sermon

The Astonishing and Mysterious Growth of the Kingdom (Matthew Sermon 62)

July 20, 2003

Sermon Series:

Scriptures:

Andy Davis preaches a verse by verse expository sermon on Matthew 13:31-33. The main subject of the sermon is the mysterious growth of the kingdom of heaven.

Introduction 

In so many ways, I am in awe of Jesus Christ, He just takes my breath away. The things that He does are astonishing, and we know of his mighty miracles. We know He spoke to the wind and the waves, and they were completely still, and we know how He raised his friend Lazarus from the dead, dead though he was four days, yet that word of power that he was able to speak.  But what takes my breath away in this passage is the perfection of his teaching. He’s the greatest teacher that ever lived. John Calvin in his commentary, the preface to his commentary to Romans, said that what he was seeking was loosed brevity, in other words, clarity and brief-ness, to coin a phrase, that everything should be made as Albert Einstein said,  as simple as possible, and not simpler. Abraham Lincoln in his Gettysburg address was able, somehow, to capture what was being fought over in the Civil War better than anyone that had ever seen it up to that point, and he did it in 271 words. He was able to capture what was going on, that there was a test of our governmental system going on and that was what was at stake. The apostle Paul in his preaching asked the Colossians church to pray that he would make it clear as he should.

But none of these teachers have compared to Jesus Christ who, in 17 words in the Greek language encapsulates all of human history in a homely, home-maker parable in which a woman is baking bread.  Seventeen words, and He gets all of human history together. Not only that, but He gets my history as well, what’s happened in my life since the time I heard and believed the gospel. He’s got the two together, both the individual and the global in one little homely kitchen parable. Only Jesus could do that. “The Kingdom of Heaven is like yeast that a woman took and hid in a large amount of flour until it permeated the whole lump.” There it is. There’s human history. It doesn’t sound like it to me. We must come like spiritual beggars and humble ourselves and say, “Lord, Jesus what does it mean?” The parable of the mustard seed, the parable of the yeast, how can we understand these things? Once the spirit has come and has opened our eyes, we are in a great position to understand better than any generation that has ever lived because we have seen the fulfillment of these two parables over the last 2000 years, then at last we can wonder and be amazed at the teacher who sits before us, and instructs us on world history. The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his garden, though it is the smallest of all your seeds, yet, when it grows, it becomes the largest of garden plants and the birds of the air, come and nest in its branches.  The kingdom of heaven is like a little amount of yeast that a woman took and mixed or hid into a large amount of flour until it worked all through the dough. All of human history and my personal history too, wrapped up in these two little parables.

I.  Two Parables, One Central Message: The Kingdom Grows

The one message of the two parables is that the Kingdom starts small, and grows huge, as a matter of fact, dominates in the end. That’s what they mean together. The mustard seed is a proverb. The Jewish people knew that the mustard seed was proverbial for something small. “If you have faith as small as a mustard seed,” Jesus said, “You can say to this mountain, move from here to there, and it’ll move.” Jesus Himself said, “Though, it is the smallest of all your seeds.” The point is, it was the smallest of the seeds that they used to plant in the garden; all the others were larger, significantly larger, and yet, this one grows to dominate in an impressive way. Within that seed is the genetic code for explosive growth. God ordained seeds from the very beginning in Genesis 1, there would be seed-bearing trees, fruit with seed in it, animals would have seed, we would have seed, there was an explosion of growth. “Fill the earth, subdue it, rule over it, populate it.” All of it built into the seed, the genetic code only recently being understood, and we’ll never finally understand it. So, it was with Jesus, what they call this one solitary life, within his life, within his example, and within his teaching and even more, in His sacrificial bloody death on the cross, and His resurrection, there in seed form is the Kingdom of Heaven.

With the proclamation of that life and that death and that resurrection comes a kingdom which will someday conquer the world. In the end, it’s the largest of all your garden plants, and it becomes a tree so that the birds of the air can come and take rest in its branches. The Kingdom starts small, seemingly from nothing and grows to an imposing height. Now, the leaven. The leaven starts small in one corner and it comes to final and total complete permeation. Leaven, or yeast, is frequently seen to be a symbol of evil.  Jesus said in Matthew 16:6, “Be careful, be on your guard against the Yeast of the Pharisees and Sadducees.” By that He meant their bad teaching, their false teachings, be careful about it. But actually yeast is not necessarily a symbol of evil, it’s really a symbol of permeation, a symbol of spreading, many times, connected to something evil as Paul does in Galatians 5:9, “A little yeast works through the whole batch of dough,” meaning you get this bad idea, of legalism and circumcision, it’s going to affect your whole faith, it’s going to affect everything.  It really is a picture of permeation. In the Old Testament, bread with yeast included in it was part of the Levitical offering in Leviticus 7. Yeast is not intrinsically evil. To me, the parable proves it, the Kingdom of Heaven, is like yeast, therefore it can’t be evil because the king heaven is good, and therefore, if it’s like yeast, then the yeast is not intrinsically evil. The issue is spreading, it’s permeation really in a kind of a hidden sort of way.  Yeast is a one-celled fungus that connects and bumps into other things and starts to generate carbon dioxide gas and ultimately alcohol if it’s left long enough. That’s fermentation and it just spreads through one side of the lump. Jesus is lavish in his picture here. The housewife took and mixed this little amount of yeast, just hid it in the corner and just let it do its work. How much is 40 liters? Imagine 22 liters bottles of flour poured into a big vat and mixed up, and a pinch of yeast from the last leaven lump put it in and pretty soon the entire lump has risen, it’s permeated. It’s a picture of permeation. The central lesson of both these parables, is growth from small and insignificant to imposing and dominant.

Why two parables? What’s going on?  What does the one teach that is different than the other?  I think that one teaches a showy display of constant progress. You can look and see it growing. You can come in the garden and you can look and it’s six inches tall, then it’s a foot tall and pretty soon it’s five feet tall and it just keeps growing. You can see its progress. In the end, it’s very big and imposing all over the place. The other is a hidden internal mysterious growth.  A permeation really that just kind of spreads. You don’t really know what’s going on and the true story is really quite hidden, and you can’t see much evidence of the permeation. The two parables together give the whole picture of the growth of the kingdom of heaven. In one sense, it can be marked and measured. We can see milestones along the way. In another sense its internal, hidden and mysterious and will only be fully understood at the end. That’s how I understand in a big picture these two parables.

II.  New Concept: The Contemptible Beginnings of the Eternal Kingdom of God

Let’s try to get in and see what’s really going on. The parables would have been in their key message a shock to the Jews. Why? They were expecting a big glorious kingdom. They just didn’t expect to have to wait for it like this. They didn’t expect a humble, despicable, lowly start to that kingdom, and they didn’t expect that it would be internal and spiritual. They will really be kind of shocked and stunned at the kingdom that Jesus is preaching here. They expected world domination, and they had reasons for it. There were prophecies, for example, like the one in the book of Daniel. There’s a huge statue that represents all these Gentile kingdoms — the head of gold, and the chest and arms of silver, and the belly and the thighs of bronze, and legs of iron and then the feet of partly iron, partly clay. The whole statute that Nebuchadnezzar dreamed about represents human history; it represents all of these Gentile kingdoms. Suddenly there’s a stone cut out, but not by human hands, and it flies through the air and strikes the statue at the feet and they crumble.   They just chaff on the threshing floor, and a wind blows them away, but the stone cut out but not by human hands grows until it becomes an impressive kingdom that takes over everything.  “In the time of those kings, the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that will never be destroyed nor will it be left to another people, it will crush all those kingdoms [all those Gentile kingdoms]. We understand clearly, “It will crush all those kingdoms, and bring them to an end but it will itself endure forever.” This is the meaning of the vision of the rock cut out of the mountain but not by human hands.” They expected a Jewish world-wide kingdom in which the Son of David would sit on the throne and all of the Gentile enemies would come and basically lick the dust at their feet. That’s going to be exciting and enjoyable when you are a first-century Jew and you’re licking the dust of the Roman Centurions feet and hating every minute: You feel like you’re in your Promised Land, why should you have to pay taxes? Why should you have to bow down to these tax collectors? Why should you have to follow rules and regulations made by an emperor who’s never been here. This was their land, given to them by God. But there are prophecies that someday the Gentiles will come and lick the dust at the feet of the Son of David. It said, “lick the dust.” It was a big theme in Jewish prophecy. For example, in Psalm 72 written by King Solomon, speaking of the Son of David, this king, this Messiah, “In his day, the righteous will flourish, prosperity will bound till the moon is no more. He will rule from sea to sea and from the river to the ends of the earth. The desert tribes will bow before Him and His enemies will lick the dust.”

