I’m not ashamed of the gospel…

‘Your kingdom come!’ A snappy title for a great weekend, but I hope we won’t be abandoning the theme too soon. As Dave shared from Matthew 5:5 (‘Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.’) some of the things Jesus said about his kingdom can knock you for six if you stop for a moment to really think about them. In fact, the kingdom of God is so counter-intuitive, so different to our way of thinking that Jesus had to explain it through a montage of parables using everyday things to explain what we would otherwise be powerless to grasp.

 I’ve been thinking recently about the parable of the sower in Matthew 13, particularly verse 8 which describes the productivity of seed in good soil. The minimum return on the seed is thirty times what was sown. And that’s the minimum – the parable also mentions returns of up to one hundred times! My question is this: if the word of God is so powerful, what am I doing wrong?! I have something inside me that has the power to multiply thirty, sixty, even a hundred times over, so why is it not happening? Why is my life apparently so lacking in fruit? Where is the increase?

 There are several possible responses to this question, the first (and least advised) is to get quite depressed about it and conclude that I must be a fraud. This usually involves criticising the ground on which the seed is sown, either in myself (“There must be something wrong with my heart because the seed isn’t growing!”) or in others (“They’re so unresponsive and hard hearted, no wonder the seed isn’t growing!”). However, the parable Jesus told was not meant to be a criticism of his followers nor of his hearers. There were places like Samaria where the disciples could only see hardness and opposition but Jesus saw fields ‘ripe for harvest’ (John 4:35). Nor was Jesus criticising the seed. Whatever barriers to fruitfulness might exist, the gospel itself is not one of them. Paul writes in Romans 1:16:

‘I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes…’

So what was Jesus saying in this parable?

 In fact, the parable of the sower was meant to be an encouragement! Jesus was telling his disciples to keep sowing because when the seed landed on good ground it would produce a harvest many times what was sown. In the face of “enemy ground” he was saying “No more excuses! Stop saying the harvest isn’t ready yet! It’s the workers that are few, not the ready fields!” We don’t need to fear that our labour is in vain, the seed will do its own work if it is only given the opportunity to do so.

 This brings us to the real question – are we actually sharing the gospel? I don’t simply mean once a week ‘hits’ on street corners or fantastic seeker services, I mean in our day to day lives are we sharing the gospel that has worked so powerfully in us with others? Perhaps our greatest danger is ‘shrink-wrapping’ the gospel, protecting and hiding it until we find the ultimate piece of responsive ground in which to sow it. Unfortunately, like Jesus’ disciples we are not usually very good at recognising good ground when we see it. Going back to Samaria, it is amazing that the disciples, who knew the gospel of the kingdom, were able to walk right into the heart of the city, buy bread, and leave without having any effect at all. Yet Jesus, waiting by a well outside the city, took the opportunity to share the gospel with the one person who happened to arrive there, a sexually immoral woman whose religion and culture caused offence to the Jews. Through that one act of seed sowing Jesus did not even need to enter the city – as a result of the woman’s testimony (more seed sowing) the people of the city came out to Jesus and begged him to stay!

 The gospel has never lost its saving power nor its potential to give a massive return on what is invested. However, unless it is freely sown and allowed the opportunity to grow and reproduce it remains all potential but no realisation. As an older bible version says, ‘it abideth alone’ (John 12:24 KJV).