God's Plan for Growing His Kingdom - Mark 4:26-29

You may not know the name of Donald McGavran, but you have likely been influenced by him. In fact, every church, every pastor, and every Christian has to some degree. McGavran was born in 1897 and died in 1990, and spent 30 years of his long life among the unreached people of India. But McGavran’s mark was made on modern Christianity in 1970 when he published a seminal work entitled “Understanding Church Growth.” Before that time, the phrase “church growth” was rare in the Christian realm. Today, hardly a day goes by without hearing it. For that reason, McGavran is called the father of the modern Church Growth Movement.

Today, churches are evaluated by a single factor: size. Someone asks you, “Where do you go to church?”, and you say, “I go to Immanuel Baptist Church.” What is the next question that gets asked? “How big is it?” And if you say, “There are around 130-160 people there on a given Sunday,” they will say, “Oh.” And it is the kind of “oh,” that you might hear if you just told someone your dog died. There is a note of sadness in the tone. There must be something wrong with a church that does not have more people than that attending it, they think. After all, every day, they drive past monstrous edifices where thousands gather every Sunday. Those are good churches, they are doing things right, everyone else must be doing something wrong. This is the way Christians have thought for the last 35 years, due in part to the movement sparked by McGavran.

Now, I don’t want you to think badly of Donald McGavran. When McGavran talked about “church growth,” he did not merely intend to talk about big churches where the number of people in attendance was the measure of success and health. McGavran coined the phrase “church growth” because he was aware that the word “evangelism” carried a lot of negative baggage. I have often said that saved people and lost people have at least one thing in common: the word “evangelism” makes them both nervous. So for McGavran, church growth and evangelism – the sharing of the gospel of Christ – were synonyms. For McGavran, the goal of “church growth” was not the building of bigger and bigger facilities or the launching of more and more programs. It was seeing lost people saved and the Kingdom of God advanced to the ends of the earth. It is an undeniable fact that in many of the largest and fastest growing churches, personal evangelism and global missions take a backseat to the church’s own programs and priorities. They continue to grow rapidly because of the synergy and excitement of the crowd, but most of their growth comes from folks who are transferring in from other churches. I am not speaking out of school here. For several years before I became a pastor, I counseled new members in one of the largest and fastest growing churches in North Carolina. I would say that 80-90 percent of that church’s new members were already saved and were coming from other churches. And it is often the case, though not in the church where I served, that the church’s financial burdens of maintaining its own facilities and ministries forces global missions to a sideline activity. The church may be growing leaps and bounds, but little impact is being made on its own community or the world for the sake of the Kingdom of God. Yet, the church is hailed as a success story by all who see it – and for one reason: it is growing numerically.

It is said that, before McGavran’s death, he remarked that he wished he had referred to the movement as effective evangelism because so many churches focused on numerical growth to the detriment of evangelistic outreach—something he never intended by using the phrase “church growth.” Now, I said in my opening statement that you have been influenced by McGavran. You have been led to think that if we have empty seats in the pews and aren’t seeing new faces in the crowd every Sunday, that something is wrong.

I don’t want to suggest that these things are unimportant, but I want to be very clear about something. The growth of this church or any other is not an end unto itself, but should be a means to a greater end, and that end is the building of the Kingdom of God by seeing lost souls saved and lives transformed by the indwelling presence of Christ. It is not only possible, but very common, for churches to grow without this. Marketing, entertainment, social action, political involvement, and a host of other activities can draw a crowd, yet they make little or no difference in the magnification of God’s glory or the establishment of His Kingdom. It is the growth of His Kingdom in the world, rather than the growth of any particular church, that brings Him the most glory. And it is the growth of God’s Kingdom that Jesus has in focus in the parable found in our text today. This parable is the only parable which is unique to Mark. It is not found in other gospels.

Here in these verses, Jesus begins to teach the multitudes what the Kingdom of God is like. What great and glorious image would He use? Would He liken it to a great empire of world history, or the entrepreneurial vision of a financially successful mogul? Would He employ a simile of grandeur and majesty? No. He says, “The Kingdom of God is like a man who casts seed upon the soil.” One of the commentators says, “A more banal comparison could not be imagined.”[1] There are all kinds of activities in the world which capture our attention and imagination. If you flip the channels on any given night, you find all kinds of so-called “reality shows,” which document the daily activities of such diverse things as fishing for lobsters and the daily routines of a family of meerkats. But, no one has ever made a reality-show about seed sowing, and no one ever will. Who wants to watch plants grow? This is not the most exciting imagery in the world. I had this friend in high school who lived what seemed to be a very boring life, and we called him “Fescue,” because being with him was like watching grass grow. This is very ordinary stuff, but it is the imagery Jesus uses here nonetheless. Jesus likens the Kingdom of God to a process of seed growing unto a harvest, and in so doing, reveals to us God’s Plan for Growing His Kingdom.

