The Soils (Matthew 13:1-23)
Matthew gives us another extended discourse of Jesus, this time a collection of various parables that Jesus told. Jesus explains to His disciples that He teaches using parables, because the message of the Kingdom is not for everyone, but only for those who will understand it.
An immediate illustration of this is found in the first parable, where the message of the Kingdom—the word of the Kingdom—is received in different ways by different people.
Some fail to understand, or even really hear it at all. Some receive it gladly but only superficially and it is quickly lost to them. Still others receive it but quickly forget it as they are consumed by concerns or distractions of the world. It is only those who truly understand it, receive it, and produce fruit in their lives as a result of it, that belong to the Kingdom.
Thus, the message of the Kingdom is this: that we are saved by trusting in Christ alone, but when saved we do not stay the same. He does all the work, but that work is manifest in our lives. If we say we believe the message of the Kingdom, but that belief remains an intellectual exercise and does not produce a change—fruit—in our lives, we have not believed in the way that Jesus spoke of.
And that is a concern in the world of Western Christianity today. If we look at all the people who claim to be Christians, a large percentage of those people—at least three fourths—are like the three soils that have not understood and received the word of the Kingdom. They either hold to a false message that calls itself Christianity, are shallow in a belief that does not go past an intellectual proposition, or that are so consumed with the things of the world that their compartmentalized “faith” is no saving faith at all.
An immediate illustration of this is found in the first parable, where the message of the Kingdom—the word of the Kingdom—is received in different ways by different people.
Some fail to understand, or even really hear it at all. Some receive it gladly but only superficially and it is quickly lost to them. Still others receive it but quickly forget it as they are consumed by concerns or distractions of the world. It is only those who truly understand it, receive it, and produce fruit in their lives as a result of it, that belong to the Kingdom.
Thus, the message of the Kingdom is this: that we are saved by trusting in Christ alone, but when saved we do not stay the same. He does all the work, but that work is manifest in our lives. If we say we believe the message of the Kingdom, but that belief remains an intellectual exercise and does not produce a change—fruit—in our lives, we have not believed in the way that Jesus spoke of.
And that is a concern in the world of Western Christianity today. If we look at all the people who claim to be Christians, a large percentage of those people—at least three fourths—are like the three soils that have not understood and received the word of the Kingdom. They either hold to a false message that calls itself Christianity, are shallow in a belief that does not go past an intellectual proposition, or that are so consumed with the things of the world that their compartmentalized “faith” is no saving faith at all.
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