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Once again as we begin and want to hear from the Lord, let’s commit our time unto Him. I want to share a verse from Ezekiel to prepare our hearts. It’s the first verse of the first chapter and it’s just a little sentence in that first verse. It says, “The heavens were open and I saw visions of God.” It’s our prayer that we are under the open heavens to behold the Lord. That’s how we come under the open heavens. We thank God for revelation. We want to come like Ezekiel and stand under the open heavens and see visions of the Lord.
Father, we thank You so much for the Holy Spirit who lives in us and indwells us, and who guides us into all the truth. We know that the Lord Himself said, “I am the Truth.” So, take us forward again in another heart knowledge of our Lord Jesus. We commit this session unto You and we trust You, Lord, to take the veil away and show us Christ. We ask in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Once again, I’m so used to teaching where a week is spaced, so review is a big deal to me, and I know we don’t need that because it’s only been a few minutes. We’re in that process of looking at these three wonderful parables; Mark 4:10, “As soon as He was alone His followers along with the twelve began asking Him about the parables.” In verse 33 & 34, “With many such parables He was speaking the word to them, so far as they were able to hear it, and He did not speak to them without a parable, but He was explaining everything privately to His disciples.” We’re praying that it’s not what I say or what Tom says, but privately in your heart that the Lord will explain His word to you; that He would reveal Himself.
As we pointed out over and over, these three parables are parables of life. They are seed parables. In all of nature God has put the mystery of life in the seed. As Tom pointed out, the sower sows the word, and the word in this case is the seed. I want to connect that to 1 Peter 1:23, “You have been born again, not of seed which is perishable, but imperishable; that is, through the living and enduring word of God”. He’s the vine. He’s the source. He is our life. There is not life anywhere else. John 1:4, “In Him was the life, and that life was the light of men.” 1 John 5:11, “The testimony is this; God has given us eternal life. This life is in His Son. He who has the Son has the life. He who does not have the Son of God does not have the life.” There is no life apart from Him. He’s the source, He’s our environment and we live depending upon Him.
The first parable, as Tom shared, the parable of the Sower, demonstrates how life begins. The Lord shows the living word, and the good soil receives the living word, and life continues as it began, receiving the seed, receiving the good word. The kind of soil I will be does not depend upon me. The kind of soil you will be does not depend upon you. Reception is not a work. We talk about works and faith, and it’s not a work. If somebody pays my bill, and I owed a thousand dollars, and somebody stepped up and paid that thousand dollars, my receiving that gift did not add one penny to the payment of the debt. Receiving is not a work. It begins, as all things in nature and in grace begin, with Him. He is the initiator. As Tom ended up and made the point, and a good point it was, that I don’t come to the Lord with good soil. I come to the Lord for good soil. He is the one that provides. If I come honestly before Him in whatever condition, at any moment in my life I can expect that He will give good soil, and that I can receive Christ over and over again.
That brings us to the second parable, The Parable of the Seed Growing Secretly. We saw how it begins. Now how does it continue? You notice that the second and third parable both begin with almost the same word. Mark 4:26, “He was saying, ‘The kingdom of God is like a man who casts seed upon the soil.’” Mark 4:30, “And He said, ‘How shall we picture the kingdom of God, or by what parable shall we present it?” As I shared in the introduction yesterday, these parables of life are parables of the kingdom of God, the kingdom of heaven. They describe the realm in which the king has dominion. If the king rules your life and my life, then this is what my life will look like when I receive this life. We’re praying that God will make these principles living principles. The sower, the seed growing secretly, the mustard seed, how it begins, how it continues and how it culminates.
We’ll read the four verses of the Parable of the Seed Growing Secretly. Mark 4:26, “He was saying, ‘The kingdom of God is like a man who casts seed upon the soil, and he goes to bed at night and he gets up by day, and the seed sprouts and grows. How? He himself does not know. The soil produces crops by itself; first the blade, then the head, then the mature grain in the head, but when the crop permits, he immediately puts it to sale because the harvest has come.’”
