All right, would you open your
Bibles to Luke chapter six. Luke chapter six. Let's begin reading at verse
37, because the things said before our text will be brought up in
the message. Luke 6, 37, do not judge and you will not be judged. Do
not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you
will be forgiven. Give, and it shall be given to
you. A good measure, pressed down,
shaken together, and running over, will be poured into your
lap. For with the measure you use,
it will be measured to you. He also told them this parable,
can a blind man lead a blind man? Will they not both fall
into a pit? A student is not above his teacher,
but everyone who is fully trained will be like his teacher. Why
do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay
no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say
to your brother, brother, Let me take the speck out of your
eye when you yourself fail to see the plank in your own eye. You hypocrite. First take the
plank out of your eye and then you will see clearly to remove
the speck from your brother's eye. No good tree bears bad fruit,
nor does a bad tree bear good fruit. Each tree is recognized
by its own fruit. People do not pick figs from
thorn bushes. or grapes from briars. The good
man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart.
And the evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored
up in his heart. For out of the overflow of his
heart, his mouth speaks. Now the Bible uses fruit, whether
from a vine or a tree, uses it to illustrate the effects of
various spiritual actions or principles or whatever. Fruit
is a very common symbol in the scriptures. It's used to describe
the various results that come from preaching the gospel. You
remember the parable of the sower and the soils, how a sower went
forth to sow and he sowed seed and some fell on stony ground,
you know, and some fell on among the thorns and the thistles and
some fell on good ground. And the results were different
because. All but one of those grounds
in which the same seed was sown. There was no fruit now on the
good soil, there was fruit. Some 30 times what was sown,
some 60, some 100. But the Lord there was using
the presence of fruit to indicate an action of life, of God-given
life that attends the preaching of the gospel when God wills
it. And yet on other occasions, you know, like I preached this
morning to a group here and I have no idea What kind of fruit will
come of this? Because I don't know what kind
of soil you are. But this is certain. If you are that good soil, and
I don't mean that you are that good soil by nature, you know,
we don't make good soil, God makes good soil. But if God makes
your heart receptive, that seed will not only grow up into a
plant of religious you know, visible religious things, it'll
bear the fruit of faith and love and hope in Christ. It's used
to describe the converts of a particular ministry, saying that the validity
of a man's ministry can be determined by the sort of converts his ministry
produces. Look over at Matthew chapter
7. I want us to look at this one
because this is one of those scriptures that is so often misused. Verse 15, Matthew chapter 7,
watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep's clothing,
but inwardly they are ferocious wolves. By their fruit you will
recognize them Do people pick grapes from thorn bushes or figs
from thistles? Likewise, every good tree bears
good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. And then you go on
down to verse 20, thus by their fruit you will recognize them. Now we read there in the book
of Luke where the Lord says, do not judge and you will not
be judged. And you tell this to some people,
they say, well, I'm not a judge. I'm a fruit inspector. And, you
know, you just want to, you know, put your head in your hand and
say, you're missing the point here. You're missing the point.
Yes, there is a time when a person's position spiritually is revealed
in the fruit he produces. But notice that it's rather narrowly
defined here. He says, watch out for false
prophets. And here's how you can determine who's a false prophet. Look at his converts. What are
they like? Are they really trusting Christ?
Or are they trusting something else? You know, there are many who
go out claiming to be gospel preachers. And if you ask them,
what do you believe? And they lay out their statement
of faith to you, you would probably say, well, yeah, that's what
we believe too. But if you want to find out what
they really believe and what they're really preaching, watch
and listen to the people they preach to. And I have heard people
that claim to preach the gospel, and from time to time they do
get around to it and they say some things that are true, but
the general tenor of what they say and what the people who follow
them say always seems to come around to something you do. It
always gets back to them. What does that tell me? If their
speech always gets back to them, it's because what they're hearing
is always directing them back to themselves. And that's the
ministry of a false prophet. And so yes, we can be a fruit
inspector in this sense. We look at the converts. of any
man's ministry, and we can determine what kind of ministry he has.
