Check out the new blog… www.John8.com

What is salvation?

Technically speaking, when Christians talk about salvation they are talking about God’s gift to those believe in Jesus Christ, whereby he grants them eternal life and saves them from the horrors of hell (eternal death).

“For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God (Ephesians 2:8)

“Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, but whoever rejects the Son will not see life, for God’s wrath remains on him” (John 3:36)

So what is eternal life?

Jesus defined eternal life very profoundly on the night before his death:

“Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent. (John 17:3)

What he meant was that the heaven to come is granted to those who know God through him and that eternal life comes by knowing God and this knowing begins on earth. Now heaven is the place where God resides and where the throne of God is located (Revelation 4). But as Christians, our eternal reward is not merely a beautiful place to live, but eternal communion with God which begins here on earth in the heart and is fully realized when we stand before God.

“My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever” (Psalm 73:26)

But more personally speaking, eternal life is living in presence of God (or with God) in his kingdom forever: “Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world” (Matthew 25:34)

Where do we start if we would seek eternal life?

With Jesus.

“I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:4)

Only Jesus?

“Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12)

How do I find salvation in Jesus?

By faith.

“Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” They replied, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved—you and your household” (Acts 16:30-31)

Isn’t it more than belief? What about all those good works God seems to require?

Good works are the evidence of true faith. They are a sign that God has moved your heart to simultaneously hate your sin while loving Jesus Christ.

“But someone will say, ‘You have faith and I have works.’ Show me your faith apart from your works, and I will show you my faith by my works” (James 2:18).

But this heart movement where you come to hate your sin while loving Jesus begins with belief:

“And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him” (Hebrews 11:6)

Faith is very simple. It is believing in the fullness of who Jesus is, and through this belief, Christians receive the Holy Spirit who guides and inspires them to do good works that both glorify God and show the world that they are saved through faith in Jesus Christ.

What must you believe? Aren’t some creeds pages long and don’t they demand belief on all points?

Paul said something very profound that is overlooked by many professing Christians:

“That if you confess with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (Romans 10:9)

The two things that Paul says are a requirement to believe about Jesus (Jesus is Lord and that Jesus rose from the dead) are anchors to every creed and statement of faith that rests on Scripture. For example the Nicene Creed begins as follows:

We believe in one God,
the Father, the Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all that is, seen and unseen.
We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the only Son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, light from light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made,
of one Being with the Father;
through him all things were made.
For us and for our salvation
he came down from heaven…

After carefully study, you will note that if you approach with the mindset that Jesus is Lord (that Jesus is the Godman both fully God and man) that you will have no problem believing what is written here. So there are many things that Christians believe about Jesus, but each thing believed is first looked at through Paul’s lens which states that Jesus is Lord and that God raised him from the dead.

Matthew 5 Commentary

The Beatitudes | Matthew 5:1-12

Matthew 5:1-12

Many unsuspecting Christians approach the Beatitudes as they would a personality test. Though they may not be poor in spirit (humble), they are delighted and relieved when they learn that one of the traits they possess qualifies for the Kingdom of Heaven. But Jesus is not giving general descriptions about those who will enter his Kingdom, but a single description. And he is not describing qualities that some of his people may posses and that others will not. Jesus is giving a single list of attributes of the most plain and the most ordinary Christian.

So the average Christian is humble, but they will also mourn over their sin. They are gentle, but they thirst to know Jesus through the Scriptures and hunger to do the righteousness it teaches them. Christians are also a merciful people, but they are also unselfishly caring without an agenda. Christians are a people who seek peace, but they expect persecution because their character stands so frighteningly different than the rest of the world.

When Jesus opened his famous sermon describing what his people will look like, he was also describing himself. Since a Christian has Jesus living inside them, it is only natural that they look like him in every detail.  They do not possess just one or two of his qualities. They have all of them. And so the Beatitudes describe the Christian fully, and they serve as warning for pretenders who would cheapen the grace of God and deny the power of the Holy Spirit.

