Pastor Ralph Douglas West - The Kingdom of God Has Come | Mark 4:1-20

0:30 Yes, sir. Hallelujah. Thank you, choir. Thank you to our children. blessing us today. I said earlier at 8 o'clock that our future is in our face. So thank you, Mom and Dad, for making sure that our children are here to bless us and to be encouraged themselves. Mark chapter 4. Mark 4 verses 1 through 20. Verses 26 to 29, 30 to 34. This is the word of God.

1:37 Amen. You may be seated. You may want to keep your Bibles open. The kingdom of God has come. Mark's gospel opens up with an emphatic statement about how Jesus came into the world. It says, and Jesus came preaching.

2:16 It actually gives the content of what he preached in terms of a message and in verse or rather chapter 4, it gives the method that he used to convey the message that he came preaching. Jesus came preaching. One of the fascinating statements in all of the scripture, as far as I'm concerned, is that Jesus came proclaiming a message about the kingdom of God. we don't talk about the kingdom of God very much anymore our focus has changed more on individual salvation privatized spirituality something that was completely different from the message of Jesus Christ he was not as focused on individual as he was communal that he focused his gaze on the kingdom and what the kingdom looked like in the world.

3:20 The people who heard this knew that Jesus was striking at the empires of its day. And not only did he strike at it then, the empires then, he strikes at domineering empires that oppress people and marginalize others even today. Jesus is no meek and mild, gentle as a lamb savior.

3:47 We refer to him that way. We probably feel more comfortable with that kind of Jesus. But where Jesus proclaims his message, it always upsets the status quo. And so Jesus came preaching the message of the kingdom of God. He was a herald. One of my favorite definitions for preaching, herald. You know it. You've used that definition maybe without calling it a herald. You said, now don't shoot the messenger. That's what a herald is. Someone that takes the message from the king, goes into the public square, and reads the king's message without editing it, without redacting it, by speaking to the crowd the message that Jesus gave in order for that message to be heard.

4:48 That's what Jesus came doing. Jesus came preaching about the kingdom of God. When Jesus said that, the people looked as disinterested as you are looking at me right now. They were looking for something else from Jesus. On several occasions, they had already adorned him as being the bread king. They wanted Jesus to provide for them something material, tangible, visible. And Jesus says, but I come proclaiming a message about the kingdom of God. Jesus knew when he said the kingdom of God That he was talking in theological abstracts That people would have a difficulty Comprehending exactly what he said But he had come with an inauguration A continuation A culmination and one day a coronation This is not just alliteration But it actually serves I think As a framework that you could use to help memorize better the ministry of Jesus.

5:59 If you can remember the lyrics of Beyonce, you can remember those four words. An inauguration, a continuation, a consummation, and a coronation. His ministry began with an inauguration. Jesus came preaching. Jesus worked his works, his miracles, his acts, A-C-T-S, in the world. It was his continuation. He'll die on the cross. This will be his earthly culmination. He will resurrect, which would be the beginning of Jesus' ultimate one day when we are with him, coronation. He's already been coronated as the king. It's a framework.

6:52 Maybe you could use it. Maybe not. but I'm always looking for something to help me understand the ways of God better. And Jesus came preaching the kingdom of God. But what was it like? And so Jesus moved the message to a method that he wanted to use called parables. Parables. These are stories, but more than stories. Parables. One, somebody defined parables as a earthly story with a heavenly meaning. It's more than that, but that'll work. That might be one of the ways that you could remember the method parable. You ought to know it's important. Jesus used this method more than anything else. And so parables might be a good place for you to begin reading. But I'm going to tell you, parables are dangerous.

7:50 No, I'm serious. Parables have a delayed detonation in them. you read a story. You assume that it's just a little, nice, neatly packaged story. And by the time you get from here to your favorite restaurant today, boom, a detonation. And you said, that was not a story with a window to look out on the world. that was a story with a mirror for me to see myself Jesus used this method of parables. The actual word means to throw alongside, parable, to throw alongside.