I. The Activity of Kingdom Growth.

Jesus says the Kingdom of God is like a man who casts seed upon the soil. The wording is of a farmer taking handfuls of seed and casting the seed broadly across his fields. It is reminiscent of what we saw in the parable of soils earlier in Chapter 4. He slings the seed far and wide. Some of it falls on the road, some on rocky places, some among thorns, and some on good soil. But he isn’t rationing the seed. There’s plenty of it and he does not discriminate – he just throws it out there. That is how it all begins.

Earlier in this Chapter, Jesus said that the seed is the Word of God. So the advance of the Kingdom begins with the announcement of God’s Word. And where seed falls on good soil, just as in the earlier parable, growth begins to occur. So when God’s Word gets planted into the life of an individual whose heart has been prepared by the sovereign activity of God to receive it, that Word begins to develop in that person’s life. The Kingdom of God begins to dawn within that individual – “the seed sprouts and grows.”

As Jesus went about proclaiming God’s truth, He was met by opposition, misunderstanding, and rejection. One would think that the seed He was sowing was destined for a crop failure. But He was confident that the process was in the works – the seed was being sown, and where it found good soil, it would begin to produce its crop in stages: first the blade, then the head, then the mature grain in the head. At first, faith might spring up inside of a person’s heart as a mere positive interest in the things of Christ, and then mature into a confession of Him as Lord and Savior, then a willingness to forsake everything for His sake and follow Him even unto death. And as that took place in people’s lives, the Kingdom of God was being established – at first, appearing to be a barren land, but then little sprouts, then leafy stalks, then fruit ripe and ready for harvesting.

And so as we think about the growth of the Kingdom in our day, we must not forget the activity to which Jesus likened it – the casting of seed upon the soil. Spreading God’s Word far and wide is the activity of the Kingdom. Today, many of us are busy with a thousand other activities, but it is this task which God has said will bring growth to His Kingdom. We can make a church grow by other activities, but that church growth is taking place with no impact for the Kingdom of God unless it grows by the sowing of the seed of God’s Word.

II. The Mystery of Kingdom Growth

So, the farmer sows the seed, and then what? Surely he must work himself to the point of exhaustion to make the thing grow and to bring about the desired outcome! No, Jesus says after he sows the seed, the man goes to bed. And the next morning, he gets up. And this happens over and over again. Imagine you go into Barnes and Noble and make your way to the gardening section, and you find a book entitled, God’s Way to Grow a Garden. You open it up, and it’s one page. It says, “Step 1: Plant the Seed. Step 2: Go to bed. Step 3: Get up. Step 4: Repeat steps two and three until the seed has grown into a mature plant.” That will be 24.99 please. No, you wouldn’t buy that book. It sounds too easy. Everyone would be a farmer if this is the way it worked. “What do you do for a living?” “Well, back in the spring, I planted some seeds, now I just go to bed and get up everyday while I wait for it to grow.” But that is exactly how Jesus said His Kingdom is going to grow. Sow the seed of His Word – then by faith, wait patiently for it to bring the harvest.

How does a seed grow? You say, “Well you plant them, water them, give them sunlight, etc., and there you have it.” You still haven’t said how they grow. What makes them grow? What process happens to bring a plant into existence from a seed? Is it chemical, biological, supernatural? Jesus says that the man who sows the seed doesn’t even know. We still have a hard time explaining this one. Think of it this way – you can count how many seeds are in an apple; but do you know how many apples will come from a seed? No. It is a mystery, how seeds grow. We don’t know. It just seems to happen automatically. That’s exactly what Jesus said.

In v28, He says, “The soil produces crops by itself.” Those words “by itself” translate the Greek word automate, from which we get the word automatic. The seed contains within itself the power of growth and generation. Human effort adds nothing to that mysterious power. Human insight fails to explain it rightly. And in this way, the Kingdom of God is like this. How can we bring it about? In Jesus’ day, the Zealots tried to force it into being through political revolution. The apocalyptics thought they could hasten the coming of the Kingdom by careful observations and reckonings about times and signs; The Pharisees thought they could midwife the Kingdom into being by their scrupulous legal observances. These attempts are still being made today. But Jesus said that this Kingdom begins with the planting of a seed, and that seed contains all that is needed to bring the Kingdom into existence.

