I wanted to tell you a little bit of a story. So most of us, I mean, you live in North Louisiana, and if you're a transplant here, this may not apply to you. But if you grew up in this area, you kind of know about hunting. And so many of you probably had to take a hunter education course at some point.
I took one a long time ago. My parents were actually here. My dad and I took that together. Way back in the day with my little brother.
Well, you know, family traditions happened. And so we hunt as a family now, too. And my children took their hunter education course with their mother. And so this is about three years ago.
And so I have a daughter and a son. And they were probably like in, we'll say 8th grade and 6th grade or 7th grade and 5th grade, somewhere long in there. And so it's one of those deals where you sign up. You have to go for a couple days.
You sit there a long, long time. Some of it's probably enjoyable. A lot of it's probably monotonous and boring. And you listen to different people.
And you know, it's not one of the greatest experiences, probably known to man. Anyway, so they're in there. But my son can't go. And so we sign up.
And they did all this stuff. But Reed, he's unable to go because of football practice. He misses one whole session. And so Sean is like, hey, look, hands are anyway.
I mean, he'd still take the test and do this stuff. I mean, he was at this other class. He just can't miss this football thing or whatever. Whatever's going on.
And they're like, no, no, no, man. You've got to be here. If you're not here, you don't get it. That's all he's doing.
It sounds like, OK, whatever. So our neighbor went through the course. And they did all this stuff. They took the test.
And which for Sean and my wife, she didn't grow a pun. So a lot of this stuff's really new information for her. And so they endure the long course or whatever. They're sitting there for hours.
And if you teach this, I'm not bashing it. It needs to be taught. I'm just saying that some people feel like it's a little long. And so there is a point to this story, I promise.
So a few weeks later, when those cards come in the mail, well then Sean gets hers. She passed. And then when the rumor gets hers, she passed. And Rie gets a letter in the mail too.
And he opens his up. And this is just like theirs. He passed the course. He wasn't even there half the time.
They told him that you will not pass. But he passed anyway. And so sometimes in life, these things that some of us work for and we told for and we want them to be great, sometimes they happen. Sometimes things just kind of fall into our lap.
And we just sort of get lucky that it just worked out the way it did. But I would bet that for things that are truly great, truly great, that there's a lot that goes into it. Everybody doesn't just get the you pass thing in the mail without doing anything. So to grow something good, my bet is that there's a whole lot that goes into it.
And we do a lot of that work. And sometimes it's tough. Sometimes it wears us down. Sometimes we don't think it's going to produce the fruit that we want it to when we're trying to grow something good.
But, but there's a God who does things even greater than we do. And even beyond our understanding. And that's kind of where our passage is today. And so before we read up on the Big Bible, which I love reading on the Big Bible for some reason, I want you to meditate with me just for a minute.
I want you to do something. I'm going to risk it and say go ahead and close your eyes. You can fall asleep. You're probably falling asleep later anyway for that kind of person.
But hopefully not. But I'm going to risk that and say, let's close our eyes just for a minute. And I want you to think about what God may be wanting to grow in you. Pause and be still and know that he is God for just a second or two.
I want you to think about your situation right now and all the craziness or pressure or anxiety or challenge or even peace and just be still. And now ask God to give you his eyes to look beyond whatever is going on so you can see how he wants to grow the good things that he has planted in you. The fruits of the spirit of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, self-control. And for many of us, the tiny seeds of those fruits are planted in your soul already.
They've been planted in us long ago. For some of us, maybe that planting needs to happen today. The question is, how does God want them to grow right now in your life at this time? What is God cultivating in the garden of your heart right now?
And if it's driving you crazy, you can open your eyes as we read this passage from Mark 4. He also said, this is what the kingdom of God is like. A man who scatters seed on the ground, night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up. The seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how.
All by itself, the soil produces grain, first the stalk, then the head, then the full kernel in the head. As soon as the grain is right, he puts the sickle to it, because the harvest has come. And again, he said, what shall we say the kingdom of God is like, or what parable shall we use to describe it? It is like a mustard seed, which is the smallest of all seeds on earth.
Yet when planted, it grows and becomes the largest of all garden plants, with such big branches that the birds can perch in its shade. So no matter what we do, God is the one who grows it, no matter what we do. Whether we put a tiny amount of work into the garden of our soul, into the goals of our life, where God wants to take us, or whether we put a huge amount of work, God in his mystery, he's the one who grows it. And often, God grows big, you know?
God's not shy. God's not limited by the size of a field or the weather. And he can do miraculous things. But if that's true, right?
God does the growing. If this farmer, this man that we read about, and this parable from Jesus, if he just does what he does, but he doesn't know how it grows, so you kind of wonder what is our role? If God does it, if it's all God, and God's all good, then what do we have to do? What is our role in all of it?
