Untitled Sermon (6)

Performance Over Promise

Matthew 21:28-32

Introduction

Sometimes in life, we encounter folks who promise to do one thing and never do it. You may or may not have worked with folks like that before- you know, the kind of folks that make you want to get double pay because you feel like you’re doing the work of two people. Sometimes people don’t like up to the promises they make and the most dangerous place for us to fail to perform on our promises comes in our spiritual lives. You’ll recall that powerful word of the Apostle James be doers of the word and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. It is a real danger for folks like us to believe we are living up to God’s will in our lives, even when we’re not. We can be blind to our failure to live up to our promise to God to love Him, trust Him, and obey Him as our Savior and Lord. Now how would you know if you might be in this shape? Take a look at how you judge the spiritual lives of others. If you are looking at others and thinking there is no way they can get into Heaven because they are nowhere near as holy as you, then be careful my friend, you very well may promising to God something you are not performing- a hearer of the word and not a doer.

This is the exact case that Jesus is addressing in our Scripture today. What we have here a bunch of folks that counted themselves as religious, counted themselves even as God’s people. They are so holy that they feel totally guiltless to look upon others and count them out of the Kingdom of God. But the King of that Kingdom comes forward here to expose the truth of their spiritual life. They said they would do His will but didn’t and the people they said God would never accept refused to do His will but later did it anyway. These, Jesus says, have entered the Kingdom of God, while the religious elite had not. And it all comes down to the reality that performance triumphs over promise, we must be doers of the word and not hearers only. And doers and performers of God’s Word we can be that the gates of the Kingdom will open to us if we will first, Live in a Spirit of Repentance, secondly, live in a spirit of obedience and thirdly, live in a spirit of grace. Let’s look at first-

Living in a Spirit of Repentance

Live in a Spirit of Repentance, as Jesus says in verse 28, What do you think? A man had two sons. He went to the first and said, “My son, go work in the vineyard today.” He answered, “I don’t want to” but later he changed his mind and went. The words of our Lord here are a continuation of His words in verses 23-27 which were centered on a debate about His authority and Kingship. The point that Jesus is drawing out here is that there are some who at one time said they refused to follow Christ, they may be of those people who say they will have nothing to do with God at all. God had called to them to come into His Kingdom, to be born-again and do His works and they responded with a resounding “no” to the call of His gospel and grace. But then, our Bibles say, he changed his mind and went. He originally said no and his father had no idea he was going to go work in the vineyard, but somehow, someway, something change his mind and he went. It happens sometimes. I’ve got a child, I won’t say which one, but sometimes I can tell her something to do and she’ll instantly say “no” and I’ll just say, “ok, we all make our choices, we all pay our prices” and walk off. Next thing I know, that which she said she wasn’t going to do, she did.

This changing of mind is part of what the Bible calls “repentance.” When it is used in a spiritual sense it refers to the changing of one’s mind to agree with God that results in a change of action or lifestyle. Repentance is something that we do, but it is a gift to us from God. Paul speaks of repentance this way to Timothy when they are discussing the sinful and the wayward. Paul holds out hope saying, “perhaps God will grant them repentance, leading them to the knowledge of the truth. When Peter and John was arrested for preaching the gospel and ministering the healing glory of Christ, they defended themselves by saying of Jesus that perhaps God will grant them repentance leading them to the knowledge of the truth. They they may come to their senses and escape the trap of the devil who has taken them captive to do his will.

Yes my friends, if we will do the will of God, if we will not only promise to follow Jesus but actually follow Him, we must repent with the repentance that God gifts us through His Spirit. Our minds must change to agree with God and our actions become those of our Lord Christ instead of ourselves. Now we all need repentance because the Bible tells us we are all sinners. Some sins we repent from quickly and easily, others are not so easy or fast. We friends, if you are walking down a path and realize you are walking the wrong way, it’s easy to stop and turn around. If you are bicycling and realize you are going the wrong way, it take a bit more time. And if you are driving and 18 wheeler it is a much bigger and harder deal to turn and go the right direction. What I am saying is, some sins are turned from easily, some much harder, but the main thing is that we are turning from them to walk in the way of the Lord. It’s not enough for a minds to change, our lives must change as well.