In all of these seed parables we are really on holy ground; how much the Lord has put into a seed—the mystery of life. It’s almost impossible to grasp the inherent life in a little seed. You look at an acorn and you can’t see the mighty oak, but it’s all there. The life is in the seed. The parable turns our eyes from the sowing, the planting of the seed, and now this parable begins on good ground. We are continuing now; if the Lord has graced us with good ground, now how is it going to continue? Tom shared the sowing of the seed. This is a parable on the release of the life from the seed that’s in good ground. We’re going to be looking at the release of life. Every part of the parable in some way grips our attention. It’s so amazing–the mystery of life in the seed and how it germinates and the successive forms that it takes, how it grows and progresses and matures, and so on. From the planting all the way to the harvest is covered in these four verses. All the wonder of nature and natural growth; this pictures this. All the wonders of natural growth picture the spiritual reality; how it grows in our lives.
I want to give three words to summarize the essence of this parable. I didn’t come up with these three words. I borrowed them from the Church of Scotland evangelist, Henry Drummond. I took a message that he had and I borrowed his words. I can’t improve on his words, so I thought I’d just plagiarize. I guess if you give the name you haven’t plagiarized. I don’t recommend Drummond across the board. He’s pretty dogmatic on some things, at least to me are not essential. I certainly need more light. Maybe he’s got the light. I don’t know. I don’t know if you write in the Bible or keep notes or just mark this in your mind, but next in Mark 4:27, “He goes to bed at night, gets up by day, seed sprouts and grows. How? He himself does not know.” Next to that verse in my Bible I’ve just written the word “mysterious”. It grows and he himself doesn’t know how. And then in verse 28, “The soil produces crops by itself.” Next to that verse in my Bible I’ve written the word “spontaneous”, by itself. And then at the end of verse 28, “First the blade, then the head, then the mature grain in the head,” I’ve written the word “progressive”. So, how does it continue? Here is my little outline; mysteriously, spontaneously and progressively. That’s what we’ll be looking at as we go through this parable.
It’s assured in the Parable of the Sower that the sower is the Lord Jesus. He’s the One who sows the word. Mark 4:14, “The sower sows the word.” It’s the Lord that sows the good seed. In the parable we’re not considering the parable of the wheat and the tares. Matthew 13:37, “The one who sows the good seed is the Son of Man.” So, it names Him as the Son of Man. But this parable is a little bit different. I think we’ll come up to a snag if we say the sower is Jesus. That is because of verse 27, “How it grows, he himself does not know.” I don’t want to put Jesus in the spot that He doesn’t know how this thing is growing. The sower in this parable I don’t think is Christ, but if you are saying that it’s you or me, the messenger, then it’s Christ in us. So, in both cases, some skirt by the problem, where I say it can’t be Christ because I don’t want to lay ignorance at the feet of Christ. They say, “Well, how about Mark 13:32 when He said that He didn’t know when He was coming back again.” They sort of get around it. Anyway, it seems like the sower here is the servant of the Lord, one who is ruled by the king, and he is sowing the seed.
Let me take those three words that I borrowed from Henry Drummond. By the way, if you read Drummond, there are two Henry Drummonds. One I partially recommend and one I don’t recommend at all. Anyway, Mark 4:26-27, “He was saying, ‘The kingdom of God is like a man who cast seed upon the soil. He goes to bed at night, gets up by day, the seed sprouts and grows. How? He himself does not know.’” If you are serious, and the Lord has made you good soil, and you are receiving Christ, be prepared to be surprised, because He loves to surprise His people. He doesn’t always do things like you would expect He will. You look at the door and He’ll come in the window. If you look at the window, He’s coming down the chimney. He loves to surprise us. That’s why I love that word “mysterious” because it continues, and he himself, the sower, doesn’t know how, and that’s what makes the Christian life so wonderfully exciting.
I went through stages in my Christian life, but I am in a stage now of season of excitement, as things begin to change and wind down in my life, and my mind is going, and I’m losing everything; I’m losing my mind, I’m losing my hair, I’m losing my memory, I’m losing my energy, I’m gaining weight – that’s about the only thing I’m gaining! The point is that we know in the parable he had the part in the sowing, and then in the end it says that he takes the sickle to the harvest, but in the middle he goes to bed. He rests and then it says he gets up in the morning; how it generates and how it grows is a mystery. How it develops is a mystery. Increase is out of our hands completely. We can’t understand the life and then how it comes out of that seed.
