Extravagant Grace

God's grace is far more extravagant than we imagine. Join us as we explore the Parable of the Sower and what it reveals about the Kingdom.

Transcript

With me to the Gospel. You already know it of Matthew, right? The Gospel according to Matthew, chapter 13. And when you found Matthew 13, and we do have Bibles there, if you'd like to look at it for yourself. Matthew 13:1.

Go ahead and stand with me for the Gospel reading this morning. We're going to go from verse 1 to 9 and then skip down to 18 and go to verse 23. Notice these words. This is the word of God.

Jesus went out of the house and sat beside the sea. Such great crowds gathered around him that he got into a boat and sat there while the whole crowd stood on the beach. And he told them many things in parables, saying, listen, a sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seeds fell on the path, and the birds came and ate them up. Other seeds fell on rocky ground where they did not have much sow, and they sprang up quickly, 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 brought forth grain, some a hundredfold, some 60, some 30. Let anyone with ears listen. Go down to verse 18.

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 is sown in the heart. This is what was sown on 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 such a person has no root, but endures only for a while.

And when trouble or persecution arises on account of the word, that person immediately 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 lure of wealth choke the word, and it yields nothing. But as for what was sown on good soil, this is the one who hears the word and understands it. Who indeed bears fruit, yields in one case a hundredfold, in another, 60, and in another 30.

Lord Jesus, thank you for your holy word. And we pray now, Lord, that the same spirit that inspired these words might inspire our hearts toward understanding them so that we can obey. May it be so. Lord, we pray in your name. Amen.

And you can be seated.

Well, here we are sort of once again in the summertime. It's interesting how this happens both in Matthew and in the Gospel of Luke. We're sort of, if you will, road tripping with Jesus as he's traveling along certain places, and we get to overhear his teachings, which we're told are actually parabolic in form. In other words, he rarely taught the people without parables. And that term parable can actually mean allegorical or, of course, as you know it to be a story that has some common ground to our spiritual life.

Right? So in other words, that's how allegory works, right? Is you've got a term and another term and there's common ground between them or a story and a story, that there's common ground between them that can be shared and lifted up to our spiritual existence or reality. And so we're traveling along, watching Jesus with the disciples as disciples, really. Right.

And so it's always instructive during our summer months that the lectionary has us looking, at least in year A and C, into these various parables of Jesus. And of course, this one is a famous one. You may remember that this one is one of the longer ones. Okay. And yet it really probably needs the least amount of explanation because this is one of those rare moments, and I do mean rare moments where Jesus, we get to overhear him tell us, along with those other first disciples, the very meaning of this parable.

So, I mean, you know, a lot of times some of us in studying the Bible go to commentaries, right? Go to the patristics, which is the early church fathers or whoever our favorite commentator or podcaster is that comments on the Bible. Commentary was around even when Jesus was there, right? So the Mishnah and this kind of thing with Jews is commentary on the law, right? So commentary's been around for a long time.

And they're useful. They're useful. Okay. They're not the word of God, but they're useful. Well, here we get Jesus commenting on the very thing he's teaching on.

Very rare, by the way. So we want to perk up. And I don't really want to add too much to that. What I would like to do today is just simply point out some things in this text that sometimes get glossed over in our reading of it. First of which is this.

Notice how it begins. Let's just right from the beginning, when you're studying a passage, just notice what's around it and how it begins is on purpose, before he ever, you know, we could just have the parable itself, and that's it. We don't, though, there's little things here that actually mean something. So notice Jesus went out of the house and sat beside the sea. Okay, What Might that mean.

Right. Well, literally, Peter's house, okay? So that's kind of important. You know, he is the leader of the 12, and that seems very obvious. Literally, Peter's house, he's leaving now this term, house shows up again in Matthew 13.

Okay? And we'll be seeing that because actually the next two Sundays, we have three Sundays that are locating us in Matthew 13. So if you want to read ahead, even in preparation for next week's sermon and the next, please do so. It makes it more fun, really, if everybody's on the. Kind of.

