Kingdom Growth

Kingdom Parables • Sermon • Submitted 3 years ago

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God's kingdom grows and spreads in mysterious ways. Just like the mustard seed and the yeast grow and spread, God’s kingdom grows and spreads. God can use something small and seemingly insignificant to make something big that is useful for people and birds alike, and He can do it with the smallest of us too. Just like the yeast works its way through the entire dough, the kingdom of God is supposed to spread into every corner and part of our lives, not be limited and shut out of areas we want to keep to ourselves.

Notes

Transcript

Thank you for being with us today. Over the past few weeks we have been studying some of the parables that Jesus used to teach His disciples about the Kingdom of Heaven. Our very first week in this series we learned how Jesus changed His approach to how He was speaking to the crowds. At first, He had been speaking plainly to them about the things that pleased God and how to live a life that honored Him. However, over time, most people decided they weren’t interested in actually obeying or following Jesus’s teaching, and some even began to outwardly oppose and challenge Jesus. As Jesus put it, they shut their eyes and ears to God’s word. By this time in His ministry, Jesus was ready to go beyond the basic teachings about the Kingdom of Heaven and dive deeper into the spiritual truths He came to teach, but those secrets were reserved for the people who listened and obeyed His teaching, those who belonged to the kingdom. So, Jesus started to teach using parables so that those who refused to open their eyes and ears would not understand, and those who were a part of the kingdom would learn the secrets that had been reserved for them.

The fist parable we looked at emphasized the importance of God’s people bearing fruit. God has a purpose for the word that He scatters and plants in our lives. It is supposed to take root in our lives, and as we deepen our faith and keep our attention and focus on God, the word God has planted in our lives produces fruit.

The second parable we looked at was an encouragement that even though for the time being God’s people co-exist with wickedness and others who don’t follow God or belong to His kingdom, that God will one day remedy this situation. For now, God has an adversary who is actively trying to destroy God’s work and steal God’s glory, the devil; but at the end of the age God will judge the world and His kingdom will overcome all other kingdoms and will remain as the only kingdom, with no more evil or sin in the world. So even though for now things might be difficult and we might have to endure suffering, there is a promise for a better future as part of God’s kingdom.

Today we are looking at two very short parables that teach us about the growth of God’s kingdom, and the effect it has on us. If you have your Bible with you, please turn to Matthew 13, starting in verse 31.

Matthew 13:31–35 CSB

31 He presented another parable to them: “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that a man took and sowed in his field. 32 It’s the smallest of all the seeds, but when grown, it’s taller than the garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the sky come and nest in its branches.” 33 He told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like leaven that a woman took and mixed into fifty pounds of flour until all of it was leavened.” 34 Jesus told the crowds all these things in parables, and he did not tell them anything without a parable, 35 so that what was spoken through the prophet might be fulfilled: I will open my mouth in parables; I will declare things kept secret from the foundation of the world.

Let’s pray...

As you read through the Gospels, one of the things you will notice is that Jesus often redefined or provided a new perspective on things Israelites had long believed. Sometimes He cleared up misunderstandings or misinterpretations about Scripture that the Jews had made, and He taught them the correct interpretation of things, and other times He turned things upside down on them, probably in order to make a point or to cause people to think about something more than they would normally. One great example of that was when Jesus shared the parable of the Good Samaritan. Most of us are familiar with that parable where a man is robbed on the road and beaten badly. Instead of using the usual good guys as the heroes (a priest and a Levite) and making them the ones who failed; then, Jesus makes the guy who is usually cast as the enemy or the villain the hero (a Samaritan).

This method of teaching broke the usual rules of what people expected in a parable in order to draw attention to the lesson being taught. Using the usual formula would cause people to zone out with an attitude of “I’ve heard this one before” and miss the point behind the story. The point Jesus was trying to make was often a clarification or new approach to something the people thought they understood, so he wanted to make sure they paid attention so that they would realize that things were different than they thought they were.

Jesus used unexpected images to draw people’s attention to unexpected truths.

In the two parables that we are studying today, we find some of this approach where Jesus brings an unexpected twist to an image or idea that was commonly held and understood among the Jews. For some who were not open to Jesus’s message, it probably resulted in confusion and them just dismissing the parable; it didn’t fit inside their box, and they weren’t interested in it anyway. But for those who were being shown the secrets of the Kingdom, it revealed new insights into truths that had been, "kept secret from the foundation of the world.”

Let’s look at the first parable of the mustard seed that turns into a tree.

Matthew 13:31–32 CSB

This parable represents a certain kind of growth of the kingdom of heaven.

