Sermon from July 16, 2000
I love to walk in Longwood Gardens, whether indoors or outdoors. Orchids and Canterbury Bells in the Conservatory, banks of Rhododendron and ranks of Triumph Tulip along the sidewalks smite eye and nose with beauty and fragrance. Copper Beech, Bald Cypress, solitary Elm, transplanted Maple and even delicate Dogwood give a sense of something solid and immovable, framing the sudden swatches of color in the flower gardens.

As you walk up the hill from the Italian Water Garden, on the north side of the walkway, a large American Beech appears to be in process of doing a death-defying leap off the sidewalk of the hill. Its girth and height and weight suggest that it should tip over at the touch of a finger. It does not, and when you look for the secret of this prodigy, you find it behind the tree in the hillside.

Giant roots have pierced into the hill, and some of the root structure has actually reached so high as to be higher than the lowest part of the tree trunk itself. Some of the exposed roots look like woody muscles flexed in a powerful effort to sustain the great tree's precarious balance on the hillside.

Lord, give my spirit rots like that! Lord, give my children roots like that! Lord, give my congregation roots like that! With your permission I would like to do some gardening in the soil of our souls today. My spade, if that is not too violent a metaphor, comes in the form of the meaning of Jesus' parable in Mark 4.

Anyone hearing the parable in verses 1-8 for the first time would understand every word Jesus said and have no idea what He meant. Now, that does not make sense, does it? Why would the master Teacher teach so as to leave His listeners without a clue to His meaning? We do not like someone's doing that to us. It seems frivolous, a waste of our time. The lack of understanding afflicted not only Jesus' severest detractors but also His closest followers, as verse 10 says. When he was alone, the Twelve and the others around him asked him about the parables, meaning, "Explain yourself. We don't get it." His friends and admirers got far more than they asked for.

Jesus did explain what the words of His parable meant. Verse 14-20 will give His explanation. Before He gave that explanation, He explained why He spoke in parables in the first place. Verses 11-12 give that explanation. Hearing His explanation is like wading in shallow water and without warning stepping into water a thousand feet deep.

He told them, "The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you. But to those on the outside everything is said in parables so that, 'they may be ever seeing but never perceiving, and ever hearing but never understanding; otherwise they might turn and be forgiven!'"

Isaiah 6:9-10, which Jesus quoted in verse 11, warned of judgment to come on the nation Israel. Mark 4 will make sense if we understand Jesus' use of parables as a warning of judgment to come on a national scale. Mark means for us to understand that like Isaiah of old, Jesus was a prophet whose message had national implications. To reject Him, as official Jewish leadership had done, would have national consequences.

Jesus' warning of national judgment seems to come out of the blue, unless we remember what precedes it in chapter three. Powerful men from Jerusalem had come bearing an official verdict about Jesus of Nazareth. Mark 3:22 says, And the teachers of the law who came down from Jerusalem said, "He is possessed by Beelzebub! By the prince of demons he is driving out demons."

This official verdict contradicted evidence Jesus had used to persuade people that His spiritual claims were valid. He said, e.g., "But that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins ..." He said to the paralytic, "I tell you, get up, take your mat and go home." Jesus intended for the healing of the paralytic to give powerful, material evidence of His authority to forgive sins.

The teachers of the law came down from Jerusalem and said, officially, "He doesn't have authority to forgive sins, if He healed him by the power of the devil." They were taking Jesus' own argument and turning it against Him and attempting to turn the people against Jesus. As a result, Jesus began to teach in unintelligible parables to symbolize the divine judgment that was going on in people, who no longer had the power to discern what God was doing in Israel.

Jesus stood in a long line of Israeli prophets who warned Israel of judgment to come and often accompanied their unpopular messages with symbolic actions. Jeremiah once broke a clay jar in the presence of Jerusalem's leaders as a warning that God would smash Israel and Jerusalem. Jesus' warning of judgment to come was not unique to Him; nor was His symbolic action of speaking in parables. He was a prophet and acted like a prophet to His people.

Now that Mark has established that crucial point about Jesus, he then has Jesus go on to explain to those who had discerned God's action in Israel what the actual words of His parable meant. We begin in verse 14. "The farmer sows the word." The word is Jesus' message: "The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is near." Block by block Mark has built up in His story of Jesus a picture of what Jesus did and said to demonstrate the presence of the kingdom in the daily affairs of Israel. Jesus' parable is all about the different ways people respond to His message.

Actually, the first group never has a chance to respond. Verse 15: Some people are like seed along the path, where the word is sown. As soon as they hear it, Satan comes and takes away the word that was sown in them. This belongs to the mystery of evil. It is consistent with what Mark has taught us about the devil thus far. When Satan tempted Jesus in the desert, we learned that Satan had in mind to turn Jesus aside from His coming death on the cross. In Mark 3 we learned that Satan is the source of that intense human suffering, called demonic possession, which destroys human personality.

It is distressing to learn that another person dislikes you. It is especially distressing to learn that another person dislikes you and actively intends to harm you. The Bible teaches that there is an evil personality loose in the world, called the devil or Satan, that actively seeks to ruin human life. Talk about the devil may seem superstitious to our secular ears.

C.S. Lewis once said this about the devil. "I know someone will ask me, 'Do you really mean, at this time of day, to re-introduce our old friend the devil – hoofs and horn and all?' Well, what the time of day has to do with it I do not know. And I am not particular about the hoofs and horns. But in other respects my answer is "Yes, I do." I do not claim to know anything about his personal appearance. If anybody really wants to know him better I would say to that person, "Don't worry. If you really want to, you will. Whether you'll like it when you do is another question,'" (Mere Christianity, 40).

