I. Observe the minuteness of the seed which is ordinarily first deposited by God's Spirit in man's heart. If you examine the records of Christian biography, you will find, so far as it is possible to search out such facts, that conversion is commonly to be traced to inconsiderable beginnings, a single word, a solitary verse, a casual expression, one of these it is which, in the vast variety of cases, settles down into the heart, and after lying buried there a year it may be, or two years, or ten years, it will suddenly and unexpectedly vegetate, so that the forgotten and apparently dead grain shoots into a plant of conversion and righteousness.
II. The parable under review is an accurate figure of the religion of Jesus Christ, when considered in respect of its spreading over all the earth. It has been sometimes thought that there lies an evidence against the Divine origin of Christianity, in the fact of the inconsiderable progress that it has hitherto made among men. We think, calculating probabilities by our imperfect arithmetic, that Christianity, as soon as published, might have been expected to start into unlimited empire. But the Bible gives no countenance to such an expectation. On the contrary, a season of depression and disaster, and occasionally almost extinction, introductory, indeed, but at long distance, to a season of strength and glory this is throughout the Scriptures a Scriptural representation. The parable before us agrees in all its main features with those ordinarily given in Scripture. The imagery drawn from our fields and gardens will always suggest the idea of a difficult and interrupted growth. As a general rule, vegetable productions pass through so many positions of danger ere they reach their maturity, that likening the text to a kingdom or dispensation will always suggest, if not actually require, the idea that such a kingdom or such a dispensation can only reach its greatness or its fulness by passing through long stages of difficulty or hindrance.
H. Melvill, Penny Pulpit,No. 1,907.
I. Small beginning may have great endings. (a) This should encourage all holy labourers. (b) This should alarm all wicked men.
II. Vitality is more than magnitude. (a) This applies to creeds; (b) to church agencies or organisations; (c) to a public profession of faith.
III. The least thing in nature is a better illustration of Divine truth than the greatest object in art. The least of all seeds more fitly represents the kingdom of heaven than the most elaborate of all statuary.
Parker, City Temple,1871, p. 82.
References: Mark 4:30-32. Homiletic Quarterly,vol. ii., p. 472.Mark 4:30-34. H. M. Luckock, Footprints of the Son of Man,p. 89.