God spoke in Isaiah 55, saying:

· ⁸ "For My thoughts are not your thoughts, Nor are your ways My ways," declares the LORD. ⁹ "For as the heavens are higher than the earth, So are My ways higher than your ways
And My thoughts than your thoughts. ¹⁰ "For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, And do not return there without watering the earth And making it bear and sprout,
And furnishing seed to the sower and bread to the eater; ¹¹ So will My word be which goes forth from My mouth; It will not return to Me empty, Without accomplishing what I desire,
And without succeeding in the matter for which I sent it.

God’s Word contains the power to produce the result for which He sends it out. All we have to do is share it, and He has promised to do the rest. His purpose is the establishing and building up of His Kingdom, and He does that by transforming lives through the gospel of Jesus Christ. Paul said in Romans 1:16, “I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God unto salvation.” How do you convince someone that they should fear a lion? Really simple, just let the lion out of the cage. Done! Convinced! How do you make a lost person come to know Christ? You can’t make them. You just share the gospel with them. Unleash it, let it out of its cage. You just sow God’s word into the soil of their lives. That seed will do the rest. Yes, there is a place for apologetics, and there is a place for relationships, but nothing takes the place of the sharing of the message God’s word, because that is where the power is. And if you share it and nothing happens, then it is the fault of the soil, not the sower or the seed.

Here is where I want to go back to my opening thoughts about McGavran and church growth. The school of thought that has emerged, rather unintentionally, from McGavran says that the only good and healthy churches are the ones that are growing large and fast, whatever the means. The end (rapid and sizeable growth) justifies the means, in their view. But this parable is showing us that God is concerned most with the growth of His Kingdom, and is most concerned that the seed that brings about that growth (His Word) is being sown. And the growth is not instant or rapid, and may not be a very impressive process. The skeptical onlooker will say, “Nothing’s happening! Something’s wrong! That church is dead because it isn’t packing the house every Sunday!” But the right perspective understands that true growth comes from God’s word, and where it is being proclaimed within and without, that church is healthy and a vital part of God’s kingdom work. We can go to bed at night and rise up in the morning confident that, despite all initial appearances to the contrary, God is going to do His part to build His kingdom through the seed we have sown, in His way and in His time. We don’t have to obsess over the details of it, or be able to explain it, put it in a box, and sell it at Lifeway. We just sow the seed, and let the harvest come as God has promised.

The mystery of this is great – God has come to establish His kingdom in Jesus Christ. He has tread into enemy occupied territory, as C. S. Lewis put it. But He did not bring a militia, He did not hurl a thunderbolt, rather He sowed a seed, and that seed will grow and accomplish His purpose. That brings us to the final point:

III. The Certainty of Kingdom Growth

Just as surely as the seed was sown, a harvest is going to come. In God’s time, and in God’s way, it is going to happen. And when it does, that farmer will be ready with the sickle. And for some, the day of harvest will be good news, and for others it will be bad news. In Matthew 13, Jesus tells another parable, one of wheat and tares, in which He says that there are tares (weeds) growing in the midst of the wheat, and the only way to deal with them is to let them grow, and when harvest time comes, take the sickle to the whole field. The wheat will be gathered into the barn, an image of believers in Christ being taken to their eternal dwelling place in the presence of God. But the tares will bound up and burned, a picture of the eternal torment of hell. Which will it be? The day of harvest is coming for certain, the sickle is sharpened and ready, and it will not miss when it sweeps across the field.

Is this good news or bad news for you? If it seems to be bad news, then you need to hear and respond to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The word “Gospel” means “good news.” And it is the best news in the whole world. God created you in His image and longs for you to know Him and be with Him forever. But because of our sins, we are separated from Him. Yet, He has come to us in the person of Christ, to live the righteous life we never could, and to die in our place as a sinless substitute. He took our sins upon Himself in death so that He might cover us in His righteousness. If you have never received Him, you can today, by turning from sin, and calling upon Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior. The seed has been planted; what is the condition of your soil?

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[1] James R. Edwards, The Pillar New Testament Commentary: The Gospel According to Mark (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 142.