Synoptic Gospels are the first three Gospels, Matthew,
Mark and Luke.
John's a little bit different, but there are
ten parables in the Gospels.
Parables come from a double word, para-beside
and balean, to throw or to cast.
So, a parable is something where you throw
something beside something else to come up with
something, I guess.
Of the ten major parables in the Gospels,
one is on being fishers of men, one
is a sick and a physician, one is
a bridegroom, one is new cloth and old
garment, another one new wine and old wineskins,
one about overcoming the strong man, there's one
about the wicked husbandman, the rejected stone and
the fig tree.
Now those are the ten major parables in
the Synoptic Gospels.
Most of them in Mark and in Matthew,
a few in Luke.
But of all of those, the one given
the greatest amount of attention in the Scriptures,
is the one found in Matthew 13, Mark
chapter 4 and Luke chapter 8.
It is a parable which has been called
the parable of the sower.
And we could call it the parable of
the sower and the soils, because it really
deals with the ground.
So let's call it the parable of the
sower and the soils, with the emphasis on
soils.
Of the 3,779 verses in the Gospels,
1,934, more than half, are Christ's words,
and they're dealing with religious people.
A great chunk of it is dealing with
religious people.
Out of these ten parabolic illustrations in the
Synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke, the majority
of them, seven of them, are full parables.
And all of them have to do with
evangelism, with the winning of people to Christ,
with the building of the kingdom.
And the one with this greatest coverage and
attention, a key parable, is this one in
Mark.
Now we're going to read the passage together,
and I want you to see why I
believe it really is the most significant of
all of the parables.
It's very short in Mark.
If you want to get a pricey or
a summary of anything, always read it in
Mark, because he doesn't amplify very much.
He just buzzes ahead and gets it on.
He began again to teach by the seaside,
and there were gathered unto him a great
multitude.
So he entered into a ship and sat
in the sea.
The whole multitude was by the sea on
the land.
And he taught them many things by parables
and said to them in his doctrine.
First, a great crowd was gathered to Jesus.
So the context of this is a great
crowd that are hungry, that are interested in
religious things.
And it's to them that he gives this
parable.
And that's why it has peculiar application in
our time, because I think we have a
vast interest.
What is it?
Over 90% of this nation claims to
believe in God.
At least 53% claim to have had
a born-again experience of some kind.
Now that includes those who were born again
when they were dropping a cap of acid
or, you know, or when they died before
and they vividly remember their new earth life.
And I mean, that includes everybody chucked into
that category.
But it also includes a large number of
people who, if you cross-examine them on
the streets, said, have you ever become a
Christian?
Would you consider yourself a Christian?
Have you had a evangelical born-again experience?
They would say, oh yes, yes.
Now whether they live like that or not
is a different story.
53%.
I talked to George Gallup, who came up
with that statistic some years back.
And I said, George, according to this statistic,
a huge chunk of this country claim to
be born again.
And I said, I've been meeting the other
47%, I think, for the last 20 years.
So there must be some problems here.
And he told me, that's pretty general.
It covers all kinds of things.
But there are a large chunk of people
who claim to be born again.
And it was a crowd of religious people
that came to Jesus.
They were not a religious.
They're not the scoffers.
They were there gathered.
And Mark points out, he with his fascination
with the crowds and power and authority, points
out that this great multitude gathered.
And then Jesus got into the ship and
began to teach them this story.
Now they went out of sower to sow.
It's got nothing to do with singer sewing
machines or all of that.
That's this old kind of, you know, this
sowing.
Came to pass as he sowed, some fell
by the wayside and the fowls of the
air came and devoured it up.
And some fell on stony ground where it
had not much earth.
Immediately it sprang up because it had no
depth of earth.
And when the sun was up, it was
scorched.
And because it had no root, it withered
away.
Some fell among thorns.
The thorns grew up and choked it and
it yielded no fruit.
Another fell on good ground and did yield
fruit that sprang up and increased and brought
forth some 30, some 60 and some 100.
Now how many of you got ears this
morning?
Put your hands up.
Most of you?
Met a pastor once, only had one.
He used to have fun with a plastic
one and he plugged in.
And he would, he would turn it around
and do stuff.
I'm getting signals here.
Slide it down, slide it down a little
bit, slide it down.
Is that good?
He sat on planes and this ear was
a little different color, see, than the others.
And time he was sitting on a plane
and a lady behind him was talking to
him, that lady, she said, is that a
real ear?
And he turned it around, you know, to
listen.
He'd really have fun and people preaching on,
Peter cutting ears off, he'd flick his ear.
