is going to come to us from Mark chapter 4 and verses 24 through 34 on in the gospel according to Mark. Mark is of course the shortest of the synoptic Gospels. What are the other two synoptic Gospels incidentally? Who can tell me? Matthew and Luke. That's right, Matthew and Luke. Very good. And then we have John, which is not one of the synoptics, but which fills in many of the details that the writers of the synoptics did not choose to focus on. But Mark is intended to be a short summary, obviously, of the Christian faith, particularly for the edification of God's people throughout the world and in every time. Therefore, that's why we're using it as an introduction to the Christian faith. And today we're going to be discussing the importance of hearing to the Christian faith, how important it is to hear. There are many, many exhortations to hear within the Word of God. We're going to talk about why hearing is so important as we also discuss the way the kingdom grows and how it advances in the world. But before we do that, let's go to the Lord who gave us this word. Let's ask for his help in understanding it. Sovereign Lord, how good it is to be able to meet in your name twice every Sunday, to look into your word, and then to have opportunities to discuss that word later on with our brothers and sisters in Christ and with our families. I thank you, Lord, that you have not left us without a guide, but you have given us this word, this sure word, inerrant and infallible in all it teaches. I pray this day that you would open up our ears so that we could hear it, and then I pray, Lord, that the word would not go in one ear and then out the other, but that rather it would stay in our mind and then settle in our hearts where it might find good soil and grow up and produce that harvest that you desire. Remind us of how important hearing is now as we strive to hear the word. Help us to resist the temptation to be distracted. Let us concentrate now on the word of Christ. And we pray this in His holy name. Amen. Reading now from Mark chapter 4 and then verses 24 through 34, I remind you this is the Word of the Lord. Then He said to them, take heed what you hear. With the same measure you use, it will be measured to you. And to you who hear, more will be given. For whoever has, to him more will be given. But whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken away from him. And he said, the kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed on the ground, and should sleep by night and rise by day, and the seed should sprout and grow. He himself does not know how, for the earth yields crops by itself, first the blade and the head, and after that the full grain in the head. When the grain ripens immediately, he puts in the sickle because the harvest has come. Then he said, to what shall we liken the kingdom of God? With what parable shall we picture it? It's like a mustard seed, which when it is sown on the ground is smaller than all the seeds of the earth. But when it is sown, it grows up and becomes greater than all herbs and shoots out large branches so that the birds of the air may nest under its shade. With many such parables, He spoke the word to them as they were able to hear it. But without a parable, He did not speak to them. And when they were alone, He explained all things to His disciples. The grass withers and the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever. Well, one of the things that we are going to see again and again as we look at the Word of God and indeed as we go through the Book of Mark is how important hearing is to the growth of the kingdom. In Romans 10, 17, the Apostle Paul picked up on this theme and he explains to us very simply that faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God. God could have used, obviously, the angels to give His message. He could have sent the message down in another form, perhaps in pictures and images and so on. But He chose the Word and hearing to be the medium by which the Christian faith would be spread. And so He tells His followers that as Christ says to His disciples, that they need to be very careful about how they hear. And He's telling not just them, but us. that the way that we hear the gospel is critical. He says, first off, that they should hear, and then he talks about what they should hear, and then how they should hear. So let's talk about the first of that, that we should hear. There are many people these days, and indeed in Christ's day as well, this is something that hasn't changed. who refuse to hear. Sometimes they refuse to hear because they won't stop talking themselves. They're the kind of person who never stops to listen. Or if they do stop talking, it's only because they're thinking about what they're going to say next. So while you're talking to them, they're actually, you know, putting together the next few sentences that they're going to speak. And then there are the people who will not listen because of the person who is talking to them. They've judged that person in advance, as the Pharisees, for instance, judged and condemned Jesus before they even spoke to him. And so, therefore, when the Pharisees listen to them, it's sometimes called jaundiced hearing. They hear, but they don't really hear what he's saying. They only hear what they want to