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Today's Little Lift
by Jim Bullington
The parables of Jesus, precious and memorable as they are, were the source of great controversy. It was here that a great separation of the ways occurred between His followers and His would-be followers. This was all part of the plan, the plan to winnow the harvest of followers so that only the cream of the crop was left. The parables were not the cause of division, they were just the catalyzing effect that made existing divisions obvious!
The heart of the disciple is what must be affected by the gospel; that was and is the target of the parables. They were told in order to impact the heart; that is why Jesus said, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear!” (Matthew 13.9). The hearing that He demanded was a hearing of the heart, not just the ears. It was this fact that prompted Him to say that those who did not hear were people whose hearts had “grown dull.” The pathway to the heart is through hearing; that is the way God planned it and that is the way it continues. Man has a choice to both open his ears and open his heart, or he can close the only faculties that God intends to use to create faith!
In that arena, the parables serve as the catalyst to make man’s decisions obvious. The person whose heart is dull or closed, will not get what he/she needs from the parables. He/she will either feign the inability to understand, declare them to be irrelevant, make fun of them as outdated and childish, or make up some other excuse not to believe. The truth acts upon the human heart only to the extent that the human heart allows it. To some, the truth is a sweet and refreshing fragrance; to others that same message has the stench of death about it (see 2 Corinthians 2.16 to see how this actually worked)! The difference is not in the message; it is in the heart of the recipient. Such it was when Jesus delivered the parables. Those who wanted to know the truth, earnestly sought understanding and gained it; others used the parables as a means to distort and avoid the truth.
This principle, the principle of the soils (hearts), was clearly declared in the Parable of the Sower. I think it no accident that it is the first in Matthew’s great parable chapter (Matthew 13). It also is noteworthy that this very parable is the one which clearly lays the responsibility for the harvest on the soil and not on the seed! The seed is good seed; it will accomplish that for which it was intended (see Isaiah 55.11), but it cannot germinate, grow, and produce apart from the good soil that is needed for these other things to take place. The heart is the place where the seed is either nurtured or annihilated. While God, in one respect, certainly controls everything, it is also the case that He gives man free will and allows Him to act as he will toward His word. The closed heart is a place that God will not enter!
Could God enter the closed heart if He willed to do so? Of course He could, but the fact is this: God covenanted in the beginning to absolutely respect the decisions of the heart and honor those decisions as long as time stands. That is a part of what is meant when Moses declared that He (God) made man in His own image (Genesis 1.26). He gave him the right to choose between good and evil right from the start and He will honor that right as long as time stands.
There is coming a day in which man will be held completely and eternally accountable for his choices, but that time is yet future. As long as this earth stands, God beckons to wayward men to come, confess Him in obedient faith, and to be immersed in the waters of baptism where the blood of Christ is contacted (Romans 6.3-4). The heart (Romans 6.17) is the place obedience starts!
Questions:
1. How is it that the same message has such differing effects upon its hearers?
2. Why did Jesus challenge His hearers to hear? Do you see some irony in that exhortation?
3. Who determined that the seed (God’s word; see Luke 8.11) will accomplish its mission? If it does not grow as it should, is the seed to blame? Then who is?
4. Where does obedience start (Romans 6.17)? Can one obey God “not from the heart”? Or, is the submission of one’s heart a part of godly obedience?
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