Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life and the time it takes to get to work.

I'm Jensen Holt McNair. Mark Chapter 4 is the first time that we encounter Jesus speaking in parables in this gospel.

Now, parables are not unique to the ministry of Jesus. Teachers for centuries have used parables, stories to help their students understand

maybe a more complex topic. Most parables that come to mind are probably the kind that portray a moral

truth in a way that a child could understand.

Tell a kid the story of the tortoise in the hair.

They'll be entertained and hopefully learn the lesson that perseverance and consistency matter more than inherent ability and speed.

Now, our perception of parables is shaped by the ones that we

continue to tell today, which is why when we approach the parables of Jesus, it feels really

natural to see his teaching style as a way to just teach morality, to show you how you should be

acting. But this isn't his primary reason for

teaching in parables, nor is it his goal. See, Jesus taught in parables to tell his audience about the

kingdom of God. You see, his primarily Jewish audience would have already had a belief that God was sending a Messiah

to establish an everlasting kingdom on earth. And so as Jesus begins to reveal himself in ministry,

as people begin to say that he is the Messiah, the crowds would have assumed that his next

move would be to establish this kingdom of God.

But the kingdom of God that they were thinking of was a physical nation to reinstate Israel,

to put a physical king back on the throne in a palace like there once was.

They probably expected him to overthrow the Romans. But this was very different

than the kingdom that Jesus had come to proclaim. And so he uses parables, stories to unveil his kingdom,

to display the ways of the kingdom of God.

In today's passage, the first parable founded Mark, we are given a parable that reveals to us

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