How Should I Live?

Life of the Church

Good morning everyone, it’s good to see you all here for our worship service. If you’re visiting us for the first time, please fill out one of our visitor cards in the pocket of the seat right in front of you. Leave that in our offering plate when it passes as your offering today and let us know you were here.

I do have just a few announcements I’d like to touch on before we begin. The men’s ministry will meet tonight at 6:00, and don’t forget about the cookout on November 7 at 3:00.

Don’t forget our Operation Christmas Child packing party on November 6 from 10-12. We have some boxes right up here that you can take home, fill, and bring back. See Della or Joanne if you have any questions.

Thanks to everyone to entered and voted in our pumpkin carving contest. The winner or winners will be announced next Sunday.

We’ll be having a deacons meeting this Tuesday at 7:00. If you’re a deacon, please try to attend.

Also, this coming Saturday is our trunk or treat from 6-8. We still need some people willing to sign up for that and hand out candy. If you’re able and willing to do that, please use the sign-up sheets right out here on the bulletin board, and I believe there’s one back there on the door as well.

Harvey, do you want to talk a little bit about how all of us can keep from losing our minds?

Sue, do you have anything?

Opening Prayer

Father, Thank you that you promise us that where two or three are gathered you are there in the midst. Lord we welcome You amongst us today and celebrate the gift of life that you have given to each of us. We ask that You would open our ears so that we may hear your voice. Open our minds so that we may receive Your eternal wisdom. Open our spirits so that we may know Your leading and guidance. And open our hearts so that we may receive Your wonderful love. We ask all this in the glorious name of Jesus. Amen.

Sermon

Every person, no matter who they are or what they believe, eventually grows to answer a very fundamental question—What’s the best way to live?

Human history is filled with advice on that. Books upon books have been written about that answer. The number one category of books sold in the United States every year is self-help.

People are starving for ideas that promise things like meaning and wisdom for their lives, and there’s no shortage of advice on how to get both. In fact, there might be too much.

There are as many ways to live as there are people, every one of them more complicated and contradicting than the next. But leave it to Jesus to make things simpler, and to state it in a way that is both deeply profound and strikingly beautiful.

We’re in the gospel of Matthew today, looking at a section of the greatest sermon ever spoken, the Sermon on the Mount. Chapters 5-7 of Matthew are the very heart of what it means to be a Christian and to live out the Christian life.

But it’s hard, living that Christian life. It’s much harder than we often think it is, and what makes it hard isn’t so much enduring the things that will happen to you as you live that life out—the sufferings, the temptations, the struggle between faith and doubt.

It has much more to do with your attitude—with your perspective—and the way you see yourself in relation to God.

The Sermon on the Mount is the most practical guide to life you’ll ever find, and in the middle of chapter 7 Jesus gets to the heart of the question we’re asking this morning—how should we live? Follow along with me there, Matthew chapter 7, starting in verse 13 and continuing through verse 27:

“Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.

“Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will recognize them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? So, every healthy tree bears good fruit, but the diseased tree bears bad fruit.

A healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a diseased tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus you will recognize them by their fruits.

“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.

On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’

And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’

“Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock.

And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.”

And this is God’s word.

As humans, especially modern humans, we have a tendency to complicate everything. Jesus always had a way of cutting through all of those complications and stating the truth in a simple way. But with that simplicity comes a challenge.

He says, “I’m going to cut through all the noise of the world and tell you how you should live in a way that’s easy to understand, but even though you’ll understand it, it’s going to be very hard. Very hard. But the great thing is that I’ll help you through every single bit of it.”

Because there aren’t hundreds or thousands of different ways we can live as human beings.

If you look at this passage, what do you see? You see two gates, two roads, two trees, and two houses built on two different foundations. Two choices, two ways to live—there’s the narrow way, and the wide way.

This entire part of the Sermon on the Mount focuses on a specific group of people found in verses 21-23. There’s where I want to start this morning.

Because who are these people? They’re Christians, aren’t they? They call Jesus, “Lord.”

