Hey, my name is Justin Kowalski, and I am the associate pastor at our Palm Avenue campus
in Riverside, California.
Thanks so much for listening to Sandals Church.
Our vision is to be real with ourselves, God, and others.
We hope you enjoy this message.
Hey, guys.
Welcome back to Sandals Church.
Our vision is to be real.
And I'm just going to be honest with you.
I'm a little embarrassed as I look back at 2020 on some of my priorities, okay?
I think was the first time.
A lot of us have been in our home that long for a while, and you started looking around
and seeing all the things you needed to fix and clean.
I cleaned the ceiling at one point.
I was so bored, and I'm a little embarrassed.
It says something about us as Americans when there's, like, a worldwide pandemic and we
think, this is a good time to remodel my kitchen.
But I did the same thing.
I went to my kitchen window, and I looked out one day, and I thought, I want to plant some
shade trees.
Like, right here.
Three beautiful shade trees in the morning that I can go out and look at.
The only tricky thing is I had to plant them in my neighbor's yard, okay?
Because when I look out the kitchen window, it is my neighbor's yard.
Our house is like, 20ft apart.
It's small.
In fact, I could see my neighbor in the window drinking his coffee.
And so one of the reasons I wanted trees was kind of have some blockage there between me
and Cody and his PJs and the college guys.
So I went across, I said, Guys, listen, you've been there ten years.
They love me.
And I was like, Listen, guys, I got a huge favor I want to ask you.
Can we plant some trees in your yard?
But here's the deal.
I will pay for the trees.
I will pay for the fertilizer, the mulch.
I'll dig the hole.
Like, I'll get the little strings, the twine that hold it up and pin it in the ground.
But I need you to water the trees.
It's kind of important in Empire, right?
Like, for six months, I need you guys to water these trees so that they live after you
guys move out next year.
And they're like, Claude, dude, we got it.
They didn't got it.
Cody was my boy for, like, the first month.
He's out there watering, and I know because I can see him every morning.
But, man, as time went on, dude, they kind of know, and these trees start drying up.
And I was like, Babe, we need to get a new fence.
That was the new project.
We're getting a new fence.
But sure enough, when my new neighbors moved in, they looked at these trees, and two of
the three were so dead the first day, man, they just chopped them down.
Listen, planting a tree is one thing, but seeing it grow is something different.
Planting is actually pretty easy, but the goal of planting is not finished until it's
matured and really, until it's reproduced.
Living things reproduce.
And, you know, last week we talked about an essential called evangelism, where we want to
see people trust Jesus.
We want to see people saved.
But listen, salvation is not the finish line.
The essential series wasn't over.
I don't know if you noticed, but we still got two more after that.
Because you becoming a Christian is not the finish line, it's the starting point.
And we have a problem when we view salvation as the finish line.
Let me tell you something.
There's a Southern Baptist convention.
It's the largest denomination in the world.
And if you rewind back about 20 years, there are 5 million people that attend Southern
Baptist churches.
That's a lot.
But over the last 20 years, they baptized 7 million new people, people who trusted Christ
and wanted to follow God in baptism.
And you're like, Dude, that's incredible.
We had 5 million.
We baptized 7 million.
And they looked up at the end of the 20 years and they had 4.8 million.
Now, I'm not great at math, but that's not great.
That's like, how did you lose 7 million people?
And in fact, we lost more than that because they took some people with them.
You wouldn't let a toddler crawl out the back door, but we were 7 million of them.
But, dude, they saw salvation as the finish line, not the starting line.
Jesus says, man, you becoming a Christian is just the beginning.
His desire for us is to grow, to mature, and to multiply.
Do you know Jesus had two missions?
We mostly think of his eternal mission to come and to pay for sin on the cross for us.
And his resurrection sealed our salvation.
But he didn't just have an eternal mission, he had an earthly mission.
John 17 before Jesus goes to the cross, he's praying for the disciples.
But I want you to see what he prays.
God, I glorified you on earth, he says, having accomplished or finished the work that you
gave me to do, now you're like, well, hold on a second.
You ain't finished finished because you still haven't been to the cross.
What work did he finish, right?
You still got some finishing.