Now, and for that reason, you see, I'm not worried that my
ministry would be judged by you. I'm not. Why? For one thing,
I know what I've preached, but I also know what you believe.
And I've heard you talk. I know what you say. And providing
you're saying the same thing to others you say around me,
There's no question. Grace is what's preached here.
Christ is what's preached here because that's what you believe.
That's what you talk about. So, yeah, there is some kind
of fruit inspecting going on, but. When you say do not judge
and people say I'm a fruit inspector, what they're really saying is
I'm just trying to find a new name for being a judge because I like
judging and we all do. I mean, let's just admit it.
We're that way. Also, fruit is used to describe the results
of Christ's work. He says in John chapter 12 that
if a grain of wheat doesn't fall to the ground and die, in a sense
that's what happens to a seed. It quits being a seed as such. But it falls to the ground, it
will not bear any fruit. And what was he referring to?
He's referring to himself. Unless he dies, there'll be no
fruit to his work. He may be a great prophet. He
was. He was the prophet, that prophet. He's God in human flesh. But all of his talking would
have amounted to nothing if he didn't die. And so fruit, he talks about
himself bearing fruit through his death. Fruit is sometimes given as an
illustration of the results of being converted to Christ. In
Galatians chapter 5, it talks about the fruit of the Spirit,
which is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, kindness, goodness,
and all this kind of, several things like that. And what it's
talking about there is if the Spirit of God dwells in you,
and if He has taken the things of Christ and shown them to you,
if the gospel has been preached to you, the gospel of Christ,
and it is found good soil in you, it's going
to bear the fruit of love, joy, peace. Now, you know, we all
may lament our lack of love and joy and peace and all these things,
but imagine what it would be like if the Spirit of God was
not in us. You know, John Newton said, I'm
not what I should be. I'm not what I want to be. And I'm not what I shall be.
But thank God, I'm not what I was. And he said, well, I'm still
just a sinner. True. We understand that. But there
is something about the power of the grace of God. It does
change a man. The man himself may never notice
it. Others will. In fact, one preacher was quoted
as saying, I wouldn't give you a nickel for a man's salvation
whose dog didn't know about it. Even the way you treat animals
will be affected by the work of God. And also in the book
of Hebrews it says that a peaceful and contented state of mind in
the child of God who has been disciplined, it's called the
fruit. And it says the praise of our
lips is fruit. Now what's evident in all of
this is that all of these spiritual things that we can see are the
result of something that already existed. Fruit does not exist on its own. The scriptures use the use of
fruit to illustrate spiritual things teaches us some very important
truths about spiritual things. First of all, there are consequences
to one's faith or lack of it, his actions and his attitudes. Fruit is inescapable. Trees bear
a certain kind of fruit because they're a certain kind of tree.
And the Apostle Paul says this in the book of Galatians, Do
not be deceived. God is not mocked. Whatever a
man sows, that shall he also reap. That is, whatever he sows,
that's the kind of fruit he's going to get. And he says, If
of the flesh, if that's what you sow to, you will of the flesh
reap corruption. But if you sow to the Spirit,
in spiritual things, if that's where your investment in your
heart lies, then you will reap from the Spirit those things
that pertain to eternal life. Now the fact is, in a very broad
sense, we sow in both directions, don't we? I mean, we have to. We've got flesh. It needs to
be sustained. So we go to our jobs. We put
effort into them. We sow to the flesh. But everything
we reap from that sowing, what is it? It's corruptible stuff.
That's why we have to go back and work again the next day.
Because it keeps falling apart. It's corruption. But all that that you sow to
the Spirit, your efforts and energies that you put in, as
Paul said, to pressing on and trying to lay hold of that for
which Christ laid hold of you, all of that produces a fruit
unto eternal life. Fruit that lasts forever. And a person And of course, this
being an agricultural community, you all understand this. The
harvest is determined by what kind of seed you sowed and how
much of it you sowed. And so, there are consequences
to how we act. Now, immediately the question
comes up, well you mean then if a guy doesn't sow enough to
the Spirit, he ends up being lost? No. If you sow to the Spirit at all,
it's because the Spirit of God is already in you. But we know
this in this life, in our experience of salvation, the more you pay attention to
spiritual things, the more you grow in grace and knowledge of
our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. And that's an eternal benefit. And then the fruit. which we
can see. Here's another principle that
the Bible teaches us from using this illustration of fruit. The
fruit which we can see is always the result, not the cause of
the character of the tree. In other words, an apple tree
is not an apple tree because it bears apples. It bears apples
because it's an apple tree. You cannot turn one tree into
a different kind of tree by trying to hang different fruit on it.