hear. And in this case, because they have a bad opinion of him, they only heard, when he spoke to them, bad things, things that conflicted with the things that they were absolutely sure were true, but were in fact falsehoods. And they only tended to listen to Christ so that they might have an opportunity to misconstrue his remarks. So, for instance, Jesus, you'll remember later on, I hope, from reading the Gospels, He will say, destroy this temple and in three days I will build it up again. And, of course, He's speaking there of the temple of His body. The earthly temple in Jerusalem was, in many senses, just a figure pointing forward to Christ. And so he said, you know, if you kill me, in three days I'll be raised up again. And indeed, that was a prophecy that came true. But of course, the Pharisees misconstrued, this man says he can destroy the temple and build it again in three days, this blasphemer, et cetera. Everything that he said, therefore, was misconstrued by these people who heard only the things that they wanted to hear. They were not really hearing him. Now, he also tells them what they should hear. There are things that we should hear, and then there are things that we shouldn't hear. For instance, people need to be careful, and the Bible warns us about this, about listening to malicious gossip. We should not be listening to people who go about every day spreading evil tales about people. If we do become the kind of people who love to hear malicious gossip, and there are people who love to hear it and love to spread it, those are people who instinctively condemn others. They have a very bad opinion of other people. And we will be judgmental and nasty people. And people will learn to avoid us after a while if they find that we're gossips. And we'll find that the way that we judge people is the way that we're judged ourselves. It's interesting, I remember as a child, often you would have gossips in the classroom. And, in one sense, the most ironic thing is listening to them gossip about each other, you know, and the way that they judged one another. That's the way the gossip acts. But, in any event, we need to be careful about not listening to that thing. There are also other things that we shouldn't be listening to. Filthy talk, vain jesting, the empty words that simply waste our time. There's so much talk out there that is completely unprofitable. For instance, daytime TV. 99% of the talk that you will hear on that is completely unprofitable. It's not a good use of our time. We have a very limited amount of time on this earth, so let's use our time profitably. What we should be listening to, therefore, is the truth. We should be investing our time listening to things that will edify us, will build us up, and that are full of truth and goodness. Now, when we hear these things, we're also told how we should hear them. We should hear the truth with attention, We should hear it judiciously, we should hear it thankfully, we should hear it profitably, and we should listen, always looking to apply the truth to ourselves. In other words, when Christ is being preached, just as when he preached the gospel to his disciples, it shouldn't be the case that we hear these things, and it's all theory that's kind of out there. We hear them, we appreciate them as theories, but we don't actually really intend to apply these things. Rather, the words of Jesus should be things that we are instinctively applying in our own lives whenever we hear them. One of the problems we sometimes have is we don't apply the word that we're hearing to ourselves, we instinctively begin to apply it to everybody around us, when in fact we are the ones who need to hear and to apply those things the most. So we should also hear, as I said, judiciously. Even when the Word is being preached by men, the best of men is a man at best. And so, therefore, we need to be careful about how we hear the Word preached. We remember in Acts 17, 11, that when the Word was being preached, the Bereans heard it and they processed it through the lens of Scripture. These were more fair-minded, we read, than those in Thessalonica in that they received the Word with all readiness and searched the Scriptures daily to find out whether these things were so. And so when we do hear the word being preached, we need to be comparing what we're hearing to the scriptures and determining whether these things are so. That counts even for what you hear here, in this place. When I stand here and preach the word, you should not hear credulously, assuming that absolutely everything that I say is going to be true. I trust this man, I trust him inherently, as though I am infallible myself. That is not the case. No preacher of the word saved Jesus Christ is infallible, therefore you need to go back to the Word and you need to test these things to see that they be true. Now, if they are true, if you compare what's being said from the pulpit to Scripture and you find out these words are true, then you need to hear them, and you need to apply them, and you need to live by them. Even if these are words that, in some sense, offend you, in a natural sense, in some sense, go against what you would rather do, or tell you to do things that are difficult or hard, nonetheless, you must live by them. We find that the Bereans, after