I think 1 Corinthians 3 Paul had that in mind, “What then is Apollos, what then is Paul? Servants through whom you believed, even as the Lord gave opportunity to each one. I planted, Apollos watered; God was causing the growth. So then, neither is the one who plants, nor the one who waters anything, it’s God who causes the growth.” Don’t lose the wonder of how this life continues, or try to balance it out with things we think we know about gardening. The parable is not designed to tell us everything. It’s designed to tell us something, and we want to know the something. I think God left out everything because it would have been distracting. We’ve got to look at the something, and the something is when my life is ruled by the kin—these are kingdom of heaven parables— when heaven rules my life, what is going to happen in my life is very mysterious.
In verse 26 & 27, “The kingdom of God is like a man who cast seed upon the soil. He goes to bed at night, gets up by day, and the seed sprouts and grows. He himself does nothing.” It’s such a beautiful thing. He sows the seed, goes to bed, gets up, and I’m assuming that night he went to bed again, gets up and then went to bed again. He’s just living. In other words, after the seed is sown, God says, “Rest; it’s time to rest in between the planting and the harvest. Relax and don’t worry about, “Am I growing in Christ? I shared the word with so and so. What’s going on with my kids? What’s going on with my neighbors?” That’s not your business! The seed is sown, and I can trust God to work mysteriously. He’s not going to work in them like He works in me. He’s not going to work in me like He works in you. This idea that we’re trying to put God in some kind of a box of our own experience, He is just saying, “Look, for you it’s to rest. Increase is Mine. It’s My business.” That’s the mystery of the seed. The farmer and the sower has no part in the process that is called “life”. His is the Life and He’s the One that does it, and we know not how.
It used to bother me that I didn’t know what God was about. What’s He doing? Now it’s the opposite. It’s exciting. I wake up giddy. I don’t know today what’s going to happen. Blessed ignorance! I’ll probably end up in a nursing home. I don’t care. I really don’t. It’s exciting. Christ lives in me. Where He goes and what He’s doing, and if He does it better with me forgetting everything, so what? It’s Him, and it becomes very exciting. The mystery of the life breaking out of the seed and growing is just a wonderful thing.
We’ll look at the parable and say, “It’s just incomplete. It’s only four verses. It should have been fifteen verses. He doesn’t tell us that we’ve got to plow and we’ve got to plant and we’ve got to pull out weeds and we have to pull out stumps, we’ve got to move the rocks away, we’ve got to fertilize, we’ve got to make sure we spray for the invasion of the insects, and we’ve got to make sure the channel is clear for water, put up a fence, keep the animals out, and keep out the neighbors kids, and all the rest. He says none of that.
Now, it’s true that we can neglect life, and stump the growth, but the causing of the growth is from God. Colossians 2:19, “Grows with a growth that comes from God.” He’s the One that gives the growth. It wasn’t the purpose of the Lord to speak on the things that hinder life. He could have made the parable big and long; “You’ve got to watch out for hail, and you’ve got to watch out for heavy rain, and you’ve got to watch out for a flood, and you’ve got to watch out for the drought, and you’ve got to watch out for the blight, and you’ve got to watch out for some insect invasion, and sometimes temperature changes, and all of that. He didn’t. I can’t make the seed grow by my care. I think I can hinder it by my careless match, but I can’t make it grow. Increase is from the Lord. The doctor doesn’t really have a prescription on how to make you grow, but he can give you some advice on how you can stump growing, and you can hinder it, and so on.
This is a parable of the mystery; the Christian life, the Life of Christ sprouting, growing, coming out of you. It is mysterious, and we need to rest in the Lord and trust Him to make it grow. Let me apply this a little. It’s such a wonderful principle, and I think we need to be very clear on what the Lord is saying here. The truth is that we can rest and trust God. No human program on the earth, no amount of spiritual discipline and things that we do can in any way assist the growth.
