7/13/25 Matt. 13:1-9, 18-23 “The Real Deal”

10 Jul 7/13/25 Matt. 13:1-9, 18-23 “The Real Deal”

7/13/25   Matt. 13:1-9, 18-23       “The Real Deal”

Every once in a while, I have the honor and privilege of taking a vacation.  This is hard to do because I am retired.  The reasoning is that if I do not have a job, how can I go on vacation?  Anyway, I try very hard not to do any work but I fail.  But least I’m not doing all the things I usually do.  Now you may be thinking that it seems that I’m always on vacation and that is true.  But I would like to point out the difference to being always out to lunch and on vacation.  Anyway, it is usually a much-needed rest.  Usually when I am on vacation, I start and finish 4-5 books.  I used to like to do a little fishing.  We like to visit our daughters and grandchildren.  It is just about always good plus I have some time for some thinking.  You should know that this is never good for me.  I read today’s reading while I was on one of my thinking missions and I thought about it a lot.  We have 4 scenarios and 3 of them involve the saying I said a couple of weeks ago from Oswald Chambers.  “Sin destroys the capacity to know what sin is!”  Let’s take a look at this passage on farming and see if any of it applies to us or are we exempt from it all.

Steve Shepherd tells this wonderful little story of a young girl who was excited about something that had happened.  We have all been around when this happens.  The child is so excited that the words just don’t come.  And when they do, they come out so fast that you cannot understand what they are saying.  This is what happened to this little girl and her dad said, “Slow up, honey, you are talking too fast!”  The little girl was not about to let her dad damper her enthusiasm and she shot back, “Oh, no Daddy, I’m not talking too fast.  You’re just listening too slow!”  Are you listening?   I like to refer to many things in science because I think science is our friend.  Anyway, it has been said that we think 4-5 times faster than we talk.  This means that if a speaker talks at 120 words a minute, then the audience thinks at about 500 words a minute.  What I’m trying to say here is that I might have to talk a lot faster or you might have to listen a lot slower, or I run the danger of putting people to sleep.  Now I don’t mind if you sleep through what I say.  However, you will have a problem if you sleep through what Jesus is trying to tell you.

The parable we are looking at today is one we have heard many times.  It is about the farmer who threw seeds so they would grow a crop.  We need to remember that farming was a whole lot different in these times.  They didn’t have a 4-wheel drive tractor that could plant 200 acres in a day.  As a matter of fact, their methods are really foreign to us.  They would take the seed and scatter it on the ground.  Then they would come along and cover the seed.  Their fields were also not anything like our big fields today.  They were usually strips of fields with paths in between.  Therefore, when the passage tells us that some seed fell on the hard path, this is why.  The same thing can be said of the rocks and the weeds.  They had a whole different way of farming that is completely foreign to us today but this should help you to visualize a little as to what was going on.

There is something else going on here that we also need to know.  The farmer spreads the seed on every kind of ground.  This is like God spreading His seed everywhere.  To God, it is the seed that is important and not the type of ground where the seed falls.  You see, with God the seed can grow and even thrive under any of these conditions.  We have all seen this happen.  Why does one member of a family become totally committed to Jesus Christ while a brother or sister may feel just the opposite?  I have heard of several instances where people in regions that are 100% Muslim suddenly start to follow Jesus.  As a matter of fact, I just had this happen to me a few weeks ago.  Jesus doesn’t discriminate when it comes to spreading His seed.  It goes everywhere and every person has a chance to pick it up.  This is just like what our founder, John Wesley, thought as he came up with the theory of ‘prevenient grace.’  It is grace that is everywhere in the world.  All people have to do is accept it and their lives change.

In our first scenario, we find the farmer scattering seeds in his field and some of the seeds fall on the path which is right beside the field.  Of course, there is no place for the seeds to sprout so the birds come along and eat the seeds.  Now I suppose that if there were no birds or anything to take the seeds, that over time the seeds might germinate and grow.  We like to think of many things as a rather permanent.  They are currently fixing the streets in Fargo as they do every year.  How long do you think it would be, if no one ever traveled on the streets, that the streets would grow back with some sort of vegetation?  I think we might be surprised at how little time it would be before God took the streets back with plants.  That is not what happened here but it could.  Anyway, I digress.

This first instance refers to the hard hearted people.  These are the ones who will not listen under any circumstances.  These are our friends and neighbors who dismiss Jesus without the slightest hesitation.  These are the goofy atheists who march on city hall in your city with one far out demand after another.  These are the scientists who believe in their way or the highway.  They won’t even consider that science and religion should go hand in hand into the future.  These are the ones who make fun of you for your beliefs, and let me tell you that there are far more of these types of people than we think.

For decades, we have let church take second, third or fourth place in our lives.  Our church leaders stress that their preachers had better preach what the people want to hear.  This is not different than the evil kings of the Old Testament who only wanted prophets to tell them what they wanted to hear.  In the Old Testament, the kings lost because of this as did all their people.  Preachers today who only preach feel good theology will lose and so will their people and churches.  Now don’t get me wrong.  I think that we need to preach some feel good stuff. However, there are some dire consequences if we should decide to follow Satan and not Jesus.  Any time you are straying from the word of God, then you are serving the evil one.  We have more people today serving the devil in the name of Jesus than we have ever before.  The Bible tells us to beware of false prophets who come in the name of Jesus but have everything wrong.  This mentality is everywhere today so beware.  These are the seeds that fall on the hard ground.

