Good morning everyone. Take your Bibles, open up to the
Gospel of Luke chapter 8, Luke chapter 8, and that is page 917.
If you're using the Bible in the seat around you, if you don't
have a Bible, please take one of those.
That's our gift to you. Want to start off by welcoming
some new members to our church family.
So would you join me in welcoming Jimmy and Katie Bender
Lewis and Monique the Jaeger and Damien Cothra to the Forward
family? And as always, if you consider
Forward to be your church home but you're not yet a member, we
want to invite you to consider membership and an important way
of making a covenant to each other as a church family and
part of your discipleship journey.
You can just text the Word member to get more information
on that. OK, how many of you this is I,
I'm going to do something to try to warm you up this morning, OK,
Because it is a little chilly out.
How many of you consider yourself to be good at
gardening? Right?
You're like looking forward to gardening season.
Gardening season. It is coming.
I promise you it's coming. All of you raise your hand.
I just want to say God bless you.
I am not good at gardening at all.
In fact, I think I could kill a plastic plant.
Over the last couple of years, I wanted my lawn to look as nice
as possible, as nice as all the other lawns on my street.
So I hired a company to come in and take care of my grass, just
to put some fertilizer on it and do whatever else it is they do
to make things green and keep weeds out.
And it was great for a little while.
And then one day, after spending a whole bunch of money, I was
devastated to see mushrooms growing on my front lawn.
And then there were brown patches on my back lawn and I
was upset and I called up the the guy who was taking care of
my lawn. Like, what did you do to my
lawn? I never had mushrooms before you
showed up. And he said, Kirk, the problem
isn't what you can see. The problem is what you can't
see. The problem is what's going on
below the surface. The problem is with the soil and
the health of the soil of your lawn.
And the reality of what was going on under the surface of my
lawn is like the spiritual reality that Jesus is going to
talk about today. Over the last number of weeks
we've been exploring this question of who exactly is
Jesus? And this week the passage is
going to show us that Jesus is the one who reveals the true
condition of your heart. One of the things that we've
seen as we've been walking through the book of Luke is how
Jesus has been sent on this mission from God to bring good
news to the people. The good news of the Kingdom of
God that has come. And the heart of Jesus is for
the good of people. That he wants your life and my
life to be fruitful. That we could be everything that
God created and designed us to be as human beings.
We even saw that last week right where we looked at how Jesus is
the one who elevates even those who are overlooked.
And as Jesus is bringing this good news to people, he starts
to create a bit of a following for himself.
As you can imagine, of course, people want to be surrounded by
good news. They want someone who's going to
make them feel good, make them feel loved, make them feel
known. And in verse 4 of Luke chapter
8, we read this as a large crowd was gathering and people were
coming to Jesus from every town. He said in a parable, and I'm
going to pause right there for a minute.
This is the first time that we see the word parable used in the
book of Luke. It is the first what we're about
to read is the very first parable that's expressed in the
gospels and and part of Jesus message to people.
For some of you, you know exactly what a parable is, but
many of you may be new to the idea of what a parable is.
So let me just quickly define parable for you.
Parable is a short illustration meant to point to a spiritual
reality. It is something that the people
of the day would have understood.
He's using language and an illustration that would have
made sense to the people of the day to be able to point to a
greater spiritual reality that he's trying to teach to them.
So up to this point, Jesus has taught all kinds of different
things, but now he transitions to using a parable in his
teachings. Let's keep reading verse 5.
A sower went out to sow his seed, and as he sowed, some seed
fell along the path. It was trampled on and the birds
of the sky devoured it. Other seed fell on the rock.
When it grew up, it withered away since it lacked moisture.
Other seed fell among thorns. The thorns grew up with it and
choked it. Still other seed fell on good
ground. When it grew up, it produced
fruit 100 times what was sown. As he said this, he called out,
Let anyone who has ears to hear listen.
Then his disciples asked him, what does this parable mean?
So here's the thing about the parables of Jesus.
They're often times very confusing.
You will listen and read a parable of Jesus and it will not
always make sense to you at first.
You have to really match up the spiritual perspective of the
teaching with the practical thing that he's trying to
illustrate in the parable in order to make sense of it.