You got ears?
Scripture says, then listen.
And of course everybody had ears in those
days.
They said, well that's heavy, you know, we
really ought to listen to this.
This is addressed then to the whole multitude
of the religious crowd.
And when he was alone, they that were
about him, with the 12, asked him of
him the parable.
He says a strange thing.
He talks about, to those that are without,
all these things are done in parables.
And you have to read Matthew a little
bit to get the amplification of this.
This is not an arbitrary thing.
When people came with hungry hearts to Christ,
he just told them directly, go and do
this, go and do that.
When they came with seeking to find ways
around what he was saying, he told them
a story.
You can't get executed easily for telling stories.
And he said to them in verse 13,
and here's a key phrase, do you not
understand or don't you know this parable?
How then will you know all parables?
It seems to me that from the importance
of this thing, in which there are 14
verses devoted to this.
The next closest is the parable of the
wicked husband in Matthew, in Luke 29 to
16, which has 9 verses.
There's 14 verses devoted to this parable in
the Gospels.
7 verses telling and 7 verses explaining it.
And that is a significant fact to start
with.
What I want you to do in this
study, we're going to look together, is if
you can keep your finger on these other
3 passages, when we look it up, I
want you to take each passage in turn
and then call out for me the key
characteristics in each situation.
We'll look in Matthew, see what Matthew says.
We'll look in Mark, see what Mark says.
We'll look at Luke, see what Luke says,
and so on.
Right through first the stating of the parable,
and then secondly, Jesus' explanation of the parable.
Before we get into that, I want to
give you, very briefly, the scope of the
problem we have today.
If it was just simply a matter of
being able to say Christian things and speak
Christian things to the world, without doubt, the
West leads the world.
We have the ability in the Western world
to communicate to more people, more effectively, than
any other time or any other culture in
human history.
And stuff like satellite technology, these are videotapes
we're doing now, audiotapes plus print, over 10
,500 new Christian books every year.
The new satellite stuff, I just saw Rex
Humbart a little while ago, they have their
program in seven languages, and it's interesting to
see Rex preach in Japanese, or something like
that.
What they do is, on the satellite bands,
they have a whole bunch of free audio
channels, up to 14 audio channels on one
video channel.
So, when I visited the Cathedral of Tomorrow
a year or so ago, they had booths
in which somebody would be watching the Rex
preaching, and they'd be preaching too.
And a computer would take the voice and
stretch it and shift it to lip-sync
it.
So, there's Rex going, holy gosh, I thought
I was going to like this.
And just a switch of audio, and you
beam down to another nation, you come out
in Spanish and stuff like that.
He did seven languages, this year they're making
a thrust to shift to 91 languages.
Now that's, that's kind of a quantum jump.
That's not 14, how about 21, then, like
this.
So, we have the ability to, to, to
say things to the world.
The problem is, what are we saying?
That's, that's the, I had a friend, he
worked, he prayed while he was in high
school, that God would make him, give him
the ability to speak to the media.
And his vision was to start a Christian
communications thing, and, you know, lay these heavy
tapes out to, Billy Graham gave him a
commission to do different things.
And so, he was all set, and he
got drafted in the army in Vietnam, right,
when Vietnam Days arrived.
And that was, he did everything he could
to get out of that, so he could
go on with his ministry.
And instead, he was given the task of
beachmaster in the Marines.
Beachmaster life expectancy under combat is about 45
seconds.
What you do is, you land on the
beach first, and with your back to the
enemy, you wave in the on, signal in,
because he said he was in communications, so
they put him on beachmaster.
You signal in the oncoming troops, while the
other guys fire at you from behind.
So, this was not a promising future for
a young Christian.
He was ready to meet God, but not
anxious.
And what happened is, the day before he
was due to be shipped out, some Pentagon
general realized that they were, had this largest
radio system in the world, bigger than ABC,
NBC, and CBS all put together, the Armed
Services Network, and that they were saying all
this stuff, and none of the people, none
of the kids who were part of the
army were listening.
They were hopelessly out.
They needed a communications person, and went through
their files, computer spat out, this guy said
he was in communications, and they pulled him
the day before he went out to Vietnam
to land on the beaches, and put him
in charge of the Armed Services Network.
So, he had direct TV tie-ins to
all of the television stations in the U
.S., and a 10,000 album record library
to pull on, and could visit the set
of any movie, closed sets, any kind of
set, and ask questions of the producer, and
he was given top-level authority.
So, he worked for four years in communications,
the best there were, over 200, 300 face
-to-face ways of communicating with people.
