Jesus Walks on the Water and With You Well, today we continue our journey through the Gospel of Matthew. And as we do, there's some points of background that we need to keep in mind to better understand Matthew's purposes in writing this gospel to his original audience. Now when we better understand what Matthew was communicating to that original audience, we can better understand the application of Matthew's gospel to us today. It appears that Matthew wrote his gospel for a church and a Jewish Christian church in particular. And perhaps the first and foremost thing that Matthew wanted his audience to understand was the answer to the question, who is Jesus? Also, Matthew realized that his church was faced with persecution and was having to deal with discouragement. And so, they had questions. questions like why God was allowing trials and tests and hardships to come upon those who were the devoted followers of Jesus? After all, where was God in the midst of all of the trials and the tests and the orals that they were going through? Where was God in all of this? Well, as we examine our paricopy today in Matthew chap 14:22-33.

let's take a look at that story in Matthew 14:13- 21. and along with the disciples of Jesus, let's learn a lesson in discipleship and in participation in the ongoing ministry of Jesus Christ - Feeds the Five Thousand

Today we have opportunity to be in the book of Matthew and it's a section where Jesus is telling a bunch of parables and a lot of people recognize that parables are they're stories right stories and they're not nec they're not stories about true people, but stories that that bring us just kind of shedding light on different realities, helping us to grasp something that maybe is not familiar to us. Jesus has this incredible reality of the kingdom of God that he is sharing with us.  Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

I am Linda Sitterley, the lead pastor here for Grace Communion River Road. The title of the sermon, as you can see, Sowing Harvest, it had me thinking about what a customer told me a few weeks back at work. We were talking about the death of her sister, and it got a little just a little philosophical kind of like it always does at work. We tend to become like a bar where people come in with their things and then they become our things and their problems become our problems and then we're sitting and we're trying to help them all kind of get through their problems and so it's like yeah I am a bartender at times you know and there are times I do need a drink I refrain most of the time but what she said had me really thinking and I think I might have heard this a long time ago, but it really brought it back to my mind. This thing about living between the dash. And I don't know if you've all heard that before, but I looked it up again just to kind of make sure that I understood what it really meant. But living between the dash refers to the time a person spends alive on Earth, and it comes from the famous poem the dash by Linda Ellis. And the metaphor suggests that the birth and the death years on a tombstone are just bookends. And while the little dash, that line in between represents your entire life, that little dash is all of your experiences and it will be your legacy, that tiny little dash. The phrase is a powerful reminder that material possessions and wealth do not matter. Instead, it challenges people to reflect on how they spend their dash by focusing on how you live and how you love. And that song that we just did, Reckless Love, I think it kind of really speaks to this passage that we're going to look at today. The parable of the wheat and the weeds. It reminds us that our dash is also a season of growth, as we will see from today's scripture reading. But here when we before we get to that, here we find Jesus in the middle of sharing a series of parables about the kingdom of God and what it's going to look like.

Today we're going to be looking at the parable of the soar in the Gospel of Matthew. But before we get into the parable itself, there are a few things we need to know to understand its meaning to Matthew's original audience and its application to us as Christians today.

Today, we're going to follow up on last week's sermon which covered Romans 6:es 1- 11. And today we're going to cover verses 12- 23. Remember last week we emphasized our spiritual union with Christ and how important that is.