Lord God, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be pleasing and honorable to you, O Lord our God, our rock and our redeemer.
All right, this morning we're going to be studying Luke chapter 8. It's taken us a long time to get to Luke chapter 8 as we've been following this through scripture, and this is in the narrative of Luke, I believe. I didn't actually check this, but I feel like I think it's right to say this is the first parable that we're encountering. Yeah, I'm pretty sure. It's the first parable that we're encountering in the book of Luke. It's the first time that we hear Jesus use a story like this to reveal God's truth. And so what I'm going to do this morning is kind of work through the text. I'm going to read a little bit, which you have the text in your bulletin. It should be in there anyways, and you can follow along there, and I'll read a portion and reflect on it and read a little bit more, and we'll kind of work through it like that. Okay?
All right, so we're going to start with the first few verses. Starting at verse number four. "While a large crowd was gathering and people were coming to Jesus from town after town, he told this parable. A farmer went out to sow his seed. As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path. It was trampled on and the birds ate it up. Some fell on rocky ground, and when it came up, the plants withered because there was no moisture. Other seed fell among the thorns, which grew up with it and choked the plants. Still other seed fell on good soil. It came up and yielded a crop a hundred times more than what was sown."
Now, we're going to stop there. Okay, no reading ahead. I see some of you are reading ahead. No reading ahead. Okay? We could stop there. We could be finished there. Maybe we could just wrap it up right there. We have the story about a sower, a picture that was common to the people of that time. It would have been someone walking along a path in a field with some kind of grain-holding satchel on the front, and they would be sprinkling grain, and there'd be a well-trodden path for where you throw grain from, and this is kind of the process, a picture that would have been clear to all the original hearers. A very plain and simple story.
And we could just stop right there with the story. And then maybe we could say amen. Thanks be to God. That's maybe what Reverend Rollwage would say at the end of his messages, as we see him do these things, right? And we could be done. There's the message. That's it. That would seem strange, because all we have is a story. We don't have an explanation. We don't have anything else. Just a story.
But the reality is we can almost picture it, and it's easier to picture because we're outside. Jesus was speaking to a large crowd. Okay, there's people coming from all different towns and they're gathered around, and Jesus is standing there and he tells this story. And this is all the crowd gets. You will see as we read on that that's the end of the public speaking portion of Jesus' engagement. What was that like for those people? To receive this story and no context, no explanation.
I imagine that struck different people differently. I'm sure that many, and we see this in the crowds that follow Jesus, many of them are there for the sensational Jesus. They're there for the guy who's doing miracles. That's why they traveled so far. Have you heard about this homeless teacher who's healing people? Have you heard how he stands up to the religious leaders and kind of puts them in their place and they don't have anything to say back? Have you heard about the teachings that he's doing and feeding multitudes of people? Have you heard about this? We should go see this.
The ones that are there for the sensational Jesus, they probably hear this story and they don't think too much. They just kind of, okay, well, that's not what I was here for anyways. It's probably in one ear and out the other. It's not too big of a deal. It's something they didn't understand or didn't get, but that doesn't matter, because that wouldn't be a good story to tell their friends when they got home anyways. There's nothing sensational or special about the story.
And maybe we can relate to this idea, because we too are people who are seeking Jesus. We too are people who should be going out of our way to meet Jesus, to learn from Jesus, to encounter Jesus. And as we go out of our way, how do we do that? How do we go out of our way to find God, to experience and see God? What does that look like for us?
Well, God's revelation, it's where God reveals himself to us. And one of the primary ways that this is done is through scripture, through God's word. We are called to study scripture. This is something that those who are encountering Jesus, going out of your way to meet Jesus, it means reading your Bible. And so we know this, right? And many of us give this a try. Many of us do this diligently. Some of us have even tried reading the Bible cover to cover.
