Hello, welcome to another Follow Him favorites. My name is Hank Smith. I'm here with the incredible John by the way. Hello John by the way. Hi.

I'm feeling incredible.

You are incredible. You know the drill on follow him favorites. We're going to take just a single question from this week's lesson to analyze the question this week. John is what's up with Jesus and parables. Why does Jesus like parables so much?

It depends on how you define a parable, but I think there's around a total about 55 parables in the four gospels. So Jesus is always talking in parables. He's always telling stories. Why do you think he did that?

Oh, you see, one of the best answers for that is given by Jesus himself in Matthew 13 right after he tells the parable of the sower. The disciples say, why are you speaking of parables? Yeah, what are you doing?

He explains the calling of Isaiah of all things that some will see with their eyes here with their ears understand with their heart be converted and be healed. And then he says after he kind of explains the Bible dictionary. I think says both to reveal and to conceal.

But those who come up afterwards and say, why are you doing this? He says and here now the parable the sower and he gives them more. So I think the key is read it. Think about it. Ponder about it.

And you'll get even more. I suppose that some heard the first parable and went, huh and walked away. But those who actually thought about it got more. And I love him because they're fun. They're visual. Their stories.

You can picture it in your mind and understand it more than just statements of principles or doctrines. So I love the parables. What do you think?

Hank? Why would he do that?

This to me is something that is miraculous. These stories that Jesus told 2000 years ago. We still talk about them and get so much out of them. The parable, the prodigal son, the parable of the labor is in the vineyard, the parable of the good Samaritan, Lazarus and the rich man, the king's feast.

All of these stories that aren't that long. They're not page turners. You're not like, oh, what happens next? Right. Where does he plant the seeds next?

These stories have lasted through millennia and they're going to keep going. So I'm in the Bible dictionary. It says the parable reveals to the

hearer gospel trues exactly in proportion to their faith and intelligence. So you hear a parable or read a parable. You get nothing out of it.

What does that say about you? What does that mean? Yeah.

So we dive into these parables and we start to look at the details. The fun of the parables, I think, is in the details. If you just read the story and say, okay, a guy planted some seed, some of them grew and some of them didn't.

That's not the pair. Go in the details. Look at the specific soils. What he says about them and try to analyze what is that? What does he mean?

And how do I grow roots so that I can have fruit one day? Yeah. I want to be the good ground. There's four different types of ground. I want to be the good ground. How can I be the good ground?

And really after the parable, the sower, you can really analyze your own heart and make some changes in your life and in your personal worship that really can have influence for the rest of your life.

In fact, the details there, he even tells us what the weeds are, the cares of this world, the deceitfulness of riches and in mark the lust of other things so we can actually go, oh, do I have any of those weeds?

How do I weed my life? Most people have had the trial of trying to grow something with rocks all the way around and pulling out those rocks and how hard that is and sometimes the rock is huge and you just got to dig it out and take it out.

And how long that takes and how difficult it is can play into how you feel about the story. You can say, I know I've taken rocks out of the ground. That's hard to do.

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