It's just like me trying to explain a movie when you haven't seen it. It's very difficult, you know, but if you've all seen it, then it's like, oh, yeah, I remember that part. Right. So here, the house, this is the Son of God symbolically leaving the Father's house to come down to us. We often see it like that, right?

The descent of the Son. You remember this? His catabasis, or his descent to us in humanity. From heaven. Right?

From the Father. It is a descent out of the Father's house in order to save us. To what? Ascend once again to the Father, to bring us up to him. You remember the.

I have many rooms in my Father's house. Remember this whole sermon we had not too long ago? All right? And so this. Out of the house and toward the sea.

The sea represented in general, the gentiles. When you go back and read the prophets, the sea represents the nations. You know, one of the kids said what I think about when I think of water, the ocean, the sea. Right? This massive amount of people.

Yes, yes. That's what. That's what the Lord is wanting us to see here. I'm leaving the house to sit beside it. Wasn't that Jesus just loved the beach?

I think he did. That's why I try to take a beach vacation. I'm just trying to be like Jesus. Every year, you know, he was always by a beach. It seems like to me, even when he went on vacation, it was, you know, by the beach.

Remember the woman up there? Gentile woman. Remember the dogs and that whole discussion? He was on vacation, right at the beach. Here he's at the beach, the crowd gets so heavy.

He has to get into a boat. They push him out a little bit and. And he then speaks from the boat. But notice something, Notice something. He sat down.

Now, that might be just, you know, again, we just gloss right over that. Blow past it, you know. But never read the Scriptures like that. Every word of the scriptures are there on purpose. You know, when I write a paper, I put some words in there that what we call in the academic world flag fluff, you know, because I'm trying to get maybe an extra hundred words out, right?

And so I'm kind of fluffing it up and doctoring it up. There's no fluff in the Bible. Every word is inspired by God. So when it says he sat, and then when he got in the boat, he sat, there's a purpose for repeating itself like that. And of course, the purpose is.

And you know this. In the rabbinic tradition of the first century century, rabbis, when they taught, would sit down, you know, and there's some preachers now that, you know, it's like, oh, yeah, we're the new rabbis. So we sit and they. And they sit and pray. I can't do that.

I've got probably some form of ADHD or something like that that prevents me. I'd be shaking my leg like crazy and it'd be very distracting. So I just stand up and preach. Okay? But in the first century, the rabbi would sit, the people would stand.

Now just think about that. Some of you, you know, I won't point fingers here, but some of you snooze sometimes. That's okay. I don't get mad about that. You know, I don't try to wake you up or anything like that.

But some of you snooze, okay? And I could, you know, what if we stood up, right? You just stood up the whole time I preached, Right. I'd be wild, wouldn't it? Well, they did that for Jesus, okay?

And so there's this sitting. But sitting for the rabbi meant two things, okay? Or for in a Jewish mindset, it meant two things, not just for the rabbi. The rabbi part was teaching. The other sitting was done by judges, literally judges of the law, which, again, it wasn't secularized judging, right?

This is literally judges of the. So it was two things. Jesus is doing two things here. He's sitting as teacher of the word of God, and he's sitting as judge of the world, literally the world. Because remember, he's on the sea which represents all nations.

There's a lot of symbolism that's kind of packed into some of these. Just brief kind of tertiary introductions to this parable here. And so the whole crowd was there because Christ sows his word, his judgment, his teaching to the whole world, not to a part of it, only not just to the Jews, but the Jews and Gentiles, which is just to say the elect people of God and everybody else they're called to, which is the whole world. He's not leaving anyone out. And that's kind of the, that's going to be part of what's going on here in this sower, sowing.

And so Jesus isn't just teaching about agriculture, right? We know that he's not just trying to tell us how to have a good garden or good grass at our house. It's a spiritual diagnosis, this is. And so the parables are always going to lift up to the spiritual reality. Or maybe we could go the other way, which you often can do this, go deeper than the surface level things, because that's what analogies do.