Recently I was going through the book of Exodus, the Lord really caught my attention when I was looking at the golden calf. I was a little bit surprised to learn that there was a mold. I know that Aaron said, “We threw it in and it came out a calf.” That’s not how it happened. There was a mold, a wooden mold, and Moses set it on fire later, remember. It was overlaid with gold and inlaid with gold, and so on. At the same time I’m studying that I’m studying ahead, and I was looking at the tabernacle. That tabernacle, God gave a blueprint from heaven, and He said, “You follow this plan, every detail.” It’s so detailed. He gave the plan. It struck me the difference between a pattern from heaven and a mold from which they got the golden cow.
The mystery of this life is exciting. We don’t know what God is going to do, and we don’t know what He is going to do next. Like the church is a pattern, like the tabernacle. It’s God’s blueprint what He’s going to do. He’s going to build His church. He’s going to take living stones and put them together and fit them together. It’s dangerous to do something like this, “I’m going to study the book of Acts because we’ve got to know what the church should be like. Let’s study the book of Acts, and see how they did it. They met at this time, they broke bread here, they collected money here, and we’ll read this and make a mold, and pour ourselves into that mold so that we look like that.” Brothers and sisters in Christ, throw the mold away. It’s idolatry. It leads to idolatry. You need the pattern from heaven. God will show you how to do it. You don’t need to follow this mold or that mold or this group or that group. We’re constantly making molds, and we try to pour ourselves or our group into that particular mold.
The Christian life is full of mystery. It’s wonderful! It has no human tool marks. If you could see the mark of a human tool, “With this we look like this because this man has this gift, or this program we followed or we went through this system or we keep these particular rules, we follow these steps. We get up early and have devotions, and we know how to pray, and we come together and we fast, and we have all night prayer meetings, and we believe in baptism, and we believe in breaking bread, and we support missions, and we have a time to confess our sins one to another. Some of us know the original language, and some of us have been to school, and some have been to seminary.”
Those, my friends, I fear are man-made molds, and God doesn’t want a mold. He wants you to thrill in the mystery, not knowing what is next, not knowing what to do, not knowing. You make a decision and you don’t know; you don’t have to know. Blessed assurance! Watch the Lord do His thing. He brings out life, and this parable makes us rely on the mystery of the Christian life. Jeremiah 1:12 is always true, “I am watching over My word to perform it.” Let God be God; stay out of the Godhead. Just be you. He never wanted anything else than for you to be you and me to be me, and let Him be Him. Let God be God. If there is a human explanation, probably the ministry is of the flesh. If you can give a human reason, “We’re this way because of this and this and this,” the seed grows secretly while you rest. Go to bed, and just rest. Sow the seed and trust God to bring the increase. This is what we call “the exchanged life”. I hope you are entering into the mystery of it.
Mark 4:28, “The soil produces crops by itself, first the blade, then the head, then the mature grain in the head.” The Christian life is not only wonderfully mysterious, bringing on an excitement as you watch God do something unique in your life, in your church, in your ministry, but it’s also spontaneous. Life is intuitive. Nothing depends on effort and flesh. I used to honestly think that so much depended on my sermons and on my teaching, and on some things that ended up getting printed. I had to figure out good illustrations and powerful illustrations and read the best books and quote the best people. “We have a super follow-up program. That’s why we’re growing.” Some follow-up programs are foul-up programs, I think.
Our Lord Jesus made reference to this when He said in Luke 12:27, “Consider the lilies, how they grow. They neither toil nor spin. I tell you that not even Solomon in all his glory was clothed like one of these.” Notice what He didn’t say. He didn’t say, “Consider the lily, that it grows.” He didn’t say that. He said, “Consider the lily how it grows.” He wanted us to know how it grows; without toil, and without spinning, and without labor. Jesus called attention to how it grows, so that they might, by observing, learn one of the wonderful secrets of life. It’s spontaneous, it’s automatic, without labor, without anxiety. When Christ rules your life, it brings you into rest and composure and delivers us from anxiety and fretting and wondering what in the world is going to happen next. God knows what is going to happen. Mark 4:28, “The soil produces crops by itself.” He’s not only ignorant; the sower is detached. It happens by itself. Life is organic. As Tom shared, it begins by receiving, by being open to become good soil, so that Christ can come into your heart and then be released and grow.