Now as Christians we will repent of many sins over the course of our lives and we’ll likely have sin to repent of up till the moment we die. But the greatest and hardest repentance that everyone must make is that repentance that comes not simply over our sins, but over the fact that we are sinners, full of sin and condemnation, and we need the Lord Jesus to forgive us. This is the path of the new birth in Christ my friends, when we change our minds and our lives from unbelief and evil to turn to Christ, trust in Him and know through Him we are saved. I pray everyone here today has turned to Christ! And for we who have, may we continue to keep refining our lives in the heat of His Word through repentance. What do you need to change your mind about today? What do you need to come before God with a live new life? In this way we become doers of the words and not hearers only, performers of God’s will and not simply promisers. Now, let’s see secondly that we can go even further in living that life through-

II. Living in a Spirit of Obedience

Living in a Spirit of Obedience, as Jesus says in verse 30 then the man went to the other (son) and said the same thing. “I will sir,” he answered, but he didn’t go. There is not a parent among us that does not know what it is for our children to tell us something will be done and yet it never get done. And if you are a person with no children, just wait, they day will come that you will likely find out. You see, it’s easy to say we will do something. It’s easy to say we commit. It’s easy to make promises, but it’s a whole other thing to perform it. It one thing to hear God’s Word, it’s another thing to actually obey it.

I mean, listen closely to the words of Jesus from John 14:15, if you love me, you will keep my commands. Now I would hope, I would think, that the vast majority of us here today would say that we love Jesus. But that is where we must be careful my brothers, because we often determine what love is based on our definition of it instead of God’s. Why remember some years ago that classic song by Tina Turner? “What’s Love Got to Do With It?” And someone here is saying, “I don’t think our pastor should listen to rock.” Oh, if you only knew. But in that song Mrs. Turner asks the question, “what’s love got to do with it, what’s love but a second hand emotion.” That’s kind of how we see it, isn’t it. Love is something we can fall into or out of. Love is something we feel and experience. But biblically, love is a verb, it is a result, the action of the decision of our will. Our love for Jesus is revealed in our love to Him which is revealed in our praise, prayer, worship, repentance, and obedience.

Now here’s the thing- these folks Jesus is addressing, these religious elite folks in Israel, they had all heard the call of God and had said, “yes! You will be our God, we will follow you!” These are those that the father called to the vineyard and promised they would go but their performance did not match their promise. And so Jesus asks them, of the two sons, which one did the Father’s will? The first, they said, the first did the will of their father. They are correct but by their admission, they prove themselves the second son who heard the call, agreed to go, but stayed still instead. One Bible commentator says, “The priests and leaders are called to work, but they have declined, and their disobedience is heinous.”

It is this heart that we must watch out for my brothers and sisters. It is the heart that thinks we are good with God because we answered a call but didn’t go. This heart that thinks we’re good with God because we’re meeting our terms of what faith in Him looks like. This heart that promises but never performs, the hears but never does. For the Kingdom of God was going to be taken from them and given to a people that produced its fruit. I mean, these are the very types that Jesus says will stand before Him in the judgment and cry out that they did many works in His name only to hear Him say, depart from Me you workers of iniquity, I never knew you.

