Good evening and glad to be able to be with you tonight and open God's Word together. Our passage tonight comes from the Gospel of Matthew chapter 13. We'll read verses 31 through 33. If you don't have a Bible and would like one, there's one in the pew rack in front of you, and you can find that on page 819. We're looking at Matthew's Gospel, chapter 13, verses 31 through 33. As we continue our evening sermon series on the parables of Jesus, concerning the kingdom of God. And we are in a section now about growing in the kingdom, and actually tonight we'll be looking at the kingdom's growth itself. So, with that in mind, please turn your eyes to Matthew 13. Read and hear the word of our living God. He put another parable before them, saying, The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed that a man took and sowed in his field. It is the smallest of all seeds, but when it has grown, it is larger than all the garden plants and becomes a tree so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches. He told them another parable. The kingdom of heaven is like leaven that a woman took and hid in three measures of flour till it was all leavened. The grass withers and the flowers fade, but the word of our Lord stands forever. Would you pray with me before we dive into this passage? God, we thank you for your living word. I pray that you would help us to believe what you have to tell us. Help us to trust you. Would You strengthen our faith tonight? And would You draw us to You, we pray in Jesus' name. Amen. Now, there are certain things in life that I'm sure you've taken note of and have experienced, whether you are young or old, that there are certain things that you can count on in life, no matter how much your circumstances change. You have the famous quote, I believe it's attributed to Benjamin Franklin, saying that nothing in this world can be said to be certain but death and taxes. Wherever you live, you can count on those two things. But you know there are other things as well that you can always count on that will be there. And if you've ever had a bad day, has anybody encouraged you and said, you know, the sun will rise again tomorrow. Well, we can count on that, that the sun will rise in the morning in the east. Or perhaps you've had one of those nights and it's been quite a long night and you find yourself at a Waffle House somewhere serving coffee and hash browns. There is a Waffle House open no matter what time of night it is. There are certain things in life that you can count on. Well, our two parables, it's not just one parable, but it's two parables tonight, teach us about something else that is certain. And I would say even more certain than the things that were just mentioned. Even though it may not appear to be so. And that is that the Kingdom of God is growing. And it will never be stopped. The kingdom of God is growing and it will not be stopped. You hear that from the pulpit and you say, well, I agree with that in my mind, but I'll be honest with you. I've got some questions about that. Consider the decline in church attendance in the United States over the past few years. What's going on? Or perhaps you've seen in the news in the last few years the number of celebrity pastors who have walked away from the faith and have formed what's now called the exvangelical movement. Or others have lived a famous celebrity Christian life, but have lived a life of hidden sin that ultimately wrecks their ministries and the people around them. And you may look at these things and you may wonder what in the world is going on? Have things come to an end here in the United States for us? Well, I want you to know tonight from these parables that even in the darkest days, no matter how significant the world's latest triumph may appear and be, no matter how depressed you are when you turn on the news, or how impossible things may look to you, do not despair, Christian. Do not despair. God and His kingdom are winning. In these parables that we've been going through on Sunday nights, Jesus is speaking to crowds. There are many people who are there. But then you may notice, if you've been reading through the Gospels, we've just been kind of looking at a couple of verses here, at the parables themselves. But then, like in this passage, just three verses later, Jesus pulls His disciples aside from some of these parables and explains it to them. And when He's doing that, He's taking this time to teach and train His disciples, even though He's preaching to the public here. He's preparing them. He's training them and preparing His disciples to go out from Him after His death and resurrection and ascension. And He's going to send them into a hostile world. Hostile against Christianity. Hostile against Christ and His people. Where for them, the cost of the disciples, the apostles, and those early Christians, the cost of things like meeting for worship, like we're doing tonight, or doing evangelism, just telling people about Jesus, could result in your