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Jan 09, 2022

Hanging on Every Word

Hanging on Every Word

Passage: Mark 4:1-20

Speaker: Patrick Lafferty

Series: Follow: Learning from Mark about Jesus’ Most Misunderstood Command

Keywords: persecution, righteousness, soil, parables, harvest, seed, cares

Just in the last week how many voices or sources have you given your attention to? What if any effects have you noticed in you? Perhaps never has a culture had its attention so targeted by so many competitors for it. The first parable Jesus tells is a parable about all his parables. Get this one, and others will fall into place. Fail to–and nothing else will. The long and the short of it: Jesus is saying we need to learn to hang on his every word. What word? Why that word? And most of all–how?

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Readings & Scripture

PREPARATION: Isaiah 55:6-11
LEADER: Seek the LORD while he may be found; call upon him while he is near; let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts; let him return to the LORD, that he may have compassion on him, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon
PEOPLE: For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.
LEADER: For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return there but water the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater,
ALL: so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it.

CENTRAL TEXT: Mark 4:1-20
Mark 4:1 Again he began to teach beside the sea. And a very large crowd gathered about him, so that he got into a boat and sat in it on the sea, and the whole crowd was beside the sea on the land. 2 And he was teaching them many things in parables, and in his teaching he said to them: 3 “Listen! Behold, a sower went out to sow. 4 And as he sowed, some seed fell along the path, and the birds came and devoured it. 5 Other seed fell on rocky ground, where it did not have much soil, and immediately it sprang up, since it had no depth of soil. 6 And when the sun rose, it was scorched, and since it had no root, it withered away. 7 Other seed fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked it, and it yielded no grain. 8 And other seeds fell into good soil and produced grain, growing up and increasing and yielding thirtyfold and sixtyfold and a hundredfold.” 9 And he said, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”

Mark 4:10 And when he was alone, those around him with the twelve asked him about the parables. 11 And he said to them, “To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside everything is in parables, 12 so that
“‘they may indeed see but not perceive,
and may indeed hear but not understand,
lest they should turn and be forgiven.’”

Mark 4:13 And he said to them, “Do you not understand this parable? How then will you understand all the parables? 14 The sower sows the word. 15 And these are the ones along the path, where the word is sown: when they hear, Satan immediately comes and takes away the word that is sown in them. 16 And these are the ones sown on rocky ground: the ones who, when they hear the word, immediately receive it with joy. 17 And they have no root in themselves, but endure for a while; then, when tribulation or persecution arises on account of the word, immediately they fall away. 18 And others are the ones sown among thorns. They are those who hear the word, 19 but the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches and the desires for other things enter in and choke the word, and it proves unfruitful. 20 But those that were sown on the good soil are the ones who hear the word and accept it and bear fruit, thirtyfold and sixtyfold and a hundredfold.”

BENEDICTION: Isaiah 40:8
LEADER: The grass withers, the flower fades,
ALL: but the word of our God will stand forever.

Related Illustrations:

InView Media Album 01.09.2022

Related SCRIPTURES:

  • Psalm 119
  • Isaiah 29:13
  • Isaiah 55:10-11
  • Matthew 7:24, 26
  • Mark 3:33-35
  • Romans 7:4-5
  • James 1:12-15
  • James 1:22-25
  • Colossians 3:16

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS:

  1. Who and what were the greatest influences in you at an early age? How did they become influences? What did you do to “permit” them to become influential?
  2. We have the advantage of knowing the meaning of the parable he tells here in the first part. But try to imagine yourself there at its first telling. What might you have thought? About him? About what he said? 
  3. How does the scene shift during the course of the passage? What changes about the setting–or better, the characters present–by the end? What might that signal about the purpose of his parable?
  4. Verse 10-12 are some of the most difficult words to interpret. Sit with them for a bit and then venture a guess: do the parables cause one to hear and yet not understand, or do the parables reveal how one’s lack of understanding is because of how one hears?
  5. Perhaps you’ve heard this parable before as boiling down to who has salvation and who doesn’t. How does that reading not quite work when you look closer? If Jesus isn’t talking about four different kinds of people, to what might those four illustrations point?
  6. How does truth become real in and through us–that is, how does it move from being what merely informs us to being what transforms us? 