But in other words, Jesus was saying, my earthly mission of preparing the disciples to be
mature enough to handle the trials of life, to plant the church and to reproduce and
multiply, he had finished that because that salvation wasn't the finish line, it was the
starting line.
Do you know the word Christian is only used in the Bible, like three times?
That's not the end.
The word disciples used 261 times because it's essential.
It's essential that you move on to maturity.
So at the end of Jesus ministry in Matthew 28, we know that he gives them a commission.
He says, Go therefore and make disciples of all nations.
You remember when he called them, he says, I'm going to make you fishers of men, but at
the end of his ministry, you're going to turn around, you're going to make disciples,
you're going to multiply, you're going to baptize them in the name of the Father, the Son
and the Holy Spirit.
But guess what?
You're not done?
Then teach them to observe and obey all that I've commanded you.
Listen, we have forgotten that salvation is not the end goal.
Your maturity and your multiplication is the end goal.
Jesus loved to use analogies and metaphors of planting and sowing and reaping and harvest.
And we're going to look at a parable together that to be honest, I've interpreted wrong
most of my Christian life and most of you have too.
It's known as the parable of the sower.
And we're going to read Mark four version, starts off saying this.
Listen.
He says, Behold, a sower went out to sow and as he sowed, some of the seed fell along the
path and the birds came and devoured it.
Other seed fell on the rocky ground where it did not have much soil, and immediately it
sprang up.
But since it had no depth of soil, when the sun rose, it was scorched.
And since it had no root, it withered away.
Other seed, he says, fell among the thorns and the thorns grew up and choked it, and it
yielded, listen to this, no grain.
Other seeds fell on good soil and they produced grain growing up, increasing, yielding 30
fold, 60 fold and 100 fold.
And he says, let he who has ears, let him hear.
He's saying this is hard to understand.
Listen, when you read the parables, one of the things I learned in seminary is that a
parable, especially in Jewish culture, usually taught one truth.
We shouldn't try to apply a bunch of different things to the sun or Satan's power.
Really.
A parable taught one big obvious truth.
And the obvious truth in this and into this is the person who multiplied 30, 61
hundredfold so that you don't miss it.
That the obvious point, is this is not who's going to make it to heaven, but who's going
to grow and mature and multiply.
And I've read this, I think most of us have read this as a salvation parable and it's not.
I think it's a discipleship parable for us to grow on.
The point is, why does the sower sow?
It's so that the harvest will multiply and he can eat again next year.
That's the whole reason a sower sows in the first place.
Jesus goes on, he explains the parable later, so we get his explanation.
He says this the sower sows the word of God.
It's the gospel that we're talking about.
And the ones that fell along the path where the word is sown, satan immediately comes and
he says, he takes away the Word that is sown in them.
I think this is the one in the three that's not a believer.
It never says they believe.
Now, we're going to talk about the other three, but I don't want to move on past this
because we need to stop and just remember that, man, you are not saved because you were
smarter than somebody else or better.
It wasn't even your decision to be born in a country where you could hear the Gospel.
There's 3 billion people that will never get a chance to have the seed stolen away from
them.
It was a miracle.
And you need to thank God and be grateful.
I mean, the Bible says that you and I were lying in the dirt and God walked by one day and
said, Live.
Come on, come on, live.
It was his grace that saved us.
I get a text message every year on February 13.
It's not my birthday, it's not my anniversary, but Mike Simpson texts me every single
year, and he says, today was the day that you shared the gospel with me.
And I trusted Christ 25 years ago, Claude.
26 years ago, today was the day.
And it changed my family, it changed my kids.
It changed everything.
Don't ever get over that we were dead men walking.
God saved you by his grace.
What scares me in this parable is actually the other two, because I've started to believe
that I need to admit these are probably Christians, and it's possible.
I don't think you can fall from grace, but I think you can fail to grow.
In verse 16, this is what Jesus says.
And these are the ones who are sown on the rocky ground.
Once you when they hear the Word, they immediately receive it with joy.
But they have no root in themselves.
They endure even for a while.
Luke Eight says that they believe and are saved.
Like it says the first one, Satan, steals away from their heart, so they cannot believe
and be saved.
So I believe this is a Christian, but he has no root in himself, but he believes and
receives it with joy.
Only God can allow you to receive His Word with joy.
That's a miracle of his grace in your heart.
But because they have no root, they endure for a while.