That’s an interesting word in the Greek. It’s Kyrios, someone who is in supreme authority over life and death. It’s a term of deep reverence, and in that time the word was used with regards to the Roman emperor. Everyone in the Roman world at time would say Kaiser Kyrios—Caesar is Lord.

But the Roman Christians would never say that, which is one of the big reasons why they ended up being persecuted. They wouldn’t say that Caesar is Lord because Caesar was just a man. There was only one Lord, and that was Christ.

So these people that Jesus is talking about in verses 21-23, they’re Christians. More than that, they’re Christians who fully believe in the doctrine that Jesus Christ is the Messiah and the son of God, because they call him, “Lord.”

What else can we learn about them? Look in verse 21 — they don’t just call Jesus “Lord,” they say, “Lord, Lord.” There’s a doubling of that word, and in the Jewish culture that’s a literary device that’s used to convey passionate emotion, both positive and negative.

Calling Jesus “Lord” is an act of devotion. Saying to Jesus, “Lord, Lord” is an act of worship, isn’t it? These people are people of passion. They’re emotionally involved with Jesus. They’re excited about him.

Look at verse 22. What are these people doing? They’re prophesying, aren’t they? They’re casting out demons. They’re performing miracles. They’re in ministry.

People’s lives are being changed through them. Souls are being saved. The kingdom is being furthered. They’re out there every day making a difference, lifting up, healing the broken, and what does Jesus say to them? Look in verse 23:

“I never knew you.”

Can you think of a worse thing to hear from God? I can’t. Jesus doesn’t say, “What happened to you?” He doesn’t say, “Remember when you used to be a part of my church? Remember when you used to love me? Remember when my will was the only will you wanted to follow?”

He doesn’t say any of those things. He says, “I. Never. Knew. You.”

John chapter 17 contains one of the most famous prayers in the Bible, the high priestly prayer given by Jesus just before his arrest. And in John 17:3, Jesus says this:

And this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.

In order for you to have eternal life, you have to know God. And you cannot know God unless He first knows you. But Jesus right here is saying to all these Christians out there doing God’s work, out there saving souls, out there casting out demons and performing miracles, that he never knew them at all.

What he’s saying is that you know the gospel, yes. You’re out there changing people’s lives, yes. You say your prayers and you’ve been baptized and you know all the words to all the hymns and you have your own special chair in the sanctuary every Sunday, but you’re not saved.

He says, “You’re not saved, because you don’t have a saving relationship with me. There’s no spiritual connection with me. And more than that, you never had one. I. Never. Knew. You.”

That’s scary, isn’t it? That’s terrifying to me. Show me any verse in any book of the Bible about the devil or hell, I’ll tell you verses 21-23 of Matthew chapter 7 is the most terrifying scripture there is. And that’s exactly how Jesus meant it to feel.

You think he doesn’t know what he’s doing here? You think he’s talking to this small group of people on a hillside one sunny afternoon not knowing that these words will be written down and read from now until the end of history?

Here’s the truth: he wants to scare you. He wants to scare me. Because sometimes that’s what it takes for us to finally pay attention and take things seriously.

Jesus is saying that it’s possible to call yourself a Christian, to have all the Christian beliefs and doctrines and all the outward appearances of being a disciple of Christ, and still have your spiritual house built on sand instead of rock, because your roots aren’t in him.

Look at these people who Christ says he doesn’t know. What do they have? They have spiritual gifts, don’t they? They can prophesy. They can cast out demons. They can heal the sick. Just like the disciples, right?

But you say, “No, that can’t be right. People who do things like that are the people who are saved. You can’t do things like that unless you have the Holy Spirit, and once the Holy Spirit’s in you, it’s in you.”

Okay, I’ll grant you that. I am a full proponent of once saved, always saved. But what if you’re not once saved? What if you’re not saved at all, and all you’re doing is going through the motions? What if you’re relying on the wrong thing to be saved?

