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Planting Seeds in God’s Kingdom Keith McFarren July 26, 2026 Mark 4:26-34 Jesus liked to teach by using parables. Today he uses agricultural language to talk about God. First, he talks about scattering seeds and watching them germinate and begin to grow. If you have ever planted a vegetable garden you know how amazing it is to watch how the seeds germinate and break the soil and begin to grow and eventually grow large enough that you can harvest and eat whatever it is you’ve grown. Jesus also talks about a mustard seed. The mustard seed is the smallest seed on earth which would lead us to believe that the harvest wouldn’t be very big. But Jesus tells us that from the smallest seed, comes the mustard bush, one of the largest of all shrubs. It ends up having such large branches that birds use its branches for nesting and for shade so they can get out of the hot sun. Verse thirty three (33) tells us that Jesus “used many such stories and illustrations to teach the people as much as they were able to understand.” Jesus taught the people just enough so that they could understand but the disciples were the ones that had it made or lucked out because verse thirty four (34) goes on to say that “afterward when he was alone with his disciples, he explained the meaning [of everything] to them.” Think how much easier the bible would be to understand or how much easier the kingdom of God would be to understand if we could have access to all the explanations that Jesus gave his disciples. There would be less confusion, better understanding, and people like me could get rid of all the commentaries and all the text books that I have accumulated over the years that help me better understand what Jesus is talking about. How much easier would all this God stuff be if we could have private tutoring sessions with Jesus. But it doesn’t work that way. We don’t have access to one on one meetings and lecture classes with Jesus and we don’t have a commentary written specifically by him, so we have to do the next best thing and that is to do our best to understand all of this with the help of the Holy Spirit that speaks God’s word and God’s meaning and God’s love to each of us. In these two parables this morning we learn about seeds and planting, and growing and harvesting, but more importantly we learn about a topic that seems to be the most important topic of all to Jesus – that being, the kingdom of God. We learn that the kingdom of God is about the unknown. The kingdom of God is a mystery…and for most of us, well, for most of us, we don’t like the unknown; we don’t like this feeling of mystery in our lives. We want to know what’s going on, what’s going to happen next and we want to know why it’s going to happen. We want order. We want structure and we want to be in control. But at the same time, we are also reminded who is really in control. We’re reminded that God is sovereign and that God works in God’s own way and in God’s own time. A second thing we learn about the kingdom of God is that many of the things God does may appear to us to be small and insignificant, but like a tiny mustard seed, the kingdom will somehow continue to grow in mysterious and significant ways. That’s what Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus” is about. It’s about affirming that all the kingdoms of this world will someday come together to become one…to become the kingdom of God. In the “Hallelujah Chorus,” we are affirming that God’s kingdom will someday reign supreme and that someday we will all experience life here on earth exactly as God intends it to be. That’s what we are trying to accomplish through the mission programs Bethel church participates in. We are, in our own little way, reaching out to others as we try to bring the kingdom of God closer to reality. Week after week we give our money to this program or that program…every week we give our food to Church Community Services to help the hungry. Think how many meals we have provided over the years with our Souper Bowl Sunday soup collection. Time after time we are continually doing something with our resources to help others that are less fortunate than we are. That’s what it’s all about…the overall reality of the kingdom of God begins right here with all of us, right here in this church with all that we are doing for others. We also learn this morning that Jesus will never force feed us. He will never overload us or give us more than we need or more than we can handle. He only gives us as much as we need or as much as we can understand at any given point in our lives…and that is good news for people like you and me, people who are not perfect and sometimes have a hard time catching on and understanding things. He gives us just what we need for each day and he gives us just what we ned for each situation of our lives. We may not fully understand all at one time, but we get just enough…little by little we continue to get a little glimpse of the coming of the kingdom of God because that’s all Jesus feels we really need. God, you see, will provide for our needs. All we have to do is trust him and be open to receiving whatever it is that he is willing to show us or to give us at any particular time in our lives. But with so much turmoil going on all over the world it makes us wonder whether it’s worth all the time and the effort we put in to promoting the kingdom of God. With all the evil that is going on throughout the world, we can’t help but wonder…is what I’m doing…is what we are doing helping…is it making a difference or are we just spinning our wheels? Let’s face it, over two thousand (2,000) years of discipleship and constant faithfulness have gone by and to judge by what we see on television and read in the newspapers the world doesn’t seem to be getting a whole lot better. There have been times over the years when Christians believed that the coming of the Kingdom was just around the corner. During a forty (40) year span from 1880 – 1920, Christians in the United States were convinced the Kingdom was near. