Getting Conversion Right Part 2

Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith. When the seed of the gospel is sown, it can land in receptive soil or soil that will not allow the seed to germinate. Today, lessons on how some seed lands where its hearers will accept it and be fruitful.

Please stay with us. From the Moody Church in Chicago, this is Running to Win with Dr. Erwin Lutzer, whose clear teaching helps us make it across the finish line. Pastor Lutzer, we turn again to the parables of Jesus as you take us into Mark chapter 4. You know, Dave, when I think of the ministry of Running to Win, in a sense, we are like the sower that Jesus talked about. We sow the seed of the gospel in 20 different countries in three different languages, and our desire is that it fall on good soil and bear fruit.

Of course, there are times also when it may fall on other kinds of soil, but the Word of God does the work. And I want to thank the many of you who help us get that word to as many people as possible. You know, during this period of time, we have a matching gift challenge that has been put before us. There are special friends who have said, we are willing to match everything that is given up to $90,000.

That means whatever you give, it becomes double. Would you help us? Here's what you do. Go to RTWOffer.com.

RTWOffer.com or call us at 1-888-218-9337. Today my heart is filled with joy and faith, and I want to thank you in advance for helping us. Help us during this period of time as we sow the Word of God in many different places. But now we listen to the words of Jesus as we continue our study of one of his most important parables.

Now we come to category number four, and that's what we've been waiting for, isn't it? But those, verse 20, that were sown on the good soil are the ones who hear the word and accept it and bear fruit, 30-fold, 60-fold, 100-fold. Now, you know, I was born on a wheat farm. We had some cattle, but primarily we grew wheat and some oats, maybe also some wild oats at times, at least my brother.

But I know something about planting. We thought that for every bushel of wheat that we planted, if we got 30 bushels in return, that was really great. If we got 40, 50 was unusual and only happened every once in a while. Now Jesus here is saying, 30-fold, hey, that's great. 30-fold, 60-fold, that's beyond the limit. A hundred-fold, there's no way that you could expect to get a hundred-fold.

There may be some things that you get a hundred-fold in. Usually it's weeds, not wheat or oats or barley. But Jesus said that the life where the soil was good doesn't mean that we as humans are good. It means that the soil received a wonderful welcome and was deeply rooted, that that soil bore fruit. And by the way, that's the only soil that really has the assurance of salvation. It's the only real evidence that you and I have that somebody has been converted when they become fruit-bearing Christians, and we begin to see evidence of the new life that God has implanted within them.

Now what I'd like to do is to give you three lessons that I hope that you never forget. It's easy for us to forget, but don't let Satan snatch this out of your mind. First of all, notice this, that even though all of the soils received the same seed, only one really bore the fruit God intended. And that means that there are degrees of receptivity for the Word of God. Today I'm preaching to a lot of people here at the Moody Church, many who have joined us by way of the internet.

This message is going to be on the radio, God willing, and will be heard by many thousands of people. And there's going to be a variety of responses. Some are going to say, yes, I get it.

I understand. And those are the Christians who say, I know that my roots are real, that the gospel has done its work in my life. Others are going to blow it off and simply say, we've heard all this before.

And they are uninterested because their hearts are hard. This past week, I met a man who debates atheists. I wish I had met this man a few months before, before I debated an atheist a few months ago. And he said this, he always asks atheists this question.

I love it. He says, if I ask you two questions, will you give me an honest answer? And they say, of course, yes.

And the first question is, will you give me an honest answer to question number two? Every atheist, of course, says yes, because remember atheists also are created in the image of God. And because they're created in the image of God, they have a sense of morality, a conscience, et cetera.

Their conscience and their morality did not come from atheism, but it comes from the fact that they are God's special creation in His image. So they always say yes. And then he asks them this question. If Christianity were true, would you become a Christian?

Most of them think about it for a moment, and some of them say no. Well, what's this debate all about here? How much evidence would it take to convince you? The answer is none, because even if it were true, you wouldn't become a Christian. In other words, it does not matter.

The evidence is irrelevant. And what that means is a hard, determined heart. But let's not think that that's relegated to atheists. It's relegated to church people who are willing to come and listen, but are indifferent to God and indifferent to the gospel. And so please keep in mind that when we speak about hard hearts, it doesn't mean somebody who's angry. It means somebody who's comfortable without God's forgiveness and grace as it is found in Jesus.

So please keep that in mind. The response is different in the lives of different people. And the second lesson, and that is that it is the word of God, the gospel, which will become clear in a moment, it is the word of God that produces the miracle, not the sower. The sower who sowed the seed may not have been dressed too well.

He may not be very educated. But ultimately, if the miracle is going to happen, it's going to happen because the word of God, the seed, fell onto soil that was willing to receive it and accept it. That's really the key to witnessing. Now, I might say that sometimes the sower gets in the way of the seed. If you're going to sow the good news of the gospel to those with whom you work, your friends, and so forth, don't trample on them at the same time because, as I mentioned, those who are along the path, that path was hard because many people had walked over it.