But when tribulation and persecution arise on account of the Word, immediately they fall
away.
My third tree, it's 30ft tall.
It has bloomed.
In fact, man, it survived some storms.
Hillary wasn't that bad where we were at, but we lost a lot of limbs in our neighborhood.
And that tree, I remember going out worried about my baby tree, and it lost, like, a big
limb out of it.
But you know what?
It hung in there and it lived.
And then after that, it bloomed.
I swear it doubled after Hillary.
And I thought, you know what?
You need roots like it took a hit, but it didn't die.
And listen to me, man, life is hard, right?
Like some of us, life has been hard, but life as a Christian is harder.
I think we need to be honest about this.
It's harder, I think, to live as a Christian because you can't cheat your way around your
circumstances.
It's harder to live with integrity.
It's harder to live with purity.
It's harder to live an honest Christian life.
And you need roots for that.
You need that modeled for you.
So where do you get roots as a growing Christian?
It's called discipleship.
So I want you to write this down.
Point number one is this, and don't ever forget the first part.
It's God's grace that secures my faith, but my growth secures my life.
You need roots.
Do you guys know palm trees?
The roots of palm trees are not that big.
They're like the size of pencils.
But there's so many of them, and they're so interwoven, and they get so wide looking for
water, like 40, 50ft wide.
You ever see a palm tree blow down?
No, right?
Because it's got so many of those things supporting it.
And I look at that and I go, man, that's the church.
That's what you need.
The body of Christ that supports you and holds you during the storm.
Ephesians four says that the body does this for us, the church body.
Ephesians four says this.
Instead, we speak the truth in love, growing in every way to be more like Christ, who is
the head of the body, the church.
And he makes the whole body fit together perfectly as each part does its special work,
each of those roots have a special role.
And listen to this.
It says each one helps the other parts grow so that the whole body is healthy, growing,
and full of love.
Listen.
Who is helping you grow in these essentials?
Who's helping you learn how to study God's Word?
Memorize God's word.
Who's helping you learn how to meditate on God's Word?
Hear God's Word preached at a great church?
Who's helping you learn how to pray more than just praying for yourself?
Like, who's helping you learn how to pray for your lost friends, your coworkers of the
world, maybe open a map of the world and pray for the world?
Who's helping you learn how to share your faith?
Who's helping you learn how to share your testimony, what God has done in your life?
You need others.
You need the body to help you.
And most of us don't have that.
One of the things I want you to notice from now on, every time we do a series, one of the
coolest things that maybe you miss is some of the art and the design and even the title of
these series that we do.
There's a lot of intentionality behind it, a lot of thought, a lot of talented people that
work on that because it all communicates.
And this summer we did a series on discipleship.
You should go back and watch it.
But originally the title of it was Follow Me.
This journey of discipleship.
Follow Me.
And the image was this hiker on this boulder, this silhouette of a hiker going through the
desert.
There's yellows and oranges of this sunset.
And we're in like a couple of meetings into this design and this image.
And I looked at it one day and I said, guys, I'm so sorry, we can't use this.
We got to scrap this.
I thought I was going to get stabbed with an apple pen from one of the design people.
But I said, we can't use this because there's only one hiker.
And that's the problem, is that most Christians think after I trust Christ, it's up to me
to make my way through the desert in my 20s, in the wilderness in my 30s, on my own.
Listen, the beautiful thing about discipleship is you don't have to grow by yourself.
You're not meant to just pull yourself up by your own pickaxe.
In fact, that's not even a safe way of hiking.
I said, that's how people get lost and die.
Listen, the biblical image is not you alone hiking.
It's two.
Timothy two.
Two.
It's a Paul discipling, a Timothy who's discipling others.
It's you being tethered in with people in front of you and holding the ropes for people
behind you.
Two Timothy Two two says this.
The things you've heard me say.
Paul is speaking to Timothy.
Timothy, the things you've heard me say in the presence of many witnesses entrust them to
reliable people who will be able to teach others also.
This is what we mean by multiply.
Multiplying your life.
Who are you tethered to in front that when you get tired, when you want to give up, they
pull you through, they hold the rope for you.
And then how are you turning around and multiplying that holding the rope for others.
Jesus is saying, basically, we have a problem as a plant, we have a problem two
directions.
