A Little Leaven
Another parable He spoke to them: “The kingdom of heaven is like leaven, which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal till it was all leavened.”
(Matthew 13:33 NKJV)
Jesus shares a short but powerful parable to give us an image of the transforming power of the gospel.
The message of His parable is that any exposure at all to the gospel has the power to totally transform a person’s life. Just as faith only needs to be in small measure to invoke mammoth change, the same holds true for the gospel. Any amount of saturation of the gospel in one’s life can transform it entirely. That’s the power of the kingdom of God. That’s the power of a gospel that announces and proclaims the love and the salvation found in Christ alone.
Jesus images it like this: a woman wants to make bread and has many pounds of fresh dough. In order to get that dough to rise, she takes some fermenting acidic dough from a previous batch and she skillfully and carefully kneads it in, knowing that this leaven will make the whole lump rise.
That’s it. This simple picture tells us that the kingdom revealed and accepted—even in small embrace, with small amounts of belief—has the power to transform. Encountering Jesus in any fashion has enormous impact. It can have “raising” capacity in ways that the human mind cannot imagine.
• Raising awareness of the need to settle matters that deal with eternal possibilities.
• Raising acceptance of divine intentionality connected to your human journey.
• Raising internal awareness of spiritual gifts and graces that are to be lived out in relational exchanges with others.
Jesus brings raising power to the life of a believer. The encouragement of this is significant because it suggests to us all that any exposure to the promises of God, any practice of the discipline of prayer, any time spent in the Word of God, any minute offered to meditate about God’s presence in your life, is enough to start a raising process that can make the rest of your life an abundant life with kingdom-size impact.
How will you work some of that leaven into the dough of your life today?