And I remember talking with him one time,
he said, I have a microphone on my
desk, I could pick it up, and switch
it on, and you could talk to the
largest audience, networked audience in the world.
And he said, now I've spent four years
learning how to do it, and I can't
find anybody who can say anything.
And our study is on the content of
the gospel.
It's not a problem of being able to
say things to people.
It's no longer a communications problem.
Any of us could communicate something.
The question is, what are we saying?
Are we saying what God is saying?
Are we preaching what Christ would preach?
Are we teaching what he would teach?
To give you an idea of the scope
of the problem, it seems to me that,
you know, our problem in the country is
not in lack of religious experience, it is
lack of genuine Christian experience.
A shallow thing, we could call it a
counterfeit conversion, has eaten out the heart of
the Western world.
I had a friend, he was praying that
God would tear down the Iron Curtain so
that the gospel could go into Russia.
And a friend of mine who just returned
from Russia said, I believe God put up
the Iron Curtain to keep our kind of
Christianity out of Russia.
And I'll give you some examples from history
here.
Here's what one young man, he's in a
missionary fellowship now, he said, Most adults don't
face reality.
They're very reluctant to believe anything sordid or
sadistic about the flesh and blood people under
their personal jurisdiction.
To them, rottenness is often a reality in
the abstract, but never in the concrete.
It seems to me a great injustice is
being done to our young people because of
this attitude.
Christian workers are supposed to be spiritual problem
solvers, but no problem is ever solvable until
it is faced squarely, called by its right
hand, dragged into the light, and washed away
in the blood of Christ.
Recently a young missionary told how he had
repeatedly taken his problem to a spiritual counselor,
only to be told he should simply have
faith.
So while he went to Bible school in
the morning, he sat in showers in the
afternoon, smoked cigarettes, and sank in sin in
the evenings, while he was vainly trying to
have faith that his soul needed.
It is simply not fair to smile a
spiritual smile at our young people, soothe ourselves
inwardly by calling the difficulty superficial symptoms, and
let it go at that.
If we do, we're certainly the ones being
fooled.
God is in on the facts.
The devil knows the true story.
The young person himself is painfully aware of
his real condition.
I slid down the rugged road to perdition
myself for years in my life, and always
under the ministry of the Word of God.
Nobody ever was kind enough to thrust a
loving finger at me and call me the
lowdown sinner I knew I was.
I heard about heaven every Sunday, and things
about hell the rest of the week.
And it seemed there was no one around
who would graciously back me into a corner
and plainly tell me which place I was
bound for.
We're surrounded by a whole growing generation which
is immersed in fornication, thievery, swearing, hypocrisy, perversity,
pride, and rebellion.
Young people don't want some vague religious sounding
drivel about comfort and peace.
They must be confronted with a strong God
who looks them squarely in the eye, calls
a spade a spade, and comes to grips
with a particular sin and problem which plagued
their day-by-day lives.
I frankly admit I'd not be much interested
in getting to know the God who is
usually introduced by preachers and programs.
This God is afraid to tell me what
I look like.
Here's another one.
There's a young man in a high school
in Germany.
He had excellent records in his high school.
It was a Christian school.
He was planning on going to university in
the fall.
His examiners looked over his test papers.
His maths was pretty bad, but he was
a good writer.
And one paper was called, A Young Man's
Choice of His Career.
And Kitty was writing a paper warning young
people they should consider God's will before deciding
on their life work.
And his last paper was a theological one.
It was called, On the Union of Believers
with Christ.
And they read these sentences which were the
final test of the five years of Christian
training they had put in his life.
Zeal for virtue becomes deafened by the tempting
voice of sin, turns into a mockery as
soon as we feel the full impact of
life.
Yearning for truth is deadened by the sweet
flattering strength of a lie.
Man remains the only member of the created
universe who is unworthy of the God who
made him.
Yet the gracious creator is incapable of hating
his own handiwork.
He wanted to raise it up to himself,
and so he sent his Son.
He causes us to be called through these
words.
Now you are clean through the words which
I have spoken to you.
Abide in me and I in you.
Where does Christ express more clearly the necessity
of union with himself than the beautiful parable
of the vine and the branches in which
he refers to himself as the vine and
to us as the branches?
Our hearts, reason, history, the word of Christ
all call out to us loudly and convincingly
to tell us that union with him is
absolutely necessary, that without him we would be
rejected of God, that he alone is able
to deliver us.
The year was 1835.
The student was the son of a converted
Jewish lawyer who was baptized into church membership
with five years of evangelical high school instruction.
And two years later the same boy became
an avowed atheist, and eight years later he
penned these words.