We need roots to keep us in the storm and the trials.
But then he said, we have a problem another direction.
Are you bearing grain?
Are you bearing fruit?
Are you multiplying?
Verse 18.
He says, now there's other ones, other seed.
There were sown among thorns.
And he said, These are the ones who hear the word, but the cares of the world, the
deceitfulness of riches.
And then he just throws in the desire for other things.
I don't know what that is, but that covers a lot of other stuff.
The desire for other things enter in and choke out that vine.
They choke it out and it proves listen to him unfruitful.
His point is, are you maturing and are you multiplying?
Does it produce grain?
Now, one of the things about this one that bothers me anybody ever watch thorns?
Grow.
I have.
I see it every summer when most people leave and take off from May to August.
I go, there's.
The thorns, it's slow.
In other words, it's a decision.
It's a decision over and over and over in time.
And I'm not saying there's anything bad about you going on vacation.
Beautiful things have thorns.
But what is it that causes you to miss community group?
What is it that causes you to cancel community group?
Because it's a decision for us.
Thorns grow slowly.
You don't get snuck up on by some.
Know, my little sister, when she was traveling back home to the country, she lives in
Southeast Asia, they lost one of her crates.
It had, like, all of her Bible, her journals, like all this stuff for a month.
And we found it in Sydney, Australia.
And that's a whole nother story.
But I found out later why her bag grabbed, why they took it, why they separated it.
She's lucky they didn't incinerate the whole thing, because inside the crate she had a
Christmas wreath, like a real vine twisted, beautiful wreath.
But you can't take that through another country.
Australia looked at that and said, no, if it's got one little insect, if it's got one
little fungus, that kind of invasive species could wipe out something in our ecosystem.
And so they took care of it.
Do you know California has 16 checkpoints when you drive in, don't they?
And they ask you two questions.
Do you got any plants or any produce?
Right?
They're not asking if you got fentanyl or if you're with know, but if you got grapefruit,
you're in trouble.
They're guarding, right?
Like, they're guarding the citrus industry from those invasive things.
And listen, California does a better job guarding its borders than Christians do guarding
the gates of your life and your heart.
Do you guard the gates of your heart?
Like, what do you allow in that says, man, I need to pursue this instead of community.
I need to pursue this instead of those time, that time and effort and resources that could
be used to multiply my life.
I want you to write this down.
Number two, the fruitful life, it's a daily choice.
It's a daily sacrificial choice that we have to make.
I think a lot of the Christians in our church know just enough gospel to think, I'm going
to heaven, so I'm going to chase two rabbits.
And you can't do that.
Jesus says you'll waste your life.
I think that's what he's saying, that they fall away from the community, the church, the
life that God wants for them, and they waste it.
Hey, everybody, before we keep going with the message, I want to take a minute and invite
you to consider giving to the work of Sandals Church.
If you're interested in doing that, you can go to Donate SC.
Let's get back to the message.
Matthew six.
Jesus tells us, man, don't worry don't try to chase two rabbits.
Don't worry about what are we going to eat?
What are we going to drink?
Where am I going to get my clothes?
What am I going to wear?
He says, for every pagans, the world runs after all those things.
And your Heavenly Father, he knows what you need.
He knows that you need them.
But Jesus challenges us.
He says, seek first his kingdom of first priority, his kingdom, his righteousness.
And guess what?
All these things, this is a promise.
All those things will show up in your life as well.
That's the great surprise is that you don't need to live some kind of balanced Christian
life.
I don't think there's any such thing as a balanced Christian life.
I don't go balance my thorns and my vegetables.
You know what I'm saying?
Jesus is saying, dude, it's death and resurrection.
That's the Christian life, to put some things to death.
But he promises you're going to look up and find that you got everything you want anyway.
I want you to imagine for a second that you're like a home builder.
Or let's just say this.
Let's say you had to rebuild your own home.
That's funny.
Okay, imagine if some of us had to rebuild the house that we lived in.
And you never swung a hammer before.
I would probably forget, like a toilets, have no electricity, three walls.
It'd be bad.
But have you ever been in somebody's home who's like a master who builds houses for a
living?
Dude, I went in this guy's kitchen who builds homes, and it was like a Swiss Army knife of
drawers and stuff sliding out.
