Yours, Mine and Ours: The Wait
October 2, 2016
Dr. Tom Pace
Mark 4:26-32

Our Scripture today is from the Gospel of Mark, one of a number of parables that are about sowers of seed, about farmers. And we are continuing or finishing our series on “Yours, Mine and Ours” about how we can help form children and youth, how we can form all of one another in such a way that faith sticks, so that as the years go by that faith remains vital in our lives. So I want you to listen as we hear the Gospel read from the Gospel of Mark.

He also said, “The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground,and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how.The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head. But when the grain is ripe, at once he goes in with his sickle, because the harvest has come.”He also said, “With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it?It is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth;yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.” (Mark 4:26-32 NRSV)


In our “Yours, Mine and Ours” series we have been focusing on three primary principles. The first one is that young people are more likely to end up with a faith that sticks. But that’s not just young people. All of us are more likely to have a faith that sticks when we are formed and supported by an intergenerational community of faith, so that we have a relationships with people across the generational spectrum, and we learn from them. Older people learn vitality and zeal from younger people, and younger people learn wisdom and perseverance from older people. And across the spectrum we all love and learn from one another.
The second principle is that in churches where parents are challenged to be the primary teachers of faith, that faith is more likely to stick. So we work to partner with parents so that faith isn’t just about something that just happens on Sunday morning from 8 till noon. But it’s something that happens all the time; it’s talked about at home and at work. And that’s true not just for with families with children. If we compartmentalize it on Sunday morning it’s not going to be as pervasive in our lives as if we choose to talk about it and think it and live it at home or at work and all the time.
And finally, people who are formed in a grace based church are more likely to have faith that sticks. And by that it means a realization that it isn’t just about doing right and wrong, that faith is not just about, “Here’s a moral code you’re supposed to follow.” But it’s relation-based. It’s about a relationship with Jesus Christ, and out of that relationship with Jesus Christ comes our morals, our religion, our way of living, our way of treating others. But there is a relationship that is the formative part. So those are the three principles we’ve been talking about.
So what happens if you do all those things? Are you guaranteed that the people that the children who grow up in that kind of church are going to turn out to be staunch committed Christians? That’s what we’re going to talk about today. Let’s pray together. O God open us up, open our eyes that we might see, and our ears that we might hear. Open our hearts that we might feel and then O Lord open our hands that we might serve. Amen.
Sometimes I talk to parents who have really worked at parenting, done it as well as they possibly could. They’ve prayed with their kids, invested in their kids, brought their kids to church, loved on their kids, were involved in their young people’s lives. And they’ve become frustrated. They say. “My child did not turn out the way I had planned.” I think every parent can say that to some extent. Our children don’t turn out to be just exactly the way we planned. Look, it’s not just about parenting. It’s about everything in life.
Sometimes we as a church will work really hard at something. We’ll give it our very best. We’ll plan, we’ll resource it, we’ll invest in it, and we’ll persevere working at it. And it doesn’t work. And we’re frustrated. We’re like, “I did everything right!” No, actually what we usually do is say, “It must be something we did wrong. It’s got to be up to us.”
Jesus uses an image of a farmer more than any other image in any of his parables, the image of a farmer. He uses agrarian images. And that’s because they paint a wonderful picture of the partnership we have with God. Farmers do their part but God’s got to do the rest. So we’re going to look at seeds today and what happens to seeds and see what we can learn from them.
Here’s the first thing we can learn, and you can follow along in your Sermon Notes if you’d like. The first thing is that it takes time for seeds to grow. Everything takes time.
That’s not true. Everything important takes time. We’re used to getting that immediate gratification on the Smartphone. When you do something you want a response right back. We like microwave ovens where we can push the button. You know, I get really annoyed when my computer takes more than five seconds to get where I want to go. And then that little spinning thing comes on - you know what I’m talking about? I think, “What’s the deal? I need a new computer. This has taken five seconds.”
We want it right now. Everything important takes time. Seeds take time to grow. Warren Buffett says this: “No matter how great the talent or effort some things just take time. You can’t produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant.” That’s pretty good thinking, Warren! I like it when you’re straight forward! We want everything to happen quickly.
Tim Keller is the pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York, and at Easter time they have these testimonies in church. I think they do six testimonies during that period. He has a rule that only one of the testimonies can be of a sudden change. You know one of those, “I saw a blinding light, and I came to Jesus, and now my life is swell!”
