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Christ Community Chapel is a church in Hudson, OH, that invites people to reimagine life because of Jesus. Learn more about us at ccchapel.com.
Matthew 13:1–9
That same day, Jesus went out of the house
and sat beside the sea, and great crowds
gathered about him,
so that he got into a boat and sat down,
and the whole crowd stood on the beach,
and he told them many things in parables,
saying, "A sower went out to sow,
and as he sowed,
some seeds fell along the path,
and the birds came and devoured them.
Other seeds fell on rocky ground,
where they did not have much soil,
and they immediately sprang up,
since they had no depth of soil.
But when the sun rose, they were scorched,
and since they had no root,
they withered away.
Other seeds fell among thorns,
and the thorns grew up and choked them.
Other seeds fell on good soil
and produced grain
some hundredfold, some sixty, some some thirty.
He who has ears, let him hear."
Matthew 13:18–23
Hear then the parable of the sower:
When anyone hears the word of the kingdom
and does not understand it,
the evil one comes and snatches away
what has been sown in his heart.
This is what was sown along the path.
As for what was sown on rocky ground.
This is the one who hears the word
and immediately receives it with joy.
Yet he has no root in himself,
but endures for a while.
And when tribulation or persecution
arises on account of the word, immediately
he falls away.
As for what was sown among thorns.
This is the one who hears the word.
But the cares of the world
and deceitfulness of riches
choke the word, and it proves unfruitful.
As for what was sown on good soil,
this is the one who hears
the word and understands it.
He indeed bears fruit, and yields
in one case
a hundredfold,
and another sixty, and in another thirty."
Hey everyone, good morning and welcome to CCC,
n this crisp May morning.
My name is Joe,
I'm one of the pastors here,
and thanks for coming.
This morning we kick off a new series,
It's a four week series,
We're actually call it
our Breathe Out series.
We believe there's a basic rhythm
to the Christian life,
basic rhythm to life in general.
Kind of like breathing.
Breathing in, breathing out.
Inhaling, exhaling.
When we say breathe in when we're talking
about the Christian life.
There are times when God wants us to focus
on what he is doing inside of us.
And then breathing out,
there are times
when God wants us to focus on the impact
we're having on the world around us.
And of course,
those two things are connected.
The more you are growing
in your understanding of Jesus,
the more natural
it will be for you to impact
the people around you,
the way Jesus wants you to impact them.
This is our Breathe Out series,
and we're starting it
by looking at a story
that Jesus tells in Matthew chapter 13
called The Parable of the sower
and the seed.
And we just heard it read to us.
Jesus tells the story
and then he gives the explanation
of the story to his disciples.
And let me reread the explanation.
Then I'll give you my three points.
that I want to get into this morning.
It's what Jesus says. Hear
then the parable of the sower.
When anyone hears the word of the kingdom
and does not understand
it, the evil one comes and snatches away
what has been sown in his heart.
This is what was sowing along the path
as what was sown on rocky ground.
This is one who hears the word
and immediately receives it with joy.
Yet he has no root in himself,
but endures for a while.
And then, when tribulation or persecution
arises on account of the word, immediately
he falls away.
As for what was sown among thorns,
this is the one who hears the word.
But the cares of the world
and the deceitfulness of riches
choke the word, and it proves unfruitful.
As for what was sown on good soil,
this is one who hears
the word and understands it.
He indeed bears fruit and yields
in one case a hundred fold,
and another 60, and in another 30.
Okay, here are my three points
to really simple
I want to talk about the seed,
the soil and the story.
That's it.
The seed, the soil and the story.
First the seed.
So Jesus begins this story by saying,
the kingdom of God is like a sower
who goes out to sow his seed.
Let me stop there.
I don't want you to miss
how weird that sentences.
It's easy to, you know, get familiar
with Jesus teaching
and miss how strange
some of the things he said actually were.
This one is very strange.
He says the kingdom of God is like
a sow goes out to so his.
See, that's not the way kingdoms move
and take over other kingdoms.
Not in our world.
I mean, right now our nation is at war
with the nation of Iran.
We didn't go in like a sower sowing seed.
We went in his epic fury
with fire and destruction
and overwhelming force.
That makes sense.
But here Jesus says
the kingdom of God is different.
Very different.
The kingdom of God is like a seed.
You know, seed is interesting.
It's it's tiny.
This is a seed that I saved from
an apple I ate this week.
No one is afraid of a seed.