Man makes religion.
Religion does not make man.
Religion is the opiate of the people.
The people cannot really be happy until they've
been deprived of the illusory happiness by the
abolition of all religion.
His name was Karl Marx.
Now I believe in our nation there are
tens of thousands of kids who if you
asked them, are you a Christian, they'd say
yes.
But down the road, just five years down
the road, two years down the road, what
in the world is going to happen?
In 1960s there were tens of thousands of
kids who came in under the Jesus movement,
and the Church Renewal movement, and the charismatic
movement in the Western world.
And I think there's a groundwork there of
knowledge of God that's begun to affect now.
Some of these were teenagers.
There were kids maybe in junior high school.
Some of them are in universities now.
Some of them are moving up.
There are young middle class families across the
nation.
And I think that religious impulse that came
in in the 1960s has begun to affect
now the nation in the 1980s.
In recent surveys conducted on college campuses, there's
a great burst of patriotism that's come back
into the country.
A desire to stick up for the U
.S. Two-thirds of college students interviewed in
a whole bunch of colleges said they would
lay their life down for the nation.
Now that's a radical shift away from the
1960s and from Vietnam.
Some things have happened in the consciousness of
the nation.
There is a network of young people who
grew up in the 60s where there was
a throwing away of materialism and all this
stuff, and enough religious background there for them
to know all the words.
And the great thing about that is that
it really lays a good foundation for a
revival.
When people know what they ought to do
but are not doing it, when they have
enough truth there laid at the base, that
has not, somebody's not backed them into a
corner and said, well why aren't you living
like this?
Then there's a great base laid for revival.
You don't have to put in the words
first, it's already there.
What we want to look at again is,
what are we going to say if this
breakthrough, which I'm praying and believing God is
going to do, comes in the tens of
thousands of people go out to preach to
those who are away from church, who know
nothing of this other 47% that don't
know if they've had anything.
What are we going to say to them?
Let's put it like this, God is not
stupid.
He will not bring awakening to a nation
when we're not prepared to conserve the results
of that awakening.
And the only reason I think why God
has held back on doing anything in this
country is because if we disseminated what we've
got now across the world, we'd hurt what's
happening in all the rest of the world.
It's been cut off from our Western ideas
and cut off from our crazy views of
what Christianity is.
So that is, I think, one of the
reasons why God has held back the full
force of what he could do.
We've seen in this country a renewal.
We're not close yet to a revival, but
there's a, it's like a tide going up.
And what's interesting is when the tide rises,
little ships come up first.
See?
Now, it takes a long time for the
big ships to move.
So all around you watch the little, little
groups, little group here and little group there.
And the odd one person in this closet
over here, that's the ones that first feel
the tide.
And eventually the giant brrrr type, you know,
steamers, oh yes, yes, I've noticed the water.
We've been here in the mud 40 years,
but it'll come.
Is it possible to be religious without a
Christian?
Of course it is possible to be religious
without a Christian, to without, to be religious
without being a Christian.
There's a book written in the 60s, How
to Be a Christian Without Being Religious.
We need to write a book now called
How to Be Religious Without Being a Christian.
Our problem today is a counterfeit Christianity, a
false Christianity.
Two examples from history.
How Christian can you be without being Christian?
Here's a young man.
He got up at four every morning to
pray.
Pretty heavy for a start, isn't it?
He wrote a list to discipline his life
in holiness.
He spent hours every day studying the great
spiritual masters of his time.
And he met with friends every week to
study the Bible.
He preached to others.
He went out on a missionary journey to
another nation.
And he wasn't a Christian.
His name was John Wesley.
And one prominent bishop who studied John Wesley's
life before he became a Christian, said this.
If John Wesley was not a good Christian
in Georgia, which is where he went to
this nation to be a missionary from England,
totally failed miserably, came back on the boat,
blown away.
If John Wesley was not a good Christian
in Georgia, then God help the majority of
people who call themselves Christians.
But on the way back, remember he ran
into that little band that were praying on
the boat.
And up came this giant storm, looked like
everybody was going to die on the boat.
These guys were all singing.
They were all excited.
Came to meet God.
And John Wesley was freaked out of his
gourd.
He could not believe they were doing this.
And they knew he was a missionary.
They knew that he was a preacher.
They said, well, he said, in effect, why
aren't you afraid?
And they said, well our hearts are hid
with Christ and God.
Is this not true with you brother?
He said, oh yes.
He said in his diary, I fear these
were vain words.
And he realized he didn't have what he
was studying about.
He knew all the facts.