QUOTES:

  • We sit down before an image in order to have something done to us, not that we may do things with it. The first demand of any work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive.  C.S. Lewis
  • The tie between information and action has been severed. Information is now a commodity that can be bought and sold, or used as a form of entertainment, or worn like a garment to enhance one's status. It comes indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, disconnected from usefulness; we are glutted with information, drowning in information, have no control over it, don't know what to do with it. Neil Postman (1990)
  • Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.  Simone Weil
  • The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. David Foster Wallace
  • It is a great mystery that the kingdom of heaven is in mortal combat with the devil, the world, and earthly ambition, and in this war [the kingdom] has and needs no other weapon than the Word of Jesus. Adolf Schlatter
  • Culture catechizes. . . .if people are getting one kind of catechesis for half an hour per week, and another for dozens of hours per week, which one do you think will win out? . . . People come to believe what they are most thoroughly and intensively catechized to believe, and that catechesis comes not from the churches but from the media they consume, or rather the media that consume them. Alan Jacobs
  • I once had a patient, a sound atheist, who used to read in the British Museum. One day, as he sat reading, I saw a train of thought in his mind beginning to go the wrong way. The Enemy, of course, was at his elbow in a moment. Before I knew where I was I saw my twenty years’ work beginning to totter. If I had lost my head and begun to attempt a defence by argument I should have been undone. But I was not such a fool. I struck instantly at the part of the man which I had best under my control and suggested that it was just about time he had some lunch. The Enemy presumably made the counter-suggestion (you know how one can never quite overhear what He says to them?) that this was more important than lunch. At least I think that must have been His line for when I said ‘Quite. In fact much too important to tackle at the end of a morning,’ the patient brightened up considerably; and by the time I had added ‘Much better come back after lunch and go into it with a fresh mind,’ he was already half way to the door. Once he was in the street the battle was won. C.S. Lewis,  The Screwtape Letters 
  • I understand in the past there have been many heretical movements, and we still need to maintain sound doctrine in terms of a good understanding of how God works and operates. But I think our real doctrine is that doctrine that is born out in our character. I think you can profess the Apostles' Creed until Jesus returns, but if you don't love somebody you never were a Christian. Rich Mullins
  • Let us not place the blame on what we possess, but on our own corrupt mind. For it is possible to be rich and not be deceived.  It is possible to be in this world, and not be choked with its cares. [But] indeed riches have two contrary disadvantages; one, anxiety over them, wearing us out, and spreading darkness over us; and the other, luxury which makes us soft.. . .for no one is as seriously harmed by anxiety as by immoderate indulgence.  It brings premature old age, dulls the senses, darkens our reasoning, blinds the keen-sighted mind, and makes the body flabby. John Chrysostom
  • The path of spiritual growth in the riches of Christ is not a passive one. Grace is not opposed to effort. It is opposed to earning. Effort is action. Earning is attitude. Dallas Willard
  • If seeds in the black earth can turn into such beautiful roses, what might not the heart of man become in its long journey toward the stars? G.K. Chesterton
  • Lord, make me an idiot, an idiot for Thy Kingdom. Keep me focused on the weeds I need to pull, the garden I am charged with tending. Let the lunatics run and shout as they will, but keep me at work on my humble daily “exemplary task.” In the name of Jesus I ask this. Amen. Alan Jacobs
  • What is this force? What could be so powerful that it could dissolve away centuries of our cultural inheritance; could dissolve forests and oceans, great faiths, nations, traditions - everything that makes a human life real - and replace it with this … Pleasure Dome? Want. Want is the acid. “Want is the Acid,” Paul Kingsnorth
  • https://twitter.com/stephanpastis/status/1470083553316671491/photo/1
    https://twitter.com/stephanpastis/status/1470083553316671491/photo/1
  • I might, indeed, have learned, even from the poets, that Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness. . . .Kindness, merely as such, cares not whether its object becomes good or bad, provided only that it escapes suffering. . . .If God is Love, He is, by definition, something more than mere kindness.  . . . He has often rebuked us and condemned us, He has never regarded us with contempt. He has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense. . . .We are, not metaphorically but in very truth, a Divine work of art. . . Over a sketch made idly to amuse a child, an artist may not take much trouble. . . .But over the great picture of his life—the work which he loves, though in a different fashion, as intensely as a man loves a woman or a mother a child—he will take endless trouble and would, doubtless, thereby give endless trouble to the picture if it were [alive]. One can imagine a [live] picture, after being rubbed and scraped and recommenced for the tenth time, wishing that it were only a thumbnail sketch whose making was over in a minute. In the same way, it is natural for us to wish that God had designed for us a less glorious and less arduous destiny; but then we are wishing not for more love but for less. . . .You asked for a loving God: you have one. . . .not a senile benevolence that drowsily wishes you to be happy in your own way. . . . but the consuming fire Himself, the Love that made the worlds, persistent as the artist’s love for his work. C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain
  • The root of Christian love is not the will to love but the faith that one is loved.” Thomas Merton

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