Title: The Crisis of the Kingdom of God
When God comes to us, He comes to us through His Word. The word of God is different from the words of men, so it creates specific events. God created the world with the Word, and the Word came in the flesh to heal the sick, cast out demons, and change from the old life to the life of a new creature. In this way, the Word makes history. The prophet Isaiah had this to say about those words:
“As rain and snow come down from heaven and do not go there again, but water the land and make it sprout and bear fruit, to give seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so the words that go out of my mouth do not return to me in vain. He will do my will, and he will prosper in the work for which I commanded him” (Isaiah 55:10-11).
When God comes to us through His Word, everyone meets them in the course of their own life history. Everyone has their own life history. Children who live in the season of childhood have a history of life up to childhood, and those who are in adolescence, adulthood, or old age have more diverse life experiences than in childhood. Depending on what kind of experience the history of your past life was, you become the person you are today.
The history of a person's life is closely related to the cultural history of that time. In the history of such a life, a person will have positive and negative experiences. Not everyone can have a positive history of their life. Rather, there are many more negative factors. The question is what state he is in now. The past can be positive for him when his present situation is a state in which the sins, wounds, and pains of the past have been healed by God's grace. If he doesn't, his past experiences can be a shame he doesn't want to talk about.
Because the Word of God falls on the basis of the existing life that has already been formed, the response is also not constant. Today's sermon is about that. The text is a metaphor. This parable tells us what kind of crisis situation the kingdom of God faces in this world. When Jesus spoke in parables, he was not unfamiliar with the expressions of the parables, as he always spoke with empirical events that were very familiar to the people of his time. But it wasn't easy to figure out what the parable meant.
First, it is the case of seeds sown by the roadside.
In the old days, most of the fields in Palestine had a path through which people and livestock passed through the middle of the field. If you sow seeds in the sowing machine, some of the seeds may fall on the roadside. A seed that falls on the roadside shows no possibility and loses its value. The reason is that the sprouts cannot sprout because they are trampled by many people and animals that come and go, and eaten by birds.
There are types of life you can think of in this regard. It is a life that is too entangled in the mundane. When you attach too much value to everyday things and get caught up in them, there is no place for the kingdom of God.
Next is the case of a seed that fell on a rocky field.
Among the fields in the old Palestine, the soil is superficially soft and the plants seem to grow well, but beneath the soft soil is a thin layer of wide rock, so seeds germinate but cannot take root. There is another type of life that comes to mind when thinking of this type of field. It is a type of life that is deeply wounded in childhood and lives with the door firmly closed, otherwise it is an absolute type of life in which you are completely absorbed in the prejudice of ideology and reject any other truth. The kingdom of God also faces a crisis under such circumstances.
Shortly after the collapse of the former Soviet Union, I visited Russia and a country in the Baltic Sea. As I set foot on that land, the question I kept asking myself was, what was the meaning of the 80-year history of communism? The answer I got at the scene was that communism is a fiction itself. The reality of history after 80 years has been devastation. The period of history of 80 years is by no means a short period of time, and the historical events that occurred during that period are massacres, destruction of humanity, formation of a privileged minority class, devastation of culture, and economic collapse.
What are the religious lessons from this historical event that we are seeing and experiencing with our own eyes in our time today? It tells us how futile life and history are without accepting the kingdom of God. This is not just limited to political ideology. The same is true of false ideas and false religious beliefs. In the past, the common words of those who had spent almost half of their lives in Park Tae-seon's faith village were that they had lived in vain and were deceived. Their lives could never be repaid anywhere.
Then it is the case of the seed that fell among the thorns.
It is a form of life that you can think about in relation to it, and it is a life in which you are caught up in the worries and worries of many lives in reality. Life's worries and worries keep us from seeing the God who feeds and nourishes the birds of the air and the lilies of the field. Worry prevents us from taking root of our faith in God.
Finally, the seeds that fell on good soil.
Thinking about the good land can remind you of a moral life in which you live morally perfectly, otherwise you have a good nature from birth, and a legalistic life where you set your own principles of life and live without breaking out of the fence. . But the meaning of good land is far from that. Seeds that fall on good soil rot in the soil and lose their shape, sprouting stems and leaves, and bearing fruit. The old form disappears and a new form is formed. The conditions for the kingdom of God to come and bear fruit a hundredfold, sixtyfold, or thirtyfold are suffering, repentance, seriousness, meditation, and obedience. In such a life, the power, change, and growth of the kingdom of God take place.
Let me tell you about one thing that happened in Plant City, Florida, USA. In the summer of 1965, all family members and relatives gathered in a family living in that city. Suddenly, at two in the morning, Grandma woke everyone in the family and ordered them to prepare an empty Coke bottle, a cork, and a piece of white paper. And the grandmother went to write a few Bible verses on a blank sheet of paper, saying that she had the word of God to tell people to her family. Then the family rolled up the Bible verses that Grandma had written, put them in a bottle, and covered them with a cork. That morning, Grandma and all her family went to the beach and sent as many as two hundred Coke bottles into the waves.
Over the years that followed, many people called or wrote to Grandma, or came to say thank you in person. They were all very moved by the Bible verses in the cola bottle. My grandmother passed away in November 1974. And in the next month, December, the last letter arrived to my grandmother.
The story of the letter is as follows.
Dear Mrs. Gauss,
I am writing this letter now under a candle. Our farm no longer has electricity. My husband died when the tractor capsized. My husband left me with eleven children. The eldest is fourteen years old. Banks are no longer refusing loans, and now we have only a loaf of bread left. Snow is covering the world, and Christmas is two weeks away. I went to the river to ask the Lord for forgiveness and kill myself. The river has been frozen for weeks, so I thought it wouldn't take that long.
I had to take a stone and break the ice. But when I drilled a hole, a bottle of Coke came to mind. I opened the cork and, with tears in my eyes, read the words of hope written on it with trembling hands. Ecclesiastes 9:4 is written.
"Everyone has hope for the living. Even a dog, alive is better than a dead lion."
You also wrote down other passages from Hebrews and the Gospel of John. I'm back home, and now I'm grateful for the message God sent me. We will get through this hardship now. Please pray for us. But we will all do well. God will bless you and your children.
on the Ohio farm
Even at this hour, God comes to us through His Word. The Word of God knocks on the door of our hearts through our ears. We must open the door of our hearts and respond to that word.
God comes to us through His Word every day. Therefore, a moment in our lives to read and meditate on the Word should always be prepared in our daily life.
The Word of God created the world, and at a time in past history, the Word came to the flesh and dwelt directly among us as light, and now the Word is coming to us with the Holy Spirit. God in eternity always comes to us by word in eternity.
The hope and meaning of the church's existence is that it has been entrusted with the Word. The key to the kingdom of heaven that Jesus gave to Peter means the Word. The church must open the kingdom of God, which has been closed to the world, with the key of the Word so that they can enter. Amen