God's Unconventional Kingdom

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. Good morning. And happy Mother's Day. Happy Mother's Day. Happy Grandmother's Day. Happy day for all of you. I don't understand why it's a day. It should be at least a month. We get a month for all sorts of things these days. It's time to have Mother's Month. Should we start the movement? Yeah. And that wouldn't even be enough, would it? And last week, we discovered, first of all, that the reactions to who Jesus was by his actions and what his teaching was, and how the crowd saw him, how his own family saw him, as well as the religious leaders, it was all over the map. Some of them thought, this guy is out of his mind. They called him kind of a lunatic. And others, he is a liar. He is part of the prince of demons, the father of lies. Those were the two reactions to Jesus in Chapter 3, which is just kind of shocking. And then Jesus declares who he is, the Lord, in that chapter as well, through the use of imagery. Today, we finally get to Mark's Gospel, some extended teaching that Jesus did. Before this point in time, we only hear a phrase here, a phrase there. Jesus doesn't go into great depth of teaching at all. For that, you have to go to the Gospel of Matthew. He gets these huge sections of teaching, in fact, five of them, to match the five books of Moses in the Pentateuch, or the Torah. But in Mark, it's just action, action, action, action, moving along simply. But today, we get his first main teaching, and it's a parable. He always taught in parables. Why? What's going on with this? So, let's read Mark Chapter 4, where we will begin with, I think, verse 1, and go for quite a while. He says, again, he began to teach beside the sea. And a very large crowd gathered about him, so that he got into a boat and sat in it on the sea. And the whole crowd was beside the sea on the land, a natural amphitheater that way. Have you ever been to a lake or wherever? You can hear across the entire lake conversations sometimes. So, Jesus knew with a large crowd, he needed a place where he could sit and proclaim, and everybody hear him. But the question is, whether people actually heard him. That's the real question. Maybe the Verizon commercial came out a lot later. Can you hear me now? That's the question Jesus is really asking. Can you hear him now? Do you hear him? So, he was teaching them many things in parables. So, that's his standard form of teaching. And in his teaching, he said to them, listen. Behold, a sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seed fell along the path, and the birds came and devoured it. Other seed fell on rocky ground, where it did not have much soil. And immediately it sprang up, since it had no depth of soil. And when the sun rose, it was scorched. And since it had no root, it withered away. Other seed fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked it and yielded no grain. And other seeds fell into good soil and produced grain, growing up and increasing and yielding thirtyfold and sixtyfold and a hundredfold. And he said, He who has ears to hear, let him hear. And when he was alone, those around him with the twelve asked him about the parables. And he said to them, To you it has been given, the secret of the kingdom. But for those outside, everything is in parables, so that they may indeed see but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand, lest they should turn and be forgiven. And he said to them, Do you not understand this parable? Then how can you well understand all the parables? The sower sows the word. And these are the ones along the path where the word is sown. When they hear, Satan immediately comes and takes away the word that is sown in them. And these are the ones sown on rocky ground, the ones who, when they hear the word, immediately receive it with joy, and they have no root in themselves but endure for a while. Then, when tribulation or persecution arises on account of the word, immediately they fall away. And others are the ones sown among thorns. They are those who hear the word, but the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches and the desires of other things enter in and choke the word, and it proves unfruitful. But those that were sown on the ground, on the good soil, are the ones who hear the word and accept it and bear fruit thirtyfold and sixtyfold and a hundredfold. Jesus taught in parables. And he taught about the kingdom of God. A parable is parabola. I don't have that word up, but it's actually, we just transliterate it into English, parabola. Bola means to cast or throw, and para is from parallel. You put alongside two things. It's a comparison. And so Jesus is comparing the kingdom of God and how God works in this world, how God gets things done in this world, what God is all about in this world, to a sower, a farmer who goes out and scatters seeds across the ground. And the seed doesn't look l...