8:49 It's taking one story and reading it next to another story and then saying the kingdom of God is like. similes and metaphors. The kingdom of God is like, and this is where we meet Jesus now as he is at the peak of his popularity and crowds of people are gathering around him whenever they hear that he is teaching. You can never get in a space large enough to contain the crowds that come to hear him teach. But don't confuse crowd with Christian. You read this word in the scripture, come follow me. In the Greek, that word means that one walks in front of you and you began to to walk in the steps of the one that went before you by following them.

9:59 The crowds of people came and some of them were no more than religious enthusiasts, spiritual seekers looking for what they could get from Jesus. It didn't mean that they all followed him. In fact, some of the people who had gathered, you meet them in the previous chapter of Mark 4. In chapter 3, round verse 6, an unlikely duo meet up, Pharisees and Herodians. They have nothing religiously, ideologically, or philosophically in common. But Jesus has come posing a threat to the way that they live. And the best thing to do with him is get rid of it. And so the crowd gathered around when Jesus had come. Mark, or rather John 6, and crowds gathered.

10:55 And what did they want to do? They wanted to eat bread. And when Jesus offered them a cross, the crowd thinned out. Because not everybody that comes to sit around Jesus has come to follow Jesus. I don't have to say to you that I could use that as a point of preaching privilege to step out of the manuscript for just a moment and sit down and say, make sure that while you are here listening to the message and the method that Jesus used, you got the right motive for why you have come here. And that is in order to hear God, in order to know him better, to follow him more faithfully. And so Jesus is at the peak of his popularity. People are gathering around to listen to this young charismatic leader talk about a subject like the kingdom of God. These people would be interested in this subject, by the way, because of the Roman domination, the empire that is exacting its influence, marginalizing people, oppressing others.

12:05 They would be interested in this. This would not be a group of people gathered around and saying, I didn't come here to hear this. These people, when they heard kingdom of God, they would say, hush, be quiet. I want to hear what he has to say about this kingdom. They knew about kingdoms. It's difficult for people like you and me to comprehend kingdom because we live in a republic, a democracy. But not these people. They knew what monarchy was. They knew what somebody sitting on the throne looked like. They knew the power that that person had and they possessed. And Jesus says, I have come preaching, announcing the kingdom of God.

12:54 God's kingdom was, and I've tried to explain this over 35 years, is the reign of God. But also the rule of God. but when Jesus tried to tell that crowd of people that gabbled around him these Galileans who stepped with him while he was at the home base in Capernaum they looked at him again like you're looking at me what in the world are you talking about the kingdom and so Jesus commandeered a boat pushed away from the shore crowds gathered and they were looking at him Amen. and Jesus started speaking. Listen up, he said. Growing up, the pastor had a way of saying to us, my dears, beloved, that's what he would say.

13:58 He said, then as he moved about the sermon, he would say, you don't hear me. That was our way to say, we hear you. That's what Jesus is doing. I'm in verse one for those of you who think I'm making this up. This is going to be a long, long sermon. And so Jesus is saying to them, listen up. The kingdom of God is like. And so he tells three stories to convey one message. That the kingdom of God, though invisible, is at work in your life even when you don't see it. Jesus now begins with the first parable.

15:02 And he focused the attention on the sower. And it reminds us, he said, now let me tell you something about the kingdom now. The kingdom of God advances in spite of disappointing responses.

15:24 The kingdom of God will triumph even when it looks like nobody is paying attention to what's going on in the kingdom. So in doing this, Jesus tells them a parable. And he talks about a sower sowing seed in soil. and then how negative the response is. Now, I've been guilty over many, many, many, many years of focusing in on the pessimism of this passage when in fact it is a story of encouragement and of affirmation. A sower sowed seeds When Jesus is teaching He probably saw a farmer Walking across the field And used it as an object lesson No different than many of you When you're trying to convey a point And he says a farmer sows Scattering seed Jesus would know The different types of soil He says he sows seeds On a path where people walk by and beneath the weight of their body and their footprints, they harden out the path.