Let me ask you this.
If you were God and you had all power,
and you wanted to make some changes
in this world,
which you undoubtedly would,
but not just little changes.
You wanted to make sweeping changes.
So it become like your kingdom,
where everything happens
the way you want it to happen.
How would you come?
I can tell you I'd come.
Come like a hammer.
Not like a seed.
Hey, like let me see this.
Which is scarier?
A hammer or a seed?
Which is more powerful?
A hammer?
It depends. It depends.
It's a guy named John Chapman,
who, in the early 1800s,
left his home in Le Meester,
Massachusetts, with a bag of seeds.
And he began to plant those seeds
as he walked through Pennsylvania
and West Virginia
and Ohio and Indiana and Illinois
and Ontario,
he would travel back and forth,
sometimes to orchards
that he had planted before,
and make cuttings of them and bring them
and plant them other places.
We know him
as his moniker, Johnny Appleseed.
He because of him, there were
whole counties that became orchards.
By the end of his life, there were
hundreds of thousands of apples.
And even today, generations later,
millions of apples
because of Johnny Appleseed,
which is more powerful,
a hammer or a seed or depends.
A hammer can do something right away,
but inside of a seed is the potential
to fill whole counties with trees,
to feed hundreds of thousands of people
apples generations later.
Because inside of a seed is life,
and that's power.
That's the seed.
Jesus says,
the kingdom of God is like a sower
who goes out to sow his seed.
The kingdom of God.
Actually, when it comes into the world
or into your life,
it can seem underwhelming at first
because it's
a seed in the seed,
he says, is the word of the kingdom.
So the kingdom of God starts as a message.
It's information.
And and this is the message.
It's a crazy message.
The message is, is that
the God of the universe became a human
being and allowed himself to be tortured
and hung on a cross, and somehow that paid
a cosmic debt that you had to God
with your sin and reconciled you to God.
And then he rose from the dead.
And when you believe that
there is life,
that enters into you like a seed
with the power
to change everything about you,
and you sit across from somebody and you,
you tell them the message and you say,
do you believe this message?
Do you want this seed?
And they look at you and they think,
I don't know how that's going to
change my life.
I mean,
if you want to change my life,
then give me a better job,
give me more opportunities,
give me a better marriage, right.
What they're saying is,
if you want to change my life,
I need a hammer.
I need something to do it right away.
Jesus holds up a seed and he said, no.
Trust me. Swallow this.
And if you believe in,
then there's life
and the power
to change everything about you.
That's the seed.
And the question is,
how do we get it?
And that brings me to my second point.
The soil.
So Jesus says that the
the kingdom of God is like a
so he goes out to sow a seed, and the seed
falls on different types of soil.
And since the seed is a message,
his information,
what he's saying really spends the most
the majority of this story
saying how we can miss the seed,
how we can miss the kingdom
because it comes through listening.
And of course,
there are different ways to listen.
If you've ever talked to somebody
while they were texting,
while they were receiving a text,
you realize there are different ways
to listen.
And so one of the drawbacks are,
well, let me say this, that listening
with a deep understanding,
listening with a receptive heart
is one of the primary skills
of the Kingdom of God.
One of the drawbacks to being a preacher
is that I'm more of a talker
than a listener.
Even when I
when I'm preparing for a message
like I did today, whenever I'm doing that,
I'm thinking about how I can
communicate it to you in such a way
that you'll be able to hear it,
that it will be interesting and
and will be something
where it's easy for you to understand.
So I, I'm thinking about props,
and I'm saving seeds from apples and
all kinds of stuff.
But I need to be careful
because Jesus says how I listen
will determine
how much life I really have.
That's one of the reasons that I love team
teaching with Pastors Act,
because that means every other week
I get to sit and listen like you listen.
I get to be here.
But I want you to know, too, that,
we even when I preach,
I am a a listener, too.
Sometimes people ask me, how do I preach
without notes in the way that I do?
It is I preach this out loud to myself
several times so I can hear it.
And because if it doesn't
have the power to change me,
it won't have the power to change you.
But because the kingdom of God comes
as a seed and comes through listening,
it's very easy to miss.
So Jesus ends up telling us
three ways that people can listen
and miss the kingdom of God.
And this is super important
because later on in the Gospel of Matthew,
Jesus will say, at the end of time,
there'll be people who thought they got it
and didn't,
and you don't want to be there.
Okay,
so the first way to listen and miss it,
I'm going to call a hard listening.