Salt & Light | Matthew 5:13-16

Matthew 5:13-16

There is no hope for the world outside Christ because Christ is carried around by those who believe in him. If those who have the Holy Spirit inside them were to lose him, just as if salt were to lose its “saltiness,” they would be worthless and good for nothing.

The same is true with light. Take a light into a completely dark room and it will reveal whatever its light can reach. And though some lights do a better job at showing the contents of a room because they are brighter, even a dim light is far more useful than a burned out bulb.

So again, there is no hope for the world beyond Christ. And while he is preparing for his return, his true disciples are charged with displaying their faith openly. They do so by happily preaching the Gospel and allowing the righteousness of Jesus in them to shine out through them. The true Christian cannot hide their joy and love for Christ anymore than sports fans can hide their love of a team or a mother can hide her love for her children.

But Jesus’ message here is as much a warning as it is an illustration. Christians must let their light shine from a grateful heart. And if Christians do not preach the Word, no one will. If they do not show the righteousness of Christ by their life, then who will believe their profession of faith?  And who will bring the faithless to Jesus?

Without Christians, no one will be warned of God’s coming wrath and no one will be told of true peace and joy that is found by faith in Jesus. Christians are the means by which Jesus is revealed today. They are the means by which the words of Scripture leap from the page into everyday life. And they alone are the light of the world. For there is no hope for the world beyond Christ.

Looking only at the verse, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them” it is easy to lock onto the last part of this verse and believe that Jesus meant that he set aside the Law so that we might live as we please. It is also just as easy to stress only the first part of this verse, and so believe that Jesus meant that we are to try and gain favor with God through the rules and regulations that fill the pages of the Old Testament.

For 2,000 years, Christians have wrestled over this theological divide – where faith ends and obedience begins.  And for 2,000 years I think it’s generally fair to say that we have made a complete mess of things.

Jesus favors neither of these interpretations. First, he is emphatic in his sermon that the Law will never disappear. The law of God is eternal because God is eternal and because the law reflects his nature. Second, Jesus is just as emphatic in letting us know that our good conduct must exceed that of the greatest rule keepers of all. For even the Pharisees, arguably the most moral of the Jews, couldn’t keep the Law perfectly.  And if these famous rule keepers fell short, what hope is there for us?

But the Law of God was given in order to show fallen humanity that it can never measure up to God. Only God is able to keep his own rules and only the Godman was able keep them in human flesh. And in Jesus we see the Law is fulfilled. It was perfectly kept and nailed to the cross; not to abolish it but provide a means of escape from it. By paving a way through it, a way that is offered to us and lies before us through Jesus himself.

The Law is the guide to the character and standards of God.  It is also the mission statement of a Kingdom that transcends this world. For the Law is the cultural norm of Kingdom people. It is the  essence of heaven and the ethos of God’s transcendent world.

Faith in Jesus grants us access to this transcendent world. In Jesus, we walk into the Law pure and holy, because through rebirth (repentance and faith) we walk into the One who fulfilled the Law. When we become transformed through Jesus by faith we also become transformed by the Law. We do not become rule keepers, but we do become expressors of the Law.  We do this because the Law now lives inside of us, in the Jesus that lives inside of us, and out of our grateful hearts we obey the law and share its goodness with the world.

A Higher Law | Matthew 5:21-26

Matthew 5:21-26

Sins are merely the ugly expressions of our root unbelief in Jesus. And I say not to diminish the horrors of sin we set in motion, or as if their stench before God should be thought of as any less, I say this because our outward sins are small compared to the sin factory that lies within us.

Every sin, great or small, is a willful, rebellious act that is punishable in the eternal realm – a realm where but “a moment” is eternity in itself.

And understanding that inward sins are equally heinous, if not more, is a crucial distinction that we need to make in order to avoid the same trap the scribes and Pharisees fell into.

Working feverishly to kill our outward sins accomplishes nothing. It is the inward, evil roots of our sins, those things that lie hidden below the surface and that are only detectable when they occasionally leak out and become outwards sins that needs to be confronted with the Word and by faith.