Right? You start with Genesis, pretty exciting and engaging stuff. You get the whole creation narrative and it's a lot of stories that are really practical, and you can start to understand what this means or what this is about. You can read the book of Exodus, and this is a good one too. Lots of narrative and pretty engaging. Hollywood even makes movies about this stuff. But then you get to Leviticus and Numbers and Deuteronomy and books like Song of Solomon, or these minor prophets who just seem to be yelling all the time. And it doesn't make a lot of sense. It's hard to understand. In fact, it might be a little bit like a parable. It's like hearing a story with no context. And there's no way to know what it means or to understand what to do with it.
And what are the responses to that? Well, we could say, I don't know, I just don't get much out of scripture. It doesn't make a lot of sense. And we can carry on and we can continue to look for the sensational Jesus. Maybe we give up on reading scripture because it's like a parable we don't understand, so we turn to powerful worship experiences. Maybe we think the best way for us to encounter God is through a dynamic and gifted worship leader or preacher. Someone who can hold our attention for 20 minutes, maybe throw in a few jokes, keep us entertained. This is how God reveals himself. This is how and where we're willing to go out of our way to encounter Christ. And scripture is just stories out of context.
Let's read on another verse here. This is the latter half of verse eight. "When he said this, he called out, whoever has ears to hear, let them hear." All right, Jesus has just told the story. He's told it to the masses. He hasn't explained himself. He hasn't made clear what he's trying to say. And he says, "Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear."
This is how Jesus reveals himself when he has a large crowd. It's probably not how I would choose to do it. I mean, imagine if a council member called me this week and said, "Brad, I just got really exciting news. There is a Christian conference in town. There's 10,000 people descending on PEI, and I just looked on their website for registration, and they're recommending that everybody goes to the CRC on Sunday morning." I'm like, oh, this is perfect. We got an outdoor service. We got tons of room. I imagine I probably would spend a good deal of extra time preparing for all of these people. I would want to make sure that I'm engaging. I would want to make sure that I hold people's attention and that I have a really good message. Jesus has throngs of people around him and he tells a story without explaining it, and he says, "If you have ears to hear, hear."
Next verse. Verse nine. We can imagine the public portion is completed now, and now Jesus is left with his closer followers. "His disciples asked him what this parable meant." What's the difference between Jesus' closest followers and the masses, the large collection of people? Is it that Jesus' followers have an innate sense of what the parable means? They hear the story and they're like, oh, because we're good followers of Jesus, we know what this means. We don't need an explanation, we understand. No. No. They ask. They're as confused by it as everybody else. But they ask. They know that they don't understand and they know there's something wrong with that. They're not willing to just resonate with the sensational Jesus. When Jesus tells a story that they don't understand, they know there's something wrong with them, and they would do well to know more. And so they ask Jesus.
Next verse. He said, "The knowledge of the secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you, but to others I speak in parables so that through seeing they may not see, through hearing they may not understand." All right. So Jesus, in responding to them asking for some meaning to this parable, he doesn't immediately answer the question. He starts to explain what's going on here. He acknowledges this tension that we're seeing and experiencing in the text. He names it. He says, I'm doing this on purpose. This is not a mistake. I'm not confusing people. I'm not being mysterious. There is a purpose to what I'm doing.
And he gives reference to Isaiah 6:9. And as you study scripture, it's quite easy to see that. They always put the little letters next to the words, and you can look at the bottom and it tells you the text. You don't need to be a pastor to figure that out. And then you can just simply flip, if you have the question, you can flip back to Isaiah 6, and then you can see, oh, this is the story of Isaiah's calling. Isaiah 6 is where there's this vision Isaiah has where he's sitting before God, and he experiences and encounters God. He also experiences and encounters himself. So he's like, wow, God's amazing, and I'm not very good, and I don't feel good about myself at all right now, and I don't know how I could ever follow this God. And then God says, I'm choosing you to speak for me. And he lifts Isaiah up. And then he gives him a purpose. He says, Isaiah, I'm going to send you out to speak my message, but the people are not going to hear. They're not going to understand.