This is what Jesus says. Verse four.
It says, and as he sowed, some seeds fell
along the path,
and the birds came and devoured them.
This is how he explains it.
When anyone hears the word of the kingdom
and does not understand it, the evil
one comes and snatches away
what has been sown in his heart.
This is what was.
This is what was sown along the path.
Like the path is packed down.
This is hard, like cement.
First thing I want you to notice
is that the sower of the seed
throws the seed indiscriminately,
like he throws it all willy nilly.
Like if I'm planning grass seed in my
yard, I make sure I don't waste the seed.
I don't throw it on my parking,
on my driveway or anything. I.
I make sure that there's good soil
and I try to tilt it up.
And then I put some seeds in there,
you know?
But that's not the way the sower,
the sower throws seed everywhere.
And I tell you that
because sometimes people will ask me
what happens, what happens to those
who've never heard the gospel,
who've never heard the message?
And I want you to know a lot more
people have heard the message
than you probably think. I've heard it.
You'd be very it'd be very difficult
for you to find somebody that you know
in your neighborhood at work, at school,
anywhere that doesn't know
the basic message of the gospel.
If you ask them,
what does the Bible teach about Jesus?
Eventually they would say,
I think he died on a cross, supposedly
rose a rose again.
That's it. That's the seed.
But there are some people,
when they hear the seed,
it just sits on their heart
because their heart is hard.
There are a couple of ways.
There's an obvious way,
in a more subtle way, the obvious way
is people who have objections
they don't want to believe.
Anyways,
I've sat across from people who say, well,
this is my problem with the Bible,
or this is my problem with Christianity,
and they'll give me their problem.
And there's a good answer
to that particular question,
and I'll give them that answer.
And before I even get the answer out,
they're off to another to another
objection going, yeah, okay. Okay.
What about this?
What about that?
And it's almost like, you know,
going to a fair and playing that game,
whack a mole where one problem pops up
as soon as you knock down the other one.
That's the obvious way to be a hard
listener.
Just decide. You don't want to believe.
But there's a more subtle way,
and that's to sit in a church
like this and hear the message.
And we think, you think you believe it.
But it's never become personal.
You've
never come to the place where you realize
that you're the one Jesus came for,
that you're the one that Jesus
loves, that you're the one that Jesus
is calling by name.
And you can sit here your whole life
and never really make it personal,
and you don't realize it.
But you've been listening for years
with a hard heart.
That's one way.
The second way is what I call
shallow listening.
Sweet Jesus says.
And as for what was sown on rocky ground,
this is the one who hears
the word immediately receives it with joy.
It has no root in himself,
but endures for a while.
And when tribulation or persecution
arises on account of the word,
immediately he falls away.
Know I told you before
that you can sit across from somebody,
give them the message,
and they'll say, I don't see
how that's going to change my life.
If you want to change my life, I want
I need a better job or a better marriage.
Your life, my circumstances to get better.
Sometimes
when someone does hear the message
and they bring Jesus into their life,
their life does get better right away.
But then
they start to think of Jesus
as a life enhancer.
And when things go south
or life gets hard,
they say to themselves,
this is not what I signed up for.
And they bail.
That's a shallow listener,
and I want you to hear that
because some of you
are going through a really difficult time.
If you're not, you might have
a difficult time right around the corner.
All of us go through hard times
and I want you to be prepared for it.
Somebody who's a shallow listener
hasn't really come to grips
with the idea of their sin
and the holiness of God.
Because if you ever really understand
the depth of your sin
and the holiness of God, your separation,
what Jesus did on the cross for you,
you will never feel
like you're getting the short
end of the stick with Jesus.
You just never will.
But if you think you are,
you're a pretty good person
and God owes you a good life,
then the son won't have to get very hot
before you wilt.
That's a shallow listener.
The third kind of listener
that misses
it is what I call the thorny listener.
He says that as what was sown
among the thorns,
this is the one who hears the word.
But the cares of the world,
the deceitfulness of riches
choke the word, and it proves unfruitful.
If hard listening is a hard
heart
and shallow listening is a shallow heart,
then a
then thorny listening is a divided heart.
A divided heart is somebody who who goes
to church and is involved in church.
But when they're at work
or in their neighborhood or at school,
they're not really any different than
somebody who doesn't believe in Jesus.
That's somebody who has kind of a foot
in both kingdoms.
And when that happens, what Jesus says
is that you are you become unfruitful.
