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Once there was a man who owned a large farm. We will call him Farmer Dan. He decided to plant a wheat field. So he bought some good seed, and sent his workers out to plant it. After a little while, the seed sprouted, and when the workers went out to water and cultivate it, they saw that there were other plants besides wheat plants coming up! They called these other plants "tares". We would probably just call them weeds. Apparently there were a lot of them, and none of the workers could figure out where they came from.
When the workers went back to talk to the Farmer Dan, they asked him: Was the wheat seed you bought mixed with weeds?
Farmer Dan said: No, the seed I bought was very good seed. It did not have any weed seed mixed in with the wheat. The farmer down the road, the one who is always so jealous of how good our crop is, must have sent his workers over during the night to throw the weed seeds into the field. He would like to ruin our crop, you know!
The workers said: Do you want us to go back to the field and pull up all the weeds?
Farmer Dan knew that the young weeds looked so much like young wheat plants that if he told his workers to pull up the weeds, they would pull up a lot of wheat plants by mistake. He said: Let the weeds grow alongside the wheat until the harvest time. Then, during harvest, you will be able to pull up the weeds and burn them without hurting the wheat plants by mistake. Then you can gather up the good wheat and put it safely into the barn.
In this story Farmer Dan is playing the part of Jesus. Jesus owns the whole world, just as Farmer Dan owned the farm. The workers in the story represent Jesus' apostles and disciples. The good seed is the Word of God that Jesus taught. The tares, or weeds, are the bad teachings that the enemy, Satan, is responsible for. The harvest time in the story represents the time when Jesus will return to set up His Kingdom.
You can make many good things with wheat, like bread and cake and pies. If there are weeds mixed in with the wheat, the flour will not make good things. The flour will be all lumpy and maybe even have stickers in it! But Jesus is not really talking about baking and desserts in this story, He is really talking about you and me.
You can get the good teachings of Jesus to grow in you by paying attention to your parents and Sunday school teachers when they tell you about Him. But the weed seed will grow if you disobey your parents and hang out with bad friends.
When Jesus returns to set up His Kingdom, He will only want the people who have grown up to be good wheat plants to live with Him there. Those who have grown up to be tares will be thrown away.