This, Then, Is How We Live

Life of the Church

Good morning everyone, happy Sunday. Thank you all for joining us in worship today. It’s good to see everyone here.

There are a few announcements from your bulletins I’d like to highlight.

The men’s group will meet tonight at 6:30.

We will also have our quarterly business meeting this coming Wednesday.

We’ll also be having our quarterly fellowship lunch on May 21 after our worship service. I think we’ll be having barbecue again, and it’s delicious, so please try to make that.

This month’s items for our Operation Christmas Child shoeboxes are small toys. You can leave your donations in the Sunday school room across from Randal’s.

We’ll be having our next outreach opportunity with Love Inc. on Saturday the 20th from 10-noon. Please let Della or Sandy know if you can help out.

Our church will also be providing dinner for a Love Inc. class on Tuesday the 23rd. Amy Campbell is coordinating this and would appreciate your help. You can see Amy after church or give her a call. Her phone number is listed in your bulletin.

Finally, our church helps a lot of people in need. That’s our mission as the hands and feet of Christ. Very often we never know the impact of that help we give. If you remember about five months ago, we had a woman named Amy call us on a Sunday morning in trouble, needing a place to stay and a place to worship. We got her here and Jesyka got her the help she needed. This week, she called to let us know that she’s been clean and sober for four months. She has her life back and is doing well, and she just wanted to thank our church for helping her to find Jesus again and to finally find her way. So praise God for that.

Jesyka, do you have anything this morning?

Sue, do you have anything?

Opening Prayer

Father, 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

I preached a funeral this week. It was a lovely service for a lovely woman and a lovely family. There aren’t many things that are more holy to a pastor than presiding over a funeral service. It’s a very serious, very solemn thing to comfort a grieving family while offering hope not just to them, but to the loved ones who gather by a grave to say goodbye, even if that goodbye is only for now.

But not every funeral is like that, and not every family has their tears mixed with faith. Part of my process for preparing a funeral sermon is to look through the notes from all the ones I’ve preached before, and looking through those notes means remembering all of those families stretching back nearly three years now. One of those families will always stand out, because it’s still the only funeral I’ve done where none of them felt any hope at all. The only talk of heaven, of grace, of seeing their loved one again, came from me. To them it was as if this truly was an end.

The worst part was that this family would without question call themselves Christian. They all grew up in church. They went to Sunday school and Bible school. They were even baptized. But like a lot of people, they drifted away from the church as the years went on. Other things became more important — work, ballgames, sometimes just sleeping in after a long week. Prayers were said before meals, maybe, but that’s about it. God became a general kind of idea rather than a friend. And that’s just how it went for years.

Now, let me ask you a question — were those people still Christians? Tricky one, isn’t it? My answer is that I don’t know. Only God knows their hearts. What I do know is years had gone by without any of them making their faith a priority, and so when the person who held that family together was taken away, the world came crashing down, and they had nothing to hold onto but their grief. They had no faith, or at most only vague shadow of it. They might be saved, they might be going to heaven, but their salvation isn’t helping them one bit in this life.

I thought about that family again a few days ago when I was talking to a pastor friend of mine, and he said something that stuck with me. He said one of the biggest things that prevent Christians from having the spiritual life God wants for them is the sinner’s prayer. Do you know what that is? This is a big part of things like revivals, when you have pastors calling on people who aren’t Christians to give their lives to Christ. They’re always asked to pray something like this:

Dear Lord Jesus, I know that I’m a sinner, and I ask for Your forgiveness. I believe you died for my sins and rose from the dead. I turn from my sins and invite you to come into my heart and life. I want to trust and follow you as my Lord and Savior. In your name, Amen.

Great prayer, perfect prayer, but the problem is that too many people think saying that prayer is all that God requires. It’s like a magic spell — just say the words, and you’re saved. But you’re not. Salvation has very little to do with words. It has to do with your heart, your mind, and your will. Salvation is about a relationship. It’s about replacing the things you think you need from life with the things Jesus knows you need, and what you need most of all is a growing relationship with him.

