14 Authentic Hearing

Mark 4:1-20

It had been a long and emotional day for Jesus. First his mother and brothers had come in an attempt to forcibly take him back to Nazareth to protect him from himself. Then he had been accused by the scribes of being in league with Beelzebub, to which he issued a solemn warning against unforgivable blasphemy. Lastly he had proclaimed the shocking fact that his true mother and brothers were not his earthly relations, but "whoever does God's will" (Mark 3:35).

Now in the afternoon he left the house in Capernaum and went down to the refreshing shores of Galilee to preach. Verses 1 and 2 give us the setting: "On another occasion Jesus began to teach by the lake. The crowd that gathered around him was so large that he got into a boat and sat in it out on the lake, while all the people were along the shore at the water's edge. He taught them many things by parables." The crowd was so great (some believe it was the greatest yet in his ministry) that Jesus was forced to preach from a fishing boat. The picture we have, then, is of a vast heterogenous assembly sitting in a great arc on the rising shore, all facing Christ, who was seated aboard the boat in rabbinical teaching posture, giving forth the parables of the Kingdom as the sea gently lapped the shore.

As Jesus surveyed the sunlit multitude, he was aware not only of their diversity, but that a whole range of hearing and understanding was in operation. He was aware that the mystery of the Kingdom was being worked out in their lives. Some were coming to faith, and others were hardening in their unbelief.

Jesus wanted all of them to listen with receptive hearts. He was the Word of God, and for this he had come. So he gave them a parable which if listened to and meditated upon would result in their opening themselves to life. The parable drew upon a rich agricultural image with which they were all familiar: a man with a seed bag tied to his waist, walking his field and rhythmically casting the seed.

The seed was a proper and powerful symbol of the Word of God springing into life. Within every seed there is almost infinite potential for life! God's Word is the seed par excellence! The sower is, of course, Christ and anyone else who puts forth God's Word, whether in preaching or in personal exchange. The soil represents the varying condition of human hearts on which the seed is tossed. As the sower hurls his seed, some falls on the roadside, and the birds flutter down and steal it away. He hurls again, and it lands on rocky soil, where it quickly sprouts, only to wilt under the Palestinian sun. The sower casts in another direction, and it falls among thorns, where it is choked and cannot grow. Other seed, cast on good soil, marvelously multiplies thirty, sixty, and a hundred times! End of parable.

Then Jesus began to repeat, "He who has ears to hear, let him hear" (Mark 4:9). Jesus was the Word, God's ultimate communication. His every fiber longed for his hearers to comprehend.

Not everyone had ears to hear that day. Some understood, but many were perplexed. Some of his followers were in the dark themselves. Mark 4:10 tells us that they began asking him about the parable. Jesus responded with one of his famous "hard sayings": "The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you. But to those on the outside everything is said in parables so that 'they may be ever seeing but never perceiving, and ever hearing but never understanding: otherwise they might turn and be forgiven!" (Mark 4:11, 12).

What did Jesus' mysterious pronouncement mean? The parallel account (Matthew 13:12, 13) sheds some light: "Whoever has will be given more, and he will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him. This is why I speak to them in parables: 'Though seeing, they do not see: though hearing, they do not hear or understand.'" In essence Jesus was enigmatically saying that the condition of one's heart determines its receptivity to truth. The scribes had originally been given straightforward teaching which they rejected and thus they could ultimately lose the truth—it would be taken away from them.

Those who receive truth and act upon it receive more. Those who reject truth will ultimately lose the bit they have. The parables were full of truth, but for truth-rejecting people, they were inscrutable.

This principle is paralleled in other areas of life. Physically, if we fail to exercise a muscle, we will one day lose its use. It is the same with our intellectual powers. If we fail to use them, there will come a time when we will not be able to summon their full power. God confronts us with his truth, but if we do not positively respond to it, we will lose it. What a solemn reality for those who sit under the teaching of God's Word week after week and do not respond to it.

The writer to the Hebrews must have had these matters in mind when he said: "If we deliberately keep on sinning after we have received the knowledge of the truth, no sacrifice for sins is left" (Hebrews 10:26). If we repeatedly hear God's Word and refuse to respond time and time again, there will come a time when we become so hardened that we not only will not, but cannot respond. If we are believers, we must set ourselves to always respond to God's truth as we read it or hear it from another believer or from the pulpit. An excellent spiritual discipline is to respond to truth by saying, "God, you have spoken to me, and I will do it." We must respond to truth!

