The Sermon on the Mount – Session 7

A Foundation that Endures

Reading: Matthew 7: 13-29

AUDIO

Lecture Handout

Sermon on the Mount Handout – Session 7

Lesson Notes

Last week you dealt with some of my favorite passages in the Sermon, on how we manage our finances and how to live without anxiety by seeking God’s Kingdom first. Thanks to Steven for leading and for designing this course and partnering with me!

Tonight is the final session of this course and our last Wednesday study in 2019. We’ll gather again on January 8 when I will begin an 8-week course called “Understand and Study the Bible”. Tonight we come to the climatic and sobering conclusion of the Sermon!

• Words of warning that set apart false Christians from true disciples
• The key questions: Do we know Christ? Are we following Him? Will we take His words seriously and try to live like Christ by His grace and power?
• Before we start, I believe Steven had a couple of postscripts to last week’s discussion

Gates, Paths, Fruit, and Knowing Christ (Matthew 7: 13-23)

• 3 different (related) dangers highlighted in church life: failure to follow Jesus, false leaders/teachers, and mistaking religious experience for a relationship with Christ
• verses 13-14 – The wide and narrow gates that lead to our eternal fates
  • This is a stark call on our lives, because the emphasis is on the destinations: destruction vs. life, damnation vs. glorification, hell vs. heaven
  • The way of destruction, death, and eternal damnation is easy to find and follow, it’s wide, offering a great deal of freedom
    • That’s the way most people go!
    • Paved with comfort, personal preference, doing things “my way”
  • The way of (eternal) life is hard, narrow, confining, difficult to find and hard to walk, because it’s through Christ who is the narrow gate
    • This is the way of a disciple, a true follower of Jesus Christ
    • Bonhoeffer, “On either side of the narrow path deep chasms yawn. To be called to a life of extraordinary quality, to live up to it, and yet to be unconscious of it is indeed a narrow way. To confess and testify to the truth as it is in Jesus, and at the same time to love them with the infinite love of Jesus Christ, is indeed a narrow way. To believe the promise of Jesus that his followers shall possess the earth, and at the same time to face our enemies unarmed and defenceless, preferring to incur injustice rather than to do wrong ourselves is indeed a narrow way.”
    • Bonhoeffer, “A little band of men, the followers of Christ, are separated from the rest of the world. The disciples are few in number, and will always be few. This saying of Jesus forestalls al exaggerated hopes of success. Never let a disciple of Jesus pin his hopes on large numbers.”
    • Think back to all we’ve discussed – doing what the Sermon is hard, in fact, impossible in our own abilities, though we’re called to it
    • Bonhoeffer, “If we regard this way as one we follow in obedience to an external command, if we are afraid of ourselves all the time, it is indeed an impossible way. But if we behold Jesus Christ going on before step by step, we shall not go astray. But if we worry about the dangers that beset us, if we gaze at the road instead of at him who goes before, we are already straying from the path.”
    • The Sermon forces us to take up our cross daily, rely on God’s Spirit, and give up much of ourselves.
    • Carson, “God’s way is not spacious, but confining. Poverty of spirit is not easy; prayer is not easy; righteousness is not easy; transformed God-centered attitudes are not easily achieved. In fact, these things are impossible for us apart from God’s grace. They are alien to much of what is in us and which cries out to be heard; and therefore the re-alignment that is part and parcel of genuine conversion is a confining thing.”
• verses 15-20 – The hazards of false prophets
  • A false prophet claims to have an insight or word from God that isn’t true
  • We still see them today – people claiming or teaching contrary to the Bible and claiming it a word from the Lord, etc.
  • These were and are people claiming to be Christian, holy, to have special insight
  • Seeking to take advantage of the church – ravenous wolves in sheep’s clothing
  • verses 16-20 – Analogy – plants in Israel that look from a distance like the good thing, but aren’t when you see up close
    • Key principle – you will know them by their fruit = visible evidence of their lives and ministry (NOT our usual human criteria of numbers and dollars)
    • True prophets and teachers of God will hae lives and produce fruit consistent with their nature
    • Deceivers will live nad produce fruit in keeping with their nature
    • What does it look like?
      • Good fruit
        • Good, increasingly Christ-like character and temperament
        • Fruit of the Spirit
        • Repentance for wrongdoing
        • Pointing people toward Christ and greater faithfulness
        • Pointing people to the narrow path
      • Bad fruit
        • Lack of Fruit of the Spirit
        • Lack of repentance
        • Pointing peple toward themselves or the world rather than Christ
        • Pointing people away from increasing holiness and Christlikeness and toward something else (“your best life now”)
        • Pointing people to the wide path
      • Verse 19 – False prophets are bad fruit trees condemned to burn in hell
      • Verse 20 – Restating the point -> before swooning for a TV preacher or web phenomenon, look at the fruit of their life and ministry
• Verses 21-23 – There aren’t just false prophets – also false disciples and miracle workers
  • Salvation isn’t based on appearances, words, or even miracles in Christ’s name
  • Verse 21 – It’s not about statements of piety but our genuine faith that compels us to obey Christ and do God’s will
    • Bonhoeffer, “The man who says ‘Lord, Lord’ has either called himself to Jesus without the Holy Spirit, or else he has made out of the call of Jesus a personal privilege. But our doer of the will of God is called and endued with grace, he obeys and follows. He understands his call not as his right, but as an act of God’s judgment and grace, as the will of God, which alone he must obey. The grace of Jesus is a demand upon the doer, and so his doing becomes the true humility, the right faith, and the right confession of the grace of the God who calls.”
    • That’s who will enter the Kingdom of Heaven; the chief characteristic of a true believer is obedience to God’s will – that’s a theme underemphasized in modern Christianity!
    • Verse 22 – People will point to their works, even miracles as defense
    • Verse 23 – But if you don’t do God’s will and want to do God’s will, you don’t really know Christ and He will condemn you to hell
      • Here we see the relationship of grace and works – we are saved by God’s grace through faith in God’s revelation of Himself in Jesus Christ
      • But if we know Christ and have saving faith, we will want to do God’s will more and more
      • Carson, “It is true, of course, that no man enters the kingdom because of his obedience; but it is equally true that no man enters the kingdom who is not obedient.”
      • Bonhoeffer, “But Christ’s followers must ask by what ultimate criterion Jesus will accept or reject them. Who will pass the test, and who will not? The answer lies in the words of Jesus to the last of the rejected: ‘I have never known you.’ Here we are at last, here is the secret we have been waiting for since the SErmon on the MOunt began. Here is the crucial question – has Jesus known us or not?”

