Light on the Hill

James Kaddis: Coming up next on Light on the Hill. You can look at anything that's happening in this world right now in this moment and you can learn the wisdom of God from that. You can look around at the universe that surrounds you and you can literally recognize it as evidence of the Creator. This is why the Bible tells us that the very glory of God is proclaimed by His creation. The heavens declare the glory of God and the earth literally shows the very work of His hands. They're all related, and if you understand these principles, then your awareness of spiritual things is going to grow deeper.

Guest (Male): Calvary Chapel Signal Hill welcomes you to Light on the Hill with Pastor James Kaddis and our new series in Mark. Throughout His earthly ministry, Jesus used stories that His audience could identify with to help them understand a heavenly truth. They're called parables. We're about to encounter one such parable today, and it's one of the best known of all shared by the Lord. The parable of the sower is really designed to get us to think about the condition of our own heart. So let's do that now. Here's Pastor James in Mark chapter four.

James Kaddis: So, they some fell on stony ground we saw what happened with that. Verse seven, and some fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked it and yielded no fruit, which of course was a very common occurrence, especially in those days, and it still can be a very common occurrence today. As a matter of fact, anybody who knows anything about gardening, and we got quite a few people in our church that do, know that there are certain plants you can't plant with other plants because if you do, one of those plants will work against the others.

There are rules that you have to go by. If you're going to plant flowers in a flower bed, you have to be very careful what type of flowers you plant because some plants work against others. The whole idea of a seed falling in a place where there's a plant filled with thorns and everything grows up, it's going to get all torn up and it's going to end up dying. So that's an interesting picture but something that these farmers would have been very familiar with. And the other fell on good ground, verse eight, and did yield fruit that sprang up and increased and brought forth some 30, some 60, and some 100. And he said unto them, "He that hath ears to hear, let him hear."

Let's just say that we're all experts in gardening. Let's say we know everything there is to know about agriculture, that we know how a farm works, we know what happens to seed. We just heard from Jesus what might be one of the most basic elementary school descriptions of how different types of seed either fail or do well. So the moment he finishes all of this, he says, "He who hath an ear, let him hear." Jesus is implying here that there's a greater lesson to be learned. If I'm listening to this, I'm like, what's the lesson?

We don't know what this parallels. We don't even know what Jesus is trying to say, and I can't blame the disciples for not knowing. I can't blame the disciples for wondering. Now we go, what a ridiculous thing, how could the disciples not know? Only because we know what the interpretation is because it was given to us. So we look at it using hindsight, we sort of Monday morning quarterback it, and we think what a basic thing. But all we're good at doing is regurgitating what Jesus said, but we're not necessarily good at grasping the bigger principle.

Let's get into the depth of the bigger principle here. Look at this, and when he was alone, of course they're going to wait until he's alone. It's very important they're going to wait until he's alone. They that were about him with the 12 asked him of the parable. So they go to him and what did that parable mean? Look, Lord, we're just confused. So what, we know what happens to seed. What does it all mean? Jesus says something very interesting. This is a wild statement if you don't understand the context. But look at Jesus's response in verse 11, and he said unto them, "Unto you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God, but unto them that are without, all these things are done in parables."

I kind of wish I could be with Jesus and these disciples when he's lecturing them on something this intense. It's pretty amazing because they're going to Jesus basically and some of you might not recognize this, but they're not just going to Jesus and saying, "Lord, what does it mean?" They're going to Jesus and saying, "Why did you do this? What's the meaning of all of this? This is basic elementary stuff." And quite frankly, there's probably people there telling him, "What does it have to do with anything that we're learning? What about the spiritual issue here? I don't see the application."

And Jesus stops and he says, "The parables is how I teach them. The mysteries have already been revealed to you." Now that's an interesting thing, because if that's the case, then that means what Jesus is about to do is he is about to explain to them what he was trying to communicate to the crowd, which is very likely something they already knew, they just heard it in a different context. Now that does a couple of really interesting things for the disciples. Number one, it demonstrates to them how they ought to communicate to people who don't understand the things that they now understand.

I think that that's a good tool for men like me and people like you, to learn how to communicate these very important principles. That the best communicator simplifies things, they don't complicate things. I think that's a very important lesson to learn. So that's the first thing we learn. The second thing, and the thing that I think is really remarkable, just one that I think is astounding to me, is that Jesus is making it clear that the principles that he has already taught them and demonstrated to them is going to get communicated in this method because understanding that method helps to understand the practical application of the principle that they already know.