This is why Jesus tells us that Law cannot be grasped by human hands. It was one thing for the hypocrites, who paraded around in their self-righteousness, to describe the Law as a thing that could be perfectly kept. But it was quite another thing to hear that God’s Law also considered the thoughts and intentions of the heart – and treated them not only as sins, but often referred to them as the greatest of sins.

Suddenly, Jesus refocuses our attention to the heart heart. According to Jesus, adultery was not merely sleeping with another man’s wife, it was simply looking at her from a distance and undressing her with your eyes. Murder wasn’t simply taking a man’s life through revenge or greed, but wishing him dead in your heart.

By showing us the depth of our sin, Jesus reinforced his claim that his mission was to come and fulfill the law.  His mission was to master the law in human flesh by humbly sacrificing himself on a cross, so that through him, sinners might find an escape for all their sins committed under it.  And through Jesus, the true righteousness that is revealed by the Law can be granted and grasped.

No one will ever take hold of a remedy if they are not first shown the dangers of ignoring it. And here Jesus unveils the height of the Law and the  the towering demands true obedience requires. The Pharisees tried to climb these cliffs without so much as a rope.  But by faith in Jesus we have a Guide who will navigate us up its sheer walls, and who will even carry us when we are weak, up to the glories of heaven that awaits all those who put their trust in him.

A Higher Law II | Matthew 5:27-37

Matthew 5:27-37

As Jesus progresses through his Sermon on the Mount, his conscience crippling deconstruction of the law continues. Instead of being told that you must obey the law as the current tradition had taught, Jesus’ teaching so raised the bar that no honest soul on earth could ever boast of their own righteousness again. Beginning with “You have heard it said…”, Jesus recounts the modern interpretation of the most serious breaches of the Law only to suddenly shift to his devastating “But I say…” as he unfolds the unattainable heights of the Law’s demands in order to show his listeners how it condemns everyone.

To the first-century hearer, Jesus’ message must have been astonishing. It’s one thing to restrain oneself from adultery, lying, or taking murderous revenge on one’s neighbor, but it is another thing entirely to be told that the very thoughts of the heart are moral equivalents to the outward act itself. But Jesus doesn’t stop there. To reinforce his points, he goes further, by trying to instill the sense of urgency, fervency and the desperation that one should have in ridding themselves of all sin. To draw attention to the danger, Jesus sprinkles in shocking metaphors about tearing out eyes and sawing off limbs. He grabs their attention by casting down blasphemous superstitions about modern day oath taking and the injustice of the divorce certificate that revealed the hardness of the modern man’s heart.

The Sermon on the Mount proves that Jesus was anything but soft on sin and careless with the requirements of the law. In fact, Jesus was far tougher than his contemporaries – even in the strictest legal sense. And why not? It was God interpreting God’s law. It was God unveiling the depth of his requirements and the heights of his demands.

If any of Jesus’ hearers took these words at face value, while dismissing the hope of the Good News, there would be cause for hopeless despair. Yet this passage represents the heart of the Gospel and the heights of Jesus’ compassion. He is not sugar-coating the Good News for us. Instead, Jesus is elevating its great need by showing how futile rule keeping is one’s own strength. And Jesus is not over-embellishing the serious spiritual danger that his hearers are in, nor is he hiding it. Jesus is trying to bring stiff necks and hard hearts to their knees in order that they might look away from themselves and look to him in faith.

The Law is a necessary light that needs to be shone on us, but it is not a comforter. It can act as a guide or a measuring stick, but it offers us no peace without Jesus. Having Jesus in faith will give us comfort as we read the Law, and it will bring us joy knowing that as we obey it trusting in him it will please him through out faith. But the Law cannot save us without God’s help, and by elevating the demands of the Law, Jesus is trying to show us our futility in trying face the law in our own strength.

