You Will Know Them By Their Fruits #2

All right, so before the sermon, I have a few announcements, not really announcements, they're announcements, about New Geneva Academy. Some of you guys are maybe familiar with New Geneva. Some of you may not know what that is. That's the school or the pastor's college that Timothy is enrolled in. It's the school I graduated from. And we're doing, we have a lot of new things going on right now in the school that I just want to make you aware of. One of those is we're having a shepherds conference. New Geneva has hosted a shepherds conference for a number of years. And so it's a conference aimed at particularly pastors and their wives, elders, officers and their wives. Historically, that conference has been down in Bloomington in October. This year, it's going to be here at our church. First weekend in October, the 4th and 5th.

Actually, it's not the weekend. It's a Wednesday night and a Thursday. So Wednesday evening and then all day Thursday. The topic of that conference is hope in God, bearing the burdens of ministry. And so again, it's aimed at officers and their wives, but it is not limited to officers and their wives. If you're a Christian, you've had burdens, you've had hardships. You thought, man, being a Christian is heavier than I thought it was going to be. Or you may just be in a hard season right now and want fellowship and encouragement. guidance and prayer surrounding those things. If that's true of you, then I invite you to come to this conference. It's not exclusively for pastors or officers and their wives. If you need more information about how to sign up for that, you can talk to me. I'm sure Timothy could point you in the right direction to get signed up for that. It's going to be a good time of fellowship. And so it'll be Wednesday, starting in the evening, so you could work that day. There's going to be a session, and then we're going to go over to the indoor go-karting track over in Speedway.

for a few hours, and we'll have go-karting and duck pin bowling and food. And so there's fun, there's fellowship. And then Wednesday, there's going to be a number of sessions aimed at encouraging and strengthening us for the work of ministry and of being a Christian. And so I just wanted to put that on your radar. Another thing that New Geneva is launching is a program. It's a one-year program called Groundwork. You might wonder what that name is or what that means. What Groundwork is, is it's meant to be a one-year survey of... history through a Christian lens or worldview. And so you're going to start at creation. It's not a biblical history. It's looking at all of civilization. And obviously moves very quick. It's one year. The classes meet on Tuesdays and Wednesday evenings. They're live, but they're virtual. There's going to be teachers from down in Bloomington and from all over the country. We've got a number of men that are engaged in teaching different sections of that.

And you might wonder, why are you telling us about that? Well, I'm telling you about that because if that's the sort of thing you'd be interested in, you should sign up for it. It's made for people who are preparing for ministry all the way down to people who are just curious about this stuff. There's going to be a lot of reading, right? There's going to be a lot of discussion, and I trust that it's going to be very edifying. If I had the time, I would take the class because it sounds that awesome. And so if you have questions about groundwork or about that sort of thing, it's like $2,500 for the whole year. It's not a huge commitment financially. You can work, you know, you're just going to be busy reading and probably writing and in classes some, you know, in the evenings. But if it's the sort of thing that would interest you or if, you know, talk to me or talk to Timothy, we would be able to give you more details about what that course is about. One of the things that's true of New Geneva is it's a small work.

meaning there's not a lot of people involved in it. There's not a lot of students. But I'm convinced that it's a good work, a very good work. And so if you think groundwork's not really for me, and you think, I'm not interested in the conference, that's okay. What I'd also ask you to do, and all of us can do this, is that you would pray for New Geneva, that you would pray that God would send us students for those two programs. There's a few other programs as well that I'm not going to go into right now, that he would send us students. And that you provide for our needs because it's a very good and worthwhile program. And there's a lot of work that's gone into it by good men that you, whether you realize it or not, are indebted to. And so if you can't do anything else, I'd ask you to pray for New Geneva Academy, for the instructors, for the students, and for the future. That we would gain an audience or people who are interested in this work.

If you know someone, you think, well, the conference may not be for me, but if you had a pastor from your home church where you came from, invite them to come to the conference. Say, you should go to this. My church is putting this on. It's going to be great. You should come to this. I've never met a pastor who says, oh, life is easy. Ministry is just wonderful. It's so much easier than everyone told me it would be. All the pastors I talk to say ministry is way harder than what they ever told me it was going to be. And that applies to their spouses, and it also applies to the elders and their wives.