Think about it like this. I could go to you right now and I could, as a five-year-old or as a let's just say a two-year-old, I could go to you right now and I could say, "Two plus two is four," and you remember that until you're blue in the face. And then I could go to you and I could say, "Five plus eight is 13." You're growing, you're getting a little bit more complicated. Five plus eight's 13. You get a little bit older and now you're going over algebra, calculus, you're going over more intense math.

And you know what every teenager I know tells me when they get to that phase? They tell me the same thing I told myself, and that's this, "Why the heck should I pay attention to math? It's useless. It's just a bunch of dumb busy work. I'm not going to do anything with it. That's just crazy. Why would I even waste my time? This is a waste of time. I'm going to be this person or I'm going to be that person, I don't ever need math." You realize something very quickly. You say that you don't need it and you say that it doesn't matter because you're so immature of your understanding of God's epistemology that you, in the moment in which you are, don't know how to apply the information that's been given to you.

The sooner you learn how to take the practical information that's being given to you and apply it to the life that you're living every day, the sooner your awareness of those principles that you thought were lame and stupid and granted because they become the very keys that open up the door for your life. You could come to me right now, give you an example on this whole math thing. You could come to me right now and you could tell me, "I'm never going to be anything that relates anything to math. I will never need another math calculation ever in my life. I have calculators, I have this, I have that. I will never use math ever, so I don't really need it and I don't really need to understand it."

Well, I would argue with you that Jesus created this world, God created this world through a series of logical expressions that can oftentimes be quantified through mathematics. And mathematics can open up your understanding of the very issues that you so desperately want to learn, but have no idea how to apply it. It's a very interesting thing. People look at me and they go, "James, that's kind of crazy, that's a little nuts." No, it actually isn't, because you can look at statistics for example, like just one very moderate picture of that.

You can look at statistics for an example, and if you understand the item that you are analyzing statistically, you can understand everything there is to know about that item. You can identify ebbs and flows of how it moves, you can look at patterns, you can understand optics. There are so many things that you'll find because these numbers are actual expressions of God's logic, of His very epistemology. You understand that, you understand all kinds of things. And look, I know I'm overcomplicating this for some people, but I need you to understand that it's not just knowing the information, it's understanding how it actually applies in the cosmos created by God.

So if Jesus is sharing a simple story of farming, understanding the principles of farming that he's talking about is directly related to a series of mathematical calculations that you can run down through. And everything in the universe around you is all tied in. Now this is not pantheistic type of teaching, this is not like some L. Ron Hubbard kind of a weird take off or whatever, but what I'm saying is if God created the heavens and the earth, then God's very code is embedded within everything that surrounds the heavens and the earth. Your DNA is something on a microscopic level that is actually a function and an expression of God's creation throughout the universe.

So the more you begin to understand how certain things relate to one another, then the wiser you become because the wisdom, the application of the knowledge that you have, will grow exponentially if you're able to make these connections. See what I'm saying? And I think that's really interesting because when you start talking about this farming thing that Jesus is explaining to them, these guys know the wisdom of God, they know the spiritual principles that were illustrated by this parable, and they just heard the parable, but they don't know how they interconnect. They don't know how to draw application from it.

And what that also tells us is that you can look at anything that's happening in this world right now in this moment and you can learn the wisdom of God from that. You can look at the universe that surrounds you and you can literally recognize it as evidence of the Creator. This is why the Bible tells us that the very glory of God is proclaimed by His creation. The heavens declare the glory of God and the earth literally shows the very work of His hands. They're all related, and if you understand these principles, then your awareness of spiritual things is going to grow deeper.

Guys, this is why I cannot emphasize enough how critical it is to learn how to develop a process of mastery in your own lives where you stack the things that you learn on a regular basis, because that's how God operates. That's what He wants us to do. Look what it goes on to say as he starts to interpret this. Verse 12, that seeing they may see and not perceive, and hearing they may hear and not understand, lest at any time they should be converted and their sins should be forgiven them. What he's saying is these things are right in front of you. They're right there. We all are seeing the same data. We're all looking at the same things, we're all hearing the same words, we all are discerning and understanding the same principles.

But there are many of us who will not know what to do with the very thing that they're seeing. There are many of us who will not be able to recognize what exactly is going on. There's many of us who are not going to be able to really be able to make a connection between what you might be seeing and hearing and what is going to inevitably happen. This is a funny story that'll demonstrate this I think relatively well and it was one of my glory moments. You'll laugh at me when you hear the story. I'm out many years ago with the guy who taught me how to fly radio-controlled helicopters, my instructor, a really, really sweet man. I love the guy. He's probably top five in the world, best pilots in the world. The guy invented a lot of the maneuvers that guys do today. The guy is just a really brilliant guy.

