Bible Study Lesson- The Kingdom Of God - Power Of A Seed Part 7

Welcome to episode 38. You know how it begins.

Chapter 1:1 of the Gospel of John: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Spending time in the word of God is the best way to spend time with God. Welcome to No Doubt, No Fear, Only Believe podcast. Where we will encourage, inspire, and empower you to live your best life in Christ. Here's Greg.

Welcome to episode 38. If you are here for the first time, I want to thank you for being a part of this episode. And I am continuing my teaching on the power of the seed and to try to help the church— the— and the church again, as we defined it, or as I guess as I defined it, is you and me. If you have Jesus Christ, if you declared him as your Lord and Savior, you are the church. It is not a building, it is not a place where you go and worship. You are the church. And we just need to figure out that, you know, that we take Jesus and the Holy Spirit and Father God everywhere we go. And everything we do, everything we say, we are representing Jesus. And I know that may be a little bit heavy, but it's the truth, and we need to, we need to come to grips with the truth. And one of the things that I have not said in a while, or actually the 3 things that I've, that I was saying in every episode, and I thought maybe that was getting a little hard to listen to, but I want to remind you that you are God's favorite. If God had a refrigerator in heaven, your picture would be all over it. God loves you that much. And the second thing I want you to know is God is not mad at you. He's not even a little bit upset because he put all of his anger and all of the justice and all of the judgment he put on Jesus Christ and nailed that, all the sin, everything, nailed it to the cross over 2,000 years ago. And his anger is pointed directly at Satan and all of his demons. So he's not angry at you and I. He's not angry at flesh and blood. And Paul reminds us that we're not warring against flesh and blood. We are warring against the principalities and the powers. We're, we're not warring against flesh and blood. So we're not, we're not in a battle against the evil people in this world. There are no— these are all children of God that are in one way or the other being deceived, I guess, because we're all deceived. And I think I've touched on that before. I mean, some of us are more deceived than others. You know, if you're not in the truth all day, every day then there's some part of your life that's being deceived. And that's where you stay in the word, and that's kind of where you pray and you have communications with the Holy Spirit, and you ask him to lead and guide and direct you. Well, this is kind of taking a tangent that I wasn't prepared to talk on, but I did want to tell you one more thing. Jesus is one day closer to his return today than he was yesterday. I don't know when. I'm not here to make any kind of predictions on when he's coming, set a time and date. I'm told not to do that over and again. But we're not gonna set a date, but you can be sure that he's one day closer today than he was yesterday. So those three things, I've got those, I haven't told you those in a long time, and I wanna remind you that those three things are very important as you walk through your life. You've got to remember that God's not mad, he loves you. He is Father God and you are his favorite. God's not mad at anything that you've done or anything that you've said. He put all that anger on Jesus. And Jesus is returning. Okay, let's dive back into the parable of the sower. If you remember back in the previous episode, I was talking about the 4 types of soils, and I got to the first 2 types of ground: the, the wayside, which is like the road, or the hard, hard ground, and then the stony ground, which has no depth of soil. And I'm not going to go back through those. You can listen to the previous episode, but we're going to We're gonna go to the next two types of soil and to get all four of them done in two episodes. And we're gonna pick back up in Mark 4:18. Now these are the ones sown among thorns. They are the ones who hear the word, and the cares of this world, the deceitfulness of riches, and the desires of other things enter in, choke the word, and it becomes unfruitful. Again, this is talking about the word of God being sown, and I use the example of your pastor talking to you or preaching at— on a Sunday service. And remember, Romans 10:17 says, faith comes by hearing, hearing by the word of God. The preacher is preaching the message that he has prepared for you for this Sunday, and you're sitting there receiving this seed and it's being planted. But when it— when it's thrown into that ground, and if your heart— if you're distracted, if you're so— if you're so worried about all of the different things in your life. Like, if you've ever been in a service and you got bored and you look down on your phone or your tablet and you start rifling through Facebook while the pastor is preaching, now it's going into your ears and maybe getting into your heart, but