Separating the Weeds from the Wheat
Keith M. McFarren
July 19, 2026
Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43
    Jesus is talking
about weeds this morning… a weed called “bearded darnel” that was one of the
biggest pains in the “you know what” that a farmer could have.  Darnel looked exactly like wheat so when it
started to grow it was very, very difficult to distinguish between the
two.  But eventually as the wheat and the
darnel grew they begin to look a little different and the farmer could begin to
tell the difference between the two but by then, the roots of the wheat and the
roots of the darnel had intertwined or grown together and you couldn’t pull out
the darnel without pulling up the wheat at the same time.  So the best thing to do was to let them
continue to grow together until harvest time.
    At harvest time
though, it was imperative that they be separated because the darnel weed was
poisonous and it would make you dizzy and sick to your stomach.  
    So to keep from
having it mixed in with the wheat the farmer would have to take some extreme
measures after it was harvested and hire extra women to come in and have them
go through all of the wheat, piece by piece, and separate one from the
other.  
    The farmer in our
text this morning was a good man, a man just trying to make a living.  He wanted to plant a good crop that would
hopefully grow and benefit not only his family but also the entire
community.  
    He had no idea
that as he slept, someone would come along in the middle of the night and do
such a terrible thing.  So he had to slow
things down and take the extra step of hiring extra help, which cost him extra
money, plus now he had the added mental stress of making sure that every little
piece of the darnel was found otherwise someone would get sick if they ate
it.  
    A process that
should have been very simple and gone very smoothly had to be made into a big
unwanted production because of someone who not only wanted to ruin his crop,
but at the same time ruin his life.  
     In life,
disastrous things can happen if we fall asleep or if we don’t pay
attention.  That’s why Jesus tells us to
stay alert because all sorts of bad things can happen if we don’t pay attention
to the people around us.  
    There are people
in the world, both inside and outside of the church, who care only about
themselves.  They have ulterior motives
and their own agenda and they will do whatever it takes to get what they
want.  But the problem is you can’t
always tell who the good person is and who the bad person is just by looking at
them.
    The bible never
tells us the woman’s name but an angel of the Lord came to her and told her
that she was going to have a son, to be named Samson and he was to be a
perpetual Nazarite.  Of all the people in
the world perpetual Nazarites were the holiest of the holy. They were to never
drink wine, or eat anything that was ceremonially unclean and they were to
never cut their hair – ever.  
    The angel told
Samson’s mother that her son would be blessed by God and that he would be the
one to deliver Israel from the Philistines who had controlled the Israelites
for over 40 years.  Samson was born a
child of God and God continually blessed him as he grew and God continued to
stay with him as he led the Israelites against the Philistines.  
You’ve heard about Samson strength.  
·He
tore a lion in half.  
·He
took 300 foxes and tied them together, two by two, tail to tail, and then he
fixed a torch to each pair and turned them loose to torch the grain fields of
the Philistines.  
·He
snapped the ropes of the Philistines after they captured him, grabbed the jaw
bone of a donkey and killed 1,000 Philistines.

    The guy was a
behemoth.  He could have been a
professional wrestler and could have beaten Hulk Hogan and King Kong Bundy
easily. He could have made millions of dollars.

