Choose your Guide
Notes
Transcript
Scripture Reading
Scripture Reading
And He spoke a parable to them: “Can the blind lead the blind? Will they not both fall into the ditch?
A disciple is not above his teacher, but everyone who is perfectly trained will be like his teacher.
And why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye, but do not perceive the plank in your own eye?
Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Brother, let me remove the speck that is in your eye,’ when you yourself do not see the plank that is in your own eye? Hypocrite! First remove the plank from your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck that is in your brother’s eye.
“For a good tree does not bear bad fruit, nor does a bad tree bear good fruit.
For every tree is known by its own fruit. For men do not gather figs from thorns, nor do they gather grapes from a bramble bush.
A good man out of the good treasure of his heart brings forth good; and an evil man out of the evil treasure of his heart brings forth evil. For out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks.
“But why do you call Me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and not do the things which I say?
Whoever comes to Me, and hears My sayings and does them, I will show you whom he is like:
He is like a man building a house, who dug deep and laid the foundation on the rock. And when the flood arose, the stream beat vehemently against that house, and could not shake it, for it was founded on the rock.
But he who heard and did nothing is like a man who built a house on the earth without a foundation, against which the stream beat vehemently; and immediately it fell. And the ruin of that house was great.”
You need a guide whenever you are going into unfamiliar territory or when you don’t know how to do something. Sometimes I’ll use the internet to figure out how to do something simple. Some home repairs are within my ability, and in that case I might need a bit of help to figure out how to do it. If I’m cooking and I don’t know quite how to cook something, I’ll look up a recipe. Of course, when you’re looking for how to do something on the internet, you’ve got to be discerning. There’s a lot of junk and misinformation out there, so I’ll pay careful attention to who I follow as a guide. Get your guide wrong and you’ll be sorry, however, if you need a guide, you’ve got to follow someone.
Last time I checked, life doesn’t really come with an owner’s manual. And I don’t know about you, but sometime I don’t know what to do; I don’t know the right course of action. At times like these, I need a guide to tell me how to live. I can’t do without one, because I lack the knowledge and ability to get it right. You don’t need to live very long to realize that just guessing doesn’t usually result in doing the right thing.
Jesus’ words in the last part of the Sermon on the plain are all about choosing a guide. He is the guide you need, but there a lot in that simple statement. How do you pick a good guide for life? You’ve got to have one, because no one knows enough to always choose the right thing without good advice.
I. It helps if your guide can see
I. It helps if your guide can see
On the face of it, Jesus’ parable is blindingly obvious (I’ll show myself out). Of course if the blind lead the blind, they’ll inevitably get off into the ditch. But no one ever actually follows the blind. So his parable means that your guide is blind in other ways than physical eyesight. What sort of blind guide do we need to avoid? To figure this out, let’s turn to Matthew 23:16-22
“Woe to you, blind guides, who say, ‘Whoever swears by the temple, it is nothing; but whoever swears by the gold of the temple, he is obliged to perform it.’
Fools and blind! For which is greater, the gold or the temple that sanctifies the gold?
And, ‘Whoever swears by the altar, it is nothing; but whoever swears by the gift that is on it, he is obliged to perform it.’
Fools and blind! For which is greater, the gift or the altar that sanctifies the gift?
Therefore he who swears by the altar, swears by it and by all things on it.
He who swears by the temple, swears by it and by Him who dwells in it.
And he who swears by heaven, swears by the throne of God and by Him who sits on it.
Here, Jesus is rebuking the Pharisees, and in this chapter he has seven woes to them. To pronounce woe is to forecast certain doom; they are blind guides, so these are the blind leaders of the blind (Matt 15:14). In this section Jesus has three different types of examples of how they are blind guides.
Let them alone. They are blind leaders of the blind. And if the blind leads the blind, both will fall into a ditch.”
The first example of blind guidance is in how they swear - that is, this is how they assure people they will do what they say. And they had a very clever trick to get out of pretty much any oath they would ever take. They would swear by the temple, then go back on their promise. When called on it, they would claim that to swear by the temple meant nothing; they said God would only hold you to account if you swore by the gold of the temple. Thus, they didn’t actually have to keep that promise. They would swear by the altar, then go back on their promise; when people complained, they would say that swearing by the altar meant nothing; for God to bind you to keep your promise, you had to swear by the gift that was on the altar.
