Upon Further Reflection
Message Description
Dr. Kurt Bjorklund returns to Orchard Hill Church and teaches out of the New Testament book of Luke and the parable of the seeds thrown on different soils.
Message Transcript
It is really good to be back with you. I had a chance two weekends ago to be at our Butler campus. Last weekend to be at our Strip District. And while we were away, we weren't really away. We, like many of you, participated virtually when we weren't here. And that was great to still feel connected and to be a part of it.
But I do want to just say virtual isn't quite the same, and it's not the same in these ways. It was not as personal because when you're in person, you meet people and talk to people. There's something about that communal effect, which is good. And there's something about walking into a space when songs are being sung and teaching is happening where you are publicly affirming something that you don't do in your living room.
And there's something to the lack of distraction when you're in your own home or somewhere you have lots of options while it's going on. Like, "I'll just finish this. I'll take care of this." And there is something to being in person that's good. And so, it's really good to be back. And our time away was really good. It was by and large what we hoped it would be. It was good for us as a couple, good for me. And I'd highly recommend that if you ever get a chance to be away for a little while.
And it was certainly an element of vacation. There were a lot of moments that were very free, not quite as exotic as what we saw, but very good. And there were a lot of things that weren't like a vacation. And what I mean by that is the goal was really to have a time of a different kind of work without the week-in, week-out responsibilities around the church, without teaching on an ongoing basis. To think about, pray about whatever I wanted to think about. To pursue some work in our own hearts and souls. And we really tried to do that.
And here's what I ended up doing for a big chunk of the time. And this is much less exotic than what you saw. But I decided that I wanted to try to read through the New Testament in Greek. So, having gone to seminary years and years ago, I learned Greek at the time, still consult Greek when I teach, look at it all the time, but I've never just read through the New Testament in the original language.
And so, I decided to do that. And just to give you an idea, in every chapter, there are about 30 to 50 words that appear in the New Testament less than 30 times. So even if you have a pretty good grasp of the Greek vocabulary, you still spend a lot of time looking up words. But that's actually part of what made it good is that it forced me to grapple with the meaning of words, with the grammar, with the different things that were there.
And my hope was that it would do something in me, spiritually, just to not read a bunch of other books, but to focus on what does the New Testament say? What does God say through His word? And that's what I tried to do. And I hoped that it would also be good just for me in terms of what happens here in the teaching. So, I'll do my best not to geek out on the Greek in the next few weeks with you all but know that that is part of what we did. And it was hopefully really good. I've had some people say to me, "You look really good. You look really rested." I'm not sure what that means exactly. I must have looked like death last year, is my conclusion, but it is good to be here.
Let me pray. And we'll jump into what we're doing in here today. God, thank you. And as we often pray here at Orchard Hill, God, I pray that my words will reflect Your word in content, tone, and emphasis. And we pray this in Jesus' name. Amen. So, mentioning that, that I read through or tried to read through the New Testament, I didn't make it all the way through, so it'll be an ongoing project. I did have a chance to just say what jumps out at me as I read through the text that maybe I hadn't been thinking about. And so, I'd like to share with you today one of the things that jumped at me. And what I'd like to say is this, and that is there is a consistent warning from the writers of the New Testament about the danger of having faith and falling away from faith.
Let me show you just a couple of places in one book where this is true, and then I'll show you from the parable of Jesus the same idea. This is first Timothy, chapter six. This is verse 21, "Which some have professed and in so doing have departed from the faith." So, as I said, I had to look up words, and the word here for departed from the faith appears three times in the New Testament, all three times in first and second Timothy, this is one. It appears in chapter one, verse six, where we read this. It says, "Some have departed from these things and have turned to meaningless talk."
And at first, when you hear that, you say, "Okay, departed, departed, what's the big deal?" But the word has this connotation of leaving something irreversibly. And so, the writer of first Timothy, it appears in second Timothy 2:18 as well, is saying there is a category of people who believe for a while and then they depart. And here's why this jumped at me. This concept appeared in several different writers, different words, but the reason it jumped at me is Orchard Hill has been in the reformed tradition of faith. And what that means is we believe that it's God who works to draw us to faith and keeps us in faith over time.
But here's what sometimes happens when we're reformed in faith. And that is, we so quickly go to that answer that we don't take these warnings seriously, or we don't see them for what they are. And that is, they speak about the reality of a spiritual battle that you are in, that I am in to continue in the faith. And you know this is true because every one of you knows people, maybe you've been this person, who believed for a season who said, "You know what? There's something to this faith thing."
