Matthew 13: 1-9; 18-23
A Sower Went Forth To Sow

My text is not so much a short, terse statement, as most of the other sermons in this little series have been, but it is a figurative teaching, a parable about the nature of the Kingdom of Heaven and how people enter into it.  Here, the Lord depicts the Gospel of salvation as seed, sown and harvested by one of those ancient farmers. 

It has a multiple effect on our understanding of the Kingdom of God in Biblical times, and in our own.  It explains the mixed effect of evangelism and the phenomenon of what might be called "short-term faith" (which is not really faith at all). -- "seeming faith," it is.  But it also deals with us who presume ourselves to be regenerate Christians.  It probably primarily speaks about an individual first receiving the Gospel.  But it also applies, I think, to the individual Christian hearing the Word of God in all the periods of his Christian life and experience.  Repeatedly, "a sower (still) goes forth to sow" in your church involvement, in your Bible study, in your consideration of the hundreds of Bible verses you have learned.  In your regular personal Bible reading and contemplation of what you have read, "A sower goes forth to sow!"

If you think about what the Lord said here, you will notice that there are three bad and three good responses to the Word, whether or not we are reading it or hearing it read and exegeted; or in our remembrance and consideration of some passage, at some unplanned moment of time in our daily schedule.

I. THE THREE BAD RESPONSES UPON HEARING OR REMEMBERING THE WORD OF THE GOSPEL, ARE CLEAR.

1. The first is represented as seed falling upon the hard, rocky path, where the birds ate them all; the second is the seed falling on the stony and infertile ground; and the third is seed falling in the midst of thorns -- something like what we would call "weeds." 

In the first case, there was no germination of the seed, for the seed simply became bird-food for the hungry birds.  In the other two instances, the seed germinated, all right.  But it had been sown on ground which was inhospitable to fruition.  In the one case, the Lord said it died out in the heat of the sun, because it had no depth of soil.  By this, he explained, that the heat of persecution and difficulty caused the seedling of faith to die out.  In the last case, the seed sown among thorns -- where the thorns came up and choked out the fragile seedlings, the Lord said, is the situation of those who start out well, but who are not prepared to resist the competition of the cares of the world, or the desire for luxury and riches.  No doubt, we who live in this society where we are, would be correct to add ambition to this list of causes of failure, also.

When a person tells you that he has received Christ, you ought to "take that with a grain of salt," while rejoicing at the hopeful possibility that he, indeed, has saving faith or will soon experience saving faith.  And you should encourage that person to vigorously follow the Christian life and the "means of grace" and the teaching and fellowship of God's people.  And a part of those "means of grace" should be a life-long association with a believing church wherever life's journeys should lead him (or her).

Furthermore, you must notice that, the so-called "decision," (as modern people call it) may be merely a starting point, with full, authentic, saving faith following along in the near future.  The person who has professed to accept Christ is like a tender seedling, and we ought to encourage, nurture and support him or her in the same way we do these things to a literal seedling in the "plant" realm.

And, even though we all ought to try to be faithful in bearing witness and telling the Gospel, (indeed, we probably ought to pray more frequently than we do, that God will lead us in this) yet, we must recognize that there is not a hard and fast division between evangelism and Christian teaching and nurture.  When you are faithfully fitting into the community of God's people here, and I am fulfilling my responsibilities, and our teachers are doing so, we are becoming a part of this witness bearing.  The local church, functioning as it should, is very significant in this teaching and nurture! 

But, lest we miss what I think is the main message of God for us today, let me mention my second point.

II. THAT IS, THAT HERE ARE ALSO THREE GOOD RESPONSES TO THE GOSPEL AND THE WORD OF GOD.

1. Evangelisticly this is so.  You will find that in some cases, people just seem to "take off" in their Christian lives; seeming to, in a moment or a few days after believing on Christ, grow beautifully in the Christian life.  Others, go through a period in which we may be uncertain about their outcome; but then, it becomes clear that they have a credible Christian faith.  In other cases, the great harvest is not until many weeks or even years after their supposed conversion.  But the long-term picture shows that they, without question, have accepted Christ.  In many cases we do not know if their conversion was back when they supposedly became believers, or at some time along the way.  There is no "litmus test" for the validity of a supposed conversion.  But in the long run, there is strong evidence that a person has truly accepted Christ and has been regenerated by the Holy Spirit.  In many cases we do not know the exact point of their conversion (or, as we say theologically, their regeneration.  This is, often, especially true of people who have been raised in believing Christian families, and they often do not have a radical "Damascus Road," kind of conversion.  Even in the case of the Lord's 11 disciples, we do not really know at what point they experienced regeneration, as we do, for example, in the case of Paul on the Damascus Road. 

