The Two Claims

I’m going to approach today’s message in a little bit of a different fashion than I do most weeks.

Most of you have probably figured out by now that I like to start with a little story — preferably about myself — that I then connect to the main point of the passage we are studying.

The idea is that if you are able to relate to the story somehow — even if it’s simply by recognizing that your pastor is human and has a tendency to do dumb things like rubbing poison ivy on his face — you will then be better able to apply the point of whatever passage we are studying to your own lives.

I thought long and hard this week about some story I could share to help you better apply the point of today’s passage to your lives, and I DID come up with a couple of stories to illustrate the idea of thinking everything is fine and then finding out you’re in grave danger.

But whenever I tried to slot one of those stories into the introduction of today’s message, it felt as if I was cheapening the message that Jesus was so serious about as He neared the conclusion to His Sermon on the Mount.

And the fact of the matter is that, although there is an easy case to make that Jesus taught with humor and enjoyed having a little fun just as much as anyone else, there was nothing fun or funny going on in what He had to say in this passage that begins in Matt 7:21.

We have seen that He used clever plays on words in other parts of the Sermon on the Mount and that He even poked fun at the Pharisees while making the points He wanted His disciples to understand.

But in His conclusion — and especially in the two concluding paragraphs that we will look at this week and next — He became utterly serious. What He taught in this week’s passage and in next week’s was no laughing matter.

Indeed, I consider this week’s passage to be one of the most frightening ones in Scripture, and as I studied it, I concluded that the only way to do it justice is to approach it with the seriousness that it deserves.

So, let me start by asking you to think about a couple of questions as we read and then study today’s passage in Matthew, chapter 7: First, do you really know who you really are? And second, are you really safe where you really are?

Now, let’s read these three verses together, and then we’ll talk about this third of four warnings Jesus had for His listeners and for us in this second-to-last paragraph of the Sermon on the Mount.

Matthew 7:21–23 NASB95

“Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father who is in heaven will enter. “Many will say to Me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, and in Your name cast out demons, and in Your name perform many miracles?’ “And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness.’

You will recall that in the previous passage, which we studied last week, Jesus warned about false prophets — false teachers who would come into the church looking, talking, and even acting like true Christians.

But, dressed up to look like sheep themselves, these ravenous wolves, instead of bringing glory to God by delivering lost sheep into His sheepfold, would swindle unsuspecting lost sheep out of the inheritance they could have as adopted sons and daughters of God, and they would rob undiscriminating sheep of the rewards they could be storing up as citizens of the kingdom of heaven.

So in last week’s passage, Jesus warned about the danger of false teachers. And in this week’s passage, he warns about the danger of false believers.

And this is why I consider this passage to be one of the most frightening in Scripture.

It’s one thing to understand that there are people out there who falsely present themselves to be prophets of God speaking God’s words to the people, and to know that Jesus will judge them and punish them in the end.

But it is quite another thing — and potentially much more personal — to understand that there are people out there — and perhaps right here among us — who falsely consider THEMSELVES to be followers of Jesus Christ, and to know that Jesus will also judge THEM and punish THEM in the end.

These are the false followers, and what’s important to recognize about them is that they go through their lives thinking they know who they really are and where they really stand in relationship to God.

You see, what matters in the end is not what we think about ourselves but what Jesus, to whom God has given the authority to judge mankind, knows about us.

He alone is the one who will look at you one day and say either “Well done, good and faithful servant” or “I never knew you; depart from me.”

And this is true, whether you are the most devout Christian or the most unbridled atheist.

Jesus, who had committed no sin and was judged by a man to be innocent of any crime, was nevertheless subjected to the unjust sentence of death on a Roman cross.

And as He hung on that cross, God heaped upon His own Son the guilt for the sins of the world. The innocent one became the guilty one, suffering God’s punishment — not just the physical pain and death, but absolute separation from the Father with whom Jesus had enjoyed eternal and perfect fellowship — so that we who HAVE sinned against God in our selfishness, in our greed, and in our lusts could have eternal life through faith in Christ and His sacrifice.

The innocent died for the guilty. The selfless one died for the selfish ones. The gracious one died for the greedy ones. The loving one died for the lusting ones.

The one who described Himself as the resurrection and the life died for the ones who were dead in our trespasses so that we might have life through His resurrection.

And His sacrifice was a sacrifice of obedience to His Father, whose plan from before the foundation of time was to reconcile sinners to Himself by the shedding of His own blood in the person of His crucified Son.