So only one person can do that. The other five have to be either slow organic changes, because that’s how God usually works. Like a child when you see them again after a while, you say, “My, how you’ve grown!” But when you’re there watching the whole time, you don’t even notice the growth. Some things just take time.
We’ve been working out at the Gethsemane campus in southwest Houston for a little over eight years. Actually, I think it was eight years this month that we voted to merge. It’s taken almost this long to really get some traction. And we can feel it really starting to happen after we’ve been working and working. We’ve begun making inroads into the community and building relationships with people from the neighborhood coming to us instead of us going and banging on their doors all the time. It’s a gratifying thing.
But one of the reasons we chose to merge as opposed to just be a partner is because when you merge you can’t bail. You can't quit when it gets hard, you have to stay at it. And some things just take time. We often just start to give up, because that which we have planned for doesn’t happen right away.
Sometimes parents will come to me. You’re familiar with the passage from Proverbs 22:6 where it says, “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.” So they say, “You know I trained up my child right, and now the child is doing the wrong things. He’s often in trouble.” Well, the proverb is wrong. It says, “When he is old.” Like after you’re dead maybe. Some things just take time. You’ve got to wait and let God to do God’s thing.
Okay, here’s the second thing. It takes time, and it takes work. There’s cultivating, there’s sowing. Deciding to let God handle it doesn’t mean that you don’t work at it. You ask any farmer. The farmer gets up early before light, works all day long until the end of the day, goes to bed tired, then gets up in the morning and works all day again. You’ve got to work at it. There are no shortcuts allowed.
One of my daughters purchased her first home a couple of years ago. It’s one of those homes in the Heights that’s real skinny, real tall and has a really tiny little front yard. And the front yard was really crummy looking. So she texted me, “Dad, we want to re-sod our front yard.” I said, “Great!” And she said, “What do I do? Can I just go get sod and put it down?” I said, “No, it says you’re supposed to kill, till, fill and then sod. You’re supposed to kill all the grass that’s there with Round-up and then get a tiller, and till it up really well, and then you put sand down to make it flat and even. Then you can put the sod on.”
So I’m texting her with all that. There’s this longtime pause, and she came back, “Dad, I found a guy on the internet, and he said just to put the sod down without doing any of that stuff. Will that work?”I replied, “No, it won’t. You have to kill, till, fill and then sod.” You’ve got to do the work. If you expect the grass to grow you just can’t magically hope that it happens. There’s lot of work involved.
Everything we do that matters - parenting, marriage, what we do for a living, ministry, teaching children's Sunday school, being a youth counselor, being a reVision mentor, being a Kids Hope mentor, being anything you do is going to take effort and work. There's nothing that’s just a joyous free ride. Sometimes it feels good, sometimes it doesn’t. But you have to do the cultivating, you have to do the seed sowing, or you’re not going to get anything.
But here’s the phrase I love the most, “And he would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, and he does not know how.” The New International Version even has the word even in it,” he does not even know how.” It's like he does his part and then steps back, and something incredible happens.
Steven Furtick is a pastor, and he was preaching on a passage from I Corinthians 15 where he talks about seeds that are planted, then die and then grow again. I want to read to you what he says. The passage in I Corinthians 15 says, “What you plant does not come to life until it dies.” Here’s what Furtick says, “What you sow does not come to life until it dies. And while it is in the soil dying and being reborn, all we can do is wait. It’s just a matter of time before the potential in the seed is released from the seed. The seed is on schedule. So when you have done all you can do, prayed all you can pray, sowed all you can sow, prepared all you can prepare, get some sleep and trust.”
At some point you have to let it go. You have to realize that you are not in control of the world. You ask any farmer, and they’ll tell you that they have to work really hard but they can’t make it rain. All the wishing he wants cannot make it rain. At some point you just have to let it go. It may be your children. It may be your financial life. It may be your ministry. Maybe all these things that you care so much about, you work at, and you want so much to be able to dictate the outcome. But who are we to believe that we know what’s best for everyone and for everything? We do our part, and then we have to let it go.
Ruth Bell Graham, wife of Billy Graham, wrote a poem. She had her own challenges with prodigals. Here’s what she wrote. The poem is called “She Waited for the Call That Never Came,” and here’s how it goes: “She waited for the call that never came, searched every mail for a letter or a note, or a card that bore his name. And on her knees at night and on her feet all day, she stormed heaven’s gate on his behalf. She pled for him in heaven’s high court. ‘Be still, and wait and see,’ the word God gave. Then she knew that God would do in and for and with him that which she never could. So doubts ignored, she went about her chores with joy, knowing, though spurned, his word was true. The prodigal had not returned, but God was God and there was work to do.”