You do your best to explain what ministry is going to be like, but you don't know the future. Other than that caring for people is messy and very necessary. And so if it's not for you to come, don't be ashamed of telling other people about it. Again, if you need information, you can talk to Timothy. You can talk to me. We'd be happy to answer any questions you've got or point you to the people who could. So that's my plug for New Geneva Academy. Now, our sermon this morning is going to be continuing on in our study of Matthew 7. We started a new section last week where Jesus warns us against false prophets. Last week we saw that false prophets are men who seek to lead astray the sheep. They're a danger to us. Then we saw also that they're common. They're not like every once in a great while there's a guy who's going to cause some harm, but that they're common. And our job is to keep watch for them. That can be hard to do because they disguise themselves.

The text tells us that they come, they're wolves dressed in sheep's clothing, so there's an element of deception and misleading that we have to be aware of if we're to avoid them. And so our job is to identify and then to avoid for the sake of our own souls. This week we're going to be focusing on how to recognize false prophets. The text tells us very simply, you'll know them by their fruits. And so my hope is that God will help us to identify good and bad fruit, to know what it is. and that he'll give us the faith to act accordingly. It's not okay to seek the good fruit or bad fruit and to do nothing. When we see good fruit, we should respond appropriately. When we see bad fruit, we should respond appropriately. Our text is Matthew 7, verses 15-23. Would you please stand as we read the word of the Lord? This is the word of the Lord, and it is eternally true. Beware of the false prophets who come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits.

Grapes are not gathered from thorn bushes, nor figs from thistles, are they? So every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree produce good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. So then, you will know them by their fruits. 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? Then I will declare to them, I never knew you. Depart from me, you who practice lawlessness. This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. I was telling Eric and also my wife earlier in this week, I said, this seems like a pretty easy text to preach on this idea of fruit. By their fruit, you'll know them.

Good trees produce good fruit, bad trees produce bad fruit. It seems pretty simple. All we really need is a list of the good fruit and a list of the bad fruit, and then we're all set. But as I was studying and as I was preparing, I went, it's not nearly that easy to identify good fruit and to identify bad fruit. Here's the danger when we read a text like this. It sounds like an engineer wrote it. It sounds like this is the good and this is the bad, and the good always looks exactly like this and functions like this and walks like this and smells like that, and you can see it from a mile away. And this is the bad stuff, and it's equally discernible. And you can see from way off and go, good and bad, bad and good. Never is there any gray area. Never is there any consideration. It makes it sound really easy, when in fact it's very difficult. In the first verse, it says that these prophets...

These false prophets will come to you in sheep's clothing. That there's going to be some element of deception. There's going to be some element of lying. And that we need to beware of them. That they don't come up and introduce themselves and say, Hi, I'm here to lead your soul to hell. And so while it sounds easy, you'll know them by your fruits, it actually requires two things, discernment and practice. Hebrews 5.14 said, Solid food is for the mature, who because of practice have their senses trained to discern good and evil. Now, some of you guys know that before I was a pastor, I was an arborist, a certified arborist. I worked with trees for five years. I used to climb them. I used to plant them. I used to remove them and trim them and do all kinds of things with them. The only thing we didn't do was transplant them. And so I spent a lot of time around trees and got the certifications and all these sorts of things that attended that work. And so I've forgotten a lot of that knowledge and a lot of those details. But one of the things that we had to...

We had to learn in the process of being an arborist is you had to learn to simply identify trees. And not only what type of tree, but what particular type of tree it was. And also, what was wrong with it, simply by looking at it. Now, if you know anything about trees, you know that trees, like every other plant, don't have apples on them or pears on them or figs on them every day of the year. In fact, they only have fruit on them a very small portion of the year. And so if we're left saying, oh, well, there's fruit to identify, we're supposed to know them by their fruits.

Actually, we need more knowledge than simply what the fruit looks like and tastes like. Because how do you know? The goal here is not to identify the fruit, but to identify the tree. And fruit only shows up once in a while on a tree. Trees have all kinds of other things that you can learn about them from. Their leaves, their bark, their structure, their growth pattern, how do they grow. You can learn all kinds of things about these trees to the point that you could walk up to a tree in the middle of winter. We would get these jobs. And it would seem crazy to an untrained tree arborist or to a commoner, but to an arborist, we would show up and our job was to take the deadwood out of trees that didn't have leaves on them. And we were trained to do it. We were trained to be able to look at a tree with no leaves and know which branches were alive and dead.