And because of Christ’s obedience to and through the cross, God has placed His resurrected Son on the throne of judgment in heaven, where He has the authority one day to judge every person who has ever lived.

Jesus describes this judgment in Matthew, chapter 25:

Matthew 25:31–34 NASB95

“But when the Son of Man comes in His glory, and all the angels with Him, then He will sit on His glorious throne. “All the nations will be gathered before Him; and He will separate them from one another, as the shepherd separates the sheep from the goats; and He will put the sheep on His right, and the goats on the left. “Then the King will say to those on His right, ‘Come, you who are blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.

Many will stand before the judgment seat of Christ on that day and acknowledge for the very first time that He is the risen Messiah, the King of kings and Lord of Lords they had spent a lifetime denying.

And because they never placed their trust in Him as their only means of salvation, they will be sent away into eternal punishment in hell, where they will forever suffer the choice they made to live as if there were no God.

But the righteous, Jesus says at the end of that passage in Matthew, chapter 25, will go away into eternal life, life in perfect fellowship with the Father and the Son the way it was always meant to be.

And who are the righteous? Well, Jesus has been clear throughout this Sermon on the Mount that none of us has the righteousness that is required to enter the kingdom of heaven.

Each one of us is spiritually bankrupt, unable to offer God anything that would put Him in our debt or earn us His favor.

The righteous ones who will enter into eternal life are the ones who have the righteousness of Jesus Christ imputed to them through faith in Him.

They are the ones who, as Jesus says back in today’s passage in chapter 7, “do the will of His Father who is in heaven.”

So what is the will of God? Well, the first part of it is this: To believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the promised Savior of mankind.

Jesus put it this way in the Gospel of John:

John 6:28–29 NASB95

Therefore they said to Him, “What shall we do, so that we may work the works of God?” Jesus answered and said to them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He has sent.”

So, if belief in Jesus is what’s needed for salvation — for entrance into the kingdom of heaven in the context of the Sermon on the Mount — then how do we account for the “many” in Matt 7:22 to whom Jesus will say, “I never knew you; depart from me, you who practice lawlessness”?

It comes down to a right understanding of what it means to believe, to have saving faith in Christ.

A true, saving faith in Jesus includes three elements, and these are Latin words, but bear with me, and I’ll give you some definitions and explanation.

A true, saving faith in Jesus Christ must include all three of these elements: notitia, assensus, and fiducia. Notitia, assensus, and fiducia.

Now, notitia simply means information. And in our context, what it means is that a saving faith must have content. It must have an object. You can’t simply say you have faith and expect that to have any real meaning. What do you have faith IN?

Furthermore, the content of biblical faith must come from the Bible. The wide road that leads to destruction has plenty of billboards with messages about a Jesus whom we do not find in Scripture.

And this is one more reason it is so important for us to know just what the Bible says about Him and not to simply take the word of some prosperity preacher who tells you, “Jesus just wants you to be happy.”

But notitia alone is not sufficient for saving faith. To have saving faith, there must also be assensus, and that means just what it sounds like. Assensus is assent or agreement.

In other words, saving faith includes not just a recognition of the facts of who Jesus is but also agreement that these facts are true — that He is the Son of God; that we are all sinners and our sins have created a chasm between us and God that we cannot bridge; that the sinless life, sacrificial death, and supernatural resurrection of Jesus provided the only bridge across that chasm; and that you can be saved from eternal punishment for your sins only by God’s grace through faith in Jesus and His sacrifice.

But even agreement with these facts is not enough to produce saving faith. Saving faith must also include fiducia, which is the word from which we get “fiduciary.” It means “trust.”

A banker has a fiduciary responsibility to her clients. That means that her clients trust her to take care of their money responsibly.

And in the context of saving faith, what fiducia means is that you put your complete trust in the facts that you have agreed are true. You have no “Plan B” for your salvation. If Jesus has not really accomplished it for you, then you believe you are utterly lost.

Saving faith requires a level of trust that causes us to forsake ourselves in order to follow Jesus. In other words, we stop trusting in ourselves and our own righteousness — giving up the notion that there is some good thing or some pile of good things we can do to save ourselves — and begin trusting completely in Jesus as our only means of salvation.

But there is another facet to this matter of fiducia. A saving faith that includes this trust results in some action.

Let me give you an example. If I had asked you earlier whether you trusted that the chair you are sitting in now would support you, you probably would have said, “Yes, of course it will.”