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., wrote an article in the Saturday Evening Post in February of 1918 stating, “I see the church molding the thought of the world as it has never done before, leading in all great movements of history as it should. I see it literally establishing the kingdom of God on earth.” But here we are, over 100 years later, still waiting for the coming of the kingdom of God. Here we are some 100 years later, and as Bob Dylan once said, “We don’t talk so proud.” Because instead of things getting better and showing signs of the coming of the kingdom, the world seems to be going down hill and is in worse shape than it was in Rockefeller’s time. Sometimes things get so bad that we’re not really sure if good will ever overcome evil in this world. But that’s why Jesus told these parables – parables about sowing seeds; about the different results; about the hidden growth; about the mustard seed; and about the harvest. The good news in all of this is God’s promise that the harvest will come…that the kingdom of God will someday come. As surely as you and I know that physical death is going to come to each of us, Jesus tells us that you can trust in the forces of God’s mercy, and in the forces of God’s grace, and in the forces of God’s love to someday usher in the kingdom of God. In the mean time we can’t give up and we shouldn’t be discouraged by its timing, he says. Don’t be discouraged by the size of its beginning and don’t be overly concerned about the lack of visible signs you see despite all of your efforts to promote God’s kingdom. The kingdom of God will come. It is working below the surface…but it is working and it will come, maybe not on our time, and maybe not in our time, but it will come when God is good and ready. God’s kingdom is one of grace and mercy and will come only on God’s time…only when God is ready for its fulfillment. Just as the farmer doesn’t understand how the seed germinates and grows…we don’t fully understand how the kingdom of God grows in hidden, mysterious ways…ways that are independent of our human efforts and our knowledge. The work of God goes on quietly but it goes on powerfully…because like the tree that grows in the crack of the concrete pavement or like the tiny weed that pushes its way through the asphalt, nothing can stop its growth. Weather can cause all sorts of problems for farmers and fruit growers. Earlier in the spring the fruit growers lost a whole lot of money because it got warm and brought out all the budding and flowering on the fruit trees and then it turned right around and got below freezing at night and killed off a lot of their crop…and a lot of their profit. But one thing I’ve noticed in all of this is when they interview the farmers and the fruit growers on TV, none of them seem to worry too much about what could happen to them if the weather doesn’t change or what has already happened to them because the weather did change. They always seem to be accepting of the drastic changes and they always seem take it all in stride…and whether they make money or lose money they’ll be right back at it again next year. If it were me and I was about to lose all my crops or had already lost all my crops, I wouldn’t be a very happy guy. But these guys just matter of factly say that there isn’t a whole lot they can do about it and so they will just keep “plugging along” and wait and see what happens. And that’s what our parable suggests this morning…that we are to simply be faithful farmers, that we are to be faithful sowers of the seed, and we are not to worry about the outcome because God is in charge and God will take care of things. God will continue to get the seeds to germinate and grow and when God is ready God will eventually produce the harvest. Mankind thinks in terms of the moment…we think in the terms of the “here and now.” That’s because we’re impatient. God, on the other hand, has all eternity to do his work. “For you, Moses wrote in the 90th Psalm, a thousand years are like a passing day! As brief as just a few night hours!” (v. 4). So don’t give up! Don’t be discouraged. Continue to work for the fulfillment of God’s kingdom. Continue to scatter the seeds. Work diligently…but work patiently. “If we live in patience, and if we live in hope…we shall, by the grace of God, [always] be ready [for the coming of God’s kingdom]” (The Gospel of Mark, William Barclay, p. 126). |
Bethel United Methodist Church
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