Monthly Archives: March 2011

Luke 8:13 And the ones on the rock are those who, when they hear the word, receive it with joy. But these have no root; they believe for a while, and in time of testing fall away.

Do you garden? I have been at it now for over twenty five years. My only regret is that I didn’t start earlier. To plant something in the spring and then pick something you can benefit from in the fall is a living marvel. Every spring when I start to clean up the yard and get the garden ready for planting I find sprouts from the previous year coming up all over the place. It is amazing what a plant is able to grow up from. A tiny crack in the concrete will have a shoot coming up from it because a seed fell in there and there was enough dirt and water to get it going. Quite often I will leave them to see how well they will do. They don’t do well. They start out fine but they don’t prosper. There is no place for the roots to go. The little bit of dirt they germinated in does not contain enough nutrients to make it thrive. They get spindly and if they survive the season they still will not bear fruit.

Jesus compares this kind of plant with those who hear the Gospel and right away they grab onto it and for all appearances they seem to be solidly rooted in Christ as true believers. They have heard the promise of eternal life, of joy in Christ, of the forgiveness of all their sins. Who wouldn’t want that? What they failed to hear,m or what they were not told, was that real faith will hang on even when it is the cause of trouble in one’s life. Jesus here, calls it a time of testing. God is in the business of testing our faith. It is very easy to say “I believe”. But the proof of that pudding will be perseverance when faith is challenged. Matthew calls it “tribulation or persecution on account of the word”. That is, the troubles in life are a direct result of faith in Jesus. The choice is clear. You can put an end to the trouble by turning your back on Jesus or you can stay with Christ and have difficulty. Those without root will always choose ease. They have nothing to make them choose otherwise.

Note a few things about all this:

1) God tests our faith. He is not interested in fair weather friends. Faith in Jesus Christ is not real if it is only alive when times are good. God is in the ferreting business.

2) Trials are going to come and if people are willing to jettison God out of their lives for the sake of getting rid of difficulty then they never had God in the first place. And that is why God sends the test. He wants real Christians who really follow Him and love Him more than anything, including peace and safety.

3) When we give the Gospel and some respond right away with great joy and excitement we need to carefully teach them the cost of discipleship. When we give the Gospel we must be sure not to give the impression that life is a happy fest. Happiness, yes, but not because there is n trouble. It is happiness in Christ in the midst of great trouble. We are to invite people to come and die for Jesus so that we might live with Him forever. We must never go light on the cost of discipleship because we are afraid of not getting converts. The converts that come through an incomplete and happy face caricature of the Christian life will not be real in any case.

4) There will always be false believers and those who for awhile give the impression of being genuine but who cannot stand the day of difficulty. This does not necessarily mean that we have taught badly or sold the Gospel short. No matter how plainly we say things there will always be those who will misunderstand.

Luke 8:11-15 (ESV)

Now the parable is this: The seed is the word of God. [12] The ones along the path are those who have heard. Then the devil comes and takes away the word from their hearts, so that they may not believe and be saved. [13] And the ones on the rock are those who, when they hear the word, receive it with joy. But these have no root; they believe for a while, and in time of testing fall away. [14] And as for what fell among the thorns, they are those who hear, but as they go on their way they are choked by the cares and riches and pleasures of life, and their fruit does not mature. [15] As for that in the good soil, they are those who, hearing the word, hold it fast in an honest and good heart, and bear fruit with patience.

Having told His disciples why He speaks in parable Luke 8:9-10), Jesus goes on to explain the parable of the sower to them. There are four types of soil that the good seed of the Word of God lands on when the Gospel is delivered.

The path.

Seed that falls on the roadway will never penetrate into the ground. The ground is too hard and dry. It just sits there and as soon as the birds spy it they swoop down and take it away. We have all dealt with such people. They hear the Gospel but they give it no consideration or thought. Their hearts are hard, their minds are closed. As soon as they hear the Word it leaves them. The devil snatches the Gospel out of their thinking, out of their lives before it has a chance to germinate in the least. They may be antagonistic, faithful to some other religion, convinced of other things that oppose the Gospel. It could be any number of things. But they do not receive the Gospel.

We can often think that as long as the Gospel is delivered properly, relevantly, faithfully, that it will garner an audience and reception. This is not the case. It was not the case with Jesus Himself and it will not be the case with us. Technique, approach, clarity etc. are not what convinces people. Sometimes we can have all our ducks in a row and get no response to our preaching at all. Other times we may not be as prepared, not as faithful and not as organized and find that people were saved despite us.