Now how would you know if you are in danger of committing their error and mistake? How would you know if you were thinking you was right with God when you wasn’t? It all comes through a heart that lives and views others by God’s grace. Let me show you this thirdly as we think about how we can be doers of the word by-

III. Living in a Spirit of Grace

Living in a Spirit of Grace. Watch carefully what Jesus says to them in verse 31. He says truly I tell you, tax collectors and prostitutes are entering the Kingdom of God before you. For John came to you in the way of righteousness, and you didn’t believe him. Tax collectors and prostitutes did believe him; but you, when you saw it, didn’t even change your minds then and believe him. Our Lord calls them to think of the ministry of John the Baptist which was a ministry of getting men ready of the Messiah by calling them to repent of their unbelief, repent of their sin and turn to God. Jesus said that John came to them in the way of righteousness but you didn’t believe him. They should have though, they should have! But they were so blinded by their own self-righteousness that they could not see the righteousness of the God they needed to turn to. They totally missed the message and as such, they totally missed the Messiah. But the most sinful people of all, in their eyes, didn’t miss it. They repented and turned to God and embraced Christ as their Savior and Lord.

I tell you my friends, I have often said that the absolute hardest people to ever bring to Christ are those who truly believe they already know Him. But it is clear as day they do not know Him- why? Because by their fruits you will know them. Listen, it is an act of judgment, and while we are not to carry around a critical attitude judging everybody for the splinter in their eye while we ignore our own, when the life and love of Christ and Christ’s people is not in a man, you can know the man is not in Christ. Yet, when they believe they are it is the hardest thing of all to convince them otherwise.

This was the exact shape the religious elites of Jesus’ day was in. They had said yes to God and even though they did not lift a finger to obey God, they believed they were absolutely right with Him and needed no repentance. Jesus shatters that that thinking by calling them to account for the fact they they have promised but not performed, they have heard but not obeyed.

Now I asked you a moment ago what’s one good way you would know if this was happening to you- here it is- take a look and see the lens of grace by which you are viewing others. For these religious elites, they looked at tax collectors and they looked at prostitutes and they decided that there was no possible way they could be right with God and enter the Kingdom of God. And yet, Jesus tells them tax collectors and prostitutes are entering the Kingdom of God before you.

Now my friends, I want us to see a certain deep beauty of grace that pours forth from these words. While we can lament the fact that the spiritually elite have rejected Jesus and so not entered the Kingdom, look my friends, those the elite would have rejected from the Kingdom are those that Jesus has brought in- the King has brought those men reject into His Kingdom! He says tax collectors and prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God before you. Isn’t that something- the worst of worst of the worst have been brought into the Kingdom of God as full- fledged citizens of the Almighty’s reign. Why friends, the Jewish elite despised those tax collectors- men like Zachhaeus, men like Matthew- because they cooperated with Rome to tax money from the people. They counted them to be the most unsavable, unredeemable people of all. And prostitutes were universally considered unclean- the most unclean of all- but not only unclean- unworthy of salvation, unworthy of the Kingdom of Heaven. And Jesus says, “They’re in! They once said no they would not repent, but then they repented and I brought them in!” Oh I tell you my friends, the mercy and grace of God to we sinners is a wonderfully glorious to behold. Is there someone here today that in your heart, in your mind, you are as filthy and unclean as it gets? Maybe others look at you and think that you would never be fit for the Kingdom of God. Maybe you have heard the gospel and at some point said there is no way you will bow to Jesus, no way you’re going to do what he says. You decided you were going to live life your way, and I want you to know, you may live it if you wish, but you will not die as you wish and you will burn in Hell forever for your refusal to change your mind, to repent. But would you look to Jesus now and see that if you will repent, if you will turn to Him, He will open the gates of His Kingdom wide open to you! I tell you, Christ has come to save sinners! Everyone else may rejected you, He will accept you.

Conclusion

And may our eyes always be cleared to see that the grace of God can embrace anyone. We only judge folks unfit for the Kingdom when we are looking to exalt and justify ourselves. Let the clean cut young man turn to Jesus, for the young man is a vile sinner in need of God’s grace. Let the young woman come to Christ, for He shall clean her. And let the worst of the worst, the drug addict, the murderer, the abuser turn to Christ, everyone needs the grace of God that comes to us through the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ! He who died for us will save all who call on Him- those whose faith leads them to love Him and obey Him- no one is outside the shot of God’s grace. The doors of the Kingdom open to all who change their minds and turn to Christ!