The devil's intention, according to Jesus' parable, is to prevent people from receiving and responding to Jesus' message. Nothing would please him more than to come between us and God in that way. In this case of the parable the word of God does the listener no good, because he cannot even receive it. If ever you find yourself unresponsive to the scriptures, pay attention; it may be symptomatic of the devil's hateful work of coming between you and God.

Verses 16-17 call attention to the first positive response to Jesus' message. Others, like seed sown on rocky places, hear the word and at once receive it with joy. But since they have no root, they last only a short time. When trouble or persecution comes because of the word, they quickly fall away.

This refers to people who make a good beginning and are in danger of making a bad end. They receive the word with joy, but when the going gets tough, they quickly fall away. Jesus pictures their falling away in the very suggestive words that begin verse 17. "They have no root." They have no depth, no staying power. What kind of root system does your spiritual life have?

Let me show you what a good root system looks like. Look at Colossians 2:6-7. So then, jus as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live in him, rooted and built up in him, strengthened in the faith as you were taught, and overflowing with thankfulness. This passage identifies two actions that build a good root system: 1) being strengthened in the faith and 2) overflowing with thankfulness. We need to add a third action from Ephesians 3:17-18. I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ. Being established in love also builds a good root system. Let's take these three actions one at a time.

First, being strengthened in the faith will build a good root system in your soul. Do you know what you believe as a Christian? Do you hold before your mature mind each day some aspect of Christian truth? One way I do this is to read the Bible every day. Thanks to Keith Brady, I came across a way to read through the entire Bible in one year. It is the most realistic method I have ever seen. We are making that available to you today. Another way I hold Christian truth before my mind is to read or listen to throughtful presentations of Christian doctrine. Especially helpful is the Apostles' Creed. Do you know the Apostles' Creed, and could you give a concise explanation of it to an interested non-Christian? We will be offering an academy course on it this fall.

Knowing what you believe as a Christian is only one part of being strengthened in the faith. Do you try to live according to what you believe? Does what you believe about God color the way you live in the world? Untested faith is unused faith, and unused faith is weak faith. The issue is not whether you are obeing everything in the Bible, but whether you are obeying something that is central to you life. Knowing what you believe and living according to what you believe will build a good root system in your soul.

Second, being established in love will build a good root system in your soul. Being established in love means, first, knowing that God loves you. Our lack of love, that is, our poverty of spirit, is not primarily the failure to love God as we ought. To put it that way turns love into one more duty that reinforces our poverty of spirit. What we need is not one more duty. What we need is to know that God loves us. Perhaps we expect to hear more than that. Perhaps we think there is more. There is not. If we ever know what it means that God loves us, we shall know there is no more. By the way, being strengthened in our faith will help us to learn that truth.

Being established in love also means loving our neighbor as ourselves. Christian love means intending and, where possible, for the sake of Christ, doing what is best for the other person, regardless of who the person is, regardless of what it may cost us, and regardless of what we get for our efforts. The default setting of the human heart that loved like that would express itself this way: "I welcome each person who requires my attention today, as if that person has been sent to me by Jesus Christ, and to honor Christ I will seek to serve this person in any way I can." Knowing that God loves us and loving our neighbor as ourselves will build a good root system in your soul.

Third, overflowing with thankfulness will build a good root system in your soul. Gratitude is having the joyful humility to admit you could never make it one day on your own without God and without more people than you can remember.

Overflowing gratitude toward our God and Savior for His creation and His great acts of salvation is the joyful humility that keeps us properly related to Him. Look at Romans 1:21. For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Futile thinking and dark hearts make a recipe for human disaster. Paul says they come from a failure to glorify and give thanks to God.

A loss of gratitude means a loss of the humility to admit you could never make it one day on your own. It means a certain forgetfulness has led you to the illusion of self-sufficiency. The most powerful man on earth would not enjoy power for long without his trash collector. Both our masters and our servants make it possible for us to have whatever success we have in this world. Great people have great gratitude. The greatest people have the greatest gratitude to the God of Jesus Christ and praise Him from whom all blessings flow.

Being strengthened in the faith, being established in love, and overflowing with thankfulness will build into our souls a spiritual root system that is prepared to handle trouble or persecution that comes because of the word. And it will come. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour (1 Pet. 5:8). He had just as soon devour you as anyone.

This truth goes deeper. It is not just you, sir, or you, madam, or I who needs to be strengthened in the faith, established in love, and overflowing with thankfulness. This congregation needs to have a root system that will bear whatever threats come to its life in Christ in the next 30 years of its life.

How well we build that root system depends in a large way on how you and I think about what happens in this place. If we view it as a kind of religious filling station that we pull into occasionally to fill the tank so we can keep going, it will always be marginal to what matters to us day in and day out.

On the other hand, if we view what happens in this place as a community whose faith and life bear witness to God's purpose for the human race, then we will see it as something central, not only to our lives but also to the life of people around us. You don't participate in a community to "fill the tank," but to experience in a way of life. Faith, love and thanksgiving are most definitely a way of life.

So, which model governs your connection with BVBC? The filling station model puts down few or no roots in your soul. When the evil days come, your spiritual life will wither. The faithful community has for itself and offers for its members a root system that endures the coming of evil times. We offer such a root system. Root yourself in here.