Let Both Grow Together (Matthew 13:30)

 


Tuesday, 14 October, 2025


Psalms 108; 109:20-30

2 Kings 2:15-3:3

Matthew 13:18-30


Let Both Grow Together (Matthew 13:30)


“Let both grow together until the harvest, and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, “Gather the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.”’”


Walking along the path of Christian discipleship as one living in the real world, we often find ourselves coming into moral conflict. Smarter people than I describe it as the difference between orthodoxy and orthopraxy; that is, the conflict we find when the truth we know in our head seems to butt up against the truth we know by deed. We are very good at creating these conflicts: we always need to find a way to live with the fact that we have been given eternal, divine truths on human behaviour, yet none of us manage to live up to that standard perfectly.


Jesus gave us a parable about weeds growing up with wheat, to describe the fact that in the Church there will always be non-Christians. But the point of his story is that we are to let God look after the harvest; God is the one who gets to decide who is “in”, and who is “out”.


What is most terrifying about this parable is it makes us ask ourselves: am I wheat? Or am I a weed? Was I planted by the man who sowed good seed? Or was I planted here by the enemy?


I don’t think there is an easy answer. Going back to our original problem, of balancing Godly behavioural standards with God’s commandment to love, perhaps we just need to sit in that until the final day when we see Christ clearly face to face. As long as we are doing our best to please Christ, by following all his commandments, both those for holy living as well as those for loving one another, then we know we are wheat, and will be gathered into his kingdom to live with and love him forever.


What contradiction between what you think and how you should act have you faced recently? How did living the love of Christ provide a pathway through?


Lord Christ Jesus, your word has gone throughout time and space and reached us here today. Plant your word deep in us, and tend it with your love, that we may spend our days living in your grace, and be a message of your grace to those around us.

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