Mark 4:26-29

Speaker 1: Well. We sure do appreciate you all being here with us tonight. Good to have some, some guests with us as well. And if you've been bringing your kids up here to the church for a witness, you're not maybe a normal ATENDER or a regular member of the church. We count that as a great privilege that you would trust our workers, our church, to try and invest in your children and teach them about the word of God. One is, is an investment. You know, it's it's it's a financial investment for our church. Before that, we were kind of writing our own material and so there was some financial investment, but Alana was a significant financial investment. It's also an investment of time. A lot of our teachers work all day long and then come here, they actually eat dinner. Here we have a Wednesday night fellowship meal. They'll come straight from work, eat dinner and go right into a one is working there with your children. But they they always have such a great attitude and spirit about it. It is a huge blessing and it's an investment for you as well. This isn't the kind of program where you just, uh, drop your kids off and pick them up, and that's the only interaction you have with one of the entire week. Of course, one requires study, requires a lot of hard work for those kids. I mean, you don't say six hundred verses as a club without a lot of investment by parents and teachers and the kids themselves. And so we absolutely love it. I grew up doing Alana's brother, Zach. I don't know if you got those pictures up. Um, I just thought I'd maybe share some of this with you. Uh, while they're doing that, take your Bibles if you have them and turn to the book of Mark Mark chapter number four is where we'll be here for just a few moments. I smelled that chili as soon as I came out of my Deacons meeting and I thought, Oh yeah, it's going to be a short service tonight. All God's people said.

Speaker 4: A man.

Speaker 1: Mark, chapter number four. And you can remain seated and you've got children with you and everything, so just read it to you so you can hear it. Mark Chapter four verse number twenty six The Bible says this says he said That's Jesus. So is the kingdom of God, as if a man should cast seed into the ground and should sleep and rise night and day and the seed should spring and grow up. You know, it's not how for the Earth bringing forth fruit of herself first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear. But when the fruit is brought forth immediately, he put it in the cycle because the harvest is come. And just like those of you that have ever played in the garden or worked on a farm, you know that it's hard work. There is a lot of investment that goes into it, just like the investment that is going into the lives of these young people. Many times, you know, when you think about the start of school I used to be a kindergarten was the first grade that a lot of people went into. Now I know it's earlier and earlier pre-K and preschool where kids are getting taught different things. But kindergarten, at least it was when I was a kid that was the first experience with school and kindergarten actually is a term for garden for children. And the idea is not that they're in their gardening, but that they are the plants that are being brought up. The seeds of knowledge are being planted in their mind. Those things that will be built upon, they'll be nurtured and hopefully will grow up in their lives. And the same is true about our spiritual matters, God's word, the teachings of the Bible. It is important, and statistics show that the earlier you start to teach a child about the Bible, the more likely it is that they will remain and remain in church following Jesus for the majority of their lives. Did you guys get those pictures? One picture. Uno momento. This is an English service, sir. Is not. I wish I was bilingual, but I am not. Well, that's exactly what the Bible is talking about here in Mark, Chapter four is that investment that planting of a seed and the the work and the labor that goes into seeing that seed grow up and produce fruit down the road. The goal of every gardener, the goal of every farmer is obviously to produce fruit. I believe that the goal of every parent and should be the goal of every church is to see fruit in the lives of the children that we are working with. You probably would not have your child here at Awana if you didn't want to see fruit in that child's life, that would spring up. Now maybe you're bringing them for the free babysitting for an hour on Wednesday nights, so you can just regain some sanity and just have some silence. We just appreciate the silence. That's a beautiful thing. I love it. But probably you want them to learn. You want them to be memorizing God's word, you want them to be going over the Bible stories and becoming more familiar with it. I love the fact that those kids can come up here and sing in front of all of you. I mean, wasn't that great seeing them up here singing about God? And so many church members that are saying, hey, men need to join the choir because be good to have you up here to. But Jesus is helping us in this passage to understand a little bit about how God works in the lives of individuals. And he compares the work of God with the work of a gardener in this story that we read in Mark Chapter four. He says this is the way the Kingdom of God is. If a man should cast seed into the ground all throughout the Gospels, Jesus refers to the word of God as a seed, a seed that is planted in our hearts. A seed that we desire to plant in the hearts of these children from a young age. In this story, we see a farmer planting and caring for his crops. You look at verse number twenty seven. It talks about the continual nature of his investment. It says it should sleep and rise night and day. The Old Testament talks about the fact that everywhere we go as parents and oh yeah, there we go. Yeah, so that was me as a sparky all the way over there on the left, you can tell by the big years. Standing next to me is my brother, Micah. It was an odd looking child. And then our friend, Kyle, there, the Grand Prix, and I remember the Grand Prix. I can't wait to see what some of you men can cook up for the Grand Prix when that gets going. A little soap box derby. Oh, a lot of fun. Those sparks. All right. Go to the