death. That's the fate of the disciples, actually. with the exception of John who ends his time in exile in prison. And yet Jesus doesn't tell, and He knows that this is going to happen for His disciples, but He doesn't tell them to hide and just, you know, survive and hold on for as long as you can. No, He tells them to go forth and make disciples in this hostile world. And He tells them, He tells them, and you will be killed for this. And he says to his disciples, this is my strategy to conquer the world. That's the strategy of our Lord. And so when he's preaching, as he's preaching, when he's telling his disciples, he's preaching about the kingdom. And a big part of that is to lay a foundation for his disciples. And for those who would believe the apostolic message like you, people like you and me, that no matter how bleak the outlook for the church may appear to be, the kingdom of God is advancing, it will advance, it is growing, and it will overcome. Now you may not see it. You may not see it. You may not understand it. And you may have times where you're going to have a real hard time believing it. But he tells us we must believe it. Believe it. We are to walk by faith after all, not by sight. So with that in mind, I want us to look at our passage. We have two parables. They really are twins, essentially saying the same thing, but I'm going to make two points out of them. And the first is we're going to consider the kingdom's growth. And that'll be looking at the mustard seed parable. And then the second point will be the kingdom's power. And we'll be looking at the parable of the leaven. So the kingdom's growth and the kingdom's power. So first, let's consider the kingdom's growth. Let's take this first parable about the mustard seed, verses 31 and 32. Let me read it again. Jesus says, The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed that a man took and sowed in his field. It is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown, it is larger than all the garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches. Now when Jesus was speaking, preaching these parables, a mustard seed was a common picture. It may not be common for us. We might say something like a grain of salt or something like that to kind of get the idea across. A grain of sand perhaps. But in Jesus' day when he talked about a mustard seed, it was a symbol for something that is super small. Tiny. Whenever anybody would talk about a mustard seed back in this time period, it was likely used to describe something insignificant. Something tiny, small. In fact, Jesus uses the image of the mustard seed in other places. In Matthew chapter 17 and in Luke chapter 17, Jesus uses the picture of a mustard seed to describe little faith. If you have only the faith of the size of a mustard seed, you can move mountains. He's describing something small, something that is so small it can be overlooked. It can be missed. It's not seen if you're not looking for it. But here, in this passage, rather than talking about someone's faith, Jesus is describing the kingdom of heaven, or the kingdom of God. He says, the kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed. Now, it's one thing to talk about one's faith being small. If you're a humble person, you might say, yeah, I struggle. I do have faith, but I have my weaknesses, and so on. But why would Jesus ever describe his kingdom in such a way? And especially, how is it that Jesus himself would be calling the kingdom a mustard seed, the smallest seed you could find? What would the disciples be thinking here? Again, we get so familiar with passages like this, and we're like, oh yeah, I know what you mean, Jesus, but the disciples, do they hear this? What? Your kingdom's like a mustard seed? What are you talking about? Wait a minute, I thought I was serving somebody with great power and authority. I thought we'd been working on the kingdom of God that was promised by God long ago. The kingdom of heaven's supposed to be glorious. large, overwhelming and powerful enough to overthrow kingdoms of the earth, even kingdoms as big and powerful and rich as the kingdom of Rome. But of course, when we encounter our God, he reminds us often, doesn't he, that his ways are not our ways. Jesus is telling us that His ways are not our ways. And that His kingdom is not like our kingdoms. Jesus is working on the hearts of His disciples, recalibrating the way that the disciples and the way that we think about God, how we think about ourselves, and how we think about the true nature of His kingdom. It starts small. It's seemingly insignificant. If you didn't know it was there, you would never see it. But he tells us in our verses, the Kingdom of Heaven will reach the ends of the earth. It will defeat all enemies. But it's not going to happen right away. There's a slow, steady growth. Like a mustard seed. If you didn't know it was there, you wouldn't see it being planted in a field over time. We'll grow a plant, we'll grow a tree. And Jesus says in