Soil & Seed – The Keys to the Kingdom – Plant the Seed!
Pastor Chad Everett | The Roads Church
Welcome and Introduction
Hey, let’s jump into the message. I want to welcome you again. I know Justin did a great job with that. Welcome Carlinville and Effingham! Next Sunday, come on, The Roads Church family, all together: Mount Carmel, Norris City, and Effingham. Next Sunday is the first-ever service for our Carlinville family in their own building. Yeah! Super excited about that for our Carlinville family. I will be there next Sunday morning for that first service. Praise the Lord! We’re praying that God’s going to do fantastic things in Carlinville.
There’s no Marion service tonight with Memorial Day weekend; we’ve canceled that. But I want to get into what God’s speaking to me about here. We talked about it last week a little bit: Soil and Seed – The Keys to the Kingdom.
The Foundation of Soil and Seed
We love the Bible here at The Roads Church. We get excited when we open it up because we believe it is life to those who find it, health to all of their flesh. So if you’ve got your Bibles, come on, get them out. Open to Genesis chapter 1. Sermon notes are available on the YouVersion Bible app if you’d like to follow along or download those. Use them!
I will say something else about the app. If you haven’t downloaded the YouVersion Bible app, you need to do it for a couple of reasons: one, just so you can read your Bible right off your phone; number two, we also have information on there. They have study guides available. What Teresa Fenton has put together has just been amazing! There is a study guide based on the sermons that you can actually download. There are discussion questions and all this. So just tools for you to be able to get more out of the word than just in one sermon. I looked at it, and I’m like, man, this stuff’s really good, and it’s because of what she’s put together. So, shout out to Teresa Fenton for a fantastic job there. Come on, Teresa!
Praying for the Word
Hey, before I preach, let’s pray. Father, we need You. We desire You. We want to hear from You. You’re everything, and without You, there is nothing. So we just surrender our hearts to You, Jesus, that this word will not just be a sermon that comes into our ears, but I pray that it will be a voice piercing into our hearts, and it will bring change on the inside of us. So Lord, we thank You for the opportunity to gather around Your word, to proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ, to look at Your holy scriptures, and to find You. Thank You, Lord, for the privilege and honor. It’s in Jesus’ mighty name. Everybody say amen.
The Kingdom of God: God’s System
Now, the principle of soil and seed is key to the kingdom of God. When I use the phrase kingdom of God, I want to make sure you understand what I mean. The kingdom of God is the system of God—God’s will and way of doing things. When we talk about the kingdom of God, it’s about the system: how God does things.
The foundation for many principles of the Word can be found in the beginning, before the fall, before sin. We can find out what God intended from the very beginning. That’s why I like getting the basis for my foundational beliefs from the beginning, because I can see what did God put in place before we messed it up.
In Genesis 1 and 2, we can see what God intended. It didn’t take long. Genesis 3: man began to create their alternative plan. I like to see how God set up this world, how He set up this earth, how He wanted it to function, and then bring that forward into what Jesus did when He came.
Genesis 1:1 says, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.”
God’s Creative Power and the Principle of Seed
What I want to pull out of this is that in the beginning, God created. Everybody say “created.” This part’s important. When God created, it’s the Hebrew word bara, which means to form or produce something. It can be translated “create”—to bring into existence, to make something that was not in existence before. So creation, this Hebrew word, means to make something that does not exist. Not to put something together to build something; no, that’s what we do. This Hebrew word means something was not, and now it is. That’s God. He creates. Everybody say “creates.”
He created the heavens and the earth. The earth—we’re going to focus on it because it’s the topic of the soil—it means the ground, the land, the solid part of the earth’s surface. He created this earth. He created the dirt. He created the soil, the solid part of the surface.
Jump down to verse 10: “And God called the dry land Earth, and the gathering together of the waters He called Seas. And God saw that it was good.” Then God said, “Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb that yields seed, and the fruit tree that yields fruit according to its kind, whose seed is in itself.” And it was so on the earth. Verse 12: “And the earth brought forth grass, the herb that yields seed according to its kind, and the tree that yields fruit, whose seed is in itself according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.” So the evening and the morning were the third day.