And to know which tree it was we were supposed to go and trim. Now some of you might be like, how in the world do you do that? Through practice. Through being taught. Saying, this is what you look for. These are the indicators. This is what deadwood on this type of tree looks like. This is what deadwood on that type of tree looks like. There's all kinds of tells, if you will. And so it took a lot of training. It was not the sort of thing that people would pick up in a few weeks or even a few months. We would do things. We had weekly safety meetings. And there were times with the new guys, what we would do is, when we were out on jobs that they weren't on, we would grab leaves off of all kinds of trees and bushes and flowers and all kinds of stuff. And we'd bring them in and we'd lay them out and we'd say, what are those from? And they had to look at them. And they couldn't look at the tree or the fruit or where it was planted or was it big or was it small or anything like that. And we had to learn to identify just from them.

Then you get into a type of tree, and then there's all these different varieties of trees. You guys are familiar with ash trees? Emerald ash borers killed them all. They're all going away. Great firewood. There's all kinds of ash trees. There's green ash trees and white ash trees and blue ash trees, and they all look different to me. But to you, they wouldn't look different because their leaves are pretty much all shaped the same. They're all kind of pear-shaped, dark green leaves, and they all kind of grow like a lollipop. But I could look at them and I could tell you the difference in the winter between a white ash, a blue ash, and a green ash. Simply by looking at the buds and seeing what the bud looked like on the branch. And so there was a lot of training involved. So we would train people with expecting this level of knowledge from them. You come in with a twig and say, what's this from? It's from an ash tree. Good. Here's two or three more. Now tell me what type of ash tree they're from. And it's fun if you know, right?

It's like a fun exercise because they're sitting there like going, well, I don't know, and this isn't any fun for me. But they need to know these sorts of things. Because if you show up to someone's house and it says, trim the three green ash trees in the backyard, raise up the white ashes, you know, and clear the blue ashes off of the fence, you actually have to know the difference because what if you show up in February? So it's actually quite involved, right? You could say the same thing with apple trees, right? If we were maybe something that's more familiar to you guys. When you go to the apple orchard, When do you go to the apple orchard? When are the apples ripe? Fall? Kinda? Halloween, maybe, yeah? Mid-July? There are apples that basically, we have friends that own an apple orchard. And basically from the second half of July through about October, the first hard frost, there are apples that are ripe. So when do you go get your apples? Well, what's it depend on? That's right, Marianne said it. It depends on what type of apple you want.

Because not all apples are ripe from mid-July till mid-October. Certain apples are ripened earlier and certain apples ripen later. And you care because those apples have different qualities. Some of those apples are only good for baking. Some of you like to eat those really sour, hard things. But most of us don't. But those are the apples that are good for baking. Some of you like really juicy, you know. These golden delicious or these sorts of things, and you're like, these are the ones to get. But if you try to turn that thing into an apple pie, you're just going to have a bunch of mush. This is not going to work well. Some of us like sweet apples. Some of us like crisp apples. Some of us like big apples. Some like small apples. Some of us like to eat the apple skins. You've got to know something about the apple trees, don't you? Now, if I set you loose in an apple orchard in the winter, and they pulled up all their little signs that say, down this row are the Johnny Golds, and down this row are the Granny Smiths,

or whatever kind you like, would you be able to tell the difference between any of those trees? No, of course not. And so it's a lot of work, isn't it? And it's nice that if you go to the apple orchard, you have people who set signs out. And they say, pick the apples in this section. They sort of cordon off the ones that aren't ripe. And they're like, just don't go over there. Apple orchards are a funny thing. They employ people year-round to take care of those trees that produce apples just for a few months out of the year. And those men work. tirelessly trimming, protecting, pruning, cultivating, cutting down the old ones, the bad ones, keeping away the bugs or the funguses or anything that could be a danger to it. They just work and work and work at these things because they're vulnerable. There's all kinds of different trees out there. And if you worked on an apple orchard, would you need the sign that said, this is the type of tree that's down this aisle? You wouldn't need it. Maybe you've memorized, well, down the third aisle is where all the...

Apples I like are at. Or maybe you learn to look at the different types of apple trees, and you've learned to say, oh, I can tell by the bark on that tree it's one of these. Oh, I can see that one has yellow blossoms, so it means this. Oh, that one has white blossoms, so it means that. Oh, that one's a crab apple. It's an imposter. It's not good for anything with regard to eating. They're pretty for a few weeks in the summer, spring, right? And then the rest of the year, crab apples. They don't produce any fruit that you'd like to eat, unless you're a little kid who's like, look what I found. And you put that little bitter thing that takes all the saliva out of your mouth into your mouth. And every parent goes, what are you doing, son? Like, that's gross. No, it's good. Every kid's like, no, it's good. And you're like, no, it's not. But the child lacks this incredible amount of knowledge about what's going on. And this is just apple trees. I could talk about ash trees or apple trees or cherry trees or pear trees. Those stinky, nasty pear trees that don't produce any pears.