They deal with something that is unseen, with something that is seen. You know, when you're trying to tell somebody something and you're explaining, you say it's like this. And now you're all of a sudden getting analogical, right? Because you know they've seen that. What they haven't seen is what you're trying to get them to see.

And that's why even when we're talking and just using words and images in our head, I say to you, do you see what I'm saying? Well, I hear you. I still don't quite see it. That's why Jesus here let he who has ears to hear hear, eyes to see see. Now notice, same word being spoken to all different reception.

And that's kind of the point here. That's what this parable is going to highlight. Because honestly, the only changing, shifting variable here is not the sower who sows or the seed that falls, but the soil or might we say the soul that it falls upon. That's the variable. That's the secret here.

All the parables have a little secret and they normally have one big point. And that's kind of the big point here is the variable is not the sower who extravagantly sows or the seed who is the word of God, the Logos, the divine word, but the soul upon which it falls, the soil. And so if we could imagine being a first century farmer, some of us are not even good at the 21st century farming. I have trouble with this sort of thing. I've got six dead plants right now on my property that I'm hoping resurrect some soon.

I don't know that they will, but I'm praying truly I do want those little fellows to survive. I'm not that great at farming and I don't know much about it, but in the first century, if A farmer would have been standing there. And inevitably they were very agricultural society, okay? Unlike us, where we just, you know, somebody. Just recently, we were sitting at a baseball game, actually, we were eating peanuts.

They looked up, where do peanuts come from? And they show me. They said, pastor Marshall, do you know that peanuts are like, in the ground? I said, yeah. He said, I just thought they were on the shelf, you know.

No, no. They don't just come as is in a package, but rather they're grown. We're just not very agriculturally minded because that's not how we, you know, if you want something, you just go buy it somewhere. You don't grow it. These people grew their stuff.

And when. When they would have heard this parable, think about this. And somebody's throwing seed, which is precious and expensive, especially good seed, and they're throwing it on the path. That's like throwing it out here on slaughter road on 565. Why would you waste your seeds on a path, man?

What kind of farmer is this, throwing it into thorns and thistles? Why would you do that? Why would you throw it on rocks? What kind of sower is this? And here's the little secret here with this parable.

It's an extravagant sower.

In other words, he doesn't issue out the seeds in little teaspoons. He throws them everywhere, across the whole world, whether it's rocky, thorny, or a path that has been trodden and is hardened. And the farmer said, what kind of. And by the way, most of the parables, they kind of flip things on their head to prove a point. And that's exactly what this is doing.

The sower sows the word of God extravagantly. He doesn't just give it to the best of us, whatever that might mean. He doesn't give it just to the Jews. No, it falls on the righteous and the unrighteous. His Word goes out across the whole world.

There's not one human being not touched by his Word. Word. And I mean W O, r, d n, caps, logos. Because here's what John says in John 1. In the beginning was the Logos, the Word.

And then later he says, who lights everyone coming into the world? In other words, the light of Christ in some way. And we don't even know all the ways. That's the whole point. Here goes to everyone in some form.

Now, again, that's the theological quandary, isn't it? Who gets what, how much that not everybody has access to the Bible. We know that. And yet he's the light that lights Every man coming into the world. In the Greek there, every man means every man.

There's nothing hidden there.

This sower is not like your typical farmer that has limited resources. The Lord. Here's the way the prophets say it. He doesn't have alligator arms. You ever heard of that?

You know, like, when it comes time to pay the bill, I have alligator arms. I'm like, yeah, no, we should all share it. I'm waiting for somebody else to reach out. Right. I like it when somebody does that.

Now, every once in a while, if it's not that expensive, I'll go out and reach out. Right? Here's the Lord. He doesn't have to decipher. Okay, do I have enough seed or do I not?