2. This uncertainty is also true in the sense of when we, as professing Christians, read and hear the Word of God and when we fellowship with the saints in a local church.  Sometimes our growth and the plausibility of our faith is dramatic; at others it is more subtle and our faith begins to bear fruit thirtyfold, or sixtyfold, or a hundredfold. 

In seeds, of course, this "fold" measurement refers to the number of bushels of grain in a harvest that was produced in return for the amount of seed that had been sown.  If we were to modernize this, I guess we would need to add in the cost of chemical fertilizer, diesel fuel, etc, to the seed, but the application is clear.  Sometimes the Word is more fruitful in our hearing of it than at other times. 

Indeed, sometimes we hear it so shallowly, and so partially, that our minds are like the path, in the parable, where the seeds were sown.  We may be thinking of a psychological or a financial problem, and the seed has been sown but the seed finds no root.  Or we are so sleepy, or we are angry at something, or we are encumbered about our weekday responsibilities, so much that, the seed did not really take root in the hard ground of the path which represents our life.  And then the seed is gone. 

Christians sometimes become experts at a "passing-the-buck" style of exegesis.  For ministers, this is, of course, a occupational hazard, because it is their job to conceive of how a text relates to their people.  And sometimes, because of the same sort of things, we find that the seed only bears 30-fold when it might have borne a hundred-fold.  Indeed, it is the experience of all Christians, that we find periods of exceptional spiritual growth come and go.  One time of personal devotions and reading of the Word, might be dry and unproductive; another, rich and spiritually rewarding, with a sense of closeness to God.  One Sunday morning might not be much help to our Christian lives, and the best we can say is that we were faithful to the Lord's commandment to "not forsake the assembling of (ourselves) together."  But then, the next Sunday might be a time of great spiritual refreshment. 

Sometimes this is just the Lord's timing, but at other times, it has to do with the way we are, or are not, prepared beforehand to be fertile ground upon which the seed is sown.

First, spade up the soil!  Come to church with an attitude of expectancy.  God, the Holy Spirit, is here in a special way because it is the assembly of those who are gathered together in Jesus name.  This presence is not created by a building, but by God's faithful saints being there.  We ought to expect that it will be a place where we may likely be taught of God and encouraged in our faith. 

Second, get rid of the birds, so to speak.  And pull out the thorns and the weeds!  Do your best, with God's help, to leave your anxieties, and angers, and failures, and hurts and other distractions on the outside. 

In some churches, everybody checks their brains and common sense at the door; I would suggest that it would be best to keep you brain and check your distractions at the door.

Third, "fertilize the soil" and pray at the outset: "Open thou my eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law," or some other similar prayer.

Fourth, cultivate the soil!  Receive the seed and consider it!  The 17th chapter of Acts (chapter 17: 11) says that the Bereans "were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the Word with all readiness of mind."  It was not that they were gullible, because the same passage says that "They searched the Scriptures whether these things were so."  I can't tell you how much it encourages me, when I find out that someone has remembered something I have said in a sermon, and who cares enough to ask about what it means a day or two later.  I believe they are, figuratively speaking, "cultivating the soil." 

The fifth thing is to nurture the seed once it has sprouted.  Call it to mind and think about it on Sunday afternoon and in the following week.  Sometimes I do this, and as a result of having spoken about a text, I see an entirely new, additional application of the text to the one I have always understood.  Then, I wish I could preach my sermon over again, with the additional insight I didn't originally have.

Presumably, every time you attend worship, and the sermon begins: "A sower goes forth to sow!"  When you read the Bible in devotional times during the week in your personal or family devotions, "A sower goes forth to sow."  And in your thought-life, when a phrase, or a verse, or a passage from the Word of God comes into your mind, "a sower has gone forth to sow." 

"He who has ears to hear, let him hear," says our Lord.