In other words, they could get out of pretty much any oath they would ever take, simply by splitting hairs about exactly what was binding and what wasn’t. And they would claim that God would back them up. This is all nonsense, promoted by people who want to be able to break their promises whenever it was convenient. To swear by the gold of the temple is just as binding as swearing by the temple; to swear by the temple is just as binding as swearing by the God who commanded it to be built. To swear by the gift on the altar is to swear by the altar, which is the same as swearing by the God who ordained that Israel ought to sacrifice. To swear by heaven is to swear by the throne of God; to swear by God’s throne is to swear by God himself. God won’t pay any attention to your hair-splitting excuses for why it’s OK to break your promise. He’ll take any hair-splitting distinction and just ignore it.
They thought their hair-splitting distinctions got them out of their oath; they were blind to the reality of what God thought of it. Such distinctions worked in their culture; so they could get away with it. But it didn’t work with God.
The second example is tithing (Matt 23:23-24). In the Law, God commanded them to take a tithe of all (Deut 14:22-25), that’s a tenth of all that was produced. Since God did command this, they would carefully take a tenth of every last little scrap grown on their property - and remember that most people worked as subsistence farmers, so most people didn’t earn a salary; they grew their own food. They would even tithe a tenth of the herbs of their garden. Even then, most people didn’t have much in the way of herbs, so it was an insignificant amount.
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith. These you ought to have done, without leaving the others undone.
Blind guides, who strain out a gnat and swallow a camel!
“You shall truly tithe all the increase of your grain that the field produces year by year.
And you shall eat before the Lord your God, in the place where He chooses to make His name abide, the tithe of your grain and your new wine and your oil, of the firstborn of your herds and your flocks, that you may learn to fear the Lord your God always.
But if the journey is too long for you, so that you are not able to carry the tithe, or if the place where the Lord your God chooses to put His name is too far from you, when the Lord your God has blessed you,
then you shall exchange it for money, take the money in your hand, and go to the place which the Lord your God chooses.
The problem with this wasn’t the tithing; Jesus in fact declares that they ought to do this. Instead it’s that they were extra careful in this area of the law, to make up for the fact that they didn’t want to obey God in other, much more important ways. They would ignore justice and steal a widow’s home out from under her. They would ignore mercy to the poor and needy when it suited them. They would have hearts that were actually quite far from God, for they were primarily concerned with their image.
Sometimes, people will be extra super careful in one area to make up for moral deficiencies in others. The problem isn’t in their annoying punctilliousness in one small area; its that this is to compensate for a much larger, hidden area where they know full well they ought to obey God. Perhaps they are engaging in some shady behavior at work; so they give a lot to make up for it. Perhaps they have a bad relationship with their spouse, or their kids, so they try to fix everything at whatever church they go to.
In other words, sometimes people can try to cover up their sins by being extra faithful in another, easier to handle, area. They are blind to the reality that this extra faithfulness is great and all, but it doesn’t make up for their hidden sins.
The third example comes from our text in Luke. It’s the humorous illustration of getting the plank out of your eye. Of course it’s a metaphor. No one can actually have a real plank in their eye. But how ridiculous it would be to see some tiny speck in your fellow Christian’s eye, when you’ve got a plank. Again, the problem isn’t trying to get the speck out of your fellow Christian’s eye. There’s a time and place to Biblically confront someone. Clearly the “speck” and the “plank” are metaphors for moral faults.
In other words, you look for a tiny flaw in someone else’s life. It’s not that you’re wrong about that tiny moral flaw. Nor is it always wrong to confront them about it. The problem is that you’ve got a much larger moral flaw, a giant sin that everyone can see. Now you’re not likely to be listened to in that case, but that’s not the problem either. The problem is, that your own moral failings will at least partly blind you to the real problem. You’ll not be able to see the moral landscape correctly, so any effort at helping your fellow Christian will likely do much more harm than good.
But why would someone do such an obviously terrible thing? Because it’s much easier to find fault in others than it is to fix your own flaws. Because you can often end up looking good to certain kinds of people by making other, objectively better people look bad. In other words, this fault-finding flaw is another coping mechanism for dealing with sin in your own life. Rather than facing the uncomfortable truth of your own sin, you try to mask it by making other people look bad. Not only does this often shatter relationships with those around you; not only does this cause disunity and division, God isn’t fooled by your coping mechanism; even if others around you are.
In other words, fault-finding may work in making other people not notice your sins; but God isn’t fooled. So fault-finders are also morally blind. They are blind to the reality that God sees who they really are, and he is disgusted by their damaging use of criticism, turning what ought to be constructive and helpful into a club to hurt others.
