Luke 8:4-15
Our scripture reading today is
from Luke’s gospel. It’s from chapter eight, and
we will be reading and considering verses four through 15. Let us hear God’s word together.
And when a great crowd was gathering and people from town after town
came to him, Jesus said in a parable. A sower went out to sow his seed. And as he sowed, some fell along
the path and was trampled underfoot. And the birds of the air devoured
it and some fell on the rock. And as it grew up, it withered
away because it had no moisture. And some fell among the thorns
and the thorns grew up with it and choked it. And some fell
into good soil and it grew and it yielded a hundredfold. And
as he said these things, he called out, he who has ears to hear.
Let him hear. And when his disciples asked
him what this parable meant, he said to you, it has been given
to know the secrets of the kingdom of God. But for others, they
are in parables so that seeing they may not see and hearing
they may not understand. Now, the parable is this. The
seed is the word of God. The ones along the path are those
who have heard. And the devil comes and takes
away the word from their hearts and they may not believe and
be saved. And the ones on the rock are
those who, when they hear the word, receive it with joy, but
these have no root. They believe for a while, and
in a time of testing, they fall away. As for what fell among
the thorns, they are those who hear, but as they go on their
way, they are choked by the cares and riches and pleasures of life,
and their fruit does not mature. As for that in the good soil,
they are those who hearing the word, hold it fast in an honest
and good heart and bear fruit with patience. Amen. This is God’s word. Let us pray
together. Almighty and everlasting God,
we recognize that without the help of your Holy Spirit, we
cannot see. We cannot understand and we cannot
believe your scripture. It has no value for us. Well, in fact, it does. It only
condemns us. And so we pray now that you would
you would rescue us from condemnation. Let us who hear your word today,
let us see it, hear it, believe it, understand it. And most of
all, let us put it into practice in our lives for your glory,
for our good, and also for the good of our neighbors. We ask
it and pray it in Jesus name, amen. Yesterday as our family
made it around to a handful of events for our children, we bumped
into people where the inevitable conversation was, oh, where do
you go to church? And so we began to explain and
they always want to know what is an ARP. All right, what is
an ARP? What is an associate reformed
Presbyterian? Well, it depends on who’s asking
and who’s giving the answer what you can say. If you ask me, I’ll
give you the long 200 and some Scottish history of our denomination. And I’ll say all kinds of things.
Some of you may give other answers. You may speak of your experience
in this congregation, this ARP congregation and other things.
And some of you land somewhere in between. But one of the wonderful
distinctions about our denomination, one of the reasons that our forebears
left the Church of Scotland in the 1700s was over the, what
would you call it? The argument or the fuss, the
hullabaloo, I’m not thinking of the right word today, over
the problem of do we offer the gospel to all? Or as Calvinist,
as reformed Protestants that we were back in those days and
still are today, do we only preach the gospel to the elect? Well,
the second question is really not a question at all, because
which of us knows who is elect? Only God knows. He only knows
the secrets of the heart. And so we are called to preach
the gospel. We are called to proclaim the
gospel. We are called, as our parable calls it today, to sow
the seed. And as Jesus explains, the seed
will fall, some on the path, some on the rocks. Some in the
briars and others will fall on good soil. And so we have this
rich history in our denomination of the free offer of the gospel. Well, it’s not just in our church
history. It’s in the history of the church. It’s in the history of salvation
for Jesus explains in this parable that we offer, we sow the seed
of the gospel freely. Now to understand this parable,
you have to understand for a moment about a field in Palestine. We
today can go over to the tractor store and we can buy this giant
Case International or John Deere or whatever brand of tractor,
and we can put all these tools and implements on it. And we
can go out into the field and with an afternoon of riding in
an air conditioned cab and a little bit of diesel fuel, we can plow
up the earth and turn over the soil. and make acre after acre,
even in our own state, thousands and millions of acres of land
arable, ready for planting. But not so in ancient Israel.
Can you imagine, as some of you I’m sure know what it is to hoe
a little patch? We may even have a small hand
tiller and we know what difficult work it is to turn over the soil,
to put oxygen in, to put nutrients in, to replenish it with organic
materials in order that it might be a fruitful piece of land. Well, you can imagine with lack
of modern tools. There was no Lowe’s home improvement
to go replace the hoe or the shovel or the pickaxe. It was,
it was handwork. It was difficult work. And so
you can imagine the picture of this field. It was a small patch
of land and it had been turned over and was ready to be sewn.