This is not the last time that you are ever going to see the
disciples of Jesus listening to a parable and going, Huh, we
don't know what you're talking about.
We, we're we're lost. What in the world do you mean by
that? Jesus?
So in verse 10, Jesus begins to unpack why parables are
important and what he's trying to say in this parable.
So he says the secrets of the Kingdom of God have been given
for you to know, but to the rest it is in parables so that
looking they may not see and hearing they may not understand.
What Jesus says is that he's come to unpack secrets of the
Kingdom of God, things that up to that point had not been fully
understood or known by a group of people who had an Old
Testament understanding of how God works.
And now Jesus is unpacking for them a a picture of the fullness
of what the Kingdom of God is like and what it's all about.
That he wants to help them understand more of the beauty
and the joy of life in a Kingdom where Jesus is king.
But then he says there's another side to the story.
The end of verse 10 is a quote from the book of Isaiah, chapter
6. Jesus is quoting the Old
Testament here. And what Jesus is saying is
this. Some people are going to hear my
words and they're going to have their lives transformed.
And some people are going to hear the words of Jesus and it's
going to have no impact whatsoever on them.
And some people may even become bitter and angry when they hear
the words of Jesus. And that can be very
disorienting for a lot of people when when you stop and think
about it, why is it that you can have some people who hear the
message of Jesus and they feel so loved and so cared for and
that their life has meaning and purpose again, and other people
just shrug their shoulders and go, meh, no big deal.
Why is it that some people give their entire life to follow
Jesus? I mean, they will sell anything
and everything. They'll move to other parts of
the world because they just want to say yes to Jesus.
Why do some people do that? And other people spend their
entire life trying to disprove Jesus.
What's going on there? Why do some people say that they
follow Jesus and yet their life and their actions seem to be
doing the exact opposite of following Jesus?
You see, there is something about the message of Jesus that
is always going to reveal what's going on below the surface.
The mushrooms in my yard tell a story of what's happening in the
soil. And our response, your response,
my response to Jesus and his message, tell a story of the
true condition of your heart. It doesn't matter if you are
just exploring faith today or if you've been a Christian for most
of your life. The words of Jesus will always
reveal something about what's really happening inside your
heart. And so Jesus now starts to
unpack the meaning of this parable for us.
And here's the first thing that he wants you to know.
You are here today because there have been seeds planted in your
life. That's why you're here.
Verse 11, Jesus says this is the meaning of the parable.
The seed is the word of God. Remember how this parable
started? A sower goes out to plant seeds,
and Jesus now says the seeds that were planted by the sower
were the word of God. God's word, both in terms of the
presence of Jesus himself and also God's written word in the
Bible, that is the seed that is planted in people's hearts.
And no matter who you are today, every single person who's in
this room and every single person who's watching online,
you are not here by accident. You are here in part because of
people who have planted seeds of the Word of God into your life.
Whether you are brand new to the Christian faith or you've been
around for decades, you are here because of those seeds.
You are here because God has been doing things in your life
to reveal himself to you. For some of you, he's worked
through a person in your life who's talked to you about faith.
It's been so cool to meet some people who are going through
Alpha or people who are new to our church who are saying, hey,
I'm here because this person has been talking to me about Jesus
and that's why I'm here. That's planting seeds in your
life. Some of you are here because
your parents or teachers or youth leaders, they have planted
seeds into your life of the Word of God.
Maybe you've just stumbled across some Christian songs
along the way, or Bible verses, or Bible teachers who said some
things about Jesus. All those things over the course
of your life are seeds of the Word of God that have been
planted into your heart. Sometimes Jesus is going to
plant seeds just simply by you looking at nature and going man
alive. There's got to be somebody out
there who would be so amazing to create something as beautiful as
this. That's a seed being planted into
your life or looking at history or even thoughts in your mind
about the big questions of life. Those are seeds that have been
planted. And what God has done is put
together this incredible resource and team of people in
your life to plant seeds of God's Word.
And there are so many times we don't even pay attention to
what's going on. We don't even think about all
the people who've invested in our lives.
Sometimes it's just one sentence, sometimes over years,
but they've all been planting seeds of the Word of God into
our lives. And all those seeds have brought
you up to this point where you are today.
But what happens with the seeds that have been planted?
