If you'll take your Bibles now
and turn with me to Matthew chapter 13. And let's read verses 24 through
30. Another parable put he forth
unto them, saying, The kingdom of heaven is likened unto a man
which sowed good seed in his field. But while men slept, his
enemy came. and sowed tares among the wheat,
and then went his way. But when the blade was sprung
up and brought forth fruit, then appeared the tares also. So the
servants of the householder came and said unto him, Sir, didst
thou not sow good seed in thy field? From whence then hath
it tares? He said unto them, An enemy hath
done this. The servant said unto him, Wilt
thou then that we go and gather them up? But he said, Nay, lest
while you gather up the tares you root up also the wheat with
them. Let both grow together unto the
harvest. And in the time of harvest I
will say to the reapers, Gather ye together first the tares,
and bind them in bundles to burn them. But gather the wheat into
my barn. Now, the Lord was a master speaker. He was a master storyteller. Whenever He preached, He took
things, common things, simple things from everyday life. And
that's what He used to illustrate the things that He taught. And
He just used plain, simple illustrations. And here in verse 35, he tells
us a little bit about the subject matter of Christ. These were
things kept secret since the world began. That's something
about what he's teaching, something that's not common knowledge to
man, something he can't go down to the public school and learn.
These are great mysteries, secrets. Things kept secret. And the gospel
of Christ is one of those things. God's purpose of grace toward
the Gentile nations, that's another one of those things. And the
fulfilling of the Old Testament times. These were all great mysteries. They didn't know what was going
on when Paul wrote the book of Hebrews and began to talk to
them. You can imagine a people who for thousands of years brought
a sacrifice to the priest. They had a priesthood established.
You had a temple. You went there. You handed Him
the sacrifice. He did according to the law with
the sacrifice and so on. And then all of a sudden, Paul
comes along preaching that all those things are done away. All
those things are gone. They are fulfilled in Christ.
These were mysteries. And then in verse 36, he gives
us again a view of God's sovereign grace in the revelation of His
Word. Now what I see here is a little
bit different. If you go back to verses 10 through
16, you'll see the same thing. You'll see the same thing, what
He did. But I see something a little
bit different here. In verses 10 through 16, He's
declaring His sovereign prerogative in giving His revelation to His
disciples in particular, and not to every man who claimed
to be sent of God. Now, in these verses, he's teaching
us that what he will give to the multitudes, he will give
first to his preachers. That's what he's talking about
here. He's talking about himself as
a preacher. You remember, we went through
those lessons, and he said, make the tree good, or else make the
tree corrupt. He calls for a decision to be
made on your part. You're going to have to decide
if this one standing before you is sin of God, if it's a good
tree, or if it's a corrupt tree. And you're going to know it by
its fruit, which is the Gospel. According to His good pleasure,
the Lord gives His disciples three parables. Now, I read to
you one, the parable of the wheat and tares. But there's three
parables here. And He gives them these three parables to illustrate
the results of gospel preaching throughout the whole of the gospel
age. We're living in the gospel age. There's not another age yet to
come. This is it. These are the last
days. Over and over, Christ referred
to this age. These are the last days. So let's
look at these three parables and then consider the primary
lessons that are taught in these things. Now, first of all, he
gives us the parable of the wheat and the tares. And the lesson
here is that there is no perfect church in this world. It's not here. I remember Brother
Mahan saying years ago, if you find the perfect church and you
join it, it won't be perfect anymore. Every local church, every assembly
in this world is made up of a mixed multitude. When Israel came out
of Egypt, it says there was a mixed multitude. God's elect was among
them, but there were others among them that weren't His elect.
And their carcasses fell in the wilderness. And He talks about
that in Hebrews chapter 3 and 4. But every church, every local
assembly in this world is made up of a mixed multitude, and
it contains believers and others who have made professions of
faith, but have never truly believed. And he clearly teaches us that
they sprang up together. They came up together. They came
in the same spot. These servants went out and planted
this field. And the master gave them good
seed to plant. And they planted that seed. And
the blade came up and the fruit began to come out. But they looked
in there and it was full of weeds. And they went back and they said
to the master, didn't you give us good seed? Wasn't that good
seed that we planted? Oh, yeah. Well, where did these
tares come from? An enemy planted them. The enemy,
while you were sleeping, the enemy planted some seeds. That's
how they got there, while you were sleeping. They sprang up
together. The wicked one sows like the
good servant sows. He sows when our guard is down. That's when he sows. He sows while we sleep. And he
sows in the same field. And he sows exactly as the master
sows. And what's the result of this?