It was beautiful, dark wood, and it was amazing.
The closest I've ever had to anything like that is when we moved into our house.
And the garage was it was like a blank canvas for a man.
I was like, this is awesome.
I'm going to put industrial shelves from Lowe's all down the wall.
And then I realized how expensive those are.
And I'm like, I'm going to put hooks from Lowe's all down the wall.
It was still fun.
I remember as like, a young person growing up and trying to make disciples, going, god, is
your promise really true?
And you know what happened?
I realized later in life, I'm like, you know what?
I know how to choose a spouse because I've helped other people through that.
When we had kids, I realized, man, I know how to answer this question because I've
answered it with people before.
I know where in the Bible this is my kids.
We get to watch other people's lives play out.
We get to watch and learn how to have integrity, how to deal with finances, how to choose
good friends, how to go through tragedy.
And I realized, man, if you don't build into the lives of others, you're not ready to
build your own home.
You're not ready to build your own life, but God will give that to you.
He'll give everything back to you.
And you'll be like, wow, I know how to do this.
He also holds out one fourth soil, and there's incredible purpose and promise in it.
He says there's other seed, though, those that were sown on the good soil.
He said, These are the ones.
They don't just hear the word, they accept it.
And they bear fruit, undeniable fruit.
30 fold, you don't miss it.
60 fold, 100 fold.
Like, they multiply.
They don't just mature, they multiply.
We live near the orange groves, like the Orange Grove State Park, and we love to drive our
friends through there because it's beautiful.
But people always get a little bothered by all the oranges that are just, like, laying on
the ground and in the road, and they're rotting.
And people get kind of they know how much money those are.
When you go to the grocery store, especially here, and they're like, what's with all the
oranges?
I'm like, well, they're not growing oranges.
And they're like, what do you mean?
They're growing trees.
You're thinking addition.
They're thinking multiplication.
It's way bigger.
When the church thinks addition, we miss it.
And I love our church.
Sandals is one of the fastest growing churches in the country right now.
I don't know if you know that we baptize somewhere of 600, 700 people a year.
If we were able to do that for 100 years, that'd only be 60,000 people.
You're not going to reach the world doing that, right?
The world is multiplying.
We can't be adding.
But do you know how powerful multiplication is?
You know why Jesus wants us to multiply.
If you could fold a piece of paper ten times, which physically you can't, but the
thickness of it would be the thickness of your hand.
If you could fold a piece of paper 20 times, it jumped to a football field.
If you could fold a piece of paper 44 times, it touched the moon.
Listen, if someone started making disciples in our church and they reproduced two, four,
eight, if any one person took Jesus up on that and started making disciples in 33 years,
it'd reach the world.
That's how powerful multiplication is.
I want you to write this down.
Multiplying my life.
It's not easy, but it is simple.
It's simpler than you think.
We have some men and women in our church right now that just after this summer, they
started gathering people from their work and saying, let's get together every Friday and
let's read the Bible and pray.
There's stay at home moms that are getting together.
Play dates Thursdays, 10:00 a.m..
Let's read the Bible and pray.
It doesn't have to be complicated, but it costs you something.
But if you're growing, you can disciple somebody else.
Ezra.
Look what Ezra 710 says.
Ezra he had set in his heart to study the law of the Lord and to practice it and then to
teach the statutes and rules in Israel.
He was living it out first.
But if you're growing and living it out, you can turn around and teach a younger Christian
model.
It for them.
Show them how to live and follow Christ.
Okay?
I want to teach you guys a new term, and you probably don't know it.
It's not in the Bible.
It's BROP, okay?
With a P at the end.
So some of you Motocross guys know BROP because you hear it all the time.
And if you've never heard this term, it's really common because if you ever seen, like,
Motocross where those guys jump the huge 70, 80 foot jumps and do the tricks with their
feet and all that stuff, I have friends that do that.
They're some of the best guys in the world.
But I just was like, Guys, one of my friends.
I'm like, how do you even learn that?
You know what I mean?
Because if you go long, it's dangerous.
If you come up short, it's dangerous.
How do you even get started in that?
And I've watched some of them follow along and do all this.
I'm like, Are you trying to get the speed and the timing?
He goes, no, it's actually you're listening.
You're listening to the motor.