testing the words of Paul by the scriptures, they reacted this way. In Acts 17, 12, we read, therefore, many of them believed. and also not a few of the Greeks, prominent women as well as men. They heard the word, they looked at the scriptures, they determined it was the truth, and then they obeyed its instructions. Most particularly, they obeyed Paul's instruction to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ that they might be saved. They did that. You need to do that. That's the word of God. And if it's the word of God, it needs to be something that you not only hear, but obey. Now, we're also warned by Christ in the verses that we read here in Mark 4 that the measure we use is the measure that will be used against us. For instance, the idea, the standard, the measurement, the way that we judge others is the way that we will be judged. And the measure that we use should be fair and godly. Wouldn't you want to be judged by a fair and godly measure? And therefore, for instance, when you judge people, we should never judge people based on hearsay, what somebody else, especially if they don't particularly like that person, has said about them. Unfortunately, we were talking about, at lunch, about how quickly within Christian circles, bad reports, sometimes based on nothing at all. circulate so that a person who has never met you might already have formed a bad opinion of you based on a bad opinion that was passed on by somebody who didn't like you to another person, and then they passed it on, and they passed it on, and they passed it on. This person has no direct contact with you, and yet they've already formed a bad opinion of you. You wouldn't want that to be done to you, so therefore don't do it to others. Make sure that the standard that you are applying is biblical, it's godly, and it's based upon solid evidence. Because ultimately, as verse 25 points out to us, hearing is critical. We must be hearing the word and we must be growing. Understand this also, that in the Christian faith, standing still is impossible. You can't remain at stasis. I'm neither growing in the Christian faith, but I'm not falling behind. You're either going to be doing one or the other. You're either gonna be growing in grace as you attend on the means of grace that God has given us, or you will be falling back. You must take heed. You who have heard the word many times, I'm speaking to a lot of children here, but I'm speaking to adults. You've been around the sun quite a few times. I won't say how many times, but you've been around the sun, you've heard many a sermon, you've been here week after week hearing these sermons, but that doesn't reduce the responsibility that you have, even though you've built up this knowledge of the word, to continue to hear well. to be attentive whenever the Word is being preached. So remember this, it doesn't matter how old we are or how long we've been in the faith, we'll either be gaining ground or losing it. Think of it this way, if I'm running in, let's say, a marathon, I can't stand still and hold my ground. Because what happens? Everybody else, you know, is passing me. They're moving on. I'm actually falling behind if I stand still. I don't have to actually move backwards to lose the race that way. We need to be continuously pressing on, running the race with all of our strength, trying to get as much of the means of grace as we can. And if we neglect the means of grace, give me an example incidentally, I'm using the phrase means of grace. Give me some examples of the means of grace that God has given to us. Prayer, what else? Yeah, yes, the Bible, prayer, the Bible, yeah. Hearing the word preached, yeah, the reading and hearing of the word. Fellowship of the Saints, for instance, singing of Psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs. These are all means by which the Lord builds us up in the faith. These are things that we have to apply ourselves to. Those are the means of grace. We need to be taking the light that we're given, nurturing it, causing it to grow, and not hiding it, obviously. Now, hearing and understanding, at the point we've come to in Mark chapter 4, are becoming more difficult for the disciples and for all of the people who are hearing Jesus. And that's because Jesus has switched his teaching style. Before, it was very straightforward and very open. Repent, for the kingdom of God is near, for instance. That's a very straightforward instruction. But now, He's speaking by analogy. He switched his teaching style to a heavier use of parables, these earthly stories with heavenly meanings. And often that meant that as Jesus was speaking, it was not just the crowd that was unsure of what Christ meant. Even his own disciples are unsure as well. So I'm positive, though, that as Christ was speaking, or at least I imagine it was probably the case as Christ was speaking these parables, you know, the disciples stood by and they nodded their heads. Yeah, definitely. And then as soon as he was done preaching, they ran to him and said, What did that mean? What was it that you were actually teaching? So they come to him and they ask, as Luke 8, 9 puts it, what does this parable mean? It's not just that the people don't understand it, the disciples don't get it often. And that's because a parable requires interpretation