This should, I hope it does, make you very hungry and very desirous to be ruled by the King. These are Kingdom of Heaven parables, and the one that is ruled by the King, that’s what his life looks like. He doesn’t have to try and figure everything out. Praise God for that! I used to think you had to know what was going on and what God is going to do and what He’s doing now. I don’t have to know any of that. I’m going to bed, and I’m going to go rest. I’m going to trust the Lord, and let Him take care of that. That’s what He wants to do, and I’m not going to try to make it happen, and dig up what I planted. God is going to make it. I don’t need all the programs and all the anxiety and frustration. Manifestation of life is His job.
Can you tell the difference between life that is spontaneous, automatic, from God, and the death that masquerades as life? I hope God gives you insight into that. I hope He gives me insight on that. Do you really know the difference between what is real and what is not real, and what is fruit and what looks like fruit; it’s just imitation? May God deliver us from unreality. There is an enlargement that looks like growth. It’s not growth. It’s enlargement. Don’t be deceived. The life we’re talking about is from within and comes out. It’s not external. I think many Christians have not learned to grow as the lily grows, “Consider how the lily grows.” I think many churches have not learned to grow how the lily grows. “Consider the lily,” Jesus said, “how it grows.” It’s from within.
I think you might be familiar with the term, or not, let me introduce you to “accretion”. Are you familiar with the word “accretion”? Accretion is expansion; it gets bigger, but it’s not growth. Growth is life, and life from the inside. Accretion gets bigger from the outside, not the inside. For example, an icicle will get bigger and bigger and bigger as the drops fall down and freeze. When I was a kid we didn’t have drain pipes, so the icicles would come down real big. We’d pluck them off and use them as swords. When we lived in Newport, Rhode Island, they had sand dunes, and we were told not to go on the sand dunes. They had fences around them. The sand would blow and they would get bigger and bigger and bigger with piles of sand. You would say, “Well, that’s growth. That’s not growth. That’s accretion. That’s a bunch of dead things getting piled on top of one another, and they can get impressive, because they are getting pretty big. That looks like growth. It’s not growth.
A crystal might be a beautiful thing. Lillian and I went one time several years ago to the Museum of Science in Washington, and she wanted to go to the history museum because she’s into Egypt and looking at all that kind of stuff. But I went to look at the rocks. Some of them are very, very beautiful; quite dead, but very, very beautiful. It’s the way a coral grows, or a reef grows; they get bigger and bigger, and larger and larger, and they’re beautiful and they’re brightly colored, and they can be broken off, and they can be polished, and they can be made into little ornaments or jewelry, or something like that, but they are made from the skeletons of sea animals; things that have died. There were colonies of sea polyps and they died and they crystalized and they make these beautiful things. Death is not growth. Accretion is not growth. Enlargement doesn’t mean growth. Expansion may look like growth, but it’s not growth.
Christians, you, me, us, are to grow as the lily grows, “Consider the flower, how it grows.” That could be death (the sirens in the background). Unless growth comes from union with the vine, unless it’s internal, unless it’s drawing life from Christ, it could be only accretion. Many have been led astray because they’ve increased, they enlarged, adding pews and adding people and adding buildings, and adding stations, and adding meetings. That could just be accretion and may not be growth at all, by just bringing a bunch of dead things together. “We want to expand, and we want to get bigger.” Be careful about that. If you get bigger and it’s not from the inside out, you are just inviting more trouble than you can handle, and what you want. Friends in Christ, I fear coral Christians, and I fear coral churches. They can look so beautiful, but if it’s just from the outside, if it’s not spontaneous, and it’s not the Life of Christ, if it’s not the Holy Spirit…
I was for a long time, and maybe there are still occasions on which I’m a coral Christian. I don’t want to be. You try to impress people and you say, “Well if we have this big thing, then we’re alive and it will attract people to come.” My poor Lillian. I went through a series where I thought the way to reach the community is to have all these fancy meetings, and we had a series a week of meetings. And every one of them blew up in my face. It was horrible. I had all these object lessons. I rented a coffin and I put a mirror in it, “Come look in at who will soon be in the coffin.” You can’t believe the stupid things I did. I got a pig and I got a sheep and I dressed up a pig in beautiful clothes, and I had a mud puddle, and I said, “Watch!” And the sheep wouldn’t get out of the mud. It was a horrible time. I thought that I was doing the work of the Lord, and it was to bring people in. It was just accretion.
