I Workout.

Assault on two fronts.

Two men sow in the same field. One sows in daylight, out in the open, good seed by the handful. The other waits for dark. He comes while the workers are asleep, scatters weeds through the wheat, and is gone before morning. By the time anyone notices, both crops are up and tangled together, and no one can tell one green stalk from another.

Jesus tells this parable right after the one we looked at last week, the Parable of the Sower. Put the two side by side, and you see the enemy fighting on two fronts. In the first parable, he is a thief. The seed that falls on the path gets snatched away before it can take root, and the word never gets planted at all (13:4, 19). In this parable, he is a con artist. He does not only steal the good seed. He sows his own, a weed that comes up looking like wheat, but it is a complete counterfeit. Learning both attacks is where standing guard begins.

While you were sleeping

Notice when the enemy sows. He comes at night, while the men are sleeping. He does his work in the hours no one is watching.

Our enemy plants where we have quit paying attention. When we are looking right, he sows on the left. When we finally fortify one part of our life and move on to the next, he creeps back into the ground we thought was safe. This is why Peter tells us to stay sober and awake, because our adversary is prowling (1 Peter 5:8). God is not anxious about it. He will bring in his harvest no matter how much the enemy steals or sows. But we are told to watch, because the sowing happens in the places we stop guarding.

How can you tell?

So how do you tell Christ's seed from the enemy's? For a long while, you can’t. That is the hard reality of the parable. Wheat and weeds come up looking alike, and to the untrained eye there is no telling them apart. You could walk the rows all summer and still not be sure. The person you have known for years, who sits in your pew every Sunday, who shares your last name and your table, may show the same early green growth as everyone else.

The difference shows at harvest, when the wheat carries grain, and the weed carries nothing. Fruit is what tells them apart.

The sorting

And that sorting is not ours to do. Jesus is plain that he will send his angels to separate the crop when he returns (13:41). This parable is not a tool for grading the person next to you. It is a mirror for your own face. A life grown from the seed of Christ produces the fruit of Christ. A life that only looks the part produces nothing, and one day the emptiness shows. So look at your own stalk. Can you say, with any honesty, that you are bearing grain? Or does your faith only resemble wheat, all leaf and no head, with nothing on it when the harvest comes?

Read the master's answer to his servants slowly. They want to pull the weeds now. He tells them no. "Let both grow together until the harvest" (13:30). The wheat and the counterfeit come up side by side, in the same field and the same pews, until the day Christ sends his reapers and sorts the crop himself.

There are two sowers in this parable, but they are not equals. The devil is allowed to sow. He is not allowed to win. His seed is bound and burned. The good seed is gathered in. Jesus is the greater sower, and his harvest will be plentiful. That is why the master can be patient. He is not worried about losing the field.

Inputs and outputs

So how does the seed of Christ actually become a stalk that bears grain? Paul provides us with a helpful answer. "Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure" (Philippians 2:12–13). God works in. You work out. The two are one work. God plants the seed and gives the growth, and your part is to cultivate what he is already doing in you.

If his word tells you he gives grace to the humble, you go find the next place in your day to be humble, and you are humble there. If his Spirit nudges you toward discipline while your flesh argues for desire, you turn the volume up on the Spirit and let the flesh keep grumbling. You heed the seed planted in you by acting on it in the next breath you breathe and the next step you take.

Think of it the way you think about your body. God gave you one with muscles, energy, and the strength to build it up, and then he tells you to go work it out. When you do, you grow stronger, and you see the results. The Christian life runs the same way. God has worked his own life into you, and he invites you to work it out, to train in the things of Christ until your life takes his shape. That is how the good seed grows in you instead of the enemy's, day after day, as if the growing depends on you showing up for it.

And it does, because there is no unplanted ground. To refuse the one seed is to receive the other. You are being sown into right now, today, by one sower or the other, and there is no neutral strip of dirt in the human heart where nothing grows. This is why we cannot live as though the matter were already closed. There is a habit in our kind of Christianity that treats a single prayer as the end of the story, as though salvation were a done deal the moment the words left your mouth. But no one who is still in the field is finished. We work out our salvation with fear and trembling, living as if what we do matters, because our assurance is not a moment we can point back to. It is the seed of Christ still growing in us, and our hand in the growing.

The seed of the church, the body of Christ

Notice, lastly, what the seed is meant to become. Wheat runs all through Scripture, and its meaning comes clear the night Jesus takes bread, breaks it, and says, this is my body. Follow the seed to its end. Wheat produces grain, grain is ground into bread, and the bread is the body of Christ. So the wheat Christ sows is finally meant to become his body, and his body on earth is the church.

That gives the growing its full weight. When you cultivate his seed in your life, you are being grown into his body. The true church is not the crowd that gathers. It is the wheat Christ has sown and brought to grain. This is part of what we are doing when we come together on Sunday. We are the harvest in progress, the body of Christ taking shape in plain sight.

So let us start working out and watch for the results in the body.

Peace be with you,

Pastor Bruce