And as the, the, the earth had been turned over, the rocks were
tossed to the side. And so in this field that was
ready for planting, around the edge would have been the briars.
and the rocks. And then somewhere around the
perimeter of the field would have been a pathway where people
would have made their way through the Judean countryside. And so
you can see how this parable, this picture that Jesus is giving
was something that was always before their eyes. It would be
as common as Jesus giving a parable in your day about the grocery
store. or about the shopping mall or
about the roadway or about something that you experience in everyday
life. It’s been said, and it’s probably
true, that as Jesus gave this parable, we remember the very
beginning of the early verses of our passage for the day, lots
and lots of people, town after town, came and gathered around
Jesus. And you can imagine that as the
crowd gathered, somewhere in viewing distance from all of
them was a sower in a field where there was good soil, where there
were also briars and sticker bushes, we might call them, and
also piles of rocks that had been tossed out of the good soil. And so you can imagine this parable
was living. It was right before their eyes
in high definition. And so Jesus tells them this
parable. And you’ll notice also that Jesus
pulls his disciples aside to explain the parable. So there’s
a wider audience. And then he pulls his disciples
off to the side to explain. And there are four types of ground,
the seed the gospel is placed on. First, there’s the path.
The word of God tells us that the sower sows the seed, which
is the gospel on the path. the path that surrounds the field.
It’s trampled and the birds pick it up and devour it. Some of
you actually spend money to feed your birds, don’t you? You have
the feeders and you buy the wild bird seed and you keep them busy
and they bring you great joy at your kitchen window, your
breakfast window, your dining window, your den window, and
you take great joy in that. But what if you had sown that
seed and intended for it to grow? You would not want those birds
to pick up The seed, you would call him a thief. That is exactly
what is taking place here. The thief, Satan, has come and
he has picked up. He has picked up the seed that
was sown, the gospel that has been sown. Some of you have your
yards broadcast spread every fall with grass seed. And the
problem with that is while it fills up your yard with seed
and we reap that harvest of a good, healthy lawn, it gets in our
flower beds. So as maybe some of you have
been doing, I’ve been doing the last several days, I’ve been
going in the flower beds and plucking out the grass by the
roots, hopefully of the seed that got spread into those outer
edges of the yard and into the natural areas. But what happens
here? we’re told by Jesus, grabs the
seed, it may not even have the chance to grow. It may not have
the chance at all to bear gospel fruit in the life of this person. And this, this matches our theology,
doesn’t it? We know from other places in
the scripture that all of us who are born in Adam, that’s
every one of us, all of us who are born in Adam are born dead
in our sins and trespasses. We are under the dominion of
Satan. And do you think Satan wants
the seed of the gospel sown into the lives of those he has captured? Absolutely not. He is desperate
to make God and his people miserable. And since Satan in heaven fell
a millennia ago, he has been constantly trying to stop the
people of God. We see that manifest in the early
chapters of Job, We see it also in the garden in Genesis chapter
three and God promises Adam and Eve. He tells us in his word,
there is going to be a continual battle of the seed of the woman,
the seed of Eve and the seed of the serpent nipping at each
other’s heels. But God, the seed of the woman
will come and he will crush Satan’s head. Excuse me. Many will hear the gospel. many
will see the gospel. But as Jesus explains this parable
to us, many will see the gospel, hear the gospel, but they will
not believe the gospel or come under its saving power because
the devil keeps them in his way and in his path. One of the things
we speak about in the work of redemption is that Jesus is our
ransom. He saves us from Satan’s power. He rescues us from his chains. And so the seed that falls on
the path, it is devoured by Satan. It never enters the hearts or
the minds of the people of God. Now, this passage is speaking
to us preachers. It’s telling us preachers. It’s
telling Jesus’ disciples, you’ll scatter seed. And some of it
will not even reach the minds and hearts of the people because
Satan will snatch it up. Does that not make preaching
a supernatural event? Preaching is an event where Satan
and Christ are battling for your minds and your hearts. We don’t
see it. We sit here in this nice, comfortable
room. We sit here safe and comfortable, we feel. But there is this cosmic
battle under the preaching of the word. It’s why most preachers
on about Saturday afternoon, three, four o’clock, this holy
dread comes over them. And the holy dread is not because
they haven’t had enough time to do their sermon for some,
it may be. It’s not because they got to go to work the next morning.
