Words of Jesus Podcast - Seed Comes Up - We Know Not How

Episode Date: December 30, 2022

Jesus did not come to condemn the world; the world was already condemned. He came to save us; however, our effort is required. Faith, obedience and trust are required. God will not prove Himself to us. Obedience and trust are the evidence of faith. Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. ***Ch. 30 - Jesus Teaches the Kingdom in ParablesTHE SEED (Mark 4:36-29)            Jesus spoke another parable, saying:             “So is the kingdom of God, as if a man should cast seed into the ground; and should sleep, and rise night and day, and the seed should spring and grow up, he knoweth not how.  For the earth bringeth forth fruit of herself; first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear.  But when the fruit is brought forth, immediately he putteth in the sickle, because the harvest is come.”A MUSTARD SEED (Matt. 13:31, 32; Mark 4:30-32; Luke 13:18, 19)            Then Jesus, speaking another parable, likened the kingdom of God to a mustard seed that grows from a small grain into a large plant:            “Whereunto shall we liken the kingdom of God? Or with what comparison shall we compare it? It is like a grain of mustard seed, which, when it is sown in the earth, is less than all the seeds that be in the earth. But when it is sown, it growth up, and becometh greater than all hers, and shooteth out great branches; so that the fowls of the air may lodge under the shadow of it.” LEAVEN (Matt. 13:33; Luke 13:20, 21)            Then Jesus compared the kingdom of Heaven with leaven, saying:             “The kingdom of Heaven is like unto leaven, which a woman took, and hid in three measures of meal, till the whole was leavened.”THE HIDDEN TREASURE (Matt. 13:44)            Jesus spoke another parable, likening the kingdom of Heaven to a hidden treasure.  He said:             “Again, the kingdom of Heaven is like unto treasure hid in a field-which when a man hath found, he hideth, and for joy thereof goeth and selleth all that he hath, and buyeth that field.”THE COSTLY PEARL (Matt. 13:45, 46)            Jesus told another parable to teach his listeners what the kingdom of Heaven is. He said:            “Again, he kingdom of Heaven is like unto a merchant man, seeking goodly pearls—who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had, as bought it.”A NET (Matt 13:47-53)            Jesus likened the kingdom of Heaven to a net, saying:             “Again, the kingdom of Heaven is like unto a net, that was cast into the sea, and gathered of every kind—which, when it was full, they drew to shore, and sat down, and gathered the good into vessels, but cast the bad away. So shall it be at the end of the world. The angels shall come forth, and sever the wicked from among the just, and shall cast them into the furnace of fire.  There shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth.”            Then Jesus...

Think Red Ink Ministries presents The Words of Jesus series with Don C. Harris Hello friends, I'm Don Harris of Think Red Ink Ministries. Welcome to the Words of Jesus series. Hope you're enjoying yourself. Most of all, I hope that it's starting to happen to you. The very thing we started out to do, what was that? To get us all to start thinking red ink.

Think like Jesus thought. To do what he did. To handle a situation the way he thought it should be handled. What a wonderful example he is, and what a wonderful teacher he is. It's so miraculous, actually, that the teachings of Christ came down to us through these writings, that we can still hear the Spirit of God when we

read these words. And our eyes soak up the words, our brains put the sentences together, but down inside our own heart we can hear the Word of God as clearly as the day these words were first said. We're going to delve into mysteries that have been hidden, not from us, but for us. And they are the words of Jesus. Let's continue in chapter 30 of our little book, The Words of Jesus. And our Lord Jesus is continuing by teaching us about the kingdom of God. As I said before, it bears repeating, Jesus was under a handicap when He came to the earth and that was that He was going to take on the frailty of flesh. Not only the being susceptible

to sin and degradation and injury and all the kind of things that we're susceptible to, but even on His best day, even on his most healthy day, his happiest day, he was still trapped, if you will, in the same coil of flesh that we all find ourselves in today. Thank God he was, because he turned out to be a perfect example of how we should live our lives.

He actually came to this earth and laid down every supernatural power that he had. Does that surprise you to hear that? Jesus said that everything that he did, he did not do in his own strength or ability. He says, I simply do what the Father says to do. The Father worketh hitherto, and I work. He said that of ourselves, and he included himself, I can

do nothing. But what I see the Father do, that's the work that I do. And it's just really a wonderful gift that he chose not to come here and essentially lord over us by an ability or by being just plain superior to us, or being a god amongst men. No, that was not his case at all. He came and laid down every bit of that that he had, and as I said, as far as I can tell, there's only a couple of things that separate him from us. One, he did not have an earthly father, as all of us do.

