How to Remove Rocks
Mark 4:1-20
Mark 4:1-20
Listen Link: http://www.firstcovenantcadillac.org/#!this-weeks-sermon/c20mw
Like my little froggy chia pet here? The seeds are on there. But of course the root is going nowhere in the extremely shallow soil. I read in the instructions that the chia plants on here can last up to four weeks, if they grow at all. Well I planted this a week ago and this is all I got. Froggy is smiling a happy smile, but that’s about all he’s got going for him. He’s really shallow.
Cadillac News columnist, Mardi Suhs, recently asked me, along with other pastors in the area, and some church members too, to write a little essay for a column she is working on in which she is exploring what we think are the five greatest challenges to the Christian church today. Among other things I said that one of our greatest challenges is getting disciples of Jesus Christ to read and understand the Bible as much more than a book about moral teachings.
For example, I think in general many Sunday School lessons for our young children are more focused on how we should behave and obey our parents and do not focus enough on the deeper truths about the sin nature and our need of a Savior. In my former church there was even a lady who objected to the work of Child Evangelism Fellowship because they were going to talk to early elementary age children about sin in a way that lets children know that they are not basically good and trying to get better. CEF tells the truth that children are basically bad and evil and born that way, but that God came to fix that problem.
No other religion anywhere in the world teaches that truth about our sin nature. Christianity is unique in that. But there are very many people all grown up in the Christian church who believe that Christianity only teaches the same moral truths as every other religion so it doesn’t matter what you believe as long as you’re trying to be good. That’s actually very shallow theology. God takes us deeper.
Today we talk about the shallow rocky soil. And I am going to show you how to remove those rocks so we can go deep! We are focused on this portion of our parable, “Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root.” Later Jesus explained, “Others, like seed sown on rocky places, hear the word and at once receive it with joy. But since they have no root, they last only a short time. When trouble or persecution comes because of the word, they quickly fall away.”
Shallow faith is the kind of faith that says, “Yeah, I believe in God. I am a spiritual person. I worship God in my own way.” There is a lot of this on Facebook. It takes the form of encouraging words or positive motivation sayings where God is mentioned. One of my favorite examples of this shallow theology is the one that says, “Religion is a guy in church thinking about fishing. Relationship is a guy out fishing, thinking about God.” Sounds good. We love that kind of turn of a phrase. But in reality, a guy out fishing isn’t in the right relationship either. The second half should say, “Relationship is a guy in church thinking about the God and the people he is with.”
Now I want to turn to a much more spiritual saying that could take us very deep. In John 6: 54- 58, Jesus said to the Jews, “Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven. Your ancestors ate manna and died, but whoever feeds on this bread will live forever.”
Then in verse 60 we are told, “On hearing it, many of his disciples said, “This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?” From this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him.
No longer followed him is exactly what happens to the shallow soil when they are offended by, or puzzled by, the meaning of the Word of God. They don’t go deep. They don’t seek to understand. Many of the people around Jesus were very happy to be witnessing his miracles and very hopeful that he would in fact be the one to get rid of the Romans. They welcomed him joyfully for that. A following “sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root.” Like froggy here. “Since they have no root, they last only a short time. When trouble or persecution comes because of the word, they quickly fall away.”
The trouble that came was that Jesus started to say some really deep things about his true purpose and he used language that was hard to understand and even normally offensive to the Jews. They were not cannibals. Their religion prevented them from ever drinking blood. And here is Jesus, a supposed rabbi of great wisdom telling them that they would have to eat his flesh and drink his blood! No wonder they had problems.
But the response of just walking away shows that they were not willing to go deeper and work things out with Jesus. They made up their minds based on that hard teaching and they walked away, unwilling to think things through. The sun came up. The burning light of God’s glorious truth shone down upon their heads and they dried up. There was no water source to keep them alive under the heat. The water would have been the Holy Spirit. But they were not tapping into that. They had no root.
But that’s not our problem. We are Christians so we have gotten past the problem Jesus posed in John 6. We know he was talking about his great sacrifice for our sins and in his words he was hinting at what would become the Lord’s Supper, our Communion service. So to help us know whether we are shallow soil, we need a more modern problem to work out. And it ought to be kind of close to home so that our emotions are engaged in it. So let’s try this. Culturally these days I have heard it said that there should be no food in the sanctuary. It is sacred space and must be kept clean and pure.
But consider this. In Leviticus God himself gave the instructions and regulations about what should go on in the sacred temple space. Leviticus 1:5 says, “You are to slaughter the young bull before the Lord, and then Aaron’s sons the priests shall bring the blood and splash it against the sides of the altar at the entrance to the tent of meeting.” If the offering to the Lord is a burnt offering of birds, Leviticus 1:15 says, “The priest shall bring it to the altar, wring off the head and burn it on the altar; its blood shall be drained out on the side of the altar.”
