To What Shall I Compare The Kingdom Of God?

We're going to be continuing on this morning in our study of the Gospel of Luke. We're in Luke 13. And we're getting into a section where Jesus is teaching pretty regularly. And when he teaches, you'll find that whenever he's with the crowds, he always teaches in parables. What's a parable? Well, it's a story. It's a similitude. It's an analogy. He doesn't speak plainly to the crowds. He's always saying, well, the kingdom of God is like this thing. what do you think should happen in this situation? Should we heal on the Sabbath? He's always talking in word pictures. He's always talking in parables. And so what's the point of him always teaching in parables? It's not so that the people would understand more clearly. In fact, what happens is the exact opposite. Oftentimes, his meaning is veiled. They can't understand what he's saying. And so we read time and again that when he gets alone with his disciples, they come to him and say, what did that mean? What were you saying there?

And sometimes even the crowds will say, what are you saying? And so I want you to see that the goal of Jesus' instruction was not to put everything down as simple and as easy for everyone to be able to understand without effort, but that it actually takes work to understand what Jesus is saying, what he's teaching. And so this morning we're going to be studying two parables, some of them... Both of them probably common to you if you've read scripture, if you've read the parables before. These two parables serve sort of as a topographical map. A topographical map is a, you know, if you were going to go on a hike through the woods, one of the things that would be helpful is to know where you're at and where you're going. The other thing that would be helpful is to know if there are...

creeks, if there are valleys, if there are mountains, what's in the way? What's the rise and fall of the land look like? That's what a topographical map is. It tells you what the lay of the land looks like. And so that's the purpose of these two parables is to orient us in the right direction and to set our expectations for the journey ahead. When I was a youth leader years ago, we went on an orienteering event with the kids and we told the kids. Dress appropriately, we're traipsing through the woods. Well, some of them thought, we're going to walk, we're going to go on nature trails. Well, we didn't go on nature trails. And one of the poor young ladies, she came in shorts and flip-flops, and she was through the briars. She didn't prepare. It wasn't a fun time for her. And so what we need is to be oriented. We need to be taught, okay, here's what our expectations ought to be. Because if our expectations are wrong, then the chances of them being met go way down.

And the goal is not to have no expectations, but to have appropriate expectations. So that we know what to hope for, we know what to plan for, we know what to prepare for. That's the purpose of these two parables this morning, is to teach us what we should expect and which direction we should be moving. Would you please stand now for the reading of God's word from Luke chapter 13, verses 18 through 22. This is the word of the Lord and it is eternally true. So he was saying, what is the kingdom of God like? And to what shall I compare it? It is like a mustard seed, which a man took and threw into his own garden, and it grew and became a tree, and the birds of the air nested in its branches. And again he said, To what shall I compare the kingdom of God? It is like leaven, which a woman took and hid in three pecks of flour until it was all leavened. And he was passing through from one city and village to another, teaching and proceeding on his way to Jerusalem. This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated.

So one of the things I've started doing these last couple of weeks, sort of as sermon prep, is for one of the devotions during the week with my kids, my family, my wife, is I take my sermon text and I just say, okay, we're going to do two things. The first is, you guys are going to determine what I chose as the title, because I always pick my sermon titles from in the text, and so I go trying to figure out, okay, what part of the text best captures, what phrase or sentence best captures the point? of the sermon. And so the title of this week's sermon is, in the middle of the passage, verse 20, it says, to what shall I compare the kingdom of God? And so we go through and we read it, and before we come to the title, I start asking my children, okay, just tell me in your own words, big picture, what's this text about? What's the subject or the theme? And they say, well, the kingdom of God. Because twice in our text, Jesus compares the kingdom of God to two different things, a mustard seed and leaven. And so they go,

Okay, well, the point of this text is to learn something, or two things, rather, about the kingdom of God that we don't know. And those things will be helpful to us to know. And so this is what I do with my kids. And then we start saying, okay, what do you learn about the kingdom of God? Well, we can get this far pretty easily. What's the text about? It's about the kingdom of God. What's it being compared to? A mustard seed and leaven. Okay. What do you think the title of the sermon should be? It's pretty simple to figure all of that out. But then we come to the point and I say, okay, What is Jesus teaching us? What are we supposed to learn from these parables? Because we're not supposed to simply learn kingdom of God is like a mustard seed. Good. End of story. That's not the end of the story. There's something about the mustard seed that was supposed to communicate a truth to the people who were hearing him.

