represented as birds.

Um but here's what we have to look forward to.

Jesus will come and reign in the new heavens and the new earth.

And it the kingdom of God does not retreat until he comes.

The kingdom of God advances until he comes.

You know, the Great Commission is our the Great Commission was not just like a uh like maybe this will happen, maybe all nations.

Uh no, it's a it's a command and a promise uh that the gospel will go forward.

So, so take this up as a as a vision for the gospel in your life.

Lay before Christ the areas of your life that you that you need his grace in, that it hasn't taken place yet, the areas in your workplace, in the cult in the culture uh where you see this needs redemption by the gospel.

Uh lean into those.

Uh this is the there's there's no time for retreat.

Now let's take communion, and then we'll wrap up for today.

In 1 Corinthians 11, beginning in verse twenty twenty-three, Paul said, For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you.

That the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks he broke it and said, This is my body which is for you.

Do this in remembrance of me.

In the same way also he took the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new covenant in my blood.

Do this as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.

For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.

We center on this every week, and we invite all the Christians here to the table.

If you're not a Christian, we'd ask you to abstain.

And the reason is because part of this is a proclamation of the Lord's death until he comes.

What is the Lord's death?

It is the seed that was buried into the earth and then grows.

He is the seed.

Jesus is the one who dies that we might experience new life.

And so we come to partake of the feast that we know will take place in the future, and it'll be a glorious feast of all nations, all tribes, all tongues together in the kingdom of God.

And today we get that shoots back from the future till now.

And we get a glimpse of that as we take communion today.

Holy Father, pray that you would uh call us to your table with joy, helping us to recognize in our hearts the work that you are doing by the power of your gospel.

We pray that your name would be proclaimed and made glorious throughout the whole world and into every nook and cranny of our lives.

Lord, you are King.

You are a gracious and good King, and we praise you for that.

We lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.