16:45 He sows on that. Birds sometimes come along, they just pick up the seed, take it away. While he's sowing seed, some seed falls on rocky ground, little soil. And so under the right conditions, due in some dampness, the seed germinates, it breaks through the ground, sprouts up quick, but it doesn't last as soon as the sun comes out. It just burns it away. And still, other seed falls around thorny spaces.

17:24 And they might grow, but the weeds around them choke them out. And then he says, of the fourth type of soil, good soil. One Lutheran missionary sheds light on how farming and sowing is different there, speaking of Palestine, and here, speaking of North America. He says, now, in America, farmers, they till the ground. They work the ground. Get it ready to receive the seeds. But in distant Palestine, that's not how they sow seed. They just threw the seed out. And then they would tar the ground. And some of the seed would get into this soil and it would then work and grow.

18:20 That's how Jesus was defining this. He says the kingdom of God works like that. It will triumph and it will advance against soil conditions that resist it. This is not a word of pessimism. I've been guilty of that. Talking about how many people don't receive the message. But here Jesus is telling this story to the face of these people. And it's important for me right now to read this to you. Because Jesus wants to explain it. And he can explain what he's teaching better than I can. Look at verse 13. he's already told them the story we know it's a parable and Jesus is saying why are you teaching us in parables so you can have eyes to see and not see hear it but don't understand he said well why bother then Jesus said to them don't you understand this parable How then will you understand the parable?

19:38 The farmer sows the word. Some people are like seed among the path where the word is sown. As soon as they hear it, Satan comes and takes it away. The word as soon as it's sown in them. Others like seed sown on rocky places. Hear the word and at once receive it with joy. But since you have no root, they last only a short time. When trouble or persecution comes because of the word, they quickly fall away. Still others like seeds sown among thorns hear the word. But the worries of this life, the deceitfulness of wealth and the desires for other things come and choke the word, making it unfruitful. Jesus describes the conditions hardness thorny grainy the winds blow birds come locusts rise up worms eat it out all of this is taking place whenever you hear the word so it's no surprise when you say I went to church and pastor West they say he can preach I didn't get anything out of it It's okay It's because worms and locusts And pressure and life Is taking away what you think you heard But this is a word of encouragement and affirmation.

21:11 Because on the surface where it seems like this is so discouraging, lift up your head. That's what Jesus said. Listen up, my dears, beloved. Listen up. He's saying, raise up your head. This is not a message of negativity. This is a positivity. This is not pessimism. This is optimism. This is not discouragement. It is encouragement because all God needs is a seed to make things happen in your life. Please pass the west. Martin Luther the reformer liked to drink beer. That's tough for you Baptists. Luther was sitting down drinking beer and he said, While I'm drinking this beer the gospel is still at work.

22:17 In other words, God's word is at work even when you don't know that it is at work. Help me hold it, though. Somebody need to hear that. It is working when the conditions resist it. Some years ago, Ria and I, we were over in West Germany, and we were taken where, and this is back in the early 90s before they took down all of the walls. Now the walls have been replaced in the same area, but it's just a few slabs to get an idea. At this time, the wall was still up.

23:13 You stood on the west side and you look through a gaping hole to the east side. The west side was full of life and music and color. but on the east side. This is where the concentration camps, the boarding of the trains that would take them to those incinerators to kill those Jews. You would see that dead area. In the midst of it, there was a radio tower that was pointed out to us and atop of it would be a restaurant. And this was the radio tower where propaganda had been announced in the communist country. Something happened in the design of that tower. It had vertical beams, traverses, and when the light of the sun would hit it, its reflection would hit the wall on the distance in the shape of a cross.

24:26 Well, you can't have a cross in communism. But we can fix that. All we have to do is change the material. And so they did. They changed it from a different kind of metal so that there would be no cross. and then when the sun shined the next time that was a cross Well, there's a way to get rid of that. Because if the sun shines and it's shining, then that's black in the wall so that you can't see the cross. And when the sun shines, it was even brighter against a black backdrop.