And that's what most of religion is trying to do. Is trying to
take bad trees and hang good fruit on them. And then declare
the tree to be good. You know what happens if you
hang fruit on a tree? The fruit shrivels up and dies. I mean I could go out to a...
We got several maple trees. And they bear a kind of fruit,
and it gets stuck in my gutters. Whirlygigs. I like apples. I think apples are better than
whirlygigs. I could go out to those maple
trees, and I could tape apples all over them. It would not make
them into apple trees, would it? And it would not. Well, all I would do in the process
is lose all the apples I taped to it, because they would shrivel
up. and become nasty rotten things. And you know that's what happens
in religion. Religion tries to tape good things on bad trees
and all that happens is the bad trees remain bad and the fruit
itself goes bad. And it becomes nothing but self-righteous
works. Which men do, thinking it makes
them good enough for God. And they come before God in the
final day and they've got a bushel full of fruit. swarming with nasty flies and
it's rotten and smells awful and they think they have something
good. And even in the bearing of good
fruit, among those who are the people of God and who bear fruit
unto eternal life, there is a difference in the measure of the harvest.
And I don't mean by that that I'm not talking about when we
get the glory, I'm talking about here. Paul acknowledges that there
are differences among believers. They all bear fruit, but some
30-fold, says the Lord, some 60-fold, some 100-fold. You know,
there are some people who I know that seem that they have an absolutely
unshakable faith. I envy them. They're those hundredfold
people. For some reason or another, when
the seed was sowed to them, it brought forth a plant and such
an abundance of fruit, and I honestly wish I was like them. I don't
profess to be, and I'm not going to tell you which fold I am.
I don't know. But I know that there are some who may be way
down on the 30 fold or even 10 or 20 or whatever, they barely
have any faith at all. Or they don't show a level of
interest that we might think is appropriate or whatever. But
here's the thing, there's something there. There's something. And something is always better
than nothing. That is, something of real fruit
is always better than no fruit. There's a lot of people that
make for a beautiful plant that produces no fruit. And there
are some who the plant doesn't look so good, but at least there's
some fruit on it. And what does that tell you?
There's life there. There's something real there. Our Lord said to
the disciples, O ye of little faith, why do you doubt? They
were doubters. They were complainers. They were
whiners. They got all upset over things that shouldn't have upset
them. But the Lord did not ever say to them, oh, you unbelievers.