You would have accepted the information you could discern about its sturdiness and construction. You would have agreed that the chair you were seeing wasn’t a mirage or hallucination and that chairs built this way are capable of supporting your weight.

But only by sitting in it, by placing your entire weight upon the chair, could you truly demonstrate that your faith in it went deeper than mental agreement.

I think this is the element of faith that is missing from the “many” whom Jesus talks about in verse 22.

Look what they say to Him.

First, they call Him Lord, Lord.

Now, prior to His resurrection, most of Jesus’ followers didn’t fully understand the significance of calling Him “Lord.”For most of them, this was simply a title of respect, like “Sir.”

But after the resurrection and surely by the time Matthew wrote this Gospel, this had become a title of great significance, denoting both Jesus’ divinity and His place as the rightful King of kings.

Furthermore, the “many” in verse 22 describe prophesying and casting out demons and performing miracles in His name, which tells us they also agreed that His very name is powerful.

And here’s the frightening part: They were doing real ministry in His name. People were being saved in His name.

But Jesus will say to them, “I never knew you; depart from me.”

You see, God can glorify Himself through faithful servants, but He can also glorify Himself through false prophets. He did that in the Old Testament through the false prophet Balaam, whom the king of Moab hired to pronounce a curse on the people of Israel.

Balaam really wanted the king’s money, and so he went with the king up onto the hills of Moab three times, but each time, instead of cursing, He could only speak God’s blessings upon the people of Israel.

God can even work through those who have set their faces against Him, as we see in Matthew, chapter 10.

Matthew 10:1–4 NASB95

Jesus summoned His twelve disciples and gave them authority over unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to heal every kind of disease and every kind of sickness. Now the names of the twelve apostles are these: The first, Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew his brother; and 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, the one who betrayed Him.

Now, this isn’t just a list of Jesus’ 12 disciples. This is a list of the 12 apostles, or sent ones, who went out with His power and authority to heal sickness, cast out demons, and even, as verse 8 of this passage tells us, raise the dead.

It may surprise us to see the name of Judas, the one who betrayed Jesus, listed among those to whom Jesus gave this authority, but the lesson to us should be clear: Even an effective ministry for Christ does not guarantee salvation.

And in today’s passage from Matthew, chapter 7, we see in verse 22 that the “many” Jesus spoke of had very effective ministries in His name.

So what was missing in them that would cause Jesus to say, “I never knew you; depart from me”?

We can see that the people Jesus is warning about agree with the information about who He is and what He can do. Their faith has the elements of notitia and assensus. What it seems to be lacking is fiducia, trust only in Him as their sole means of salvation.

What’s the basis of the people’s belief in verse 22 that they are citizens of the kingdom of heaven?

I think the basis is their works. “Didn’t we prophesy? Didn’t we cast out demons? Didn’t we perform miracles? Didn’t we give to missions? Didn’t we tell people about Jesus? Didn’t we tithe and go to church on Sundays and serve the church and read our Bibles and pray?”

All those are good and proper things for Christians to do, but none of them will save you.

We are saved by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone.

The people in verse 22 will be people who know Jesus, but He will not know THEM, because they will never have had a relationship with Him that is founded upon complete trust in His sinless life, His sacrificial death, and His supernatural resurrection as their only means of salvation.

They are people who have hedged their bets. They are people who have never let go of their trust in themselves to be good enough for heaven. They are people who saw the chair and agreed it would support them but then never sat down in it.

And the reason this passage is so frightening to me is that I know how easy it is for us to fool ourselves into believing that we have somehow placed God in our debt with the things we do in His name, that we can earn our way into heaven by the work we do for Him, that somehow we can clean the filthy rags of our own righteousness by just being better people and doing religious things.

The reason this passage is so frightening is that it shows us just how close one can come to saving faith and still be lost.

You can know your Bible frontwards and backwards, inside and out, and you can agree that it is completely true and that Jesus is who He said He is and will do what He said He will do.

But if you do not take that final step of fiducia, of turning from trusting yourself and placing your trust completely and solely in Him for your salvation, then these terrible words will be the ones you hear as you stand before his throne of judgment: “I never knew you; depart from me.”

Have you repented of the sin of self assurance? Have you forsaken yourself to follow Jesus? Is it time, finally, for you to sit in the chair? You may know Jesus, but does Jesus know you?

This can be the very day you begin a relationship that will last for eternity, but it is a relationship that must be built completely and only on the foundation of Christ’s finished work at the cross.

You will meet Him there, or you will meet Him on that terrible day of judgment. Won’t you meet Him at the cross?