verse 32, this kingdom will grow larger, this mustard tree will grow larger than all the garden plants. It'll be the largest one there. So we see the point, the kingdom of heaven may look like nothing in your eyes right now, There's no growth. There's no progress. Nobody's going to pay attention to it. What kind of kingdom is this? But God's kingdom will grow and it will cover the earth. We see that in the way that Jesus even uses this language about the birds. He is calling back to some Old Testament passages, and one of them is in Ezekiel 17. In Ezekiel 17, God makes a promise where He says that He'll take a small twig and He will plant it on a mountaintop. And there, He says in Ezekiel 17 verse 23, it will bear branches and produce fruit and become a noble cedar. And under it will dwell every kind of bird. In the shade of its branches, birds of every sort will nest. I said, okay, well, what is this about the birds? Well, first of all, we see Jesus is picking up this Old Testament promise and he's saying, this is what's happening now. He speaks of how great this mustard tree will become. And when it becomes as great as it will be, larger than any other, as it says in verse 32, the birds of the air will come and make nests in its branches. He's saying that's been the plan from long ago. It's been God's plan. And then it will be fulfilled. It will be fulfilled. And on the final day, we are told in Revelation that every people from every tribe and language and nation will be knitted together in the Church of Jesus Christ. Every kind of bird will be coming and resting in this tree. People from every nation, every tribe, every language will come into the Kingdom of God. This is the plan of our Lord Jesus Christ. Because of that, the destiny of the Kingdom of God is certain. Because Jesus is the King. It starts as a small seed. In verse 32, Jesus says, the smallest of all seeds. So small, you just miss it. Walk past it. Don't notice it at all. How easy is it for us to miss God's kingdom? How easy is it to be discouraged when we look at the world around us? But I want you to know something before I try to encourage you. Well, hopefully this will encourage you. As you're overlooking You're looking out in the world and you're being discouraged. And you might think the Kingdom of God is losing its ground and grip. Actually, Jesus is telling us, no, the seed's planted. It's here. The Kingdom of God is already here. It's not waiting to be planted. It's not waiting for some moment in the future. God's Kingdom is present already. Where Jesus is, there is His Kingdom. And I tell you what, the Kingdom of Christ resembles its King. Consider for a moment Jesus' earthly ministry. The disciples hearing Jesus talk about the Kingdom being like a mustard seed, what are you talking about? Then they're looking at their Savior, the Messiah. What do they see? Isaiah 53 tells us, speaks of our Lord Himself. It says, For He grew up like a young plant, like a root out of dry ground. He had no form or majesty that we should look at Him, and no beauty that we should desire Him. He was despised and rejected by men. a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and as one from whom men hide their faces, he was despised and we esteemed him not." That's a description of the King of Heaven. Despised and rejected. A man of sorrows whom we esteemed not. You see, ultimately, Jesus himself is the rejected seed sown into the world. Consider him on the cross. As he was hanging there, a bloody lump of flesh, mocked, scorned, beaten. You look at the cross and say, what threat is that to Rome? The disciples, after he was killed, they despaired, didn't they? They hid in a room behind a locked door. They were told this would happen, and yet they still ran and hid. When they looked at the cross, when they looked at their Savior, they didn't see what was really happening. This is the mustard seed of the kingdom of God. Jesus Himself said, "'Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone. But if it dies, it bears much fruit.'" Jesus dies on the cross. He rises again from the grave. He sends forth His disciples. The Church is established. Peter preaches in Acts 2 and 3,000 are converted. 3,000 go to the morning service, 3,000 come back for the evening service. Now, it may be that the general attitude in the world today about Jesus is that He's irrelevant to our lives. I mean, we do live in the modern world, after all. Siri can tell me anything I want to know. And perhaps you, as a Christian, you know, you feel small. And you feel overwhelmed. And you feel just ready to give up. It is a big world, isn't it? And it seems to be moving fast. Despite the growth of the church in history, to bring it to where it is today, and despite the influence that the church has had for such a long time, it sure can feel like God's kingdom is small. And you may have experienced yourself where you've given yourself over to prayer. And you've prayed, and you've prayed, and you've prayed, and nothing happens. Or