This holy dread is because before the people of God and in the
cosmic realm of the universe there the next day, especially
under the preaching of God’s word, there will be this battle
for will that seed fall or will it be snatched up? And preachers
today think they’re so cute, don’t they? They think they’re
so powerful and so persuasive. They think that if all they have
to do, they just have to get up and give their gift of gab
and the people will flock to the Lord Jesus. Now there’s this
cosmic battle taking place. And many who hear the sound of
God’s voice through the reading and preaching of his word, they
will reject it because Satan snatches up that seed. Well, there’s a second soil,
there’s a second way the seed falls, it falls on the rock. And the scripture tells us that
this seed which falls among the rocks that have been plucked
out of the good soil, they’ve been tossed to the side, the
seed falls and it grows for a little while. There’s enough to germinate
it and sprout it, but it has no moisture and it withers. There’s a correct way to plant
things. We read about it in our Southern
Living magazines through the Grumpy Gardener. We read about
it in our, usually I believe it’s our Saturday edition of
the Times News with our local farm extension expert, Mr. Ritt, I believe is his name.
We read about what to do with our plants, when to put them
in the ground, when not to plant, when to put on our herbicide,
when to put on our fertilizers. We read all of these things.
Well, there’s a correct way to plant a plant. And dear friends,
it is not in the rocks. If you go to Lowe’s or your favorite
home store and you pick up some plants, you’ll get a plant planting
guide. You dig a hole that’s usually
deeper than the root ball. You dig a hole that’s usually
wider than the root ball. You chop up the soil. You put
a little peat moss in there. You add some enriched soil. And
then you plant your plant, and you put the dirt on just right,
and you water it just right. And you’ve got to do it not only
that right way, but you’ve got to do it at the right time, for
the heat can scorch it. And in order for the gospel to
get a right response, it cannot be planted in the rocks for it
cannot root. It cannot reach down and get
moisture. And so what happens as the heat comes, the weather
comes, the wind comes. We see it in our gardens, in
our yards, a little sprout that came up. We know it won’t last
because it’s not in good soil. It’s in rocks. It’s in the rubble.
It’s in the driveway crack. And a little testing will come
as comes to this one who the seed falls among the rock. And
we walk away is what Jesus is saying. We apostatize to use
the word from the letter to the Hebrews. We see this from time
to time in the church. You will have someone they’ll
come in the doors and they’ll experience the life of the church
and and they’ll be rah rah. This is great. This is the best.
I’ve decided to follow Jesus. And they’re here for six weeks,
eight weeks. And they they sound committed.
They act committed. And all of a sudden they’re gone.
One week, two weeks, three weeks, and we reach out and say, so
and so, where are you? Where have you been? Well, This
happened and that happened and this happened. And, you know,
we want to understand and be charitable, right? But most often
the case is this. Jesus sounded great until trials
came. Jesus sounded wonderful until
temptations came. And like the seed that falls
upon the rocks, the cost of following Jesus fades away. This person not quickened, this
person not called by the Holy Spirit, this person. This person
responded outwardly, but not inwardly to the seed, which is
the gospel. There’s a third place where the
seed falls, it falls among the thorns, it falls in the briars. And the word of God tells us
that it grew, it grew until it became choked. You know, a lot
of us are distracted, especially in the age of iPhones. We use Verizon for our mobile
phone service, and the iPhone came a little late to Verizon.
We wanted to keep Verizon, and so we waited for iPhones to come.
And I can remember in March of 2011, this is a big day for us. iPhones, we wanted one. Our friends
who had AT&T, they had had them for a couple years, and we just
We’re jealous and salivating until it came to our carrier. But you know, that little iPhone
is wonderful as it is. It’s good to take pictures and
videos and read your Bible and listen to podcasts and check
your emails and get your map directions to this place and
that. They’re wonderful, but they sure have made idiots of
us. They have ruined our brains where we cannot think. We reach
for the pocket, we do the phone grab, we press the button and
hundreds of times per day, we find ourselves distracted by
this little two year old child that’s in our pockets. We’re
distracted. And that’s what Jesus is speaking
of here when he says the seed falls among the briars and It’s
choked and the plant can’t reach full maturity because it’s not
fed. It’s not nurtured. It’s not cared
for. And you think about the things that choke out the gospel
seed from our Christian lives. I’ve watched it in my generation.
I’ve watched a Sabbath keeping Southern culture turn into what
today is a seven percent a year decline in church attendance.
There’s a lot of reasons, I’m sure. It’s a seven day week now. It’s no longer a six and one
cycle. Sunday blue laws went out the
doors in the early 1980s. And so you could get gas on Sundays.