1. The Kingdom of Heaven spreads in the world.

God’s plan had always been for the entire world to be blessed through Jesus and the Gospel He brought to share with others. The Messiah and His mission was to have a much greater impact than the Jews realized. The Jews had been looking forward to someone who would save the nation of Israel from their enemies, but God’s plan was much bigger than that; He wanted to save humanity from its enemies (sin and death). The reality of God’s plan was much bigger than what the Jews realized. The impact of Jesus’s ministry, then, was well represented by the contrast between the mustard seed and the tree that it turned into.

Mustard seeds grow from small beginnings to large plants. You should have received a bookmark in your bulletin with a mustard seed. If you don’t have one, a mustard seed measures about one to two millimeters in diameter, about half the size of a sesame seed, for comparison, for those of you who love sesame bagels or burger buns with sesame seeds on them. However, a mature mustard tree can grow to be twenty feet tall and twenty feet wide, and some even grow to be thirty feet tall under ideal conditions.

Jesus was trying to hightlight the difference between what something is at its beginning versus its final state. As Jesus was doing ministry, and even at the end of His life, the movement He was leading was far from established and secure. Jesus was reassuring His followers that even though the kingdom of heaven might have seemed like it had a small beginning on this earth, it would become something much bigger. The disciples needed this reassurance because at the moment, even in the midst of the excitement and momentum, there were times when it seemed like it could all fall apart.

In fact, some time after Jesus’s death and resurrection, the disciples were sharing the Gospel among the people in Jerusalem, and many were coming to faith in Christ. At one point the Apostles had been arrested, and the religious leaders wanted to put them to death. However one of the teachers of the law named Gamaliel made an argument in their defense. Here is what it says in...

Acts 5:35–39 CSB

35 He said to them, “Men of Israel, be careful about what you’re about to do to these men. 36 Some time ago Theudas rose up, claiming to be somebody, and a group of about four hundred men rallied to him. He was killed, and all his followers were dispersed and came to nothing. 37 After this man, Judas the Galilean rose up in the days of the census and attracted a following. He also perished, and all his followers were scattered. 38 So in the present case, I tell you, stay away from these men and leave them alone. For if this plan or this work is of human origin, it will fail; 39 but if it is of God, you will not be able to overthrow them. You may even be found fighting against God.” They were persuaded by him.

For the first few years of the early Church, it was primarily located in Jerusalem. At the point in the book of Acts when this discussion happens among the religious elite, Jesus had already sent the Holy Spirit to His disciples (that happened just a few days after Jesus went up into heaven after appearing to them during forty days after his resurrection). The follower of Jesus had already begun to grow in number, and numbered in the thousands, but it was still small compared to what God’s plans were for His Church.

Over the next decades and centuries, the Church grew beyond Jerusalem, then beyond the immediate surroundings, and beyond the Roman Empire. Ever since then it has been spreading to new places where it was not before. It has made its way across the world by the work of missionaries and Christians who took it with them as they settled in new places and sought out new peoples who had not heard the Gospel yet.

The Kingdom of Heaven is still growing and spreading in the world.

At times the kingdom’s growth has been slow, as in some nations where the local governments, religions and forces of darkness have violently resisted the message of God. Many Christians have given their lives to the effort of taking the Gospel to new places and growing God’s kingdom on earth. And yet, God’s kingdom is growing in a steady way.

Back in 1949 the Communist government took over in China, and the missionaries that had spent years sharing the gospel there had to leave. In reality, there had been efforts to spread the Gospel in China for several hundred years, and there was a small number of Christians by the time the Communist government came to power. At that time there were about one million protestant Christians in China, and for several decades, very little news made it out of China regarding the state of the Christian church there. Because of the strong opposition to religion by the government, many Christians worried that the church in China would have all but disappeared under the oppression of the government. When China started to slowly reopen in the late 1970’s many were amazed to learn that Christianity had not only survived under communism, it had thrived despite the persecution. Some conservative estimates calculated that Christianity had gone from one million to around thirty million during those dark years, and by 2010, conservative estimates put that number at around sixty million or more.

Now, the Gospel is spreading among other nations, even majority Muslim nations where the consequences of being a Christian might cost you your life, but still, the seed grows and spreads, and new peoples come under the protection of its limbs.

Sit with a group of missionaries, or go to a missions conference and listen to stories about what God is doing to expand His kingdom, and you will realize that even though sometimes things start small, with God leading the way He can cause it to grow into a tree that provides for the needs of many nations spiritually.

This is one way we can view this parable, but the principle of small beginnings can also be applied to individual people.

Small beginnings don’t limit what God can do with someone who is willing to let God do His will in their lives.