He was taking something they did not understand, the kingdom of God, something that was unfamiliar to them, and he was using something that was familiar to them and saying, you know about a mustard seed, you know about those trees, you know what they're like, right? Yes. Okay, the kingdom of God is like that. So he's taking a wealth of knowledge that they already have and connecting it to something they don't understand and saying, these two are similar. And he does the same thing with leaven. So we'll start with the mustard seed. What is a mustard seed? Well, first I want you to know, and if you've ever heard people talk about this, the one thing they'll tell you about the mustard seed is what? It's tiny, right? Everyone who's ever heard anything about the mustard seed, that's the one thing everybody knows. Mustard seeds are tiny. Okay, what about mustard trees? They're big, okay? So you have this idea.

That this little tiny seed, you know, it's not like a bean or a tomato seed or a cucumber seed or something that's big. It's this little tiny. It's like the size of a poppy seed or smaller. It's little tiny. Not like a walnut or an acorn. It's just this tiny little thing. You learn that it's going to grow into this big tree, this tree that's big enough for birds to come nest in its branches. And so think big, big oak tree. We don't have mustard trees around here. Think big oak tree, big wide branches. A place that birds would make their nest. And so far we go, okay, that makes sense. So it's a little tiny seed that grows into a big tree. Got it. Okay. So what's that mean for the kingdom of God? Well, it's a little tiny seed that grows into a big something. But I want us to dig in a little bit more to this text and learn a little bit more than that. Because I think, you know, my children could come away with that understanding without much effort.

And the benefit to them or to us is commensurate with the effort that we put in. And so if that's all we know about mustard seeds, and we go, hey, that's great, good Bible study, we haven't been helped that much. What have we learned about the kingdom of God? Well, it's tiny? No, it's big. The kingdom of God is big, and here we move on. There's more to it than that. So what else do we know about this mustard seed? Well, we know that this mustard seed was planted in the man's garden. It wasn't planted out in the... in the wild or on the hillside or in the field. Well, why is that significant? Well, it's significant because it's protected and it's cared for and it's not going to be turned over with, you know, tilled under next year when they go to plant the potatoes. It's going to be cared for. It's going to be protected, not just from being tilled under, but also from animals eating it. You know, I bet that if a number of us let our grass grow and you just let it grow, you'd find that there are trees growing in your yard just right out there in the grass. And the only reason they don't grow is because you just...

You keep mowing them down. And that's what would happen to this mustard seed if we just cast it out in our yard. It would just get mowed down. It would never grow. It would never become a big tree where birds can rest and nest at. So this little tiny mustard seed is put in this guy's garden, and he protects it. It's protected from being tilled under. It's protected from being eaten by animals or killed by a drought. You know, I water my gardens, but I don't water my grass. And when we have a drought, there's quite a disparity between the two of them. Green, lush. Brown, dry, scratchy. And so it's significant that it's put in a garden. It's put in the man's garden. What we're learning is that the man's going to care for it. If you were here a couple of weeks ago, we talked about a tree being planted in a vineyard and being cared for and needing to bear fruit. And the analogy wasn't to the kingdom of God, but rather to us. We were the trees, and were we going to grow?

But this week we find a similar theme, a seed planted in a garden, cared for and protected to the end that it would grow. And that it would grow big enough and strong enough that the birds of the air would rest in its branches. So what does the mustard seed teach us about the kingdom of God? Well, if you've ever planted, how many of you have gardened? Do you prefer to plant seeds or do you prefer to go buy the little tomato plants? Why? They're easier. You know when you have to start, if you're going to plant with seeds, you have to start in like March, end of February. And you've got to have the right humidity and you've got to have the right soil. You've got all this work that goes into it. And it's a hassle. And so we'd rather just wait until the second week of May, go to the store, buy our crates, our flats full of our vegetables, and then we'll go plant them.