There it is, Psalm 72:9, “The kings of Tarshish and of distant shores will bring tribute to him, the kings of Sheba and Seba will present him gifts, all kings will bow down to him and all nations will serve him.” They were ready for that; they were ready for an impressive worldwide dominating kingdom in which the Gentiles would come and lick the dust. They were ready for another prophecy too. Zechariah 8:23, “This is what the Lord Almighty says, in those days, ten men from all languages, and nations will take firm hold, of one Jew, by the hem of His robe and say, ‘Let us go with you because we’ve heard that God is with you.’” Oh, they were looking forward to that, too. They were looking forward to being part of that Messianic Kingdom and it was going to be impressive with world domination. They were so weary of the Assyrians, and the Babylonians and the Persians, and the Medes, and the Greeks and the Romans whoever comes next, weary of it, they wanted a king.

They were ready of a king, but they weren’t ready for the kingdom that He was living and proclaiming, they weren’t ready for that. They were wondering when Jesus began to preach, “Repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand,” wondered if the time had come, especially intrigued by his miracles. Now, that was never really, I think, in their mind, that the King would be a miracle worker for David and Solomon never did that. So that’s an enhancement. But we’re troubled by the way He’s living His life; we’re troubled by the Kingdom. It’s so quiet, it’s so humble, He gets along too well with the Romans. This is not what we had in mind. He was even healing one of their centurion servants, what is going on here? He’s not quarreling and crying out in the street and rabble-rousing and getting an army together, he’s not doing what they expected. He spoke of redeeming Gentiles, not of destroying them. Because of the mysteries of the kingdom, that’s why He told these parables, that they would understand the kingdom isn’t like what they thought. It’s going to start small, and even contemptible, in some ways it’s going to be repugnant. Christ was born of humble origins, born as a baby, raised in a rejected part of Israel in Nazareth: “Can anything good come from Nazareth?” said the Jews. He wasn’t trained in the halls of power; He wasn’t instructed in Jerusalem by the Pharisees and the best teachers. He was of a humble origin and He carried on a confusing ministry. He challenged people, “Follow me and let the dead bury their own dead, follow me and you may not know where you’re going to lay your head tonight, follow me and your parents will reject you or your children and you may die.”  They didn’t understand this, this didn’t make any sense. Even worse He was clearly on the outs with the Jewish leaders, rejected by them. They hated him, and they it seemed were plotting against him. They had already decreed that anybody who claimed that he was the Messiah, would be thrown out of the Synagogue. This isn’t what they had in mind. “Why are you dividing our people? We’re supposed to be united, and then taking on the Gentiles.” They didn’t understand. Look at your followers, Jesus, a motley band of ignoramuses, of what we would call blue collar workers. Galilean fishermen who don’t even know the simple basics of biblical instruction. They’re workers and even worse look who is following you: tax collectors, prostitutes, sinners. This is not what they had in mind. It’s going to get worse. He gets rejected and scourged and nailed to a Roman cross, with the ultimate insult, “This is Jesus, the King of the Jews,” over his head as He bleeds to death, as an executed criminal. The Jews cannot understand, they can’t accept it. Ugly, ugly, ugly the beginning of this kingdom, not what they had in mind. A small band of women, John standing there at the foot of the cross, that’s it. A very, very tough way to leave the world, a very ugly picture.

“Who has believed our message,” said Isaiah, “And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? He grew up before Him like a tender shoot and like a root out of dry ground. He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in His appearance that we should desire Him. He was despised and rejected, a man of sorrows and familiar with suffering, like one from whom men hide their faces, He was despised. And we esteemed Him not.” That means we rejected him. We thought nothing of him, he was low and despised, this tender root out of dry ground. So, the kingdom was going to start from despicable origins, lowly and despised, and it wasn’t just the Jews who despised him.  When Christianity began to make its progress and they began to preach a dead Jewish Messiah on the cross, the message made no sense. It was foolishness to the Gentiles, and they didn’t understand. Celsus, who Origen wrote against in the third century, a bitter foe of the Gospel, attacked the very concept that God would send His son in such a low in contemptible way to the despised Jews in one corner of the world. This is what he wrote, “God is good and beautiful and blessed and that in the best and most beautiful degree. But if he come down among men, He must undergo a change and a change from good to evil, from virtue to vice, from happiness to misery, and from best to worst. Who then would make choice of such a change?   It is the nature of a mortal indeed to undergo change and re-molding, but of an immortal to remain the same and unaltered. God then would not admit of such a change. God would never become a man and if he did, just for a joke,” that’s what he said. “If he’s like Jupiter coming to the Athenians he sure wouldn’t come to the Jews in that corner of the world,” so said Celsus. His ways are not understandable to us, His ways, are not our ways.

For the kingdom to start like a tiny seed stuck in the ground, or like a little amount of yeast off in the edge makes no sense. To me this is great encouragement for every generation, especially for ours, that God delights in small things. He delights in humble beginnings; He delights in just a conversation sparking at all. Just a thought that popped in someone’s head and then look where it’s gone.   God delights in small things and doing great things with small things. We forget that the universe is made up of atoms and they’re really small. God delights in small things, in putting them in order, and building a history out of it. And so, Zechariah 4:10, “Who despises the day of small things?” Yet we need constant encouragement because the Kingdom of Heaven never seems equal to the task, does it? It always seems overwhelmed by the obstacles and the odds. We have to hear 1 Corinthians 15:58, “Therefore my dear brothers stand firm, let nothing move you, always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain.” You need to be told that, don’t you? Do you ever get discouraged in the Christian life? I need to be told my labor in the Lord is not in vain, because it sure seems like it, sometimes. All of us as Christians, we need to hear that. Hebrews 12:12 says, “Therefore, strengthen your feeble arms and your weak knees,” because the kingdom doesn’t seem to match up. We’re wasting our time here.  In one 24-hour period almost a quarter million people in one day are added to the world population. People think, “We’re losing ground. There’s a sense of urgency. Is the kingdom up to the task?” What do these parables tell you?  Yes, the Kingdom of Heaven will permeate the entire dough. The Gospel of the Kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.

III.  The Lesson of the Mustard Seed: Outward and Visible Growth

The lesson of the mustard seed is outward invisible growth. Jesus said in Matthew 5:14, “You are the light of the world, you’re a city on a hill which cannot be hidden. The growth of the Kingdom can’t be hidden, it’s going to leave markers along the way in history. It’s going to start small, but we’re going to see marks of its progress along the way.   It started with 120 believers in the upper room.  That’s a small church. 120 believers in the upper room and then the Spirit poured out and in one day, 3000 were added to their number that day, just like that. Now that’s outward, visible change. Suddenly boom, 3000. Pretty soon the number grew to 5000 men, it kept growing and growing. Soon the call came to send missionaries to Gentile regions.  The Gospel spread along Asia Minor. Back up the roads of conquest where Alexander the Great and the Roman Legions had marched down to conquer Palestine. The Gospel went back up those pipelines across to the man from Macedonia who said, “Come over and help us.” The Gospel was preached there, in Philippi, and Thessalonica. It starts to spread, it starts to move, it starts to conquer. So that by the time Paul writes in Romans, he says, “It’s always been my ambition to preach where nobody’s heard of Christ, but I’m having trouble finding that place these days,” because the gospel had come from Jerusalem all the way around to what is modern Yugoslavia, right across from Rome.   Soon the gospel would be there. Within two and half to three centuries, the Gospel would have so permeated and so dominated in the Roman Empire that Constantine would declare himself to be a Christian. Incredible. What a marker in history. The progress that this Galilean carpenter, executed on a Roman cross, has made. If you had told Pontius Pilate, what was going to happen in the next three centuries, “The man you’re about to kill will someday be the God worshipped by the Emperor of Rome,” what do you think he would have said to you? “You’re insane.” It didn’t stop there. It continued to grow and to explode. Missionaries traveling. The Norsemen coming down, the Vikings coming to faith in Christ. It continued to spread, clear markers of progress. They left behind physical remnants: cathedrals built, art, hospitals, works of theology and writings. Clear markers of the progress of the gospel. The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that just explodes, and everyone can see where it’s heading, a visible legacy of Christianity.

IV.  The Lesson of the Leaven: Inward and Invisible Growth

But the kingdom of heaven is also like yeast which a woman took and hid, it says, in a large amount of flour until it worked all through the dough. So yes, there’s an outward invisible marker of the progress, but there’s an internal mysterious transformation. It says, “The Kingdom of Heaven is like yeast which a woman took and hid.” The Greek word is “enkrupto”, from which we get “to encrypt”. A hidden thing, a mysterious thing. So, there’s this hidden nature of the kingdom. You can’t see what it’s doing, but it’s making progress all the way through. I think this individually describes your own salvation if you’re a Christian, doesn’t it? You hear the Gospel, maybe John 3:16 something as simple as that. You read a tract, and all of a sudden it takes hold in your life. Little by little, it starts to conquer everything. It conquers the way you talk, it conquers the way you dress, it conquers the way you think, the way you make your living, the way you pray, what you hope for, what you dream, it conquers everything. It just starts to permeate within.

