Good Soil – Where Real Life Rises | Good Soil: Where Real Life Rises | Mark 4:1–20

reached by Robin Vonk | 31 May 2026, 6:00 pm

Everyone is looking for the good life. But what if we've been looking in all the wrong places?

In this message from our series Good Soil – Where Real Life Rises, Robin Vonk brings us to the parable that gives the whole series its name — one of Jesus' most famous and most searching stories. It is a parable that doesn't just describe different kinds of people out there. It holds up a mirror and asks: " What kind of soil are you?

Jesus is teaching beside the sea, the crowd so large that He speaks from a boat. And the story He tells is deceptively simple: a farmer scatters seed, and it falls on four different kinds of ground. But when the disciples ask Him privately what it means, Jesus opens up a world of extraordinary depth. The seed, He explains, is the word of God — the message of the kingdom, the gospel itself. And the soil is the human heart.

Here is the gospel at the heart of this parable: the sower is extravagantly generous. He does not carefully select only the most promising ground before scattering the seed. He throws it everywhere — on the path, on the rocks, among the thorns, and on the good soil alike. This is the grace-filled generosity of God, who sends His word — and ultimately His Son — into a world that is largely hard, shallow, and distracted. Jesus Himself is the seed that fell into the ground and died, so that a harvest beyond all imagining might rise. The gospel is not rationed to the deserving. It is scattered lavishly, freely, over all.

But the parable also calls for honest self-examination. The question is not simply whether we have heard the gospel, but whether we have received it.

This sermon is part of the series Good Soil – Where Real Life Rises, exploring the Gospel of Mark.

Link to sermon outline: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1g0nBbf9jZZEMl4hB7teY24MJOmdIiOAV/view

Good Soil – Where Real Life Rises | Jesus: The Man Who Calls Us Family | Mark 3:7–35

Preached by Ian Morrison | 24 May 2026, 9:30 am

In this message from our series Good Soil – Where Real Life Rises, Ian Morrison brings us to a passage in Mark's Gospel that builds to one of the most astonishing lines Jesus ever spoke.

The opposition closes in from two very different directions — and the contrast between them is sharp enough to cut.

First, His own family. They have come to take Him away, convinced He has lost His mind. They are close to Jesus by blood, and yet in this moment, they are missing Him entirely. Proximity is not the same as understanding. Familiarity is not the same as faith.

Then the teachers of the law arrive from Jerusalem — the insiders of the religious world — and their verdict is damning: He is possessed by Beelzebul. He casts out demons by the prince of demons. Jesus dismantles their logic with calm precision. A kingdom divided against itself cannot stand. But underneath the argument lies a sobering warning about what it means to place oneself in permanent, hardened opposition to the work of God's Spirit. This is not a passage about accidentally saying the wrong thing — it is a warning about a settled, deliberate rejection of the One who has come to save.

"Here are my mother and my brothers. Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother." The family of Jesus is not born into — it is entered by faith and obedience. It is a family defined not by DNA but by grace.

This is the gospel made personal. Jesus did not come merely to teach us or to fix our behaviour. He came to bring us home — to draw us into the very family of God. On the cross, He bore the full weight of our outsider status, our wandering, our rebellion — so that we who were once far off might be brought near. So that we might hear Him say, without qualification: you are mine.

The implications stretch in every direction. If Jesus calls His followers family, then how we treat one another within that family matters profoundly. The church is not a club, not a crowd, not a loose gathering of like-minded individuals. It is a family — with all the depth, the commitment, the vulnerability, and the belonging that word carries.

This sermon is part of the series Good Soil – Where Real Life Rises, exploring the Gospel of Mark.

🔗Sermon Outline: https://drive.google.com/file/d/13uAcTUrkP2iH6zo5_Xkf7iayKImKY3zN/view

Editor's Note: I have noticed that this and the previous few sermon recordings are randomly skipping/jumping ahead. I don't know what this is, but I will aim to fix it in the coming recordings. Apologies for any inconvenience.

Good Soil – Where Real Life Rises | Jesus: Opposed by the Religious | Mark 2:13–3:6

Preached by Ian Morrison | 17 May 2026, 6:00 pm

We all have boxes. Neat categories for how the world should work, how people should behave, and — dangerously — who God should be. But what happens when Jesus refuses to fit inside any of them?

In this message from our series Good Soil – Where Real Life Rises, Ian Morrison walks us through a mounting series of confrontations between Jesus and the religious establishment of His day. With every encounter, the tension rises — and Jesus becomes harder and harder to contain.

It begins with a scandal. Jesus calls Levi, a tax collector — a man considered a traitor and a cheat by his own people — and not only invites him to follow, but sits down to eat with him and his disreputable friends. The Pharisees are appalled. This is not how a holy man behaves. But Jesus answers them with words that cut to the heart of the gospel: "It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners." Jesus is not made unclean by the company He keeps. He is the One who makes the unclean clean. He is the Friend of Sinners — and that is very good news for all of us.

Then comes a question about fasting. Why don't Jesus' disciples fast like John's disciples, like the Pharisees? Jesus' answer is startling and tender: you don't mourn at a wedding while the bridegroom is still with you. He is the Bridegroom — the One to whom all the longing and hope of Israel's story has been pointing. The old religious forms were always preparations, shadows, pointers. Now the reality has arrived in person, and everything must be rethought. New wine, Jesus says, cannot be poured into old wineskins. The gospel is not a patch on the old system — it is something wonderfully, disruptively new.

But the most explosive confrontation is still to come. Walking through grain fields on the Sabbath, then standing in a synagogue before a man with a withered hand, Jesus deliberately and openly agitates. He will not let the law of God be twisted into a weapon of oppression. He heals on the Sabbath — not to break God's law, but to fulfil its deepest intention. God's commands were always about human flourishing, never about cold religious performance. The Pharisees are furious. Mark tells us, chillingly, that they begin to plot how they might destroy Him.

And here is the irony laid bare: the most religious people of the day — the rule-keepers, the box-builders, the guardians of orthodoxy — become the ones most opposed to God in the flesh. Their boxes were never big enough for Jesus. Their religion had drifted so far from the heart of God that they could watch a man healed and respond with murderous anger.

This is a warning and an invitation for every listener. It is possible to be deeply religious and yet to have missed Jesus entirely. It is possible to keep all the right external rules while keeping Jesus safely at arm's length. The gospel calls us not to a tidier version of self-managed religion, but to an encounter with a living Person — One who sits with sinners, who celebrates like a bridegroom, who agitates our comfortable assumptions and refuses to be domesticated.

The boxes we build can never hold Him. The question is whether we're willing to let Him out.

This sermon is part of the series Good Soil – Where Real Life Rises, exploring the Gospel of Mark.