Love Your Enemies | Matthew 5:38-48

Matthew 5:38-48

Jesus’ characterization of the Law has hit its apex. It wasn’t enough to describe the perfect Kingdom worker in a way that no one qualifies, and it wasn’t enough to reveal that the Law condemns the thoughts and intentions of the heart on equal terms with outward actions. Now Jesus has lead us to the summit of the Law’s perfection: loving one’s enemies.

Not being immersed in first-century Judea, it’s hard to imagine the level of hatred the Jews had for the Samaritans, or the contempt they had for the Romans or Gentile pagans living in and around Jerusalem. I suppose in modern terms, it could be described as hating a person of an opposing political ideology, religion or race. But the Jews hatred went beyond our contemporary bigotries or mere theological snobbery. The Jews hatred was on par with the ethnic hatred that plagues the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Asia today. It was a hatred that spanned hundreds of years and was deeply and culturally ingrained.

Jesus tells his hearers that they must love their enemies in order to fulfill the requirements of the Law, and he reminds them that this is the very heart of their religion. He says that it’s not enough to be simply tolerant, you must love your adversary as you would an old friend, and that you must love your critics as a dear relative. And what’s more, Jesus tells us that you must embrace the insults of your enemies was cheer and welcome their demands by exceeding their expectations.

To a first-century zealot this would have been devastating news. “I have to give double what my enemy asks of me? He persecutes me all day long, then asks me to walk a mile with him, and now I have to go with him two miles? My adversary sues me for my tunic, for no good reason, and I have to give him my cloak as well? Why should I bless this godless pagan  who’d just as soon see me dead?”

But when Jesus began recounting that the Father allows the sun to rise and the rain to fall on both the just and unjust, and that to welcome an enemy is to be “perfect as your heavenly father is perfect” Jesus reminds us how we are no better than they and he was describing what the Father has already done for us. As breakers of God’s perfect law, each of us are enemies of the Kingdom of God. God has already shown us undeserved mercy and love, even while we were yet sinners (Romans 5:8). So in order for us conform to the Law through faith in Jesus, we must love our enemies in the same way we have been loved by God.  This is a sure sign of faith, because such a sign shows that the Jesus who loves his enemies happily resides in the one who imitates him by faith from the heart.

Mark 5:1-20

We see the core motivations of the people emerge in their response to Jesus’ miracle.  The people’s real care is over the loss of wealth from the drowned pigs and not for the healed man.  This once pitiful man who roamed around the graves, cutting himself,  unable to be restrained by chains, was found by his neighbors sitting at Jesus’ feet with a sober mind.  He had lived alone in solitary torment and unspeakable misery, yet now he was healed and the people barely noticed.

The people grew terrified at  Jesus’ power, but their fear did not inspire them to glorify God or rejoice that a once raving lunatic was made well.  Instead, the people were fearful that Jesus might do even more damage to their wealth and property by performing another miracle.

Now the pigs did represent the loss of a great deal of money, and the town’s economy most likely felt the lost revenue that the pigs would have brought in from the market or at slaughter.  But the loss also revealed the hypocrisy of their owners.  These pigs couldn’t have been intended for Jewish use, as Jews were forbidden to touch the animals, let alone eat them (Leviticus 5:2).   Yet here are Jewish farmers raising the animals as livestock to be sold. And to whom would the people sell them?  In all likelihood, these animals were to be raised and sold to their Roman occupiers.

Now even more ironies arise. The demon possessed men and the townspeople suddenly take on reversed roles.  The people asked Jesus to leave them because they were afraid of losing more of their possessions, even though those possessions kept them more dependent upon those who enslaved them.  Yet here at Jesus’ feet is a man that had been enslaved by a host of demons (Legion) who was now free.  So the man’s freedom was disregarded by people fretting over the death of a heard of pigs (that held them chained to their earthly captors) and yet it was the possessed man, the one who had just been out of his mind, who could see what Jesus had done.