Remember when Jesus sent the twelve disciples into Israel? Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons?

Matthew chapter 10. Listen to this:

And he called to him his twelve disciples and gave them authority over unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to heal every disease and every affliction. The names of the twelve apostles are these: first, Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew his brother; James the son of Zebedee, and John his brother; Philip and Bartholomew; Thomas and Matthew the tax collector; James the son of Alphaeus, and Thaddaeus; Simon the Zealot, and Judas Iscariot, who betrayed him.

See that? Judas went out with the other eleven. Judas had authority over the unclean spirits as much as anyone else. He healed every disease and affliction every bit as much as Peter and James and John and Matthew and all the rest.

But do you think Judas was saved? Do you? I don’t know, maybe at the end he was. Maybe when he realized what he’d done, he had a change of heart. But I guarantee you he wasn’t saved when he decided to betray his Lord.

You see, Judas and these people that Christ is talking about, they have spiritual gifts. They have a lot of spiritual gifts. But they don’t have spiritual fruit, and that’s what Jesus is trying to get us to look at. Look at verse 20: “Thus you will recognize them by their fruits.”

Not the gifts, the fruit. Because spiritual gifts are what you do—the healing, the praying, the prophesying. But spiritual fruit? That’s what you are. That’s your heart.

And if you say you’re a Christian but your life isn’t growing, if your heart isn’t changing to hold more love, more grace and forgiveness for others, more peace, more joy, then that means the gospel isn’t coming in. You have the gifts but you’re not bearing fruit, you’re just going through the motions.

Jesus is saying that you can profess a belief in Christ—you can call him Lord—and you can have the spiritual gifts of a Christian, and you can do all the right things, and still not be saved because there’s no fruit.

So if that’s the case, then how much of a chance do any of us have? So what the heck is a Christian anyway? Right? Because you’re probably feeling a little down right now.

You’re probably wondering, Wait a minute, am I saved or not? You’re supposed to stand up there and give me hope. Instead it sounds an awful lot like you’re standing up there telling me I’m not saved.

If that’s what you’re thinking, I’m getting there. Hope is coming. Because like I said, Jesus is doing this on purpose here. He wants you a little nervous, because then you’ll pay attention.

He says don’t get caught up in thinking there are a thousand different ways to live your life, or a hundred, or even a dozen. There are two. There’s a narrow gate, and there’s a wide gate, and the narrow gate is the one you want to walk through.

Now what’s the image Jesus is painting here? If you remember how verse 13 is written in the King James, it says strait is the gate and narrow is the way. That’s strait as in s-t-r-a-i-t. As in, “He’s in dire straits.” It’s not the word that means the opposite of crooked. It means being crushed or squeezed or strangled.

In the Bible, the symbolism writers use for death is to be crushed. On the opposite side, abundant life is described as spaciousness. You’ll often see Psalms that say something like, “The Lord will bring me to a wide place.”

So what Jesus is saying here is that there is this tiny gate that looks so narrow you think it’s going to kill you if you try to fit through it, but on the other side there is a wide space that gives you more life and freedom than you ever thought possible.

And then you have this wide gate with a broad road that looks much easier to get through, but if you go through there what you find on the other side is that you’re in a hole and you’re dying.

So what are these two roads? It’s easy to think this is Jesus’s way of saying that there are two ways of doing things and you have to choose the right one.

You can either follow God’s laws, obey the Ten Commandments, practice the sermon on the mount, pray, and take care of the poor.

Or you can live like the world and do everything only for yourself and try to get as many things as you can in the short time. You have.

Two ways: either the good and moral way, or the bad and evil way.

But that’s not what Jesus is saying, because look. Look at these trees in verses 15-20. All the trees Jesus is talking about look the same, don’t they? It’s the roots, the hidden parts, that are different.

And the two houses in verses 24-27, they’re the same kind of house, aren’t they? It’s just that the foundations are different.