No, it is extravagant. Extravagant sowing, which is good for us when we don't deserve it or when we've made our own soil, hardened or thorny.

He still sows his good divine word to us. He sows it anyway with extravagant love. And it defies all reasonableness. That's the whole point. Why would you plant on 565?

That's. I mean, you almost want to say that's dumb, yet he's throwing it out there.

I mean, can you imagine a farmer trying to do that plant out there? But you know what? It's interesting. The other day, I'm, like, doing my yard and cleaning up, and I look and there's a little crack in my concrete, which I wasn't greatly happy about. But then all of a sudden, I notice there's a little green shoot that's right there.

It's like, what are you doing there? Right. Yeah, that's exactly what he's talking about here. Springs up, but then gets scorched because it can't really bear fruit in concrete. But he sows it anyway.

He sows it anyway because that's the kind of extravagant love God has. No heart is skipped, no soul. Soil is written off every person, including in this room. You've met his light in some form. Paul says in Romans 1, the attributes of God are clearly seen in creation.

That's apart from the Bible. Now, I'm not saying people don't need the Bible. We absolutely need the Bible. But Paul's saying nature itself can condemn us if we reject it.

That's his whole point there in Romans 1. At least part of his point. He's much more complicated, by the way, than this parable, you know, in Romans 1. But you just have to spend some time there for yourself to see. You see, here's the Point.

Even though many seeds never bear fruit, in the end there's a super abundance, hundredfold, 60, 30, that supersedes all of the seeds lost. Because here's the point. God is not stingy. He's not stingy with his forgiveness like we are. You know, we have to really weigh sometimes.

I really want to forgive this. Why is it so hard? Keeps coming back up. Listen with God. He loves to forgive.

When we show up a well worn path where we've been before and we have to come and say, lord God, forgive me, he says, I will, son, I love you. Open arms right here. He's already shown us what depths he will go to to open his arms up to us, to open his life up for ours. Thanks be to God for his extravagant sowing of His Word into our life.

And then we've got the unavoidable, if you will, word or seed here. And Isaiah's key. By the way, we read the Isaiah text. Did you catch it as the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return there until they've watered the earth. Now look, we've had.

It's kind of a good analogy again, right? To talk about thunderstorms because we've had them here in the summertime, right? Almost every day it's like, oh, where'd that come from? And all of a sudden, here comes the rain. And then you hear the.

You feel the humidity and it's rising back up. There is a water cycle. You guys all know it, right? And there's this cycle. God says, you know what?

Yeah, I created that cycle. And my grace works like that. Think about it. His grace pours down not just on one little section, but on the whole area. The righteous and the, the good and the bad, the evil and the righteous.

Think about it. They both get watered. Not all grow. They both get watered. And then for those who do bear fruit, his grace carries us up to the heavens.

It is an analogy here where he says, my notice. Word does not return void. What word? Just the Bible, sure, Absolutely. But also the Logos, the Word.

His Word will not return void. Because when he came down for heaven, left his Father's house, he created a household of God on earth. Not where we have to climb our way up to heaven. He came down where we are. And now you're sitting in a localized body of Christ.

House of God used to be a gym, now it's a house of God. And think about the household being we're invited in. Why? Because he's the only begotten Son and We become sons by his sonship. He is a son by nature, we are a son by grace.

He provided that for us. And that's why we gather, you know, is, you know, we don't just come in here and like, hear a lecture and sing a couple songs and rah, rah, rah, leave. No, no. We actually put weird things in a sanctuary or in a house. Why, like a table in the center?

This is exactly why. The architecture of this room is pointing to the reality that exists here as a local body of Christ, as a church. And that is every church is a local house of God. Well, what is a house? If you went in there and it was no table?

No, the table is the center because it is he who provides us with his body and blood, his grace, water for the washing away of sins. Just like before you eat, you got to be washed, right? A bath and a meal, not the other way around. A bath and you wash and then you eat. And this is exactly what he has provided for us in the two sacraments that the Church has recognized and that Jesus himself instituted and also participated in.