That Mark would highlight only one of the possessed men should in no way cause us alarm.  The details of Matthew, written hundreds of miles from where Mark was penned and in a completely different language, are otherwise well aligned with Mark’s account and give us great confidence that these events did indeed take place. Mark’s focus on just one of the two men leads us to conclude that it is his response to Jesus’ merciful act that captured his interest. And to Mark, this possessed man did do something highly significant in response to Jesus’ command:

“Go home to your family and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and how he has had mercy on you.” (Mark 5:19, emphasis added)

And with a smile we realize that this is exactly what the man did, even as Jesus was trying to deflect praise from himself to his Father:

“So the man went away and began to tell in the Decapolis how much Jesus had done for him. And all the people were amazed.” (Mark 5:20, emphasis added)

Mark 5:1-20

The demons were right when they addressed Jesus, as he was indeed the “Son of the Most High God.” And this is why the possessed man ran to Jesus instead of running from him.  With but a word, Jesus could have easily cast out “Legion” from a distance (just as he healed the Centurion’s servant and the Canaanite woman’s daughter).  Seeing Jesus, the man ran quickly to him to beg for mercy on Legion’s behalf.  And this happened because the demons knew well of Jesus power. They knew that because Jesus had already commanded them to leave the possessed man that they would be forced out of him.  So now the legion did what it could to negotiate with Jesus, hoping to get a favorable departure.

What happened next was symbolic in many ways.  From one vantage, we see Jesus granting the demons (Satan’s servants) the ability to destroy themselves in their effort to save themselves.  Their destruction was prophetic, as God would soon allow Satan to destroy his own kingdom when his servants nailed Jesus to a cross.  Another vantage has us examining the demons as they were allowed to enter into ignorant, unclean animals running headlong and over a perilous cliff.  Here is a metaphor for those who love the world and embrace the devil’s values as they are led blindly to their destruction.

But irregardless of what image we take away from the perishing pigs, we now learn that the once possessed man is free. And through his freedom, the man gives us more metaphors himself.  He shows us how salvation comes upon the saved soul, and as to how the redeemed are sobered once they receive release from the devil’s grip.  For every soul released from hell is released by God’s command, and every saved soul is sobered and is able to receive and understand the wisdom of God.

And the apex of this wisdom is found most prominently in the death and resurrection of Jesus.  Who brought glory to his Father and redeemed a people from a fallen world, and used a legion of demons found in one man to demonstrate it all so clearly to us.

Mark 4:35-41

Real faith goes beyond warm feelings. It’s easy for anyone to say that they believe in Jesus. It’s even easy for someone to say that they love him enough to die for him. But proving such a claim is a different matter entirely, and such proof will never come when we are sitting comfortably in church or when life is quiet and smiling on us warmly.

This is why the trials in our life test us. They prove to us whether real faith exists. Trails not only develop patience and persistence with our faith, they expose its depth. They show us if it is there and how deep it is.

When Jesus awoke and rebuked the storm he wasn’t angry with the storm. The storm was merely behaving as it was supposed to behave. It was churning up waves that were making it difficult for the disciples to cross the lake. It was stirring up the lake that was stirring up the disciple’s fear to test their faith. So when Jesus calmed the storm, he immediately asked his disciples why they were so afraid and asked if it was because they still had no faith.

The disciples believed that they were going to drown. Jesus was with them, but they still panicked.  And their panic suggested that they did not fully believe that he was the Messiah. Though they had seen him cast out demons and heal a paralyzed man, they didn’t believe he could help them escape the storm.

Windstorms like the furious squall that Mark describes are not unprecedented on the Sea of Galilee. In 1992, a late winter storm produced 10 foot waves that slammed into the town of Tiberias on the lake’s western shore. A 10 foot wave would have certainly been more than a mild concern for even the heartiest first-century Galilean fisherman, though they were used to being on the water in all kinds of weather. Though we don’t know the true height of the waves we do know that they were more than a match for their vessel -  a vessel that was likely not constructed to withstand large waves that crashed over its sides.