There comes a time when you have to let it go. When you’ve done all you can do, prayed all you can pray, you’ve worked all you can work. You’ve cultivated all you can cultivate, you’ve seeded all you can seed. You have to let it go, and see what God will do.
This letting go and waiting is not just for prodigals. It’s for all of our children. John Claypool talks about this Christmas Tree Spirit that children need in which over their lifetimes they open up their spiritual gifts. They open up their gifts to see what God has in store for them. And as much as we want them to be who we want them to be, what really matters is that they become who God wants them to be. And we can do our part, but then we have to let them go. The seed does not become the sprout and then the head unless we release it.
It takes time, it takes work, and then we let it go and look forward to the harvest. There’s a harvest coming. After time, who knows how long, there will be a harvest. That’s what the Scripture says over and over. The little mustard seed grows into a great tree. When God does God’s thing and the earth produces the stalk, then the head, then comes time for a harvest. There will be a harvest.
And that means there will be a time when God draws all of the children to him. And there is a time when all that which is broken is healed. Here’s what happens so much of the time, I think, because we can’t control it we look forward. We have this sort of dread about what is to be. We say, “What if I fail as a parent? What if I’ve failed as a pastor to do what I need to do so this church will become what God wants it to be? What if I didn’t dot my i’s and cross my t’s?”
So we look forward with this kind of fear or dread that maybe we’ve not done it right. No, we’re to look forward with trust and expectancy to see what’s God’s going to do, waiting, and yearning and believing and hoping and having that joyous picture of the harvest.
At the end of the service we’re going to sing this wonderful hymn that they made the mistake of leaving out of our current hymnal. We used to sing it when I was a youth pastor, and I was in charge of the Sunday night service in Duncanville, Texas. We’d get out the old Cokesbury Hymnal and sometimes the Baptist hymnal. Don’t tell the bishop, but we sang out of the Baptist hymnal, because we liked the hymns better sometimes. We sang “Bringing in the Sheaves” - “We shall come rejoicing - bringing in the sheaves…” We sow in good times, and we sow in bad times, and then there comes a time when we bring in the sheaves, when we gather them in, and we do that rejoicing. So as we wait we look forward.
I want to close this whole series with just a reminder that the whole emphasis here is that we’re all in the business of forming one another in the faith, of planting those seeds in one another, of cultivating the soil, of sharing our faith with one another, of encouraging one another, of sending one another out into the world. And we do that we do it because we're family to one another. We are family.
I went into a hospital room a number of months ago, and there was a young man there. They’d had a baby who had a number of challenges, and the young man threw his arms around my neck. I barely knew him, didn’t know him well. He threw his arms around my neck and cried. We talked about what the options were for them. I’m full of joy to tell you that it wasn’t too long after that that we presented that baby to you as your new son. Your new son! We’re family.
I saw a man out in the hall a number of months ago. He said, “You probably don’t know me, but I’m single and I have two foster boys. I can’t tell you what a difference this Children's Ministry has made in the lives of my boys. They love getting up on Sunday mornings and coming here. What a difference it’s made. It’s like they’ve got a family.” And I thought, “Yes, it is.”
Somebody caught me not long ago and was telling me that they had recently become involved in the woodshop across the street. The woodshop is a wonderful ministry we have where a lot of people, mostly retired folks - not all, but mostly retired - gather to make little wooden toys and all sorts of other wooden things we send all around the country. The person said, “That group over there is kind of like a family.” I said, “It’s not kind of like a family, it is a family.”
We are brothers and sisters in Christ and this table that we’re eating at today, this communion table, is a family table. And we do not just look back to the time when this was the Passover meal and Moses led the Children of Israel out of bondage, we look forward. You’ll hear it in the communion ritual, in the Great Thanksgiving. We look forward to that time when we feast together at his heavenly table when he comes in final victory.
So this is a foretaste of that table. When we come here, I want you to imagine people all around the world, not just in this room, but all around the world sitting at that table with you. All different kinds of people, people you like and maybe some you don’t. And at that table Jesus sits at the head of the table, and we’re all there together as family.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.