Stay on Mission – 22nd October 2017

2. Matthew 13: 1-9 The Sower.
‘That same day Jesus went out of the house and sat by the lake. Such large crowds gathered around him that he got into a boat and sat in it, while all the people stood on the shore. Then he told them many things in parables, saying: “A farmer went out to sow his seed. As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants. Still other see fell on good soil, where it produced a crop—a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown. 9 Whoever has ears, let them hear.”
My wife, Lynn, would probably be the first to tell you that I am not a keen gardener. Mowing the lawn and pulling out weeds is about as ambitious as I get. However, while I could never be described as an expert at gardening, I am pretty sure that the way the Sower sets about things in this parable is not the way that seeds are normally planted. It seems like he just throws them everywhere and anywhere! He scattered it all over the place and it fell on the path, on rocky places, among thorns and on good soil. Why didn’t he put all of the seed in the good soil so that none was wasted?
What Jesus wants us to know is that the sower is generous and extravagant, he wants there to be an opportunity for the seed to grow anywhere. As we think of the seed as ‘the words of the Kingdom of God – the gospel’, we see that what Jesus says in this parable is exactly what He did in His ministry. He went everywhere and anywhere speaking to every kind of person that he met.
As we seek to join Jesus in is mission this has something very important to say to us. We, in our daily lives, are surrounded by all sorts of people, some may be like the path or rocky places and so we just decide that there is no point saying anything to them about Jesus. We become selective and only talk to people about Jesus if we are pretty convinced that they will be receptive. Jesus didn’t do it that way and if we are going to reach the people that Jesus came to seek and to save we must, like Him, be prepared to ‘sow the seeds of the words of the kingdom’ into lives that we may think will not be receptive. If you could imagine for a moment that you had never read the gospels, and the read them for the first time, I think you may be very surprised at the people who received the gospel and ‘bore fruit’. Many of them are the kind of people that we may just never consider!
This week, I encourage you to ‘generous and extravagant’ in sharing the words of the kingdom with ‘whoever’, you may be surprised at what grows!
Dennis