He had all the information.
But he did not have that reality.
And then remember reading, going into that Elders
Gate prayer meeting chapel and hearing Luther's epistle
to the Romans.
Luther, another man that came from a lot
of religious study.
He was in a monastery.
He did not have that personal change of
life that made him a firebrand and affected
the whole history of the world.
Reading those same writings by Luther on justification
by faith.
Wesley in his, talked about which Garth Lean
has made the subject of his dynamite short
little biography of Wesley.
Dynamite went to get hold of him.
He felt his heart strangely warmed.
And later on those beautiful words, I felt
that Christ had given me birth to brother
every soul on earth.
And out of that came the great awakening,
which changed England, preserved it from what could
have been a bloody mess like the French
Revolution was.
All right, another guy.
Here's a man, he sang in a choir.
He had a great voice.
He played a musical instrument in the choir.
He was at church every Sunday.
He never went to the prayer meetings because
he didn't feel like they were having their
prayers answered.
So he didn't go.
And this young man went out into the
woods and he was studying his Bible every
day to see what God had to say
about right and wrong.
But he was so embarrassed if somebody came
into his business when he had the Bible,
he'd throw books on top of it.
You know, so nobody would catch him reading
it.
And he went out in the woods and
God spoke to him in the woods and
dealt with him.
He came back into his office and he
was playing a song and began to weep.
And the Lord appeared to him face-to
-face and gave him in his own words
a mighty baptism of the Holy Spirit.
And Charles Finney got off his knees to
be a man of God, to change his
world.
I think some of the greatest revivalists in
history are religious people that were not saved
and then got saved.
So there is great potential in a counterfeit
convert to become real and to become a
world changer because they've got all of this
stuff behind them.
Now how many of you got saved out
of the streets?
You didn't know anything about anything.
About three or four of you.
How many of you came from religious backgrounds?
You know, you have 87 grandparents that were
all missionary evangelists or something.
Now, I was essentially pagan.
You know, I came from an essentially pagan
background.
Not the beat-up strangle-to-death pagan,
but the nice pagan.
You know, the ordinary pagan.
So, but I had six years of religiousness
before I got saved.
The only value in that is that I
learned a lot of words.
I learned a lot of verses that were
not real until God changed my life.
So I believe one of the biggest mission
fields in the world today is in the
church, kids and adults who do not know
God.
And there may be some Wesley's and some
funny sitting there, smoking cigarettes and doing dope
and preaching at night who need to get
saved.
So here's a message that is desperately needed.
Okay, that's the scope of the problem.
And want to now, let's look at this
parable.
I want you to give me, please, an
outline.
The first, can
you give me the name of the first
sower?
We'll put this all up on the board.
Here's a man, he's a sower.
He's got a bag here or something, and
he's throwing this stuff out.
Look at this book.
You, three verses a day, Bible scholars.
This was written in, look at the size
of the print on this thing.
Would you believe the guy did two like
this in his spare time?
Nowhere was done.
1668.
He, the guy got saved, 18 years old,
started writing.
This is on the sower.
About there to there in fine print.
Now, how much are you going to get
out of this thing?
There's 14 verses in there.
Here's what Benjamin Keats says about the purpose
of this parable.
It is evident one reason or main design
of Christ speaking this parable is to convince
him that it's not sufficient to hear the
Word of God preached, but that many may
hear it, who have never effectively, who are
never effectually wrought upon by it, but shall
eternally perish.
In other words, a lot of people will
hear the Word, but still go to hell.
One, two, three sorts of ground proving bad,
and only one in four good ground intimating.
But few hearers have their hearts broken up
or prepared by the convictions of the Holy
Spirit to receive Christ.
So not only is this a parable to
wake people up on the possibility of counterfeit
conversion, but it is also a parable that
deals with the preparation of the soil, the
breaking up of the heart to receive the
gospel, which is something we have completely missed
out, it seems, in our part of the
century.
A lot of people before did what we
could call pre-evangelism.
They plowed the ground first.
They made sure that before they pressed somebody
to receive Christ, quote-unquote, that their hearts
were broken, and that there was a real
preparatory work of the Lord to bring them
under conviction, and lead them, shut them up
to Christ.
All right?
Good tillage before the seed of the Word
will take root and bring forth fruit to
perfection, which three sorts of hearers never experience.
Fifthly, it might be to discover the cause
of man's damnation or their final apostasy, because
their hearts were never right with God.
So it's a warning.
And then finally, to discover some men who
never were sincere or upright Christians, might nevertheless
go very far in a profession of the
gospel, as is signified by the stony and
thorny ground.