So what do we learn about seeds from all of that? Well, we learn that we don't really like seeds because they're a big hassle. Now, some things you can't buy a little starter, things like carrots. We like to grow carrots at my house. You can't buy carrot this big you go plant. It just doesn't work. You have to buy a little 59-cent bag of carrots. It's got 500 carrots in it. And it's a great value. So what do you do with those seeds? How do you plant carrots? You don't plant them like you plant tomato starters. You know, tomatoes, they're going to get this big, and so you're going to plant them, and you're going to give them their space, and you're going to put the cage up and do all that stuff. No, when you plant carrots, how do you plant them? You just spread the seed. And then what do you have to do? We have to keep the rabbits away, for one, because it's in your garden, yes. What you have to do is, what you've decided to do is enter in in this process of pulling carrots, little tiny sprouts. You can put them on your salad, they're great. They actually taste like carrots. But you've entered into all this work.

Of tending your seeds. Because if you just go, I'm going to pour out a whole bag of carrots. I'm going to grow 500 carrots. You won't have any carrots. Because they'll all grow up against each other and they'll get rotten. They won't grow. They'll get all snarled up and nasty. And so seeds are a hassle. And because they're a hassle, they're very easy to despise. And all of us have already admitted we'd rather just go buy a starter instead of a seed. So if you want to learn something about the kingdom of God, Just plant your garden with seeds this year. And you'll learn something about the kingdom of God. You'll learn something about how his kingdom grows. Seeds are small and they're despised. They take a lot of work. They're vulnerable. They're very vulnerable. You know, if you've got seeds in your garden, your house is climate controlled. Everything is a controlled environment. What happens when you want to take it outside? Well, you don't want to have spent six or eight weeks getting your seeds germinated and sprouted and all that. Because then you have to take them outside. And what has to happen? They have to harden off.

They have to become acclimated to a fluctuation in temperature. And it's your job to make sure they're not out there when it's too hot or too cold. When you play this game, how many hours a day, what hours a day, when can I leave them out overnight? This is all before you even get them in the ground. Seeds are a hassle. That's why you can buy a bag for 70 cents, and you can buy a flat for five times as much, for a tiny fraction of the amount of plants. Seeds are small. They're easy to despise. They're insignificant. They're useless. They're very weak and they're tender. So what does this teach us about the kingdom of God? It's not a very favorable view of a seed, is it? You're going, Dave, this isn't, like, I thought, like, the kingdom of God's what? Is it like the seed you've been describing? And I say, yeah, it is. Because that's exactly what Jesus told us. He said, you know about mustard seeds? You know how small they are? You know how they have to go in your garden and you protect them? And eventually they grow and they become big. But you know the amount of care?

You know the amount of time that you have to wait for? Can you imagine growing a tree from seed? You know how we decide what kind of trees we're going to plant? By how much money we're willing to spend. Because you can buy a one to two inch tree that's four feet, and that's like, maybe that's $150. You could buy a two to four inch tree that's seven feet tall, but maybe that's four or $500. And if you get a big, I mean, the price just keeps going up really quickly. And the reason is because... Growing trees takes a long time, and nobody wants to plant a tree that's this big. You can get little trees from Arbor Day for really cheap. They'll send them to you free, says Kristen. Little tiny things just wrapped in a wet paper towel, and they'll mail them to you, and you put them in the ground. They're just a little tiny thing, but nobody does it because they don't want to wait. So seeds are a hassle. They're vulnerable. They're weak. You might lose them. And then you have to wait. How long is it going to take this little seed to become?

the kind of tree that's being described. A long time. You guys know when you drive down 74 out here on the south side of the road. So for those of you who don't know directions, when you're going towards India on the right, if you get on at Ronald Reagan and you turn right, not long after that, there's these rows of trees. And do you know what they are? They're walnut trees. They're black walnut trees. Now, why would someone plant rows of walnut trees? It's for their retirement. Walnut is really valuable when it gets big. And so some farmer, probably 30 years ago, decided, I've got three acres of land, and you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to plant my retirement. And I'm going to get those walnut trees, and they're going to be little tiny, and I'm going to put them there, and I'm going to grow them. And you know what? By the time I need them, we're going to cut them down, we're going to have beautiful walnut trees, walnut wood to sell. That's what they're there for. There's probably, if I had to guess, 100, 150 trees in there.