So every time we would fly, what he would do is before I would go out there, we would connect to one another and he could take over from my controls and I could take over from his. So he would go out there and he would put his own personal helicopter up, fly it around a little bit, warm up, show off a little bit. It was always really amazing, it was like fun to watch. So one day he puts his helicopter up and as he does in the air, I hear this very subtle sound. It was a sound that was very familiar to me. I knew it because I tend to be very mechanically inclined in that hobby. I could build these helicopters blindly. All of us build our own helicopters, it's something I very much enjoyed and so I have a certain mechanical inclination in that area.

So he's flying and I hear this little very familiar sound to me, it's a click. And the sound sounds like the tail blades have a little pinion gear that connects to what's called a torque tube that drives the blades to make them go forward, make them spin. And it sounded like to me there was some kind of a pinion or something like that that disengaged from the gear and that he was going to lose tail control. So I hear the sound and I tell him, "Bro you're going to lose your tail." "Ah bro I heard that too but that was nothing bro, that was I probably hit a rock or something." "No bro you're going to lose your tail." And he's a very colorful man in his language, "Okay bro, whatever, I've been flying for longer than you've been alive, whatever."

And then as he's kind of mocking me, literally he's at an altitude of probably 150 feet and he loses control, he just loses control. Now he's such a remarkable pilot that he didn't even destroy it. The helicopter's spinning violently, he still knows how to land it. He lands it and he's looking at me and he's like, "How the blank did you blank know that?" The sound was obvious. Well the point behind it was he heard the same sound I did. We both heard the same sound. We both experienced the same moment. There was a principle that that sound should have produced within his mind that didn't get produced because he didn't know what to do practically with the sound that he heard.

We went flying a few months later and I told him I heard the same sound and he landed it immediately and then he got mad when I told him, "Ah I didn't hear that," we were joking. But my point behind all of this is me and you could be listening to the same thing, we could be seeing the same thing, we could be hearing the same thing and we don't know how it actually applies. Now the difference between the two people, the one person who knows and understands it versus the person who doesn't know and doesn't understand it, the big difference is one was willing to understand or to seek knowledge as into how it all relates to the bigger picture and the other one didn't care.

It's that simple. And God wants us to know that every learning point that we come into we should seek Him for wisdom on how it relates in the bigger picture. Makes sense? You guys following me here? Okay, so let's get into what Jesus says is the interpretation of this. Verse 13 he said unto them, "Know ye not this parable? And how then will ye know all parables?" In other words, if you don't know anything this basic, how are you going to know all the other parables? By the way, it's really cool that Jesus says this to him because you find out later that the writers of the Gospels had profound understanding of the parables and they explained it in many context on their own volition.

It wasn't Jesus all the time that explained it, but he said if you can't understand this basic thing how are you going to understand everything else? So the lesson here for us as we go over this right now is to understand how the parallels are drawn from the parable that you're reading here and how it can apply to other principles in your life. Because when God created this universe he created everything using the same principles. The same physics, the same science, the same rules that we go by, the same everything and if you understand those things and you understand those things well, you will become better and better and better at interpreting the things that you see on a day-to-day basis, if that makes any kind of sense.

So look what he says here. This is verse 14, the sower soweth the word. Okay, that's a basic thing. So he's basically associating the word of God with the seed. You guys get that? When the sower is sowing seed he's saying the seed is in essence the word. So the sower soweth the word, and these are they by the wayside where the word is sown, but when they have heard Satan cometh immediately and taketh away the word that was sown in their hearts. Okay, this is very interesting. How do you draw the parallel? What would be the person whose heart is the road that is opened up for the thief to come and take it?

The bird here is the thief, the bird here is Satan. Satan is the adversary. He's coming to eat up the seed that was sown. Literally rip you off of the word that's being given to you. Folks, the powerful lesson that you learn from this and this is really important, this is a universal lesson, by the way. Most people don't look at it this way, most people see this as a progression that describes the process by which somebody gets saved, but there's a much bigger lesson in all of this. The first and immediate lesson that you learn from this story is that location means everything. Location, location, location.

If you are opening up the word of God and you are in a loud noisy place that has a bunch of distractions, it's very likely you're not going to be able to take in the very thing that you've read. But let's take it a step further. How about you choose to read the Bible but you have chosen not to internalize it? In other words, you're doing it mechanically because it's something that you've told yourself you have to do, and this is the danger of people who want to read the Bible in a year. "I've just got to get in my Bible reading for the day."

