A Parable about Parables

Today on Summit Life with J.D.

Greer. The same sun that hardens the clay softens the wax. The difference is not in the sun that shines on it.

The difference is in the material which it shines upon. That's the whole point Jesus is making with this parable. The condition of your heart is more important than the intelligence of your head. Which, by the way, is good news for some of you. Amen?

Because maybe you're not that smart, but you can submit your heart to God and God will show you the truth. Welcome back to Summit Life with Pastor J.D. Greer. As always, I'm your host, Molly Vidovich, and we are so glad that you're with us today as Pastor J.D. begins a new teaching series titled Listen. We're working our way through the parables of Jesus. These stories, on one hand, are so simple that a child can understand them, yet on the other so profound that we can never exhaust their wealth of wisdom.

We know you don't want to miss a single message here on the program, so if you ever find yourself falling behind, you can catch up on previous broadcasts online at jdgreer.com. But first, let's join Pastor J.D. as he kicks off our series with A Parable About Parables.

Amen. All right, if you've got your Bible this morning, we'll take it out and open it to the Gospel of Matthew. Gospel of Matthew chapter 13, to be specific. Today, we are going to begin a series on the parables of Jesus from the Gospel of Matthew. So if you find the Gospel of Matthew one time, then for the next several weeks, you can just open right there because we'll be there every single week for the next several weeks to come. The name of the series is called Listen.

Listening, of course, is a critical life skill. One of our campus pastors told me this week that he not too long ago was working at home in his yard when he got a phone call from his wife who told him that she was at the mall at a store that he had never heard of called West Elm. She told him that she wanted to buy a credenza that cost $1,400 and asked him if there was any way in their budget they could afford that.

He said, first of all, I had no idea what a credenza was. I thought it must be a cooking book. That's what it sounded like to me.

Second, I was working in the yard and not paying much attention, so I heard $40 to $100. So I said, sure, buy the cookbook. Frankly, I was surprised how grateful she was. She just kept saying over and over, thank you, thank you, thank you for the life of me. I couldn't imagine what was so exciting about a cookbook, but I was glad she was glad. A few days later when West Elm delivered our credenza, I said, wow, you got this for $40 to $100? And she said, no, $1,400.

My jaw hit the floor and I was distraught, and now I need a welfare check. So listening is a critical life skill. You know that, not just in marriage, but in every facet of your life. And whenever Jesus would tell the parables that he tells in the book of Matthew, quite often you will see that he uses the word listen. Listening, of course, is different than hearing. Hearing just means it enters into your ears and you translate it into your brain.

Listening means you are hearing it with your heart. Today we're going to look at a parable that Jesus told about why he told parables. It's a parable about parables, which I know sounds like a biblical version of Inception, a parable within a parable about parables to interpret parables.

But this one is absolutely fascinating. You see, I was always taught when I grew up that parables were just earthly stories that had a heavenly meaning, where Jesus would use simple everyday analogies to help people understand profound truth. It's kind of like today when we say, you know, it's like you've seen in that movie or you remember that scene from The Office, had Nicolas Cage been around in Jesus' day, he would undoubtedly have featured frequently in Jesus' teaching.

That's all true. They are very earthy ways of making profound truth accessible. But this parable is going to show you there actually was more to Jesus' parables than simply trying to take profound truth and put it on the bottom shelf. In fact, in a twist of irony, Jesus is going to explain to us in this parable that sometimes he told parables not to illustrate truth, but to obscure truth. And I know that sounds confusing to you, but I honestly believe that today is going to answer some questions that many of you have had for a long time and you've not known how to ask them. In fact, you've been embarrassed to ask them and felt like it was the kind of thing you couldn't ask in church. It's going to explain to you why some people, even though they are really, really smart, just can't seem to grasp the truth. And you're like, I don't understand because I feel like it's playing in front of me and I'm trying to explain it to you, but they don't seem to be able to get it.

Or why so many people interpret the Bible in such vastly different ways. I'm also going to explain today why some of you have such a hard time paying attention in sermons and why some of you, the very moment that I stand up here to preach, start to get drowsy. Yes, I see you. I've got a good vantage point on most of you right here. I know it. I see it. I'm going to explain why a bunch of you middle and high school students suddenly have to use the bathroom the moment I start speaking.