There's a lot to learn. There's a lot to learn. There's a lot to learn about trees and their fruit. There's a lot to learn about people. The amount of knowledge that it takes to be able to not just be led by the hand and told, you can have these apples, they're good for you, or you'll like this kind, but to be able to look and see for yourself whether this is a good apple, whether it's ripe or not. If we cut you loose in an apple orchard and you walked up and you're like, oh, that tree has apples and that tree has apples, but how do you know if the apples are ripe yet?

The way we figure it out is we just go take a bite out of it. And if it's got like the milky sap in it and it's like really bitter and sour, we're like, I don't think those are ready yet. But if it's got clear sap in it, juice in it, and it's sweet, we go, this one's ripe. We learn by experience. The problem is when you're dealing with false prophets, you don't want to learn by experience what's dangerous, what's bad for you, what's good or bad. And so when we read this passage where Jesus talks about fruit, we need to realize there's something more to this than simply saying, that's good and that's bad, and I can tell from a long way away. If we were to walk down the aisle at the apple orchard, does every tree produce equally? No. Some trees produce better than others. Why? Because one tree's good and one tree's bad.

Those who have knowledge, those who work at the orchard, would be able to tell you which trees were good or bad, not just by the fruit that's on it, but by the fungus that's growing on the tree, by what the leaves look like, by what the blossoms look like. They would be able to tell you which tree is going to have good fruit and which one's going to have bad fruit. And so this idea, this concept that I'm trying to open up to you that's really big and involved is the work that we have before us if we're to identify good fruit and bad fruit. It's not a simple thing. We need to have...

Our senses trained to discern good and evil. Then our text tells us, every good tree bears good fruit, but bad trees bear bad fruit. And you remember that not every good tree in an orchard, you can read this passage and be really linear and really sharp, clean edges on it, but we have to also understand what we're dealing with, which are trees. And a good tree, not every apple on a good tree is free of worms, right? And not every apple on a bad tree is rotting and stinking. We have to be careful to recognize here that Jesus said that there's such a thing as good fruit and bad fruit. There is such a thing as a dead tree. And what kind of fruit does a dead tree produce? No fruit. And so we need to be careful to distinguish between bad fruit and no fruit. Bad fruit does not mean no fruit. Trees that produce bad fruit are alive. They are producing a crop. It's just not any good.

So what is the fruit? If the teacher, the prophet, is the tree, what is the fruit that we ought to be paying attention to? What is good fruit and what is bad fruit? Teaching is what's primary here. The man's teaching and the man's doctrine. Are those things good or are those things bad? Does he teach the truth or does he pull his punches when there's danger or risk? Does he avoid difficult or costly positions? Have you ever been asked a yes or no question and not been able to bring yourself to answer it, yes or no? Were you late to work this morning? Well, and you could talk for minutes, but it really is a yes or no question, isn't it? Were you late to work? Yes. No. What's going on with the person who doesn't simply say yes or no? They're being deceptive. They're trying to spin a story. They're trying to spin the truth in such a way that it doesn't reveal them.

So you're all familiar with this temptation or this concept. You've all done it. It's a type of lying. You might ask your kids, honey, what happened? Your sibling is crying and they're pointing at you. What happened? And they got the look on their face. And you just know there's a big long story coming. And the simple answer of like, I threw a ball at his face is not what's going to come out of their mouth. It's what happened, but it's not what's going to come out of their mouth. And so when you're evaluating teachers, Those sorts of things are what you should be listening for. When the answer is costly or dangerous or unpopular, does the man answer simply and truthfully or does he dance around the edges and try to distract? Does he try to get you to feel sorry for him? Many times leaders, what they'll do is when they've failed, what they'll try to do is they'll try to garner sympathy from their followers to cover over their failures and their weaknesses.

Well, it was very, very difficult for me. Well, it was very, very sad. Well, you don't understand the pressures. I understand the situation better than you understand the situation. And really, I was doing the exact right thing. And you're left sitting there going, well, maybe. But I think that there was a simple answer. There was an obedience. There was something that was clear that should have been done that didn't get done. Men who say that they're going to speak on behalf of God and to lead people and to care for their souls ought to resemble. Jesus Christ. In Luke 6.40, it says, a pupil is not above his teacher, but everyone, after having been fully trained, will be like his teacher. I was just reading this back and forth recently, trying to evaluate the fruit and ministry of Tim Keller. And there's some who think that Tim Keller is the greatest thing and the leader of the Reformed world in terms of preaching and contextualization and ministry. And there are others who say, no, no, no, no, he's bad news.

