All God gives you when he gives you his word is the seed.

But Dr. Tony Evans says that the soil won't allow it to grow, it's not the seed's fault.

When the word of God goes to work, inside the soul of a believer, you're going to see the explosion of the new life.

This is the alternative broadcast featuring the timeless biblical teachings from the archives of Dr. Tony Evans.

People who plant vegetable gardens usually expect to wind up with vegetables.

But lots of things can go wrong between the seed and the salad.

Today, Dr. Evans explains why some of those same problems can hinder

our spiritual growth. Let's join him as he begins. Jesus speaks of a treasure. He calls this

treasure the mystery of the kingdom. He says about the kingdom that this thing called the kingdom

is an unusual treasure for which He says about the kingdom that this thing called the kingdom is

an unusual treasure for which there ought to be nothing that gets in your way of discovering it.

This word kingdom means rule.

Eschatologically, in terms of the final things, it refers to the millennial reign of Christ,

a subject that the Bible talks quite a bit about when Jesus Christ will return and run the whole earth from Jerusalem,

under his thousand-year rule.

In the meantime, he set forth during his earthly life, kingdom principles.

But he set them forth as a mystery, as something that was not previously understood, but needed

to be understood if you were going to understand the uniqueness of this treasure that he calls

the kingdom. When he wanted to explain this treasure, he would use parables. A parable is a earthly

story with a heavenly meaning. Jesus would take something ordinary, something everydayish,

something that would be known to all to teach them about something of which they were unaware.

Beginning in verse four of Luke chapter 8, a sower went out to sow his seeds. He tells the story about

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