    But he had one
weakness in his life and that weakness was women.  He loved women and he couldn’t keep his hands
off of them nor could the women keep their hands off of him.
    He was tall, dark
and handsome and he was stronger than an ox but they also loved him because of
his beautiful hair – it was long and flowing because remember – he was a
Nazarite and it had never been cut.
    It was like a
dream come true when he found Delilah.
He couldn’t keep his hands off of her and she couldn’t keep her hands
off of him.  Samson flexed his muscles
for her and that was all it took – she was hooked.  She looked at him with those big starry eyes
and Samson melted right on the spot.  
    Samson was so much
in love with Delilah that he told her the one thing he had never ever told
anyone before.  He told her his God given
secret of how he maintained his strength. ..that it was all in his hair.  All in that long, beautiful hair. Cut off the
hair and the Spirit of the Lord was no longer with him.  Cut off the hair and he was no stronger than
the normal man.  
    Then one night
after they went out for dinner and then dancing and as Delilah sat on the couch
in the family room and Samson slept with his head on her lap, a Philistine
barber sneaked into the room and cut off all of his hair and immediately Samson
lost all of his strength.  
    The Philistine
army rushed in and captured him, they gouged his eyes out, and they took him
out into a big field and 3,000 Philistines laughed and made fun of him as the
muscle bound blind man blind man wandered around helplessly in the big field.
    Delilah put on a
good show didn’t she?  She knew what she
was doing.  She hid herself well. She was
his best friend, his girlfriend, his lover and we could probably say she was
his bride to be.  But there was something
else.  
    She was also the
beautiful girl who turned out to be a spy for the Philistines. She had been
bribed and hired by the Philistines to find out exactly what it was that made
Samson tick and she did a good job of it.
    She looked good on
the outside but on the inside she was a completely different person.  On the inside she was an ungodly, evil person
with her own agenda.  The kind of person
Jesus was referring to when he said to “stay awake” because you can’t tell the
good people from the bad.  
    There are people
all over - in the church and outside of the church - who want to destroy the
work we want to do as Christians.  That’s
the kind of world we live in.  The man
didn’t come in the middle of the night to sow the weeds because he hated wheat;
he came because he wanted to destroy the good work of the farmer.  
    Jesus tells us in
the 13th chapter of Mark that we “can’t sleep.”  We have to constantly be on the alert for
people slipping into our lives just like the man who slipped into the farmer’s
field in the middle of the night to destroy his crop. We have to be alert to
the Delilah’s of the world.  We have to
be alert because when you work on the side of Christianity you automatically
have a formidable opponent by the name of Satan.
    But Satan won’t
wait until the middle of the night…he’ll send people into our lives right in
the middle of the day to work against whatever it is we are trying to do for
God.  They don’t come because they
dislike us personally, they come because they dislike what we stand for and
what we are trying to do for God’s kingdom.

    But how are we to
know who these people are?  What do they
look like?  How do we tell the good
people from the bad and what are we supposed to do with them?
    If you go down to
Elletsville, a little town just northwest of Bloomington, on a Sunday morning
you’ll hear the loud, indistinguishable rumble of Harley Davidson motorcycles
coming into town.
    If you met these
guys on the road they’d scare you to death with their big mustaches, beards,
tattoos, black leather coats, and vests and pants, big motorcycle boots and
bandanas tied around their heads.
    This is a bunch of
guys who have done it all. They’ve experienced drug abuse and drug addiction,
alcohol abuse and alcohol addiction.
They have been in fist fights; they’ve been in knife fights; they’ve
been in gun fights and have committed crimes that have put them in prison.  
    These are the kind
of people that people like you and I don’t even look at because you don’t want
to make them mad.
    But each and every
one of these people (men/women) has given their lives to God and asked for his
forgiveness.  And every week the former
convicts, drug users and abusers, all members of the Unchained Motorcycle Gang,
take their new found lives out on the road to evangelize and spread the Good
News of the Gospels and do missionary work in prisons, jails, and bike
rallies.  
    A strange looking
bunch of people to do God’s work aren’t they?  
But then again what are God’s people supposed to look like?  It’s hard to tell just who belongs to God and
who doesn’t.              Some people may
look and sound like they are good but in all reality they are bad. Others
appear to be bad but instead they are good.
All we see is what’s out here…not what’s in here (heart).
    Samson fell head
over heals for Delilah because she was a beautiful woman, because she smelled
good, because she said things that made him feel like a man and it was the
worst move he could have made.
    If we were to see
the Unchained Gang’s motorcycles sitting outside a restaurant we would keep
right on going wouldn’t we,  because we
would have judged these guys by the way they look.
    It’s hard to
distinguish between the weeds and the wheat and it’s hard for us to distinguish
between those who are God’s people and those who aren’t.
    What Jesus is
telling us this morning is that it is not our place to judge other people.  It’s not our place to decide who is good and
who is bad because we don’t always know the whole story.  No one who sees only part of a life can judge
the whole life and no one who knows only part of a person can judge the whole
person.
    Yet, we are
expected to produce a fruitful harvest despite all the weeds that grow around
us.  We are expected to keep our lives
focused on God and to continue to grow and strengthen our faith and work toward
perfection in spite of all the adverse conditions the world throws at us.
    God will
ultimately be the judge and he promises us that everyone who lives a sinful life
and everyone who does evil in this world will someday pay a terrible price for
what they have done.
    Like the weeds,
the ungodly person will be destroyed.
But the Godly person will live forever and the Godly person will “shine
like the sun in their father’s kingdom” (Matthew 13:43).