next one. You got that next one. Before they had TNT, they had upper clubs and upper clubs, poles and pioneers, and I got to go through that. And what's that last one? So that one up there and then a long, long, long time ago, my first ministry that I got to be involved in as a helper was the one and started off as a cubby ended up helping out as as a worker. And if you go through the entire I want to program, there are actually scholarships that you can earn from various Christian colleges. And so I was able to do that. But anyways, yeah, OK, you can take that down now. We don't hear like that anymore. But it's kind of like that idea of seeing something that starts small. You look at those cubbies, who knows what God has for those cubbies. Later on in life, there's so much potential. There's so much opportunity that lies ahead of them. They're like that little seed. And then you look at the sparks in there, they're getting a little bit older. And of course, you know, if you've raised kids, an eight year old is really getting into that goofy stage. You know, when they're little, they're cute and cuddly. And and then something happens and they just turn into this giant goofball, you know, everything's a joke. But sorry. And then then they get into TNT upper clubs and they were right on the verge, right? Hayden of being a teenager. And maybe there's some some little glimpses of that teenager ness coming out in them. But there's also glimpses of what God's doing in their life, that adulthood, that responsibility, that independence that starts to peek through just like a scene, just like a plant growing up. This gardener that's working here in Mark, chapter number four, he knows that you can't just throw out a bunch of seeds and come back the next day and expect to find rows and rows of fruit. It's not the way it works, not in real life, not in spiritual life. We can't expect to have a one this year and next year have a whole bunch of, I don't know, Bible college students. Doesn't work that way. Oh, we can't expect to stick Asher there in cubbies and in just, you know, next year, he's going to be ready to be a deacon. It's not the way it works. Your child, maybe it's their first year in Alana. You can't expect that they go into a one to one year and the next year they're a theologian writing out commentaries. They're in your house. It is a process. It is a growing experience. And every year, as they go through a winter, they learn more and more and more. Did you notice the difference between the versus the cubbies quoted in the versus the sparks quoted in the verses that the TNT boys and girls quoted? They got a little bit longer, a little bit longer, a little bit longer. Same goes for their Bible stories. Some basic, simple truths are taught in the cubbies. They get a little bit more deep. They're in the sparks. But time they get to AT&T or trying to get them ready to go off into the youth group and see a garden requires more than just throwing out seeds. It requires a lot of work. It requires consistent work. You think about all of the weeding that has to take place. You ask our helpers, there are some weeding taking place in our in our gatherings. You know, hey, that behavior doesn't belong in here. Hey, we don't talk like that. Hey, when you lose, you shouldn't respond that way. There's some weeding going on. There's also fertilizing. Yeah, there's some fertilizing, there's pruning, there's watering in the in the list, goes on there, getting the right chemicals and all the different things that go into a garden. Obama is here to help you and your children grow up into the people that God wants them to be. But, you know, even with all of the gardeners work. Some things are just out of his hands. You know, you've grown a garden before a lot of things you can do to prep care for. Manage the soil, manage the seed, manage the plant. But there are some things that are out of your hands. They're outside of your control. The the weather is outside of your control. The way that seed works while it's in the ground, you can't control that way that it sprouts and begins to grow. There is nothing you can do to make that happen. Let me ask you the question has the gardener done his job if he spends one day giving attention to his garden and then never tends, do it again? It was no. How about you as a parent? Have you done your job? If you spend one night a week giving attention to your child's spiritual life, but the six other days, you just don't even think about it. Have you done your job as a gardener for your child? The answer is no. The farmer must be consistent day after day, night after night as he waits for the fruit of his labors to appear. Anything worth having is going to take a lot of hard work. And if it's worth waiting for, then it's probably worth the effort. At first, the gardener goes to look out in his garden, all he sees is dirt, but then he goes out some days later and he begins to see little green blades poking through the dirt. Next, the plant grows and buds begin to form, leaves start to appear, and with each phase, the gardener is assured that he's doing his job. Man, I cannot wait to see three, four, five years down the road. What having a plant at our church is going to help accomplish in the lives of our children. See the fruit of the efforts to see the investment that has been made from our children's director, Miss Leah, down to our different club directors and then the workers and the diverse listeners and the teachers and the game directors, all of these different people coming alongside you as a parent trying to help invest in your child's life. You see. One week of a one to one year of a one to one night a week isn't going to do everything that needs to be done. You look up here and you see all these kids. It's kind of like those little green shoots poking through the dirt. There's some really good signs of life encouraging, right? Aren't you encouraged by that? There's a lot of junk out there that you have to see a lot of trash and then just bad news and things that discourage you. But to see these kids up here using their voices and their talents to sing for the Lord, the quote his word to you. Pretty special. To me, that something like this should just encourage us to keep nurturing these lives that God has entrusted to your care and that you have been