From my vantage point up here, it's like watching a parade out there sometimes. I am going to explain to you why a lot of the different spiritual forces that are happening when I am up here, so anybody is up here with the word of God open. Matthew 13, let's look at the parable itself. Verse 1, let's set the context. On that day, Jesus went out of the house and was sitting by the sea. Such large crowds gathered around him that he got into a boat and sat down while the whole crowd stood on the shore. Basically, Jesus got in a boat and pushed himself back from the shore a little bit so that he could have a place to preach from.

This is the first century version of an overflow lobby or a satellite campus. Verse 3, then he told them many things in parables, and here was the first parable that he gave to them, the parable about parables. Consider the sower that went out to sow. As he sowed, some seed fell along the path, and the birds came and devoured those seeds. The seed fell on rocky ground where it didn't have much soil, and it grew up quickly since the soil wasn't deep. Verse 6, but when the sun came up, it was scorched, and since it had no root, it withered away. Other seed fell among thorns, and the thorns came up and choked it.

Still other seed fell on good ground and produced fruit, some a hundred and some 60 and some 30 times what was sown. Let anyone who has ears to hear, everybody say it together, listen, listen. If you have ears to hear, listen. Then the disciples came up to him and said, Why are you speaking to them in parables? You see, evidently, a bunch of the people listening to Jesus were confused, which, by the way, might be good news for a bunch of you who get confused when I'm up here speaking.

It doesn't mean there's something wrong with you. You probably would have made a pretty good disciple of Jesus. They were confused also. So Jesus' disciples are like, Jesus, Jesus, why don't you just come out and tell us what you mean?

I'm going to suggest to you today that you have probably asked this exact same question at some point. You may not have known that you were asking it, but you have asked why at some point. If Jesus is true, if Jesus is really true, why wasn't he more straightforward and definitive about it? Why did he leave any room for doubt about who he was? That question comes out of our mouths in questions like, God, if you really are the author of the Bible, why not just prove that to everybody, right? I mean, why not make it where every time you open the Bible, a little angel hovers above the Bible and just says, this is true, this is true. You know, why not make it where you open the Bible and you look at the thing and it's like one of those magic eye pictures where a figure skater comes out who does a dance that somehow symbolizes your life's journey.

Why not make that happen? Why not make it whenever your professor begins to deny the truth of the Bible that all of a sudden a Darth Vader choke hold comes on him, right? I mean, that would prove that this is God's word, right?

I mean, you ever ask things like that? Why doesn't God make it more plain? You know, some Bible critics even use Jesus' lack of straightforwardness to try to suggest that Jesus didn't really believe he was God, that that was something that later Christians added to him, that Jesus was unaware of that. Bart Ehrman, for example, over at UNC, he points out that in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus doesn't seem to aggressively put forward his deity. In other words, he doesn't come out that often and just say, I'm God. And now in the Gospel of John, Jesus does that. And what that shows, Dr. Ehrman says, is that that was something John invented later. The earliest Christians, he says, didn't believe it.

John came up with it later, and John convinced everybody else they should go along with it. Dr. Ehrman says, if Jesus really was God, after all, surely he would have talked about it more directly. He would have come out of Mary's womb, you know, having solved a Rubik's Cube and, you know, working on a physics problem and said, good morning, everyone, I'm God.

Watch me levitate or something like that. But see, that's the question that's being asked here. Jesus, if you really are who you say you are, and if all this stuff matters as much as you say that it does, why weren't you more straightforward and definitive in your claims? Why leave any room for doubt or confusion?

Again, I would say you probably have that same question. Jesus' answer to that question is as follows. Verse 11, he answered, because the secrets of the kingdom of heaven have been given to you for you to know, but it has not been given to them.

Here's number one, if you're taking notes, it's because insight into truth is a gift of the Holy Spirit. That means no matter how smart you are, you cannot understand the gospel without the help and the grace of God. When Peter made his famous confession, when Jesus said, who do you say that I am? And Peter responds with, thou art the Christ, the son of the living God. Jesus did not say, gold star for you, Peter. The reason you figured that out is because you're so smart and you pay attention all the time.

No, what was his response? He said, flesh and blood has not revealed it to you. In other words, your brain.