And so today we're going to talk about four things that are, you could say they're Christian cultivation, you could call it foundry farming techniques, you could call it good growing advice, you can call it people planting, whatever you want to call it. But these four things, I think, have a little bit to do, a little bit to do with our role. Now, in the parable that we read in Mark IV, if you back up earlier, that was starting with verse 26, if you back up more towards the beginning, you're gonna hear the parable of the four soils. And so the number one thing, you know, I think you're not the number one, the one we're gonna talk about first anyway, is there's gotta be good dirt, there's got to be good dirt.
If there's gonna be something that's gonna be grown, there's got to be good dirt. And so Jesus in his parable, he talks about the seed that scattered out on the ground, and at first it's on the hard ground like the road, and it can't get into the soil, and the birds come, and the birds eat it up, and they take off. Then he talks about soil that has rocks in it, and so the plant gets planted, and it begins to sprout, but then because of the rocks, it can't take root. It's too shallow, it doesn't, it's getting at the nourishment it needs so it doesn't grow.
And then thirdly he talks about this plant, or the seed that's planted and sprouts up, but yet it's among thorns. And so the thorns creep in, and they choke it out. And then lastly he talks about this good soil, where the thing is planted, and it grows, and it produces something beautiful. God's gotta grow it, or God's gonna grow it, but there's got to be good dirt.
And that's kind of our role, making the dirt good, avoiding certain things. If you talk about your soul, and what God's doing in your life, and the trajectory that he has you on, I mean, God does make dirt good, I would agree with that, but we have a part to play, in what the soil, the soil, in our soul looks, we have a role in that. And so think about that this morning, where is it rocky, is it thorny, what's going on in you, is it fertile? Are you open to what God wants to do in your life?
God's gonna do things miraculously, you can count on that, but are you open to it, are you ready to receive it? Because that's what he was talking about with these soils. The very first one, he wouldn't even receive it at all. He'd be like, our heart would be so hard to what God wants to do.
I'm guessing that your heart's not quite that hard, or you might not be in this room today. But I'm also guessing that you could be like me, and sometimes the soil is kind of trashy, or there's other things growing in there in your heart that can choke out what God wants to do. Sorry, you're open and ready to receive it. So like there's got to be good dirt, there's always the Uncle Cracker exception, the flower growing through the sidewalk crack, or whatever.
There's always that possibility. I was at Chad Meredith's house the other day, and Meredith was talking about the little grass that continually pops up in their brick patio that they put together back there. No matter what they do, no matter how they try to kill it, it keeps growing through. And there's something about God in that.
There's something about God that no matter what someone might do to keep something down, sometimes God just does stuff beneath the surface that we don't understand, and he keeps coming through. He keeps growing things, even when he's not supposed to. Even when the world would say, that's not supposed to work like that, there's bricks here, we put weak killer on it. God keeps pushing stuff through, because God grows it, not us.
God does the growing. And so as you think about that idea, think about the people in your life, the people that you impact, that you reach, that you touch in one day, and sometimes you might look on the surface of them and you might go, I don't know what's going on with them. But what might God be brewing beneath the surface in their heart? And how might you have a role in that?
How might you help them maybe remove one brick so more could grow up through? Pull one root, I mean one thorn. Think about what God is doing, what God could be doing right beneath the surface that you don't see in the people that you're around, people that you live with, people that you work with. Number two, we're gonna be part of this whole growing thing.
We pour in our passion, we pour a passion into things that things that we care about, things that matter, these things of God that God has placed on our hearts, we'll just dive headfirst into some things because we believe in them so much. And because we feel like this is what God has laid on our heart to do, we will pour our passion into it. When I was a kid growing up, my parents always had a garden and my mother's dad, he always had a garden. And so I was kind of around that stuff, but I was never like a farm kid.
I mean, I shook some corn, I shelled some peas, picked some tomatoes, whatever. Saw my granddad's potatoes all sitting out in front of the shop on Sawhorses and Plagwood board. But I mean, I wouldn't want to farm her. But then later in life, I was this distraught youth minister who just couldn't take it anymore and was so burnt out.
And I had this idea of going back to one of my high school kind of dreams was to work, like I said, for a timber company and walk around in the woods all day and drive a four-wheel drive truck so I could go hunt and whatever one or two stuff like that. And so I thought maybe I could go back to school and get my four-story youth. So step one of that was to take a, I didn't have a lot of biology stuff in my accounting degree, imagine that. And so I had to take this botany class at South Plains Community College in Levelland, Texas.