Jesus said in John Chapter 3, that the wind blows where it wishes, and you hear the sound, but you can’t tell where it comes from and where it is going. So is everyone who’s born by the spirit, that internal transformation changing everything, if anyone is in Christ, he’s a new creation. The old is gone, everything has become new. All things have changed, and so that from the inside out, it permeates and conquers. The biggest grief of your life is that it hasn’t conquered everything yet. But it will someday. Isn’t that glorious? It’s going to permeate everything, and there’ll be no sin left: no wickedness, no violence, no temptation, no pull toward evil. No, as it says in Romans 7, “sin living in me that does it,” all gone.

The Gospel will have permeated everything, and you will be glorious and perfect. Amen and amen, the glory of the internal transformation, but you can’t see it from the outside. You look like the same person but there’s something different about you, an internal transformation that conquers everything. Jesus was also talking about the world, wasn’t he? He had his eyes not just on the individual, but on the whole world. It would be down in the catacombs, under the streets of Rome where nobody could see it. Celsus was frustrated. He said, “You know something, they won’t talk about this, when the masters and better learned people are around. But when everyone’s gone, they’ll start to talk to your children and then kind of take on the weak and the lowly and share with them.”

The gospel spreads through the slaves, and the weak, and the despised and the lowly, and it just takes over, permeates, influences, just by hearing. Sometimes, the gospel is gossiped almost like news.

I love the story of John Bunyan’s conversion. John Bunyan was a tinker by trade, went around sharpening knives and fixing pots and pans which was obviously not a lucrative employment.  But he went around, and he was in a kitchen, sharpening some knives, fixing some pots and pans one day when he heard three or four women. This is what he says, he overheard, “Three or four poor women sitting at a door in the room and talking about the things of God.” And later he said, “I thought they spoke as if joy did make them speak.” Like they couldn’t hold it in. Christ had so filled their hearts they couldn’t help themselves. They’re just filled with the gospel and with Christ, and they’re just talking, gossiping Jesus. They never knew that Bunyan was overhearing, unconverted but listening. Later he gave his life to Christ and wrote Pilgrim’s Progress, and so, from just a little affect, a little permeation, it spreads to the whole world.

I love the story that my Mission’s Professor Christy Wilson, told of what’s happened in China. The same thing. I love this story because it shows the power of the gospel, how the Gospel was opposed by Mao Zedong. It was attacked and Christians were murdered and slaughtered down to a certain level and finally he stopped and said, “I can’t continue, I’ve got to denounce the idea of Christianity, not just kill Christians. I’ve got to take these few Christians that are left who are gaining strength and get them out of being together. I think what I’ll do is I’ll scatter them all over China so that they’re alone, and lonely, and they’ll die disgraced.” Christy Wilson said that the communist party in China is the greatest mission sending agency of the 20th century. Mao Zedong said, “What I’ll do is I’ll humble them further, I’ll give them jobs like garbage collector, where they go from house to house every day, collecting garbage.” You’re in a new town, never been anywhere. You’ve got Christ inside you and you’re going from house to house. What do you think you’re going to do? Could it be that you’re going to share the Gospel, and could it be that there are over 100 million Christians in China today? And could it be that Mao Zedong is dead?

V.  Prophecy Being Fulfilled: The Kingdom is Immense… But Unfinished

Kingdom of heaven is like yeast. Hidden in a little corner, it permeates the whole thing. You can’t stop it. But it’s hidden. It never made the headlines in The New York Times. But it is the story of China, just like it is the story of the entire world which the gospel is conquering and advancing, and the gospel is winning. The kingdom is immense but it’s unfinished. We live in a great time, brothers and sisters, a time in which the gospel is accelerating, a time in with a local church like ours can send out our own people across to the ends of the world, and they can influence, they can share the Gospel with some student who’s studying English. That study of English becomes a bridge that the Gospel could get across into their minds, and they could believe and be saved. This is a great time, and we can look back over 2000 years and say, “Lord, you’ve done it, it’s not finished yet, but I see it, I can connect the dots. We’re 95% there but I see what you’re doing. The Kingdom of Heaven is like a small mustard seed, which has grown to imposing size, yes, Lord, the Kingdom of Heaven is like yeast, which is tucked in a little corner, Jerusalem, upper room, and then spreads through the whole world. And yes, Lord, the kingdom of Heaven has conquered my heart and it’s taking over everything inside me. Oh, let your work be finished in the world and in me, let your kingdom come.” We never despise the days of small beginnings.

I think about, for example, the haystack prayer meeting. It was a sultry Saturday afternoon, in August 1806. Samuel J. Mills and four other students at Williams College in Massachusetts were talking and discussing the things of God, when suddenly the skies broke overhead, thunder and lightning and they ran and found protection kind of in the back side of a haystack. They just started to pray about world evangelization, they prayed that they would be used in a mighty way by God to spread the influence of Christ to the unreached people, what they called the heathens.  This was just a short time after William Carey, but there were no mission-sending agencies in America at the time. It wasn’t long after that, two years later, that they met a student from Brown named Adoniram Judson. He got involved, caught their vision, and he and his wife and a number of others set sail for Calcutta to join up with William Carey. En route, of course, they became Baptist. En route, they realized that they needed some financial support because the Congregationalists were not going to support them anymore, and so they sent Luther Rice back. Luther Rice went from Baptist church, to Baptist church, saying, “You guys have missionaries in the field, and you’re obligated to support them financially.” That was the beginning of the Southern Baptist Convention. That’s how it started, from a prayer meeting in a haystack. Do not ever despise the day of small beginnings. God loves to do this kind of thing, again, and again, and again. To advance the kingdom with just a little mustard seed of faith, to see what God can do.

VI. Application

What kind of applications can we take?  First of all, can I say to you come to Christ, if you’re not a Christian? The things I’m saying to you make no sense whatsoever, if you don’t trust Christ. If you don’t know Him as your Lord and Savior, if you don’t see Jesus bloody and dead on the cross as your substitute for sin, Jesus your sin bearer, and put your trust in your faith in him because he didn’t stay dead. God raised Him from the dead on the third day. Is he your life? Is he your righteousness? Is he your hope? If not come to Christ today.  But for you who are Christians, first of all, could you worship Christ for His sovereignty and fulfilling his prophecy? These were prophecies, weren’t they? The kingdom of heaven is going to take over and it has. Worship Him. He got it right. It’s not finished yet, but you see what He’s doing, worship him for what he’s doing. Secondly, never be discouraged over the seemingly slow progress of the kingdom. Never be discouraged about what He’s doing here, in this church. As long as we are faithful to teach and live obey His word, He will bless this church. Even if the progress seems slow.

Thirdly, expect great things from small beginnings. God does this again and again. Fourth, put priority on internal spiritual transformation, that comes first. The outward shows and the markers along the way come from a genuine internal transformation. Put the yeast ahead of the mustard seed. The internal transformation happens first, and out of that, comes the fruit that we’ve been talking about. Influence your surrounding world. Be yeast in your world, let there be lots of Christ about you. Lots of tracts handed to people if you only have a minute, invitations to church, going this afternoon to witness. Take a chance, I don’t think you’re going to get killed, but even if you do, you’ll rejoice and be glad and have the resurrection of a martyr.

Rejoice, be an influencer for Christ, pray for an unreached people group. Adopt one and pray for it for the rest of the year for six months. I prayed for Nepal for eight years, and I have personal stock in the company that God set up there, of over 100,000 Nepali Christians. There were almost none when I began praying. So, pray for them. Start a lunch time Bible study and rejoice if one person shows up. I saw a Bible study like that, start from one person and grew to 23 people.  That’s how it all started. Start a lunchtime Bible study, be an influencer for Christ. The kingdom of heaven in the end will conquer all things. Be faithful and serve Him.

These are only preliminary, unedited outlines and may differ from Andy’s final message.

Gettysburg Address… 271 words

“Brevity is the soul of wit”

John Calvin:   “Lucid brevity”

Apostle Paul:  Colossians 4:4 Pray that I may proclaim it clearly, as I should.

NONE compares with what the greatest teacher in history accomplished here, however… a mere seventeen words in the Greek text to describe all of human history, and all of my own personal history as well!!

I.  Two Parables, One Central Message: The Kingdom Grows

A.  The Mustard Seed:  From Tiny to Impressive

1.  Mustard seed:  proverbial for tiny

vs.  32 Though it is the smallest of all your seeds

2.  Not literally the smallest of all seeds… but the smallest of those seeds one plants in the garden

3.  But within the seed is the genetic code for impressive growth

So also the entire history of the Kingdom of Heaven was contained in the life, teaching, miracles, death and resurrection of Christ

A seemingly insignificant beginning (unheralded to the ends of the earth, unknown at that moment to most of earth’s inhabitants)

4.  The end result:  a huge plant

vs. 32  Though it is the smallest of all your seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and perch in its branches.”