And then down the road somewhere, it was like, "Well, I'm not so sure I buy that anymore." Maybe you know somebody who grew up around the church and they went to college and when they got to college they said, "I'm not so sure that this faith thing suits me. I don't like what some of the beliefs are. Therefore, I'm going to poke at the whole thing and abandon it and just live without Christian faith." Maybe, you know somebody who's in an unhappy marriage, but it wasn't to the point of feeling like they had biblical reason to step out of marriage. And so, they start to poke holes at the faith to say, "I don't need to believe this anymore." You've met people like this.
Just last year, I was out to dinner and there was a young woman who waited on us. And she asked me, as we were talking a little bit, she says, "Do you know who I am?" And it's always an interesting question. And I said, "No, I don't, I'm sorry." And she said, "Well, I'm so-and-so." And she told me her name and I recognized the name. She said, "I grew up, in part, coming to Orchard Hill for a season. My parents..." and I knew her parents from years ago. And she said, "But we, they left the church. And so, I didn't come back. And now they've moved out of the area."
And I just said what I often say when somebody says that "I'm sorry to hear that it used to be their church." And I said, "Did they ever find another church?" Because there's a lot of places you can go. Orchard Hill isn't the only place. And she said, "No, they really didn't. Once they left, they just came to a point..." And she said, "I'm not even sure they believe anymore." And I had that moment of just saying, this category in the New Testament exists, and you and I are in a battle to continue to believe over time.
So, Jesus tells a story. It's the “Parable of the Sower.” And in this story, he talks about falling away. He uses the word right in there. It's a different word than the one in first Timothy. But the concept is to rebel, to reject, to say, "I'm stepping away from this altogether." And in the story, what Jesus does is, He teaches us about the journey of faith, the journey every one of us is on in one way or another. And so, what I'd like to do today is just talk about three things we learn from this story.
So, the first is this, and that is we learn that there are different responses to the Word. Now we know that the seed in Jesus' story about the sower going out and sowing seed is the Word of God. Jesus tells us, it's not hard to figure that out. It's right there. And what we know is that each of the four soils represents a different response to the Word of God.
So, here's what we read. It says, "A farmer went out to sow his seed. And as he was scattering seeds, some fell along the path. It was trampled on and the birds ate it up." So, there's the along-the-path seed. I'm going to call it rocky seed, even though the next soil is actually the rocky seed in the text. It's along the path. It's the hardened soil. And the idea here is that this is the seed that is sown that doesn't take. And you know, again, this category. This is the person who hears the Word of God and says, "Nah, I'm good. I don't need it. Don't believe it. Not for me. It's for somebody else."
Then we read about what I'm going to call the rocky or the shallow soil. It's called rocky here. Here's what it says. It said, "Some fell among the rocky ground, and when it came up the plants withered because they had no moisture." The idea here is that it's shallow. It doesn't go deep. And so, somebody believes for a season, but then it doesn't endure.
And then Jesus says this other seed fell among the thorns, which grew up with it and it choked the plants. And so, this is the crowded soil where the soil is so full of other things that even though the roots start to come up, it's choked out because there are so many other things going on around it.
And then there's the good soil, verse eight, and called the good soil. "It came up and it yielded a crop a hundred times more than was sown." And the constant in this story is the Word of God being sown. The difference is the response to the Word of God. And this is something just to understand if you're a parent who wants your children to believe, your job is to sow, what you can't control is the response. If you're a spouse and you want your spouse to believe, and you're not sure that they're getting it or going down the path, it's your job to sow the seed, you're not able to control the result. It means something for a church. Our job is to sow, we can't control the result.
And what Jesus teaches us is that there are different reasons or different results to the Word of God. But we also learn a second thing, and that is we learn the reasons for ineffectual faith. And we see this in His explanation. So, Jesus gives the explanation in verses 11 and following. And what He says in verse 12 is this, "Those along the path are the ones who hear, and the devil comes and takes away the word from their hearts so that they may not believe and be saved."
And this, I believe, is talking about hardness of heart. The packed soil has seed that comes, but it can't go in because it's hard. And then in time, what does Jesus say? The devil comes and takes it away. Now, I know in talking to a modern audience that some of us are like devils. That's a lot. But Jesus doesn't shy away from it. What he says is that one of the reactions to faith is that because of hardness, that there's a spiritual being who's bent on getting you, getting me not to believe. And he comes and takes the Word away so that you can't believe and be saved. That's what it says right there. And so, there's a category of people who hear, are around Christian things, are around churches, and they never believe, and there's a spiritual battle going on for our souls.