And so in the comments in this discussion, someone was saying, someone had said, his ministry didn't look anything like Jesus' ministry or the Apostle Paul's ministry or Calvin's ministry or John Knox's ministry or any of these men we would recognize as being faithful. That Tim Keller's ministry didn't resemble that. And the response from the guy defending Keller was, our ministries aren't supposed to look like theirs. We minister in different times and with different pressures and in a different context. To which the original commenter said, Paul said we're supposed to imitate him. To the extent that I follow Christ, follow me. Are ministers supposed to resemble Jesus in the way that they speak, in the things that they say, in their love for sinners? Yes. But there's a danger that there will be men who will come in who will take on the office or take up the mantle but will be...

There to collect a paycheck. There for the perks of the job, but not for the costs of the job. And Jesus warns against that in John chapter 10. He says, I am the good shepherd. I lay down my life for the sheep. But he who is a hired hand and not a shepherd. There's a difference here between a hired hand and a shepherd. He who is a hired hand and not a shepherd, who is not the owner of the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and flees. The wolf snatches them and scatters them. He, meaning the hired hand, flees because he is a hired hand and is not concerned about the sheep. This is a description, another place in Scripture, of what a false prophet looks like and what they do when difficulty comes, when hardship presents itself. They run away. They withdraw. They don't engage. I've often said that you don't want to take people's...

You don't want to hold people to what they do on their worst day. You wouldn't want to go to the doctor when you're sick as a dog and have them think that that's always how you are, because it's not always how you are. And so there is some truth to that, but it's also true that we need to pay attention to how pastors and elders and deacons and those who purport to teach the Word of God to us and care for our souls, we need to watch how they respond when the difficulty comes, when the pressure rises. Do they flinch? Do they blink? Do they back up? Now all of this is only possible if we actually know what the Bible says and what it requires. If we lack knowledge, we can go back to the orchard analogy. If we lack knowledge, we can just happily walk through and grab apples and some of them don't taste good and some of them are good and we don't really know what anything's good for. And we can get through life that way. But that's not what Jesus calls us to here. He tells us to beware, to pay attention to the...

to the fruit, to be able to identify the difference between a thorn bush and a grape vine, between a thistle and a fig tree. There are many questions that would put pastors or teachers on the spot and be very difficult for them to answer or at least costly for them to answer. Simple questions perhaps to us, but costly ones to answer publicly. Do you believe there's ever a situation where an abortion would be justified? You remember the senator a few years ago who answered that question poorly? in the eyes of the world, of the eyes of Hoosiers? Murdoch, was that his last name? Yeah? He said, no. I don't think rape and incest justify, I mean, I'm paraphrasing. But basically he said, no, I don't think there's a justification for it. Rape and incest don't rise to the level. And that was it. That was the end of him. And we could all get on him and we could say, well, you didn't say it the right way. You didn't nuance it. You weren't winsome. You sort of, you stuck your foot in your mouth. And I'll just tell you, there are times and there are situations in your life,

where to answer faithfully will require you to put your foot in your mouth. In the eyes of the world, there's no graceful way to do it. Or there's no way that's not offensive. And so what do you do when that's the case? Maybe your sibling's living with their boyfriend or their girlfriend. What do you think about that? Well, I have my private thoughts about it. Okay, well, what do you do when they want to come to your house and stay the night? What I'd like to do is tell them that we're not going to let them do that. Yeah, but then all hell will break loose in your family, in your Christian family, right? And so it's not just pastors and elders who have this difficulty in telling the truth and speaking the truth when there's a cost to it. We all have it. And so you should have some sympathy for those who haven't answered just perfectly all of the time, who haven't produced perfect fruit. Good fruit is not the same as perfect fruit. And yet we need to be able to identify what should be said or what needs to be done.

And then we should expect those who would take on the responsibility of our souls before God and incur a stricter judgment to be faithful in that work, at great personal cost at times, to themselves. This is why we should love the men who are faithful and why we should avoid the men who are not. Because when push comes to shove, the faithful man will stand by you and be with you through the difficulty, and the unfaithful man will be nowhere to be found. Jesus warned, in this world you'll have trouble. But take heart, I've overcome the world. In the end, he has overcome the world. In the end, we will be conquerors. But in this life, we will have trouble. You want men who will stand with you through the trouble, who will tell you the truth in the midst of the trouble. You'll know them by their fruits. These are the places we're looking and paying attention to. Having grace and not expecting that good fruit will always be perfect fruit.