Mustard plants can grow to be as large as 10 to 15 feet high

Birds of the air come and rest protected under the shade of the Kingdom of Heaven:

Christ’s point:  the Kingdom of Heaven starts from seemingly nothing… and it grows to dominate the earth

B.  The Leaven:  From One Corner to Total Permeation

1.  Leaven (yeast) frequently a picture of evil

Matthew 16:6 “Be careful,” Jesus said to them. “Be on your guard against the yeast of the Pharisees and Sadducees.”

2.  Really, though, a picture of PERMEATION and INFLUENCE

Galatians 5:9 “A little yeast works through the whole batch of dough.”

Illus.  Yeasts is one-celled fungi that multiply rapidly by dividing… they ferment sugars in the dough and produce carbon dioxide ethanol (alcohol)… the gasses given off cause pockets to form in the dough, which gives the bread a light, airy feel in the mouth… if the leavening is left to go on too long, massive fermentation occurs… this is how alcohol is produced

Yeast is a prime illustration of INFLUENCE… it spreads and multiplies to surrounding areas, spreading persistently through the dough until the entire batch is leavened

3.  Even massive batch completely leavened

NIV:  “a large amount of flour…”      NASB:  “three pecks”

Perhaps as much as 40 liters of flour… a huge batch of dough; imagine 20 2-liter bottles filled with flour… mixed together in a huge mixing vat.  One tiny amount of yeast tucked in the corner would successfully leaven the entire batch

4.  Is this a NEGATIVE parable?

John Walvoord and other commentators point out the fact that leaven is almost always associated with evil

However… leaven is not ALWAYS evil:

Leviticus 7:13 Along with his fellowship offering of thanksgiving he is to present an offering with cakes of bread made with yeast.

If yeast is always evil, why would God command it be used in fellowship offerings?

Also, Christ said simply:

“The Kingdom of heaven is like yeast…”

C.  Central Lesson:  Growth from Small and Insignificant to Impressive and Dominating

II.  New Concept: The Contemptible Beginnings of the Eternal Kingdom of God

What’s astonishing:  Not the final glory and expanse of the Kingdom… but the contemptibly small beginning, and the long, slow process of growth!!  This is the mystery and the challenge of the Kingdom of Heaven.

A.  Jews Expected an Impressive Kingdom

1.  World domination

Daniel 2:34-35, 44-45   While you were watching, a rock was cut out, but not by human hands. It struck the statue on its feet of iron and clay and smashed them. 35 Then the iron, the clay, the bronze, the silver and the gold were broken to pieces at the same time and became like chaff on a threshing floor in the summer. The wind swept them away without leaving a trace. But the rock that struck the statue became a huge mountain and filled the whole earth. … “In the time of those kings, the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that will never be destroyed, nor will it be left to another people. It will crush all those kingdoms and bring them to an end, but it will itself endure forever. 45 This is the meaning of the vision of the rock cut out of a mountain, but not by human hands

a.  Son of David would rule to the ends of the earth

b.  Gentiles would “lick the dust” before Jewish rule

Psalm 72:7-11  In his days the righteous will flourish; prosperity will abound till the moon is no more. 8 He will rule from sea to sea and from the River to the ends of the earth. 9 The desert tribes will bow before him and his enemies will lick the dust. 10 The kings of Tarshish and of distant shores will bring tribute to him; the kings of Sheba and Seba will present him gifts. 11 All kings will bow down to him and all nations will serve him.

Consistent prophecies showing that a Jewish King will rule the earth, and that all Jews will have positions of honor and power, even over Gentiles

Zechariah 8:23 This is what the LORD Almighty says: “In those days ten men from all languages and nations will take firm hold of one Jew by the hem of his robe and say, ‘Let us go with you, because we have heard that God is with you.'”

2.  Gentile submission

a.  “times of the Gentiles” would end

b.  one Gentile overlord after another

i)  Assyrian… Babylon… Persia… Greeks

ii)  Roman:  strongest, most powerful of them all… no end in sight

Every day the enslaved Jewish people of Jesus’ generation saw the Roman legions marching through their streets, demanding their rations, arresting and executing people, behaving arrogantly, worshiping pagan deities, sucking them dry through tax collectors, they comforted themselves with a single hope:

Someday the Son of David will set up his kingdom… then these Gentile dogs will lick the dust at our feet

This Kingdom will be more glorious and more powerful, richer by far than any Kingdom in history:

Isaiah 60:1-6  “Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the LORD rises upon you. 2 See, darkness covers the earth and thick darkness is over the peoples, but the LORD rises upon you and his glory appears over you. 3 Nations will come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn. … 

c.  prophets foretold Jewish restoration and domination

B.  Jesus Proclaimed the Kingdom… BUT This Was NOT What They Expected

1.  Jesus’ message stirred their hopes

Matthew 4:17 From that time on Jesus began to preach, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.”

2.  Christ’s miracles electrified those hopes

Matthew 12:28 But if I drive out demons by the Spirit of God, then the kingdom of God has come upon you.

3.  But Christ’s Kingdom was so different than they expected

a.  it was quiet… humble… almost weak

b.  He spoke of redeeming Gentiles, not destroying them

C.  “Mysteries” of the Kingdom:  Contemptible Beginnings

1.  A Small Mustard Seed… hardly worth discussing

2.  A “tender shoot out of dry ground”… contemptible

Christ was of humble origins… easily rejected

Born of an enslaved race in an obscure corner of the world

Raised a despised part of the country… Nazareth

Not educated in the Jewish halls of power

Carrying on a confusing ministry

Doing mighty deeds… but not MILITARY deeds

Promising a life of poverty and suffering

Rebuking Jewish leaders

Cleansing the Temple

Teaching in parables

Speaking hard sayings

Followed by a motley band of societal rejects

Galilean fishermen… common laborers

Tax collectors

Prostitutes

Sinners

Hated, rejected, condemned by Jewish leaders who plotted to kill Him

Ultimately:  arrested, tried, condemned by His own people

Crucified on a Roman cross… stripped of all dignity, the most horrible death imaginable

Sign incredibly offensive:  “This is Jesus, King of the Jews”

Breathed His last, His blood all over the ground… UGLY UGLY picture of Jewish abject humiliation

Isaiah 53:1-3  Who has believed our message and to whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed? 2 He grew up before him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of dry ground. He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. 3 He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not.

All in all, the exact opposite image of the triumphant Kingdom of God…

Gentile opponents had just as much trouble accepting this idea

Celsus (Greek, 3rd century, a bitter foe of the gospel, refuted by Origen)  attacked the very concept that God would send His Son in such a contemptible way… to the despised Jews in one small corner of the world:

God is good, and beautiful, and blessed, and that in the best and most beautiful degree. But if he come down among men, he must undergo a change, and a change from good to evil, from virtue to vice, from happiness to misery, and from best to worst. Who, then, would make choice of such a change? It is the nature of a mortal, indeed, to undergo change and remoulding, but of an immortal to remain the same and unaltered. God, then, could not admit of such a change.”…  (Origen, Contra Celsum, ANF vol. 4, Book 4, Chapter 14)

“Again, if God, like Jupiter in the comedy, should, on awaking from a lengthened slumber, desire to rescue the human race from evil, why did He send this Spirit of which you speak into one corner (of the earth)? He ought to have breathed it alike into many bodies, and have sent them out into all the world. Now the comic poet, to cause laughter in the theatre, wrote that Jupiter, after awakening, despatched Mercury to the Athenians and Lacedaemonians; but do not you think that you have made the Son of God more ridiculous in sending Him to the Jews?”  (Origen, Contra Celsum, ANF vol. 4, Book 6, Chapter 78)

Christ answered this with these two parables!!!

the parable says from this tiny, rejected, contemptible beginning would arise a Kingdom so vast and wealthy that it will cover the earth with its glory

“The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his field. 32 Though it is the smallest of all your seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and perch in its branches.”

D.  Encouragement for Every Generation:  Kingdom Comprised of Small Things

Zechariah 4:10 “Who despises the day of small things?

1.  Constant need for encouragement

1 Corinthians 15:58 Therefore, my dear brothers, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain.

Hebrews 12:12 Therefore, strengthen your feeble arms and weak knees.

2.  Progress of Kingdom always seems small, insignificant

Illus.  U.S. Census Bureau estimates 140 people added to the world every minute… during time of our worship, world population will grow by 10,500 people

In one 24-hour period, world population increases by 201,600 people

Teeming billions presently stand outside pale of the gospel reach… presently living in communities in which there is no viable witness for Jesus Christ

3.  Reality is different than appearance!!!

III.  The Lesson of the Mustard Seed:  Outward and Visible Growth

Matthew 5:14 “You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden.

Summary:  When the tiny mustard seed of the Kingdom takes root in a heart, it produces immense and visible changes in the life… thus are we the “light of the world” and “a city on a hill” that CANNOT BE HIDDEN!!!