Then we see not just hardness, but I'm going to call it testing is part of this. Verse 13. "Those on the rocky ground are the ones who receive the Word with joy, and when they hear it..." But they have no root. That's why we call it shallow. It doesn't have a root. "They believe for a while, but in a time of testing, they fall away." Here's the word, fall away. Jesus, the same concept that's in other places in the New Testament, He says, "They believe for a while."
Now I want you to notice something. The word believe here is the same word that's used just a verse earlier, where He says, "They believe and are saved." The belief is unto salvation. Here He uses the same word and He's saying some people believe, and then they fall away. And I'm not going to try to resolve the tension between this warning, and the bigger theological thinking that says, once we come to faith in Jesus Christ, he preserves us. I do believe that. But I think sometimes in jumping to that, we neuter the warning or the exhortation that Jesus gives us. And here, what Jesus is doing is he's saying, I want you to know that there are people around you who, at a minimum appear to believe, maybe believe, and they fall away. And why is it? It's because of a time of testing. What it is, is they have a mindset that says, "If I believe in God, if I believe in Jesus, then everything should go a certain way. And if it doesn't go a certain way then I'm not sure I can believe in this God."
And here's what happens. Scott Peck wrote a book years and years ago called The Road Less Traveled. And the first page is the best page of the book in my estimation. So, if you do the Amazon preview, you can get the best page of the book. You can read the whole thing. And Scott Peck didn't write from a Christian perspective. He wrote as a psychologist, a counselor, his experience. And this became a classic book in psychology.
And here's how he starts his book. He says, "Life is difficult." You think this is going to be a page-turner. I can't wait to read what you have to say after that opening salvo kind of a thing. But here's his point. And he lays this out on the first page. This is why I say the first page is the best page. He says, "If you believe that life isn't difficult," he says, "you become neurotic." Again. He's speaking as a counselor, a therapist, psychologically. He says, "You become somebody who is neurotic about lining up everything to be the way that you want it to be so that you can have the life that you think you deserve." No, Christian thought in this. This is just his observation.
"And if you believe that life is difficult," he says, "Then you're able to receive good things gratefully, joyfully along the way." It doesn't take a lot to take a step from there to faith to say, "If you believe that God working in your life means that there's no hardship. Then you will have a neurotic, spiritual existence. And you'll always say, "Why did God cause this to happen? Let this happen. How come God didn't do this? Why didn't God do this in my life?" And the time of testing will lead us away from faith." But if we say, "Life is difficult, but God is at work," then we're able to endure in faith.
So, we have hardness, and we have testing. And there's one more cause that I think we see here, and this is in verse 14 and that is competition. The competition we see in this, says, "The seed that fell among the thorns stands for those who hear, but as they go on in their way, they are choked by..." And then Jesus tells us, "…life's worries, riches, and pleasures. And they do not mature." So, Jesus tells us what the thorns are. He says, "It's anxieties, it's riches, it's pleasures." And because of that, some of us don't mature in our faith.
What we do instead is we start down a path and then we say, "These are the things that keep me from coming to a point of having an enduring, robust faith." Now, sometimes anxieties take different forms. I was listening to a podcast by a man named Tim Keller and Kathy Keller, a man and woman. Married couple, they'd been authors. And Kathy Keller was talking on this podcast about singleness and Christianity. And she was talking about, she said, especially young women, but she said, it's true of young men. But she said, "I know a lot of young Christian women who in their twenties have this idea that says, "I'm going to meet somebody, marry somebody, and then live a certain kind of a life." And they're fine as long as they're on the acceptable timeframe. But as soon as the timeframe doesn't work exactly as they want, they start to say, "I have to take matters into my own hands and help God out because God hasn't brought the person yet."
And she said, "What they end up doing is they end up compromising on the biblical principle of marrying somebody of like-minded faith." The Bible says in Second Corinthians, "Don't be unequally yoked together with an unbeliever." And so, what happens is, as long as everything's going, according to my plan, I can follow God. But as soon as it doesn't, then I say, "I can't follow Him." And we come to a Y in the road where we have to say, "I'm going to trust God, or I'm going to trust myself." Anxiety. And she goes on and talks about the yoke imagery because the yoke imagery says, when you put two animals together of the same species, then they make your work easier. You can plow your field. You can move heavy loads. But when you put two different species together, the yoke's uneven and it chafes and causes pain.
