Please turn with me in your Bibles to Matthew, chapter 13.  Matthew 13 contains seven great parables of the Lord Jesus Christ.  In each of those parables He speaks about the nature of the kingdom.  Remember that the disciples were expecting a Messiah, and they were expecting the kingdom,  but they were gradually learning from Jesus that the Messiah was different from the way they had expected Him.  And they were now learning, too, that the kingdom was going to be a little different than they expected it to be, in fact, each of the seven parables about the kingdom found in Matthew chapter 13 tell us something different, unexpected, about the kingdom.  In the parable of the sower, which we saw a couple of weeks ago, in verses 1-9, and in the explanation of that parable, which…