A.  Understanding the Parable

1.  The Kingdom of Heaven is like…

a.  Christ uses a simply analogy… a parable to explain Kingdom truth

b.  the mysteries of the Kingdom would be unclear to us without Christ’s instruction

B.  The Mighty Advance of the Kingdom

1.  Humble, contemptible beginnings

a.  at the cross… a handful of women and John

b.  in the upper room… only 120 believers (would be considered a small church today)

2.  Then began the irresistible advance of the gospel

·      Three thousand added to the church on the Day of Pentecost

·      The number of men grew to five thousand by Acts 4

·      Soon the call came to send missionaries out to Gentile regions… the ancient home of the Philistines (Cyprus) soon heard the gospel from common Christians scattered after Stephen died

·      The church at Antioch sent out Paul and Barnabas to Cyprus… and to Gentile regions in Asia Minor

·      Next Paul had a vision of a man from Macedonia, the home origin of Alexander the Great, begging for help… the gospel was traveling the old roads of conquest… a new Kingdom of far greater power retracing the steps of the Gentile conquerors of old… irresistibly heading toward Rome

·      By the end of Paul’s ministry, the gospel had saturated all of Asia Minor from Jerusalem all the way to Illyricum (modern Yugoslavia… across the Adriatic Sea from Rome)

·      The gospel had progressed so far and so thoroughly that Paul found no more place for him to work in that entire region!!

·      Over the next two and a half centuries, despite bitter persecution by the vicious Roman Empire, the gospel continued to advance, to permeate the entire empire… going from neighbor to neighbor, from slave to slave, from merchant to customer, from sailor to passenger

Celsus spoke of this quiet, almost subversive growth of Christianity with contempt:

“We see, indeed, in private houses workers in wool and leather, and fullers, and persons of the most uninstructed and rustic character, not venturing to utter a word in the presence of their elders and wiser masters; but when they get hold of the children privately, and certain women as ignorant as themselves, they pour forth wonderful statements…” (Origen, Contra Celsum, ANF vol. 4, Book 3, Chapter 55)

·      Christianity conquered the Roman Empire quietly, secretly, like yeast taking over the batch of dough… but in the end, the effects were spectacular and open… like a mustard plant dominating the garden

·      In 312 A.D., at the Milvian Bridge, Constantine had a vision and was supposedly converted to Christianity.  From that time on, he claimed to be Christian and carried Christian symbolism into all his battles and sought to stamp out paganism.  Whether or not he was truly a Christian is not the point… what is astonishing is how far the Church of Christ had come… this was an open, visible landmark that the internal spread of the leaven had permeated every corner of the Roman Empire

If you had told Pontius Pilate that, less than three centuries later, the Roman Emperor would declare himself to be a worshiper of a Jewish carpenter and traveling holy man… a Jewish carpenter and holy man who’d been executed as a common criminal on a Roman cross… he would have thought you insane!!

the kingdom of heaven is like yeast”  [Hidden, quiet, invisible permeation until it conquers the whole loaf]

“The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed… [Open, visible growth until it reaches dominating, imposing stature]

1.  Christianity has advanced irresistibly for twenty centuries… against immense odds

2.  Now there is not a nation on earth where the church is not represented

C.  Worldwide:  The Visible Legacy of Christianity

1.  Major visible, historical milestones

a.  conversion of Constantine

b.  saturation of Europe with gospel

c.  conversion of barbarian tribes

d.  missionary endeavors… transforming power of the gospel

2.  Immense evidence of Kingdom of Christ

baptisms… writings…missionaries…Cathedrals… works of art… hospitals… acts of benevolence… world history greatly influenced forever by Christianity

D.  Individually:  The Obvious Visible Effect of the Gospel

1.  Heart changes:  transformed by the gospel

2.  Everything external changes eventually

3.  “Fruit” is obvious

Church history full of lives lived openly to the glory of God… sprung from a small mustard seed of the Gospel and faith

George Mueller:  Halle, Germany:  One Saturday afternoon, about the middle of November, 1825, a Prussian playboy, liar, swindler, and convict named George Mueller was invited to the house a man named Herr Wagner.  Seeing Herr Wagner pray on his knees and explain John 3:16 changed him forever… the seed would grow immense in his life:

Summary:  When the tiny mustard seed of the Kingdom takes root in a heart, it produces immense and visible changes in the life… thus are we the “light of the world” and “a city on a hill” that CANNOT BE HIDDEN!!!

IV.  The Lesson of the Leaven: Inward and Invisible Growth

What “cannot be hidden” (the outward visible effects of the gospel) comes from what HAS been hidden… the seed in the soil, the yeast in the dough;  outward display comes from mysterious, internal transformation

A.  Mustard Seed Grows Outwardly… visible to the eye

B.  Yeast works inwardly… invisible to the eye

“The Kingdom of heaven is like yeast with a woman HID in a large amount of flour until it worked all through the dough.”

Greek word:  “enkrupto”… to hide away in secret

The kingdom’s outwardly spectacular growth takes place based on a secret, inward transformation

C.  Individually:  One Person’s Salvation Described

1.  Seed in the heart

2.  Spirit’s work on the soul

John 3:8 The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”

The Kingdom’s permeating power is internal, hidden, mysterious, powerful… it permeates everything

3.  Word of God gradually influences more and more areas of life

way of thinking… eating habits… conversation… entertainment… work habits… goals and aspirations…

4.  Gradual transformation of the entire life until whole self is dominated by the Kingdom

D.  Worldwide:  World history also described

1.  Church tiny, off to the side… hidden in an upper room in Jerusalem

Little by little it begins to permeate the world around it… its influence is irresistible, but not always seen

2.  Many times illegal, underground… oftentimes ignored as irrelevant

No New York Times headlines about the advancing Kingdom of Heaven… the world has more important concerns

But the secret leavening of the gospel goes on, person to person all over the world

3.  One Christian influences a non-Christian neighbor, relative or friend… even by something like gossip

Illus.  Bunyan’s conversion:  He overhears “three or four poor women sitting at a door in the room, and talking about the things of God.” Later he said: “I thought they spoke as if joy did make them speak; they spoke with such pleasantness of Scripture language and with such appearance of grace in all they said, that they were to me as if they had found a new world….”

That overheard word transformed his life…

In time Bunyan’s influence would transform the hearts of millions

“The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into a large amount of flour until it worked all through the dough.”

Illus.  Church spreading in China… Christians given demeaning jobs like garbage collector

4.  Eventually the internal transforming power of the gospel and the spectacular external progress of the gospel meet when Christ’s Kingdom is complete

V.  Prophecy Being Fulfilled: The Kingdom is Immense… But Unfinished

A.  Parable is Prophecy:

CHRIST’S PARABLE IS ALSO PROPHECY… this is what the Kingdom WILL do

His words would have seemed folly at the time if the people had understood the scope of His vision

Christ’s prophecy is coming true right before our eyes!!!

B.  Worldwide Expanse

Over 300 million people have been added to the true church in last 10 years…  About 10 million of these new Christians are from North America and Europe, and the rest –290 million—are from developing countries like Nigeria, Argentina, India and China.

In mid-16th century, evangelicals located only in Europe… numbered about 3 million;  In last 450 years, evangelicals have grown to 680 million, most of them non-whites, living in every nation on the face of the earth!!!

·      Christianity is the single fastest growing religion in the world

·      In Central Asia, a church planted in Uzbekistan just four years ago has grown to 3,000 members and has planted 55 other congregations.

·      Mongolia, which had no church at all as recently as 1991, now has more than 3,000 believers in 17 congregations. And the Mongolians have sent their first missionaries to work with Operation Mobilization in India.

·      In Nepal, the world’s only official Hindu country, over 100,000 Hindus have met the Savior in the last two decades.

B.  Innumerable Small Beginnings

The principle of the mustard seed has been characteristic of God’s way of advancing His Kingdom for two thousand years… it’s the way He starts new movements among every generation… one individual or a small group of believers trusts God for something great, and the reality grows until it is immense

Illus.  The Haystack Prayer meeting

On a sultry Saturday afternoon in August, 1806, Samuel J. Mills and four other students of Williams College gathered as usual in the maple grove of Sloan’s Meadow for one of their twice-weekly prayer meetings. Thunderclouds broke open the sky, driving the students to seek shelter from the rain on the lee side of a great haystack. With thought turned toward their classroom studies of Asia and the East India Company, Mills shared his burden that Christianity be sent abroad. The five students prayed that American missions would spread Christianity through the East.

The missionary vision of this group of students, under the leadership of Mills, is the more remarkable since no missionary societies existed in America at that time.

In 1808, Mills and other Williams students formed “The Brethren,” a society organized to “effect, in the persons of its members, a mission to the heathen.” Shortly thereafter, Adoniram Judson from Brown joined the Brethren.  By February, 1812, Rev. and Mrs. Judson, Rev. Luther Rice and five others were commissioned as the Board’s first missionaries and set sail for Calcutta, India.

En route to India, Judson and the team converted to Baptist convictions and sent Luther Rice back to America to raise funds to support the missionaries… this was the beginning of the organization that eventually became the Southern Baptists.