it's not growing. And if it grows, it has— it's not fruitful. That's what the word says, is that it's grown because you have planted it among the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches. So you're worried about your bank statement, maybe you're worried about your stock, it went up or down and you're fired up, but you can't— you're not here. You're hearing the word and it's coming in, but it has no fruit. And that's the problem. If you— just because you're listening doesn't necessarily mean you're hearing. And we're going to talk about that in the next episode. But right now I just want to kind of get you thinking about the different types of soil and the first three kinds were negative. So, you know, I've kind of got a little bit of math in me. I got more math in me than English in me. So in an effort to kind of flex my math skills right here on the podcast, there is 3 out of 4 are bad. So that is 25% per quarter, or 75% are bad. So 75% of the, of the seed that's thrown out falls on bad ground. Now I want that to sink in, and I'm not saying that that's you, but that's— this is Jesus talking, and it's talking about when the seed is sown, the word of God is sown. And if you've ever walked out of a service and couldn't remember what the pastor talked about or what the 4 points were or 3 points were on the message, then there's probably a problem. I mean, it Again, I've used this analogy. My pastor used to tell me, you know, if a rock is thrown into a pack of dogs, the dog that yelps the loudest is the one that got hit. So 3 of 4 of the grounds that your pastor or that God, the Holy Spirit, is throwing this seed out on is gonna fall on bad ground or nonproductive ground. And the, the last, the 25%, or the last, the last ground. And this is the ground that has been prepared. This is the ground that's prayed up. This is the ground that's excited about getting to church. This is the ground that is maybe humbled themselves and repented from all this garbage, the other 75% of the stuff we just talked about. But you have prepared your heart And you have cultivated that. And I talked to a friend of mine just this past week. I was recently looking back at kind of how I handled different situations. And before I was saved, I would consider myself kind of thin-skinned and hard-hearted. And after I got saved, it was just the exact opposite. I became thick-skinned and soft-hearted. So if you can kind of picture that, if you can kind of heard the saying, "Water off a duck's back," Well, that's kind of when people start criticizing me or roll their eyes or don't care what I'm saying. I just keep— my job is not to convert people to think the way I think. My job is to proclaim the gospel or to tell you what I'm kind of seeing or how I'm teaching it. My job is not to change you. My business is to turn you. That is your job, is to remember exactly how I thought it was gonna be or to say, nah, this is not exactly how I thought this life was gonna go.. And so then you kind of take a kind of an evaluation of how your life's going, and that's where repentance comes in. If we all kind of mess up, we all kind of screw up through life, and that's why it's so important that we repent and that we say, whoa, that's enough right there, and just put a stop to it and turn 180 degrees in the next direct— in the other direction. And I think that's kind of the, the heart that is ready to receive this seed and that when you're in the service or when you're listening something, maybe this podcast, or you're listening to something that a Christian teacher or a Christian pastor is telling you, that you kinda just open up your heart and mind and you start taking it in, and then you ask the Holy Spirit, "What is it that you want me to have out of this message?" And that is what I want you to start asking every time you listen to something that's biblical-based is, God, I'm gonna allow this seed to be thrown in, and I'm gonna ask you to help that good seed grow. And that kind of reminds me of the podcast I talked about of Psalm 23, the two spiritual beings, goodness and mercy, following you all the days of your life. When you throw the word of God into your heart, into the good soil, you want goodness to water that. And it's gonna take some time for that to grow, and that's okay. Because we've got time. In fact, that's part of the kingdom of God is the seed time and harvest. But the time when it's growing, we don't know how. And that's part of the— back in, I think it was a couple episodes ago, but it was Mark 26 through 29 where it grows and we don't know how. So I'm going to stop it there. I'm going to talk to you, kind of try to pull all this together in the next episode, episode 39, and then we're going to move on to a different topic. But I appreciate you being part of this. And if you have not hit the subscribe button, I'm not going to beg you, but I am going to ask again. Thank you for being a part of this, and I look forward to talking to you in the next episode.

Thanks for listening to the No Doubt, No Fear, Only Believe podcast at www.nodoubtonlybelieve.com.