How far you can go without becoming a
real Christian.
Okay?
Now let's go, and I want you to
give me the characteristics of the first kind
of ground.
First of all, what is it called?
It's called the what?
The wayside ground.
And what is the wayside?
A pathway, a road, a place you can
stomp on.
All right?
The main road is here.
Is it a protected place?
Anybody can stomp on that thing.
David talked about God searching to see if
there'd be any wicked way in him.
This is open season, boy.
Anybody can stomp on them.
Anybody can walk there.
It's the broad highway of the world.
Now, what kind of ground is this?
Is it?
It's hard.
That's not only hard, it is packed hard.
I tell people about New Zealand, where when
I went to high school, there was a
new field there, sown with grass, and tennis
courts were here, and our, you know, we
had a, if I was in a classroom
here, right?
This is the way you're supposed to, here
are the gates to the court.
You're supposed to do this.
There were a thousand kids in our school,
and about half of them played tennis, and
there were four tennis courts.
So if you did that, you got to
beat the ball against the wire for about
three hours outside.
Now, there's a big sign here which our
faculty had placed for all who could read,
which was some of us in that high
school.
It said, don't walk on the grass.
Don't step on the grass, Sam.
Now, what we'd do, is we'd have our
tennis rackets ready, and we'd be looking at
the time, and when the bell rang, bang,
we'd, gah!
Grass is forgiving stuff.
You know, it can just, shoomph, on once,
and it'll sort of, ahh!
Climb up again, but eight thousand indeed has
hit you in a week.
Boy, that's it.
You're out.
You're gone.
So eventually, we created our own wayside ground.
That's what hard ground is.
Now, it doesn't tell us much more about
that.
Benjamin Keats will give you about eight pages
on what hard ground is, but we want
to look at that.
I just want to say this.
When we look at Jesus' explanation here, let's
just look at the story first.
That seed falls on that hard ground, thump,
there it is.
Does it go into the ground?
No, why not?
Somebody's been stomping on that thing, so it
just lies there.
Next, what happens?
This is what we call three horror stories
from the Bible.
This is called The Birds, by Mark Hitchcock.
And then, uh, lunch,
thanks for the lunch, and then it's gone.
Horror story from the Bible.
Alright, that's the parable.
Now, if you have disciples sitting there trying
to look intelligent, and one of the chosen
twelve, out of all the rest of this
multitude, Jesus gives this story, this parable, supposed
to be the heaviest one that he's ever
done.
And, uh, you're sort of standing there, and
a bunch of people sneak up afterwards and
say, uh, what, what does that mean?
And I got the story, it was great,
but what, and notice it says, with the
twelve.
The disciples were sort of also there as
well.
Well, we, we actually know, but we'd like
to listen too, just, I mean, I have
no idea what he's, so Jesus explains it.
Isn't that nice that he explained it?
Now, what did he say about it?
Let's write down characteristics in this ground.
Verse 14.
First of all, tell us what the seed
is.
The Word.
That's interesting.
If you compare some of these other Gospels,
there is also another alternate explanation of this
parable, that in many ways parallels what we're
going to look at here, but it's quite
different.
Sometimes God sows people.
He does.
He scatters people.
It's the Word, but sometimes He scatters people.
He scatters people into the world.
So another possibility of this parable, and it's
a rich, rich parable, is that what He's
talking about here is His Word incarnated in
people, because that's the best way Christ has
to witness, is to put Himself inside somebody
else, and let His love and His light
and His wisdom and His power shine through
somebody.
If you want somebody to know what Christ
is like, the best way to do it
is to meet somebody who's met Him, and
whom that, in that person, we could say
a Christian is somebody in whom Christ dwells,
for whom Christ died, and through whom Christ
works.
So an alternate possibility is that God scatters
people through an age, and that these soils
are different cultures or different ages into which
God throws His people, and that they, depending
on how that culture has been prepared or
how that age has been prepared, it gives
differing results.
Okay, so think of that word, not just
as maybe a verse, but maybe a person
who is living out that scripture, who, who
is like Jesus' ambassador or a representative, or
He incarnates His Spirit again in a person's
life, and scatters them through the world.
Okay, so is anything wrong with the seed?
Nothing is said about the seed.
It's the same seed, it seems in each
one, it just, it goes up, throws it
out, it doesn't pick it in, it's a
funny looking seed.
Nothing wrong with the seed.
Isn't it interesting how seed, seed is a
dynamite illustration of the gospel, because if it
sits up on a shelf, it doesn't grow.
But if you put it in the ground,
it takes a miracle to make it grow.