He just said little faith. Doubting faith. In our text, the Lord speaks
of good fruit and bad fruit. We're back at Luke chapter six
now. He speaks of good fruit and bad
fruit. He declares that the character of the fruit reveals the character
of the tree. And he says that in this case,
the fruit he's talking about is what a person says. This scripture is not about the
fruit of our conduct as such. He's not saying that believers
as opposed to unbelievers do good things while unbelievers
do bad things. That may be true, but that's
not what the Lord's teaching at this point. It's always good
when we're seeing these illustrations Find out if the Lord gives any
indication as to what we're to apply it to. And what we're to
apply this to is to what a person says. Because he says there right
at the end of this portion here, at the end of verse 45, out of
the overflow of his heart, his mouth speaks. So the heart, so to speak, is
the tree and the words are the fruit. And a bad tree will not produce
good fruit, nor does a good tree produce bad fruit. Okay, verse
43 now. No good tree bears bad fruit,
nor does a bad tree bear good fruit. That person who is only
flesh, who has never been born again, does not produce anything
good. The Bible says there are none
good, None that do good. No, not one. Now when we speak
here of good and bad trees, we're speaking of the good trees are
those who've been born of the Spirit of God and the bad trees
are those who have not. Or you could divide it into believers
and unbelievers. But the bad tree, the unbeliever,
does not bear good fruit. Not of any kind. The fleshly
mind, the scripture says, is enmity with God. Now it doesn't
say the fleshly mind is ignorant of God. It may be. But that's
not what the scripture says. It does not say the fleshly mind
doesn't like God as much as he likes other things. It says the
fleshly mind, the fleshly way of thinking, is hostile toward
God. Now how can someone who it is
the very core of his being is hostile towards God. How can
he do anything good? Now, he may do things that are
good for you and me. I mean, he can be an honest man. He can even be a charitable man
in the sense that he gives gifts to the poor. He may be a friendly
man. He may be a great neighbor. He
may help us when we're in trouble. I'm not talking about those kind
of things. That isn't necessarily what makes a deed good or evil. For you see, when a person who
is only of the flesh does those things which appear outwardly
to be good, we find that the motive behind them is always
self. They are trying to advance their
own cause one way or another. That's why so many preachers,
when it comes time to take the offering, try to give the congregation
the idea that if they will give to God, God will give them more. In fact, they might use this
scripture, verse 38, give and it will be given to you, a good
measure, pressed down, shaken together. And so they're acting
like, why don't you give because giving to the church is a good
investment, it pays better than Wall Street. Well, yes it does,
but it doesn't pay in the same coin that Wall Street does. And
if you ever give, and you give $100 hoping you'll get back $1,000,
forget it. That's not what the scriptures
teach. But there are many who give for that very reason. Or
they give, as many do, thinking that when the day comes, that
they must appear before God, they can point to that giving
and say, Lord, Lord, did we not give? I gave to the church, and I gave
to the hospital, and they came on TV and showed me starving
orphans in the third world country, and I sponsored three or four
of them, and I've done this, and I've done that. And it's
all been done out of an evil heart of unbelief that's trying
to work its way into God's favor. And that's why the natural man
cannot do anything good. He can't produce good fruit.
It's always fruit unto death. Sometimes it looks like The bad tree is bearing good
fruit because as we mentioned, somebody is just hanging good
fruit on it. They've been taught what they ought to do and what
supposedly constitutes good fruit and they're just doing what they
were told to do. What they're doing doesn't flow
naturally from what they are. They have just found a new law. They went to church and got new
rules to follow. You know, we teach our children.
We teach them at home. We teach them here. But here's
one thing we never do. We should never do. After we've
taught them, we should never ask them to say back to us what
we taught them as though they're saying it back. Is an indication
of what they believe. This whole business of reciting
the creed as a profession of faith, that is getting children
to do so. And then we think, okay, they're
believers. See, they just said, I believe in God and blah, blah,
blah, you know, all this kind of stuff. You could teach a parrot
to say that. You see, you can hang good fruit
on a bad tree. The problem is it won't last.
And you got to keep hanging the fruit on it. So we don't, we don't, And I
mentioned the children there. Actually, we don't ask anybody
to recite back to us what we have taught them. As though the
reciting of it is in any way a revelation of what's in their
heart. That's why I would never do that
kind of thing that I saw so much of in my youth. Where they would
say, would you like to be saved? And someone says, yeah. Okay,
repeat after me, dear God, dear God. You know, and go through
this prayer that they said like wedding vows, you know, you say
three or four words and they repeat them back. Why wouldn't
you do that? Because you could tell them to
recite good fruit, but it'd just be hanging good fruit on a dead
tree, on a bad tree. Brethren, if a man doesn't know
how to ask God for salvation, it's because he doesn't yet want
it. You know something, if I'm hungry, I know how to ask for
food. Isn't it so? Peter, going down
there in the water. Did the Lord have to tell Peter
what to say? Did He have to preach Peter a
long message and then start singing the disciples back in the boat,
that stayed in the boat, start singing a slow hymn? And He said,
Peter, would you like to be saved? You know, your wife would sure
like it if you were saved so that you didn't drown today.