Now when the
Bible talks about fruit,
it talks usually about two different
types of fruit a fruit on the inside
and a fruit on the outside.
The fruit on the inside.
Paul describes in Galatians chapter five
the fruit of the spirit
and it's love, joy,
peace, patience, goodness, kindness,
gentleness, faithfulness, self-control.
And what Paul says is the deeper
the love of Jesus goes inside of you,
the more that will become part
of who you are.
Those those characteristics of love
and joy and peace.
But if you have a divided heart,
you don't experience that.
In some ways, you're
you're the most miserable of all people
because you experience the guilt of sin,
because you come to a place like this
and you know what Jesus wants from you,
but you never experience the real benefit
of walking with Jesus because you don't
have love and joy and peace.
Deep down,
that's a fruit that happens on the inside.
Then there's fruit
that happens on the outside
where the Bible say
that when Jesus takes control of you
and begins to transform
you, you become like a light
in the midst of darkness,
and you have people coming up to you
and saying, wait,
there is something different about you.
What is that difference?
Right?
But what Jesus says here is,
if you have a foot in both kingdoms,
no one comes up to you.
No one asked you why you're so different.
Because you're not different at all.
Jesus says
that the the sower goes out to sow a seed,
and the seed has the power
to change everything about you.
But it falls on different soil.
It falls on hard soil,
on shallow soil, on thorny soil.
But then the question is what happens
when it falls on good soil?
And that brings me to a third point.
The story.
This parable is the first of seven
parables that Jesus tells in
Matthew chapter 13.
They're called the parables
of the Kingdom.
Listen, this is important.
Jesus didn't come
just to forgive your sins.
Jesus didn't.
You know he forgives your sins.
But that's not all he came for.
He came to bring a kingdom.
And this is the way the kingdom comes.
There's a great word in Greek.
It's only used twice in the New Testament.
One of my all time favorite words,
the word is in Genesis.
In Genesis, for the first time, it's used.
It's used in the Gospel of Matthew.
Jesus uses it
when he's describing what will happen
to the world when his kingdom comes
in all of its fullness.
Palin. Genesis.
It means a remaking,
a renewal of all things
you have to think of like HGTV,
where, you know, you see this house
that's just a dump,
and then people descend on the house
and they make it into something
that you can hardly recognize.
It's just glorious.
That's a Palin genesis.
That's what Jesus is going to do, but
it's going to do it to the whole world.
That's the power of the kingdom of God.
The other times it's used as in Titus
chapter three,
when Paul the Apostle uses it to describe
what happens when the Spirit of God
begins to change a person
like you or a person like me,
that God's desire
and his plan is to make me into something
glorious, to make me into a person
that fits in his Kingdom,
who actually ushers his kingdom in.
So when I say the story,
I mean this is the story of God.
This is the way
God's going to take over this world.
This is the way.
This is the story of God's kingdom coming.
This is also your story.
Listen,
your whole life is going to be determined
by how the seed takes root in your heart.
It will be determined on the kind of soil
you are.
But if you have good soil,
if you receive, if you hear,
if you believe,
then the seed has the power of life
to change everything about you,
to make you one that is like a light
that God uses to usher in his kingdom.
Finally, it's the story of our church.
Like our church is exploding right now.
We baptized 40 people last week.
We have more people in a baptism class
this week.
It is just one.
People ask me
what's going on with the church
and now I have a new answer.
What I tell them now is in Genesis,
what God
is doing is there are more and more people
who are hearing, listening well,
and they're taking the seed into this
beginning to change them in such a way
that the people that they live around
are saying,
what's what's different about you?
How can I know what you know?
And you're bringing them here?
This is the whole world
is going to be changed, not with a hammer,
not with a hammer,
with a seed, with a message.
And the message is this that God so loved
the world that he came for you,
that the seed of the kingdom
take root in all of us,
so that it bears fruit inside and outside.
And the kingdom of God grows here
because it's growing in us.
You pray with me,
father in heaven, we come to you.
And I'm so grateful.
I'm grateful that you came into this world
not as a hammer,
but as a sower sowing seed.
And that your plan is to change.
People like me, people
like the people here in such a way
that we begin to live
as citizens of your kingdom.
And your kingdom comes
and your will is done
here on earth as it is in heaven.
That's our prayer.
Turn us into people,
that the seed is not only changed,
but we become sowers of the seed as well.
We pray this in Jesus name. Amen.