And they're all about that big right now. They're not ready to harvest yet. But in another 30 years, he's going to have some money. But he's got to wait. He's got to wait a long time. That's the other thing you learn about this. You know, this little tiny mustard seed that grows into this big tree is it takes a long time for a tree to grow from this size to that. It doesn't happen overnight. So let's set aside the mustard seed for a minute. And let me get you thinking about the kingdom of God. When you conceive of the kingdom of God, what do you think of? What does it strike you as? Does it strike you as a big, strong, powerful, magnificent thing in this world? Should it be? Do you want it to be? You want it to be. We'll all go there. Yes, I want the kingdom of God to be this big old powerful thing. And I want to be associated with that. That's a good thing. But Jesus tells us in time it's going to become this.

But is it that right now? Is the kingdom of God this great and glorious, powerful force in this world? The answer is no. It's not yet. So what is it like then? Well, at least in our country, it's like a little sapling. And if we're honest, it's like a sapling that looks like it's under distress, that's had its glory day, that's had its good time, and is now dying. There aren't birds roosting in the branches of the kingdom of God yet. So will the kingdom of God become as a mustard tree? We say, yeah, I mean, how could I not say yes? But it's not yet. And in our particular context, it seems to be under distress. I want you to see that our experience, our context, whether you think of that as here, these four walls, or you think of Indianapolis or the state or even the country.

We're only a small cross-section of the work of God in his creation. And one of the realities of trees, I used to work for a tree company. Some of you guys know that. So I used to climb trees. And one of the questions we're always dealing with is how natural people want their trees to look. And so that often materialized in questions like, well, how high up should we trim the tree? How many of the low branches should we cut off? And usually the people didn't want to cut them off. They wanted to keep them alive and well and beautiful. And yet what I would have to tell them is, okay, you've got three trees all planted close to each other. What's going to happen is right now they're little, and they're all pretty green little trees. But what's going to happen is as they get bigger, in between the three of them, it's all going to get shaded out, and the branches are going to die. And yet the tree's still growing, and the tree's even still healthy. But trees, as a part of their growth,

have branches that serve a purpose, and then they die. And we're going, oh, no, are you saying that the church is dying? And I say, no. God has always maintained a remnant. He's always maintained a group of people. No matter how bad the stress becomes, he always maintains a remnant, a group that he saves, that he preserves. And so you don't have to worry that everything's just going to die and that there's no hope. But you do have to realize that a part of a tree growing is that they produce dead wood that has to be trimmed out. That's a part of the process. And so when we think of the kingdom of God, we should understand it to be like a tree growing from a seed to maturity. There are going to be branches that are plucked out. What does that mean? Well, that means that there are going to be people who fall by the wayside.

That means there are going to be churches that fall by the wayside. That means there's going to be denominations that fall by the wayside. It means there are going to be countries that fall by the wayside. The other thing you should know about trees is that trees are perennial, not annual. Some of the things that you plant in your yard, you have to replant every year because they just don't reproduce. They're not going to be there next year. Now, some perennials, they grow up, and then they get cut down to nothing. But they come back. If you have ornamental grass or something like that, it grows up, and then you cut it down to the ground, and the next year it grows up, and then you cut it down to the ground. But trees aren't that way. Trees grow year after year. I could show you on a branch and show you, this is how much this tree's grown over the last couple of years. By looking at the branch, you can see the growth. It grows and gets bigger and bigger and bigger over time. Now, what kind of tree do you want? Do you want a little tree?

Or do you want a big tree? Most of us want big trees. We want the shade. We want the beauty. That's what we like. So when it comes to the... Let's just take our country, for example. If what we want is something that grows bigger and better over time, how many of you have been tempted to look back at the good old days of America? Taylor, you're not even old enough to know about the good old days of America. You've heard about them. They were the 90s. You are showing your age, young man. You were born in the 90s. We all have this place, however we define it, of the good old days. In the past, when things were better than they are now. But which one of us would look at a tree and say, I wish it was half the size it is? I'll tell you, foolish people do it. You know what they do to their trees? They top them. Drives me nuts. Being an arborist, people cut the tops of their trees off. Trees are not like bushes. You can't do that. You'll kill them.