Yes, the rain and the snow fall on all. You know, when it snows, it looks all nice until it starts to melt and then you can see what's really underneath there. Get the point? This thing can't just be superficial where he speaks forgiveness over us and then puts on glasses where he can't see anything but Jesus. No, no.

There should be a depth of character, of righteousness, of virtue that is in us. If His Word bears fruit in us, it is not just superficially spoken over us in a forensic, legal way, but rather is actual righteousness in our good work. Works, you say? Pastor, now you're doing a works law. Yes, because here's what the Bible says.

You were created for good works. So to denigrate good works over faith, Paul would rip his hair out. He wouldn't know what to do with. I wouldn't want to be on the receiving side of Paul in that way.

Listen, he's an extravagant sower. And what he is sowing is good because it's his only begotten Son. That's who he has given to us. And his son gets the preeminence. We're told that he is the Son who lights all and think with me.

And this is something that we say often here, but when we talk about the sun, we do mean kind of like the sun. S u n. You know, you can either have fun in the sun or it can kill you. It depends on how you Approach the sun. And that's why the Old Testament and the New make a big deal about how we come to God. If we come with no covering, we will be absolutely burned up and exposed.

We must have the covering of Christ before we approach his holiness. There is no holiness apart from Christ. This is not something we can do on our own any more than you can absorb the sun out here for 24 hours and be okay. You wouldn't be okay, but with the right covering, that nice little beach umbrella, right? Man, you can have fun in the sun.

You can either bask or you can bake. And that's kind of the only two options. You see, it's not that God doesn't like the unrighteous any more than the Son doesn't like people who wear sunscreen. No, his nature is consistent. His nature is never changing.

We're the variable, remember? It's how we approach him that matters. His grace always precedes us.

And you say, well, Pastor, but what about really bad things that that were? Is God commanding those things? No, he's permitting those things, just like he did with his son. The Father did not command the murder of his son, but he definitely permitted it. Now, that's hard to wrestle with.

I understand. And we're not going to try to do it now. But it's something that we need to understand. There's nothing that happens to us in God's providence that doesn't come through his hand first.

That's tough, but. But it's also something we must trust. I'm telling you, like Job, we're always going to bump into why. And there's not going to be a direct answer. Because I think even if we got an answer, would that really help?

The loss of a loved one, the pain that you're feeling, Would it really help just to know? No. That's why I think for Job and for us, God simply shows up. He doesn't show up with some cheap answer. Instead, he shows up in person because he is the answer.

And he shows us in the coming of Jesus Christ that if we're going to suffer, he will suffer with us. What a God. What an extravagant grace.

Yes, he is only good. There's not good and evil as two polar opposites. There's only good and the privation of that good, the rejection of that good. And that's what's going on here with these soils. And so notice, they don't really need much comment.

I'm just going to simply say them as Jesus himself says them. The parable is really divided here again in those who receive and those who don't. And it's just that simple. It really actually is that simple. The souls or the soils, I'm using those interchangeably are not fated dispositions of, but rather they evoke from us a real response.

And this is where things get tricky for some of us. You know, we don't know how all of this works. And I don't either. I'm not saying I do any more than when I saw Jessica. I knew I wanted to be with her and I had these strong urgings and I really felt like I couldn't control them, but I really could have controlled them.

It's interesting how we work as humans. We don't have to understand our all of how electricity works to enjoy its benefits, do we? Thanks be to God. Same thing with baptism, same thing with the Lord's Supper, same thing with his grace. What we must do though, is trust Him.

We must trust him and His Word. And so he said, look, some of us are like the path, our soul. We've been around the things of God for years and years. Please listen to me right here because we're wrapping up. This is, this is the end.