And Jesus references exactly this. Now, if you remember from two weeks ago in the message that I preached on John, this was John the Baptist's criticism of Jesus. Right? John the Baptist said, Jesus, you're no different than the prophets. You're just repeating the same cycles. And Jesus in a way is acknowledging that, that the same things are happening. God is revealing himself through Jesus Christ, and yet people are missing the message.
And what this does is it shows and illustrates the condition of hearts. For those of the masses that showed up and heard Jesus' story and simply walked away and went home with stories about miracles and healings and totally forgot about this parable, the condition of their heart is they're not ready to listen. They're not impacted by the truth of the gospel. And the others who also didn't understand are troubled by their lack of understanding and they investigate. They ask Jesus for clarity. That's what Jesus is highlighting here.
All right. Verse 11. Now he goes on to explain the parable. "This is the meaning of the parable. The seed is the word of God." The seed is the word of God. This is where it starts to get really interesting, because Jesus is saying the parable that I told is illustrated in the response to the parable that I told. I'm telling people, I'm giving the word of God, and it hits people differently. It's received differently. It's incredible when you see what's happening here as Jesus is explaining this and as people are realizing that what he's talking about is happening in real time.
This also connects incredibly well with Reverend Rollwage's message from last week, which was neat for me as I was studying and preparing this week. Last week, Reverend Rollwage talked a lot about the scriptures of God, the word of God being a light that illuminates our path. Something that helps us to see and have knowledge and understanding of God, and he urged us to study scripture. He told us to read our Bibles. He encouraged us to gather as families after meals and do Bible study. He encouraged us as a church to study the Bible.
Let's keep reading, verse 12. "Those along the path are the ones who hear. And then the devil comes and takes away the word from their hearts, so that they may not believe and be saved. And those on the rocky ground are the ones who receive the word with joy when they hear it, but they have no root. They believe for a while, but in the time of testing, they fall away. The seed that fell among the thorns stands for those who hear as they go on their way, they are choked by life's worries, riches, and pleasures, and they do not mature. But the seed on good soil stands for those with a noble and good heart who hear the word, retain it, and by persevering produce a good crop."
Jesus shares four different responses to the seed, which is the word of God. And this is four conditions of the heart. And as we inspect these, we can probably see ourselves in a few of them, one of them, most, maybe all of them.
So the first one is the seed on the path, which the birds come and pluck away and people trample with their feet. And Jesus says, this is like the word of God that is offered, but then Satan gets in the way. Sometimes we don't like talking about, you know, evil powers. We like to be taken more seriously maybe by the world than that. We want to be rational. We want to say things that make sense, things we can prove. And so we don't talk a lot about spiritual warfare. But it's real. The devil is real. Satan is real and is at work in this world, actively working against the word of God. And Jesus acknowledges that.
And we can see this in our life. We can see this since the beginning of Genesis when we fell into sin. We see how death and decay, we can see how people fighting with other people creates suffering. It creates a scenario where it's hard for people to receive the word of God. And I think in this instance there's judgment, of course, but there's also compassion. For all of us who have experienced the challenges that Satan puts against us in this life. Conflict with family members or loved ones. When people who we've let get close to us, people we're vulnerable with, when they hurt us, that's the work of the devil. Actively present in this world. Illness that we face, violence that we see in our world, this is Satan attacking the word of God.
The second instance. Rock below the surface. So it says rocky soil. From my understanding from the commentaries, in first century Israel, the soil in some areas there was like a thin layer of topsoil with kind of like a rocky layer just beneath. And so the image is the seed that lands and it germinates, and as it starts to come up, there's no ability for it to take root. There's no ability for it to establish a real foundation.
And we can imagine what this looks like too. This is those who hear and experience the word of God and it all sounds good and it makes a lot of sense. But then when life gets hard, when troubles happen, there is no foundation to prevent that seed from being destroyed. Maybe what this looks like is those that are raised in the church, and they're given really good answers to some theological questions. And then something really hard happens in your life, and those answers just don't cut it anymore. And we have to really wrestle with what happens in that situation.