So the integrity of the sower oftentimes is important for the receiver to accept. But at the same time, when the miracle actually happens, that miracle is really a miracle that the seed does. The word does what you and I cannot do. It is the miracle of regeneration. It is the word of God.

And we don't know how that is, do we? In another parable, Jesus said that the kingdom of God is like unto a man who sows seeds in a field, and then he goes and sleeps. And after a number of sleeps, he comes back and he sees that there is growth, but he doesn't understand how it happens.

And I don't understand how you can have one little seed of something that is very small and you plant it and then you get 30 or 40 or 100 back. I don't understand that. I don't understand how the Holy Spirit of God works in a heart and brings about conversion or regeneration.

I don't understand that. But I do know that the word does its work, and we are born again by the word of God. And so God often uses very imperfect sowers. I love that story. You know, in the 1800s, there was a great preacher in England by the name of Charles Adams Spurgeon. One time when he was about 18 years old, as I remember the story, Spurgeon went to a church and it was snowing so hard. He trudged through the snow and it snowed so much that the pastor never made it to the church himself. So a lay person stood up and read the phrase from Isaiah, look unto me and be ye saved all the ends of the earth.

He read that text a couple of times, made a few comments, and that was it. And that word stuck in Spurgeon's heart and soul and led him to conversion. It's not a matter of saying, oh, I don't witness because I don't have all the answers or I'm not polished.

No. What we need to do is to give people the word of God. Now there's a third lesson. Only God, only God can take the soil and change its consistency. Only God can really take the soil and change it. Because a question you should be asking in this message is, what about the hard soil? Can it ever be plowed so that it becomes soft and pliable?

The answer is yes. We should never think that somebody is locked into hardness. God is able to take soil and change it. Now one of the things I learned and Colin Smith preached on this passage and he brought it out and I totally agree with him, is that in those days what they would do is to seed the word of God or seed the seeds, I should say, and broadcast it over a piece of land. And only after that did they plow it. They didn't plow it ahead of time. They plowed it afterwards and so they plowed it under so that it would begin to grow. Now here's the reason why you and I should be witnessing and sharing the word of God, is that as we give it out to people, we have no idea when God may decide to plow, whose life he may begin to plow up so that they can receive the word of God.

Maybe they can't when we give it to them, but the time may come when they will. And how does God do that? Well, I don't know all the ways that God does it, but I do know that there are times when a person feels as if he needs God, maybe an awareness of God, it may be tragedy. Somebody comes into your room, if a doctor comes into your room and says, you know, you've got six months to live, that may cause you to begin to think, you know, my heart has been hard toward God, but maybe, maybe I should listen to God's word. God comes along and plows. And the reason that you and I should sow seed is we do not know where he will plow next.

Now, sometimes God goes ahead of us and prepares the soil so that when the word comes, it falls into good soil immediately. Now let me tell you a story. Two weeks ago today, Rebecca and I were on a train going to Prague in the Czech Republic. We were with two other couples. And when you buy tickets on a train, you are given, you know, the place where you're going to sit and so forth. So we were given six seats and we arbitrarily chose them. We couldn't sit together. One group went there. I and another man, we chose some seats. I found myself directly across. You know how those trains are.

The seats face one another. I found myself across from a young woman who had headphones and I asked her whether or not she could speak English and she said yes. I asked her where she was from. She said Moravia. I said, do you know the story of the Moravians? You know, they were the ones who went from the Czech Republic to Germany and sent 265 missionaries around the world.

No, she'd not heard of the Moravians. And I said they spread the gospel and she said, what do you mean by the gospel? So in less than two minutes, we were into the gospel. Now, the good news is this.

I'll tell you the end of the story and then I'll give you the process. In less than an hour, I took her by the hand and led her to saving faith in Jesus Christ. Isn't that wonderful that God did that? For all I know, she may be listening today because I encouraged her to join us here at the Moody Church online.

But here's what I discovered. First of all, most of the time was spent helping her to see why she was a sinner who needed a Savior. Now, she was open to God but thought that she could find God just within her, you know, the God within. She didn't need forgiveness in the biblical sense because – and then she raised the issue of why can't we just come to God directly? Why do we need Jesus?

I love that question. Why do we need Jesus? And so I explained to her why you can't go to God directly.

You can pray to Him and He may answer your prayer but the way in which you'll answer it is He'll bring Jesus into your life in one way or another very quickly because Jesus is the mediator between God and man and the only one qualified to take away this issue of sin. Now she said she was defining sin as the big things – murder, you know, theft, et cetera, et cetera. When I began to help her to see that our nature was corrupt, I said, you know, we as human beings are something like fish in a sea that say, I don't see any water. You know, where's the water?