Whether or not the storm itself was supernaturally spawned, we do know that Jesus’ response was absolutely supernatural. It’s one thing to make the fantastic claim that Jesus was just a good meteorologist with an impeccable sense of timing a storms’ break, but it’s another thing entirely when you realize that it wasn’t just the winds that stopped at his command. The waves broke as well. According to the laws of physics, this couldn’t have been a natural phenomenon. Winds have been recorded to suddenly die off, though rarely.  But waves do not suddenly stop.  The wave action should have continued on for several more hours.

The disciples instantly recognized the miracle and were stunned by it: “Who is this that even the wind and waves obey him?” It was obvious who he was now, even as the disciples struggled to grasp the idea that this extraordinary rabbi was far more extraordinary than they first imagined. He was the Godman, who calmed not only a raging sea in northern Israel, but calms the raging heart of sinners and transform them into his people.

Mark 4:30-34

It’s interesting to look at the different types of mustard seeds that were planted in Palestine 2,000 years ago.  Each of them are very small and look very plain. They look nothing like the tree they eventually grows into that reaches some 8 to 12 feet high from the tiny seed.  And the black mustard seed is particularly interesting given the likelihood that Jesus had this seed variety in mind when he was speaking.  This seed not only looks ordinary, it looks even less appealing than the other varieties.

Scripture tells us that there was nothing extraordinary about Jesus’ appearance, and that there was nothing about him that would have suggested that he was destined to change the world (Isaiah 53:2).  He was like an ordinary mustard seed.  He grew up in an obscure Galilean town. He grew up with an insignificant family who lived ordinary first-century lives.  When he began his ministry, he chose working class fisherman, overlooked religious zealots and even a tax collector to become his trusted disciples. And Jesus associated with the poor, the sick, social outcasts and the lowest and most despised people in Israel.   By all outward appearances, Jesus showed no promise of changing human history.

But Jesus did change history.  With his extraordinary teaching, came unprecedented miracles; and with his miracles came the revelation of who he was.  Jesus was the Messiah and the Son of God.  He was God in human flesh.  He was the King of Kings wrapped in an ordinary package.  And his death on the cross carried with it so much lasting significance that our historical calendar is now split because of what he has done.

Jesus died as a single mustard seed, but from him rose up a Kingdom that changed the whole world.

From his death came a new people. A people who are not marked by special physical features or noted because they come from a particular geographic boundary.  His people are people with new hearts.  They are souls who have been humbled and changed by the death of their Savior. They are seeds from the very first Seed.  They are a transformed people, who have had the Gospel of God planted in their hearts on account of their Savior’s death and resurrection.

Though in the shade of the great tree the birds are allowed to perch, the Kingdom still grows ever larger.  They hide in the shade because they cannot tolerate the light of truth and they steal seeds in defiance of the one who planted the great tree.  They build their nests by its dead branches and they eat the fruit it bears.  But the birds cannot bring the great tree down.  They cannot stop its growth, and in Kingdom terms this great tree will last forever.

Mark 4:26-29

Farmers cannot grow large crops by themselves.  They can plow the ground.  They can water and fertilize the soil.  They can even plant the seeds.  But unless the sun shines, diseases stay at bay and the seeds germinate below the ground there is nothing more that the farmer can do.

Jesus uses these humble realities to remind us who is in control of his Kingdom.  It is our responsibility to plant and water, but God makes his Kingdom grow. We plant the seeds of the Gospel.  We water it with his Word.  We even bring nutrients to the soil through God’s grace in our hearts – such as the love, peace and joy we find through faith in Christ’s cross and his resurrection. But God is the One who germinates the seeds of faith.  He is the One who sustains the sunlight for spiritual photosynthesis.  He is the One who brings the cool rains of grace to ensure that his plants will withstand the hot summer days. In fact, God is the one who oversees the plant’s entire development, from the first sprout of Spring to the harvest grain of Summer.

According to Jesus, our job is to share Christ’s cross and resurrection.  But faith begins and ends with God’s will.  God sparks repentance and faith through the Spirit’s penetration of the heart. He then cares for the soul’s development through his Church and by his Word, and when he is ready, he brings a soul home to live with him forever.