C.  Mysterious Internal Transformation

This worldwide explosion is happening one sinner at a time… when the yeast of the Gospel permeates his heart and begins to conquer his life

All over the world, the Holy Spirit is spreading the yeast of Kingdom truth gradually through the secret recesses of human hearts, mysteriously transforming them to be like Christ

D.  Prophecy Incompletely Fulfilled

The parable is prophecy…   BUT the prophecy is not yet complete:

KJV Matthew 13:33 Another parable spake he unto them; The kingdom of heaven is like unto leaven, which a woman took, and hid in three measures of meal, till the whole was leavened.

The work of the Kingdom will not be done until the whole world is leavened with this message!!

VI.  Application

1.  Worship Christ for His power in fulfilling prophecy

2.  Never be discouraged over the seemingly slow progress

3.  Expect great things from small beginnings

regular pattern in church history

no insignificant acts, words, moments, efforts

everything can be used mightily for the Kingdom

4.  Put priority on internal growth over external display

external display of mustard plant encouraging to prove truth of Christ’s words

BUT Christ Himself put priority on internal transformation

Before Kingdoms change, men must change from the heart

5.  INFLUENCE your surrounding world

a.  be the yeast which spreads in your daily life

b.  sow seeds for the Kingdom

disciple your children in the small daily things of life

give evangelistic tracts out to UPS deliveries coming to your door

write a letter of encouragement to a missionary and include Scripture

pray for an unreached people group

start a lunch-time Bible study at work and rejoice if only one person shows up

meet with a new Christian once a week at train him in spiritual disciplines

take on a children’s Sunday school class and teach them even if they seem barely old enough to understand your words

A hope-filled attitude of faith permeates these parables… great things come from small beginnings; and a great God can use even insignificant actions by a sinner like me to build a portion of His Kingdom

Introduction 

In so many ways, I am in awe of Jesus Christ, He just takes my breath away. The things that He does are astonishing, and we know of his mighty miracles. We know He spoke to the wind and the waves, and they were completely still, and we know how He raised his friend Lazarus from the dead, dead though he was four days, yet that word of power that he was able to speak.  But what takes my breath away in this passage is the perfection of his teaching. He’s the greatest teacher that ever lived. John Calvin in his commentary, the preface to his commentary to Romans, said that what he was seeking was loosed brevity, in other words, clarity and brief-ness, to coin a phrase, that everything should be made as Albert Einstein said,  as simple as possible, and not simpler. Abraham Lincoln in his Gettysburg address was able, somehow, to capture what was being fought over in the Civil War better than anyone that had ever seen it up to that point, and he did it in 271 words. He was able to capture what was going on, that there was a test of our governmental system going on and that was what was at stake. The apostle Paul in his preaching asked the Colossians church to pray that he would make it clear as he should.

But none of these teachers have compared to Jesus Christ who, in 17 words in the Greek language encapsulates all of human history in a homely, home-maker parable in which a woman is baking bread.  Seventeen words, and He gets all of human history together. Not only that, but He gets my history as well, what’s happened in my life since the time I heard and believed the gospel. He’s got the two together, both the individual and the global in one little homely kitchen parable. Only Jesus could do that. “The Kingdom of Heaven is like yeast that a woman took and hid in a large amount of flour until it permeated the whole lump.” There it is. There’s human history. It doesn’t sound like it to me. We must come like spiritual beggars and humble ourselves and say, “Lord, Jesus what does it mean?” The parable of the mustard seed, the parable of the yeast, how can we understand these things? Once the spirit has come and has opened our eyes, we are in a great position to understand better than any generation that has ever lived because we have seen the fulfillment of these two parables over the last 2000 years, then at last we can wonder and be amazed at the teacher who sits before us, and instructs us on world history. The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his garden, though it is the smallest of all your seeds, yet, when it grows, it becomes the largest of garden plants and the birds of the air, come and nest in its branches.  The kingdom of heaven is like a little amount of yeast that a woman took and mixed or hid into a large amount of flour until it worked all through the dough. All of human history and my personal history too, wrapped up in these two little parables.

I.  Two Parables, One Central Message: The Kingdom Grows

The one message of the two parables is that the Kingdom starts small, and grows huge, as a matter of fact, dominates in the end. That’s what they mean together. The mustard seed is a proverb. The Jewish people knew that the mustard seed was proverbial for something small. “If you have faith as small as a mustard seed,” Jesus said, “You can say to this mountain, move from here to there, and it’ll move.” Jesus Himself said, “Though, it is the smallest of all your seeds.” The point is, it was the smallest of the seeds that they used to plant in the garden; all the others were larger, significantly larger, and yet, this one grows to dominate in an impressive way. Within that seed is the genetic code for explosive growth. God ordained seeds from the very beginning in Genesis 1, there would be seed-bearing trees, fruit with seed in it, animals would have seed, we would have seed, there was an explosion of growth. “Fill the earth, subdue it, rule over it, populate it.” All of it built into the seed, the genetic code only recently being understood, and we’ll never finally understand it. So, it was with Jesus, what they call this one solitary life, within his life, within his example, and within his teaching and even more, in His sacrificial bloody death on the cross, and His resurrection, there in seed form is the Kingdom of Heaven.

With the proclamation of that life and that death and that resurrection comes a kingdom which will someday conquer the world. In the end, it’s the largest of all your garden plants, and it becomes a tree so that the birds of the air can come and take rest in its branches. The Kingdom starts small, seemingly from nothing and grows to an imposing height. Now, the leaven. The leaven starts small in one corner and it comes to final and total complete permeation. Leaven, or yeast, is frequently seen to be a symbol of evil.  Jesus said in Matthew 16:6, “Be careful, be on your guard against the Yeast of the Pharisees and Sadducees.” By that He meant their bad teaching, their false teachings, be careful about it. But actually yeast is not necessarily a symbol of evil, it’s really a symbol of permeation, a symbol of spreading, many times, connected to something evil as Paul does in Galatians 5:9, “A little yeast works through the whole batch of dough,” meaning you get this bad idea, of legalism and circumcision, it’s going to affect your whole faith, it’s going to affect everything.  It really is a picture of permeation. In the Old Testament, bread with yeast included in it was part of the Levitical offering in Leviticus 7. Yeast is not intrinsically evil. To me, the parable proves it, the Kingdom of Heaven, is like yeast, therefore it can’t be evil because the king heaven is good, and therefore, if it’s like yeast, then the yeast is not intrinsically evil. The issue is spreading, it’s permeation really in a kind of a hidden sort of way.  Yeast is a one-celled fungus that connects and bumps into other things and starts to generate carbon dioxide gas and ultimately alcohol if it’s left long enough. That’s fermentation and it just spreads through one side of the lump. Jesus is lavish in his picture here. The housewife took and mixed this little amount of yeast, just hid it in the corner and just let it do its work. How much is 40 liters? Imagine 22 liters bottles of flour poured into a big vat and mixed up, and a pinch of yeast from the last leaven lump put it in and pretty soon the entire lump has risen, it’s permeated. It’s a picture of permeation. The central lesson of both these parables, is growth from small and insignificant to imposing and dominant.

Why two parables? What’s going on?  What does the one teach that is different than the other?  I think that one teaches a showy display of constant progress. You can look and see it growing. You can come in the garden and you can look and it’s six inches tall, then it’s a foot tall and pretty soon it’s five feet tall and it just keeps growing. You can see its progress. In the end, it’s very big and imposing all over the place. The other is a hidden internal mysterious growth.  A permeation really that just kind of spreads. You don’t really know what’s going on and the true story is really quite hidden, and you can’t see much evidence of the permeation. The two parables together give the whole picture of the growth of the kingdom of heaven. In one sense, it can be marked and measured. We can see milestones along the way. In another sense its internal, hidden and mysterious and will only be fully understood at the end. That’s how I understand in a big picture these two parables.

II.  New Concept: The Contemptible Beginnings of the Eternal Kingdom of God

Let’s try to get in and see what’s really going on. The parables would have been in their key message a shock to the Jews. Why? They were expecting a big glorious kingdom. They just didn’t expect to have to wait for it like this. They didn’t expect a humble, despicable, lowly start to that kingdom, and they didn’t expect that it would be internal and spiritual. They will really be kind of shocked and stunned at the kingdom that Jesus is preaching here. They expected world domination, and they had reasons for it. There were prophecies, for example, like the one in the book of Daniel. There’s a huge statue that represents all these Gentile kingdoms — the head of gold, and the chest and arms of silver, and the belly and the thighs of bronze, and legs of iron and then the feet of partly iron, partly clay. The whole statute that Nebuchadnezzar dreamed about represents human history; it represents all of these Gentile kingdoms. Suddenly there’s a stone cut out, but not by human hands, and it flies through the air and strikes the statue at the feet and they crumble.   They just chaff on the threshing floor, and a wind blows them away, but the stone cut out but not by human hands grows until it becomes an impressive kingdom that takes over everything.  “In the time of those kings, the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that will never be destroyed nor will it be left to another people, it will crush all those kingdoms [all those Gentile kingdoms]. We understand clearly, “It will crush all those kingdoms, and bring them to an end but it will itself endure forever.” This is the meaning of the vision of the rock cut out of the mountain but not by human hands.” They expected a Jewish world-wide kingdom in which the Son of David would sit on the throne and all of the Gentile enemies would come and basically lick the dust at their feet. That’s going to be exciting and enjoyable when you are a first-century Jew and you’re licking the dust of the Roman Centurions feet and hating every minute: You feel like you’re in your Promised Land, why should you have to pay taxes? Why should you have to bow down to these tax collectors? Why should you have to follow rules and regulations made by an emperor who’s never been here. This was their land, given to them by God. But there are prophecies that someday the Gentiles will come and lick the dust at the feet of the Son of David. It said, “lick the dust.” It was a big theme in Jewish prophecy. For example, in Psalm 72 written by King Solomon, speaking of the Son of David, this king, this Messiah, “In his day, the righteous will flourish, prosperity will bound till the moon is no more. He will rule from sea to sea and from the river to the ends of the earth. The desert tribes will bow before Him and His enemies will lick the dust.”