Is it bra or is it and so the reason they're riding along and you listen to motor and
that's all Motocross guys talk about.
He was like, BRAP, BRAP.
And I went, Bra.
And it was hilarious.
They got, like their whole language, man, I pinned it.
I still cased because I didn't rap, but he said, yeah.
As I ride along, man, I'm listening to that sound to know exactly how to gauge it.
And I thought, dude, that's discipleship that's discipleship right there.
You get close enough that, man, you can see it lived out.
You can hear it in their life.
First, thessalonians one Paul says this, he said, man, we didn't just lead you to Christ
and leave you there.
He says, we lived among you for your sake.
That wasn't the finish line.
We wanted to see you mature.
You became imitators of us and of the Lord, for you welcomed the message in the midst of
severe suffering, you made it through some trials.
And then he said this.
You multiplied.
You became a model to all the believers in Macedonia and Acaia.
And the Lord's message rang out from you not only in Macedonia and Acaia, but listen to
this.
Your faith in God has become known everywhere.
Can you imagine God saying that about you someday, man, because of what you did, your
faith rang out like a song that was heard everywhere someday.
I think when someone shared with me the vision of multiplying my life, there was just
something inside me that woke up and said, man, I get to do this.
It's not a sacrifice, but I want to give my whole life.
To this.
And I'm not like a big, what do you call it, verse, where you have your life verse kind of
person.
But I was reading Psalms one day in Psalms 45.
I thought, this captures my whole life and it's a commitment.
It says this, psalms 40 517.
I will cause your name to be remembered in all generations.
Can you imagine doing something with your life that's timeless like that?
I will cause your name to be remembered in all generations.
Therefore the nations will give you praise forever and ever.
I want to do something with my life, God, that's going to be timeless and it's going to
fill the world one day.
And I made a decision.
I'm asking you maybe to make a decision like this, to take personal responsibility for the
mission of God.
Jesus didn't just save you, he wants to send you.
And I don't know where you started in your growth, in your discipleship process, but I
know that with God, he can 100 fold your life.
It's still possible.
I've seen it.
If you make a decision like that.
I remember one of my favorite worship memories was several years ago.
I was speaking at a conference and it was a huge ballroom, like filled with people and it
was getting ready to start and everything was there.
Everybody was in, the band just started playing and they're like halfway through the first
song and all of a sudden the screen behind them went out, like with all the words that
people needed to sing.
And the room kind of goes quiet and the microphones went off.
I don't know what power problem happened, but all of a sudden it was just the microphones
were off, the screen was off, and there was this young girl up there leading this worship
team.
And I thought, oh no, what's she going to do?
I would have probably cried, balled up on the floor or left or ran out of there.
But I watched and as the music kept playing, it was almost like she made a decision.
And I saw her turn around and kind of motion and then she stood there all by herself and
closed her eyes.
And I didn't even know for a minute, but she was singing and I couldn't hear her.
But I started to hear the first row, and then I started to hear like the third, 4th, 5th
row.
Join in.
Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty and it
started to fill the room.
Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty and man, pretty soon the whole room was singing.
And let me tell you something, there wasn't a worship team anymore.
We were the worship team.
And it's one of the most powerful worship moments I've ever had.
I think the power came back on, but the power was already there, you know what I'm saying?
And it was amazing.
Listen, I don't know what went wrong for you in the beginning.
Maybe you didn't get the growth you needed.
Maybe you didn't get the start that you needed.
Maybe you didn't get somebody discipling you.
But you can stop right now and decide that this is going to be a moment that says, I will
cause your name, God, to be remembered to do something timeless with your life.
Listen, we don't get to decide where the story starts, but God can help you change how the
story ends, and God can multiply your life beyond anything you could ever imagine.
Can I pray that for us as a church?
Let's pray.
God, my prayer this weekend has just been that you would awaken a giant in our church,
God, that we would hear the sound of it.
We would hear the sound of it right now as it starts to grow in our hearts.
God, would you awaken something in us that tears off the thorns that have kept us and
choked out what you want to do through our life?
God, would you awaken a giant in us that says, I'm going to send roots straight through
these rocks if I have to.
And that you would multiply us, God, so that the world might be filled, that we might
multiply our life and bring you glory forever.
And it's in Jesus name we pray.
Amen.