The point Jesus is trying to make is that there are two things that look the same on the surface but are different on the inside. He’s not talking about people who believe in God at the narrow gate and people who don’t at the wide gate, or people who help the poor and people who don’t.

No, both kinds of people here, the ones who take the narrow road and the ones who take the wide road, are believers.

They’re both trying to live by the Ten Commandments and the sermon on the mount, they’re both praying and worshipping, but at the roots of their tree and at the foundation of their home are two completely different beliefs about how they think about life and God.

Two different beliefs that lead to two completely different kinds of results.

Because “on that day” as it’s written in verse 22 — and by the way, what is “that day”? It’s judgment day. On that day, Jesus is going to say to some of the Christians gathered before the throne, “Well done, my good and faithful servant.” And he’s going to say to others, “I never knew you.”

And what will these people say in reply? Again, verse 22: ‘‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?”

The Greek there is important. Our translation has the word “we” used in that first clause—“did we not prophesy in your name...”

But in the Greek, that word “we” is used in the following two clauses as well. So it’s, “Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and did we not cast out demons in your name, and did we not do mighty works in your name.”

Remember last week with Moses? What got Moses into trouble? When he used that word “we”, right? When he said, “Should WE give you water out of this rock,” instead of God and God alone.

When Jesus talks about the two ways to live here, the two roads, we think he’s talking about the good people and the bad people. No.

What he’s talking about is the same thing he talks about back in the first part of Matthew chapter 6, about how some people pray but only care about the words they’re using, and how they help the poor just so they can look good in front of other people.

What he’s talking about is the difference between those who know they are saved by grace because of what Christ has done, and those who are trying to be good so they can get something from God.

That’s the two roads. That’s the two different kinds of people — the ones who think they can save themselves and the people who know that only Jesus can save.

The wide road is wide because it has to include so many people. It has to include Christians and people from other faiths and people with no faith at all, all trying to save themselves by being good or rich or important or famous.

How can Jesus tell people who professed a faith in him, who did all the right things, who went to church and sang the hymns and taught Sunday School and took communion, how can Jesus look at them and say, “I never knew you”?

Because those people might really believe that Jesus is God, but they don’t believe he’s their savior. They believe they’re their own saviors.

Forget what you do. Never mind what you say. If inside your soul you’re telling Jesus, “I don’t need your blood to get into heaven, I can do it myself,” then you don’t know him.

And if your soul looks Jesus in the eye every day and says that, what’s the only thing he can say in return? Just the truth: “I never knew you.”

But look at this. We have these trees here, right? Verses 15-20. Trees look the same. And we have these houses in verses 24-27. Houses look the same. But these two roads, they’re different, aren’t they? They don’t look the same at all.

The bad one starts out wide and gets narrow. The good one starts out narrow and gets wide. Why is the good road narrow at the start? What’s that mean? It means two things.

First, it means true repentance. Way back at the start of the sermon on the mount in Matthew 5, what’s the first thing he says?

“Blessed is the poor in spirit.” That’s the first thing Jesus says, because it’s the one thing that has to be true for everything else he says to make sense. You have to be poor in spirit.

Now what does it mean to be poor in spirit? It means that you understand you’re spiritually bankrupt. And that can be a hard thing for us to do.

How many times have you thought something like this: “Look, I know I’ve done some bad things. Maybe I’ve even done a lot of bad things.

“But I’m basically a good person. I’m friendly. Nice. I’ve done a lot of good things that probably equal out the bad things. I’m a decent person. But I’m not bankrupt. It’s not like I don’t deserve anything good in return for the all the good things I’ve done.”

We don’t want to be spiritually bankrupt because that sounds like a bad thing, but Jesus says that’s the one thing we need in order to truly have him.

We have to understand that the good things we do matter only when they’re a result of the thankfulness we have for a God who forgives us and loves us and covers us with His grace and mercy.

On their own face value, the good things we do aren’t good at all because they’re always done for the wrong reasons. Right? Because deep down we’re not good, we’re selfish.