25:16 And the kingdom of God is like that. You can blacken it out. You can change the situations. You can alter the conditions. But the S-U-N knows how to respond to the S-O-N. You can't stop the kingdom of God. I don't care what you do. You can burn up the Bible, you can drown the Bible, but God's word, God's kingdom will keep on advancing. You can put a moratorium on preaching, but God's word, God's kingdom will keep on going. Preach Pastor West. That's one story. But then Jesus moves to another story where he says, now the kingdom of God is going to advance because it has irresistible power. He now takes us to the story of the growing of the seed in verse 26.

26:18 and in the growing of the seed he reminds us what the kingdom of God is like. He says that the kingdom of God is like a person who scatters seed on the ground and look what it does night after night, day after day, sleep or wake. Look what the seed does. It's sprouts.

26:51 So you sow the seed. At night, you get up in the morning, you get a shovel and dig up the seed to see if it's growing. No. That's not what you do, but that's what we would do because as pragmatists, we must know how things work. And Jesus says, the kingdom's growth is a mystery and it's beyond your ability to comprehend.

27:27 In the same way you sow a seed, you lose it in the soil. You start damaging it if you start digging it up. But when you sow it, plant it, something happens. A natural progression of order takes place. A seed that is dry, dead, desiccated, dehydrated, looks like a corpse being planted in the ground. And it ought to be dead. and then something happens when the ground and the seed marry one another. There is a breaking, there is a shooting, there is a growing. Nobody announces it, nobody highlights it. All you know is you wake up the next day and say, I saw something come to life.

28:25 that's why as Christians when our loved ones die we do not weep like folk that don't have no hope it's because when they take these earthly bodies and put them in that ground we are as alive then as we are now and maybe more alive Jesus says that's how the seed works And then he uses a word here where we get the word automatic from. He says this automatic growth. You ain't got to tell it to grow. Come on, grow now. This spontaneous growth. The moment it's in the ground, it begins to grow. And our problem is we want to be able to track. We want to be able to draw a diagram to say, now in five years we're going to be here and ten years here.

29:27 And the Lord says, hey, hey, hey, one, one plants, one waters. I am the one that gives increase. You can have the best plan on the planet. It doesn't mean it's going to work. My kingdom don't work like that. So everybody wanted Jesus to have some plan. The zealots wanted him to have a plan. They wanted Jesus to have a political plan. The political plan was that the zealots were going to insurrect and take over the kingdom with swords and shields and riding on the back of steeds and going to war. Jesus says, no, no, no, no. No, you can't usher in righteousness by breaking in on some property, destroying it, tearing it up, breaking in, breaking in.

30:30 You can't, that ain't my kingdom. Now that may be a kingdom, but it ain't mine. My kingdom advances in a way in which there's an irresistible power that even when you're trying to stop it, you can't stop it. It just keeps on working. He said to the zealous, yours ain't going to work. Then there were the Pharisees who had a plan. Their plan was if you can memorize all of the law and keep it perfectly for three days, the kingdom would come. Jesus said, now you know none of y'all can do that. None of you, none of you possess the capability to do that. And so Jesus says, so how then do we get this resolved? He says, you do it this way.

31:27 You do it by allowing the seed to work irresistibly, automatically, and spontaneously. Nature is a way in which we understand the grace of God. The San Andreas fault line, one day they say, they predicted in 2030 that in this fault line is enough disaster that the Californians will experience an 8.3 unstoppable earthquake that will destroy the land. We don't know. But that's the kind of capable power that's in the ground that's irresistible, that's working even while we're sitting here on Sunday morning.

32:20 You go and you go to Carbabs Canyon and you see those stalactites and stalactites and you say, when did that grow? How did you get that? One drop at a time. One drop of water on top of water with mineral,

32:48 on top of water with mineral. And the next thing you have, you have stalactites forming. Stalactites pointing up, And it becomes one of the most attractive, natural feats in the world. How old is it? I don't know. Tens of thousands of years.