But people go, I want small trees. I like small trees. And every time you see a tree that's been topped, you should think, that's not what the kingdom of God should be like. It shouldn't have all of the growth cut off of it. We shouldn't look for something smaller and weaker and less mature. We should be looking forward, not backwards. We should be pressing on toward maturity, not looking back towards immaturity. So some of us think of our country, we look back at the... The good old days of America, whatever that was for you that you've heard about. What about in terms of church history? When were the good old days of church history? Oh, the 1600s, right after the Reformation, right after Martin Luther and all these reformers, man, they fixed everything. It was great. We need to get back to that. We need to have all their theology, and we need to have all their music, and we need to have all their clothes, and we need to have everything like they had. So the kingdom of God was further along then than it is now?

Is that what we're supposed to believe? That things were better 500 years ago in terms of the growth of the kingdom of God than they are now? To believe that is to believe that the kingdom of God is shriveling up and dying. But Jesus tells us that it's not far from shriveling up and dying. It's going to grow, and it's going to continue to grow, and it's going to continue to expand. And so we ought to look forward, not back. You know, when you cut a tree down, you can look at the growth rings, and you can see when there was a good year of growth, and you can see when there was a bad year of growth.

You see when it rained and when it didn't because the growth rings will be bigger or smaller. The same thing is true of the church. You can look back and you can see times of great growth. If the church were a tree and we could cut it and look at the growth rings, if we went back into Acts and we looked at the growth rings then, big, huge growth rings. Things were going well. Things were expanding. Then you come into the Middle Ages or the Dark Ages leading up to about 1000 AD. Real tight growth rings. Things weren't growing as well. They were all afraid of the millennium and Jesus coming back, and things were not going well. And then 1080 came, and it went, and Jesus didn't return. And then they started to build again. And things started to grow, but it was struggling. And then 500 years later came the Reformation. Some more big growth rings came. And those things are still going on. Those things are still happening. And we can't look at a tight growth ring and say, oh, it's dying, it's dead. This can't be our view of the kingdom of God. It can't be pessimistic. It can't be looking back to the days.

of presumed glory. God's planted us here now to grow. So the kingdom of God is like a tree. It grows like a tree. And it will grow to maturity, where it provides cover and comfort for the birds of the air. We should look forward to that time. We should not despise the weakness of the time we live in. We shouldn't hanker back to the glory days. Oh, it was better then. It may have been easier. There may have been something easier about it. But who wants to go back? How old are you? If you're 40, do you want to go back to when you were 20? Do you want to go back to how smart you were then? How you lived your life then? Do you look back and go, those were the best years of my life. No. I don't want to go back to high school. I thought it was the greatest thing when I was in high school. I thought, this is as good as it gets. And now I know better. The kingdom of God grows slowly.

Like a mustard seed. And our place is to wait on it. Our place is to anticipate its growth, to participate in its growth, and to not despise the rate at which it grows. Another area where you see this very commonly, we want to see things grow, grow, grow, grow, grow. Sometimes you want to cut back and go back to the early years, and other times you want to see things grow up really fast. People do this with their kids. I want to see them grow up. I want to see them do this. What's their next milestone? When are they going to do this? When are they going to do that? You know what? They're going to be out of your house before you know it.

Like that. The reality is, if you live to be 80 years old, you aren't even going to spend half of your life with your children living in your house. It's a short time. They're young, they're weak, they're vulnerable in that time, but they're going to be gone. They're going to grow up and they're going to go. So do you despise those years, those hard years? It's hard having kids that's in your home, especially the little ones. You want them all to grow up. You want them to be independent. You want them to be mature. And I say, okay, they will. In the same way that the kingdom of God is going to grow and mature, your kids will grow and mature and they'll be gone. So do you despise those years? Do you despise weakness? Or do you love it? That is what the kingdom of God, in our time, in our age, where we're at right now, that's the way it presents. It's not mature yet. It's not done cooking. It's not done baking. It's still got a doughy center. And our place is not to despise that. So that's the mustard seed. How about the leaven?