to be understood correctly. And that's because the meaning of the parable is not on the surface. The parable of the soils, is the parable of the soils a story about farming? No, it uses farming or agriculture as an example, as the setting that people would understand, but they're not talking there about farming. Jesus is talking about the gospel. It's about preaching in the different ways that the gospel is received. Now, if your eyes aren't open to understand the interpretational key of a parable, the parable itself can be completely missed by you. In fact, you might be, you know, somebody who's an example in the parable of the soils. If the word is preached and you don't understand a word of it and it just bounces off of you and you ignore it, what kind of soil is your heart? It's a stony ground, right, that doesn't receive the seed. So parables were not something that Jesus invented, but something he used to great effect during his teaching. You remember, we see parables in the Old Testament. There's that famous parable of when Nathan went to David after David had committed adultery with Bathsheba, and he tells him a story. about there was a poor man who had a lamb and then there was a rich man who had many, many sheep in his flock and he tells him that this poor man had loved the lamb. He brought it into his house. He treated it like family. It was very precious to him. But the rich man, as soon as a guest came, he didn't take a lamb from his own flocks. He went to the poor man, stole his lamb and killed it. David is enraged. This is awful, how unfair, how wrong, how terrible that anyone should do such a thing. That rich man who acted that way should die." And then Nathan says to him those words, you da man, you're the rich man in the parable. You're the guy who took that lamb because the lamb, of course, was who? It was the lamb. Bathsheba, who was the poor man, Uriah. And then he put him to death. And suddenly Nathan has convicted David in a way that probably wouldn't have happened if Nathan came to him and just said, David, you've been a wretch. There's this guy Uriah, he served you so well, he was one of your mighty men. He only had one wife, you have many, and you took his wife. And then you killed him to cover it up. How awful that is. Had he done that, David probably would have been enraged, he probably would have gotten around it, but first he convicts David, and then he brings David into the heart of the parable and says, you're that man. So David can say nothing at that point in time, he's already convicted himself. So Jesus uses parables in order to do the same thing, to convict us, to cause us to see with new eyes. Now all of these parables that Jesus uses in this chapter, These earthly stories with heavenly meanings use the growth of plants in order to illustrate the way the kingdom of heaven grows. But that raises the question, why is Jesus doing that? Why is Jesus using the example of plants? Why is he focusing on teaching, first off, his disciples about the growth of the kingdom of heaven? And the answer is because the kingdom of heaven doesn't grow in the world the way earthly kingdoms do. And it also doesn't grow at the rate that believers might want it to. So first, we have a parable that he gives us here found nowhere else in the synoptics. It's only in Mark. We find it in 26 through 29. And it's the parable of the seed growing in secret. Now, what does this parable emphasize? It emphasizes God's sovereignty. in the growth of the kingdom. It says he is ultimately sovereign in the matter of spiritual growth, and therefore he is the power behind the establishment and the progress of the reign of God in hearts and lives and spheres. It's God who brings the growth in the kingdom. And the example he uses, he already in the parable of the soils, he used the example of a sower, and again he's gonna use the example of a sower. A sower is somebody who casts wad into the earth. Seed, right. So we have this man who goes out and he sows seed and in the evening he retires. He spread the seed in his field and he goes to bed. He goes to sleep and then in the morning he rises and he looks out and has the seed sprung up overnight. No. The seed hasn't immediately sprung up. Very few seeds will do that. You plant them. I don't know if chia will do that, but, you know, remember you used to get the chia heads and things like that, but most seed doesn't grow that quickly. He waits, he watches to see whether or not it'll grow, because he lacks all control over the process of germination and growth. He may sow the seed, but he doesn't necessarily cause it to grow. Incidentally, it reminds me, it's a wonderful thing, obviously, to see your kids growing up, but one of the sad parts about having your kids grow up is the older they get, the less you have that wonderful excuse to read children's stories. You know, you pretend you're reading it to the kids, when in fact, you're like, I really want to find out what happens next. Anyway, so, and they're just listening along with you. A long time ago, we read the Frog and Toad series to our kids, and I loved the Frog and Toad are Friends series. There's one that I've forgotten the name of the story, but where a frog plants a garden, and it's beautiful. And then Toad looks at this, and he's envious of