Pastor Mark Nieting
Matthew 7: 15-27
Sermon on the Mount, part 10
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It was a simple email, and it looked perfectly legit; just a few pieces of information were needed to keep my hotmail account up and running. Who can live without email, right? So I entered what they asked and hit send.
It wasn’t long before charges started being wracked up on my credit card, things I had never bought from places I had never been by people who had STOLEN my identity claiming to be someone they weren’t. I was NOT a very happy camper. I had been deceived; “ripped off” by identity thieves. I should have known better, of course, but I was in a hurry and it LOOKED “right.” I really thought it did!
Looks can be deceiving, Jesus says, as He brings the Sermon on the Mount to a “crashing end” with these words, “The rain came down, the water rose, the winds blew and beat against that house and it fell with a great crash.”
Does it seem like there have been a lot of earthquakes recently? Off the top of my head, first Haiti, then Christchurch, New Zealand and finally Japan have been hit hard. In Haiti over 300,000 people died, far more than the others. In Japan the tsunami killed far more than the earthquake did. What was the difference? Simple: Japanese buildings are designed to withstand earth-quakes; Buildings in Haiti? Not at all. The difference starts with the foundation and ultimately works up through the entire structure of the building. An “earth-quake proof” house might LOOK the same as those that aren’t…… the proof is in the shaking.
We’ve been reading, studying and living the Sermon on the Mount for almost 3 months now, and by this time I am sure you have noticed a theme running from beginning to end: there are tremendous blessings to be experienced by those who live in the Kingdom of God, blessings that can’t be obtained anywhere else.
He began with the “beatitudes,” the series of blessings: blessed are the poor, blessed are the merciful, blessed are those who mourn, blessed are the meek, the pure in heart, the peacemakers and so on. It’s totally “counter-cultural,” isn’t it? After all, wouldn’t it be far more logical that the rich, the powerful, the famous, the happy, the strong, and those ready to go toe-to-toe with anyone else would end up “winning” in life? That may be the prevailing message of our culture, but it’s not the language of the Kingdom of God.
All through the Sermon on the Mount Jesus shows how different life is within the Kingdom of God from life in the world. I find it tremendously interesting, however, that there’s not a single clue in this entire message about how one BECOMES a part of the Kingdom of God. It’s focused on highlighting the differences between those who are truly IN God’s Kingdom and those who aren’t.
I don’t have to tell any of you today that life can be downright difficult. Recently at Hope we’ve had people struggle with dying, with cancer, with divorce, with auto accidents, sick children, aging parents, financial issues, deployment stresses, coming back off deployment stresses, and a long list of life’s other maladies. We all face a variety of tests in life, you have yours, I have mine.
In the first section of today’s text, Jesus warns His people about what He calls “false prophets.” He refers to them as “ferocious wolves disguised in sheep’s clothing.” I don’t know about you, but “Little Red Riding Hood” jumped into my mind…….unless we were 2 years old the first time we heard the story, most of us were going, “Hey Red, watch out…..can’t you tell that’s not your grandma? Check out the paws, the teeth, the bad breath! RUN RED RUN!!!!”
Most false prophets do a far better job with their camouflage than did Grimm’s big bad wolf. These false prophets may look like real Christians, act like real Christians, give their offerings and offer their prayers. They may have huge churches, fancy pulpits and television shows all their own. They might offer all sorts of great sounding advice, flowery prayers, best selling books and who knows, maybe they even heal people! But they’re not, says Jesus, bearing good fruit, and in the end, they will be “cut down and burned in the fire.”
People like this have been around since the very beginning of the Christian church. Paul dealt with them. So did the rest of the disciples, the post-apostolic church leaders, Martin Luther and his contemporaries and down the road to you and me. As long as the devil is alive in the world, which he most certainly is, there will never be a shortage of false prophets trying to lead God’s people away from God’s kingdom.
So how do we tell? What’s the test? Jesus gives us the answer in 7:16: “You will recognize them by their fruit. A good tree bears good fruit. A bad tree… no way. In fact, Jesus says, a bad tree CAN’T produce good fruit and a good tree can’t produce BAD fruit.” OK….we know an apple tree isn’t going to produce milkweed pods and a poison ivy plant will never bring out bananas, great…..but when it comes to Christianity, we need a different standard: one that comes from God’s Word.
In Acts 17 Paul and Silas have gone to Berea. The Jews there had received the news about Jesus and were excited about what they heard. Even though we know God’s Holy Spirit brings the gift of saving faith in Jesus Luke carefully tells us that the Bereans tested everything they heard about Jesus against the prophecies from the Old Testament. They did this every single day! They let God’s Word be the filter for everything they heard.
Martin Luther grew up in a church that was filled with false teachings and false teachers……a church that taught people could have their sins forgiven by purchasing indulgences; a church that taught that so many good works moved you from purgatory to heaven, a church that offered extra forgiveness if you would go to Rome and crawl up the stairs of St. Peter’s basilica, kissing each step as you went!!
To the vast majority of the people in Luther’s day, the church looked real, acted real, dressed real…..but when Luther (and many others) studied the teachings of the church and compared them to God’s Word, he realized the truth wasn’t in Rome, it was in Scripture. The result was the Reformation, where, in the words of Jesus, Luther found the truth and the truth set Luther free and the rest, as we say, is history…..our history.
It’s sad to say, but I have attended quite a few funerals and watched countless more on television where the message has come across loudly and clearly that the dearly deceased beloved is in heaven because he or she was, hear me, “a good person.” I can remember watching Princess Diana’s funeral (along with a billion others) on television when the Archbishop of the Church of England proclaimed clearly that Princess Diana was in heaven because she led a campaign against the use land mines in war! Here was a church leader who had a wonderful, God-given opportunity to proclaim salvation by faith in Jesus Christ as a gift from God through the Holy Spirit. Sorry to say, this man ended up as a wolf in sheep’s clothing proclaiming a false gospel of being saved by being good.
I shudder to think how much damage was done to the Kingdom of God that day.
God gives us the gift of saving faith in Jesus, the most precious gift of all. From the time we are marked with Christ in baptism, we are also marked by Satan as his “targets of opportunity.” He attacks us in a wide variety of ways, sometimes subtly and other times blatantly. His message can be as sneaky as “did God REALLY want you to leave this one poor tree alone” or as bold as “fall down and worship ME!” What’s important, dear friends, is that we recognize him.
That’s why Bible study is so important. Parents and grandparents, that’s why Sunday School is critical for children and confirmation for our teens. The best way to recognize false teaching is to know what it is that the Bible teaches and what it doesn’t and the only way to know that is to be IN the Bible.
For each and every one of us there will come a time, as happened to our dear Angie Colrud last Monday, when we face the last and final storm of life: death itself. It’s in that moment when we will discover the eternal and everlasting joy of having built our lives on the solid foundation that is none other than Jesus; His perfect life, His suffering, death and resurrection….all done for us. It is in that truth that we live, that we produce the fruits of faith, and that we “go home!”
Amen.