Now God is beginning to show me life in Christ is mysterious. I don’t know and I don’t care. Life in Christ is spontaneous. He does it. I don’t have to do from the outside. It comes from the inside. Romans 7:24, we’ll all come to that one day. I hope it has passed for you, “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from the body of this death?” Let’s consider the lily and how it grows.
Let me move on and sort of wrap it up. Real life is spontaneous, and it’s His Life, and it’s mysterious, exciting, surprising, unpredictable, spontaneous and it doesn’t depend upon anything I do, anything I’m involved in. The third word that I stole from Brother Drummond is “progressive”. Mark 4:28, “The soil produces crops by itself; first the blade, then the head, then the mature grain in the head.” Again, in my own heart there is comfort in reading this that the sower sows the seed, goes to bed, leaves the production to the Lord, including the growth. What we’re about to look at is the fruit of a life that is ruled by the King; ruled by heaven. It’s one thing to know and understand and believe that I don’t need to understand it. It’s another thing to know that I don’t need to engineer it. Praise God for that! But then can I rest in the guarantee that I’m going to be growing in the Lord, that you are going to be developing in the Lord?
God has given an illustration in nature. I just love the way He pictures spiritual truths in the natural. He did a wonderful thing. This took place the third day of creation. Genesis 1:11&12, “God said, ‘Let the earth sprout vegetation; plants yielding seed for trees on the earth, bearing fruit after their kind, with seed in them,’ and it was so. And the earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed after their kind, and trees bearing fruit with seed in them after their kind, and God saw that it was good.” It started with plant life, but the principle extended to animal life and the fowl and fish and everything. Everything produced after its kind. The seed was planted and it produced after its kind. If I plant an apple tree I will not expect to find pears on that tree. It produces after its kind. A pear tree is not going to produce peaches. And a grapevine is not going to produce something other than the grapes. Every seed produces after its kind. That’s why apes produce apes, after its kind. There is nothing not created in the image of God that becomes something created in the image of God; the seed, not the sower, and not the soil, not the laborer, the seed—that’s the womb of life—and out of that seed after its kind.
I’m not concerned about my growing in the Lord. You don’t have to be concerned about your growth; not if the King rules your life; not if you are good soil. You say, “Why?” Tom already quoted the verse, but I’m going to expand on it. 1 John 3:9, “No one who is born of God practices sin because His seed abides in him.” Do you capture the wonder of that? When you got saved and you received Christ you received divine DNA. His seed came into you, and it will produce after it’s kind. You are going to be like Jesus because His seed is in you and the seed produces after its kind. This is one of the great assurances.
I used to be so concerned, “Am I growing in the Lord? What do I need to do to grow? I need to grow and study this and study that, and read the Bible in a year,” and all of that kind of stuff. I used to go through all those things because I wanted to make sure I was growing in Christ. I’ll tell you how I know I’m growing. It’s because His seed is in me. Everything alive grows. If you aren’t growing, you’re dead. If you’re growing, you’re alive. You are growing in the Lord. The life is in the seed. The seed will produce after it’s kind. I’m going to be mature. You are going to be mature. It depends now if you are coming out of sleep before God, and not, “Here I am and I’m good soil.” No, no. I come for good soil; not with it. Grace is great, not because of what it finds when it arrives. It’s great for what it brings with it when it arrives. He comes to bring all these things; everything after its kind. It’s bigger than, “I have Dad’s dimple and I look like mom and I’ve got her eyes,” and all that kind of thing. You’ve been born again, not with perishable seed, but imperishable. I hope you don’t spend five minutes of energy worrying about how to grow in Christ. His seed abides in you. You have the Holy Spirit in your heart, and God has created in all nature a great picture. The seed will produce after its kind.