Frog's beautiful garden. So he wants the same kind of garden. And Frog instructs him, well, what you're going to have to do is you're going to have to take seeds, you plant them in the ground, you water them, and then you'll have a garden that looks like mine. So Toad goes home and he plants the seeds and he waters them and he stands there and he's like, okay, where's the growth? Come on. And then he starts shouting at them, plants grow! Plants grow! And, you know, expecting that they'll grow up and, you know, a few days later he's still got a patch of ground with nothing. It doesn't look anything like Frog's garden. And he says this gardening thing is hard because it doesn't produce the immediate results that he expects. And we look at that and we say, what a silly example. But unfortunately, many Christians act in exactly the same way. We expect that we'll plant the seed of the gospel immediately. everybody will be saved, you know. That's the way it will happen. And they'll all be not only convicted, converted, and sanctified, they'll be perfect Christians. They will get, you know, a congregation of people who have arrived there, you know, the same way they will be in glory and so on. That's just not the way the kingdom goes. It's not the way farming goes as well. The farmer doesn't cause the plants to grow. He, in this example, he doesn't even know how they grow. He puts this, what they called a dead seed, into the ground. And there it germinated, and it gradually began to grow. But the growth is gradual. Jesus points out, first you see the blade, just a little bit of green poking through the earth. And then the head. comes up, and you can see that the plant is beginning to rise, and then finally you see the full growth, and eventually, hopefully, you have the full grain, the harvest that the farmer is looking for. But throughout all of that, all the farmer can do is trust. I mean, he can do certain things that may aid in this process. He can root up weeds, he can loosen the soil, he can fertilize it, he can water it, and so on, but he's not the one who actually causes the plant to sprout or to grow. And ultimately, We, even though we're called to preach the gospel, we are not the ones who cause it to germinate in hearts and to grow either. We need to be able to admit, I can't do this. And that often the growth of the seed goes according to God's wishes and not our wishes. It works according to His timetable. Sometimes it has been that the men who we expect would produce the greatest growth in the kingdom have planted seeds and not seen them germinate, not seen them grow for many years. Robert Murray McShane, a tremendously godly Scottish pastor who preached in Dundee in the early 19th century. He preached and preached to his congregation. And amazing sermons. People are still reading the sermons that he preached to that congregation with profit to this day. And yet, he didn't see much growth in his congregation. Then he went away on a mission trip to Israel to preach the gospel to Jews throughout Europe and then obviously in the Holy Land. And yet, when he left, another man came into his pulpit, and this man was less gift than McShane. And yet, it was under that man's brief span of preaching while he was away that revival broke out in Dundee. It was God who caused the seed to germinate when he wanted. The same happened with Edwards. That is, Jonathan Edwards preached to his congregation week after week, saw very little growth. He preached that, what's Jonathan Edwards' most famous sermon, incidentally, you guys know? in the hands of an angry God. Very close, but sinners in the hands of an angry God. He preached that to his congregation in Stockbridge. Nothing. Not a peep. But he went and preached it elsewhere, and people were convicted. People were brought to an end of themselves. People cried out, what must I do to be saved? What was the difference? It was the grace of God working at one point and not working at another. That's the way it is in the kingdom. The faithful minister scatters the seed, but he cannot produce the growth. That is up to the Lord. You may want the growth to be immediate, like Toad in that story, but it doesn't happen. Paul summed it up best, I think, in 1 Corinthians 3.6. He said, I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the increase. So then neither he who plants is anything, nor he who waters, but God who gives the increase. Now, he who plants and he who waters are one, and each one will receive his own reward according to his own labor, for we are God's fellow workers. You are God's field. You are God's building. So, our calling is not to actually produce the growth. Our calling is to plant the seed. and then to water it, to do what we can trusting that God's work will be done and that the kingdom will grow how and where he applies or desires. The second parable we're given about growth here is this parable of the mustard seed. He says that the way God's kingdom grows the way that God desires his kingdom to grow, and the way that he did grow it historically is not the way that we would expect in the world. It doesn't start with a huge bang and then quickly fill the world, but rather it started very small. You remember the men who were originally preaching the gospel were just 12 men, and what was their vocational