Pastors are not perfect. Elders are not perfect. Our wives are not perfect. We have failed you. The best ones of us will have failed you. But if you were to walk down the aisle of an orchard and you saw a tree that was laden with fruit, but some of them were malformed. Some of them had bad spots. What would you do with the tree? I would fertilize it. I would want to keep that tree going because it's a good tree. I'd just look at the bad fruit and I'd say, okay, but the overwhelming... The testimony of this tree is that it's a good tree. And I'll ask you this, if you've had trees or if you've raised a garden, you can have a good, I mean, some of your garden plants you plant every year, but some things you have to cultivate for years, right? Your bushes, your berries, your strawberries, your blueberries, whatever have you. If you've got a good blueberry patch, do you ever have a bad year where there just aren't really good fruit? There's not, you know, the fruit's just not that good this year. There's not much of it. It's not very sweet.

What do you do with your blueberries if that happens? Bad fruit, throw them away. No, you realize that in the course of life, and these are the examples that Jesus gave to us, and so we should take out as much as we can about him using trees and fruit as an example to set our expectations appropriately. Even good trees have bad years and will always have some bad fruit on them because they're not perfect. Meaning, here's maybe a way to process or something to keep in your mind. Your pastors and your elders, the people that you listen to and entrust your souls to, you should know what their failures are. You should have experienced their failures because they're not perfect. You should be close enough to them to know that they don't do everything right all the time. That sometimes they have to apologize. That they have to ask your forgiveness because they didn't do what was right. And yet they remain a faithful man, a good shepherd, a true prophet.

The difficulty is that our admiration for men can cloud our judgment. It's very hard to see the failures of someone that we love, someone that we admire, someone that we look up to. You see this with children and their parents, especially their dads. Dad never does anything wrong. Never does anything. If he does it, it must be right. The child doesn't know whether it's right or not because they're young, but they just think everything dad says and does is the right way to say and do it. What he does at home, what he eats, how he eats, how he dresses, how he talks, how he treats his wife, who is their mother. The children love their father, so they just think, I'll just do what dad does. But they don't take into account that not everything dad does is what should be done. And yet he can be a good father and a good husband and fail. And yet the kids have to learn as they grow up to be able to discern between the good and the evil. When is dad doing the right thing and when is dad doing the wrong thing?

What's the child to do if the dad does something wrong? Emulate it? Cast his dad out and say, I'm not going to listen to you anymore. How about he go to his father and say, Dad, I don't think that was right. I don't think that honored God what you said or what you did. Wouldn't we do the same thing with our pastors and our elders? That we believe to be faithful that when they fail or when they struggle or when they've got some sin, that we go to them and say, hey, I love you and I trust you and I don't think this is a good thing.

Yes, that's what should be done. Because good trees don't produce perfect fruit. Not in this life. Not in this world. And yet you can't get good fruit off of a bad tree. Grapes are not gathered from thorn bushes and figs are not gathered from thistles, are they? There's this middle ground approach to avoid having to make judgments about good and bad. There's this, I think of it in terms of there's this phrase, chew the meat, spit the bones. Maybe you've heard this saying before. That in this life, everything's good and bad and everything's really gray and there's not really, there's really not things at the end. There's not things we should give ourselves to and there's not things we should avoid. We should just trust ourselves to always be discerning what's good and what's bad and figuring it all out ourselves. I don't think that's a good approach because it denies that there are men that you should avoid and you should have nothing to do with.

Because their fruit is bad or getting worse. Have you ever worked with somebody and thought, they're ambitious, but not the good kind of ambitious? Like, they're the kind of people who are going to just, they're going to make it. You know they're going to make it. But at what cost? You think they're going to climb, they're going to rise. There are some young pastors that, there's a particular young pastor I've got in my mind, young meaning he's in his 30s, my age-ish. And I think, He's ambitious. He is going for it. And the more that I have that thought about him, the less I trust him. None of you probably know him. He's just a friend of mine, or acquaintance, a guy I know. So don't sit and think, who's Pastor Dave talking about? Is it someone in Evangel? Is it one of the students in NGA? It's none of that. But you look at some people and you just think, when you consider the trajectory, and you consider the appearance and the comportment of the man, and you think,

Huh, I think he's intending to go places. And I think he's going to step over or pay whatever price it costs. You know, one of the things that signals to me about that guy, he never speaks about his family. He's married. I don't know if he has any kids, actually. He never says anything about his family, about his wife. I think, don't you love your wife? Is there never any place in your social media context to speak about your wife? You're a pastor. Shouldn't you brag on your wife a little bit about how helpful she is to you in ministry? But it doesn't fit. Not with what he's got going on. And so when you assess men, when you look for good and bad fruit, one of the things you're trying to assess is their trajectory of their teaching. Is their trajectory that they're headed in a good place toward a good direction or a bad direction? The example I just gave you was of a man that in my judgment, and I may be wrong, but I don't think I'm wrong. Time will tell. Is that he's not headed in the right direction.