And two, he seemed to keep intact his memories of his life when he was with the Father, and he understood exactly what the kingdom of God was. Now, when he came here and he wanted to teach us about the kingdom of God, he found real quickly that this is not going to be an easy task. So he couldn't just sit down and tell us in a language that we didn't understand, using words that we don't understand, about a place that we've never been to, but he decided that he was going to take what he did have and teach us with it. The society in which Jesus grew up and frankly as much as or as little as

150, 200 years ago, life on this planet was pretty much like it had always been. And that was that we planted into the ground, we reaped harvest, we grew our own food, and it was, you know, they say that Israel in those days was an agricultural society. Well, friend, all of them were agricultural societies at one time. It's only now in our crippled time that we live in today

that we suffer from not having any sense of agriculture at all. It's one of the handicaps of older scriptures that I don't know how Jesus would have described certain things had he had the vocabulary of the 21st century man. We can only speculate and all those need to be kept into the category of speculation. Anybody who pretends to know

anything in this area is fooling himself and hopefully he is the only one he's fooling because we have this handicap within us all the time and we are not the Son of God. And there are a lot of things that we don't understand. So I say we kind of keep things in his area of expertise.

Let him speak by the Spirit of God and let's learn the vocabulary of yesteryear so that when he speaks that we will understand what he's talking about. There is an undeniable principle of sowing and reaping. There is a method of sowing and reaping that extends out of agriculture into many areas

of life. However, there is one thing that he wants us to know, and we're going to be talking about that today as he continues to talk about the kingdom of God using whatever limited vocabulary or vernacular that he finds himself having to use in his day and now in ours. The disciples ask him to explain the parable of the one who sowed the good seed in the field and he says we want to know about the

wheat and the tares parable, can you explain it to us? And he did so. What he did was he simply took the terms of that parable and translated them into the meaning of that parable. There was no need to translate anything into another language at that point because they all spoke that language. It would do us well in many cases to know what certain words mean. But in his particular case a grammatic

translation was not necessary. But the transfer of the thought or intent of the parable had to be explained to the disciples. There would come a time in the disciples' life as the seed of Christ grew within them that they were moving closer and closer to being born again, to having the mind of Christ that these things weren't necessary. As a matter of fact, these

disciples were soon to be called and recognized as apostles who wrote their own hard-to-understand sayings, things that they understood that they were putting into language for their particular audiences and sometimes they were misunderstood as well. There is no need for us to misunderstand what Jesus did and what he accomplished when he was here. There's no need to misunderstand that because frankly these things are

easy to be understood by a person of spirit. Do you know the Bible uses the term being of a certain spirit and do you remember when I guess it was Peter, as they were being rushed out off of Mount Gerizim and out of Samaria, they were unaccepted in that area and Peter said, let's just

call fire down on heaven like Elijah did and consume this group of troublemakers. And Jesus made a statement to him that I think would do us all well to consider this statement that was said to Peter and wonder at least wonder if it could or should be said to ourselves. And that was, you don't know what spirit you're of. I believe that there are millions of well-meaning

and even people that could be, should be called Christian on the earth today. Well-meaning people. Good people that are trying to do things right, that are doing things right. There's no deception, there's no hypocrisy. These are good people. However, I don't think they have fully realized the spirit that they are of. We are of a certain spirit.

We are supposed to be of the Spirit of God. I think that the characterization of the Spirit of God as a third entity or a part of a trinity of God is a mistake that sets Him off as a personage and sets Him off as a being or a force Himself. And I think we lose sight of the fact that the Spirit of God is God Himself. That is the Father. The Spirit of God, Jesus said, that God is a Spirit. So are there two Spirits in the Trinity? Well, of course

not. So what is this all about? The Spirit that is in God was the same Spirit that was in Christ. And it is the same Spirit to be installed in us. It was God's plan from the beginning for the Spirit of God to be in us and not extracted from us by our own choosing of sin over righteous living. However, we did suffer that very fact. We did suffer from the Spirit of God being choked in our

life to the point that His voice is almost silent, His face is almost obscured, and there's very little semblance of God left in the world and unfortunately in the hearts of many people. But if there is a glimmer of that Spirit within us, if we have been called to be a child of God, friend, I don't know of anything more important that you need to accomplish today than to find God's will in your

life and find that proper spirit within yourself to be the man or woman that God has intended for you to be. And you're going to find in some cases that that's a joyous experience. Some cases it's a painful experience. But all experiences are under the guidance and tutelage of our Father God

through His Son, Jesus Christ. So, if you do have that, I want you to know that you don't just simply have something that everybody in the world has. It's no big deal. I've given the example of a group of neighbors meeting at the post office and one of them says, Hey, hey, I got a check here for $1,000 from whoever.

