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Mark 4:1-20
Are You Interested Enough?

If you regularly attend the meetings of God's people, and if you're regularly taught the Word of God, then it's been explained to you and applied to your life many times. Our Lord's parable here in Mark's Gospel, then, is about you and any other people who hear the Word with you from week to week. It's about what you and I do with it after we hear it.

Too often, this passage has been thought of as only concerned with those who hear the evangelistic message, the message of salvation. That's an important application, but our Lord's teaching here also concerns any and all others who hear the Word preached and explained. I believe our Lord's purpose here is best accomplished when we carefully examine our own attitudes after we hear the Word .

We're going to divide our consideration of our Lord's teaching here into two parts. We'll consider verses 1 and 10-12 now, then the rest afterwards. We're going to divide it that way because the listening crowd in Jesus' day was divided. It was divided between those who truly listened, who very much wanted an explanation of what our Lord was saying and those who didn't care, who didn't stay to hear it explained. Our Lord made a difference between these two groups of people. It's a huge difference, and it's one that should concern us.

The parable itself is really quite clear. Even in our day, a day in which most of us have very little relationship to the soil, we can still understand it's extreme simplicity. A farmer sows lots of seed, but only some of the seed grows and produces grain. There are various reasons why some of the seed doesn't produce.

But remember that this is a parable - its purpose isn't merely to describe farming problems. It concerned Jesus' hearers. He was teaching an extremely large multitude by the sea, many of whom no doubt came only because of the excitement and general curiosity caused by Jesus' ministry. As in the case of most such crowds, many no doubt didn't care much for the teaching or its meaning. They were probably glad for a short parable, so they could get back to the normal activities of their lives. But not everyone.

There were always some who listened more carefully. In fact, there were some who came to hear Him every time Jesus taught because they didn't want to miss anything He said. Unlike the rest of the multitude, they went home excited, not only by the great healings and great crowds, but by the meaning for their lives of what He said. They thought about it when they got up in the morning, while they worked through the day, and when they went home at night. They wanted to hear more. They began to relate to God in a new way, and they remained long after the crowds left, hoping to have some point explained, some question about God and life answered. They were Jesus' "followers," and they were the ones still there to ask the meaning of the parable after the multitude left.

I think we can easily find an application to our own lives. I think we could well ask ourselves whether we stay behind to ask questions. When our Lord is teaching His people today - by means of His pastors and teachers – are we still there afterwards to ask questions or discuss some important point? Are we so eager to understand  that we hang on every word and aren't satisfied without full understanding?" Oh may God make us the "inner circle," those who can't bear to walk away careless after we've heard!

Those who stayed on the occasion Mark describes were probably those who came right up to the front of the standing crowd and never left it. They were the first ones there and the last to leave. Of course they included the twelve, who had been personally called by Jesus to remain with Him 24 hours of every day, but there were others as well. They were the real believers - those who were convinced that Jesus really was the Christ, the anointed of God, sent from Heaven to be their Savior. They listened to Him because they believed He had the answers to their own and all the world's troubles.

We need to ask ourselves whether we're like them, whether we believe those things about Him. If we really do, then we speak of Him reverently, and we think of Him reverently. In fact, if we believe He's sent from Heaven, then we really want Him to be Lord of every aspect of our lives - our work, our recreation, our finances, our families, our health, and even our thought lives. If that's so of us, then we have an eager desire to listen to His Word and to know more about Him.

To all with eagerness like that, Jesus makes a wonderful promise.  He says, "To you it is given to know the mystery of the Kingdom of God." In other words, if you're one of the people to whom Jesus makes this promise, then He's telling you that He'll explain - make clear - the "mystery of the Kingdom of God" as He did here. In Mark's day He explained these things verbally – but in our day He does it by His Spirit, either directly as we read His Word or by means of His teachers.

Now, as I promised, here's the rest of the passage.  If you're part of the "inner circle" – those who stay for further explanation - then you need to pay particular attention to verses 10 through 20. They concern you.

These verses begin with a quotation from Isaiah, one that could easily trip us up. But before we try to understand it, we need to at least try to see the overall purpose of our Lord's parables and of Isaiah's teaching as well. We need to see that parables weren't used to hide the truth or to cloud issues. In fact, they were given for the purpose of illustration, to make the truth even more understandable, more vivid, and more memorable. Our Lord1s illustrations from nature or from life give us more insight than we might otherwise have.  He uses the more familiar to illustrate the less familiar.