And her point was, it isn't God's big plan to say, "I just don't want you to do this because it's somehow good for me." But he understands how you were made and says, "This will chafe at you and cause you pain." And for some people, our anxiety causes us to take on somebody to who we're not unequally yoked to and then we look up and say, "I'm not sure I believe."
And then Jesus talks about riches. And we could spend a lot of time talking about this, I won't, but the more you have, the more you have to take care of, the more you worry about things, the more it concerns you, the more it becomes a driving force in your life. And then he talks about pleasure. And here, certainly, the word pleasure has a connotation of sensuality, but it's bigger than that. It's the idea of saying that your life becomes about everything else that's important to you. And so, you're running around saying, where do I get pleasure? How do I take care of everything? What am I worried about? And it chokes us out. Chokes out our faith.
I don't know how many of you will relate to this. My guess is if you're younger than me, you haven't seen this. But when I was a kid growing up, they used to have these county fairs that would come around and they would bring a ride in that was called, at least where I was growing up, it was called Centrifuge. Does anybody remember that? I think they have different names. Yeah, those of you who are younger are like, "I have no idea what you're talking about?" So, insurance knocked this out. This is why you didn't get to have fun with this. When I was a kid, you'd go to the county fair and there was a ride you'd go on.
And it was called Centrifuge. And it would spin really fast so that it ended up pushing you to the wall, and then it would push you against the wall, and the floor would drop out, and you would be pushed up against the wall because it was spinning so fast. And I guess we thought that was fun. People would get off, they'd throw up, stuff like that. And wonder why insurance said, "You can't keep doing that?"
But what I've come to understand is that that is centrifugal force. Centrifugal force means you move something around so fast that you can't stay in the center. The same concept happens on a merry-go-round. You get on a merry-go-round, those are gone too because of insurance, but you push it really fast. And all the kids try to hang on until it's going so fast. And the last one on it wins. Boy, my childhood was different than some of yours.
So, here's my question, has Jesus become a victim of centrifugal force in your life? And if so, there's a chance that you have taken a step toward falling away. Remember we're in a spiritual battle to maintain faith, to have faith over time. And it's hard to maintain faith when it's being choked by everything else. And we learn one other thing in this passage, not just the reasons, not just the reality of these differences, but we learn the remedy or the key to perseverance.
And here's where we learn it, verse 15. "But the seed on the good soil stands for the noble and good heart who hear the Word and retain it. And by persevering produce a good crop." So, what's the good crop? Well, the good crop means that your faith endures, it perseveres. And He says here, it's the Word of God.
And I think that's substantial because what He's doing, in essence, is He's saying, "I want you to understand that if the Word is the seed, the more you get the Word into your life, the more it will impact you." And he talks about hearing the Word, and you can't press that too far. But I do think there's something to hear, not just reading on your own, being in a place where you hear something proclaimed, because at that point you have to say, "I believe it, or I don't. I accept it, or I reject it." And there's something about the ascent of that, that's good for our souls. And to retain it means to press it down, down into our heart, down into our souls means that what we're doing is we're saying I'm taking this into my life. And that's what it means to persevere.
There's a book that was written by a man named John Bunyan years and years and years ago, a couple of centuries ago now. And he wrote it while he was in prison. It's called Pilgrim's Progress. And it's a book about a man named Christian who's trying to get to the heavenly city. And it's all the people he encounters. It's an allegory, so you don't want to press anything too far. But at one point he encounters a man named Mr. Temporary. It fits what we're talking about here today. And in the course of the dialogue, he has a conversation about how does somebody come to become Mr. Temporary? And here's what he says. "First, they cease to think seriously about God and death and coming judgment. Second, they cast off by degrees, private duties, such as prayer, Bible study, curbing the lust of the flesh and sorrow for sin." So first you stop thinking about God, then you cast off by degree any kind of personal devotional habit.
"Third, we shun the company..." And I'm going to use his words, "lively and warm Christian." Some of what he says will feel archaic here. "Fourth, we grow cold in public duty." All of a sudden, corporate worship is a take it or leave it option in our lives. And then fifth, he says, "We pick holes in Christians in the Bible." So, what happens is, first you say, "I believe." Then you stop thinking about serious things. You cast off by degree your personal devotions. Then you move into a space where you say, "I can take or leave public worship." But then what happens is you start picking apart other people's lives, what's wrong with it, or the Bible. And you say, "Here's what's wrong with it. Here's what I don't like." And that leads us to six, "Associate with," and this is his words again, "carnal and loose Christians, wanton men."
