Have you ever woken up to periods in your life, in which you feel like anything “good” that happens to you is immediately snatched away before you can touch it? What about periods in which you have something “good” in receipt but bad circumstances take away from it, and you can’t savor it? This one’s my favorite: do you have times in your life where you have this incredible “good” entering your life, yet you sabotage yourself so that self-negativity pervades all aspects of this “good,” and your life, like the plague? I ask these of you, this morning, because we all have an incredible “good” being sown into our lives. What we fail realize is that this “good” isn’t meant for some type of temporary happiness, but is meant for long-term growth and expanding production. We have to do something with it, because only we can provide a place for that “good” to grow. Other seeds fell on good soil and produced grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. – Matthew 13:8 Jesus continues, later in this chapter, to explain this parable by saying, “As for what was sown on good soil, this is the one who hears the word and understands it. He indeed bears fruit and yields, in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty.” (Matthew 13:23 ESV). Essentially, Jesus is saying that we are the soil; that is, people’s personalities, characteristics, preferences and actions are soil in which the Word of God is sown. We control the fate of what happens to the gospel in our lives, and our response determines how much impact is made in our lives.This is not salvation, because salvation is the freebie we get when we are saved; rather, I’m talking about production, the marks of our salvation conveyed through the works of our hands and the words of our mouths. Therefore, the “good” I’d referred to is not only the message of the gospel of Jesus Christ, but also the life-changing work of Jesus, through the Holy Spirit, in our lives. We are saved by Jesus through faith, and also tangibly receiving the gifts that come with this message of faith: life-changing and life-producing seeds that radically change our being. We may not choose the circumstances and mindsets that we are in when we receive the gospel, but we definitely choose what we do with it: that much is evident from this passage. We are responsible for what happens to the gospel planted within us. We must respond to it. Even no response, is a response. However, the ultimate response is “bearing thirty, sixty and one hundred times.” The question is whether or not we are game to respond to the gospel of Jesus Christ in this way. Do we really want to do something with the gospel in our lives, or will we be satisfied with living ineffectually, allowing the “good” to pass us by?
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