Alone with his followers, having made this sobering pronouncement, Jesus graciously explained the parable. He wanted them to become better listeners to truth. What he said can open our ears and hearts too.

THE SEED CAST ON THE ROAD: THE HARD HEART (Mark 4:15)

First the Lord explained about the seed cast on the roadside: "Some people are like seed along the path, where the word is sown. As soon as they hear it, Satan comes and takes away the word that was sown in them."

The farmers' fields in ancient Palestine were long, narrow, often serpentine strips divided by little paths which became beaten as hard as pavement by the feet, hooves, and wheels of those who used them. The seeds merely bounced on these paths or were swept back and forth by the wind. These beaten paths represent the hardened hearts of some unsophisticated people who hear God's Word. Their own busy comings and goings and the frenetic traffic of life have so hardened them that nothing of God's truth stirs them. Life for them may be no more than the sports page and a beer, or a movie magazine and an hour at the beauty shop. There may be no gross sin, but there is no interest in God whatsoever. Life is crowded with other things.

On the other hand the person may be more sophisticated. Screwtape describes one of his charges' experiences. The man is in the British Museum. He is reading, and his reading suggests a train of thought which sets him on the path of spiritual inquiry. But Screwtape, devil that he is, intervenes by making the man terribly hungry for lunch.

Once he was in the street the battle was won. I showed him a newsboy shouting the midday paper, and a No. 73 bus going past, and before he reached the bottom of the steps I had got into him an unalterable conviction that, whatever odd ideas might come into a man's head when he was shut up alone with his books, a healthy dose of "real life" [by which he meant the bus and the newsboy] was enough to show him that "that sort of thing" just couldn't be true.

Such people's lives are hardened with presuppositions, distortions, and prejudices which steel them to the truth. They may be hostile, but very often they are simply uninterested. God's truth has no relevancy for them.

The main emphasis of Jesus' metaphor was busyness. These people beat the ground of their own lives asphalt-hard with their frenetic feet. This was (and is) a warning to people "on the go" who had no time for contemplation, who rarely gave a second thought to the spiritual. What a powerful warning to the twentieth century, which exhibits a busyness and a hardness which exceeds the first century. Many of us need to embrace Jesus' warning and pull it into our lives for our souls' sake.

As the truth bounces around on the surface of some lives, Satan comes with a fluttering, chirping interest, some busy excitement perhaps, maybe some gossip, and flies away with the life-giving seed. This ground needs to be broken up. Often the plowing that is needed is some pain or stress or trial to soften that hardened surface to the relevancy of God's truth. This is how grace came to some of our lives, isn't it? Life's hardships made us ready. "The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of man." Difficulties made us quit our busyness, and then the Word of God fell powerfully into the plowed ground of our lives. Let us pray this for ourselves and for our hardened friends.

THE SEED ON ROCKY PLACES: SHALLOW HEARTS (Mark 4:16, 17)

Next our Lord explained about the seed sown in rocky places: "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."

In Palestine much of the land is a thin two- or three-inch veneer of soil over a limestone bedrock. Here some of the seed falls, the warm sun quickly heats the seed in the shallow soil, and the seeds sprout in feverish growth. But then the sun beats down, the plant's roots meet the bedrock, and it withers and dies.

I have seen this tragically happen in a number of lives over the years. On one occasion I saw a young man make a dazzling profession of Christ. In a few weeks he was speaking everywhere, dominating testimony meetings, reproving older Christians for their coldness. But then he broke his leg, attempted vindictive litigation on the innocent property owner, cursed God for his hard luck, and abruptly fell away.

The problem was, he had a shallow emotional response to Christ which never penetrated his entire heart—his intellect and will. When affliction came, there was immediate rejection. I am convinced that this is where so many of the enemies of the faith come from. Too many, through their emotion, tasted something of God's power, but not true conversion. In falling away they became bitter and jaundiced and terribly lost. Affliction, like the sun, brings growth to roots in good soil, but withers the shallow profession of faith.