But you need to notice that the Lord seems to be saying that His purpose in giving the parables was to hide the truth from "outsiders!" To make His point, He quotes from Isaiah 6:9, 10, where He seems to be saying that the parables are given to keep people from "converting," to keep them from being "forgiven their sins."

But we need to turn to the context in Isaiah. In it we learn that the prophet had been commissioned to go to a people who won't listen to him, a people who heard with their ears but ignored with their hearts. Isaiah was told to be quite sarcastic with them. He was to tell them to "go right on listening, yet not understanding . . . looking, yet not getting it."

Why would God want him to be sarcastic like that? Possibly because sarcasm would tend to awaken these hard-hearted people. But then Jehovah goes on to tell Isaiah to, "render the hearts of this people insensitive, their ears dull, and their eyes dim, lest they see with their eyes, understand with their hearts, and return and be healed." In other words, Isaiah was to give them that one last shot of sarcasm, then continue prophesying - while people were ignoring him, and while their hearts became harder and harder.

God knew it would happen. He sees the future as well as the past. He knows our thoughts and where those thoughts will inevitably lead. He knew that Israel wouldn't really listen to Isaiah. He continued to send His prophet to them, though, and it was their own willfulness that did them in. Even if it had been His purpose, God didn't need to actually make "their ears dull and their eyes dim," because they did it quite well for themselves as they listened to Isaiah.  So what we read here is heavenly sarcasm. God never kept these people from converting or from underestanding with their hearts - they were fully capable of doing it themselves! He's just saying, "Go ahead, Isaiah, keep preaching to these hard-hearted people. They won't listen. They'll just tune you out. But keep telling them anyway, even though it just results in harder hearts and duller ears!"

It's the same with the parables of our Lord. Any who wanted could remain for the explanation after the meeting was over. Anyone who wanted would be free to join the "inner circle." Our Lord never turned anyone away. But we need to notice that only the twelve disciples and a relatively small number of others remained for explanation. The rest had heard all they wanted to hear. With dull ears and dim eyes, they departed - voluntarily.

Jesus explained this same phenomenon on another occasion. John reports that He said, "All that the Father gives Me shall come to Me, and the one who comes to Me I will certainly not cast out." (Jn. 6:37) People come to Jesus, because they are "given" to Him by the Father. No others come. But the others do exactly what they want to do.

In fact, those who stay and those who don't are the very ones described in our Lord's parable about the seeds and soils! Those who stay are illustrated by the seeds that sprout, grow, and remain. Those who don't stay are one or the other of the other seeds of Jesus' illustrative parable. We'll consider the rest of Jesus' illustration when we look at the rest of the verses in this passage. For now, though, suffice it to say that some didn't stay for Jesus' explanation because they realized that the He was talking about them - they didn't want to hear any more! May God grant to us a heart to hear Him, even when He speaks about us!

So we've seen the differences between those who stayed to ask questions after our Lord finished teaching and those who didn't stay - those who wanted to understand more and those who didn't care. As we look at the remainder of the passage - the parable itself and its explanation - we'll actually be focussing upon the same two classes of people. But when we do, we'll be considering how such differences arise.

To make best use of our Lord's similes in this parable, we need to understand two concepts: we need to understand who the Sower is, and we need to understand what seed is sown.

In John's Gospel, (16:27, 28), speaking of His own origin and destination, our Lord says, "For the Father Himself loves you, because you have loved me, and have believed that I came forth from the Father. I came forth from the Father, and have come into the world; and I am leaving the world again, and going to the Father." In our Lord's parable in Mark's Gospel Jesus tells us that He was the Sower, the One Who came from the Father to sow the seed.  Since His Resurrection He has come back into the world in a special way by His Spirit to continue sowing.  He's still sowing.

But we must remember that He alone is the great Sower. If any of us attempt to sow that same seed, but not by the leading and blessing of the Spirit of Christ, then that seed will never sprout, never bring forth fruit. It's very, very necessary for us to remember that we're mere field hands. Not only might we sow when He hasn't sent us, but we may sow in the wrong places as well.  We might attempt to sow the seed on the "waypath," or on the "rocky ground," or among "the briars" - or onto the good soil. We don't know what kind of "soil" it is. We should sow as well as we can, but the ultimate result is the responsibility of the sovereign Sower.