I don't see him paying the prices that young pastors should pay to be faithful. I see him avoiding those things, or at least minimizing them. I was reticent to bring up Tim Keller in this sermon because, of course, false shepherds are good and not. Of course, the question on all of our minds is, well, what do you think? Is he a good shepherd or a false shepherd? And I don't actually intend to answer the question. It wasn't my point in bringing him up. Because what's hidden behind all of this is, is he a Christian or not? No one ever says it. Well, some people say it.

but it's like gauche when they would just come right out and say it. And so we just kind of nibble at the edges of it and say, well, there's this bad stuff and there was this I don't knows. And so I just decided I might not bring Tim Keller up because I don't want to plant in your minds something I didn't say about whether he was a good pastor or whether he was a false shepherd or not. I will say that there's a thing to learn from him. And he's a good example in our lives and in this world, nothing is ever all good or all bad.

It's just not simple. I think the trajectory of his teaching over time, I would not track with him early on in his ministry. He's old enough to be my father now that he's passed away. He's a generation older. But the trajectory of his teaching seemed to get worse over time. The positions that he took and the things that he said seemed to become less biblical over time. But I don't think that was always the case with him. There are other men you could look at and you could say, you know, we've seen the storm brewing for a good while, and no one ever said anything about it or did anything about it. Some of you guys may be familiar with Gary DeMar and his position on full preterism. I know some of you have no idea what I'm even talking about, so I don't want to spend a bunch of time on it. But the fact of the matter is this pastor, full preterism is a denial of the resurrection of the dead. It says that everything that Jesus talked about,

In Matthew 24, all happened when Jerusalem was destroyed and there's basically no more resurrection of the dead. And so that's heresy. That's damnable heresy. No Christian can claim to be a Christian and believe that. And he's toyed with it for years and kind of been hard to nail down. But whenever he's asked a direct question, he will not answer directly. And finally has been, after decades, sort of coming around and saying, well, you know, I really do wonder. And a man like that should simply be avoided and should have been... avoided many years ago. And we don't want to look back and say, well, he had some good things to say in the past, so we'll just chew the meat and spit the bones. Because we need to take into account that the things that that man believed and was convicted by were of a fabric. We ought not to take our theology or the men that we entrust our souls to as though it's a la carte. I'll just take the good thing over here and I'll just take the good thing over there and we'll just cherry pick it all through. That'd be very foolish.

The fruit that a man bears in his life is a function of the type of tree that he is. Bad trees can only produce bad fruit. Occasionally, you'll find something that looks good on a bad tree. Occasionally, you might find on a bad tree that's all ate up with fungus an apple that was not affected by it. But you would not want that tree planted in your backyard to be your apple tree. Bad trees tend to get worse over time, year over year. In Luke 13, Jesus said a man had a fig tree which was planted in his vineyard. And he came looking for fruit on it and he did not find any. Now some would argue and they'd say, here, well Jesus came and this was a crazy thing for Jesus to say because it wasn't the time of year when the figs were supposed to be, you know, there weren't figs growing on the tree in that season. So why is Jesus being so harsh about this tree? But you remember, you can know whether a fig tree is a good fig tree even if it doesn't have fruit on it at the moment. If you know about fig trees.