And he looks at his friends and they're not smiling, they're not laughing, they're not rejoicing with him. Oh, you know, what's up? And they look at him and says, everybody got one of those. And it kind of really takes the fun out of it. It takes the sparkle out of it when, well, everybody got one of those. Well, unfortunately, I think that the idea that God came to save everybody on the earth does the same thing to many Christians.

Listen, if you feel that the Lord has called you to be one of His, that's a wonderful thing. Because I assure you, everybody standing around you, that's not necessarily so for them. So we need to be very careful how we treat one another and how we present our own Christianity to one another. Because in this case, we're not all equal. We're not all receiving the same gift. I know the Bible says that God came to save the whole world, but

to Him the whole world was His people. You know, the fact that we're Gentiles and been invited into this family actually circumnavigating the very conduit by which we were supposed to be brought into this family, namely the Jewish people, it's really a sign of God's love for the stranger nations out here, which are us, frankly. There are some people today that are fascinated with finding out

that their DNA or their bloodline is indeed Jewish. You know, I'm one of God's called and chosen people. But, you know, the truth is that all of that's gone away. All of that, that whole promise has evaporated. It's just gone because he came to his own, but his own received him not. And now he's going to talk about Gentiles for just a second. But as many as received him,

to them gave he power to become the sons of God. So that's us. That's exciting. And I love the fact that everybody standing around in the post office didn't get a check it that's that's not really setting cruelty toward them as much as it is an appreciation for the fact that if you're called you're called that's a wonderful thing I wouldn't despise that I certainly wouldn't take

it for granted as a matter of fact, act on it. Act on it. Answer the call. In the day that we live in, in our Christian world, our preachers, our teachers, they never tell us how to answer the call. They act like that if we accept Jesus, if we believe on him, believe in God, that that is answering the call. Friend, the chances of you mustering faith in Jesus because you're called is very, very slim. As a matter of fact, it's the gift that he gives to the people who he calls, and that is the ability to believe in him. Is this a strange way of looking at it? Well, not if you go by

the Scriptures. The Bible teaches us clearly that for by grace are you saved through faith. And that not of yourselves, it's the gift of God. What is the gift of God? The faith to believe Him. This is not some universal blanket opportunity like the publisher's clearinghouse. This is God individually choosing people because He loves that individual. And if

you want Him to love you, if you want Christ to love you, it's not just claiming the promise of a bumper sticker that says God loves you, or some billboard on the highway, or some silly preacher barking it over a pulpit. If you want to know that God loves you and his son loves you, then you need to do what Jesus said when he says, if you keep my commandments, then my Father will love you. And I'll love you. And we'll move into you. What a lovely promise this is. It's a wonderful, wonderful thing. Now, he goes on to explain the kingdom of God, and this time he is going

to talk about seed. He says, so is the kingdom of God as if a man should cast seed into the ground, and should sleep and rise night and day, and the seed should spring up and grow. He knoweth not how." I always thought it was fascinating. I've known farmers, I know farmers today. And this is one thing that they will tell you.

And a farmer with any brains in his head says, you know, I can prepare the soil, and I can water it, and I can fertilize it. I can keep the weeds out of it and all the rest of this stuff. But I can't make that seed come up. I can't do that. Well, how does that happen? You know what? Nobody really knows that. We don't understand how we can go to an Egyptian crypt somewhere

and find where somebody has put a little jar of corn in there as they would do for the dead. And we don't understand how we can pick up 2,000, 3,000 year old dried out kernels of corn, push them into the ground and put a little water on them and up comes a corn stalk. That is an amazing thing to begin with. It's one of the miracles of life that is undeniable. We don't understand how come you can take ten seeds and plant them in the ground and six of them

sprout and two of them not and one of them rot. We don't understand what in the world is wrong or what's going on. What's right about this? This is just something that's a mystery. He plants a seed in the ground and it springs up. He knoweth not how. I think that it has a tone to it that puts us in our place, so to speak. You know, great, you're a farmer. You're doing a wonderful job. But look, the truth is, is that it's the touch of God that brings these seeds to life.

I don't understand how there is even an oak tree inside of a tiny little acorn, but it's in there. And if you treat it right, up it comes. It's just an amazing thing to even see. This is some of the things that are missing in our society today. The children never see, essentially never see this. And children don't know where food comes from. They don't know where the very sustenance of their own life comes from.