Your brain did not figure that out. My Father in heaven revealed that to you. Paul would say it this way in 1 Corinthians 12, three, the exact same thing. No man can say that Jesus is Lord. No man can say that Jesus is Lord from his heart except by the illumination and the help and the empowerment of the Holy Spirit. You see, sin makes our hearts so naturally dull and slanted against God and so biased against his authority and glory that we cannot see spiritual truth.

We can't see it without his help. I've described it like this before. You ever meet somebody who is so jaded or biased against somebody or some group of people that they just can't see an issue clearly? They so dislike a group of people that they twist anything and everything that that person or that group does so that it's bad? I mean, we see it all the time in politics, right? Democrats think that everything that Republicans do is stupid and reveals the wicked evil intentions of their hearts and vice versa. Republicans think that about Democrats.

Or think about it in reverse. Do you ever see somebody so biased by love that they can't see legitimate faults in somebody even when they're there? Hank Murphy, who is one of our worship pastors, so loves LeBron James that no matter what LeBron James does, Hank will see it through a positive lens. If LeBron has a low scoring game, then Hank will say, you know, that just shows how unselfish he is that he let all the other players on his team score. If LeBron goes 0-15 from the field, Hank will say only a player of such elite confidence would keep shooting after he missed 14 shots in a row.

If LeBron punches another player in the face, Hank will say, well, man, he's just got such passion for the game and I admire that and touch is obviously his love language and I just, I really respect that. We'll see our sinful hearts are like that but in reverse. Our sinful hearts are so biased and jaded against the authority and the glory of God that we can be blind to evidence even when it's right there in front of us. Listen, it is a miracle of regeneration. It is a miracle of regeneration for anybody to see the truth about Jesus. So honestly, stop congratulating yourself for coming to see the truth about Him. It was not your intelligence, it was not your righteousness that led you to understanding it was a gift of His grace that you didn't deserve and couldn't work up on your own which is why Ephesians 2-8 says, it is by grace you have been saved through faith and not even that is of yourself. Even the faith to believe was a gift of God, it was not of work, so stop your silly boasting because it has no basis whatsoever. And what that means is when you find somebody who is not convinced of the truth like you, right, don't talk down to them and don't think of them and talk to them like they're an idiot.

Pray to God that He will extend to them the same understanding that He did to you. That's the first reason He spoke in parables because ultimately it's a gift of the Holy Spirit. You're listening to Summit Life with Pastor J.D.

Greer. We'll return to our teaching in just a moment but I wanted to remind you about our featured resource this month. As we walk through several of Jesus' parables here on the program, you can also walk through them yourself in a 10-day devotional as well called Listen Up. Dig deeper into these same teachings of Jesus and really personalize the lessons learned. It comes with your gift to the ministry right now so give us a call at 866-335-5220 or check it out at jdgreer.com. Now let's get back to our teaching for the day, Jesus' parable about parables.

Here's Pastor J.D. Here's verse 12, gives us the second reason Jesus was not always straightforward which goes hand in hand with the first. Verse 12, For whoever has, more will be given to him, and he will have more than enough. But whoever does not have, even what he has, will be taken away from him. Now, in context here He's talking about insight into truth and what He means is that if you obey the insight into truth that God gives you then God will give you more insight into truth but if you don't obey that, God will take even what you have away. That is why He says I speak to them in parables because looking they do not see and hearing they do not listen or understand which is a reference to a statement by the prophet Isaiah and Jesus goes on to quote that in the next few verses and He reveals to us the second reason that He spoke in parables. Number two, insight into truth is as much a matter of the heart as it is of the head. It is the condition of our hearts, Jesus says, not a lack of clarity in the evidence that keeps us from seeing the truth. The same sun, the same sun that hardens the clay softens the wax. The difference in effect has nothing to do with exposure to the sun.

It has to do with the material upon which the sun shines. So Jesus is explaining that He obscured truth so that only those who were of the right disposition of heart could actually see it. I skimmed through my Bible this week and compiled a list of reasons that keep us from seeing the truth that Scripture identifies that God says have nothing to do with your intellectual capacity. I give you a handful of them.

This isn't all of them, but it's a handful of them. Letter A, number one is an unwillingness to change. Just an unwillingness to change. Look at what Jesus said, John 7, 17. If anyone's will is to do God's will, if anyone's will is to do God's will, he will know whether the teaching is from God or whether I'm speaking on my own authority.