In other words, you don't want to be around people who have faith. "And then we give way in secret. Then we play sins openly. And then," as he, "we show ourselves for who we are." Now, there's a lot we could talk about here, but you know what's at the core of all of that? It's saying that the Word of God is the seed, and I will do all I can to take it seriously into my life and to let it speak to me.
There was somebody who said a couple of centuries ago, this about the Word, he said, "Apply yourself wholly to the Text, and the Text wholly to yourself." Apply yourself wholly to the Text, and your Text wholly to yourself. Meaning, learn the Word of God as fully as you can, and then let all that you've learned be important in your life.
A few years back, I was at a football game, and I was sitting at a certain place. And I could see in front of me, about 30 rows, 20, 30 rows was a friend of mine. And he was sitting there with his girlfriend at the time later, became his wife. And as he was sitting there, I saw him and I thought, "I'm going to call him so I can talk to him." This was back when you still had to hit three buttons to get a letter. So instead of texting him, I was like, "I'm going to call him." So, I called him.
And he didn't know I could see him. And I watched him take his phone out of his pocket, look at the number, put his phone in his pocket. And I could see his girlfriend presumably say, "Who was that?" And to which he was like, "Eh." So, I got the wave-off. Now I gave him a hard time about that. I mean, I would've bought him nachos or something. And obviously, he didn't need to respond to my call. He was with his girlfriend. I get it, you don't need to talk to me.
But I wonder how many times we give the wave-off to the Word of God in our lives. When we say, "Ah, not that one. I don't care for that. I don't like that little piece of the Bible. I don't care for that. That doesn't make sense to me." And we make ourselves the arbiter. And then we wonder why we fall away. We wonder why our kids end up saying, "Well, you picked and chose, so why shouldn't I pick and choose?" In order to have faith that endures, we want to say in every instance, "I will not wave off the Word of God. I will apply myself fully to the Text, and I will apply the Text fully to myself."
And this has implications for us as a church. What we want to do, what we want to be is the kind of place that sows the seed. We can't control the response, but we can always talk about the Word of God. And that is what we endeavor to do. And all of our gatherings all the time and say, this is not about me or whoever speaks. I mean, what a great thing that a church is healthy when I'm not around for a lot of weeks. That tells you health exists here. Because it's not about what happens with me, because the Word of God is central. And what it means is that that will be what we do as a church to try to counter the lives of our culture and say, "We will sow the seed."
There will be some who will be hardened by it. There will be some where it will be shallow. Some who it'll be crowded, but there will be some who it will be good. And if this seed lives in you, what does it say? That it produces a crop, and in the first section it says that it produces a hundred times as much. Well, what does that mean? It means if you have this faith, you have an opportunity to sow the seed in more and more people's lives. And I know this last year-and-a-half has been a little weird. It's been like, you don't invite to church, because you're not sure you should go to church and be in a public gathering. That was right.
But I'll just say this, and that is if your friends are getting in an airplane, if they're going out to eat, if they're doing all the stuff, and by the way, I think people are going out to eat from what I'm seeing, then coming into a gathering like this is no different. Yes, if you are still hunkered down, being hunkered down makes sense. I get that. I'm not encouraging anything different, but if you have friends who are willing to go out to eat with you, maybe this is a time to say, "I'd love for you to come at Christmas," one of Orchard Hill's 18,000 Christmas Eve services, actually it's 18. "Come with me, come over to my house. Let's go out to eat after work." To introduce somebody to the message that can change the trajectory of their lives.
You see, as a Christian, I don't just believe that this is good for me and what's good for everybody else. What I believe is that the message of Jesus Christ is the hope of the world. It's my hope, but it's the hope of the world. And I'm in a spiritual battle just like you to hold on to faith. But God has also given me, given you, not just me, given all of us, the role of saying, keep sowing the seed. And even though I can't control the response, that is how we see God continue to work in our midst. And that's what we're going to do here.
And my encouragement to you, if you're a person who has faith today, is to take the warnings of the New Testament seriously and say, "What can I do to make sure that the seed goes deep in me?" And the answer ultimately is, apply yourself wholly to the Text and the Text wholly to yourself, no wave-offs. Father, I ask today that you would help all of us who are gathered, to not be hardened, to not be, in a sense, turned away by testing or competition. But instead, that you would help us to be people who have an enduring faith. And I pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.