The Lord does this with his entire Kingdom.  He quietly goes about growing his Kingdom.  He patiently and methodically tends to it until it is ready for the final harvest, and he does all this despite the opposition of the devil and the snares of this world.

Mark 4:21-25

We could conclude that Mark was collecting a few random sayings from Jesus in order to lead us into the Kingdom parables to come.  After all, we seem to suddenly switch from an examination of the individual’s heart in the Parable of the Sower to parables about the Kingdom of God.  Perhaps, Mark is introducing to us a segue between the individual and the Kingdom. Or maybe he is joining the first parable about the heart soils to the parables about growing wheat and mustard seeds.

But, in fact, Mark is doing both as he has both the individual and the Kingdom in view.

In the Parable of the Sower, the good heart is adding numbers to the Kingdom even as he is being saved. This heart is producing crops of 30 or even a 100 fold.  And so here Mark’s transition is subtle and natural.  Those who hear the Gospel will share it. They will put the message about the Light of Life on lamp stand for others to see.  The once hidden Kingdom of God now demands Kingdom people who will bring it out into the open, and Jesus’ expectation is that all who hear and receive the Gospel will continue bringing it out for those who haven’t heard or even refuse to hear.

The warning to Jesus’ listeners is clear and stark.  Be careful how you hear, because the measure you use will not only be measured back to you, but more.  Should you reveal the Gospel, more will be revealed to you.  If you love your neighbor, your enemy and brother, more love will given to you.  But if you hide the Gospel, the Gospel will be hidden from you.  If you judge others, God will judge you far harsher than you judged.  If you hate your brother, even the love you think you have from him will be taken from you.

Jesus is very concise.  If you live outside the Kingdom and demand its rules, you will have them.  There will be no mercy for you because the law shows no mercy to those who break it.  But those who embrace the Kingdom through faith in Jesus will be given more, even as grace and mercy increase in the joy of living daily in the kindness of the Savior.

Mark 4:1-20

Jesus informs us that there are four types of heart soils, but that only one is unnatural. These other soils – the soil that is hard, the shallow, rocky soil and the soil that is kind to weeds – do not require God’s touch at all. Like the grounds we would find walking through fields, along ocean shores, or in the middle of desserts are the same grounds that we find in Jesus’ parable.  With the exception of one, these soils are natural and common to the earth and behave exactly as the surrounding, wild terrain.

When a gardener works a patch of ground to plant a garden he first prepares it.  He tills the hard ground and then he pulls up all the weeds, removes the rocks and takes out anything else that would inhibit the growth of his seeds.  Then, after the soil is prepared, he plants.  And if the gardener would desire for the ground to return to its natural condition he would simply do nothing.  He would stop tending the ground and allow for the weeds and the elements to slowly take over the ground he worked so hard to prepare.

This is a key theme overlooked in our parable: A gardener takes wild ground and tames it.   He works a patch of ground that couldn’t naturally tolerate flowers and fruit that are desirable to him, and he transforms it into a fertile bed that’s ready to receive whatever he wants to plant.

The Holy Spirit is the Master Gardner. He waters hard, dry ground and softens hearts with the Word of God. He tenaciously tills the stony ground of stubborn hearts and prepares them to receive the Gospel. When he plants the Gospel, the well-prepared soil receives the Lord Jesus in the fullness of love and happily obeys his commands. And the Spirit is always busy pulling weeds, pulling those idols from our hearts that would otherwise make the Gospel boring and unlovely to us, so that the Gospel will grow unimpeded by the native plants that normally thrive in the soil of our hearts.

If left to themselves, our hearts would see the weeds rise up and choke off the Gospel or they would bake ever harder under the hot, blazing light of Gospel truths. But when the Spirit of God plants the Gospel in a good and well prepared heart, it becomes useful to God and produces a harvest of righteousness for the sake of spreading the Name of Jesus Christ.