You know what that means? Is that means submission to God is a prerequisite for understanding or having knowledge of God. A lot of times we come in and we're like, God, if you reveal this to me, then I'll consider whether or not I follow this. And God says, you will never know me that way. You have to be submitted to be willing to follow truth wherever it leads in order for me to reveal the first thing to you. That's the reason some of you are seeking and not finding.

Here's letter B, it's similar. Cherishing sin in our hearts. King David, Psalm 66, 18. If I cherish sin in my heart, then the Lord would not have heard me no matter how earnestly I prayed. Some of you are seeking God, but you have unconfessed, cherished sin in your heart.

And that's why you can't see. Jesus would say in Matthew 5, verse 8, blessed are the pure in heart. The pure in heart, they're the ones that are gonna see God.

Here's the third one, letter C, apathy, apathy. The prophet Jeremiah, when you search for me, you will find me. Searching for him implies that he's hidden, right? You'll find me though. If you seek me with all your heart, I will let you find me. It reminds me of when I'm playing hide and seek with my kids and I find a great hiding spot they don't know about and they'll never find me no matter how long they look. I'll start to give little clues because I don't want to be down there for three hours.

And I'll just kind of rattle around. That's what God is promising he'll do. He's so hidden, you can't find him, but he'll let you find him. He'll let you find him, says the Lord, if you seek him with all your heart and all your soul.

Some people never see something because they don't give this question, the weight and the urgency it deserves. I think here of college students I talk to sometimes who say, well, yeah, I'm not sure if there's a God and maybe I'll think about that one day, but right now I'm just enjoying life too much to really give this question a second thought. Pastor Curtis was telling me this week about a guy that he shared Christ with a number of times who he said always listens politely and asks some good questions, but he just doesn't take it that seriously.

In fact, Curtis said, he always says to me, hey man, there's no shot clock on this decision. I got my whole life to figure this out. What God is saying here is you will never find God under those conditions. There has got to be a sense of how weighty and urgent this is for God to reveal it to you.

I mean, just think about it with me for a minute. If it's possibly true that your creator God came to earth and was humiliated and tortured and died for you, then for you to treat the possibility of that with just a passing glance is an insult to God, no wonder he won't reveal it to you. It requires a level of urgency and to seek him with all your heart and soul.

Here's another one, letter D, hating other people. You say, well, this is a strange one, but look at it, 1 John 4.20. How can he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, love God whom he has not seen? Hating other people clouds our ability to see God when we hate other people who are made in the image of God.

You see, God, follow this. God just doesn't want to be known. God wants to be loved.

He wants to be loved. And if your heart is filled with hate and bigotry so that you're just gonna use your knowledge of God as a weapon against other people, then God will keep you from the knowledge of him because he didn't want you to know him and not love him. And the love of your heart is revealed by how you feel about the people around you and whether or not you're a bigot or a racist or you're hateful or you're jealous. The condition of your heart is revealed in how you love others. And that's the kind of heart that God reveals himself to is a heart that loves. Here's one more, letter E. Giving other people's opinions more weight than God's. How can you believe, Jesus asked in John five, since you accept glory from one another but do not seek the glory that comes from the only God. What Jesus is saying here is that you can't perceive truth. You can't believe when other people's opinions matter more to you than God's opinions. Here's what I thought about this week when I was going through that. I thought of the high school student that I sometimes see who goes off to college and stops believing in God, right?

But here's what I know about them. When they were in high school and they did believe in God, other people's opinions mattered a whole lot more to them than the God that they believed in. So it's no wonder that when they went to college, they lost the knowledge of God because God said, the reason you lost the knowledge of me is because when you did believe in me, other people's opinions mattered more to you. That word weight, I've told you in Hebrew, what Jesus would have been using probably to speak there, Chabod, the word glory means weight.

It means a weightiness. How much weight do you give other people's opinions or God's opinions? When somebody does this, it usually means that their unbelief is not a matter of their head. It's a matter of their heart. It was their heart that was wrong that made their head go wrong. An idolatrous heart almost always will lead to an unbelieving head. Tim Keller, one of my favorite pastors, he says that when somebody that's young comes to him and says they don't believe in God anymore, he said, if they grew up in church, he said, my first question is, who did you start sleeping with? He said, it almost always knocks them off guard. He says, but 99 times out of 100, there's an answer to that question. And it was ultimately this heart away from God that led to the doubt that plagued their mind.

