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The parables that Jesus told people in the gospels can sometimes sound strange or feel difficult to understand. Those parables, however, hold eternal truths and great instruction for believers in all times and cultures. In this episode, Gary Wilkerson and Joshua West walk through one of the best entry points for understanding Christ’s parables: Matthew 13 and the Parable of the Sower. This story is one of the greatest places to examine our own hearts and to receive God’s instructions and promises.
Key Points from the Podcast
• The Bible contains a lot of parables; some are very self-evident, but others take more work to understand thoroughly. Matthew 13 contains one of the only parables Jesus explained both the meaning but also his reason for telling parables, so it’s an excellent place to start while studying parables.
• Jesus invited people to understand spiritual truths through the culture they knew and also through stories of everyday life that illuminated eternal situations.
• The Holy Spirit gives us understanding when we work through Jesus’s parables if we earnestly desire to understand and grow closer to God, as he does for us as we read through any portion of scripture.
• Without over complicating the parable, this story emphasizes that God’s message falls in every human heart. We all have a choice to harden ourselves against his words or not.
• While there aren’t multiple interpretations of scripture, the nature of parables is that the stories may hit us in different ways or have depths that readers don’t initially realize.
• A good hermeneutical principle to follow is “All scripture has one intended meaning but many applications.”
• Seeing our great need for the divine gardener to come and work in our hearts is good evidence that broken soil is good soil for God’s Word.
Bible Verses Referenced in the Podcast
Matthew 13:1-23
Additional Episodes in this Podcast Series
About Joshua West
Joshua West serves as the Church Leadership Network Director at World Challenge helping equip and empower pastors all over the world. Joshua’s desire is to raise up ministers who will correctly and boldly preach the word with passion and integrity. The point of all his work and writings is to preach the gospel, glorify God and to teach sound doctrine.
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