You could go to the mall on Sundays. You could get groceries. You
could eat out on Sundays. But then sports teams popped
up. And then we decided we needed
to get ahead in life. And so we wanted to work more
and then pleasure called. And so we got a place up in the
mountains or a place down on the lake or a place down at the
coast. And pretty soon before long, every generation has had
something that has choked out the gospel from their lives.
I can worship God anywhere, we say. But eight, 10, 12, 15 weeks
out of the year, your family begins to suffer. Oh, but they’re
good at soccer. Eight, 10, 12 weeks a year, your
family begins to suffer, but boy, the mountains were pretty,
or the lake was pristine, or we got the kids up on water skis,
or the grandkids, and there is nothing wrong with those are
all wonderful things. I love the mountains. I love
the lake. I love soccer. Those are good things. But dear
friends, they are not the best things. And sometimes we let
good things choke out the best thing, and Jesus is speaking
of the cost. It’s costly to follow him, and
we need a steady diet of his word. We need a steady diet of
his word in private, at the family table, in morning and evening
church, and now through podcast and audios and daily devotionals
and all sorts of ways we can get our minds and our hearts
full of God’s word. Jesus here is speaking. of the
seed falling, but it falls in the midst of busyness, the brambles,
and it chokes out and we don’t mature. Well, who is Jesus speaking
to? Well, he pulls his disciples
aside and says, in a sense, brothers, look at this big crowd. Look
at all these people who’ve come from town after town, who have
filled the Judean countryside to hear this Jesus of Nazareth.
I want you to understand something Jesus is saying. Not all who
hear the word will respond and not all who hear the word will
respond the same. Now, we haven’t gotten to the
good soil yet, but some some will hear and believe and grow.
Others will hear and things will choke it out. Others will hear
and it will grow quickly. The heat will come and the plant
will die. Others will hear, but Satan will snatch it. This is
the first of Jesus parables. And so he explains the purpose
of a parable. A parable is literally to come alongside of. It’s to
throw alongside. And so Jesus takes an eternal
truth in an everyday life situation. He takes the eternal truth of
casting the seed of the gospel and throws it alongside the man,
probably somewhere in the distance within eyesight, who is in a
field sowing seed. And he says to his disciples,
it is given to you to know the secrets of the kingdom. You have
eyes to see. You have ears that hear. You
have a heart that understands. You have hands and feet that
will go and do the work of the kingdom. But he says, I speak
in the secrets of parables. And then he quotes Isaiah’s commission,
he says, you will preach to Israel. You will preach to hard hearted
Israel so that seeing they may not see and hearing they may
not understand. Jesus is really telling the disciples,
remember Isaiah’s call. You’ve heard about it in the
synagogue as it’s been read. That’s your same call. You’re
going to proclaim to a people who don’t want what you’re selling.
It’s going to harden their hearts and bring the judgment of almighty
God. This is the reality on the ground,
dear friends, of us sowing the seed. Some of you have probably
signed up before to sell something. I had a paper route when I was
a kid. Some of you have probably done
the makeup thing, or the oil thing, or the whatever it is. We get bamboozled into these
little schemes, don’t we? And we’re told, you just get
out there and let your personality melt people’s hearts, and you’ll
be dishing it up by the cases. And that sometimes works, right? But not so with the gospel. Could
you imagine what it would be like to be a preacher and to
preach 40 or 50 years of your life and to really see no fruit
from your ministry as you look back? That’s the case of a lot
of men in history. They preached, they went, they
served, they proclaimed, but little took place because of
the parable of the soils and its truth. And so Isaiah’s call,
the call of the disciples, the parable of the sower is a reality
on the ground. It’s a warning to us preachers.
Don’t think everybody who hears you is going to get it. Don’t
think everybody who hears what you’re peddling is going to buy
it. It’s a challenge to you, though. It’s a challenge to you
who sit within the hearing of God’s word. It’s the fine print.
