Jesus has just finished telling the crowd about the parable of the farmer
Photo by kyle smith on Unsplash sowing seeds. The disciples, who had heard Jesus teach plainly for so long, are confused as to why He has changed His teaching style. “The disciples came to him and asked, “Why do you speak to the people in parables?” He replied, “The knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of heaven has been given to you, but not to them. 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.””
Jesus is quite aware of who the disciples are, and He is quite aware of who the crowd is. Jesus knows that the crowd is there to hear, but not really to listen. To that point He tells the parable publicly. The surface of it is for those who want to hear – but the meaning is really just for those who want to listen. Those who want to listen are those who already have gained something of the Kingdom. They know who God is and they want to be about God’s purposes. They come that they may apply what God is telling them, and apply it wholeheartedly. But those who only want to hear are really just there for themselves – they want to have an experience of seeing and hearing, but they have no intention to let what they are seeing and hearing truly impact them.
There will be some in every church who are really there to be entertained. They will make space in their schedules to come to church, they may put their names forward for membership and may even give regularly. But they are not coming to church with an expectation of being regularly changed by an encounter with God. They are coming with an expectation that they will selfishly ‘get’ something from the service – something they can use for their own purposes, not God’s purposes.
It may be just to see their friends. It may be to acquire a fact they know their other friends do not yet know – perhaps a story or illustration that they think is interesting or poignant that they can use as their own in a downstream conversation. It may be the appeal of the music or the free coffee. But it is little more than entertainment or fodder for boasting. The week will pass and the next service will come and they have not applied anything at all of the previous service to how they live their lives or how they worship God.
Subsequently, instead of talking about how they are participating in the worship or applying the message given after the service, they will speak of the music volume, the use or non-use of particular instruments, the lighting, the sound quality, the order of service or some other external aspect of “how it went”. Such subjects may be appropriate conversation for church leaders trying to iron out distractions, but they are of no value at all to almost all of us who attend. That such subjects comes up in our conversation is a revelation that our focus has not been on God, but on something else.
For such people, Jesus has little.
For those who truly seek Him, He has much.
If we allow the Word to go “in one ear and out the other,” we have not understood the purpose of a lamp, nor have we been careful how we listen.
Paul R. McReynolds
APPLICATION: Intentionality
What comes up in our after church conversation? Which camp are we in? Which do we think we are in? It is that delta – the hidden and unseen motivation of the heart – that determines what we get out of a message from God. It is not the office we hold, or the gifts we are given, or the style of preaching – or even necessarily who the preacher is. What matters is whether we are there to listen or not.