How well a seed develops is directly connected to the soil
that is planted in. And what Jesus is about to teach
us is that how you respond to the Word of God is an indicator
of the soil of your heart. Let's keep reading verse 12.
Jesus says the seed along the path are those who have heard,
and then the devil comes and takes away the word from their
hearts so that they may not believe and be saved.
And the seed on the rock are those who, when they hear,
receive the word with joy. Having no root, these believe
for a while and fall away in a time of testing.
As for the seed that fell among thorns, these are the ones who
when they have heard, go on their way and are choked with
worries, riches and pleasures of life and produce no mature fruit
but the seed and the good ground.
These are the ones who, having heard the Word with an honest
and good heart, hold on to it and by enduring produce fruit.
There are four different types of soils that Jesus begins to
unpack and describe to say this is a picture of what the state
of your heart is, and these are the signs you should be looking
for to understand the state of your heart.
And the first type of soil he describes is the path.
If the path is like that path you walk on all the time when
you go for a hike, it's hard ground.
Nothing has happened to really loosen up the soil on a path.
If you've ever planted grass seed on your front yard, you
know that some of the seed lands on your driveway or on your
sidewalk. And unless there are cracks in
your sidewalk or your driveway, that seed is not growing anytime
soon because it has hit hard ground.
When seeds are planted in this kind of soil, it's easy not only
for the seeds to never grow, but for animals to come and pick up
the seeds and remove them so they have no chance because
they're just sitting on the surface.
What Jesus is saying is that some people are going to hear
the message of Jesus, they're going to hear the word of God
proclaimed, and they're going to have different responses.
Some people are going to go, I don't care.
Look, this just isn't relevant to me.
But why? Why would you think about some
guy who lived 2000 years ago? What difference does that make
in my life today? Some people are going to get
offended at the words of Jesus. Some people are going to become
defensive at the words of Jesus. Some are going to have literally
legitimate intellectual doubts and wonder about different
things. Some people simply have a lot of
wounds from other Christians in their past, and it's like their
heart has literally been trampled on by other people.
And all those things are pictures Jesus is saying of how
the soil of your heart is hardened.
People who don't want to hear God's word won't hear God's word
simply because of the state of their heart.
And then Jesus says because the seeds are just sitting on the
top of the soil, it's easy picking for the devil to come
and just take the seeds off. Some of you have people in your
life that you are deeply concerned about in terms of
their spiritual well-being. For some of you it is children
or its grandchildren. It's close friends and you,
you're like, I've tried to talk to them about Jesus.
I've tried to say all the things that I know that I should say
and it just doesn't seem to be going anywhere.
They seem to not want to listen to me and I feel like I'm
blowing it because I'm not doing this right.
And what Jesus is saying is the core issue isn't that you're
blowing it. The core issue is the state of
their heart. Their heart is hard ground and
spiritually what's happening is that the soil of their heart has
become so hardened that any seed that is planted is easy for the
devil to come in and just pick it out.
You need to remember that our role as people, as followers of
God, is not not to try and just convince someone to follow
Jesus. Our job is to plant the seeds.
We can't control what the soil of anyone's heart is.
All that we can control. Are we planting seeds of the
Word of God in people's lives? The second type of soil that
Jesus describes is rocky ground. It's what the ground's like
where I live. It's very rocky.
On the surface it looks great, but once you dig about two
inches down into the ground, you are hitting rocks, which makes
building a fence really fun. In my town, the good part of
rocky soil is that you can loosen up the ground so that the
seeds have at least a fighting chance in rocky ground.
But it's really difficult for seeds to grow any roots when the
ground is so rocky. Some seeds might make it, but
most seeds never ever make it. And here's what Jesus is saying.
Jesus is warning us of the potential of people like you and
me becoming spiritual dopamine junkies.
Here's what I mean by that. It is possible for people to
come and hear the message of Jesus and get very excited about
it. This is awesome.
Love this. Never experienced anything like
this before in my life. Never heard such great news
before in my life. Come and gather with God's
people and I listen to worship songs and I'm excited and I'm
pumped up. I've got tears coming down my
face. It's just amazing, amazing,
amazing experience. But then life gets hard and
suddenly the spiritual high isn't there anymore.