We cannot soften hearts. We cannot make someone respond to the Gospel. We should plan and strategize and know how best to deliver the Gospel. We should be considerate and non judgmental and polite and nice. This is certainly wiser than being rude and demanding. But there are no guarantees that the right approach will always produce the desired result. Jesus Himself did not convince everybody that He was who He said He was. We should be in much prayer that the Lord will lead us to responsive people, but we need to remember that there will always be those who simply do not want the Gospel.

This should never make us quit. God tells us to go and preach and talk to whoever will give us audience. Lack of results is no reason to give up. We need to be sensitive to what we are to do and where we are to do it. There are times to stop and move on to other areas, other people and other approaches but lack of converts is not the only indicator of time to move on.

The thought of the evil one stealing the sown seed should break our hearts. Casting seed is hard work. Giving the Gospel to lost people is hard work. To know that people need Christ and not be able to convince them of it is heartbreaking. Psalm 126 tells us of the one who goes out weeping carrying precious seed to sow. There will be fruit, as we will see later, but there are always birds who steal away the seed and that is so heartbreaking. Jesus saw the crowds of people and was moved with compassion on them because they were lost harassed and helpless. The trouble is, they do not know it. Such is our work. There are happier results sometimes, but we should be prepared for this if we are serious about giving the Gospel.

Reading a book lately that contained the following quote: “The Lord Jesus cannot live in us fully and reveal Himself through us until the proud self within us is broken”.

This put me in mind of Psalm 115:3

Our God is in the heavens;

he does all that he pleases.

Is the first statement true? Does it agree with the verse? Does it disagree? Is Jesus Christ unable to live in us and reveal Himself to us until our pride is broken? And if Jesus cannot do anything in us until our pride is broken, who is going to break it? We won’t. We will not do anything until God does a work in us.

Salvation happens when God the Holy Spirit comes, through the giving of the Gospel, and gives life, or regenerates the sinner. This act of regeneration is said in Scripture to be a resurrection of the dead (Ephesians 2:4-6), a creative act of giving light to the blind (II Corinthians 4:6), a release from slavery (Romans 6:18). Those are all powerful acts of an all powerful God who if He did not do them none would be saved. They are all acts done to people who have not yet had their proud self within them broken.

So, maybe the author meant that once a person is saved, Jesus cannot reveal Himself and break the remaining sin in a person’s heart. But if a person is truly saved he already has the Holy Spirit in him working on him. A lot could be said about that but it boils down to this. It is not that Jesus Christ cannot reveal Himself through us until our pride is broken. It is that He will not.

Jesus will not honour sin. In this sense it may be said that He cannot do something. The only things God cannot do are the things He chooses not to do. But He most certainly does reveal Himself to proud unbroken people. It is called salvation. We repent. We ask God to break our proud hearts. We ask for softening. But make no mistake. Only those who have already had their hard hearts broken will ask God to soften them. This is the plain teaching of Scripture (Ezekiel 36-37).

We need to be careful how we choose our words. Take a look again at the above statement. It could be interpreted to mean that we have a power that God does not. We simply cannot conclude that. Does all this mean that the reason we sin and remain so spiritually anaemic is because God chooses not to make us spiritually vibrant? No. People are saved when the Gospel is declared to them and the Holy Spirit, through that declaration gives life to the dead so that they turn to Jesus Christ in repentance and faith. The Holy Spirit takes up residence in the new believer and starts His work of sanctifying him and bringing him to greater conformity to the image of Christ.

But we are still sinners and we still have a lot of the old nature in us and sometimes we listen more to the dictates of our old nature than we do to the proddings of the Holy Spirit through the Word. We ignore His work and we refuse to use the things He gives us to help us in our progress. What He gives us is the Word of God, prayer, the fellowship of the saints, the sacraments. When we neglect these things we dry up spiritually. Could God break through in other ways and make us more holy? Of course. He can do whatever He wants. But we shouldn’t count on it. He has already given us everything we need for life and godliness and it is up to us to use what He has given. It is not God’s fault if we do not.

Why are some believers spiritually alive and exhibiting the fruit of the Spirit better than others? Because they are in the Word, prayer, church and the sacraments. It is available for all believers, if only they would. It is not that God cannot move them. It is that He has already done what we need and we simply do not contact Him and put those things to work. We can be more spiritually vibrant. God could zap us with that vibrancy, but He has chosen to do something better. We need to put it to work.