But what is this "Word" that is sown as "seed?" Matthew quotes our Lord as saying, "The seed is the Word of the Kingdom." (Matt. 13:19) This is to say that the seed is the Word of God, and, more particularly, it's the Word about a King Who was to come into the world, a world whose people are in rebellion against Him.  But it's also a world in which He intends to rescue some people from the general rebellion so that they will love and serve Him forever!

The "Word of the Kingdom," then, is the Word about this rescue operation and about the Rescuer.  So it's a word about the nature of Christ's kingdom, a kingdom that is also called the Church. In other words it's every chapter and every verse of the entire Bible. It's that Bible as it is preached and taught by the Spirit of the great Sower through the lips of His ministering people.

Let's look now at the rescue operation in terms of our Lord's parable.  First of all, let's think about the "waypath" along which some of the "Word-seed" might be sown. A little background helps. In the day of our Lord fields of grain were divided into small rectangles or squares that were completely surrounded by paths from which the sower could scatter seeds by hand, do necessary weeding, etc. These "waypaths" were trodden down and hard - any seed accidentally dropped there could not be covered by soil and thus wouldn't sprout.

Jesus tells us that whenever the seed of the Word is accidentally dropped on a "waypath," immediately Satan comes and snatches it up.  What's meant by such "snatching?"  How does Satan do it?  Does it happen in today's world?

For best understanding we need to think about what happens when we ourselves hear the Word. Isn't it true that doubts sometimes come into our hearts as we hear? Doesn't the unbeliever's taunt that we're using Christianity as a "religious crutch" sometimes make us wonder if we've been deluded? And then there are the overwhelming numbers around us of those who don't believe. Does that perhaps tend to make us wonder whether it could ever be true that we are wrong and they are right? Or perhaps, when we're least aware, we may conclude that the message of Jesus' dying for sinners on the Cross is preposterous.  From the human standpoint, it just isn't reasonable!

Doubts like these are lies, and Satan is the "father of liers."  (John 8:44) In the parable "the birds of the air" (plural) snatch up the seed – and by this plurality of birds we see that Satan plants as many doubts as possible in our minds. By them he tries to remove the seed as quickly as possible from our hearts, because he doesn't want it to remain where it might conceivably germinate and produce fruit some day.

In the second simile, the Word sown produces immediate – but temporary - results. The Greek for "sown" is a present tense, best translated as "is being sown."  So He's telling us that this kind of sowing continues in our day and beyond. In this case, the seed of the Word is heard, understood in some sense, and there are immediate results.

These "quick results" are easy to find. Men, women, or children come to Gospel meetings. While there, they hear the Word. The people around them seem to be receiving it in a believing way, so, since it's a "safe" environment for believing, they "believe" it too. After all, they don't want to appear different from those around them! It may even sound good to them, as far as they understand it. They may be impressed with all the benefits they imagine will be theirs if they believe in Christ.

But we read that there are some possible defects in these quick results. In the first place, our Lord says that these people don't have "roots in themselves." He means that the trouble is that their "roots" are in the people around them, while they themselves merely react to peer pressure.

True believers have roots that can survive in the everyday world. Such good roots spring from deep in their  hearts.  They have a deep conviction of having sinned against a good and holy God, along with a conviction that only God's love can overcome it and that redemption can come only through His Son.  They've come to a conviction that Jesus Christ is willing to receive them as they are – as they call upon Him and repent of their sin.  They have believed that they are His and He is theirs, so that they rejoice in His lordship over them and in the fact that His lordship extends even to the most mundane aspects of their daily lives. These "roots" are deep in the heart-soil of true believers.

But the temporary believers of whom our Lord speaks don't have these roots. They're moved to "receive with joy" the Word sown in their hearts – because of peer pressure and/or supposed benefits.

The second defect in these temporary believers is that their "sprouting" doesn't produce "fanatical" faith! Peer pressure moves them to receive the Word, but peer pressure also keeps them from being too zealous in their "Christianity." They were good and beautiful "plants" when they were in the midst of the Christian body, but they still want to be accepted by their worldly, unbelieving peers "on the outside" as well. When those friends criticize the Christian community, and when they don't want to socialize with "fanatics for Christ," why then these temporary believers defect and join their unbelieving peer groups - they are "scandalized" by the fanaticism of true believers. They can and do rationalize their temporary belief by saying that they're Christians all right, but not foolish fanatics as some are. They prefer to be whatever is acceptable in the society around them.