Well, leaven is yeast. So when you read leaven in Scripture, just understand yeast. Now, how many of you know what a peck of flour is? Who wants to guess what a peck of flour is? In weight, how heavy is a peck of flour? It's close. So just to give you some perspective, because remember, this would have been familiar to them, but when I ask you what a peck of flour is, you're all going, I don't know. So it's not helpful to us if we don't know what they're talking about, right? Okay, so let's start with a bag of flour at the store. They generally come in two sizes, weighing how much? What was the last time you bought a bag of flour, Daniel? Yeah, five pounds and ten pounds. You can get little bags, but generally like that normal, like kind of the size of a football, like the sugar comes in that size and all that, that's a five-pound bag of flour, okay?

Then they make a bigger one for those of us who like to bake, and it's a 10-pound bag of flour. So how big is a peck of flour? Well, it's not an exact measurement because there are different types of flours, but generally speaking, a peck of flour is between 8 and 12 pounds of flour. So for the sake of understanding what Jesus is saying, let's just say you've got... Six bags, five-pound bags of flour, and you're going to make bread with it. You're going to have a big lump of dough. I read online, how many loaves of bread? A normal bread pan-sized loaf of bread? About 50. Enough dough to make 50 loaves of bread. So let me ask you, if you were going to make that much bread, how long would you be waiting for the leaven to do its work? It's in there.

We'll just wait. No one's paying attention to me right now anyway. Where'd my water go? So how many of you would even like to take on making 50 loaves of bread? Can you imagine how big the bread mixer would have to be? How long would it take to rise? It would take a long time to rise. But we already learned that the kingdom of God takes a long time to grow, right? That's what we learned from the mustard seed. So how does leaven work? Can you see leaven work? Not unless you do a time lapse. Put your camera on it and then speed it up and you watch it rise. You stand there and watch it. It's kind of like watching paint dry, especially if you're watching 30 pounds of flour to grow. You'd just be standing there and watching for days until all of it had risen. You can't see it work. It's not visible to your eye. It's not immediately apparent to you. So not only does the kingdom of God grow slowly, oftentimes its growth is hidden.

So oftentimes, growth looks like rot, because the growth is hidden. 1 Corinthians 2.14 says, A natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually appraised. And so the growth of the kingdom of God is one of the things that the natural man can't understand. He doesn't see how it can happen, how it can work, how something can grow that he can't see. And yet Jesus uses exactly that analogy to teach us about the kingdom of God. He says, you know how leaven works? You put it in there, she hid it in the flour, and she left it until it was all leaven, until it was all grown or risen. And you couldn't see it work. You could see the results of it, but you couldn't see it at work. And you have to accept that that is how the kingdom of God grows. It's not the sort of thing you're going to read about in the news.

If you read the news, you're going to hear that the kingdom of God is dying. That it's on life support and it's about to turn over. But that's because of the way the kingdom of God grows. So when you're making bread and you put leaven in it, can you stop the leaven? I mean, you say, yeah, you could. I mean, you could put it in the freezer. You could take the dough and put it in the freezer. You could submerse it in water and tear it all apart. There are things you could do to... destroy the leaven. You could throw it in the oven. There are lots of things you could do. But the parable that Jesus tells us doesn't have anything to do with how you can kill it. It has to do with the fact that leaven does its thing. And it does its thing without you seeing it, and it does its thing without you attending to it. And yet, if you were to make bread, whether you're in a bread machine or whatever,

If you have a bread machine, it has these dials and these settings on it about how to make bread, and it has a program for how long that dough that it's mixed up has to sit there before the heat comes on. And that leaven does its work. And you look for the fruit of it. You don't look for the growth of it. No one's sitting there looking in the top of their bread maker, watching it rise. We just wait to smell it, and we say, the bread's done. So leaven grows and it's relentless even if it's not visible. It's the same with the Great Commission. If you were in Sunday school, we talked about the connection between the Great Commission and the Kingdom of God, how they fit together. The two are hand in glove. The growth is often slow, slower than we'd like if we're honest. And even then, the growth is hidden. As a pastor, I have the privilege of oftentimes of seeing the growth that's not visible to the rest of, you know, to the onlooker.