you really put your heart into loving your neighbor, and you see no result. Or you put your neck out on the line there, neck out on the chopping block, and you share the gospel with your co-worker, and you're just dismissed. You're laughed at. Or maybe you've tried to have a debate, and you've lost one more debate. about God, and you can start to feel just small and overwhelmed, and you start to think, who am I? What have I done? There's just, there's no fruit, is there? You get tired, and you get frustrated, and you feel small. I want you to remember, Jesus said, the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, small, easily missed. easily dismissed. That's the nature of our kingdom. First Corinthians one, it says that God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not to bring to nothing things that are. How does God overcome his enemies? He takes things that are foolish, takes things that are weak, He takes your weak and fragile service. He takes your prayers, even if they are feeble. You don't quite know what to say. And He uses them to grow His Kingdom. And you know, we may not see it. We may not get that validation that we want. But we cannot judge the value and the growth of God's kingdom by our own eyes. Instead we have to trust in the promises of our Lord. We must trust in His promises. The kingdom is here. The kingdom has grown. It will grow and it will overcome and it will gather. The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that grows to be larger than any of the other plants in the field. And birds of the air will come and make nests in its branches. Believe, my dear friends, believe in the promises of Jesus Christ. The kingdom will grow. Brings us now to the second parable and our second point is I want us to consider the kingdom's power. The kingdom's power. The second parable and our verses show us the growth of the kingdom like the first one does of the mustard seed. But I think it also shows us something about the way that the kingdom of heaven grows. That it has a power to it that will not and cannot be stopped. Look at verse 33. Jesus told them another parable. The kingdom of heaven is like leaven that a woman took and hid in three measures of flour till it was all leavened. Now, this may be strange language to you, unless you're a baker, or you may know that leaven, what it is. It's a fermented dough. You mix it with flour, and when you do that, it causes the flour to rise, and you bake it, and out of the oven comes bread. It's magical, smells great, and is really wonderful. You may think of yeast, you throw yeast in it, We have sourdough. Now, when the Bible talks, uses the language of leaven, often it uses the image of leaven to talk about sin. So it doesn't usually talk about it in a positive way. The Gospel of Mark, in chapter 8, verse 15, Jesus warns the disciples to beware of the leaven of the Pharisees. And then in Galatians 5 verse 9 tells us that a little leaven leavens the whole lump. What he's talking about is, he talks about the nature of sin and how it grows in the hearts of those who are in the church. Never dismiss sin, never wink at sin, it has great power and it can grow and overcome. And so Jesus gives warning against it. But here, when Jesus is using the language of leaven, he's using it in a positive way. He's saying it's like the kingdom of God, and it grows, and it multiplies. Even as sin can grow and multiply in your heart, the kingdom of heaven is even greater than that. The grace of God is more powerful than that. Where there is sin in Christ, there is even greater grace. Verse 33 tells us that the leaven is hidden in three measures of flour. It doesn't sound like a whole lot, but I was reading a commentator who helped do the math for me. Measurements from the first century to now, and figured it out to be about 50 pounds of flour. So three measures, 50 pounds. That's a lot. If you have a NIV Bible, it will say 60 pounds instead of three measures. So you kind of get an idea. This is a big old sack of flour, like cement or something. I asked my wife, who's an avid baker, if she had 50 pounds of flour and a little bit of sourdough and threw it in there and mixed it up, how many loaves of bread with her recipe would this make? And she estimated that for her normal bread, can plus or minus about 500 loaves of bread. So that's what we're looking at when it says three measures of flour. A little leaven yielding 500 loaves, standard loaves of bread. That's a lot of flour. That's a lot of bread. But a little bit of leaven, given time, will work its way through all of that flour to transform that flour in order to make an enormous amount of bread. It's transformative. It's powerful. And Jesus says, this is what the kingdom of heaven is like. When the leaven's in the sack or the bucket of flour, you don't see it working, doing its thing in there. If you're me and you look at it, it's totally a mystery. It seems magical. Now, there's science and so on and how it works, but you get the