Nowhere in the Bible is there a more perfect description of what it means to live out the Christian life than in the Sermon on the Mount. Chapters 5-7 of Matthew is the greatest sermon ever spoken and the most practical guide to life that you’ll ever find, and in the middle of chapter 7, Jesus gets to the heart of the question we’re looking at today — How are we to truly live as Christians? Let’s take a look. Turn to Matthew chapter 7. We’ll be reading verses 13-27:

“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.

This entire part of the Sermon on the Mount focuses on a specific group of people found in verses 21-23. That’s where I want to focus 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, meaning someone who is in supreme authority over life and death. It’s a term of deep reverence, and in Jesus’s time the word was used with regards to the Roman emperor. Everyone in the Roman world at time would say Kaiser Kyrios, which means “Caesar is Lord.”

But the Roman Christians would never say that. That’s 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.”

But 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. 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.

What are these people doing? Look at verse 22. They’re prophesying. 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 that. He says, “I never knew you.”

John chapter 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 is saying to all of 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. He says, “You know the gospel. You’re out there changing people’s lives. You think you’re living a Christian life. 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. You think you’re saved, but 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. He wants to scare us here, 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. They have spiritual gifts, don’t they? They can prophesy. They can cast out demons. They can heal the sick. 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 leaning on your baptism or that sinner’s prayer or your church attendance as proof you’re saved instead of growing closer to Christ? 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.

Did you catch that last bit? 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? 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 that when he decided to betray his Lord, Judas was not saved.

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 — there’s that word again — 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 by their gifts, but by 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. That’s your relationship with God.

And if you say you’re a Christian but your knowledge of God isn’t growing, your faith isn’t getting stronger, and if your heart isn’t changing to hold more love and peace and 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, and when the world comes crashing down on you — and it will, because that’s life — you’ll have nowhere to go because you won’t have him.

You’re probably wondering, Wait a minute, am I saved or not? 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. But 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’s 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 that 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 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.”

When Jesus talks about the two ways to live, the two roads, we think he’s talking about the good people and the bad people. No. What he’s talking about is the difference between those who know they are saved by grace because of what Christ has done and live their lives alongside God in a growing relationship, and those who think God’s already given them a ticket to heaven so they can just forget about him and live their lives the way they want. He’s talking about the difference between Christians who know God and Christians who only know about God.

That’s the two roads. That’s the two different kinds of people — the ones who think they can save themselves, who think saying the sinner’s prayer and going to church on Christmas and Easter and getting baptized is all they need to do, and the people who know that only Jesus can save. That’s why 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. If you say, “Well I was baptized years ago and I went to church, so I’m going to heaven. I got what I want from God, so I’m going to do what I want,” then you don’t know him. 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 are 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. I believe in God. 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 only matter when they’re done out of the thankfulness we have for a God who loves and forgives us.

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 the spiritual things we do are 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 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. 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. And if you try, he’s going to have no choice but say, “I never knew you.”

One of the oldest questions humanity asks is, “What’s the meaning of life? Why am I here? What am I supposed to do? What’s the whole point?” The strange thing is that presiding over so many funerals has given me that answer. The whole point of life, everything that happens to you, everything you’re doing, is all for one reason — to prepare you to stand before God. That’s what everything comes down to. On Judgment Day, everyone who’s ever lived is going to stand before Jesus. You’re going to meet Jesus eventually, so don’t you think you should have a relationship with him now? Don’t you think you should get to know him through prayer and reading your Bible and becoming a little more like him every day? Giving more of yourself to him every day? Learning to trust him more, learning to have more faith? Shouldn’t you live so that when you stand before God, you stand before him as a friend rather than a stranger?

Now is the time to tell him, “Jesus I know I say you’re my savior, but I’ve been living like I’m my own savior, and I’m realizing that I don’t know you at all. 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. Help me to be your friend.”

That’s what going through the narrow gate means. It 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. Certainly we can certainly go through that narrow way for him. And if you’re ready to enter through that narrow gate, if you need prayer, if you’d like to join our church family, then 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.