On the day of Atonement, the most holy day of the Jewish Calendar year, the instructions include, Leviticus 4:5 – 7, “Then the anointed priest shall take some of the bull’s blood and carry it into the tent of meeting. He is to dip his finger into the blood and sprinkle some of it seven times before the Lord, in front of the curtain of the sanctuary. The priest shall then put some of the blood on the horns of the altar of fragrant incense that is before the Lord in the tent of meeting. The rest of the bull’s blood he shall pour out at the base of the altar of burnt offering at the entrance to the tent of meeting.”
In addition, just listen to Leviticus 7:1-6. “These are the regulations for the guilt offering, which is most holy: The guilt offering is to be slaughtered in the place where the burnt offering is slaughtered, and its blood is to be splashed against the sides of the altar. All its fat shall be offered: the fat tail and the fat that covers the internal organs, both kidneys with the fat on them near the loins, and the long lobe of the liver, which is to be removed with the kidneys. The priest shall burn them on the altar as a food offering presented to the Lord. It is a guilt offering. Any male in a priest’s family may eat it, but it must be eaten in the sanctuary area; it is most holy.”
And there are many other such regulations throughout the book of Leviticus. Blood is mentioned sixty-five times in this connection. So I hope you can see from this biblical information, that in spite of how anyone may have been culturally raised in the last couple of centuries, God has absolutely no problem at all with food in his sanctuary. In fact, he commanded it. And there was messy blood poured out by the altar and sprinkled all over the place! The temple of God was a butcher shop and barbecue. It looked more like a slaughterhouse combined with an Outback Steakhouse than any modern church sanctuary.
In the early church, people met in houses and food was around all the time. That was why, in the letter to the Corinthians, Paul had to give instructions about how they should be more considerate of each other when they are enjoying their potlucks, that they called love feasts. But he did not tell them to get rid of all food in the sanctuary. And even today, food and water are still central elements in our worship services. A strict ban on food in the sanctuary would mean no communion service. And if there is some reason why people should be prohibited from drinking water in the sanctuary, then there should be no baptisms either. So is it really right to be offended if we have food and fellowship right here in the sanctuary? Is that view of holiness really from God, or have our predecessors accidentally created a more shallow theology?
What we need to do, when confronted by problems and conflicts between what we think God wants and what others say God wants, is to go deeper. Deeper in his word, yes. But just as importantly to go deeper into our own soil and identify whether we are shallow or need to pull out a bunch of rocks. It is the same as dealing with the logs in our own eyes so that we can help other people with their specks.
I have learned from my experiences with the recovery coaches and the people in recovery that there is a process by which we can actively pursue God and his plan for us. I am going to read through the 12 Steps found in a Life Recovery Bible. These were first applied to alcoholism by the people who founded Alcoholics Anonymous, Dr. Bob Smith and Bill Wilson. But they really are derived from some discipleship materials that Dr. Bob and Mr. Bill encountered in connection with a group of earnest Christians called the Oxford group, back in the 1920’s. Lately, some great Christians, notably Rick Warren, have rediscovered the Biblical basis for the twelve step program. It turns out to be a good course in discipleship and these twelve steps are useful for removing rocks in our lives.
So here is the list:
1. We admit that we are powerless over sin—that we can’t manage our lives on our own.
2. We need to believe that a Power greater than ourselves can restore us to sanity and He wants to do so.
3. We then make a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God. (That is the real purpose of asking the Lord Jesus into your heart. It is saving grace. But it is also the beginning of spiritual growth.)
4. We also have to make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. (That is where we begin to dig down inside ourselves.)
5. We learn from this so that we can admit to God, to ourselves and to other human beings the exact nature of our sins.
6. We become entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. We humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings. (This is where the rocks get removed.)
8. We are willing to make a list of all persons we have harmed and we become willing to make amends to them all.
9. We make direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. We continue to take personal inventory and when we are wrong we promptly admit it.
11. We continue to seek through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, through faith in Jesus Christ, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. We have a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps. And we try to carry this message to all people as we continue to practice these principles in all our affairs.
This is what it means to go deep. This is the process by which God will help us remove the rocks that prevent His word from taking root deeply. This work is so important that I am going to keep on encouraging us to work at it by having a sermon series in the near future focused on the Beatitudes and showing you how this discipleship material I just shared actually has strong links with the beatitudes. The beatitudes outline Jesus’ process of discipleship.
Let’s go deeper this year. It’s never too late to follow the Lord’s leading in to new paths of discovery and adventure. This is what God’s Word calls us too. The seed of God’s Word wants us to let him in to put down deep roots.