33:16 However old it is, it didn't happen overnight. It happened one drop at a time. God's going to grow you like that. and some of you are trying to compare your growth to somebody else maybe you don't possess a particular capability of comprehension that they have but one thing is true if you stay in God's word God one bible study at a time one sermon at a time one worship at a time one hymn at a time. One song at a time. You ain't got it yet. One prayer at a time. God will grow you up. Oh yes he will. Oh yes he will.

34:09 that's how God works and that's how God continues to work the farmer sowed seed at night and day and automatically God's word kept on growing let me give you one more and I'm done I got two minutes and 50 seconds Jesus' last story says and the kingdom of God moves from insignificance to significance from insignificance come stay with me now beloved my dear from insignificance to dominance this is important Jesus taught it it got to be important And so he says, I want you to see how the kingdom grows from smallness to greatness, from the lesser to the greater.

35:26 You remember that. Jesus points it out in this last parable in verse 30, and he picks out a mustard seed. That little seed. and looking at that little seed, he holds it up, and everybody knew, you can't get much out of no mustard seed. Jesus must have liked these mustard seeds, because later on in another teaching, he'll say, if you have the face, the size of a mustard seed. By the way, I just dropped this on you. It's not the size of your faith. is whether you are at the faith that you have. Let me see if I can make it a little more poetic. It ain't the size of your faith. It's how you activate the size of the faith that you have.

36:22 You don't need more faith. You just need to use the faith that you already have. Preach Pastor West. And so Jesus said the kingdom. The kingdom. The kingdom. moves from the lesser to the greater.

36:50 America thought that she had a domination on God. We put in our currencies back in the 50s, I don't want to go out, this sermon doesn't allow to talk about why we did it, but we wasn't right in doing it. But we always thought in America that God loved us, that we were God's kingdom. That ain't true.

37:19 God loves all the people of the world. red and yellow, black and white, they are all significant in his sight. In the 1900s, North America boasted that we had 79 million people who were Christians. At that time Africa only had 9.9 million people

38:01 that were called Christian. 95 years later, North America had 251 million people saying, I'm a Christian. Africa had 318 million. In 2000, the numbers dropped or went up slightly in America from 251 to 260 million people in 2000. But the numbers went up over 50 million in Africa to 360 million.

38:42 You know where the largest group of Christians are? Not here. We got cathedrals that we want to attend. We got church services that people are barcat and abandoned. But under trees and in tents and little huts in Africa, 500 million people are gathering because God will let his kingdom move. You say that's not important to you, it better be important.

39:14 It's another way of showing us that God's kingdom is at work. So you can talk about in God we trust But do you really trust in God? You can put it on your currency You can pledge allegiance to the flag But there's one thing to talk God It's something else to live God Yeah, I'm done now. And God's going to do it. And he's been doing it from the very beginning in a very small way. That God will use the mustard seed to expand his kingdom. Let me show you what I kept out on purpose. There's a scripture that for years I've overlooked it. I never gave it the credit that it deserved until I reread this now, 20 plus years later for a sermon for today.

40:14 And it leaked out to me that these three stories hinge on a promise that Jesus made. In verse 20, he says, others like seeds sown on good soil, hear the word and hear it, and it produces a crop. I'm done now. this is my clothes. Some 30, some 60, some 100 fold.

40:41 Farmers will tell you if you get a 10%, you had a good crop. If you had a 20%, come on, we going to the market. But if you get a 30, 60, 100 fold, Oh, oh my goodness. We have hit the agricultural lottery. Jesus said, that's how my kingdom is. My kingdom will always return more than what you put in the ground. Except a seed, John chapter 12, is buried in the ground and dies. It cannot bring forth fruit. He's not talking about a seed now. He's not talking about that. He's talking about Jesus.

41:35 Unless Jesus dies on the cross. Unless Jesus is buried in the grave. Unless Jesus get up on Sunday morning. Y'all can't be at the church where I was. The only reason you're here is because we serve a living Savior. And he's in the world. Now I didn't mean to go that far I declare I'm going to stop right there But he is in the world Today I know that he is living No matter what men may say I Lord have mercy I see His hand of mercy I hear His voice A cheer And just the time that I need him he's always near have a good day may God bless you on your way home but you ought to tell somebody he