The first disciples were clear examples of this. They were not famous, or powerful, or people of great stature in their culture and society, yet God did amazing things through them for the sake of His kingdom. In fact, here is what it says in...

Acts 4:13 CSB

13 When they observed the boldness of Peter and John and realized that they were uneducated and untrained men, they were amazed and recognized that they had been with Jesus.

Small and humble beginnings don’t limit what God can do with us if we follow and obey Jesus and let Him work through us. You don’t have to be someone from an influential family, have a degree from a famous school, or have some great sponsor on your side. You just need to make yourself available to the Almighty God who created the universe and let Him do in you and through you whatever He desires to do. God may use you to be faithful in the small things around you for a life of quiet faithfulness at the end of which God will greet you in His kingdom with a smile and the words, “Well done, good and faithful servant.” Or God may use you to be faithful in things that are much greater than anything you could do on your own to bring Him glory, for a life of intensity and adventure, at the end of which God will greet you in His kingdom with a smile and the words, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”

Different people play different roles in helping the Kingdom grow. Our duty is to play the role God has assigned each of us individually.

This leads to the second parable we are looking at today. It is the parable of the yeast in the dough.

Matthew 13:33 CSB

33 He told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like leaven that a woman took and mixed into fifty pounds of flour until all of it was leavened.”

In this parable, Jesus presents another thing that the Israelites are familiar with, but he presents it in a completely unfamiliar context. Yeast, or leaven, was something the Scriptures mentioned on numerous occasions. In a few cases leaven was spoken of in a positive way and there were one or two instances in which leavened bread were part of a thanksgiving offering or sacrifice, but in the majority of cases, yeast was connected to the idea or sin, impurity, or something undesirable. Most sacrifices that included some sort of grain offering demanded bread or cakes made without yeast. In other words, bread that was untainted and unspoiled by yeast was what God required of sacrifices; otherwise, the offering would be rejected. However, in this specific parable, Jesus turns the tables on the role of the yeast. He doesn’t use it to represent sin or something unclean spoiling a batch of dough, He uses it to represent the speed and thoroughness in which the kingdom is supposed to affect the person it has taken root in. By using an image the people associate with one symbol, but switching what it symbolizes, Jesus makes His point more memorable.

2. The Kingdom of Heaven spreads in our lives.

The life of a Christian is a paradox between what God has already accomplished in the life of each believer, and what He is doing in our lives to transform us into who He desires us to be. There is the reality that before God’s throne of Justice we are declared forgiven and innocent because of Jesus’s sacrifice on our behalf. We have the righteousness of Christ that is imputed to us even while we are still sinners going through a process of purification. Each of us could look back at our spiritual journeys and point out areas of our lives that God has brought under His control and Lordship, and areas where He is still working in us. This is where the image of yeast working its way through a batch of dough is helpful.

Over this past year, I have started to get into baking bread. It all started several months ago when one of my college friends posted a picture of a batch of bagels that he had baked during his COVID social distancing lockdown early in the crisis. I love a good bagel, and it occurred to me that if he could make bagels, I could too. So I asked for his recipe and I tried my hand at it. I’ve made bagels several times over the past year, and our family has enjoyed the treat they are. But I also love watching cooking shows like “The Great British Baking Show” and others like that. This past month I started trying my hand at trying to bake sourdough bread and other rustic bread recipes. Believe it or not, one of the best loaves of bread I’ve made had four ingredients in it: Flour, salt, yeast and water. I prepared it one day, let it rise overnight, and baked it the next day, and it was AMAZING.

Of course, for many of our breads we use packets of dried yeast and add that to our ingredients, but for sourdough and other rustic loaves, sometimes you use the old traditional method of leavening the bread with a live leavening agent, which basically means you have a live yeast culture that you use to start the leavening process for each new loaf of bread you make. Shannon has a jar in our refrigerator of San Francisco Sourdough starter. It’s a jar of live yeast that a friend of ours cultivated by allowing some of the natural yeast that is present in the air in the San Francisco Bay Area to start growing in a batch of dough he had. Once it was established in his dough, he has kept it alive and has used that same batch of yeast for years when he makes sourdough bread. Shannon got him to give us a small jar with some of his starter a year ago when we went to California, and she adds a little flour and water to it every week to keep it alive in the fridge. Hopefully our sourdough starter will last many years as well. From time to time, Shannon (and now I) will take about half of the starter to add to a larger amount of dough and turn it into sourdough bread, and then we add flour and water to what remains to keep it alive and thriving. The Israelites had a similar method, where they always kept part of the dough they made that day in order to start the next loaf. Each day they took the dough that was already leavened and added it to new dough until the leaven worked itself throughout the entire batch, and then they took a small portion of that leavened dough and set it aside for next time they were going to make bread. Then they baked the rest of the dough for the bread they would eat that day. Most families made their own bread, and in general there wasn’t a bakery in town like we have today. So each family had its own leaven somewhere in their home that they used to make bread with each day. Most of us don’t make our own bread, so we don’t usually have jars of leaven sitting around, or even the dry packets of yeast that we’ve developed to make modern-day baking easier, but for the Jews, it was a common kitchen item.