There it is, Psalm 72:9, “The kings of Tarshish and of distant shores will bring tribute to him, the kings of Sheba and Seba will present him gifts, all kings will bow down to him and all nations will serve him.” They were ready for that; they were ready for an impressive worldwide dominating kingdom in which the Gentiles would come and lick the dust. They were ready for another prophecy too. Zechariah 8:23, “This is what the Lord Almighty says, in those days, ten men from all languages, and nations will take firm hold, of one Jew, by the hem of His robe and say, ‘Let us go with you because we’ve heard that God is with you.’” Oh, they were looking forward to that, too. They were looking forward to being part of that Messianic Kingdom and it was going to be impressive with world domination. They were so weary of the Assyrians, and the Babylonians and the Persians, and the Medes, and the Greeks and the Romans whoever comes next, weary of it, they wanted a king.

They were ready of a king, but they weren’t ready for the kingdom that He was living and proclaiming, they weren’t ready for that. They were wondering when Jesus began to preach, “Repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand,” wondered if the time had come, especially intrigued by his miracles. Now, that was never really, I think, in their mind, that the King would be a miracle worker for David and Solomon never did that. So that’s an enhancement. But we’re troubled by the way He’s living His life; we’re troubled by the Kingdom. It’s so quiet, it’s so humble, He gets along too well with the Romans. This is not what we had in mind. He was even healing one of their centurion servants, what is going on here? He’s not quarreling and crying out in the street and rabble-rousing and getting an army together, he’s not doing what they expected. He spoke of redeeming Gentiles, not of destroying them. Because of the mysteries of the kingdom, that’s why He told these parables, that they would understand the kingdom isn’t like what they thought. It’s going to start small, and even contemptible, in some ways it’s going to be repugnant. Christ was born of humble origins, born as a baby, raised in a rejected part of Israel in Nazareth: “Can anything good come from Nazareth?” said the Jews. He wasn’t trained in the halls of power; He wasn’t instructed in Jerusalem by the Pharisees and the best teachers. He was of a humble origin and He carried on a confusing ministry. He challenged people, “Follow me and let the dead bury their own dead, follow me and you may not know where you’re going to lay your head tonight, follow me and your parents will reject you or your children and you may die.”  They didn’t understand this, this didn’t make any sense. Even worse He was clearly on the outs with the Jewish leaders, rejected by them. They hated him, and they it seemed were plotting against him. They had already decreed that anybody who claimed that he was the Messiah, would be thrown out of the Synagogue. This isn’t what they had in mind. “Why are you dividing our people? We’re supposed to be united, and then taking on the Gentiles.” They didn’t understand. Look at your followers, Jesus, a motley band of ignoramuses, of what we would call blue collar workers. Galilean fishermen who don’t even know the simple basics of biblical instruction. They’re workers and even worse look who is following you: tax collectors, prostitutes, sinners. This is not what they had in mind. It’s going to get worse. He gets rejected and scourged and nailed to a Roman cross, with the ultimate insult, “This is Jesus, the King of the Jews,” over his head as He bleeds to death, as an executed criminal. The Jews cannot understand, they can’t accept it. Ugly, ugly, ugly the beginning of this kingdom, not what they had in mind. A small band of women, John standing there at the foot of the cross, that’s it. A very, very tough way to leave the world, a very ugly picture.

“Who has believed our message,” said Isaiah, “And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? He grew up before Him like a tender shoot and like a root out of dry ground. He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in His appearance that we should desire Him. He was despised and rejected, a man of sorrows and familiar with suffering, like one from whom men hide their faces, He was despised. And we esteemed Him not.” That means we rejected him. We thought nothing of him, he was low and despised, this tender root out of dry ground. So, the kingdom was going to start from despicable origins, lowly and despised, and it wasn’t just the Jews who despised him.  When Christianity began to make its progress and they began to preach a dead Jewish Messiah on the cross, the message made no sense. It was foolishness to the Gentiles, and they didn’t understand. Celsus, who Origen wrote against in the third century, a bitter foe of the Gospel, attacked the very concept that God would send His son in such a low in contemptible way to the despised Jews in one corner of the world. This is what he wrote, “God is good and beautiful and blessed and that in the best and most beautiful degree. But if he come down among men, He must undergo a change and a change from good to evil, from virtue to vice, from happiness to misery, and from best to worst. Who then would make choice of such a change?   It is the nature of a mortal indeed to undergo change and re-molding, but of an immortal to remain the same and unaltered. God then would not admit of such a change. God would never become a man and if he did, just for a joke,” that’s what he said. “If he’s like Jupiter coming to the Athenians he sure wouldn’t come to the Jews in that corner of the world,” so said Celsus. His ways are not understandable to us, His ways, are not our ways.

For the kingdom to start like a tiny seed stuck in the ground, or like a little amount of yeast off in the edge makes no sense. To me this is great encouragement for every generation, especially for ours, that God delights in small things. He delights in humble beginnings; He delights in just a conversation sparking at all. Just a thought that popped in someone’s head and then look where it’s gone.   God delights in small things and doing great things with small things. We forget that the universe is made up of atoms and they’re really small. God delights in small things, in putting them in order, and building a history out of it. And so, Zechariah 4:10, “Who despises the day of small things?” Yet we need constant encouragement because the Kingdom of Heaven never seems equal to the task, does it? It always seems overwhelmed by the obstacles and the odds. We have to hear 1 Corinthians 15:58, “Therefore my dear brothers stand firm, let nothing move you, always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain.” You need to be told that, don’t you? Do you ever get discouraged in the Christian life? I need to be told my labor in the Lord is not in vain, because it sure seems like it, sometimes. All of us as Christians, we need to hear that. Hebrews 12:12 says, “Therefore, strengthen your feeble arms and your weak knees,” because the kingdom doesn’t seem to match up. We’re wasting our time here.  In one 24-hour period almost a quarter million people in one day are added to the world population. People think, “We’re losing ground. There’s a sense of urgency. Is the kingdom up to the task?” What do these parables tell you?  Yes, the Kingdom of Heaven will permeate the entire dough. The Gospel of the Kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.

III.  The Lesson of the Mustard Seed: Outward and Visible Growth

The lesson of the mustard seed is outward invisible growth. Jesus said in Matthew 5:14, “You are the light of the world, you’re a city on a hill which cannot be hidden. The growth of the Kingdom can’t be hidden, it’s going to leave markers along the way in history. It’s going to start small, but we’re going to see marks of its progress along the way.   It started with 120 believers in the upper room.  That’s a small church. 120 believers in the upper room and then the Spirit poured out and in one day, 3000 were added to their number that day, just like that. Now that’s outward, visible change. Suddenly boom, 3000. Pretty soon the number grew to 5000 men, it kept growing and growing. Soon the call came to send missionaries to Gentile regions.  The Gospel spread along Asia Minor. Back up the roads of conquest where Alexander the Great and the Roman Legions had marched down to conquer Palestine. The Gospel went back up those pipelines across to the man from Macedonia who said, “Come over and help us.” The Gospel was preached there, in Philippi, and Thessalonica. It starts to spread, it starts to move, it starts to conquer. So that by the time Paul writes in Romans, he says, “It’s always been my ambition to preach where nobody’s heard of Christ, but I’m having trouble finding that place these days,” because the gospel had come from Jerusalem all the way around to what is modern Yugoslavia, right across from Rome.   Soon the gospel would be there. Within two and half to three centuries, the Gospel would have so permeated and so dominated in the Roman Empire that Constantine would declare himself to be a Christian. Incredible. What a marker in history. The progress that this Galilean carpenter, executed on a Roman cross, has made. If you had told Pontius Pilate, what was going to happen in the next three centuries, “The man you’re about to kill will someday be the God worshipped by the Emperor of Rome,” what do you think he would have said to you? “You’re insane.” It didn’t stop there. It continued to grow and to explode. Missionaries traveling. The Norsemen coming down, the Vikings coming to faith in Christ. It continued to spread, clear markers of progress. They left behind physical remnants: cathedrals built, art, hospitals, works of theology and writings. Clear markers of the progress of the gospel. The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that just explodes, and everyone can see where it’s heading, a visible legacy of Christianity.