And I want to really speak this to, to us who are saturated in his word. It's a dangerous place to be brothers and sisters. And the reason why is because to whom much has been given, much then is required. And some of us who have served in ministries and this kind of thing, we've seen how the sausage is made sort of idea. We get ho hum around the things of God.

It's just emotion. We're going, we're coming into his house and we're not even expecting him to do anything. That's blasphemy. We're like the priests who no longer consider the sacred things to be sacred. They profane them.

It becomes common to them. There's nothing common about being in his house. There's nothing common about his grace that. There's nothing common about him asking us to suffer with Him. And we all will.

And you can reject that, or you can receive that and walk under his yoke. There is no other option though. And many, when they go through great suffering, they choose to reject God. We've all felt the temptation, we've all questioned, just like Job.

But like Job, we must receive his answer as his presence is enough. My understanding won't be enough, but his presence is enough.

And some of us have been, we've heard it so many times and it's just, we've Walked on the things of God and we've compacted our heart to where today his grace bounces right off of us. What a tragedy. What a tr. We need to ask God for broken hearts. Think about it.

That's the only way the seed can get down beneath the surface is a broken heart. Break up 565 and then you can grow a tree.

Yeah, that's the point. Some of us are that hard of heart. Like in this room.

Then of course, the rocky ground, instant joy, no depth again, rootless faith can't survive. Many, many, many of our students have had that experience where go to youth camp, loving on God. They love it. Oh, we're going to be like. And then they give their life away to this or that, their mobile phone, video games, sexuality, etc.

And they lose their way. Thorns, the cares and the riches of this world choke out the life of God in us. They obstruct the grace of God in us. Some of us literally, character wise are thorny. Like, don't touch, don't talk to me like that.

Don't do this. You're offended by every little thing. Just as soon as something happens, people get pricked around you. Why is that? You certainly consider yourself way more than you should, as Paul would say, consider others better than yourself.

If you find yourself getting offended over and over again by other people, it's not just other people that are the problem. And I'm trying to speak just straight as I can with everybody because, listen, I've been there. I mean, during my difficult time, I was asking Lord, like, I didn't want to ask because I already knew this stuff. But then you're in the middle of it and you're like, lord, why now? Why me?

It's like, hold on, son. This is literally what he told me one day. He's like, hang on, are you saying that people betrayed you? Yes, sir. Are you saying that you feel left out?

Yep. Do you feel like your life is, you know, thrown away? Like you're locked in a prison or something? Yep. Well then, welcome to the party.

St. Paul, St. Peter, Jesus himself, the prophets. Welcome to the party. You've arrived. This is the good life.

That's a hard lesson. I'm just being straight up like that. That's something I didn't. That was a medicine I didn't want to take. But, you know, on the other side of that, I noticed that afterward that hard time had carved out a deeper love for people that I could have never done had I not gone through it.

So thanks be to God for that bad time. How can you even say something like that? Because all things work together for his good. He permitted it. I lived in his trust, even when I didn't want to.

Some of you encouraged me. Keep going, brother. You know this won't last forever. Yes, that's the point. The best is yet to come.

Always. For us. Always. He hasn't come back, right? Yeah.

Then the best is yet to come. The show's not wrapped up. The story isn't over. His grace is still being poured out upon all.

And in the good soil, the one that hears, understands, receives and yields fruit. Listen, obviously that's what we want here.

And let me leave you with just this final image. And it's Mary.

When the Lord came to Mary through an angel and said, here's what I want to do, what were her words? Be it unto me thy servant. That's the right answer. And what happened? By the Holy Spirit, Christ was conceived in her.

She then becomes the example for all that Christ will be conceived in. Where he takes root is by that simple faithful obedience. Trust and obey. We say it. For there's no other way to be happy in Jesus than to trust and obey.

And when we do, He. He'll sneak into the cracks of our life and bear much fruit. It won't look the same. Notice 160, 30. It's not the same for everybody.

That's okay, but at least you're bearing fruit. The other option. Not so good. Don't reject him today. Receive him in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Amen.