The Sermon Concluded: Will You Build Your Life on a Foundation that Endures? (Matthew 7: 24-29)

• Jesus speaks to everyone who hears the words of the Sermon, including us, and divides us into 2 groups based on one thing – doing what Jesus said
• Verse 24-25 – The wise whod o what Jesus said
  • Build life on a solid foundation, on the rock of Jesus Christ and His word
  • Storms and disasters will come – for certain – rain, flood, wind
  • But the wise endure
• Verses 26-27 – The foolish who don’t do what Jesus said
  • Build life without a real – on sun-baked sand
  • The same disasters come, but the house is wiped out!
• Verses 28-29 – Crowd astonished because Jesus taught with authority, not derived authority and equivocation
• What do we build our lives upon?
• Clearly it’s possible to be churchy and claim Christ as Savior but not really know Him
  • Because He hasn’t changed your life with fruit of obedience
  • This leads to disaster and damnation!
• Do we take these words seriously and try to lie by them through God’s daily grace?
  • Or do we try to argue and reason and rationalize our way out of them, debating them away as not applicable?
  • That’s the house of sand!
  • Build your hose on the rock, be wise, live like Jesus, lie by the Sermon though it’s hard, lonely, and indeed impossible apart from a focus on Christ and the work of His Spirit in your life
  • Bonhoeffer, “Humanly speaking, we could understand and interpret the Sermon on the Mount in a thousand different ways. Jesus knows only one possibility: simple surrender and obedience, not interpreting it or applying it, but doing and obeying it. That is the only way to hear his word. But again he does not mean that it is to be discussed as an ideal, he really means us to get on with it.”