Helmut Thielicke aptly says:

There is nothing more cheering than transformed Christian people and there is nothing more disintegrating than people who have been merely "brushed" by Christianity, people who have been sown with a thousand seeds but in whose lives there is no depth and no rootage. Therefore, they fall when the first whirlwind comes along. It is the half-Christians who always flop in the face of the first catastrophe that happens, because their dry intellectuality and their superficial emotionalism do not stand the test. So even that which they think they have is taken away from them.

This is the wood from which the anti-Christians too are cut. They are almost always former half-Christians. A person who lets Jesus only halfway into his heart is far poorer than a one hundred per cent worldling. He does not get the peace that passes all understanding and he also loses the world's peace, because his naivete has been taken from him.

Certainly authentic faith involves great emotion. If there is no emotion, it is a crippled or even bogus faith. But true faith is also a matter of the mind and will. Jesus once cooled a disciple's glib vow to follow him wherever he went by replying, "Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head" (Luke 9:58). True belief involves all of the person, who then weathers affliction and even persecution.

THE SEED UPON THE THORNY SOIL: THE DIVIDED HEART (Mark 4:18, 19)

Next Jesus explained the image of the sower casting his seed among the thorns: "Still others, like seed sown among thorns, hear the word; but the worries of this life, the deceitfulness of wealth and the desires for other things come in and choke the word, making it unfruitful." Here the thornbushes are not visible because they have been burned off the surface, but their roots are intact. When the seed is sown on this soil, then watered and germinated, the entrenched thorns also sprout and grow with a virulent violence, choking out the grain before it can produce any fruit.

The thorns, Jesus explained, represented "the worries of this life, the deceitfulness of wealth and the desire for other things." This portrayed a divided heart, a heart divided by irreconcilable loyalties. This heart makes some gestures toward Christ, but "the worries of this life" (literally, "the distractions of this age") draw it back. It is pulled in other directions, leaving no room for spiritual concerns. "The deceitfulness of wealth" ("keeping up with the Joneses") draws them with the promise of great good. This involves buying things you do not need to impress people you do not like with money you do not have.

This is a divided heart—like the heart of the girl to which a young man once proposed. He said, "Darling, I want you to know that I love you more than anything else in the world. I want you to marry me. I'm not rich. I don't have a yacht or a Rolls Royce like Johnny Brown, but I do love you with all my heart." She thought for a minute and then replied, "I love you with all my heart, too, but tell me more about Johnny Brown."

A heart which is overcome with a love for riches and the things of this world is not a believing heart. "No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money" (Matthew 6:24). Many began well, and it looked like they were believers, but the love of the world has strangled all vestiges of Christianity from their lives.

THE SEED IN THE GOOD SOIL: THE FRUITFUL HEART (Mark 4:20)

Finally there is the good soil in which the seed brings forth fruit. Jesus said, "Others, like seed sown on good soil, hear the word, accept it, and produce a crop—thirty, sixty, or even a hundred times what was sown" (Mark 4:20).

The seed of God's Word does not bounce off the surface of this heart. It does not momentarily flourish only to shrivel under adversity. It is not divided by its competing desires and strangled. It is a heart that allows God's Word to take deep root in it. It produces first a harvest of character: "But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law" (Galatians 5:22, 23). Then it produces a harvest of good works (Ephes. 2:10).

The hearing and reception of God's Word is a mystery, and in this great parable Jesus has given us insight into what is going on in the world. He has given us this truth to straighten out the confusion about what true hearing really is and to stress its importance. He himself is the Word, and as such he is the ultimate communication from God. "The Word became flesh and lived for a while among us" (John 1:14).

Jesus conveys to us the love of the Godhead. He, by his death, tells us that we are not only loved, but in need of his atoning blood because we are sinners. We are loved. He died for our sins, that we might live. Is he communicating with you?

Right now, the most important thing is that we listen to him and receive the Word, not with hard hearts—that is busy hearts, impenetrable hearts that need to be broken up. And not with shallow hearts—only the emotions are touched. These are strangled by love for this world: "I love you with all my heart, God, but tell me what the world can do for me."

We should listen to God with a heart that is good soil, where the Word of God grows a rich harvest.

—Preaching the Word