entrusted to us to help you in your task. You see a parent like a gardener must give constant care. As you spend the years looking after them, training them, talking to them about God and his word, never forget the goal that you are working towards. You see, it could be that your kid would be the next one that would start an cubbie's or sparks and go through TNT and and then go on and become a teenager and say, Hey brother, Clarence, would it be OK with you if maybe once one week a month, I could go and help out in a one is broken and said, Yeah, that's great. I would love to see you develop your skills more in working and teaching these children. Maybe it'll be your kid that'll grow up and spend his teenage years not not chasing after girls or getting in trouble, but investing in younger kids at a harness. Let's not just accept, you know, what the world pushes as that's what's normal, and that's what we expected. Let's set a new trend here at the Baptist Tabernacle of teenagers that are that are consumed and passionate about serving the Lord because that's the way they've been trained. You don't have to wait until you're in your forties to have fruit from your labors. You don't have to go through rebellious teenage years and an early adult years of wandering and abandoning what you've been taught. You can start seeing fruit in your teenager's life very soon. It's the wait that long. No reason for it. Your patient care, I believe growth will occur over time. Like a farmer who rejoices at the first sign of green, the first bud that comes out on his his tree. There will be different moments along the way that you can enjoy. Maybe it'll be when your child accepts Jesus Christ as their savior. Fruit. Maybe be the first time that they come home from school and they say, Hey, you know, you know, my friend Joe. I told Joe about Jesus today, and he had to say. I probably didn't know what to say. He's not really saved. You don't know that. We all have to become as little children if we're going to come to Jesus. Maybe it'll be that time where where your son and your daughter makes the decision to get baptized. Make that public profession of their faith for the church to see. Maybe it'll be as they begin to read their Bible on their own. Maybe it'll be as they come to you one night and say, Hey, mom, hey, dad, guess what I learned in church today? They'll tell you some Bible truth that that you hadn't really talked about yet, but they've already got a good grasp on it because they've got the Holy Spirit living inside of them. They're learning from God, just the same as you are. There will be moments along the way that that that encourage you and show you that there are signs of growth. I believe tonight is one of those times. Who knows what some of these boys girls who spoke might do in the future? It starts with quoting a verse. Then it goes on to helping in a class. Next thing you know, they're teaching the class. I would like to encourage the moms and dads that are here to continue on. I want to encourage our Awana workers to continue on. Man, you have poured yourself into these first few months of a want to keep going. Keep it up. These kids are worth it. Our God is worth it. See, without your investment. Without you parents, what would happen to these children? Would their lives be like you weren't directing them to the Lord, introducing them to Jesus, planting the seed of his word in their soul? That's your primary goal, after all, isn't it? As a parent? To train them to be fully devoted followers of Jesus Christ. We can't do that with one hour a week. We want to help you do that as you would let us have the opportunity. Bio says verse 29, but when the fruit is brought forth immediately, he put it in the cycle because the harvest is calm. One day, I believe all of us can experience that harvest of godly spiritual fruit in the lives of our children. That's what I'm looking forward to, I know you are as well. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for this day. Thank you for the time we've been able to spend with these children. Getting a progress report, so to speak, on what you're doing in their lives. Thank you for the songs that we've heard come from there, their voices, the verses from your word that they have shared and memorized. Or thank you for the parents that are here, that have been working with them and studying them, are studying with them and teaching them. Thank you for the teachers and the want to workers, many of whom don't have children and want to, but want to help and invest in the next generation. Or I pray that you would continue to bless the Awana program here at the Baptist Tabernacle and that we would see fruit that would begin to sprout forth from these lives and we would continue to see fruit over the many years to come. Lord, we want you to call more servants from our church, from these young people, more kids that would surrender to your will for their life, to be missionaries and pastors and youth pastors and Christian school teachers and just whatever it is you'd have them to do, or we want these children to be the future generations of Sunday school teachers and and church officers and and servants and laborers here in your church. God, we want them to be the next generation of gospel witnesses on the job sites and in the offices and in the hospitals. Lord, please bless us as we seek to sow water the seed of your word in the hearts and lives of these children. Oh Lord, we love you so much. Thank you for all you do for us. It's in Jesus name. I pray. Amen. Won't you? Please join me in standing? We're going to have a brief song of invitation. And. I mean, there's not we're not really calling for like a spiritual decision as far as, you know, getting your life right. Maybe that is what you need. But tonight, maybe you would pray for the children in your home. You don't have children in your home. Maybe you would pray tonight for the children. And this isn't a program that are here every week. Pray that God wouldn't get a hold of their hearts, that the the seed that is planted in their heart would sprout forth and bear fruit for his glory. If you would be willing to do that, you pray there, as you see here at the altar. Brother Matt sings, I surrender all during this time of invitation.

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