Like my little froggy chia pet here? The seeds are on there. But of course the root is going nowhere in the extremely shallow soil. I read in the instructions that the chia plants on here can last up to four weeks, if they grow at all. Well I planted this a week ago and this is all I got. Froggy is smiling a happy smile, but that’s about all he’s got going for him. He’s really shallow.
Cadillac News columnist, Mardi Suhs, recently asked me, along with other pastors in the area, and some church members too, to write a little essay for a column she is working on in which she is exploring what we think are the five greatest challenges to the Christian church today. Among other things I said that one of our greatest challenges is getting disciples of Jesus Christ to read and understand the Bible as much more than a book about moral teachings.
For example, I think in general many Sunday School lessons for our young children are more focused on how we should behave and obey our parents and do not focus enough on the deeper truths about the sin nature and our need of a Savior. In my former church there was even a lady who objected to the work of Child Evangelism Fellowship because they were going to talk to early elementary age children about sin in a way that lets children know that they are not basically good and trying to get better. CEF tells the truth that children are basically bad and evil and born that way, but that God came to fix that problem.
No other religion anywhere in the world teaches that truth about our sin nature. Christianity is unique in that. But there are very many people all grown up in the Christian church who believe that Christianity only teaches the same moral truths as every other religion so it doesn’t matter what you believe as long as you’re trying to be good. That’s actually very shallow theology. God takes us deeper.
Today we talk about the shallow rocky soil. And I am going to show you how to remove those rocks so we can go deep! We are focused on this portion of our parable, “Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root.” Later Jesus explained, “Others, like seed sown on rocky places, hear the word and at once receive it with joy. But since they have no root, they last only a short time. When trouble or persecution comes because of the word, they quickly fall away.”
Shallow faith is the kind of faith that says, “Yeah, I believe in God. I am a spiritual person. I worship God in my own way.” There is a lot of this on Facebook. It takes the form of encouraging words or positive motivation sayings where God is mentioned. One of my favorite examples of this shallow theology is the one that says, “Religion is a guy in church thinking about fishing. Relationship is a guy out fishing, thinking about God.” Sounds good. We love that kind of turn of a phrase. But in reality, a guy out fishing isn’t in the right relationship either. The second half should say, “Relationship is a guy in church thinking about the God and the people he is with.”
Now I want to turn to a much more spiritual saying that could take us very deep. In John 6: 54- 58, Jesus said to the Jews, “Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven. Your ancestors ate manna and died, but whoever feeds on this bread will live forever.”
Then in verse 60 we are told, “On hearing it, many of his disciples said, “This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?” From this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him.
No longer followed him is exactly what happens to the shallow soil when they are offended by, or puzzled by, the meaning of the Word of God. They don’t go deep. They don’t seek to understand. Many of the people around Jesus were very happy to be witnessing his miracles and very hopeful that he would in fact be the one to get rid of the Romans. They welcomed him joyfully for that. A following “sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root.” Like froggy here. “Since they have no root, they last only a short time. When trouble or persecution comes because of the word, they quickly fall away.”
The trouble that came was that Jesus started to say some really deep things about his true purpose and he used language that was hard to understand and even normally offensive to the Jews. They were not cannibals. Their religion prevented them from ever drinking blood. And here is Jesus, a supposed rabbi of great wisdom telling them that they would have to eat his flesh and drink his blood! No wonder they had problems.
But the response of just walking away shows that they were not willing to go deeper and work things out with Jesus. They made up their minds based on that hard teaching and they walked away, unwilling to think things through. The sun came up. The burning light of God’s glorious truth shone down upon their heads and they dried up. There was no water source to keep them alive under the heat. The water would have been the Holy Spirit. But they were not tapping into that. They had no root.
But that’s not our problem. We are Christians so we have gotten past the problem Jesus posed in John 6. We know he was talking about his great sacrifice for our sins and in his words he was hinting at what would become the Lord’s Supper, our Communion service. So to help us know whether we are shallow soil, we need a more modern problem to work out. And it ought to be kind of close to home so that our emotions are engaged in it. So let’s try this. Culturally these days I have heard it said that there should be no food in the sanctuary. It is sacred space and must be kept clean and pure.
But consider this. In Leviticus God himself gave the instructions and regulations about what should go on in the sacred temple space. Leviticus 1:5 says, “You are to slaughter the young bull before the Lord, and then Aaron’s sons the priests shall bring the blood and splash it against the sides of the altar at the entrance to the tent of meeting.” If the offering to the Lord is a burnt offering of birds, Leviticus 1:15 says, “The priest shall bring it to the altar, wring off the head and burn it on the altar; its blood shall be drained out on the side of the altar.”