You can say, this one's dying back. The roots are diseased. It's not doing any good. And so it's not actually this crazy thing that's going on. Jesus walks up, even if it's the early spring and it's not time for figs. Jesus says that the vineyard owner came looking for fruit on it and didn't find any. Maybe what he was looking for were blossoms or buds that were swelling. He was looking for the guarantee of fruit and he didn't find any. And so he said to the vineyard keeper, Behold, for three years I've come looking for fruit on this fig tree without finding any. Cut it down. You have to realize the tree was still alive. It wasn't dead yet. Why does it even use up the ground? And he, the vineyard keeper, answered and said to him, Let it alone serve for this year too until I dig around it and put in fertilizer. And if it bears fruit next year, fine, but if not, cut it down. Once you gain knowledge,

in something you gain a little bit of experience and you say, I can see that that's good or I can see that that is bad, you will start to see it everywhere. This is not some sort of knowledge that's hidden from you. There are lots of things that go on in life that you don't have any awareness of. But it only takes a little bit for you to gain an awareness. I remember when I was young, I bought a Jeep Wrangler. I had a Jeep Wrangler for a while. Fun cars, right? And I never paid any attention to Jeep Wranglers on the road. I never knew they were really a thing. I just thought they were neat until I got one. And as soon as you get one, you realize there's a subculture of people who are all about Jeeps. And all of a sudden, you see them everywhere. And it's customary for you to wave at a Jeep owner. Now, it's probably that way with Toyotas. I'm not a Toyota guy. Some of you guys have Toyotas. You're just like, oh, Toyotas, right? Or Subarus. There's these like cult followings of these different...

types of vehicles and it's like it doesn't take much all you have to do is get one all of a sudden you're like oh wow they've got a cool one oh I look what they did oh look at their trim package it's so neat it didn't take much for you to gain a little bit of knowledge and all of a sudden things that you never noticed before all of a sudden were apparent to you and the same is true with with teaching and with good fruit and bad fruit if you'll if you'll look after a little bit of knowledge and try to grow just this much all of a sudden you'll start to see things you never saw before And it will be so helpful to you. That vineyard owner said, there's no fruit on this tree. Someone who is ignorant would say, well, master, it's only the spring. It'll have fruit this fall. Surely it's a fig tree. It would bear fruit. And he says, well, I've come three years looking for it and I have not found any. And they both knew that something needed to be done. It either needed to be cut down or it needed to bear fruit. And they took action. We're going to put fertilizer around it because we're going to determine right now.

Over the next year, if this is a good tree or a bad tree. And if it's a bad tree, we're going to cut it down and throw it into the fire. And do you see that in our text, that's exactly what happens to the false prophets. Every tree that does not bear fruit, does not bear good fruit, is cut down and thrown into the fire. And so these judgments are necessary. They're necessary for us to make. And yet we have to guard against our pride and our unrealistic expectations in making them. It's quite difficult, actually, to discern good fruit and bad fruit. It takes time. I said last week, it takes time to do this work. That it's not the sort of thing we should do necessarily very quickly. But we should desire to have our senses trained to be able to discern good and evil. Otherwise, we'll end up eating rotten apples. And how many of those do you want to eat? And at what cost? You know, if you went to the apple orchard and you're like, we're going to get all these apples, they're so great.

throw them all in your big bag and your big bushel, and then you go pay for it, and then you bring them home, and they're all rotten, you wouldn't be like, oh, it's no big deal. You'd be angry. Who would you be angry at? You might be angry at yourself. You might think, well, I'm an idiot. I don't know how to decide the difference between good and bad apples. Who else would you be angry at? You'd be angry at the orchard. They sold me crappy apples. They should have cut that tree down. That's what you would have said. Well, they didn't know it was a bad tree. You say you're not allowed to not know it was a bad tree. You own an orchard.

It's not okay for you not to know the difference between good and bad. On bad trees, I said already, the crop is bad year after year and is getting worse. The opposite is true with a good tree. The fruit gets better year after year, taking into account bad years and late frosts and that type of stuff in the analogy. On the balance of it all, a good tree will bear good fruit and continue and continue and continue to bear good fruit, even to the point at which Psalm 92.14 says, This speaking of the righteous, they will still yield fruit in old age. They shall be full of sap and be very green. And so there's not a season of good fruit. It's not like, well, they did some good way back when and so we don't have to worry about it anymore. Because the psalm tells us here that the righteous, the faithful, will bear fruit until they die. That they will be as a young tree and as a tender shoot, producing fruit more and more and more each year.

until the Lord calls them home. Even then their fruit will not be perfect, but it will be good. If we had to weigh out all of the good and the bad, the scales would just be tipped. We'd say it's good. It's a good tree. It's full of sap. These are the type of men that we want to entrust our souls to. That's it. These are the type of men that we want to entrust our souls to. Next week we'll come to the next section of this passage. So Jesus says, the fruit of the deception is that you'll think you're going to heaven when actually you're being led to hell. Lord, Lord, as many will say to me, Lord, Lord, but not all of them who say that will enter into heaven. So the words are cheap if the fruit's not there to prove it out. So we'll pick up there next week. Let's pray.