And for some, they simply walk away. When the answers that they received in Sunday school no longer stand up to the experiences that they're facing in real life. For some this means going to university and encountering a science class that's showing all these things and they're like, what? Why didn't my church tell me this? How does this fit with God? For some, it's getting out in the world and realizing, oh, I was told I can't do all this stuff. I'm doing all this stuff, and I'm having a lot of fun. And it doesn't seem to be causing me too much trouble at all. There's lots of different ways that the seed is not able to take good root.
The third one, thorns. Thorns that tangle the seed. What I find really interesting about this one is Jesus says three things. He says worries, riches, and pleasures are like the thorns that strangle the word, the seed, the word of God. What's really interesting about that is you find worries, which we know is negative, anxiety, worrying about tomorrow. This is okay, we know this. This is something we have to be careful with. And then riches and pleasures, good things, are held in the same breath. They're both seen as things that stand against the word of God, things that choke out the word of God.
And I think we can see this in our lives. In fact, I think for our culture here in North America as churched people, this is probably, if we're going to blanket all of us together, which we have to be careful doing of course, but it's one that we would struggle with quite a bit. We are blessed with so much. We have been given so much. It is very easy to do this life without having to rely on God. You can get through this life. You can have friends, you can have money, you can have an excellent job, you can have popularity, you can be defined as successful. You can have all of these things without relying on God at all. And I think this is a big reason why we have seen Christianity on a decline in wealthy countries, why we're seeing struggles in our own context, and why the global South Christianity is on the rise.
And the fourth condition of the heart and situation that Jesus explains is the good soil. What's interesting about a seed in good soil is there is a cultivation process that happens. The path in early Israel wasn't like a concrete path. It was just a well-walked path. It was the path from which you scattered seed. It was soil that wasn't a lot different than the good soil. It was just walked on a lot. It was packed down and hard. The good soil is cultivated. When that seed hits the good soil in a turned up soil, there's an opportunity, an intimate opportunity for the two to mesh and to work together. This is what happens with seed in good soil.
And if you think about that cultivation process for soil, it's a bit of a violent process. Less so when you're watching these big tractors move through the field, but if you've ever had to do it in your own garden and you can't borrow your father-in-law's rototiller and you have to do it by hand, man, it's a decent amount of work. And you have to really turn up that soil. So this is not an easy process, but it is a good process. And this is where Jesus says the seed, the word of God, takes root.
We are called to be cultivated Christians. We're called to be in a place of good soil where we allow ourselves to be turned over, where we don't simply accept what we've been told every time we encounter a problem that upsets what we already believe. We're called into learning more and doing more.
And then Jesus says this produces a good crop. I think when I was originally thinking of this message, I was kind of picturing a fruit tree. Like a seed that is, you know, put down and it grows into this beautiful tree and then off comes the fruit. And that is an image that's used in scripture, but it's not this image. And I often associate the seed with the fruit as an individualistic principle. Right? From seed to fruit. But I think this image, it's more about producing a grain field, which is really about multiplying the seed. It's about seeing God's word spread throughout creation. And that is our job. Our job is to spread the word as it is spread in us. Our job is to live into the calling that God has for us.
So I think it would be wrong to tell you to be cultivated soil. I think the reality is we find ourselves often in one of these places throughout our life. We're all on a journey, and God does meet us where we are. But there is opportunity for us where that seed is planted in our lives in areas where there is space for it to take root. It's a process that we're called into in partnership with God.
Let's pray together. Lord God, thank you for your word. Thank you for the encouragement last Sunday to really reflect on it, to pour over it, and to study it. God, it's so easy for us to just take scripture and say, well, it's outdated. It doesn't use language we understand. Instead of saying, well, maybe there's something wrong with us that's making this hard for us to understand. Maybe we're looking at it the wrong way. And dying to ourselves and studying. And really inspecting what is meant within the pages of scripture. Holy Spirit, thank you for revealing scripture to us. Thank you for being present when it was shared originally, when it was written down, as it was translated through different languages, and as we today read your word. God, Holy Spirit, you've been present through that entire process. Be with us, your church, in your name. Amen.