Luke 8:9-10 – And when his disciples asked him what this parable meant, [10] he said, “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of God, but for others they are in parables, so that seeing they may not see, and hearing they may not understand.

Spiritual truth is understood spiritually and that is a work of the indwelling Holy Spirit. Paul tells us in I Corinthians 2 that the reason some cannot understand spiritual truth is because they do not have the Holy Spirit to guide them. The Holy Spirit is given to all who believe in Jesus Christ (Ephesians 1:14). Understanding Scripture is not a matter of intelligence or work or insight. This doesn’t mean that all believers will agree on what texts mean or that all will have the same depth of understanding. But it does mean that all believers can understand things that no unbeliever can.

Jesus spoke in parables in His teaching so that those whose faith was in Him could know more about the secrets of the Kingdom of God. Those who refuse to believe are not given this understanding. He spoke to them in parables to further confound them. He spoke in parables that those who trust Him would have greater understanding and that those who do not trust Him remain in their ignorance.

This is a great incentive for true believers to study the parables of Jesus (and any piece of Scripture because this principle is also true for all the Scriptures). God has given us a written record of Himself, mankind, sin, the Gospel and the eternal state, so that we will be more conformed to the image of Jesus Christ. He has given all those who trust Christ the ability to benefit from the Scriptures, to be able to understand its teachings.

To neglect what God Himself has given us to understand is a great act of rebellion and we should repent to the degree that it is true of us. To be able to pray “Lord enable me to understand what I am reading” and know that it is God’s will that we will is a privilege beyond our wildest dreams. And yet, other things so easily get in the way of our time in the Word. What we all need, pastors and other spiritual leaders included, is a sense of wonder that we have been given a communication from God so that we will be more like Jesus. It is a privilege of incalculable magnitude.

We study the Bible to show ourselves as smart or to show others as stupid. We study to find out if the preacher is right. We study out of a sense of duty. We read the Bible so that we can get through it in a year. But we are called to hunger and thirst after righteousness and a starving person will not be casual when food is offered to him.

To those of us who have come to faith in Christ it has been given to know the secrets of the Kingdom of God. Meditate on that thought for a few moments and then come away with a casual approach to the Scriptures, if you can. The fact that we can is testimony to our need for a spiritual awakening in our hearts. O that God would grant it to us and may its evidence be that we feed on Him through the Word He has given for just that purpose.

Psalm 85:6 Will you not revive us again,

that your people may rejoice in you?

The evidence of revival is when the people of God find their joy in God. How tempting it is to love the gifts of God more than the God of the gifts! And how prevalent are the failings of God’s people? We fall into sin again and again and again and part of the reason is that we do not enjoy God more than the sin that entices us. We will know that God is doing a great work among us when we come to the point that we love Him more than the good things He gives us and more than the evil things He commands us to stay away from.

This may not happen overnight and it may not be marked by large groups of people being converted or becoming more committed. This revival may be restricted to one solitary follower of Christ. You do not need other people to get serious with God in order for you to do it. Would you be glad if you came to the point that you wanted God as much as you want the sins that so easily beset? Would that not be a revival? Have you shown God that such is what you truly desire?

Have you used the resources that God gives you to help get you there? The way to get to the place where God wants you to be is to listen to Him in His Word. Saturate yourself in the Word of God. Talk to others about your sins. Find other Christian people with whom you can be held accountable and for whom you can be a help. Meet with them on a regular basis and read the Bible, pray and discuss the things of Christ and what you read. Be committed to your local church. Do good for others. Overcome the evil in your own heart with good deeds done for others. And never neglect the Lord’s Supper. This is more than a mere memorial service. This is what God uses to help us stay close to Jesus. This is a spiritual fellowship in the body and blood of Jesus Christ (I Corinthians 10:16-17).

Do you feel the heart cry of the Psalmist in Psalm 85:6 when he prays that God would revive him so that he rejoices in God? Are you willing to use the good things that God has given you in order to get there? God will answer the honest prayer for a personal revival. But He will not just zap you with spirituality and victory. Victory comes to those who fight. Spirituality comes to those who start on a journey with a single step. The prayer for revival is not a prayer to avoid the hard work that God has ordained His children do in order to grow closer to Him.

Study, pray, fellowship and worship. This is what God has given us and this is what we must use. And God will do great and mighty things which up until now we have not seen.