Many of us have grown up in churches and we've gone to
retreats and conferences that are amazing spiritual
experiences where you just feel the presence of God.
For many of us, there are favorite Bible verses that we
read. They are our go to Bible verse
to make us feel good and we lean into those things all the time.
Or we listen to a pastor preach and you're like, man, he just
said exactly what I needed to hear today.
When those spiritual moments, we can't help but be filled with so
much joy and excitement. They're amazing.
But what Jesus warns us here in this parable is that the
dopamine hit doesn't last forever.
The high you get in those moments doesn't last forever.
Most of the Christian life is really rather routine, to be
honest. Not every moment is going to be
a mountaintop experience. So what happens to your faith
when it's not the mountaintop experience?
What happens to your faith when life gets hard?
There's going to be times where it's really difficult to follow
Jesus and do the things that Jesus says.
What happens to your faith then? So many people keep looking for
that next spiritual high. And don't get me wrong, I love
having moments like that. Like those kinds of moments mean
the world to me in terms of my walk with Jesus.
I love those moments. But boy, have I ever come to
learn that those are not the norm.
Normal Christian life is going to be in the valleys, and it's
going to be in the challenges. And how you respond to Jesus in
the hard times is an indicator of whether the seeds of Jesus
took root in your life in the good times.
The third type of soil that Jesus describes as thorns.
I think one of the most frustrating things in most yards
or gardens is weeds of any kind. You dig them out, they keep
coming back, right? And the more weeds you have, the
more difficult it is to grow anything.
Seeds just get choked out. And we understand this when it
comes to our yards and our gardens.
But the same principle that exists for your garden and your
yard is also true for your spiritual life.
There are going to be some people who have spiritual seeds
planted in their life, but they will never see the potential of
what those seeds can become. And the reason is just this
stuff, life. I see people all the time who
they come to church or they come to some ministry program and
they're excited and they're blessed and their courage, which
is awesome and they're excited about their faith.
But then like life gets busy and when life gets busy or some
crisis hits in life, suddenly I, I just don't have as much time
for God anymore. I don't have as much time to go
to church. I don't have as much time to
read my Bible anymore because life's just busy.
There's stuff going on. We like, let's let's be honest,
we gather here on Sundays, we hear God's word preached.
But if forward is like churches all over North America, I know
that a large number of us walk away and we go, well, that was a
nice service. And then we go and do whatever
the heck we want the rest of the week.
We live how we want the rest of the week with not even thinking
about life through the lens of Jesus.
There's this disconnect between what you know God says and how
that actually shapes the rest of your life.
But just think about some of the weeds that are choking out your
spiritual life. The worries of life, the work,
the busyness, the hobbies of life.
Somehow we try to justify so many different things that Jesus
would be fine with this. But if it's getting in the way
at all of your love for Jesus, he's not fine with it.
It's choking out the word of God in your life and it's a sign
that you have some weeds to deal with in the soil of your heart.
One of my big weaknesses is I, I worry a lot.
I'm a warrior. I, I can come to church and I
can sing songs about the greatness of God and how much
God loves us. I can sing a song like the Lord
will provide. And I'm going to walk home today
and I'm going to go home and I'm going to sit at home probably.
And I'm going to go. I'm not really sure he's going
to provide. I know He will, but I'm not sure
he will. Anybody ever feel like that
before? There's so many times where my
problems become bigger than my God, and when that happens, it's
like a weed that is strangling out hope and joy in my heart.
And I know I'm not alone with stuff like that.
Like, I am so glad you're here today.
I'm so glad you're watching online.
It's great that you read your Bible and that you pray
throughout the week. Those are all really important
things to do because those are all places where God's Word,
seeds of God's word, are being planted in your life.
But something can be part of your routines without changing
how you live. I can go to the gym every day,
but if I eat the wrong food the rest of the day, I'm never going
to be healthy. What you do with God's Word
every single time you hear it is going to reveal something about
your heart. It's heartbreaking to see how
many Christians never realized their full potential as a
Christian in this lifetime because we get distracted by
things that are temporary all the time.