IV.  The Lesson of the Leaven: Inward and Invisible Growth

But the kingdom of heaven is also like yeast which a woman took and hid, it says, in a large amount of flour until it worked all through the dough. So yes, there’s an outward invisible marker of the progress, but there’s an internal mysterious transformation. It says, “The Kingdom of Heaven is like yeast which a woman took and hid.” The Greek word is “enkrupto”, from which we get “to encrypt”. A hidden thing, a mysterious thing. So, there’s this hidden nature of the kingdom. You can’t see what it’s doing, but it’s making progress all the way through. I think this individually describes your own salvation if you’re a Christian, doesn’t it? You hear the Gospel, maybe John 3:16 something as simple as that. You read a tract, and all of a sudden it takes hold in your life. Little by little, it starts to conquer everything. It conquers the way you talk, it conquers the way you dress, it conquers the way you think, the way you make your living, the way you pray, what you hope for, what you dream, it conquers everything. It just starts to permeate within.

Jesus said in John Chapter 3, that the wind blows where it wishes, and you hear the sound, but you can’t tell where it comes from and where it is going. So is everyone who’s born by the spirit, that internal transformation changing everything, if anyone is in Christ, he’s a new creation. The old is gone, everything has become new. All things have changed, and so that from the inside out, it permeates and conquers. The biggest grief of your life is that it hasn’t conquered everything yet. But it will someday. Isn’t that glorious? It’s going to permeate everything, and there’ll be no sin left: no wickedness, no violence, no temptation, no pull toward evil. No, as it says in Romans 7, “sin living in me that does it,” all gone.

The Gospel will have permeated everything, and you will be glorious and perfect. Amen and amen, the glory of the internal transformation, but you can’t see it from the outside. You look like the same person but there’s something different about you, an internal transformation that conquers everything. Jesus was also talking about the world, wasn’t he? He had his eyes not just on the individual, but on the whole world. It would be down in the catacombs, under the streets of Rome where nobody could see it. Celsus was frustrated. He said, “You know something, they won’t talk about this, when the masters and better learned people are around. But when everyone’s gone, they’ll start to talk to your children and then kind of take on the weak and the lowly and share with them.”

The gospel spreads through the slaves, and the weak, and the despised and the lowly, and it just takes over, permeates, influences, just by hearing. Sometimes, the gospel is gossiped almost like news.

I love the story of John Bunyan’s conversion. John Bunyan was a tinker by trade, went around sharpening knives and fixing pots and pans which was obviously not a lucrative employment.  But he went around, and he was in a kitchen, sharpening some knives, fixing some pots and pans one day when he heard three or four women. This is what he says, he overheard, “Three or four poor women sitting at a door in the room and talking about the things of God.” And later he said, “I thought they spoke as if joy did make them speak.” Like they couldn’t hold it in. Christ had so filled their hearts they couldn’t help themselves. They’re just filled with the gospel and with Christ, and they’re just talking, gossiping Jesus. They never knew that Bunyan was overhearing, unconverted but listening. Later he gave his life to Christ and wrote Pilgrim’s Progress, and so, from just a little affect, a little permeation, it spreads to the whole world.

I love the story that my Mission’s Professor Christy Wilson, told of what’s happened in China. The same thing. I love this story because it shows the power of the gospel, how the Gospel was opposed by Mao Zedong. It was attacked and Christians were murdered and slaughtered down to a certain level and finally he stopped and said, “I can’t continue, I’ve got to denounce the idea of Christianity, not just kill Christians. I’ve got to take these few Christians that are left who are gaining strength and get them out of being together. I think what I’ll do is I’ll scatter them all over China so that they’re alone, and lonely, and they’ll die disgraced.” Christy Wilson said that the communist party in China is the greatest mission sending agency of the 20th century. Mao Zedong said, “What I’ll do is I’ll humble them further, I’ll give them jobs like garbage collector, where they go from house to house every day, collecting garbage.” You’re in a new town, never been anywhere. You’ve got Christ inside you and you’re going from house to house. What do you think you’re going to do? Could it be that you’re going to share the Gospel, and could it be that there are over 100 million Christians in China today? And could it be that Mao Zedong is dead?

V.  Prophecy Being Fulfilled: The Kingdom is Immense… But Unfinished

Kingdom of heaven is like yeast. Hidden in a little corner, it permeates the whole thing. You can’t stop it. But it’s hidden. It never made the headlines in The New York Times. But it is the story of China, just like it is the story of the entire world which the gospel is conquering and advancing, and the gospel is winning. The kingdom is immense but it’s unfinished. We live in a great time, brothers and sisters, a time in which the gospel is accelerating, a time in with a local church like ours can send out our own people across to the ends of the world, and they can influence, they can share the Gospel with some student who’s studying English. That study of English becomes a bridge that the Gospel could get across into their minds, and they could believe and be saved. This is a great time, and we can look back over 2000 years and say, “Lord, you’ve done it, it’s not finished yet, but I see it, I can connect the dots. We’re 95% there but I see what you’re doing. The Kingdom of Heaven is like a small mustard seed, which has grown to imposing size, yes, Lord, the Kingdom of Heaven is like yeast, which is tucked in a little corner, Jerusalem, upper room, and then spreads through the whole world. And yes, Lord, the kingdom of Heaven has conquered my heart and it’s taking over everything inside me. Oh, let your work be finished in the world and in me, let your kingdom come.” We never despise the days of small beginnings.

I think about, for example, the haystack prayer meeting. It was a sultry Saturday afternoon, in August 1806. Samuel J. Mills and four other students at Williams College in Massachusetts were talking and discussing the things of God, when suddenly the skies broke overhead, thunder and lightning and they ran and found protection kind of in the back side of a haystack. They just started to pray about world evangelization, they prayed that they would be used in a mighty way by God to spread the influence of Christ to the unreached people, what they called the heathens.  This was just a short time after William Carey, but there were no mission-sending agencies in America at the time. It wasn’t long after that, two years later, that they met a student from Brown named Adoniram Judson. He got involved, caught their vision, and he and his wife and a number of others set sail for Calcutta to join up with William Carey. En route, of course, they became Baptist. En route, they realized that they needed some financial support because the Congregationalists were not going to support them anymore, and so they sent Luther Rice back. Luther Rice went from Baptist church, to Baptist church, saying, “You guys have missionaries in the field, and you’re obligated to support them financially.” That was the beginning of the Southern Baptist Convention. That’s how it started, from a prayer meeting in a haystack. Do not ever despise the day of small beginnings. God loves to do this kind of thing, again, and again, and again. To advance the kingdom with just a little mustard seed of faith, to see what God can do.

VI. Application

What kind of applications can we take?  First of all, can I say to you come to Christ, if you’re not a Christian? The things I’m saying to you make no sense whatsoever, if you don’t trust Christ. If you don’t know Him as your Lord and Savior, if you don’t see Jesus bloody and dead on the cross as your substitute for sin, Jesus your sin bearer, and put your trust in your faith in him because he didn’t stay dead. God raised Him from the dead on the third day. Is he your life? Is he your righteousness? Is he your hope? If not come to Christ today.  But for you who are Christians, first of all, could you worship Christ for His sovereignty and fulfilling his prophecy? These were prophecies, weren’t they? The kingdom of heaven is going to take over and it has. Worship Him. He got it right. It’s not finished yet, but you see what He’s doing, worship him for what he’s doing. Secondly, never be discouraged over the seemingly slow progress of the kingdom. Never be discouraged about what He’s doing here, in this church. As long as we are faithful to teach and live obey His word, He will bless this church. Even if the progress seems slow.

Thirdly, expect great things from small beginnings. God does this again and again. Fourth, put priority on internal spiritual transformation, that comes first. The outward shows and the markers along the way come from a genuine internal transformation. Put the yeast ahead of the mustard seed. The internal transformation happens first, and out of that, comes the fruit that we’ve been talking about. Influence your surrounding world. Be yeast in your world, let there be lots of Christ about you. Lots of tracts handed to people if you only have a minute, invitations to church, going this afternoon to witness. Take a chance, I don’t think you’re going to get killed, but even if you do, you’ll rejoice and be glad and have the resurrection of a martyr.

Rejoice, be an influencer for Christ, pray for an unreached people group. Adopt one and pray for it for the rest of the year for six months. I prayed for Nepal for eight years, and I have personal stock in the company that God set up there, of over 100,000 Nepali Christians. There were almost none when I began praying. So, pray for them. Start a lunch time Bible study and rejoice if one person shows up. I saw a Bible study like that, start from one person and grew to 23 people.  That’s how it all started. Start a lunchtime Bible study, be an influencer for Christ. The kingdom of heaven in the end will conquer all things. Be faithful and serve Him.

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