But what's beautiful about it is, you know, you can talk about it comes from the grocery store. The grocery store manager will say, no, it comes from the warehouse. The warehouse guy will say, no, it comes from the trucking company. And the trucking company will say, no, it comes from the warehouse. The warehouse guy will say no it comes from the trucking company. And the trucking company will say no it comes from the farms. And they go to the farms and say no it comes from the field. And go to the farmer and say no it comes from the seed. Where does it come from before that? We don't know. There's hidden in

that a story of our very sustenance comes from a source that we don't even understand yet we use that every day to feed ourselves now um he's talking about the kingdom of god is just that way the kingdom of god is like a seed that a man should cast into the field and should sleep and rise night and day and the seed should spring up and grow up. He knoweth not how. For the earth bringeth forth of herself first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear.

But when the fruit is brought forth, immediately he put forth the sickle, because the harvest is come. There was a, in the days of starvation, when weather was very, very bad and planting could not be done, there is a concept of eating one seed that is a very dangerous thing to do. We have to hold out. We have to wait until we can have this seed sprout and create more seed. If you're eating that seed, if you're taking your seed corn and scooping up a handful of it and cooking it up like hominy

and having it for dinner, you are eating stalks and stalks of corn that could feed you for months, but it's only going to feed you for a meal. Another concept in agriculture is you set aside the best. You set aside the best as seed. We find that as the Lord teaches us to tithe, that we are to set aside the best. We're set aside the first fruit. We set aside the best for Him. And as we do, we have this inherent promise that this seed will sustain us in the future.

There is a future that is bleak. There's a future that is hungry. There's a future that does not have enough. But there's not a future like that when the proper seed is set aside and we handle our lives in a proper way. Handle our lives in a righteous way. These things are extremely important. Now you might think that I'm sitting here preaching the modern gospel of, what is it,

seed harvest or whatever that is where the preachers are, you know, telling you to plant your seed in their ministry by sending them money and these kind of things. And there's a lot of tricks and a lot of, you know, foolishness that goes along with this. But the fact of the matter is that there is a very

time-secured principle behind seed time and harvest. And I assure you it's not the adulterated variety today that we hear all the time. But the seed, very, very important as a part of our life. We should never neglect the seed that is provided us. If you want God involved in

whatever it is you do, then you have to understand that it's God's purpose and always has been His purpose to empower that seed planting sometimes it's hard to snap off the heads of some of the finest corn that you have and hold it as seed or offer it essentially, offer it to the ground to make more. But it is a principle of life that if you ignore it

you will starve to death. I think that a lot of people are starving in their Christian walk both financially, socially, spiritually, in every way, because they don't understand the first fruits offering, that seed offering that can enhance their life fully and completely and in so many ways. But it's that greed that makes them hold and makes them hold back. They don't want to subject themselves to people around them. They don't want

to give of themselves to people around them. And they find themselves very impoverished as Christians. Look, you're going to have your own troubles, but you really need to handle troubles on other people's part. You need to seek the Lord for proper counsel for your friends and for your family and these kinds of things. And make yourself available to those kinds of things and those situations in order to have enough for yourself. And it's just a principle that we can't get around. And friend, what our Lord Jesus Christ is trying to tell us right here

is that this is the way the kingdom of God works. If you knew without a doubt that you are the hand of God in your community. If God wanted to do something in your community, he needs human hands to do it. Now why that is, we could talk about for months. And how that came to be, we can talk about it for weeks. We can be a part of our Bible studies from now until doomsday. But it is the action that we all know that we need to do.

How is it that somebody among you needs something that you have? How is that? You know when Jesus says, neither have you two coats? Does that mean that it's a sin to have two coats? It's wrong to have two coats if there is someone who has none and we have to do this for the kingdom of God to operate correctly yeah I know he sent Ravens to feed Elijah but friend I don't know that that's going to happen for your neighbor down the road you know she needs food for her children and you know what she knows she knows that she prays and she knows that you do. And she knows that you're a Christian, but she doesn't understand why God isn't meeting her need. But you know what? You do. You know why God's not meeting her need because you're not

obeying the Lord. We'll see you next time on the next one. Until then, bye-bye, my friend. You've been listening to Don C. Harris of Think Red Ink Ministries. Email don at thinkredink.com. That's thinkredc.com. That's ThinkRedInc.com. Join us again for the next episode in the Words of Jesus series. you