They spring up together. The field has wheat and tares. This parable also teaches us
that we're not sufficient to weed out the tares. They said,
should we go in and pull out the tares? He said, no, don't
do that. Don't do that. I've been around
churches that like to do that. They'll have a meeting and bring
somebody out and put him up on the carpet and rip him to shreds.
And then if he says anything much to say about it, out the
door. He tells us we don't have the
ability to do it. That's the first thing he tells
us. We'll get the wheat. We'll go in there to start weeding
in God's garden and we'll pull up wheat every time. Get a big
handful of it and pull it up. And we for sure have no authority
to do it because God forbids us. The Master said no. He said no. And if we try to
separate the wheat from the tares, we're going to pull up the wheat
every time. So what are we going to do? Well, the Lord said, let
them grow together until the harvest. Leave them alone. Leave
them alone. It's His field. This crop is for Him. It ain't
for me. It's for Him. He's not calling men to me. He's
calling men to Christ. It's His garden. It's His field.
It's His crop. He'll take care of it. He'll
take care of it. And while we're not ourselves
sufficient to weed God's garden, He is. The Lord knows them that
are His. That's what He says. He knows.
And in that great and terrible day, His angels will come and
gather His own to Himself, and then bind up the tares, bind
up the weeds, and cast them into the fire. Tares and weeds are two distinct
life forms. Two totally different. You're
not going to get wheat from a tare. You can fertilize it, water it,
trim it, do whatever you want to do. When it gets done, it's
a weed. That's all it is. It's a weed. And God's fruit, his wheat, it's
going to come forth and it's going to bear fruit. It's a good
plant. It's an edible plant. One bears fruit and is useful,
and the other, at its best, just hinders the fruit-bearing grain,
and it's good for nothing. You know, he said this, he said, evil men and seducers. What did he say about them? They
wax worse and worse. Ain't that what he said? They
don't get better and better, they get worse and worse. But
Job said of the believer, that that man, he continues straight
on. Straight on. Straight on. He's going to produce fruit.
That's what James said. If you don't produce fruit, then
you don't have true faith. It's one thing to be justified
by faith, but it's another thing to justify the faith that you
have. And if you have faith and it
doesn't produce the fruit of God, then you don't have true
saving faith. You've got something else. One responds to the care of the
master, and the other only increases to its wicked end. But blessed are those who've
been planted by God from the good seed. They're blessed. They're blessed of God. Those
who in the sweet operation of the Spirit have been given life
and faith in Christ, who know their Master and are known of
Him, who respond to His care and respond to His means and
respond to His presence and power. I thought about this as I prepared
this lesson this morning. The wheat doesn't argue with
the tares. It doesn't argue with the tares. The wheat doesn't
war against the tares. The wheat simply responds to
the master's servants whose tender love and care helps them to be
rooted deep and grow strong. That's all the wheat does. The
master will take care of the tares when he reaps his crop. So one of the sure results of
gospel preaching throughout this gospel age is going to be the
assembling together of wheat and tares. It's always going
to be. It's always going to be. That's
why I've never understood the process of when you come into
the church and we're going to have the Lord's table and then
all of a sudden in some churches they have what they call fencing
the table. You have to pass a certain standard. You can't have any marks against
you and all that kind of stuff. And you've got to be a member
of that particular local church. And they fenced that table. Well,
when the Lord gave that table, here's what He told the twelve
that was gathered with Him. He said, Have not I chosen you
twelve? And one of you is a devil. Isn't
that what He said? One of you is a devil. Now, He
didn't tell them who it was. He gave him some hints, but he
didn't just point at him and say, here he is. But you know,
the Lord is the one who passed out that table. When the Lord
passed it out, He handed it right to Judas, didn't He? He handed
it to him. And He handed him the wine. And
He gave him the same instruction that He gave everybody else.
So when I stand to preach the Gospel, I'm not up here trying
to weed in God's garden. I'm going to give the tare the
same thing I give the wheat. And if you read those two letters
this morning, one is wheat and one is tares. That's what that
is. And that's how they're affected
by what they hear. And you just leave them alone.
You just leave them alone. If the weeds get to be too much
of a problem, God will remove them. He'll remove them. Alright, then the second parable.
illustrates for us the sure results of gospel preaching. And he does
it in the parable of the leaven. I'll just leave it to you to
read these. It's too lengthy for me to read and then try to
expound on in 30 minutes. But he's talking here in this
parable about leaven. They got the meal, and they mixed
the leaven in it, and it rises. It rises. And this parable teaches
us that the gospel prevails in the hearts of believers as it's
processed in them by the Holy Spirit of God. That's what this
parable is all about. You come into a church and it's
got wheat and tares. It's got believers and unbelievers.