background? Were they public speakers, rabbis, celebrities? No, most of them were fishermen, right? Starts very small in a backwater of the Roman Empire. And then it grows until it fills the entire world, but gradually, heart by heart, by dominion, area by area. And so he uses a mustard seed to explain to them how the kingdom is going to grow. And the reason he uses the mustard seed is it was this little black seed, almost a little dot. Nobody would have been impressed by it. And yet this tiny little seed could produce a bush the size of a tree, sometimes 12 feet high. But the growth of the mustard seed isn't like in Jack and the beanstalk. You remember what happens with Jack? He gets the magic beans. He throws them out the window. The next day, what's he got? A beanstalk reaching into heaven. Now, that's the way we as evangelicals would like to see the kingdom grow, but that's not the way it actually works. The mustard seed produces this giant bush, but it takes years to grow to that size. Now what Jesus is saying is that the kingdom of God starts small, appears insignificant, but then it grows and grows and grows and becomes a mighty thing. And so you can take all of the great minds in the world at that point in time, The minds of the philosophers in Greece, the wise men in China, he could have taken the Magi from Parthia, brought them together and said, I want you guys to plan the growth of a kingdom of philosophy in this world. And they couldn't have come up with anything that would have grown the way that the gospel did or that changed the Roman Empire and indeed the entire world, the known world as it did. It turned the world upside down and yet it started just with 12 tax collectors, 12 fishermen, 12 peasants clustered around this penniless rabbi from Nazareth. This man named Jesus. And why did it work that way? Well, because the Lord was behind it. The Lord uses weak things to overcome mighty things. He takes that which the world looks at and sees as nothing at all, and He overcomes the world with it to show that it's His power that's doing it. If the kingdom grew at the rates that we would like to see it grow, we would think, I did this. we would think that it was by our might and so on and unfortunately the devil plays on that time and again he's produced by getting people to use worldly means he's produced massive quick growth in the church and then he's managed to get the man you know the charismatic figure at the center of all of this he's elevated him to a very high level and This man, like Nebuchadnezzar, looks out over his church and says, is this not mighty Babylon that I have constructed with my own hands? And the next thing that happens is the pillar is kicked away, he's brought very low, and then the church is scattered. It wasn't true growth. It was a false, a counterfeit growth, and it doesn't go anywhere. How does true growth work? Well, I'll give you an example from history. On February 2nd, 1738, a minister by the name of George Whitefield boarded a ship named the Whittaker, which was supposed to take him to the newly founded colony of Georgia. He was going to evangelize there and he had been at work building an orphanage in the colony of Georgia. And the Whitaker had on board 20 or so passengers and about 100 soldiers on board who were going to defend the colony of Georgia from the predations of the Spanish who were down in Florida. And when Whitfield got on the boat, he found that the Whitaker was not stuffed full of Christians just longing to hear him preach the gospel. He wrote this, the first Lord's Day, nothing was to be seen but cards and little heard but cursing and swearing, I could do no more than, whilst I was writing, now and then turn my head by way of reproof to a lieutenant who swore as though he was born of a swearing constitution. Now and then he would take my hint, return my nod with a, Doctor, I ask your pardon, and then return to his swearing and cards again. Now, that was the way the boat was when Whitfield got on, but by the time they docked in Gibraltar a few weeks later, an amazing change had occurred amongst the passengers, particularly the soldiers. Dalimore, his biographer, records that although but seven weeks earlier the men had been scornful, cursing company, they now stood forth like little children to say their catechism. Many read their Bibles regularly, and almost all attended services both morning and evening. Such were the fruits of Whitefield's labor in that short period of time. Now, how had he produced that effect? Well, of course, he went along the decks early in the morning, shouting at the soldiers, condemning them, beating them with sticks, and telling them that they were evil men. You are very bad men. You need to stop swearing and playing cards. And eventually, he shamed them into becoming Christians. No, he didn't do that. No, rather he told them, he sat out before them in the morning, he would put up diagrams and he would show them scientifically how their lifestyle would not produce good results. You know, if you continue on in this way of, you know, you're drinking and you're cursing and you're swearing, statistics show that you'll end badly and that you will not be maximizing your happiness while you're here on Earth. Now, he didn't do that either. No, wait, what did he do? He