And you got the disciples back in the boat. Won't you be saved
today? And Peter says, yes. And the
Lord says, okay, repeat after me. Lord, Lord. The Lord didn't
have to say anything to him. He was going down. And out of
the heart of a living man that doesn't want to die, he said,
Lord, save me. That's good fruit. That's good
fruit. And the disciples didn't tell
him what to do. The Lord didn't tell him what to do. What was
in him told him what to do. We preach the gospel. And I gotta
admit, once in a while I think, what can I do? What can I do
to get more people to believe? Nothing. Nothing. Anything I can make you believe,
you might unbelieve the next day. Henry, you say anything
I can talk you into, somebody else will talk you out of later
on. If the Lord God convinces you of something, you won't be
unconvinced. Because what you believe will be the fruit of
life within you. What you believe and what you
confess with your mouth will flow out of you as naturally
as the vile stuff flowed out of you before. And so we just keep preaching
the gospel. We keep sowing the seed. And we're not going to do anything
any different. There's nothing you can do to this seed. You
cannot genetically modify the Word of God, which is called
the seed. You can't genetically modify
it to make it better. You cannot come up with a gospel
that will grow well among thorns and thistles or that will survive
on the stony ground of a stony heart. We take the Word of God
as it is. We preach it. And we just rejoice
when we see fruit come from it. Whether it's 30-fold, 60-fold,
100-fold, or just 2-fold. Whatever. As long as there's
fruit. We plant seed and leave it to
God to give the increase. And then whatever increase we
find will be real fruit. Good fruit. And then good trees bear good
fruit. They always do. You say, wait
a minute, preacher. What do you mean good trees always
bear good fruit? You said believers are good trees.
We don't always do the right thing. We don't always say the
right thing. How can you say good trees always bear good fruit? Well, you know, when you look
at a believer and you see this mixture of good and bad, even
in the things they say, what must we conclude? There's
two trees. That's what we must conclude.
I remember when a brother told me that, and it wasn't that many
years, about 10 years ago or something like that. It's one
of the brother preachers who always thought he had a way of
just in a few words saying what often takes me 45 minutes to
get out. But you all know him, Brother John Chapman. And by
the way, if you aren't aware, he's pastoring a church in North
Carolina now, they called him. I don't even think he's moved
down there yet, He's going to here in a few weeks. Faithful
preacher of the gospel. But we were talking about this
business of what is a believer like? Is he a man of two natures? Or is he a man of one nature
that just has two ways of thinking going on in his head? And he
said, well, you know, he said, you see good fruit and bad fruit
in a believer. And he says the Bible says a
good tree can't bear bad fruit. And a bad tree can't bear good
fruit. The only thing we can conclude is there's two trees
in there. Two different trees. Not one tree that has some good
fruit and some bad fruit. There's a bad tree called the
flesh and it brings forth nothing but bad fruit. Even in the believer.
That's why the Apostle Paul says, I know that in me that is in
my flesh dwells no good thing. And if there's no good thing
in the flesh, you can be sure of this, nothing good's coming
out of it. As the scriptures teach in the
Old Testament, all those laws in the Old Testament, there was
all kinds of sacrifices and ritual cleansings necessary for everything
that comes out of the body. And I've heard some people say,
well, that was God's way of teaching them good hygiene. Well, it may
have been. I don't know. But I do know this,
it was more for a spiritual thing to teach us. Nothing that comes
out of our natural selves is anything good. Everything that
comes out of us needs a sacrifice to make it clean. It needs hidden.