Because what does it mean for the kingdom of God to grow? Well, if you're in Sunday school, we learned that primarily there are two ways. One is in us. The kingdom of God grows in us. And so what's that mean? It means we become more holy. It means we become more like Jesus Christ. We become his disciples. We learn to observe or to obey more of his commands. That's what it means for us to grow. That's what it means for the kingdom of God to grow. That's what it means for the Great Commission to be fulfilled. So, is that work visible? Well, to the extent that someone knows what your sin is and what your struggles are and what your past is and where you come from and what you're dealing with, yeah, they may have more eyes to see it than the common person. But for the most part, that growth is hidden. We all show up here every week and we all come and we look at each other and basically we look the same, we act the same, and life's pretty much the same every week.

But from my vantage point, dealing with sort of the back end, behind the scenes part, I know that's not true. I know that there are things every week that are moving, that are changing, that are going on in your life, where either there's sin that you're falling into that you need help with, or there's repentance going on that's new. But it's not visible to all of us. Not usually. And so we have to content ourselves with the kingdom of God growing that way. And if we think of our own holiness and how we grow to become more like Jesus, we all know that it's not seen. Not by most people. And yet it is going on. He who began a good work in you will bring it to completion. He's faithful. And so in the same way that he promises to grow you, his kingdom will grow. And if you can't see it, that doesn't mean it's not happening. What you will see is the fruit of it.

So what are the two things? So that's the mustard seed and that's leaven as it relates to the kingdom of God. So what's the application to us? First, humility. Why humility? Well, because you remember at the beginning when we were talking about the kingdom of God and I asked you, what is your conception of the kingdom of God? Is it this grand, glorious thing? Or is it this weak, feeble, vulnerable thing? All of us want it to be the former. We want it to be strong and powerful. Why? So that we can be associated with it. So that we're associated with something great, something powerful, the newest thing, the coolest thing. But then we said, well, actually, that's not how it is right now. So think for a moment. When Judas brought the Pharisees and the men out to arrest Jesus, all of his disciples were there, scared.

And so what did Peter do? Well, Peter lopped off the guy's ear. And his conception of the kingdom of God was power and strength and dominance. And when Jesus looked at him and said, what are you doing? Put your sword away. And he picked up the man's ear and put it back on his ear. What did they all do? They all scattered. They all ran. They didn't want to be associated with the weakness and the vulnerability. They thought they had found strength. And when they discovered that actually there was weakness, they ran. And we're not above them in our temptations and our desires. We want to be associated with the big, cool, strong thing. Just think of church. You go to this church. If everyone is here, there's probably 75 people or so. There's people missing every week. But if everyone were here, it's about 75 people. That's a small church, right? So what's your natural inclination when talking about church? Oh, where do you go to church? Your heart says, I go to that small church with the funny name. And you think that it's the church's name's fault.

We're small, but it's not. It's just small because it's new. It's only eight years old. What do you mean new? I mean that's new. There are churches in this community that have been here for over 100 years. And we think, man, I need to go to a bigger church, a better church. I need to go to Connection Point. I need to go to Trader's Point. The people who walk around, who attend those churches, and I'm not making a statement about the quality of those churches at all. That's not my point. My point is simply to say, people who go to big churches, they don't have the insecurities that you do. It's like, oh yeah, I go to the downtown campus of Traders Point, and they don't even think about it. Big church, stable church, known church. You're like, I go to Clear Note, and they're like, what? Where do you go? Huh. Yeah. And so, are you willing to associate with the humble, the weak, and the vulnerable? This is a question that church planters often face.

Joseph, who went to go to Cincinnati, he finds regularly that people who theologically agree, who socially agree, who have all this agreement, won't come to his church. Why won't they come to his church? Because it's small. It's vulnerable. And they don't want to do the work associated with it. And if you guys have been here for years, you remember the work. We do a lot of work now. It's always amazing to people when they think of the work that happens in this room to get worship ready. But it's a lot less work than it used to be. Not in terms of volume, but in terms of hands to do it. It's a lot less work now than it used to be. And the question to us is, will you associate with the meek and the lowly, or does it have to be substantial before you'll put your lot in with it? What is it? It is the kingdom of God.