See, there's a work of man, and there's
a work of God, and they both work
together.
A bag of seed up on a shelf
does not grow a field of corn.
But you make up your own seed, Jack,
and you throw it out, and you can
sit a long time, and you ain't gonna
have a field of corn.
And Finney actually used that as an illustration
of revival.
He said, you plow the field, you sow
the soil, you sow the soil with the
seed, and then God must bring the rain,
and God must bring the sunshine, and God
must make the thing grow.
So there is a work which God requires
us to do in evangelism, and a work
which only He can do.
He won't repent for us, He won't believe
for us, He will not go out for
us, He's told us to do those things.
There are things that only God can do.
Next, the soil we want to look at,
it could be, you know, who knows?
It could be Christ, it could be evangelists,
it could be all kinds of things.
Tell me now about the soil.
We've only got a couple of minutes to
get this one in.
Just read to me, have you got your
fingers in those other passages?
All right, let's buzz over to Matthew 13,
and you see anything interesting there about verse
18?
Can you tell me the first characteristic of
this kind of soil?
Now here, let's put it up there.
Question, these people, religious or irreligious?
Have they had exposure or no exposure?
They've been exposed.
All of these ones, that's a common element.
They've heard the word.
Not talking about people who have not heard,
we're talking about people who have heard.
And just how wide that is, is anybody's
guess.
In Don Richardson's book, new book, Eternity in
Their Hearts, he does a mind-blowing analysis
of what God has said before to cultures
in the past.
He calls it the Melchizedek factor.
And you go into a, he talks about,
for instance, the Nagas.
You've got a previous last day's article from
Paul, what's his name?
Paul Kaufman.
There was a report on what's going on
in Nagaland, which is, it was in northeast
India, where over a hundred thousand Nagas are
turning the Lord, and used to be the
rottenest state in India, and now it's the,
it's the best.
And they said it's, revival is not a
really a good word for it.
Revolution, a spiritual revolution would be better.
People, all the bars are closed down, and
they just, people getting saved all over the
place, and there are conventions of 30,000
Nagas there, and it's cut off from the
Western world.
Glory to God.
They have no contact.
Can't even get a visa to get in
there, and wreck it.
Now how did that happen?
Adoniram Judson went in there a hundred years
ago, went to Burma, just about wore himself
out trying to preach to Buddhists.
And just all around that area, there were
tribes of a hundred thousand here, and three
hundred thousand here, and that, that had, in
their folk lore, all of this stuff was
set up for Christianity.
And Judson had a couple of helpers.
He was laboring, you know, batting his brains
out, winning one Buddhist a year, sort of
thing.
And these other guys had in their folk
lores, the whole structure of the gospel.
Some of them, check this out.
One guy, he's kind of a local village
prophet.
They're waiting for some guy with a white
face, to come to them with a book,
that will tell them about the true God,
and his son.
Right?
And then this local village prophet said, he
gets a vision from God, and he says,
I'm going to let this donkey go, and
wherever this donkey goes, he'll lead you to
this person.
So he put the donkey in the middle
of the village, and the donkey takes off.
And this guy's followers, his disciples of this
local prophet, in the village, no Christianity, nothing,
no background at all.
The donkey goes four hundred miles.
I mean, most donkeys would hang around for
carrots and stuff.
This donkey goes, and the disciples follow him
for four hundred miles, they follow him.
And there's all of these, all over the
show, there's stuff like this.
And there's a missionary compound.
Donkey comes trotting into the missionary compound, heads
straight for a well.
The fellow, he looks down into the well.
The fellow is all gathered around the well,
and out of the well, looking up, there's
a white face, blue eyes, a missionary who's
digging that well.
Right?
He climbs out of the well, everybody falls
on their knees and starts to worship him.
One of the monks, now check this out,
you're a brand new Christian, you're just out
there, doing a little missionary work, you're going
to dig a well, you're going to win
a Buddhist of the year.
The guy comes up to you and he
says, do you have the book that will
tell us about God and his son?
Well, yes, I just happen to have it
here.
And they say, come with us, I'll try
this.
He's talking about a hundred thousand, three hundred
thousand who are waiting.
See?
And the guy says, I can't, I've got
another thing over here to do.
I'll tell you what, I'll teach you.
So they go out, win most of the
tribes of the Lord, and start sending missionaries
out to all these other tribes.
See?
I don't know.
So God has had a witness through the
world.
We're not dealing with people that have nothing,
we're dealing with people who have some religious
background.
Sometimes it's a key, it's the word.
The other crazy missionaries come and go, hey,
you can teach that.