It needs a hole dug and it put in. It needs burned. Why? Nothing about us is good. Nothing
about our natural selves. And that flesh, that natural
part of our existence that's still here, even though we've
been born again, is still producing nothing that's any good. But
thank God, in a believer, a new man has been created. A spiritual
man. We were spiritually dead, but
brethren, if you've been born again by the Spirit of God, you're
not spiritually dead anymore. You're spiritually alive. And
the fruit of that spirit is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness,
goodness, kindness, and these sort of things. And that's all
your spirit produces. Now, there's a constant conflict
between those two trees. The tree of the flesh and the
tree of the spirit. And therefore we see this combination
of bad fruit and good fruit. And unfortunately, I don't know
if the word unfortunate is right there or not, but it seems for
the believer, he notices the bad fruit more than he does the
good fruit. In fact, I don't even think that
this scripture was given to us to turn around on ourselves to
determine whether we're good fruit or bad fruit, or whether
we're producing good fruit or bad fruit. Here's an interesting thing that
I've found about people. Those who have nothing good in
themselves seem to see an awful lot of good in themselves. And
those in whom there has been a good thing put, in whom God
has begun a good work, they don't see anything good in themselves. The good that men don't have,
they see. the good that God's people have,
they can't see. They may see it in others, but
they don't see it in themselves. But the good tree bears good
fruit. Therefore, each tree, verse 44,
is recognized by its own fruit. People do not pick figs from
thorn bushes or good things, excuse me, or grapes from briars.
The good man brings good things out of the good stored up in
his heart, and the evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored
up in his heart. Now, what's he talking about
there? Well, we could say, if we wanted to, though this, I
don't think what the Lord's getting at, that believers tend, because
their mind is set on things above, they talk more about that kind
of stuff. And then you hang around unbelievers, you know, they talk
about all kinds of filthy things. Well, that's probably true, to
a greater or lesser degree, depending on the person involved. But that's
not what the Lord's talking about. He's talking about what a person
says about spiritual things. And the good man, out of the
good things stored up in his heart, he brings out good things. Now, what good things? grace, forgiveness, Christ. You start talking to a believer,
I mean a real, and this is a good time to use this phrase, a real
honest to God believer. You start talking to him about
salvation, out of the good things that the Spirit of God has stored
in his heart, he will utter good things. He'll talk about the
truth of God in condemning him for his sin. Really? You meet a person that
won't own up to his sin, won't own up to the truth of his sin?
It's because God has never put within his heart the truth of
his sin. You know, truth's a good thing.
Even if it's the truth about a bad thing, the truth is still
good. Believers always are willing
to confess that they're sinners, unworthy of anything good from
God. Here's another good thing that
you'll find in the heart of a believer. Faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.
And it'll come out of his mouth. Someone says, You know, I'm not very religious,
but I believe I've done more good than evil. And when I have
to stand before God or the man upstairs, I'm sure everything's going to
go OK. And a believer will, if he thinks
it's worthwhile, say, oh, no, that's not the way it works.
I don't have anything good to give to God. I wouldn't dare
ask him to weigh my good deeds against my bad deeds, I'd be
so embarrassed to have him bring up what I've done. My hope is
built on nothing less and nothing more than Jesus' blood and righteousness. I dare not trust a sweeter frame,
but entirely lean on Jesus. He is my hope. That's good. That's good fruit,
brother. I love to hear it. I love to
hear people talk like that. It's like picking sweet fruit
from the best tree you can find. You know, sometimes even trees
that produce, you know, like you can have apple trees, but
some apple trees produce sweet apples and some of them produce
sour ones. And maybe when you're just looking at the apples, you
can't tell which one, and sometimes people will have a profession
that looks very much like a good profession, but when you bite
into it, you realize that's pretty sour stuff. I love it, though,
when people are willing to confess what they are. They make no boasts
in themselves, but they make great boasts in the Lord Jesus
Christ. That is good fruit, sweet to
the taste, encouraging to the heart of other believers. It
builds them up. Good fruit. We were singing that song, Worthy
of the Lamb. And I was standing there thinking,
I said, you know, to myself, I've been, I've taught through
the book of Revelation twice. And that song is based on a text
out of the book of Revelation. I've preached through that book
twice. I'd love to preach through it again. Because it's so full
of Christ. And that word worthy is the lamb
that was slain. Brethren, that's the good fruit
of praise coming out of hearts made good by the grace of God. Oh, in my flesh there dwells
no good thing and it bubbles up into such wretchedness. I'm
embarrassed to think about it. But you know something? When
I hear worthy is the lamb that was slain. My heart says, yes. Yes, he is. In such a time, I'm amazed when I'm given the
grace to think upon the things which are planted in my heart,
I'm amazed that I could ever think about the things that reside
in my flesh. But then that's the battle. The Bible says the
flesh lusts against the spirit and the spirit against the flesh
and you're not going to be able to do what you want. But all
that precious, wonderful fruit of the praise of the glory of
God in Christ. I'll tell you, that fruit doesn't
come out of a bad heart. They might say some words of
praise because they've been taught to recite them, but you hang
around long enough, like I said, it'll get back to them. But when
you're around a believer, he hears worthy is the lamb and
he doesn't want to hear anything else. You brag on him, he'll
say, wait a minute, let's wait till we're done bragging on Christ.