I wouldn’t put a lot of emphasis on the blade, the ear, the full corn, and the full grain in the ear. Some years ago when I was involved in a different way in the local church, they took that verse and they said, “Well, let’s have the blades meet downstairs, and the ears are going to meet over here, and then we’ve got a special class for the full grain in the ear and that will be over here.” The principle is this; the Lord will take care of every stage of growth in your life. As Tom said, and as I’ve tried to say, it’s Christ—stay attached to your environment, stay connected to Christ. As you come holding up to Christ, wonderful and mysterious things are going take place, spontaneous things that you don’t have to generate and work up are going to take place. It’s guaranteed that you are going to grow, and its going to be automatic.
I want to say one word in closing about verse 29, because that bothered me a little bit. “When the crop permits, he immediately puts in the sickle, because the harvest has come.” I read too many verses on the sickle that scared the daylights out of me, because it’s judgment. The angels come with a sickle and they are going to harvest the earth, and all of that kind of thing. I’m saying, “I wish He left that out, because it was a wonderful parable; you sow, you go to bed, you wake, and you rest and it’s beautiful. And then comes the sickle.” Once you’ve arrived, you are mature now. I thought that was a little anticlimactic. Anyway, I think I misunderstood and maybe God has begun to teach me, if there was ever mature grain in the head, probably it was the Apostle Paul, wouldn’t you say? And in Philippians 3 he gives his testimony. This is the life of somebody who knows God, somebody who has been through it, who has grown spontaneously and mysteriously and progressively.
His testimony in Philippians 3:10, “That I may know Him in the power of His resurrection, the fellowship of His suffering, being conformed to His death.” He ends up with “conformed to His death”. But he starts off with the power of His resurrection. You say, “Wait a minute; that’s backwards. Don’t you think you should die and then be raised? It seems like you should start with death. Some say, “You’ve got to die to self so you can know the risen life of Christ.” Paul said, “No. You’ve got that backwards. You’ve got to know the risen life of Christ in order to die. Christ lives in you, when He lived in His first body, His incarnate body, He went to the cross. Now He lives in His new body, the church. Where is He going? He’s going to the cross. He’s going to the cross in you and in me. Now I’m not afraid of the sickle because the apple tree never produces apples for itself. What in the world is an apple tree going to do with an apple? Fruit trees are not for the tree. It’s for others. I think what He’s saying here is, “If you trust Me to work mysteriously, and if you trust Me to work spontaneously and progressively, you will develop into such a place that you’ll be useful for the world. You’ll die and His life will be manifest, and you’ll be useful to the world. I think that’s why the sickle comes in at the end.
May God help us! What is God doing? Honestly, you don’t need to know. You just rest. “Why did He allow that? Why at this time in my life did He do this? Why did He take this one? Why did He do that?” You don’t need to know. Just know it’s His life, and it’s mysterious and it’s exciting. Keep your eyes open. Watch what God’s doing. When you see that little cloud, the size of a man’s hand, you get excited. The Christian life is exciting, and it’s not because you are doing something right. It’s automatic and spontaneous. It’s life from within. It’s real. It’s not accretion and it’s not piling dead things on top of dead things, like a Christmas tree with all the ornaments making it look good, and it’s cut off at the root. No; it’s life. It’s Christ, and you’re going to grow because His seed abides in you. How does it begin? The sower sows the word and makes you good soil. How is it released? Mysteriously, spontaneously, progressively. How does it end? Lord willing, Tom will take us through that in the next parable next time.
Father, thank You for Your word, not what we think we know what it means, but all You’ve inspired it to mean. We ask You to work that in our lives and our experience. Thank You for these kingdom of heaven parables. Thank You, Lord, when You rule our life, this is how it is, and we pray that we would embrace how it is. Now, Lord, we want to thank You also for allowing us to come together and thank you for the refreshments that are provided and the meal. We ask You, Lord, to receive our gratitude for the meal we are about to have together in fellowship. Guide our conversation. We pray that You would be honored in that and receive now the thanks that You have already planted in our heart. We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen