Sunday Worship – 19th July 2026 – Rural Mission Sunday

(All our songs this morning are from Singing the Faith (StF) numbers will be given where available)

Call to worship         
Lord God, we come to you with hearts that are cold,
that they may be warmed by your selfless love.
We come to you with hearts that are sinful,
that they may be cleansed by the Saviour’s precious blood.
We come to you with hearts that are weak,
that they may be strengthened by your Holy Spirit.
We come with hearts that are empty,
that they may be filled with your divine presence,
Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen

Song – STF 110 – In the wonder of Creation 

Prayers and Lord’s Prayer  

Creator God, your love is seen in the whole of creation. Season after season, in new life emerging, in your providence which sustains all your creatures, we can see beyond doubt that your love goes on.

We thank you that, throughout the history of humankind, the thread of your love is woven into every event, every relationship. Through the good times and the bad, you never forsake us. Your love goes on.

And, gracious Lord, your love was never more evident than in your great act of salvation for the world, when you sent Jesus to be our Redeemer. His life on earth was a perfect example of your boundless love. His death on the cross was the price of our salvation, which your love was willing to pay. And His glorious victory over the grave – all for our sakes and for the sake of those who loved him not. Amazing love, how can it be that you, our God, should die for us?

Thank you, heavenly Father, that we can know and feel your wonderful love in our lives, even though we sometimes allow ourselves to drift away from you. In our least deserving moments, when we have let you down and even turned our back on you, mercy comes and your love goes on.

So, we ask this morning, that you will fill us anew with your Holy Spirit. Help us to understand the breadth and depth of your love for us. Pour your love and goodness into our lives. And make us worthy disciples of your holy name.

We ask it, in the name and for the sake of Your Son, our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen

We say together the Lord’s Prayer…….Our Father,……..

Song – STF 103 – God is love, let heaven adore him 

Reading               
Matthew 13: 24-30 

Song – STF 161 – Speak O Lord, as we come to you 

Reading               
Matthew 13: 36-43

Sermon         
In chapter 13 of the gospel according to Matthew, Jesus tells 7 parables in all and he also explains to the disciples why he uses parables to teach people. It is quite hard to understand Jesus’ reasoning, when the disciples asked him “Why do you speak to the people in parables?”

This was his reply: “The knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of heaven has been given to you, but not to them. Whoever has will be given more and he will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him. This is why I speak to them in parables. “Though seeing, they do not see. Though hearing, they do not hear or understand.” Jesus concluded this message, by quoting from the prophet Isaiah, a passage which ends: “Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts and turn, and I would heal them.” How strange! It almost sounds as if Jesus did not want his hearers to learn the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, and so he spoke to them in code!

Having studied commentaries on this passage, my understanding now is that Jesus was indicating that the things of the kingdom can be understood, only by people who have chosen to join the kingdom. This connects with the role of the Holy Spirit in revealing the truth of God to people. You cannot grasp the truths of the kingdom, unless they are revealed to you by the Holy Spirit. An illustration which might help us to see what this means is a story told about Billy Graham, the great American evangelist. Although he was used to attending church – he had gone for some years before his conversion experience – he had always found the preaching dry and boring. (Sound familiar?) Well, on the first Sunday after his conversion, Billy Graham left the service and ran all the way home to tell his parents the good news that, at long last, the preacher had discovered how to preach! It wasn’t the preacher who had changed; it was the young man whose eyes and ears had been opened. The secrets of the kingdom are kept from those who do not belong, but that does not mean that Jesus is not ‘seeking the wanderers yet’, as the hymn puts it. His Holy Spirit is constantly at work preparing those whom he has chosen for the moment of revelation – unbeknown to them!…. I hope you find that helpful.

Jesus told the Parable of the Sower – the first parable in Ch 13 – to illustrate the different ways in which people hear the word of God and act upon it. For, of course, his audiences had many people who ‘had ears’ and many who did not. For your information, Ch 13 is not the record of a day in the life of Jesus in which he told a string of parables. All the parables were, undoubtedly, told by Jesus, at some time, but very likely on different occasions. It is almost certain that Matthew gathered them together in his writing to give an impact to the teaching of Jesus. And it is permissible for Matthew to group them together in this way. His gospel narrative does not pretend to be a history book, but rather an account of the life and character and teaching of Jesus, in order to convince people that Jesus was the promised Son of God and that he is Good News!

So – the first parable in the group – the Sower – is a scene setter, which supports Jesus’ use of parables. The following 6 parables all begin: “The Kingdom of Heaven is like this…..”

And today we will consider the longest of these, which incidentally also carries with it Jesus’ explanation of the parable.

The first thing to be said about this parable is that those hearing Jesus tell it, would immediately relate to it. Sowing seeds was a common occupation in the Palestinian countryside. Sadly, so too was the act of sowing weeds, also known as darnel or tares, amongst the good seed. It wasn’t something that Jesus invented. The people would recognise this, and it would clearly be something of which they would not approve. From the point of view of the farmer, it would be a disaster. The natural reaction to any emergency is to set about immediately to do what you can to remedy it. And so, once they were aware of the presence of weeds in the field, the farmer’s workers wanted to go out and pull up the offending plants before they got established. I have to say that, as an amateur gardener, I would much rather pull out weeds when they are mere shoots, than let them grow big and take over my flowers. Weeding is a back-breaking chore, but it is so worthwhile – if you are unfortunate enough to have a garden which is in the line of fire of weed seeds from your neighbour’s patch!

But the owner of the field had a different plan. He said that, if the servants set about pulling up shoots from the ground, they would not be able to distinguish between shoots which were wheat and shoots which were weeds. While they are young shoots, they all look the same. That is a fact. When seeds germinate, their initial shoot usually has just two rounds leaves and no matter what species the plants are, they all look alike. The reason I can pull up young shoots from my flower bed, is that the bedding plants that I put there are well-formed and recognisable, so I know that any new shoots coming up have not been planted by me, and so – out they come. The sooner the better.

In the story, the wheat seeds and the weed seeds were planted at the same time, and it would have been impossible to distinguish one from the other. The farmer was very wise. He knew that the best time to sort out the wheat from the weeds was harvest time. When he would instruct his farmhands to collect the weeds first and burn them, and then collect the wheat and put it in his barn. Sound advice about tending crops…….. it would be worthy of Monty Don on Gardener’s World. And we can assume that those in Jesus’ audience who knew nothing about the kingdom of heaven would go home, satisfied that they had heard wisdom from an expert farmer, and not looking for any more truth in the story. But for us, who have chosen to join the kingdom, there is much more meaning to be gleaned from the story, and that is what we shall look at now.

In the verses where Jesus explains the parable to the disciples (and note that this was some time after the crowds had gone away and Jesus was talking just to the disciples) he says that the man who sowed the good seed is the Son of Man. We can accept that, because Jesus was the Word which was with God at creation and which spoke into being all that is and ever was. In other words, God sowed the good seeds, which represent the people who belong to the kingdom. The weeds are people who do evil in the world and belong to the Devil. The harvest is the end of the age, and the harvest workers are God’s angels.

There is no place in the kingdom of heaven for people who follow their own evil desires and do not obey the will of God. What is important about this story is the timing of the weeding out of the bad people. That does not come until the end of time – or – the end of their lives, whichever comes first. That is the time of judgement. The time when people are brought to account for their actions during their lifetime.

There are three important points to be learned from this parable:

1. There WILL be a time when God will judge people.
2. WE are included in those who will be judged: Shock horror! But, I hear you saying, we are people of the kingdom. We have been accepted, justified and forgiven.
3. It is not for us to judge other people. That is God’s role. If we see people plainly doing wrong now, living a bad life now, who is to say that God will not take hold of them and transform their lives. It is never too late to repent and start a new life!

So – there will be judgement. God is a just God. We may be tempted to think that, whilst the God of the Old Testament was a just God, whose wrath and anger was often in evidence, as he punished people for their misdeeds, the God of the New Testament, as revealed by Jesus, is a soft-touch, more ready to forgive than to punish. Therefore, it doesn’t matter how we behave, because God will turn a blind eye to our sins, and when we die, we will be able to waltz into heaven, willy nilly. It is true that Jesus said: “God did not send his Son into the world to be its judge, but to be its Saviour.” But the same Jesus also spoke about the final judgement, when the sheep will be divided from the goats, based upon how they have lived their lives. The sheep will be welcomed into the kingdom, but the goats will be sent to the eternal fire, which has been prepared for the Devil and his angels. And Jesus concludes: “The evil will be sent off to eternal punishment, but the righteous will go to eternal life.”

We must not put ourselves on a pedestal, and hear these words of Jesus as applying to other people, whilst thinking that, we, being in the kingdom, are in some way exempt from judgement. That is not the case. We are all of us subject to God’s judgement and will one day have to account for our lives and our actions. And the awkward bit is: we don’t know when that will be. It might be tomorrow. It might even be later today! Whilst we are: accepted, redeemed and forgiven, it is possible at any time for us to fall from grace – and so to join the goats! We must be on our guard all the time and take the advice of St Paul, who says in Philippians 4 v 8: “Fill your minds with those things that are good and that deserve praise: things that are true, noble, right, pure, lovely and honourable. Put into practice what you learnt and received from me, both from my words and my actions. And the God who gives you peace, will be with you.” There will be judgement and we will be judged.

But it is true that God who is just, is also a God of love. His name and his nature is love. Which causes him to be the God of second chances. He takes fallen people and he lifts them up. He transforms their lives. And he makes them into new creations. This happens in the pages of the Bible. It also happens all the time in our own day and age. Two people I know, have been down in the pits of the earth, lost and seemingly without hope and now they are God’s faithful servants, living a new life, which bears no resemblance to their bad past. I know they would not mind me using them as examples of Christ’s saving grace, because they tell their stories as often and as widely as God calls them to.

The first is Clare, who grew up at St Andrew’s, but in her late teens became addicted to drugs and her life spiralled out of control. She stole from members of her family, to fund her addiction, and she got into an awful mess, which caused real heartache to the whole family. There seemed no way out of the situation. But God stepped in. Clare was approached by a Christian man on the street in Leeds, who belonged to an organisation called Teen Challenge. It is a world-wide organisation, which rescues drug addicts. It was started originally by Nicky Cruz, the New York gangster-turned-Christian, whose story is told in The Cross and the Switchblade, if you know the book. To cut a long story short, Clare accepted the invitation of Teen Challenge to go and live in a hostel for women in South Wales called, appropriately, Hope House. The house operates a very strict regime of tough love, but has had many successes in turning round lives which were apparently hopeless, and through Teen Challenge, God turned Clare into a new woman. She is now restored to her family, happily married and a strong witness for Jesus. When she comes before the judgement of God, he will take no account of the dark period of her life, but he will rejoice in the new being he has created and to whom he gave a second chance.

The second person I know, who had his life turned round by God is called Mark. Mark used to work in the Bradford Central foodbank, at the time my wife, Chrissie, helped there as a volunteer. He is such a kind and gentle giant, that it is hard to believe where he has come from. God sees potential in people like Clare and Mark, and he can work a miracle, with their co-operation.

To return now to the parable of the weeds….

If the angel-reapers had come along, whilst Clare and Mark were at their worst, it is more than likely they would have been sent to the fire. But God says: “Wait. Don’t judge them now. Give them a second chance.” God does not rush into judgement. As the parable teaches us, He waits for the time of the harvest.

And so we must learn these things from this parable:

God will judge people. And he will judge us. And his judgement will come at the time of the harvest. That will be at the end of time. Or at the end of our life. And we don’t know when that will be. We must be sure that our lives will please God when he judges us. Will your life stand up to God’s scrutiny? Let’s make sure that, when the time comes, we will be recognised as good seed, by the fruit we bear. Jesus said: “You did not choose me; I chose you and appointed you to go and bear much fruit; the kind of fruit that endures.” Oh! And we must not be hasty to judge other people, for God may not have finished with them yet. Praise him for his saving grace. Amen.

Song – STF 123 – Come, ye thankful people come

Prayers of intercession

(These prayers are, necessarily, being prepared in advance of the service date. Please feel free to add your own prayers for current news events and any personal concerns you have for friends or family members.)

God of peace, we pray that you will bring peace to those areas of the world where innocent people are suffering from violence. Intervene, we pray, as you did in Old Testament times, to strengthen the weak and overthrow the aggressors. Please restore harmony between and within nations. May the light of Christ drive away the darkness of enmity. Let love have the victory.

We pray for the people of Venezuela, in so much suffering as a result of the earthquakes. Please, Lord, comfort the bereaved, heal the wounded and help the nation to rebuild its destroyed cities.

We pray for refugees around the world, especially those risking their lives to escape from intolerable conditions in their homeland. Please keep them safe and help them to find safe havens, in which they can rebuild their lives. Help us, and the people of Bradford, to welcome those refugees who arrive in our city.

We pray for people suffering from the effects of extreme weather, resulting from Climate Change. Guide the leaders of the nations to heed the scientific evidence and to take steps to reduce greenhouse gases, and so preserve the future of our planet.

And finally, Lord, as we bring to mind friends and family members who have needs at this time, we hold them before you now…….Name the needs before God…… Lord, you know the situations and needs of all those for whom we pray. We ask that you will deal graciously with them. Comfort those who suffer and those who mourn, and bring your healing to the sick.

Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayers. In the name and for the sake of our Lord, Jesus Christ. Amen

Song – STF 481 – The Lord’s my Shepherd, I’ll not want

Benediction              
From the One who was and who is and who is to come, the Almighty:
grace, light, and peace be with you all. Amen