The next group of seeds I think we will call shallow Hal.  If you have ever been on a path, then you should know that often times there are many rocks and things along the edge of the path.  When a seed falls into the rocks, there is a good chance that it will germinate.  The seed will start to grow but it will soon die because there is no place for the roots to go.  It almost seems to me that the whole region of Israel is rocky like this.  It is very rough country.

The people hearing this parable were having a hard time understanding it.  This was probably because it really applied to them and it really applies to us.  Jesus does us a favor as He explains this parable.  Jesus tells us that this is the person that comes to know Him and is suddenly very excited about this new find but because the seed has no roots in the rocks, this person soon falls away.  To my way of thinking, these people never really knew Jesus in the first place or they would have never, never fallen away.

We have to be very careful when someone first comes to Christ.  Peter, Paul and the author of Hebrews all talk about how new Christians are like babies who need milk to grow.  They soon grow out of this phase and begin to eat solid food.  We have to take the new Christian under our wing and help them along the first part of their journey.  I would like to say that there is nothing more exciting in the whole world than when we first come to know Jesus.  However, in Revelation we are told that this euphoria probably won’t last.  It usually fades a little or sometimes a lot.

This is why we need support groups for new Christians.  When we have had people come to know Jesus in our churches, I have told you to go to these people to help and guide them.  If we don’t do these simple things, then we end up with people falling away from Christ because they never really got to know Him in the first place.  It is up to us to draw people out of these rocky places.

Now we come to the granddaddy of them all.  This is the seed that is put out into the thorns and is choked out because the thorns get all the water and nourishment because they have the established roots.  I would take this to mean weeds.  The weeds choke out the seedlings.  I remember when I was young and it seemed the whole world had a wild oat problem.  Everything came up fine in the spring but soon the wild oats outnumbered the wheat.  There were places where the wheat would be choked out so bad that there was no wheat, only wild oats.

Jesus explains this as the one who hears the word of Jesus and then worries about life in this world.  Then he allows the riches and wealth of this world to choke out the real world of Jesus.  This person becomes unfruitful.  I would say that these are many of the people of this country who call themselves Christian but it is in name only.  They have no substance, they have no root system and they have been choked out by the devil.

These are the people who start out in our churches.  They go to Sunday school and confirmation.  Then they decide, and their parents don’t object, that they really don’t need church after confirmation.  So we don’t see them more than a couple times a year.  They are too busy for church.  This continues in college where there might be some attendance but usually there is no church attendance at all.  Now it’s after college and there is no need for church.  If you think this is harsh, think about all the people playing softball, golf or at the lakes on this Sunday morning.  Everyone is too busy for church and they seem to think it is ok because everyone is doing it.  Then some of these people will get married and have children.  If we are lucky, we will see this new generation once in a while.  This is a cycle that we have in this country that continues to spiral downward.

We get so caught up in the material things of this world, the ‘me’ things, that we don’t have time for God.  We want to get rich quick without any regard for how we get there.  We become so unfruitful that we just tell God to stay away from us.  We become totally choked out by all the weeds of our society and let me tell you there are more weeds out there than there are kernels of good grain.

Before we draw this to a close, I want you to notice something.  Jesus is the best preacher/teacher that there has ever been.  Notice how He preaches.  He begins with the things that we do wrong.  We all do them.  You have probably done some of the things we have talked about today.  Jesus convicts us of our sin first.  We would have no need for the Good News if we never did anything wrong.  But remember from Romans, “For we have all sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”  But Jesus will never leave us mired in our sin.  He will always give us a way out.  Today, He has been convicting with this parable and now He finishes with a flurry.

Some of the seeds fell on fertile soil, good soil.  There they produced a good crop.  100, 60 and 30 times were the yields compared to what was sown.  What Jesus is telling us here is that there is no real life outside of Jesus.  He is the way, the truth and the life.  All things are possible through Jesus Christ.

As I said, the seeds are scattered everywhere on every kind of soil.  But the fertile soil is Jesus.  You will probably never amount to anything on the road or in rocks or in weeds.  No good can come from this.  However, when people find themselves in these places, they can always turn to Jesus and He will supply the fertile soil.  He will help you out of these places of no growth and transplant you where growth is abundant.

What I’m trying to say here is that if you know someone who doesn’t know Jesus or if you don’t know Him, it is never too late to turn to Him.  Jesus is waiting for us to help others and ourselves.  All you have to do is confess your sins to Jesus, turn from your old ways and make Jesus Lord and Savior of your life.  Instantly, Jesus takes over.  Instantly, there is a calming in your life.  Instantly, there is a difference, a good difference.

I hope and pray that I didn’t talk too fast today or that you didn’t listen too slowly.  This parable is one of the big ones in the Bible.  It is one where just about everyone fits in someplace.  None of us are born into fertile soil.  We may be born into an environment that is conducive for Jesus to live but we all have to make the decision at some point to accept or reject Jesus.  Recently I have just been in contact with a young woman who is in a crisis.  She was raised in the church but she is now finding out the hard way that Jesus is the real deal.  Jesus is right and He has always been right.

That is what we all need to remember.  Jesus is the real deal.  He is right.  His love will never fail, never end.  He has promised to be always with us and He is.  We thank you and praise you Jesus for this and all things you do for us.  And thank you for first loving us.  Let’s pray.