Maybe that's been happening to you. You see my point in all this? I'll say it again. Insight into truth is as much a matter of the heart as it is of the head. So Jesus sometimes spoke in parables so that those with a heart to know God could see the truth and everybody else with the wrong kind of heart would be confused. Paul would say the exact same thing another way in 2 Corinthians 2. We are, he says, the pleasing aroma of Christ to those who are being saved and to those who are perishing, we are the stench of death. Talk about a distinction. One smell, to some it's a pleasing aroma of life, to others it's a stench of death.

Here's what I thought about this week when I was going over that verse. How many of you know what durian is? How many of you know? Put your hand up, just testify for a minute.

Okay. Durian is sort of like a mutated pineapple looking thing. It looks pretty harmless right here, but I'm telling you if I were to open up a durian in this place, it would clear out this entire room. Not only could you smell it in the farthest corners of this room, our Alamance County campus could smell this thing.

When you go into Singapore, Southeast Asia where I was, they will have like in front of the malls and hotels that like we have pictures of no smoking a cigarette with a line through it. They'll have pictures of durian with a line through it because it smells so bad. All the Indonesians would tell me, oh, it is the greatest fruit.

It is awesome. And I mean, the first time I was around one, I literally had a gag because it was, I mean, it smelled, this is the best way I can describe it. I'm not trying to be gross, but it smells like Captain Crunch and armpit. If you could mix those two things together, that's what durian smells like.

And they would be like, oh no, no, it is so good. And I'm like, I don't even get it close to me. So after I've been there about a year, the strangest thing started to happen. I cannot explain it medically.

I cannot explain it scientifically. I have no idea how it happened, but it ceased to be that repulsive. And then after another couple of months, it actually started to smell good. And then somebody convinced me to try it and I actually liked it.

And then it became like my favorite fruit of all time. I mean, if I opened up a durian here, a bunch of you would want a gag and there's a handful of us that would think that smells awesome. Durian is like the gospel, okay? Because the gospel is this thing that there are certain people that it repulses them and there are others to whom it has become the aroma of life.

The same scent of durian makes one person want to vomit, makes one person crave something. That is what is happening with the gospel and the condition of your heart determines which one of those reactions that the gospel will produce in you, the same sun that hardens the clay, softens the wax. The difference is not in the sun that shines on it.

The difference is in the material upon which it shines upon. That's the whole point Jesus is making with this parable. The condition of your heart is more important than the intelligence of your head, which by the way is good news for some of you, amen? Because maybe you're not that smart, but you can submit your heart to God and God will show you the truth. So listen to Jesus explain, listen to him unpack the specifics of the parable. He's gonna interpret this one for us, which he doesn't always do.

So this is a special treat. Verse 18, so listen to the parable of the sower. You see, when anyone hears the word about the kingdom and doesn't understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what was sown in his heart. This is the seed that is sown along the path. We're gonna look at four different types of soil really quickly that just illustrate the big truth that we just unpacked.

Here's the first kind of soil. We're gonna call it the hard heart, the hard heart. This is the person who is interested in what the word of God says, just not that much. And so they leave here and almost immediately after they leave, Satan, like a bird, like a bird, snatches away the word, snatches away the ideas that they were having, snatches away their thoughts by planting doubts in their minds, or maybe he just distracts them with something else. I'm so thankful that God speaks to our hearts and not just our hard heads. You're listening to Summit Life, the Bible teaching ministry of pastor, author, and theologian J.D.

Greer. Be sure to get in touch with us today so we can get you a copy of Pastor J.D. 's newest resource titled Listen Up, 10 Interactive Devotions from the Parables of Jesus. Our prayer is that as you personally walk through these devotionals, that you'll gain fresh insight on how to apply the lessons found within these parables. We'd love to send it to you as our way of saying thanks when you donate to support this ministry.

Summit Life wouldn't be possible without the generosity of friends like you. Ask for Pastor J.D. 's Listen Up when you give a donation today of $35 or more. Give us a call at 866-335-5220. That number again is 866-335-5220.

Or you can give and request the resource online at jdgreer.com. I'm Molly Vidovitch inviting you to join us tomorrow for the conclusion of today's message right here on Summit Life with J.D. Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by J.D. Greer Ministries.