I read this week an article from Forbes magazine describing some of the 946 billionaires around the world. If they sold everything they owned and paid all of their bills they would have at least a billion dollars in the bank.

An interesting fact came out of that article. Two-thirds of them started with nothing … they went from rags to riches. I’ll mention a couple of them that you might know. Bill Gates did not graduate from college. In fact, 50 of the billionaires around the world either quit high school or college to begin their business careers. He quit college. He went one year to college, and then he and his friend Paul Allen left college and formed what we now know as “Microsoft.”

You might know Oprah Winfrey, a very popular television personality. Born in Mississippi in extreme poverty she grew up in Wisconsin, suffering physical and sexual abuse. As a teenager she moved to Tennessee to live with her father, and that made all the difference. She began a new life and went from rags to riches … from obscurity to glory.

The richest man in Russia, for example, was an orphan.

A very prominent publisher in England, one of the primary publishers of magazines and publications in England never graduated from high school.

These all went from rags to riches, from obscurity to glory.

I want to mention another man who went from obscurity to glory, Jesus Christ. We could almost say from rags to riches because you do remember that at his birth, his mother wrapped Him in swaddling clothes, rags. She had no other cloths, so she wrapped Him in rags.

Nobody knew about Jesus. The angels announced His birth to the shepherds. It occurred in a stable in an obscure city, Bethlehem.

Jesus used that aspect of His life and kingdom in this parable and describes it as going from obscurity to glory. In the description of His kingdom He used a very common picture in that day, the planting of a mustard seed. People planted this common herb in that day in their gardens along with their other herbs, plants, and foods.

He used it as an illustration to describe to this vast audience His kingdom and Himself as the King.

Before we examine the parable in greater depth, we need to make sure we understand the terms of the parable. They might appear quite obvious to you. But just to make sure that we all understand the same aspects of the parable, we’ll just briefly look at them.

The mustard seed, a tiny seed, not the tiniest of tiny seeds, but the tiniest of seeds of that locality and that place where Jesus lived in the surrounding countryside when planted into the ground would to a height of 10 or 15 feet.

Unlike our mustard plants, it looked like a tree, very sizable, large branches, capable of holding birds and even the possibility of their nesting. And the birds would gather underneath the leaves of the mustard plant and they would shelter there and hide from the sun and they would eat of the seeds of the plant.

Then we have the sower. He, of course, represents Jesus, the sower of the seed.

Notice who owned the field in which He planted the seed. The sower did. It belonged to Him. He owned it. We must remember that the sovereign God owns all things and has complete charge of all things.

We observe the disarray in our government and of the world, not just in the United States but throughout the world with its confusion, fights, arguments, and the disturbances here and there and everywhere. We sometimes wonder, is anybody really in charge here? Yes. God. The King of Kings owns and controls all things. He used this parable in the fashion that He did – to describe his kingdom.

What does the parable mean? The parable describes for us the kingdom of Christ. In other words, Jesus told that vast crowd, “The kingdom has come. ..not some time in the future, not in some other fashion. The kingdom is present now.”

He then used the parable to describe the presence of His kingdom and how it would function. Just like the large tree of the mustard seed existed inherent in the little mustard seed when planted, so Jesus proclaimed the presence of the kingdom of God in its beginnings. Like the mustard seed, it would flourish and grow large and glorious, just like that mustard seed would grow into a plant, a tree, large and glorious.

Scripture gives us several examples of this same kind of truth where someone goes from obscurity to glory.

Think of Abraham. God called Abraham out of Mesopotamia, commonly called Kuwait, Iraq, and Iran. God called Abraham and his wife Sara, a childless family and idol worshippers...a nobody.

He promised Abraham that he would become a great nation, and all of the peoples of the world receive blessings because of him. Obscurity to glory.

Then we come to another example of obscurity to glory, David. How did he start? He began as a shepherd boy – a humble position, an important one, but certainly not one of great honor and privilege.

God chose this young man because He saw in him qualities and features that would make him the great king that he became. Obscurity to glory. God promised David, out of his lineage would come a king that would rule for eternity, Jesus! From obscurity to glory.

We see it, of course, in the life of Jesus. We mentioned a few moments ago about his birth. You realize that He grew up in an obscure town, Nazareth. Nazareth does not compare to the major cities of our day, like Chicago, New York, or Miami where He could lay claim to having a great heritage of a major city. In fact the people scorned Nazareth so much that they said, “can anything good come out of Nazareth?”

A nobody, a carpenter, Jesus lived in an obscure town. John the Baptist pointed to Him, and identified Him as the one whose shoe strings he could not tie. He called Jesus greater than him, for He existed before him. Follow Him.

No one knew Jesus. He melted into the crowd until John pointed Him out. Then, one by one by one people began to follow Jesus.

Then think about those disciples that He called initially to follow Him and to join His inner circle. The Bible describes them as nobodies, fishermen, unlearned, uneducated, untrained.

He picked some of the despised of the world. He picked out Matthew, the publican, the most despised of all occupations in that day. That comprised his inner circle.