So when we’re looking for a guide, we’re looking for moral guidance. Thus, a blind guide is someone who is blind to God’s perspective on their life. They might see how others view them, but they do not see how God views them. If your guide is blind; if you are blind yourself to God’s judgment, you’ll inevitably clash with God’s perspective. And just like crashing into a wall, you won’t hurt it, you’ll only hurt yourself. Follow such a person and you’ll get hurt too.
II. Good Trees, Good fruit
II. Good Trees, Good fruit
Now again, the parable itself is quite easy to understand. If you plant an apple tree you get apples. If it’s a crabapple tree, you’ll get sour apples. Changing the environment won’t change the kind of tree it is. Similarly, good people do good things, bad people say bad things. That is, your character is like a store of treasure, and when you need to act, you bring something out of your little storehouse of virtue. If your storehouse is full of bad things, you’ll end up doing or saying the wrong thing. If it’s good, you’ll do and say good things.
This is not hard to understand; so when are people most likely to miss that? when it’s about themselves. You can always find an excuse for why you did that. I was tired, so I snapped at my spouse. The kids were being impossible. What else did you expect. I was hard up for money; it was just a little bit shady. I was afraid what would happen if they found out the truth, so I stretched it, just a bit. I’m normally a very honest person.
But that’s not the way it works. If you squeeze a wet sponge, you’ll get water out of it. You might not get anything if you don’t squeeze it, but you can only get out of it what was in it in the first place. If the water in the sponge is clean, you’ll get clean water. If it’s a dirty sponge you’ll get dirty water.
So, to make sure you do good things, you need to have a reservoir of good character. If you are actually good on the inside, then no amount of pressure can ever bring bad things out of you. In other words, if your heart is pure enough, you will never sin.
So how does one become good? that’s the question Jesus doesn’t answer here, but it follows from the idea that you have to be actually good to do good things.
The first step has to be regeneration (Rom 8:6-8). Those who have only their flesh, and not the Spirit are completely unable to please God - the biggest sin of all, their refusal to worship God, cannot be reversed without it. Thank God this problem is solved by faith in Christ (Rom 8:3-5). Thus when you accept Jesus by faith, you become different on the inside. It is now possible to please God.’
For to be carnally minded is death, but to be spiritually minded is life and peace.
Because the carnal mind is enmity against God; for it is not subject to the law of God, nor indeed can be.
So then, those who are in the flesh cannot please God.
For what the law could not do in that it was weak through the flesh, God did by sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, on account of sin: He condemned sin in the flesh,
that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.
For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit, the things of the Spirit.
But this is not the end of the journey, but the beginning. The Christian life involves an act of the will. You have to put to death the flesh; that involves actively choosing to do right (Rom 8:12-14). This must come by active conformity to the will of God (Rom 12:1).
Therefore, brethren, we are debtors—not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh.
For if you live according to the flesh you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.
For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God.
I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service.
III. It helps to actually follow the Guide
III. It helps to actually follow the Guide
Jesus’ last point is quite simple. You need to actually do the things that he says. that’s because he is the sure and safe guide; he sees God’s moral judgment with more clarity than anyone, so you’d better obey.
No, Lord?
No, Lord?
But notice how he does this. Observe the incongruity of calling Jesus “Lord,” while ignoring what he actually says. To call him Lord is to acknowledge that he gets to tell you what to do; that he has authority over you. So if you call him Lord, and mean it, you’ll obey him. To say that he is Lord, without obedience is to proclaim loudly that you don’t actually believe he is Lord.
But what things does he say? This is where we remember what he has said in the whole Sermon on the Plain.
The House on the Rock
The House on the Rock
Jesus’ parable of the two houses illustrates what happens to the person who listens to him. Those who listen avoid destruction when the flood comes, those who do not listen are destroyed. But what is the flood?
Look back to the blessings and woes - those disciples who are mistreated for the sake of the Kingdom of God can experience blessing when Jesus rewards his servants. Those who capitulate to the standards of this world and experience the temporary rewards this world will experience ultimate destruction when Jesus comes back. The disciples are like the true prophets; those who have woe like the false prophets. The destruction here is nothing less than eternal death; the blessing, therefore, is nothing less than heavenly rewards.
Thus, the “flood” must be the coming Judgment. It’s like Noah’s flood, in a way. When Noah’s flood came, those who believed God were safe on the ark; everyone outside had sudden and certain doom.