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LISTEN TO THE WORD OF GOD
LISTEN TO THE WORD OF GOD Mark 1:20 Key Verse: 4:9 “Then Jesus said, ‘Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear.’” In the last two passages we studied from Mark’s gospel, we saw that as Jesus’ popularity among the common people grew so did the opposition among the Jewish religious leaders. In fact, certain Pharisees were plotting with the Herodians, looking for ways that they might legally kill Jesus. Even members of His own family thought that He had lost His mind and they tried to physically take Him away from His ministry. Just like the ordinary people who were eagerly gathering around Jesus, the religious leaders and the members of Jesus family knew what Jesus was saying. They heard his words, but they really weren’t listening to Jesus. Listening to God’s words requires more than just hearing or reading them. It requires prayer, meditating on them and putting them into effect in our lives. Over the next two weeks we will look at four of the five parables Mark records in his Gospel, and I want to focus on what it means to really listen to the word of God. May God bless our study of this passage and help us to listen to His word so that we can bear a lot of fruit. First, Listen and hear the word of God (1-9) The opposition to Jesus ministry was growing and intensifying, yet His ministry continued to grow. In this passage, he leaves the house that he was teaching in and goes down to the lake, not to fish, but to teach the people. Such a large crowd gathered to hear Jesus teaching that he had to get in a boat and go a little bit away from shore so that He could address them all. Why were these crowds so large when the religious leaders were saying that His teaching was heresy? Well, Jesus did not teach like the Pharisees or the other teachers of the Law. The people said that He taught with authority (His own), not as the teachers of the Law who relied the teaching of their elders and ancestors. However, there was another way in which Jesus’ teaching was different from the Pharisees and teachers of the Law. Look at verse 2. “He taught them many things by parables, and in his teaching said:” Why did Jesus use parables to teach the people? Parables use everyday objects, events and examples that ordinary people could relate to. The spiritual world and the kingdom of God can not be seen and, therefore, are very hard to think about from an earthly perspective. Jesus wanted these ordinary people in the crowd to understand these things, so He used things that they could relate to. In this first parable, He uses a farmer sowing his seed. Look at verse 3. “Listen! A farmer went out to sow his seed.” Look at the first word of this verse and the punctuation that follows it. “Listen!” The exclamation point indicates that this is a very important word. Jesus is commanding the crowd and us to listen to Him. I am sure that all of us have heard this parable before, heard sermons preached on it, and have even read it many times. The farmer goes out and sows his seed and some of it lands on four different types of soil. Each of the different types of soil produces a different result for the seed. Each of us have also probably read or heard about Jesus explanation of the parable in a sermon. But do these facts mean that we have really listened to God’s word? Believe it or not, I think our familiarity with this and all of Jesus’s parables actually hinders our ability to listen to God’s word when we hear it again. Really listening to God’s word requires a lot more than just hearing it be explained in a sermon or reading it for yourself in the Bible. I think it requires three more things. First, it requires sincere prayer. We must ask God to reveal His word to us. The actual words and sentences may seem simple enough, but they are not telling us about what we can see, hear, touch or taste. They are telling us about the Kingdom of God – a place so great that I don’t think any of us can even come close to imagining what it is like. Therefore, we need God to open our spiritual eyes and ears so we can understand what His words mean. Second, really listening to God’s word means meditating on it day and night. The psalmist says this in the very first Psalm. “Blessed is the one…whose delight is in the law of the Lord, and who meditates on it day and night.” To listen to God’s word means that we keep it in our mind as we go through our daily lives. And finally, to really listen to God’s word we must put it into practice in life. In Matthew 7:24, Jesus tells us how to be a wise man. “Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock.” Listening to God’s word requires a lot; it is not just as simple as reading a book or listening to a sermon. Now let’s look at our key verse. “Then Jesus said, ‘Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear.’” I think a lot of people don’t understand this verse. They think they have functioning ears that hear what is going on around them, so they think Jesus is speaking about them. However, I am convinced that Jesus is not talking about normally functioning ears when he says this. Do you remember the first thing I said that was required to really listen to the word of God? The first thing I said you needed is prayer. Sure, the words in the parables that Jesus uses are easy to understand because they talk about things that we are familiar with, but the things they are representing are beyond our understanding. Without God’s help, there is no way we can understand what He is saying to us. Second, the secrets of the Kingdom of God (10-20). When Jesus was talking to the crowds, He did not try to explain His parables to them. He just told the parables and left it up to the individuals to decide what they meant, but when He was alone with His disciples He explained it further. Look at verse 10. “When he was alone, the Twelve and the others around him asked him about the parables.” Notice that the Twelve and the others around Jesus asked Him about the parables. That is, they prayed that God would make the meaning of the parables clear to them. The first parable that we heard was a simple story about a farmer sowing seed and the results of that seed landing on different types of soil. Anyone could understand it, but what did Jesus say about this story? Look at verses 11-12 “He told them, ‘The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you. But to those on the outside everything is said in parables 12 so that, ‘they may be ever seeing but never perceiving, and ever hearing but never understanding; otherwise they might turn and be forgiven!’” Jesus was not talking about a simple farmer and what happens to seed when it is sown. He was talking about the “secret of the Kingdom of God.” I want to point out a couple of things here. First of all, What Jesus was talking about was a secret. You can not know a secret unless someone tells you about it. That is the nature of a secret. Therefore, I say once again that listening to the word of God must start with prayer asking Him to reveal the secret to us. Second, this secret is about the Kingdom of God – something that we can’t see, hear, smell, touch or taste. Nor do I think we can even conceive of what it is like, let alone what it actually is. So, once again, we must have it revealed to us by God Himself. All of us sitting in this room are actually in the same position as those gathered around Jesus. Like them, we need to be asking Jesus to explain this parable to us. Even if we read what He said to the disciple, that may not mean that the secret of the kingdom of God has been revealed to us. The crowds and the Pharisees all heard what Jesus said, yet the secret of the kingdom of God was not revealed to them – they completely rejected it. With out going into detail about Jesus explanation of the different types of soil and what they produced, I want to go directly to verse 20. “Others, like seed sown on good soil, hear the word, accept it, and produce a crop—some thirty, some sixty, some a hundred times what was sown.” I am pretty sure that most of you have heard of our heart being like the different types of soil in this parable. I agree with that, but spiritual growth does not stop with the soil. The growth must spread through our entire. It begins in the heart and mind when we hear or read the word of God, but it needs to spread out into every part of our life as we really listen to the word of God. When that happens, everyone can see that what we have done has been done through God. Only in this way can we produce fruit for the kingdom of God. We cannot reveal the secret of the Kingdom of God through our words and/or our human knowledge. It is far too great to put into words. This is why everyday we must focus on really listening to God’s word, and by that I mean focusing on the three things required for true listening: beginning with prayer, then meditating on it day and night, and letting God put it into practice in our life. |
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