The last of the temporary believers illustrated by the parable are likened to plants in a briar patch. The problem here is simply priority: the Word of God is always less important than anything else. For instance, it's not as important as "the cares of this age." All of us are  unfortunately quite familiar with this one - we have to earn a living; we have families to care for; cars to work on, yards to whip into shape, television shows to watch, friends to visit, and even good works or religious exercises to accomplish - there's no time left to spend just seeking to more perfectly know Jesus Christ. And these cares and concerns seem only to multiply. We no sooner accomplish one thing than two more absolutely necessary things take its place! Give a little time here, followed immediately by twice as much there! Sound familiar?

We say, "I would have read the Bible this morning, but . . ." "I would have gone to hear the Word explained at church today, but . . ." "I would have spent some time worshipping and praising Him, but . . ." So we are dangerously close to becoming timporary believers, seeds that sprout but only last a short time because of worldly cares, however legitimate.

And as if such cares weren't enough, there's more. Our Lord says the "briars" may also be "the deception of riches." We often disguise our financial desires as being modest, or, more rarely, we may forthrightly admit that we are seeking to get all we can get. In either case, material gain comes first, and our Lord and His will for us are a distant second.

Actually, the problem is caused by at least two possible deceptions: in the one we might assume that riches are going to make us happy and fulfilled, or we might think that some particular level of riches would be enough to satisfy. The very poor and the very rich are alike at this point: both imagine that if they just had enough for some specified purpose, then it would truly be enough. But it never is! It's always a "moving target." Riches only whet the appetite, and the appetite grows as the riches increase. The problem is that riches, in and of themselves, can't produce happiness or fulfillment.

At this point in His explanation of the parables, our Lord must have realized how long His teaching might be if He were to discuss all possible "briars." So He cuts it short by describing His last category with the words, "and the lusts for other things." The list of human lusts is endless. They can all turn us away from what should be our highest priority - our Lord Himself.

We need to be the "seeds" planted in the "good soil," seeds that sprout, grow up, mature, and produce fruit - and we need to pray that He will make us so. We need, in the words of this parable, to "hear the Word, and receive it as part of our lives." The Greek at this point is vividly descriptive: we need to "go on receiving alongside" the Word of God. It's a present tense, a tense that is well translated, "always continuing to receive."

The word "alongside" is important - it means that we can't just file the Word in the "round file" of our minds, never to be considered again. It needs to be taken into our hearts and lives, into a continuously viewable place, so that it becomes the guiding light for all that we do. That kind of receiving must at least be the desire of our hearts, so that as often as we fall away from the Word we will turn to it again.

Our Lord makes a wonderful promise to those who receive His Word in that way: He promises that they will "bear fruit!" This is just what every true Christian most wants to do. Just as fruit is pleasing to the orchardist's eyes, so our love, joy, peace, patience, etc. are pleasing to our Lord, and every true Christian desires more than anything else to please his Lord.

Our Lord mentions three categories of fruitbearing.  He says, "some thirtyfold, and some sixtyfold, and some an hundred" We tend to think (as we had to in our school days): "thirtyfold" equals a "C," "sixtyfold" is a "B," and "an hundred" is an "A!" But our Lord's doesn't think that way. What He is emphasizing is that the fruit will be abundant in all cases. All good soil is productive, and every true Christian will bear fruit. After all, it's the fruit of His Spirit (Gal. 5:22, 23), and every Christian is indwelt by His Spirit (Rom. 8:9). Because it is the fruit of the Spirit, it includes obedience, love, relationship to our Lord, service to Him through service to others, labor in the world in order to glorify Him, and, finally, entrance into everlasting perfection in His Presence!

But fruit always takes time to appear and ripen. It begins with a single cell. If it's there, if it's healthy, if its environment is right, and if time is given, beautiful, ripe fruit will result. So with our Lord's work in our hearts: it begins with a single principle, the principle of strong, new love to Jesus Christ. And you must have that love-seed if you are to bear any real fruit: you have to be taken up with Him, to strongly admire His Character and works. You have to have deeply within you a desire to please Him and to be like Him in character.

Then, little by little, old habits change, old ways become new ways, old works become new works. You struggle, sometimes seem dormant, sometimes you even resist, but, little by little, you grow. He loves you, and you love Him and desire to please Him. The true test is life, not full-grown fruit.

But there has to be development. The obvious question, then: what kind of soil do you have in your heart for the seed of the Word? As you hear this parable, as you understand that it's about you, how do you respond? It calls for definite response.  It calls for an eager response - a response of cultivating and watering with prayer and with serious study of the Word in order to bring forth more fruit.