So it makes more sense, knowing this, that the Law of Moses commanded that households needed to remove all leaven from their homes during the Passover and some other religious holidays. Yeast represented sin, and impurity, and as part of many religious ceremonies, it was to be eliminated from the home for the duration of the holiday. There were even rules about what to do to get rid of yeast and mold and other things that spread in similar ways in order to maintain religious purity.

One thing was clear about yeast, it was an ingredient that once it took hold in something, it spread quickly and thoroughly throughout the entire thing it was in. I think this attribute of yeast was the point that Jesus was trying to make about the kingdom of heaven.

The Kingdom of Heaven should take over our entire lives. It does not grow only in some places and not in others.

For many followers of Jesus, it is a struggle to submit every area of our lives to Christ. There are times when we hold back parts of ourselves either out of rebellion or out of fear that God will do something we don’t like in that area of our lives. But this is not how God intends for our lives to be. He desires for all of our lives to be changed by the influence of His word in our lives. Part of the process of discipleship and spiritual growth is submitting ourselves to God bit by bit, and allowing God to take over and inhabit more and more of our lives. God understands that we are in the midst of that process, but we need to be careful to not rebel and shut the door of certain areas of our lives to Him. He demands and deserves to be Lord of all of us, not just part of us.

Another reality about the dough is that the yeast has to be added to the dough for it to be changed and for it to rise. If you don’t add leaven to the dough, it won’t rise. You can still make bread but that bread is more like a flatbread, kind of like pita bread or four tortillas. You have to add yeast or leaven to bread if you want it to rise, to be spongy and have those complex flavors that come with yeast.

Like I mentioned earlier, I’ve started trying to make my own bread from time to time, so this past couple of days I worked to increase my sourdough base so that I could make some sourdough bread this weekend. I decided to bring some dough with me today. One of these containers has dough with yeast, and the other has the same ingredients, without the yeast. Can you see the difference in size in these two doughs? One has risen and grown, its flavor has been changed by the yeast that is in it, and the yeast has worked its way through the entire dough I started with. The yeast has changed, grown and improved the dough. God’s Spirit within us does the same things. He changes us, He makes us grow, he brings maturity, and improves us. God wants access to every part of our lives, just like the yeast works its way through every part of the dough. It is a lifelong process of transformation. It is also a process that we cannot carry out on our own power. Here is one final truth I want to leave with you this morning:

The leaven that changes the flour is from outside.

Just like the flour or the dough cannot change itself, it needs an outside influence (yeast) to change, we need God to change us, we cannot change ourselves.

I had to add leaven to the dough for it to change and grow. It didn’t do it by itself. There is nothing in the flour, salt and water that will make bread rise and be changed chemically like the yeast does. In the same way, there is nothing in you or me that we have naturally in us that can transform us into the people that God wants us to be. We need God’s Spirit in us, His Kingdom in us to be that agent of transformation in our lives. But the amazing thing is that even though we may be powerless to effect meaningful lasting change in ourselves by our own strength, when God puts His spirit in us, there is nothing that He cannot change and transform about us. There is no sin he cannot free us from, no hurt he cannot heal us from, no fear he cannot bring under control, no enemy he cannot protect us from. With God in us, and with us allowing God into every corner of our lives, there is no limit to what God can do in us and through us. As the verse in 1 John says:

1 John 4:4 CSB

You are from God, little children, and you have conquered them, because the one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world.

So if you are a follower of Jesus, if you are a member of the kingdom of heaven, then rejoice, because the kingdom of God continues to grow and spread its branches into the far reaches of the world, and be encouraged that God’s kingdom will continue to work its way in your life, growing you and transforming you as you walk with Him day after day. There is no limit to the potential of God’s kingdom in this world, and no limit to the potential of God’s kingdom in your life.

Let’s pray.

Hebrews 13:20–21 CSB

Now may the God of peace, who brought up from the dead our Lord Jesus—the great Shepherd of the sheep—through the blood of the everlasting covenant, equip you with everything good to do his will, working in us what is pleasing in his sight, through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen.

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