told them that he was going to bring celebrities on board. They stopped somewhere, and then they got a bunch of high-profile people on, and musicians, and they did this big kind of crusade on the deck, and the celebrities talked about how Jesus had changed their life, and everybody was like, well, if the Duke of York believes, then I should as well, and they all immediately came into the kingdom. Is that how they did it? No, he hadn't done all of those things. What did he do? Well, he began gradually and deliberately bringing the gospel to them. He began a catechism class. He began to include prayers. He ate his meals. He deliberately sat with the men and the officers of the ship. He introduced spiritual topics into his conversations. He walked about with the officers as they were on watch at night and talked to them about spiritual topics. He reasoned with them about the judgment to come. He shared what he had. He brought aboard with him food for his journey and medicines that he was taking with him to Georgia. And he shared them with the sick people on the ship whenever they had need. He gave courses in reading and writing using the Bible as the textbook. And eventually what happened was the captains and the soldiers and the sailors who were touched by the good that he was doing, suggested that he begin to hold services on deck. And he did that. They rigged sheets so that he could stand under them and not be burned to a crisp by the sun. And eventually this, what Dallimore called the floating gambling house, became instead a floating church. But it wasn't Whitefield who did that. What was it that affected that change? The force and the power that brought about that change was the gospel. And it was able to change men's hearts because the power of the Holy Spirit came with it. Now men try to replicate the results of the Holy Spirit working through the gospel, that transforming power. You see that in movements like Islam and Marxism that depend upon force. It's all sticking carrot. Do this and we'll reward you. Don't do it and we will beat you. But what they can't do is they can't take a natural man dead in his sins whose will is inclined towards sin and change their heart and incline it toward good, change the things that they love. They can give him a flag, they can make him do their will, they can get him even to fight and die in their name, but they can't change who the man is. His essential nature remains unchanged. That's why it's simple to get them to brutalize people, because that's the heart of the natural man. Christianity though, in which we are called to live for the good of others, to die to self and so on, that's more difficult. That requires a change of heart. That requires that people who are dead in their trespasses and sins become fundamentally new people. And the only way that that can happen is if the Holy Spirit changes our hearts. So I wanna give you two applications. Now, We need to understand one of the things that Christ is counseling us to do here, and I want you to understand this, is to trust the means that God has appointed even though they're slow. I want to suggest to you that most of us are not like frog when it comes to gardening. We are like toad, we want immediate results. We live in an age where, let's face it, we don't have enough patience even to sit down, wait for the server to come to us, take our order, go back, cook it, and bring the food to us. So we want to drive to a window, tell them what we want to eat, and then have it handed to us. Or better yet, we don't even want to leave the house. Now we want somebody to drive there, go to the window, get the food, bring it to us, and bring it home. We want instant results all along the way. And this has come into the church. It's, you know, in some churches, I had a friend who made this analogy. He said, you know when you go into the dealership these days and, you know, you don't establish a relationship with the salesman. He just immediately begins high pressure, you know, selling you to buy the car at that moment right now and they don't want you to leave before you've made the decision. And he said, I can't tell you. He said, two times that has happened to me. Both times I walked away with a car I later regretted buying heartily. I bought it because I was pressured to do so, great deal, wonderful terms, so on, didn't have a moment to think about it, boom, I made the decision, and then later on I regretted it. He said, but so many of our churches work in exactly the same way. High pressure, make the deal, come to Jesus, don't leave the church before you make this decision, et cetera, and then they walk the aisle, they pray the prayer, but then what happens? No essential change has happened, so they can't live the life, and they end up walking away. The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, I had a friend who worked with them, he said that their internal numbers indicated that less than 10% of the people who were converted at Crusades ended up continuing on in the church. And he said he left BGEA when one day he was watching what was going on and he noticed that people were lining up to make a profession of faith before the gospel had even been preached. It was just, you know, the atmosphere and the pressure and all of those things. He said, this