Pastor Randy Hoskins

​Senior Pastor - First Congregational, Ashland, NE

September 10, 2021

In my Bible reading this morning, I came across a one sentence parable that Jesus told in Matthew 13:33. "He told them still another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into about sixty pounds of flour until it worked all through the dough.”" As I was thinking about this, it took me back to my efforts at homebrewing beer. There are multiple steps to brewing beer, but basically you soak grain in heated water until you get the sugar out of it, then you boil it for an hour or so adding any flavorings you want. At this point you have what is called "wort" - a rather bland and lifeless liquid that might even look kind of nasty.

​It's at this point you add the yeast. When working with a 5 gallon batch of beer, you use a very small packet of yeast, less than an ounce. You stir it into the wort, then watch it go to work. It starts slowly, a few carbon dioxide bubbles here and there, but within a few days it will be rapidly bubbling away. I've even had some batches where it got so carried away that it bubbled over to the point where it made quite a mess running over the sides. Over the next week or two, it slows down as all of the sugar that the yeast has been feeding on has been used up.
 
Most commercial brewers, and some homebrewers, then "harvest" the yeast for use in future batches of beer. While the yeast may have slowed down and become virtually dormant in its current batch, when put back into a new, sugar rich batch of wort, it will again actively and aggressively begin converting sugar into carbon dioxide.
 
While most uses of yeast (or leaven) in the Bible refer to evil, that is not the case in this short parable. Jesus was showing how the kingdom of heaven would grow. Starting with just a handful of disciples, mixed into the entire world, the kingdom that Jesus was bringing would eventually spread everywhere. I saw this firsthand at our church we attended in Lincoln. New believers would come into the church and they'd be bringing new families with them every week. Over time, that would start to slow down as they "used up" all the friends and family that they knew.
 
If that's where you find yourself, everyone you know already has a church, let me throw out a challenge - where can you find a new batch of people to work on? There are plenty of people out there that need to hear the message of the kingdom of heaven, but who aren't being reached. We should all be actively searching for those people to bring them in and then watch what God can do in and through both us and them.
 
Pastor Randy
402-450-4447

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PASTOR RANDY HOSKINS

After serving as part-time pastor, Pastor Randy was called to full-time ministry in February of 2020.
​He and Velvet now live in Ashland.