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Here is a most important point, and one easy to overlook. Many believers have a kind of deistic view of Jesus and what He’s up to in the world today. He has finished His course, run His race, ascended into heaven, and now He sits back and watches the action unfold, looking out over the events of history to see if anyone will believe the Good News and allow themselves to be born again. The picture that Jesus presents in the parable of the wheat and the tares is much different. Here the Lord is actively present in the world, sowing “the good seed” into the whole field of the world. How does He do that? Through His Spirit in the Church, by the witness of transformed lives and the proclamation of transforming grace and truth. Here Jesus embodies the mission of the Church and the purpose of His Spirit in giving His people power to be witnesses for Him (Acts 1:8).
Every Christian must consider that Jesus intends us to be both seeds and sowers in the process of blanketing the world with the Good News of the Kingdom of God. Christians are the good seed of the Kingdom. When you plant an acorn into the ground, what do you expect? Do you expect a little scrawny understory tree to emerge, barely hardy enough to stand against a strong wind? Of course not. You’re envisioning a towering oak, flush with glorious leaves, reproducing acorns in regular cycles to fill the ground around it with other oaks like itself. When Jesus sows the good seed of the Kingdom, what does He expect? Little twigs of believers shivering against the storms of unbelief and sin, hiding away in the greenhouses of their churches, singing their praise songs and studying their Bibles in harmless clusters, away from the world and its woes, and hardly intending to turn anything upside down in the name of Jesus?
No. Jesus is sowing the good seed of the Kingdom, and that means we are to pursue the Kingdom with all our conscious might so that we grow, day by day, in the righteousness, peace, joy, and justice that characterize this advancing realm where King Jesus rules (Rom. 14:17, 18; Is. 9:7). If we are indeed the good seed of the Kingdom, then we must seek and expect – as Jesus surely does – that all the fruit and flower and force of the Kingdom will be increasingly in evidence in our lives, throughout every aspect of our lives, in all our relationships, roles, and responsibilities.
And then we are to reproduce that glorious, transformed life in others, by sowing the good seed of the Kingdom into every area of their lives, until the progress of the Kingdom begins to be seen wherever we raise the banner of our King. People will be converted to Christ. Manners will change, conversation will improve, frivolous and unfruitful interests will be abandoned, foolish and sinful ways will be forsaken, churches will be revived, cultures will be renewed, whole societies and even the times in which we live will declare by the justice and righteousness in which they thrive that we serve another King, Whose Name is Jesus, and Whose ways fly victoriously in the face of all the sad world’s darkness, doubt, and desperation (Acts 17:1-9). You are good seed of the Kingdom, or you are not a Christian at all.
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Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture references are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version, copyright 2001by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Pattern of History 
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