point that he's saying that the power of the Kingdom of Heaven is unstoppable. Once it's planted in, once it's put in there, it will grow. No matter the overwhelming odds, it will infect everything. It will grow through everything. See, look at that bucket of flour. I can't trust my sight when I look at that. Look at the kingdom of heaven. Look at the kingdom of God. You look at the church and the church growth. You can be so discouraged, but you can't trust your sight. In Matthew 13 verse 35, Jesus says, I will open my mouth in parables. I will utter what has been hidden since the foundation of the world. He's talking about the power of the kingdom. And you may wonder, well, how does that work? What is God doing? How does he make it leaven the whole lump? How does he make the mustard seed grow into the greatest tree? Well, Jesus tells us in verse 35, He says it's by the Word of God. By the Word of God. The Kingdom of God has been planted into the world. It's making powerful progress. We don't always see it. And Jesus says, and it's not with the sword that I will conquer the world, that I will advance my kingdom, but I will, by my Holy Spirit, use the Word of God. of the preaching of the Word of God. When Jesus is using these parables, He is preaching. He is preaching God's Word. Twelve disciples, one who will betray Him, another who will deny Him, the rest will run away from Him. Talk about a small start, and an unlikely start. And here we are tonight, worshipping the same Christ. The Word of God, if you'll pardon my attempt at a metaphor, is the stand mixer that the Holy Spirit uses to leaven the whole lump. It's the Word of God that extends the branches of the mustard tree so that the birds will come and nest inside of its branches. We come to church and the world may say, well there's a football game on right now. Why do you need to go to church on Sunday evening? What's the point of hearing another preacher preach another sermon on the Kingdom of God? And you may start to lose confidence and say, well, yeah, what is the point? Is it enough, really? Don't we need to do more other things to make people believe? Can we even really believe in the Bible in this era? It's 2021. Who would believe in an ancient text like this? But, the words of God are the words of eternal life. And with the proclamation of God's Word, the Kingdom of God is growing and it cannot and will not be stopped. You may have a lot of reason for pessimism. Again, you may think about the numbers of decline in the church attendance across our country. We have celebrities who used to be pastors now making money, going on speaking tours, seeking to lead others astray from Christ. And you may feel, you just may think back in your own lifetime, I think the world is more hostile to Christianity than it used to be. We need these parables, don't we? We need to remember that the kingdom of God is like leaven that leavens the whole bucket of flour. Powerful. It may be quiet, unnoticed to our eyes, a mystery to us, but it will advance. God will bless the preaching of His Word, and it will go through the whole world until all the elect have been leavened. Until all the birds that God has called to Himself will find its place in the branches. Remember, Jesus is telling His disciples, you are about to go into this dark world. So remember my promise. Hold on to this promise. Believe in my words. The kingdom of heaven is here and it will grow. Trust in God. Believe in his word. Preach the word of God. Speak the word of God. Read the word of God. Hear the word of God. And the kingdom is going to grow. I don't know how you feel tonight. The past couple of years have been pretty difficult, as we all know. And you may have to work harder than you ever had to to fight against your own sense of discouragement, pessimism about the promise of the church and the growth of God's kingdom. But don't set your faith on what you see in the world. Instead, hold fast to the words of life. Even if you don't see it happening in front of you, believe it. Live by faith. Know that God has said it, Jesus has said it, that the kingdom is growing. The kingdom has unstoppable power. And so you, dear Christian, have the great opportunity to cling to the promises of Jesus. In doing that, you persevere in the life that He has called you to, even in your darkest hours. I know that my Redeemer lives. His kingdom is here. I trust him more than I trust what I see in front of me. Believe in Christ and keep on believing. Would you pray with me? Oh God, I pray that you would help us to live by faith and not by sight. We thank you for your words of promise. We thank you for the power that you display through your word, by your spirit, We thank you that we can trust and know that your kingdom will grow. So all the elect have been brought in. And I pray that you would give us peace and rest in that. Even in our most difficult days, our times of greatest trouble. You, oh Lord, we can trust. And we thank you for this in Jesus name. Amen.