The Kingdom is Rising

And You’re the Yeast

By Ted Yule 

Nov. 28, 2025

There’s a small but explosive parable tucked quietly into Matthew 13:33—so short you can miss its force if you blink.

“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” (NIV).

We often read it as a sweet domestic scene: a woman baking bread, a pinch of yeast, a cozy kitchen. But this is no gentle vignette. It’s a prophetic announcement. Jesus is revealing something about the Kingdom of God so big, so disruptive, that He hides it in the ordinary so we don't get scared off too soon.

Sixty pounds of flour—three seahs—would have stopped His original audience in their tracks. That’s enough dough to feed somewhere around 300 people. No home kitchen could manage it. No storage system could preserve it. This isn’t a little loaf for the family. It’s an industrial-scale batch that would require a fresh vessel, a new container, and honestly… a small army to knead it. Jesus didn’t choose this quantity by accident. He was signaling something outrageous: the Kingdom was never meant to be small. It was always meant to overflow beyond the boundaries of personal devotion and touch entire communities, cities, nations. That theme is exactly what the Kingdom message comes to do—it refuses to stay contained, refuses to stay religious, refuses to stay comfortable, and insists on transformation .

Then there’s the yeast. Not tidy, store-bought granules from a jar in the fridge. This would have been a living, breathing lump of sourdough starter—wild, messy, unpredictable, and very much alive. You didn’t sprinkle it in; you worked it in. You folded it again and again until what was alive in the starter became alive in the dough. Jesus says that is what the Kingdom is like: something living, active, and quietly unstoppable. You can’t freeze it. You can’t contain it. You can’t manage it. Once it’s in, it’s over—it will permeate everything.

And then the numbers. Three measures. Three—the number that echoes the Triune God, the divine communion that shapes our gospel and infuses it with life, love, and power. Thirty kilos—the number that calls to mind Jesus’ promise of a harvest thirty, sixty, or a hundredfold (Matthew 13:8). The woman isn’t merely baking bread… she’s stewarding multiplication. She’s taking what represents an ordinary harvest and surrendering it to a transforming agent that turns thirty into something closer to a hundred. The Kingdom doesn’t just add—it multiplies.

And let’s be honest: nobody mixes sixty pounds of flour without a brand-new container. This is new-wineskin territory. The old vessel can’t hold this kind of expansion. The Church of Jesus must make peace with this: the Kingdom is outgrowing our comfortable bowls. It’s already happening.

Because here’s the deeper point Jesus is driving home: the Kingdom does not advance through force; it advances through infiltration. Yeast doesn’t shout. It doesn’t demand attention. It simply works. Quietly. Consistently. Invisibly. Until suddenly the whole thing rises.

This is a picture of revival—not the stadium version alone, but the ground-level one. The kind where Spirit-filled believers carry the life of the King into workplaces, neighborhoods, industries, and nations until the culture itself begins to rise. This is what the Kingdom has always done. It’s what Jesus launched. It’s what the early church embodied. And it’s what the Spirit is doing again in our day. The Kingdom is already expanding beneath the surface. The yeast is in the dough. Heaven’s leaven is active.

And here’s the part we often miss: you are the yeast. The Spirit of God within you is the living culture that permeates whatever environment you’re worked into. Your presence is not passive. Your assignment is not small. What God has seeded in you is designed to transform what’s around you. This is Kingdom design. Jesus came to restore a Kingdom and citizens of that Kingdom don’t sit on the sidelines—they rise, represent, and reform.

So don’t underestimate where God has placed you. Don’t despise the small lump He’s asked you to become. Don’t overlook the quiet work of the Holy Spirit moving through conversations, prayers, decisions, and simple acts of faithfulness. Yeast looks insignificant until the moment everything starts rising.

Revival isn’t coming someday. It’s already here, working through the people who refuse to stay dormant. Working through you. Working through Kingdom citizens who understand that heaven’s strategy hasn’t changed. God still plants His people like yeast in the dough of the world—and then He releases His Spirit to do what only He can do.

The dough is rising. The Kingdom is expanding. And this is your moment to lean in, carry His presence, and trust that what God mixes, He multiplies.