Will you love the weak things, the small things, the despised things? When you pass along sermons, will you pass along sermons from your church or will you pass along John Piper's sermons? I'm not saying John Piper isn't a good preacher or he doesn't have good sermons. That's not what I'm saying. But one of them signals something about you that's like, hey. And one of them signals something about you like, who's that? So will you associate with the humble? Whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake, he is the one who will save it. The goal of your life as a Christian is not to be associated with some big-name ministry or big-name preacher or big-name whatever. Your goal is to associate with the humble. Because that's what the kingdom of God is right now. It's humble. You know, when we think of Jesus, we hold him in high regard. We think, man, he was something. But we say that 2,000 years downstream of him. At his time...

He was healing people and doing miraculous things, and so people were interested in what was going on around him. But there are these big watersheds in his ministry where people just leave. Because they just think, who are you? Who do you think you are? He wasn't held in the same regard then that he is now. And the humble were willing to associate with him. You still have to be humble to associate with Jesus. He's opposed to the proud. So the first application is humility. The second is patience. It's patience. That tree takes a long time to grow. That leaven takes a long time to work itself out to the ends of the earth. We're to wait on the Lord to consummate his kingdom, to bring it about, to grow into this tree, this leavened lump that's ready to be consumed. It's a work in progress. And when you have to deal with a work in progress, especially a big progress, a big project, it's very easy to lose heart. Because it takes so long. When I was a painter, there used to come deadlines. You had to be done.

It had to show progress. And so they would tell us to paint walls that weren't ready to be painted. And we would talk to them and plead with them and say, this is going to cost you money, this is going to cost more time, this is not what you should do. But they had to show progress. They were impatient. Paint the walls. So we'd paint the walls, and then the owners would come in and they'd say, these walls look terrible. Fix them. And then they'd have to come in and fix them, and then they'd have to pay us more to paint them again because they were impatient. And so we're to learn patience.

And we're to learn patience without losing heart and giving up or without trying to speed up the process. We're to be patient. We're to wait on the Lord. So how do you avoid these temptations to either lose heart or speed up the process of the growth of the kingdom? You wait by faith. You wait like the watchman in Psalm 130. You wait with hope that the Lord will provide everything that he's promised in his time. that his timing and his will is better than what you would do if it's not what you would do. Both his will and his timing are good in ways that we can't see it in the moment. In the moment we go, it's got to stop, it's got to end, it's got to change, it's got to grow. Paul said, I planted Apollos water, but God caused the growth. So we wait for the Lord to cause the growth. Do you want this, just as an example, do you want this church to grow? Yes. It was delightful to have

Twice as many people here last week because there was another church visiting. That was really sweet. I felt like we were like something. There was 114 people here last week. People count your heads and they tell me. And I felt like, well, we're something. The week before, there were 57 people here. So there was an exactly double between two weeks. So what are we going to do? How are we going to fill the chairs? We're going to be faithful to love God, to live. A life of holiness to repent of our own sins, to love our neighbors, to call them to repentance with love, and we're going to wait for the Lord to bring the fruit. That's what we're going to do. And if our church gets to be 1,000 people, then praise God. And if our church in 10 years is 150 people, then praise God. We have to wait, and we have to wait with hope. Wait patiently. Many of us have been taught to wait in different ways. Wait for marriage, wait for children.

wait for our children to repent, wait for income or our jobs, wait for sicknesses to get better. There's lots of things in our areas of life that we're taught to wait and we're to pursue the kingdom of God being established more than we care about all of those other things. Those other things we'll all be taking care of, whether we're married or we're not, whether we have children or we don't, whether our children repent or they don't. Whether the sickness that we endure daily is removed or we're left to bear it. Our place and our interest has to be in the kingdom of God being built. Seeing it advanced. And seeing our part in it. Acting by faith and waiting for the Lord to cause the growth. And it's an exciting thing to wait for. And so I enjoin you to wait. If God hasn't provided yet, then what are you left to do? What else can you do but wait? And so I say, if you have to wait, then wait with hope.

And wait with faith. And trust God to provide everything that you need in his good time. Don't despise the wait. Don't despise the weakness. Trust God and seek first his kingdom and his righteousness and all things will be added to you. Let's pray.