And when we've praised him enough, then maybe we'll think about
praising me. But he only says that because he knows we can
never praise him. Enough, can we? This is the fruit of the good
tree. The bad tree? Why, in his prayers,
he speaks evil. He thinks it's good because he
talks about his supposed good. He says, I thank you I'm not
like other men. And he's talking to God. Imagine
how wicked a heart must be to come before God and say, God,
I thank you I'm not like others. And God's saying, what? You're just like them. He said,
oh no, no, no. He says, I fast twice in the
week and I give tithes of even the little tiny spices that I
have. And I'm not like this guy over
here, this publican. This turncoat, this cheat. You know, one way you can find
out whether someone that sounds like they're bearing good fruit,
that is, you know, they'll say something like, oh, I'm just
a sinner. If you want to find out if that's real fruit or just
some good fruit that's been taped onto a bad tree, agree with him.
Oh, I'm a sinner and ought to go to hell. Yeah, I was thinking
the same thing the other day. You're a sinner and you ought
to go to hell. Agree with them. If they're shocked by what you
say, it's probably good fruit taped to a bad tree. All they got that they talk good
about themselves to God and their message to others is be good. Be good. Now there's words that
they intend you to understand and they've learned better than
to say them out loud. But what they're saying is, be good like
me. That's what it comes down to.
And preachers have this way of acting like they're saying grace
when they're not, act like they're preaching grace when they're
not, and you can tell it because this bad fruit of working to
get something from God is in their message. The Apostle said
in the book of Galatians, and that's where he's dealing with
that very issue, those who think the blessing of God comes to
us by good deeds that we perform. He said, were you justified by
the good things you do? Well, they all knew the right
answer to that. Well, of course we weren't. And
he says, well then, Having begun in the Spirit, are you going
to be perfected in the flesh? Do you really think that the
Spirit of God works among you because you're good? Because
you do good? And if you act like good little
boys and girls, the Spirit of God will work among you. But
if you act like naughty little boys and girls, then the Spirit
of God is not going to work among you. You see, the devil, who
is the source of all bad fruit and all bad trees in some respect,
but he's always trying to sow into the congregation of God's
people the foul seed of self-righteous works. And if he can't get it
in on the foundation of how we're saved, he'll sprinkle it in somewhere
later, how we can improve upon the work of God's grace by our
deeds. Brethren, I hope that the grace
of God improves your deeds. But I'll tell you this, your
deeds are never going to improve the grace of God. Does that make
sense to you? Now this is something I wrestle
with all the time. I'll just be honest enough. I've been among
you 30 years. There's probably nothing I can
hide from you anymore anyway. Might as well be honest. But
I do this. If I feel like I've been particularly
bad, I think God's going to destroy the church. That goes through
my mind. Sometimes we have a lean Sunday.
I think, oh, what did I do? Why? Oh, it's the flesh. And
that foul tree is never going to bear the good fruit of simple
faith in Christ. But when the flesh rises up and
says such nonsense as that, the spirit rises up and says, no,
no, none of the blessings of God come to us by our works. It's a lean day because it's
the middle of summer and a lot of people are on vacation. But
oh, how the devil wants to sow that foul seed that bears foul
fruit and bring us into bondage once again. Brethren, think only on Christ when it
comes to these spiritual things. Give your heart over completely
to that. And from that good tree of Christ in the heart, your
heart will bear fruit, good fruit. good fruit in the sight of God,
because it's fruit, the fruit of his son within you. And it'll
be good fruit to your brothers and sisters as it encourages
them. All right, I'll quit.