And I preach the gospel. In the heart of the believer,
the very Spirit of God goes to work. He goes to work. And he's
not the same. You take meal and put living
in it, it ain't just going to lay there. It's going to rise.
It's going to rise. Now you just take regular old
flour and you put it in there and you can do what you want
to with it. It'll just lay there. It'll just lay there. Some of
you men tried to make biscuits before on your own, didn't put
anything or didn't use the right kind of flour, and they come
out and they look more like cookies than they did biscuits. That's
because it didn't have any leaven in it. Nothing happened. Nothing happened. But boy, when
you put that leaven in there, when the Spirit puts that leaven
in there, boy, things begin to happen, don't they? Huh? Things
begin to happen. And I'll tell you something else
about this parable. Leaven don't work with corn or
any kind of whole grain. It has to be broken. It has to
be beaten. You go back in the Old Testament
where he's talking about this showbread and this different
stuff. It had to be beaten into a mortar. It had to be beaten
down fine. Take the fine flour, he said. And you mix this leaven in that
fine flour and it begins to work. But if you just take a whole
corner, get you a bowl of corn out there, even cracked corn,
put you some yeast in there, ain't nothing happen. It just
lays there. But boy, you beat it down into a meal. Beat it
down fine. Crush it down. And then, then
it begins to do. And so the gospel has no effect
upon a stony, hard, untouched by the hand of God heart. It
must be ground and broken by the Holy Ghost into true conviction. But once that heart is prepared,
once God prepares that heart, then the living of the Gospel
can be mixed. It can be mixed. Listen to what
the Scripture says here in Hebrews chapter 4 concerning those whose
carcasses fell in the wilderness and those who truly heard the
Gospel. Now listen to it. Hebrews 4,
verse 2, For unto us was the gospel preached as well as unto
them. But the word preached did not
profit them, not being mixed with faith in them that heard
it. Faith, God-given faith, is what
makes things work affectionately. Faith moves men who truly have
it, and it moves them in the heart. But as meal cannot go unresponsive
to living, even so the regenerate heart of faith cannot remain
as though nothing happened. Can't do it. Can't do it. The
old preachers used to put it this way, it'll leak out on you. It'll leak out on you. If God
does something for you, it'll leak out on you. You couldn't
suppress it. You couldn't hold it in. The
man of faith grows as the living of the gospel is mixed with faith,
and he responds to it. He's moved by it, and he rises
up to obey God. False faith leaves a man where
it found him. That's what it does. It leaves
it right where it found him. He's still a rebel. He's still
unbroken. He's still unresponsive to gospel
commands. He'll talk about things. He'll
talk about doctrine, but he's not moved. He's not moved. He's not moved to obey. So the
sure results of gospel preaching, both then and now and unto the
end of time, is that some, having been broken by the Spirit, will
respond in the sweet experience of grace to the gospel they hear,
while others go unmoved, untouched, ever learning, ever learning,
but never able to come to the knowledge of the truth. And then
the third parable teaches this concerning the results of true
gospel preaching, not to despise the day of small things. He's
talking here, this is the parable of the mustard seed. And he said,
a mustard seed is the smallest of all the seeds of the earth.
Can't hardly see it. Hold it in your hand, it's like
a thistle seed. You look at it, you can't hardly
see it. Almost unnoticeable. He tells us over in Zechariah
chapter 4 not to despise the day of small things. You see, God's thoughts are not
our thoughts and His ways are not our ways. We look for what we want to see. I look in others for what I want
to see. What I need to look for is what
God said is going to be there. Look for the evidence that He
says. Most always, the Lord does the
very opposite of what we would do. I mean, you can just about
take it. You want to know what unbelievers and what religious
folks teach and preach concerning the gospel. You take what you
absolutely know to be the truth, take the very opposite of it,
and that's almost every time exactly what it is they believe. What we need to learn, and this
is what the Lord is telling these people, here is a handful compared
to the whole nation of Israel. Here is the whole nation of Israel
with their priesthood, and their scribes, and their Pharisees,
and their schools, and their learning, and their all together,
and their tribes, and all these things linked together, and their
blood relatives, and covenants, and all those things. He's telling these folks that
grace doesn't triumph all at once. This gospel is not going
to triumph in these last days all at once, but a little at
a time. Very little at a time. It's going
to triumph, but it's not going to triumph all at once. You remember when Israel came.