The worries that we carry become bigger than the God we say we
worship and the Father in heaven who says He's going to provide
for our needs. The money in our bank account
drives our decisions more than the God who gave us the money in
the 1st place. The pleasures that we pursue
Honestly, have you sat down and thought through all the
pleasures you pursue in life? The pleasures we pursue that we
somehow convince ourselves are greater than the one who says
that at his right hand there are pleasures that last forever.
So many of our hearts are being choked out by weeds.
It's choking out our ability to be the people that Jesus came to
set free. But the good news is that there
can be a different story, that there is such a thing as having
good soil. In verse 15, Jesus tells us that
good soil has a desire to hear from Jesus and a lifestyle of
saying yes to him. We read that again, verse 15,
the seed and the good ground. These are the ones who having
heard the word with an honest and good heart, hold on to it
and by enduring produce fruit. Jesus says the people with the
good soil are the people who are like, I just, I need to hear the
word of God. I need to hear from God.
I need to hear his voice. They want to know Him more and
more. They want to know His will.
They want to know His heart. But not only that, over the
course of their life, not only do they want the knowledge of
who God is, they want to live with a posture of constantly
saying yes to God. When the seed of God's word is
planted in good soil, it will grow.
And when it grows, people will become more and more like Jesus,
the fruit of his character, and his priorities will blossom more
and more in your life. Like, you just know when you're
around someone who's got good soil, right?
You just look at the fruit in their life and you're like, man,
there's just something about these people.
But you can see it in their relationships.
You know, they just have oddly healthy relationships.
You see it in their consistent love for other people, like they
love people that nobody else wants to talk to.
You just see it in the deep, passionate love they have for
people. You see it in their attitudes.
You see it in their character. Like they tend to be more
peaceful, more joyful, more more loving people.
You see it in the way that they work.
You see it in the way that they worship and pray and read their
Bibles. You see it in the way that they
live for the benefit of other people more than themselves.
And by the way, it's not an age thing either.
Like you can be a 75 year old who's been in church your entire
life and have terrible soil, and you can be a 13 year old who's
just figuring this out and you can have amazing soil.
It's not an age thing. I, I see this in our church.
I see people of all ages where I look at their life.
My goodness, the fruit in their life is amazing to watch.
It's so encouraging to see what God's doing in their life and
how God's using them and shaping their life.
But if you talk to those people, one of the things you're going
to discover is none of that happened overnight.
It happens through this consistent desire of wanting to
hear from Jesus and a lifestyle of saying yes to Jesus.
Now, I know that when I describe people with good soil in their
hearts, there are going to be some of you who are here today
and you're going to be feeling very spiritually frustrated at
that because you're looking at your own life and going, Why
can't I have good fruit in my life like that?
Why isn't my life the way that Kirk's describing?
Why isn't my life as fruitful as someone else?
Let me just encourage you with this fruit always takes time to
grow. God is not done with you yet.
Your part is to keep leaning into Jesus.
The amazing thing about the spiritual life is you don't have
to try harder to be like Jesus. The fruit will be there if the
seed has been planted in good soil.
It's not about you working harder to be like Jesus.
It's about you preparing the soil of your heart to receive
the word of God into it. God is not focused on simply
passing along information to us. God is interested in
transforming us. He's not interested in giving
you a little bit of self help. He's interested in making your
life more fruitful than you could have ever dreamed was
possible. But to do that, God will always
expose what's in our hearts because unless you and I deal
with that, we won't be as fruitful as we can be.
So the question that we have to wrestle with is this.
How will you respond to Jesus shining His light on the
condition of your heart? Look at verse 16.
Jesus shifts from talking about farming to a light, but he still
keeps this same theme going. In verse 16, He says no one,
after lighting a lamp, covers it with a basket or puts it under a
bed, but puts it on a lampstand so that those who come in may
see its light. For nothing is concealed that
won't be revealed, and nothing hidden that won't be made known
and brought to light. Therefore, take care how you
listen, for whoever has more will be given to him, and
whoever does not have even what he thinks he has will be taken
away from him. I want to challenge you and
invite you into a regular spiritual habit in your life.
I want to invite you anytime you are entering into a space where
you know you're going to have God's Word brought to you,
whether that's coming into church, going into a class or a
discipleship group, or just in your own personal devotions or
you're hanging out with friends. Anytime you're going to be in an
environment where God's Word you know you're going to hear and
encounter God's Word. I want to challenge you to pray
this prayer. God, use your word to shine a
light on the condition of my heart.