And we’re going to tell you the fine print Jesus is saying. Let’s
be practical for just a moment. You need to pray for preachers
because preachers are doing a divine battle day after day, week after
week. Satan would like to snatch the
seed of the gospel. But God wants to implant it in
the hearts of people, pray for your preachers, pray for their
preparation, pray that they will study and be blessed so that
they can communicate what God has taught them. Pray for the
event of preaching. I have my great grandmother’s
old Book of Common Worship from her Episcopalian days. And taped
on the inside of it, it has a newspaper article that’s probably 70, 80
years old. It’s crispy and brown and old
and folded and broken up now. But it has an article, 10 Rules
for Worship by Charlie Shedd. And one of the 10 rules for worship
is this, I pray for my preacher as he is preaching. You ever
thought of that? I pray for him. I know some of
you are. You’re praying and looking at your watch and saying, will
he ever get done? And that’s not the kind of praying
I’m meaning. It will do you no good. Four years now you have
seen that. But pray for preaching. When
you’re somewhere else, pray for the preacher. He is in the midst
of divine battle. Listen up. This is the only religion
in the world where a group of people sits quietly and listens
to one mouth. It is strange, but the Bible
tells us over and over that faith comes through hearing and hearing
the word of Almighty God. When you come to church, listen. And that is so hard to do. You
may have to figure out how to train yourself. We went through
as parents raising little ones, mostly my wife, because I’ve
been up here and she’s been down there with the kids, but we went
through parenting in the pew. Some of you adults need to read
parenting in the pew and apply it to your adult lives. And I
don’t mean that in a negative way. It’s just a good practice.
Learn to sit and listen. We’re like, we’re like a puppy
dog in a field full of rabbits. We don’t know which one to chase.
but we chase one and then when we get tired of chasing that,
we chase the next one. That’s what these iPhones have done for us. Bring
a piece of paper to church, bring a pencil, listen, write key words,
learn how to listen up, take notes, get rid of distractions. I’m gonna step on a few toes
here, but that’s okay. You’ve got 10 of them. Bring a real
Bible to church. These little Apple devices are
wonderful, but they also got the Facebook on them. They got
the text message on them. They got the weather on them.
They got the ding dings and the buzz buzz and all that. And guess
what? You’re reading your Bible, being
all holy and reading Isaiah six and Luke eight. And next thing
you know, you’re lost in Facebook world in God’s house. Leave it in the car, put it on
airplane mode, get out your real paper Bible and follow God’s
word that way. I don’t want to be legalistic
about that, but it’ll, it’ll help you. It’ll, it’ll serve
you better. Now, if you’re a tablet person
and a note taker, Work out your salvation with fear and trembling.
That’s all good. But get rid of distractions because
Satan wants to snatch the word. He doesn’t want a sermon on marriage
to fix your home. He doesn’t want a sermon on being
faithful in your old age to hit home. He doesn’t want God’s word
to encourage you to live a Christ centered life, to land. He wants
to snatch it and he wants you to keep on living for yourself.
And you need to be careful of distractions. Finally, pray the
word will do its work. Say to the Lord, here I am, Lord.
I know that your word is sharper than any two edged sword. It
cuts to the joints and marrows. You know me and I know me. You
know me better than I know me. And you know what your word needs
to do in my life. And so I come here today to say,
here I am, an open book. Cut me up. Open me up. Remove and fill. with good things. And Jesus speaks here about the
good soil. He speaks about the disciple that loves the word
and wants to live the word. And he speaks of this good soil.
The seed of the gospel falls on this good soil. And that person
hears the gospel. He holds fast with an honest
and good heart. And he bears fruit with patience. Dear friends, the Christian life
is not easy. The Christian life is not fast. The Christian life
is, little by little, every day, as one theologian in recent years
has put it, it’s a long obedience in the same direction. And that’s
why it’s simple, the Christian life. We worship God on Sundays
here in our context. We have church morning and evening.
We sit in Sunday school. We have these Bible studies.
We give you table talk. We like to buy these Reformation
study Bibles and pass them around. We sneak other little resources
into your life and we say, here’s your chance to grow. Now do it. Let the seed of the gospel fall
on good soil, hold fast to it with an honest and good heart
that you might bear fruit with patience. Jesus says to us, let
him who has ears hear. But we might add to that, let
him who has ears who hears believe and let him who has ears who
hears and believes Obey the word of God. Let us pray together. Our Lord and God, we thank you
so much for the way of the Christian living. You put it into terms
we can understand. And we recognize this day that
Satan doesn’t want us to hear your word. We recognize that
the rocks and rubble will cause quick but false growth. We also
recognize that our love for this world, our busyness, our cares
are like thorns and thistles. We don’t like thorns and thistles
and neither does a word because it gets choked out. So help us
today to be those who hold fast with an honest and good heart
to your good gospel seed. And let us bear fruit with patience,
showing you that we have ears to hear and to believe and to
obey all for the sake of Christ. And we ask it in his name, amen.