This is the type. This is the pictures in the Old
Testament. Israel came to the promised land. And the spies
come back with a bad report because they weren't expecting enemies.
They were just expecting, we're just going to walk in. Here it
is. They're just going to hand it to us. Here it is. Come on
in. But that ain't what they found. The spies went over there
and they looked and they said, there's walled cities over here.
There's giants over here. These people got their thing
together. They got armies. They got machines
of war. We can't go in there. Can't go
in there. There were giants to be slain
and walled cities to be seized and armies to conquer. That land
was taken a little at a time. A little at a time. And even
so, the church and kingdom of God are not set up all at once,
not in this world and not in the hearts of God's elect. Brother
Don said this, he said, God's works almost always begins in
obscurity. You can't see it. You can't see
it in its beginning. But a long way, you begin to
see it. You begin to see it. And it grows,
and it grows, and it grows. And then you can really see it.
And throughout this gospel age, the gospel will be spread throughout
all nations a little at a time. And there'll be times like at
Pentecost where the Lord will grant great outpourings of grace,
but that'll never be the norm. That's not going to be the norm
throughout the Gospel age. Mostly it's just going to be
here a little and there a little. And most of what we call grace
churches, little tiny groups, just a handful in their beginning.
I remember Danville, the church in Danville, which is pretty
good size now, I remember when it was just a handful. I used
to go down and preach to them. And I remember Brother Todd's
church over in Lexington, which is pretty good size. It's bigger
than the church in Danville as far as the population of that
church. But I remember when that was
a mission and they didn't even have a building. It was just
a mission. And the church in Pikeville, it was just a bunch
of people gathering together in a home. I remember those things. That was the day of small things.
It began in obscurity, but then it began to grow. Growth is small, but it's steady. And the man who goes forth with
the gospel expecting a great response and immediate growth,
he's in for a shock. In for a shock. Like the mustard
seed, the church of God appears weak and small in this world,
but in the end, it will be a number that no man can number." That's
what he said. And the local church, which I
believe is what the Lord is referring to here, will grow, as does the
mustard seed, into such a thing that will provide shelter for
many and a stronghold from their enemies. And then, as I said
a while ago, this parable is also true of God's work in us.
In Luke chapter 17, He uses the same parable But he applies it
there to faith. And we're going to get into that
a little bit more in the meeting this morning. But in its beginning,
it's almost undetectable. Man has faith, and he's wrestling
over whether or not he even has faith. Wrestling over whether
or not he's even a believer. You can't see it, and he can't
see it, and nobody really knows for sure what's going on. It's just in a seed. In a seed. But then over time. Old time,
that seed begins to grow. Under the sound of the Gospel
and by the power of God's Holy Spirit, even the angels look
with astonishment at what takes place in the hearts of sinners
saved by grace. The angels are in amazement as
they watch that tiny seed grow. Faith is a wondrous thing. It's
a miracle of God's sovereign grace. And it's planted in the
hearts of chosen sinners. hard-hearted rebels, and they're
transformed into obedient servants and bond slaves of Christ. But in its beginnings, it's small
and undetected. They come and go without notice,
but over time, their size becomes something to see. And then at
maturity, They're indeed a wonder of God's sovereign grace. They
become shoulders to lean on. Isn't that what Paul said? He
said, you mark them that have the rule over you, for they watch
for your soul. They're shoulders to lean on.
And you mark them. They're examples. They're examples
of God's sovereign grace. You mark them and you mimic those
men. Despise not the day of small
things. It could be the planting of the
Lord. And be careful how you judge
things. Man looks on the outward countenance. God looks on the
heart. Now, these are the sure results of the preaching of the
Gospel. There will be tares among the
weak. Satan has his ministers of righteousness, and they're
busy sowing lies. And some are always sure to be
among the elect. wherever they assemble together.
But we also know this, where the living of the gospel is mixed
with faith in the hearts of broken sinners, it'll have a profound
effect on that man. It'll change him. It'll change
him. It'll turn him. He's going this
direction. Like a wild-ass's colt, he's
going this direction. But God will bridle him and turn
him and bring him all the way back around. There'll be a change
within. arising from the dead. And then
thirdly, it won't be all at once. Not going to be all at once.
Don't get all bent out of shape. Don't get all bent out of shape.
You bring somebody over and they begin to show some good signs
and then all of a sudden they just don't know what's going
on, you know. And then wait a little while
and then you begin to hear some good things from them and so
on. It's not going to be all at once.
It's not going to be. Just a slow, steady growth in
grace and knowledge of Christ.