And Levelland, Texas is Levelland, Texas. And so I would drive three days a week to this class, get up super early and drive for this class, and come back and do stuff at the church. And so one of the things we had to do in this class was we had to plant plants. And like the lab, we had, that's what we were doing.
We had like 30-something different plants over the course of the semester that we planted. And like, and I had to be tedious and care for them and all this stuff, which I'd never done before. I mean, I'm sure I'd watered one of my mother's plants at one time, but I never really cared about watering plants, but I had to, because I had to get a great, so I'd start off on the right foot. So I did all that.
I never went back to school for four-story. I never did any other stuff. God was growing in something and made it all the time. But we kept those plants, right?
And so Shauna is much more of a green thumb, Shauna wife. And so she kind of nurtured those plants after our time there at South Plains was over. And so then we worked at this youth home called Heartlight Ministries in Long Beach, Texas. We worked there for two years.
We were house parents to teenage boys that had a lot of problems. And so we had all these plants in our house. And Shauna would still water them and care for them and do all this stuff. Well, we also, in being house parents, you have to lay down the law to kids.
And sometimes kids would get mad at us from time to time, because we would punish them for different things. They need to be punished for. And so they got mad one time, and they put like 409 and all kinds of crazy stuff and killed every one of those plants. I mean, we'd poured all this work.
They'd travel from West Texas to North Louisiana to East Texas with like three moves, and me taking care of them as baby plants. And they survived all that. And then these kids just dumped clean these plants on them and just dried them up and killed them all. So we could pour our passion into so much stuff in our life.
It's so important to us. Someone can come along and just yank it up. Someone or something can come in there and mess with what is so valuable and precious to us. It can't happen.
God can be growing good things. And something or someone can still wreak havoc on the good things that are happening. And so I think about that as we pour our passion and stuff. The birds in the parable that we read perched in the shade of the mustard seed tree.
The birds in the parable that I talked about before that were kind of like the enemy. Interesting that the birds at one point are stealing seed for themselves. And later somehow the birds are coming to perch in the shade of the tree. And so even though there's evil in the world, even though we are under attack at times, even though something or someone can steal or destroy what has been happening that is good, there still can be bigger plants in the works.
Those who would hurt us may eventually come to know and love God and they may perch in the shade of the very tree we planted. When we worked with that youth home, that was kind of always the vision. These kids may hate us right now. But one day they may know this Jesus who loves him so much.
And so as I think about that, and you can kind of get emotional when you think about what you put your passion in and someone messing with it or just not working out like you want it to, then I think about God. And I think about the amount of passion that he pours into us. And what he must pour into us. How much he does love us.
And then yet sometimes we who are the recipients of that love will chip away at what he has done. We will go against the good work that God is even trying to do in our own lives. Think about how God feels with that. God who loves us desperately and pours into us all the way to the cross.
I mean, we sing about it all the time. And then what must he feel like when we mess with the stuff that he's doing? When we're not obedient to him. When we tend to go a different way.
I don't know for me that puts some perspective on life. That puts some perspective in who I deal with and how I parent my own two children. And just to think how much God pours into us. Number three, God does grow it.
And we have a role in it, but it won't be perfect. It won't be perfect. My wife, Shauna, she was Pinterest before Pinterest was cool. I mean, she is King, Queen, whatever of these do-it-yourself projects, all those home shows.
She could be on all of them, I think. And oh, no. But she's really creative. I am not.
I'm not. And I'm scared of projects at home. I mean, dear stands in the driveway. That was my project.
I could do that. I could nail two befores into other two befores and make a ladder. But anything beyond that, I'm scared to do. My bravery is increased simply because I married to Shauna.
And she puts us in these situations where we've got to finish this project. And I found out, Golly, we can really do some stuff. We did this bed recently for my son. She saw a picture, and then we did it.
And we argued a little bit over this and that. You can see, though, so the last piece of the bed is this bottom gray board. That's the headboard. And you can see the gap right there.
We measured it at least twice. We talked about it. And I got the handsaw and there's still a gap. I mean, we labored for that thing.
We would have talked about it for like three or four weeks, and finally together. And the funny thing is, that gap is there. And we will go to our grave knowing that we made that mistake. But when we put the mattress on that thing, no one's going to know.
When Reed goes to sleep at night, he's not going to go, dang it, that gap is really bothering me. It won't matter. It's OK that what we are trying to grow, that what we are pursuing isn't perfect. We have a heavenly father that makes up for her perfection, more than makes up.
And sometimes the bigger picture is that those tiny things that we fret over may not matter so much anyway. Because we can still sleep. We can still rest. We can still live and breathe and move, even though it's not all perfect.