isn't genuine evangelism. And so he walked away. Now, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association hasn't done wonderful work in other ways, particularly through the materials they preach, the radio stuff and so on, but that high pressure, do it right now, now, now, now, now, now, we want the growth now, quickly, everybody convert quickly. Okay, you're shouting at me, I'll convert, all right, I raised my hand, I'm walking now. And besides, everybody's crying and they're all looking at me, so I suppose I have to get up and walk the aisle and so on. And then you go home and you're like, I don't feel different. Because the gospel hasn't done its essential work in that case. What happens? The normal growth of the kingdom is not sudden and explosive, it's not jack in the beanstalk, it's the mustard plant. It's the gradual suffusion through the loaf of bread that happens with leaven. It starts small, it starts barely noticeable, and then you begin to see it as the blade comes through in people's lives, as you begin to see the change, then the head, and then eventually you begin to see fruit. You begin to see that they have become Christians. We want to see that kind of natural organic growth as people are brought into the kingdom by the preaching of the gospel, not through means and gimmicks and pressure and all of those things that get people to make a decision that they haven't really come to in a natural sense. And we need to remember that this is the second and final application. It's the same way when it comes to our personal sanctification. It starts slow. It's not the case, and this frustrates American Christians to no end. They become Christians and they expect, one, that they will no longer have to struggle with sin, that they will be perfect and able to resist all of the temptations they were once prone to, and that everybody else as well around them will be perfect as well. And that's not the way it works. Sanctification is a very gradual, progressive, thing that happens. And like with plants, it does not immediately, you know, come to germination in a night, and then you aren't starting to produce tremendous fruits the next day. And occasionally we'll attempt to, you know, pretend like it does. So when the celebrity does come into the faith, we immediately hand him, you know, in essence, the keys to the kingdom. And we say, begin preaching the gospel now. And then we're surprised when he crashes and he burns. because he never had time to mature in the faith. We began loading this tender young plant down with all of these things that it could no longer sustain. You can put a swing or a tree house in a full-grown tree, but try to put a swing or a tree house in a sapling, and what are you going to do? You're going to break it. And so too, when you burden down the young convert with all of these things he's not ready for, you often will break them. Matthew Henry wrote this, thus it is in the heart. When the gospel comes into the soul, it works a change, not in the substance. The dough is the same, but in the quality it makes us to desire otherwise than we have done, and we desire other things than we used to do. That is how we know the leaven, that is the leaven of the gospel is at work. We saw it in those passengers. In the soul where grace is true, it will grow really, though perhaps insensibly. A grain of mustard seed is small, but however it is a seed, and it has in it a disposition to grow. Grace will be getting ground, shining more and more. Gracious habits confirmed, actings quickened, knowledge more clear, faith more confirmed, love more inflamed, and there is the seed growing. We want to see gradual, organic growth. We do want to see growth. We need to remember, we need to be always moving forward under the means of grace. not falling back. So brothers and sisters, let us do all that we can to plant the seed, but know that God is the one who brings the growth through the ordinary means of grace that he has appointed. Therefore, let us apply ourselves to that means of grace and trust in them. If we get sidelined into all sorts of gimmicks and man-made methodologies and so on, Eventually, we may produce explosive growth, but it will not last, and it will not be true growth. It'll be a counterfeit that's here today and then blown away, gone tomorrow. Why? Because it's just chaff. It's not the real wheat that God desires. Anyway, let's go before Him now. God our Father, we do pray now, Lord, that you would continue the work of growth that you began in our hearts, that you would grow your kingdom. We thank you for the means of grace that you've given. We thank you, Lord, for the parables that you've shared with us that tell us about how God is the one doing that work, that he is the one who converts us, he's the one who sanctifies us. Help us to trust in that work. Help us to look for the evidences of it in our lives. Lord, whether it may be the initial growings or the fruit that we're all supposed to be bearing, but let us be looking for that fruit and expecting it from all of those people whom you have genuinely called. I do pray, Lord, that you would help us, though, to be diligent when it comes to sowing the seed, and then diligent also in trusting you to produce the growth. We pray these things in Jesus' holy name. Amen.