Everything we do is for us, even spiritual things. It’s to get people to honor us, or to get God to reward us. That’s so hard for some people to understand, because once we understand that, we realize that the only thing we deserve is judgment.

The people on the wide road can’t do that, because they think they have to put their self-worth into something else, people or things that make them feel good and important.

They’re always having to prove themselves, always buckling when they’re criticized.

They say they can’t accept that nothing they do is truly good in God’s eyes, because it means it’s the end of their own self-worth. Their own identity. But that’s exactly what God wants. He wants our worth and our identity to be in him alone.

So that’s one reason why the gate is so narrow. It takes true repentance, and that’s not easy. Here’s another reason: the gate is narrow because we have to believe that salvation is through Christ alone.

The people on the wide road say that can’t be the case. Look at all the good people of other faiths. Look at all the good people who have no faith. Don’t they deserve heaven too? But remember what we just talked about—there are no good people, Christians included. Nobody deserves heaven.

You think you can give good works to God, or good words, and because of that be in good standing? No.

What can we give to the God who created us and who gives us everything? We can’t give him anything, because there’s nothing we can give to God that will add to Him.

But what do we owe the God who created us and gives us everything? We owe him everything, don’t we?

That’s the entire problem of salvation—we owe God everything, but we can’t give him anything. Only when we know that can we truly appreciate salvation that comes through God’s sheer grace.

And of all the faiths of the world and all the philosophies, Christianity is the only answer because it’s the only faith that offers salvation through that sheer grace.

That’s why the gate to that wide life is so narrow. Because it takes repentance first, it takes being poor in spirit, and because there’s only one way to get the grace we don’t deserve, which is through the death and resurrection of Christ. It’s narrow because that’s the only way.

But once you go through that narrow gate, oh my. All of a sudden you discover that everything is wide because you finally know who you really are. You’re a person of immense and eternal value because you are adopted and accepted and loved and treasured by the only person in the universe whose opinion matters.

And that love isn’t conditional. Your place with God doesn’t waver.

It doesn’t matter if you’ve had a bad day or a good day, if you’ve done something right or something horribly wrong, you are still loved and still a son or a daughter of the king not because of anything you’ve done, but because of everything Christ did.

That has to be your foundation. That right there is what it means to walk through the narrow gate. When Jesus talks about the house built on rock and the one built on sand, the sand is anything you try to build your life upon other than him. And he’s saying choose.

Choose which road you want. You can take the wide road that you’re naturally on, or you can take the narrow one.

He says the first thing you have to do is know which one you’re on. Choose that narrow road. Stop trying to be your own savior, because you can’t be. Because if you do that, he’s going to have no choice but say, “I never knew you.”

On Judgment Day, everyone who’s ever lived is going to stand before Jesus. You’re going to meet Jesus eventually, so meet him in grace now. Meet him personally.

Tell him, “Jesus I know I say you’re my savior, but I’ve been living like I’m my own savior, and I’ve finally realized that there’s nothing I can do, nothing I can say, no way I can live that could ever accomplish what you accomplished for me.”

To go through that narrow gate means leaving your own life behind. It means giving up the right to live the way you want and instead live the way he wants. It takes courage. But remember, you weren’t the first one to go through that gate.

Jesus was infinite in size but narrowed himself to become human. He enjoyed limitless glory and freedom but narrowed himself to die on the cross.

He went through that narrow way for us. We can certainly go through that narrow way for him. And if you’re ready to enter through that narrow gate, I invite you up here as we sing our closing hymn.

Let’s pray:

Father in our hearts we know that there’s nothing we can do to earn salvation. It’s by your son and him alone that the canyon of sin between us and you can be bridged. But still we often try to do things our own way. We think our good works can do that, or our good lives, or doing all the right things. But father we can’t be our own saviors, no matter how hard we try. We stray toward that wide road and get lost. Steer us to that narrow gate, father. Give us the courage to enter there, knowing that we must repent and that your son is the only way to you. For it’s in Jesus’s name we ask it, Amen.