You're crazy, don't study that nasty folk religion.
We'll give you a new name.
Bat their brains out, people go, I don't
know, that's a white devil's religion and stuff
like that.
Building their own culture.
Anyway, it's a neat book.
Have a look at it.
It's called Eternity in Their Hearts, Don Richardson.
You hear the word.
I got six, three minutes, maybe less.
All right.
Hard not to get excited about this.
All right.
Give me some characteristics of it.
Second, they're here, anything else?
Ah, where did you get that from?
Matthew what?
Matthew 19, Matthew 13, verse 19 says, when
anyone hears the word of the kingdom and
what?
He does not understand it.
Ah, you
understand it not, King Jimmy says.
That tells you something, you not only have
to hear, there is something to understand in
the gospel.
Therefore there is content in the gospel.
It's not like Schaeffer says, we don't have
faith in faith.
It's faith in a person, see.
It's not faith in faith.
I'm just going to believe.
I'll believe whatever.
I'll believe, I believe, believe.
I believe, believe.
I'm heavy into faith.
Faith in a person, not in faith.
There's content in that thing.
It's the base.
That means some people are lost and they
are not lost.
They feel like they are, but I did
a study some years ago, well it's about
20 years ago now, on evangelism.
We've had some men of God who've really
done a good job statistically.
Like Billy Graham, for instance, probably kept better
records, statistics, and done research on the results
of his crusades than probably any man in
the last eight centuries, in terms of statistics
and follow-up.
He sent people in to personally check in
some crusades on every single name and address
handed in.
Took him a year or more to do
it, and to tabulate those results.
And he ran into some scary things.
In one crusade, it looked like over a
third of all of the decision cards, the
addresses were fictitious.
You know, that shocks you.
You get somebody just being saved, you ask
him for his name and address, he gives
you one that isn't there.
What kind of salvation is that?
You start asking questions.
You start checking again.
And a man of integrity like Billy Graham,
I know in like a period of a
decade, changed his follow-up program about five
times, trying to deal with this thing.
And one of the things he mentioned, was
it three years ago?
That if he had to start again, if
he was like some of your age or
my age, he was starting again, he would
put more cost into presentation of the gospel.
Emphasize more the cost.
So there is something to understand, something to
know.
What interested me, is that I graphed these
results.
You know, when the decision cards, you know,
what they call first-time inquirers, and backsliders,
you know, they have different sort of categories
for people.
You know the one that was the highest
one?
Yeah, it was called assurance of salvation.
Isn't that an interesting thing?
A huge percentage of people came for assurance
of salvation.
They did not know they were saved.
They thought they were.
They, you know, I mean the words were
there, but somehow they didn't ring true with
their lives.
And I think that's an accurate analysis of
what has happened.
There are a lot of people who think
they're Christians.
If you ask them, they'd say yes, but
there's not a ringing confidence that goes, the
Spirit answers to the blood and tells me
I'm born of God.
Ah!
Well, I'll give you one more minute and
then we'll have to take a break, because
we'll run out of tape and it'll go
and eat the recorder up.
Just write this down.
It is possible to present the gospel, I
hate to use these words because they could
be misunderstood, but we'll say in an illogical
and we'll say unphilosophical way, and by that
I do not mean that you have to
speak like a philosopher or you have to
give this deep analysis of all the detail.
Put it simply like that.
It is possible to preach a crazy gospel,
and what kind of converts will you have?
Crazy converts.
If you present something that does not tie
in with what God has said, if you
preach an imaginary gospel, you'll have to put
up with an imaginary conversion.
You come up with your own idea of
what the gospel is and preach that, you'll
come up with your own converts.
Like Dale Moody ran into a guy, drunk
as a skunk, and he said, remember me
Mr. Moody, I'm one of your converts.
Moody said, you must be, you sure aren't
one of God's.
Billy Graham was talking about a guy who
was flying in a plane, the guy was
right ahead of him, drunk, making a lot
of noise, you know, attacking the stewardesses and
they're trying to calm him down.
So they finally said to him, excuse me
sir, do you know, could you be a
little more quiet, do you know who's sitting
immediately behind you?
And he said, no.
He said, it's Dr. Billy Graham, evangelist.
And Billy said, this big face, red, beefy
face, came around the back of the chair.
You really Billy Graham?
Billy, you know, embarrassed, he said, oh yes
I am.
And the guy says, well, I want to
shake your hand, you've done me a lot
of good.
You may sit at some place like that,
but you wish you were not an evangelist.
Alright, take a break, we'll come back to
this in a little while.