Who Is a True Child of God?

I’d like to turn to Matthew chapter 13, verse 29 and 30. Now, this is the chapter of the parables of the kingdom of God. This chapter contains the seven parables of the kingdom of God. And one of the main parables is the parable of the wheat and the tares. I’m sure it’s familiar to most people.

It speaks about a farmer who sowed his field with good wheat. But at night, when nobody was watching, an enemy came and deliberately sowed tares. I’m not an agricultural expert, but I understand that tares are weeds that are very closely similar to wheat, at least in their early stages of growth.

And so, according to the parable, when the servants woke up in the morning, they found the tares growing with the wheat. And I think the whole is a picture of what we would call Christendom, or the kingdom of God. So, we find wheat that brings forth the appropriate fruit, and tares that look like wheat, but don’t bring forth any fruit.

In the parable, the servants of the landowner said, “Well, shall we go out and pull up the tares?” And I’ll give you the answer that’s recorded here. In verse 29, the landowner said,

“No, lest while you gather up the tares you also uproot the wheat with them.”

That indicates that there’s very little to distinguish between the wheat and the tares. Even people working in the field could easily have pulled up wheat, imagining it was a tare. In other words, there’s very little outward difference between the true, fruit-producing believers and the ones who claim to be believers, but don’t produce fruit. The whole is a picture, not of the unbelieving world, but of what Jesus calls the kingdom of God, or we would call Christendom.

Then Jesus gives God’s program for dealing with the tares. He says,

“Let both grow together,” that’s wheat and the tares, “until the harvest. And at the time of harvest I will say to the reapers, ‘First gather together the tares and bind them in bundles to burn them, but gather the wheat into my barn.’”

Now, in the interpretation of the parable, Jesus says the reapers in this context are the angels. So, it’s too difficult a job for human beings to sort out the tares from the wheat. So, Jesus said, “That’s not your problem. Leave that to me and the angels. When the time comes, I will deal with it.” I think that’s important because so often in our zeal, if we have any function in the body of Christ, we might say, “Well, let’s get rid of the tares.”

I mean, sometimes it’s very provoking to be dealing with people who claim to be Christians and don’t appear to bring forth any fruit. We might think, “Well, the answer is, get them out of the church.” But that’s not the answer. We have to be patient. We have to tolerate the fact that amongst the wheat there are some tares. And our main responsibility is to make sure that I, personally, am wheat and not a tare.

I used to teach students in Africa and Kenya years ago. My real aim was to bring them to the Lord. And they had certain standard objections, which they used as excuses for rejecting the gospel. And one of them was, “There are too many hypocrites in the church.” Well, my answer was, “The New Testament indicates very plainly there are going to be hypocrites in the church. So, if there were no hypocrites in the church, the New Testament wouldn’t be true. The fact that there are hypocrites in the church indicates the New Testament is true, and therefore you ought to believe it. Only just make sure that you’re not a hypocrite yourself.”

So, here we have a situation, and I personally have to say frankly, I believe it applies to contemporary Christendom all over the world, where we have wheat and tares growing side by side. And it’s not our business to eliminate the tares. Our responsibility is to make sure that we are wheat.