I drove by this church the other day. And the church signs, you know. And get off Facebook and get into my book, and all those kinds of things like that. Use the GPS, God's positioning system.
And you may love those. That's fine. You're awesome if you do. But sometimes I think, OK, right?
That's not there is no quick fix with God. We can just do one thing and boom, it happens. If we're going to grow something good, there's not like three little steps and boom, you're done. It's this patient process.
If you've ever grown anything real, like a plant or corn or whatever, it takes time. I mean, we can manipulate it. We can accelerate it. We can hamper it.
We can halt the growth. But we can't force the growth. We can't force it. It happens because of God.
We can't force that to happen. And you know that. And I know that. But we forget it.
There's no hurry up method. Elsa says let it go. We have to let it grow. We just do.
There's nothing else. Let it happen. We do our part and we let it happen. We let God do it in his time.
And sometimes that drives people crazy. But it's true. And now, parents, everybody in the room can hear this. But parents, I speak directly to you, especially if you have younger ones.
It's the growing stuff is tough, man. I tell my son all the time, I've never been a father to a 15-year-old boy before until this year. I'm learning as I go. And then I'm going to tell you, when he was a baby, before he was born, staying with his sister, we prayed for them, we had dreams for them, we had plans for them.
And then all the time, we have plans for them. All the time, we want what is absolutely best for them. We want them to walk with Jesus all the days of their life. I mean, I pray that constantly.
That's what I want. But it's tough. Growing them, seeing them go through things, watching them make decisions that you're like, oh my gosh, what are you doing? And then having them fail.
And then having to walk with them through that failure. That's not easy. It's not easy at all. But it doesn't mean God's still not growing stuff.
It doesn't mean good things still aren't happening. It's just not happening the way we want it to. We're in the time frame that we want to do. And there's a difference between just planning the plant and then walking away and leaving it.
I mean, you plant it, you water it, you talk to it, you care for it, you do those things. You still don't make it grow. God doesn't mysterious stuff. So I'm not saying let it grow and just walk away from it.
God doesn't want us to do that. He wants us to engage. And just like he got down on the dirt in that song we were just singing and presses his face to us. He wants us to do the same thing, get involved and get dirty in the whole growing process.
But we do have to let it happen. This farmer, he sleeps and he gets up. But at some point it's out of his hands. He can't be forced.
I wonder sometimes if he says he wakes and he sleeps. And sometimes I wonder if part of the sleeping is just in the mysteriousness of God growing things is just so we can rest for a little bit. I was talking to Jeremy before outside. He was talking about how his week's been a monster week.
And he just crashed Friday night and yesterday. He just rested. And I know this guy and he works hard. And so I know he needs to rest.
But I just wonder if that's part of the rhythm that God wants us to rest. We have to have a time where he takes care of stuff that we don't take care of so that then we can get back up and get in the game and continue to do what he's called us to do. Kind of like when you have the newborn baby and they finally go to sleep and so mom and dad are like, ah, pass out. That's the rhythm of all of life.
Is that God grows at this that we don't have to grow it. And we can rest at certain intervals. We can take those breaks and be at peace knowing that he's doing what we can't. So if you've read much in Mark 4, there's a section right after the Jesus talks about the four soils.
And right before he gets into this growing seed, it's two verses, it's 11 and 12. You can go home and read it today and ponder it and write papers on it and argue with people for days and days about what it means. Jesus starts talking about the secret of the kingdom. He talks about insiders and outsiders, those who don't get it compared to those who do.
And he makes this comment about being forgiven. And so my guess is he told that parable about the soils and the disciples are just looking at it. What? OK, what does this mean?
We're all fishermen. We're not farmers. What are you talking about? I don't know.
And so he starts saying, this is how maybe you could understand. And so at the end of the day, what we think about God, no matter what we think we know, God still does the growing. It's by his grace that we're here. It's by his grace that we continue.
The mystery of the seed is the mystery of the kingdom is the mystery of grace. We don't deserve it. We can't earn it. It's just there.
God offers it. We can't force our way through the surface. We don't do that. God does sin stuff through the surface.
We can't force it. And we don't get to be an insider because we're planted in the right place or because we can afford miracle grow and others can't or because we're a really good plant and we have a whole lot to offer the world if the world will just look at us. God does the growing. God grows it.
And when we're in, we grow because Jesus makes dirt good. He just does. He makes it good. Jesus pours his passion into us.
Jesus' perfection takes care of our imperfection. And Jesus knows that we can't control it. Even if he wanted to give us the reins and control what happens underneath the earth, if he wanted to let us control the movement of the spirit and people's arts, even if he wanted to let us try that, he knows we can't. We cannot control it.
So Jesus takes care of it for us. We grow because God does the growing. God grows it.