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[AI Generated Transcript]

Well, if you want to take your Bibles and turn, we're going to be in Mark chapter 4.

I'm thankful for Michael coming last week to share the word, and I was so thankful for all those guys who would take time out of their busy lives to come pour into us.

Mark chapter 4, I'm going to read verses 26 to 34.

Jesus speaking, and he said, The kingdom of God

is as if a man should scatter seed on the ground.

He sleeps and he rises night and day, and the seed sprouts and grows.

He knows not how.

The earth produces by itself, first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear.

When the grain is ripe at once he puts in the sickle, because the harvest has come.

And he said, with what can we compare the kingdom of God?

Or what parable shall we use for it?

It is like a grain of mustard seed, which when it is sown in the ground is the smallest of all the seeds on earth.

Yet when it is grown, it grows up and becomes sown.

It grows up and becomes larger than all the garden plants and puts out large branches so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.

With many such parables, he spoke to them as they were able to hear it.

He did not speak to them without a parable, but privately to his own disciples, he explained everything.

Before Andy and I got married, we went through marriage counseling.

And one of the things, probably the only thing that Dave reiterated to us over and over and over again was that it's all about expectations.

And I had no idea what Dave meant by expectations.

Like I've never been married before.

How am I supposed to expect anything from it?

And I think Andy was kind of in the same boat.

We'd have these conversations like, what does he mean by expectations?

But after we got married, we're like, oh, this is what he means by expectations.

I expect things of you and you expect things of me and these things don't line up and this creates conflict.

Nearly all of our angers and disappointments in life come from unmet expectations.

If that's true of marriage, and it's true of marriage, if it's true of work, if it's true of your human relationships in general, how much more true is it

of the Kingdom of God.

That so often the things that cause us to feel disappointed in God or upset with God or frustrated and afraid in the world come because what's happening around us does not meet our expectations for what should be happening around us.

Here in

Mark chapter 4, Jesus has been giving a series of parables, parables about the kingdom.

Verses 33-34 says, He did not speak without a parable.

The people weren't ready really to hear, in general, what Jesus had to say.

But He explained everything to His disciples.

He made it clear for them, and in doing so, as they record it, I think Jesus wants it to be clear for us, the points of these parables.

But He's speaking to the crowds in these parables, wanting it to

sit in their minds and for them to spin over and over thinking about what is the kingdom of God like?

What does Jesus compare the kingdom to?

And as we meditate on these things, Jesus wants to be setting our expectations for what the kingdom of God is like.

If we will meditate on these parables, if we will attend to them carefully, Jesus, through the parables, will realign our expectations.

The first thing that we're going to see, verses 26-29, is that seeds grow.

And the lesson from that is that there is an inevitable and sure growth in the kingdom of God.

Verse 26 says, And the kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed on the ground.

And this should link this parable in our minds with the first parable in chapter 4, the parable of the soils.

Remember verses 3 and 4.

Listen.

A sower went out