On the day of Atonement, the most holy day of the Jewish Calendar year, the instructions include, Leviticus 4:5 – 7, “Then the anointed priest shall take some of the bull’s blood and carry it into the tent of meeting. He is to dip his finger into the blood and sprinkle some of it seven times before the Lord, in front of the curtain of the sanctuary. The priest shall then put some of the blood on the horns of the altar of fragrant incense that is before the Lord in the tent of meeting. The rest of the bull’s blood he shall pour out at the base of the altar of burnt offering at the entrance to the tent of meeting.”
In addition, just listen to Leviticus 7:1-6. “These are the regulations for the guilt offering, which is most holy: The guilt offering is to be slaughtered in the place where the burnt offering is slaughtered, and its blood is to be splashed against the sides of the altar. All its fat shall be offered: the fat tail and the fat that covers the internal organs, both kidneys with the fat on them near the loins, and the long lobe of the liver, which is to be removed with the kidneys. The priest shall burn them on the altar as a food offering presented to the Lord. It is a guilt offering. Any male in a priest’s family may eat it, but it must be eaten in the sanctuary area; it is most holy.”
And there are many other such regulations throughout the book of Leviticus. Blood is mentioned sixty-five times in this connection. So I hope you can see from this biblical information, that in spite of how anyone may have been culturally raised in the last couple of centuries, God has absolutely no problem at all with food in his sanctuary. In fact, he commanded it. And there was messy blood poured out by the altar and sprinkled all over the place! The temple of God was a butcher shop and barbecue. It looked more like a slaughterhouse combined with an Outback Steakhouse than any modern church sanctuary.
In the early church, people met in houses and food was around all the time. That was why, in the letter to the Corinthians, Paul had to give instructions about how they should be more considerate of each other when they are enjoying their potlucks, that they called love feasts. But he did not tell them to get rid of all food in the sanctuary. And even today, food and water are still central elements in our worship services. A strict ban on food in the sanctuary would mean no communion service. And if there is some reason why people should be prohibited from drinking water in the sanctuary, then there should be no baptisms either. So is it really right to be offended if we have food and fellowship right here in the sanctuary? Is that view of holiness really from God, or have our predecessors accidentally created a more shallow theology?
What we need to do, when confronted by problems and conflicts between what we think God wants and what others say God wants, is to go deeper. Deeper in his word, yes. But just as importantly to go deeper into our own soil and identify whether we are shallow or need to pull out a bunch of rocks. It is the same as dealing with the logs in our own eyes so that we can help other people with their specks.
I have learned from my experiences with the recovery coaches and the people in recovery that there is a process by which we can actively pursue God and his plan for us. I am going to read through the 12 Steps found in a Life Recovery Bible. These were first applied to alcoholism by the people who founded Alcoholics Anonymous, Dr. Bob Smith and Bill Wilson. But they really are derived from some discipleship materials that Dr. Bob and Mr. Bill encountered in connection with a group of earnest Christians called the Oxford group, back in the 1920’s. Lately, some great Christians, notably Rick Warren, have rediscovered the Biblical basis for the twelve step program. It turns out to be a good course in discipleship and these twelve steps are useful for removing rocks in our lives.
So here is the list:
1. We admit that we are powerless over sin—that we can’t manage our lives on our own.
2. We need to believe that a Power greater than ourselves can restore us to sanity and He wants to do so.
3. We then make a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God. (That is the real purpose of asking the Lord Jesus into your heart. It is saving grace. But it is also the beginning of spiritual growth.)
4. We also have to make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. (That is where we begin to dig down inside ourselves.)
5. We learn from this so that we can admit to God, to ourselves and to other human beings the exact nature of our sins.
6. We become entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. We humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings. (This is where the rocks get removed.)
8. We are willing to make a list of all persons we have harmed and we become willing to make amends to them all.
9. We make direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. We continue to take personal inventory and when we are wrong we promptly admit it.
11. We continue to seek through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, through faith in Jesus Christ, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. We have a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps. And we try to carry this message to all people as we continue to practice these principles in all our affairs.
This is what it means to go deep. This is the process by which God will help us remove the rocks that prevent His word from taking root deeply. This work is so important that I am going to keep on encouraging us to work at it by having a sermon series in the near future focused on the Beatitudes and showing you how this discipleship material I just shared actually has strong links with the beatitudes. The beatitudes outline Jesus’ process of discipleship.
Let’s go deeper this year. It’s never too late to follow the Lord’s leading in to new paths of discovery and adventure. This is what God’s Word calls us too. The seed of God’s Word wants us to let him in to put down deep roots.
Comments
Post a Comment