What do you mean by water when you're swimming in it? So that helped her along the way. But here's why I tell you the story.

God prepared the soil. She said a year ago and it's a year ago this coming month, she was walking along a pier and fell down and she said there was blood for two meters. I'm not sure exactly what all that meant but she was picked up basically for dead. She was taken to a hospital and in the hospital after being in a coma for, I forget how many hours, she recovered. But the doctor said that she should be written up in the Guinness Book of World Records because they have no idea why she lived.

As a matter of fact, when she was there in the hospital, she actually, her soul left her body so that she could see herself lying there from the corner of the room, which helps us to understand the separability of the soul from the body. But she came back to life and she said that there were people who came into her room just to look at her and to say, we don't understand why you are alive. So she said to me, why didn't I die?

I love those questions. I took her by the hand and said, you didn't die because you weren't ready to die. God knew that at some time I would sit across from you in this train and explain to you how you can come to saving faith in Jesus Christ and be ready to die. So afterwards she was ready to, struggling of course with how to pray. So I explained the prayer that I would pray in detail, what she was admitting to, that she was a sinner, that she couldn't save herself, that Jesus died for sinners and that he made a path to us so that he could take away our sins and give us the righteousness of Christ.

I said, would you like to believe on Jesus? She said, that would be wonderful if you'd help me too. Now only time will tell whether or not she fits into soil A. I know for sure that she isn't in the first soil because her heart was not hard. I trust that she did not belong to soil number two that received the word with gladness. I hope that she fell into good soil and I received an email this week from the folks in the Czech Republic with whom we connected, that they have followed up with her. They've connected with her a couple of times by email and are helping her to find a church in Prague and to be discipled.

I hope and pray that she will be the fourth soil that bears fruit forever. But I tell you that to let you know that God went ahead and he plowed the soil and he brought into her life circumstances that made her ready to believe on Christ. And maybe today, those of you who are watching by internet or listening on the radio or those of you here in the sanctuary of Moody Church, God has brought you to this moment, to this hour, for this reason that you might savingly believe on Christ, that the word of God coming into your heart might be so received that it creates the life of God. And you'll begin to love Jesus. You'll begin to display the fruit of the Spirit, love, joy, peace, et cetera. And you'll say to yourself, surely, I know God. And the fruit that you will bear, you'll never see here on earth. And that guy who led Spurgeon to faith in Christ because of that one or two sentence sermon that he preached, he had no idea that that 18-year-old in the congregation was going to be one of the most famous preachers in history. You have no idea the impact you have when you sow the seed. Get your colleagues at work to read the book of John and just say to them, even if you don't believe it, read it and ask yourself, who is this Jesus anyway? Get the word in their hearts. God will come along and plow the field. Someday they'll bear fruit 40, 60, or a hundred fold. Did God intend this message for you this morning?

I hope so. To encourage you to share the word or for those of you who are not sure, to bring you to openness and receive Christ. Well, my friend, this is Pastor Luther. I can't help but think of the words of Martin Luther, who of course began the Protestant Reformation. And he said, the word of God did the work.

Sometimes when we witness, we think to ourselves that we're the ones who have to convince people of the truth of the gospel, and certainly God uses us, but ultimately it is the word of God planted in the human heart that bears fruit. I trust that you are blessed as a result of these messages. Would you like to have these messages permanently so that you can listen to them again and again? Here's what you can do.

Go to rtwoffer.com, rtwoffer.com or call us at 1-888-218-9337. Ask for the series, You Can't Redo Life, How the Parables Help Us Get It Right the First Time. You see, our desire is that all of us might be fruit-bearing Christians. And we believe that through the challenge of God's holy word, transformation happens. And that's why if you listen to Running to Win over a period of time, you will know that we're committed to the word of God and we're committed to the good news of the gospel of Christ. Ask for the series, You Can't Redo Life, How the Parables Help Us Get It Right the First Time. For info, go to rtwoffer.com.

That's rtwoffer.com for a gift of any amount. These messages can be yours or call us at 1-888-218-9337. Never forget that we exist to help you make it all the way to the finish line. Here in the ministry of Running to Win, we talk about many different issues, but we have one goal, and that is to be faithful all the way to the end. Connect with us. Go to rtwoffer.com. Call us at 1-888-218-9337.

You can write to us at Running to Win, 1635 North LaSalle Boulevard, Chicago, IL 60614. For some, prayer is a mystery. They wonder if God really listens or if prayer makes a difference in everyday life. Jesus left us a pattern for prayer, an outline of how we are to approach God. Next time on Running to Win, the famous Lord's Prayer, the answer of Jesus when the disciples asked Him to teach them how to pray. Thanks for listening. For Dr. Erwin Lutzer, this is Dave McAllister. Running to Win is sponsored by the Moody Church.