Use your word to shine a light on the condition of my heart.
Do it every single time. And here's what you're going to
find as you do that. You're not going to find a God
who is out to get you. You're going to find a God who's
out to save you. You're going to find a God who's
more like a gardener who wants to dig below the surface to find
and remove the things that are getting in the way of your
fruitfulness. When you ask God to shine His
light on your heart, the truth is you will come face to face
with some things that need to change if you're going to be
increasingly fruitful in your life.
So let me ask you, if you were to look at your life today,
which soil would you say your heart has right now?
What soil is in your heart right now, today?
It's interesting, I believe and have experienced that sometimes
my soil can be different in different seasons, stages of
life. Don't see this as I've graduated
to this kind of soil. Even the healthiest of yards can
still grow weed. What would you say is the type
of soil? Maybe, maybe a better question
is maybe I should ask the person sitting next to you, what kind
of soil do you experience in that person's heart?
Maybe the more important question though, isn't what any
of us think. Maybe the more important
question is what would God say is the condition of the soil of
your heart today? And as God reveals what's in
your heart, Jesus says these words.
Take care how you listen. Don't just pay attention to the
words. Pay attention to what the words
are revealing about your own heart.
Take care how you listen to the word of God, because how you
listen to God's word has a direct connection to your
spiritual future. The good news of Jesus is this,
He doesn't leave you alone to figure this out.
He doesn't make you go like, OK, fix the soil of your own heart.
The good news of Jesus that Jesus is able to change any
heart. Ezekiel chapter 36 says this.
I will give you a new heart and I will put a new spirit in you.
I will remove your heart of stone and give you a heart of
flesh. That's that's what Jesus came to
do, change hearts. He didn't come to put a Band-Aid
on our problems. He came to give us a new heart.
Jesus came to change us from the inside out.
So many times we look at behaviors and we go the
behaviour needs to change, the behaviour needs to change and
Jesus says that the behaviour is just a symptom.
The behaviours only change when the heart changes.
We need to ask God to shine a light on our hearts, and then we
have to respond as He does that. We need to ask God to change the
soil so that the seed of God's Word can take root in our lives.
I'm going to ask you to close your eyes.
You might be sitting here today and you recognize yourself as
someone who has a hard heart. You don't.
You're here maybe just to make someone else happy, but you
don't really have any desire or interesting God.
Or maybe your heart has been wounded and hurt so many times
and it's just gotten hardened over time.
Today I want to invite you to just pray right where you are.
Pray God, would you break open the soil of my heart and give me
a new heart. Maybe you're here today and
there's someone that you love who you know, like, hey, they
have a heart. Heart.
The soil of their heart is so hardened.
I'm going to invite you just to take the next minute and just
pray for God to soften the soil of their heart today.
Some of you, the soil of your heart is rocky ground right now.
You're going through it and your faith is wavering and here's how
you lean into Jesus in moments like that.
Here's how you help invite Him in to deal with the soil of your
heart. One of my favorite prayers in
all the Bible. If you're going through it right
now, pray. You can pray this prayer, God, I
believe, but help my unbelief right now.
And some of you, you recognize that you got weeds going on
inside your heart. I want to invite you to pray the
prayer that David prayed for himself, where he said, create
in me a clean heart. God, remove the weeds from my
life and restore to me the joy of my salvation.
Wherever you are, I'm just going to give you a moment just to
pray in response to whatever soil your heart is.
Almighty God, I come to you and ask in your grace and your mercy
that you would remove the heart of stone that some of us has and
you would give us a new heart, a heart that is ready to receive
whatever you want to plant into our into our hearts through your
Word. God, we pray that you would
create in us a clean heart and restore to us the joy of your
salvation. Help us to be a people who take
great care with how we listen to your word.
Thank you for your Son Jesus who care.
Aim to rescue us. Who is our hope?
Who is our joy? Who is the name above all names
that we stand on. Help us God, to be a people who
live every day from a heart where Jesus is the center of
everything. I pray, pray this in your mighty
and powerful name. Amen.
Let's stand together and respond
to the Lord and worship.