You can do that until you're blue in the face, but if you do not make sure that you are going out of your way to internalize the very word that you're reading, it's going to get ripped off from you. Now the first way it gets ripped off is when you just simply put yourself in a place where you're not going to be able to receive it. By the way, there are huge equivalents to this in our own personal lives with the Lord. You know there's a reason why I don't do extended Bible reading early in the morning? The reason why I don't do extended Bible reading early in the morning is because when I wake up early in the morning, if I do some extended Bible reading, I will literally either fall asleep or get distracted.

And I could read it until I'm blue in the face, but if I fall asleep and get distracted it doesn't mean anything. How many times have you guys had a paragraph that you've had to read in front of you and you were so tired that you read it again, like a simple sentence? You read it again and again and again for 45 minutes and you still don't understand, and then you realize I've got to sleep or this is never going to work. Have we all been there? I've been there. That's what he's talking about. That's the parallel here in this parable. It's the easiest way. Set yourself up to not receive it, you'll get it taken away from you very quickly.

Guest (Male): We've been exploring the parable of the sower with Pastor James Kaddis here on Light on the Hill. We'll return to it shortly. Listen to this study and more at LightonTheHillRadio.com. Pastor James's teachings are also available through the Light on the Hill app and at OnePlace.com. You can listen to us wherever you get your podcasts as well. When you have a moment sometime today, send us an email. We'd love it. It's encouraging to hear what the Lord is doing in our listeners' lives, and it's an opportunity to thank the Lord for what He's doing.

There's a place to contact us at our website LightonTheHillRadio.com. We've been blessed by the feedback we've received thus far regarding Pastor James's new book, The Last Book. If you haven't ordered a copy yet, we'd encourage you to do so. This guide to Revelation covers the first half of the book giving you what you need to know about the rapture and the end times in a clear and concise manner. Request your copy today at LightonTheHillRadio.com or through Amazon. If God is leading you to support this radio outreach, there's also a place to make a donation at LightonTheHillRadio.com.

Throughout the week, you can watch our live shows and short videos, many of which relate to Bible prophecy and help you to see current events with a biblical worldview. Look for these at JamesKaddis.com. Let's turn back to Mark chapter four for the rest of today's message featuring a great parable from Jesus about farming.

James Kaddis: And these are they likewise which are sown on stony ground, who when they have heard the word immediately receive it with gladness and have no root in themselves and so endure but for a time afterward when affliction or persecution ariseth for the word's sake immediately they're offended, they're stumbled. The best way to describe this sort of person are the people that go to church get the emotional high, "Oh Lord that was great, praise the Lord," get in the car and just flipping off every driver and going crazy. If you do not take in the word as though your knowledge of the word will depend on whether or not you live for the next week, it's not going to matter.

You have to have a certain level of desperation for it. If you don't have that level of desperation it's not going to work. I heard a story, this really happened, it's a real story of a guy who basically went to his pastor and told his pastor that the Bible didn't work and he's been trying to study the Bible but the Bible doesn't do anything for him, that the Bible hasn't been able to give him any direction in his life, hasn't been able to do anything for him. "Okay son," he says, "I want you to come over my house. Make sure you bring in some swim gear."

So they both go into the pool. He says, "Son, you had that question about the Bible and it not working and so on and so forth?" "Yeah." And they start talking a little bit and when the kid is taken off guard, the pastor grabs him as aggressively as he can and submerges him in water, puts his whole body underground. About two seconds in, the guy begins to start flailing who's underwater. About five seconds in, he's actually beginning to get a lot more aggressive and trying to free himself from the arms of the pastor. About 10 seconds in, he's kicking the pastor, punching the pastor, trying to push the pastor away.

About 13 to 15 seconds in, the pastor realizes that the guy is like legit fearful and he lets go of the kid. Kid comes up out of the water, "What was that for? What was that for?" He looks at the kid and he says, "This whole thing of you telling me that the Bible doesn't work. Do you remember the emotion that you felt when you were underwater?" "Yeah." "The only thing that you could think of was oxygen, right? That's the only thing you could think of, how to get above the water. You wanted oxygen so bad because you knew oxygen would be the only way that you survived."

"The moment you begin to read God's word with that same kind of urgency will be the moment that you actually allow God to work in your life, to see the work that He wants to do." So here's a question that I ask you with this level of the seed planting. Do you go to the word of God with that same level of desperation? Do you go to the word of God knowing that the word of God is the only place that you can find the answers to survive in your upcoming days? Are you about to buy a car? Are you about to purchase a home? Are you about to make a job decision? Are you about to do something at all that requires any level of deep thought or contemplation? How desperately are you going to the word to figure out how it all works? "God I'm about to buy a house, can you show me principles in your word that will teach me how?" Kind of amazing how that works.

Guest (Male): Remember, you are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden. Light on the Hill with Pastor James Kaddis is brought to you by Calvary Chapel Signal Hill.