You Will Know Them By Their Fruits #3

So we're going to be continuing our study in Matthew chapter 7 this morning toward the end of the Sermon on the Mount. This is a section where Jesus warns us to beware of false prophets. We've been reading a longer section, verses 15 to 23, and slowly been working our way through it. And today we come to the latter half of this section. And as you've been listening to it each week and considering it, I don't know if it's hit you that this is one of the most terrifying things that the Bible has to say. It's a scary thing. There are things you don't want to read. Like the chapter in Scripture we just read about Amnon and Tamar. If that has to happen or if it does happen, you kind of wish it wasn't spoken and said. And if it has to be recorded in Scripture, then do we have to talk about it or acknowledge it publicly? I'm sure it was very comfortable for Timothy to read that chapter to us. Probably slightly more uncomfortable than you having to hear it. This passage falls in that same sort of category.

It deals with heaven and hell, and it deals with our souls. And all of those things we might be okay with, but really what this passage deals with is that we may well be deceived in where we'll end up. And that's a fearful thing. And so my hope this morning is that God will help us to see clearly and to flee from the judgment, the wrath of God before it's too late. Would you please stand now as we read the word of the Lord from Matthew chapter 7, verses 15 to 23. This is the word of the Lord, and it is eternally true. This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. My goal this morning is to impress upon you just two things. The first is that hell is real, and that self-deception is something that you have to be very aware of. That's one, and that's two. That's all we're hoping to get through and accomplish today. And so if in the middle of our text it says that every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Now, I don't know where you live, exactly, all of you, but my guess is that where you live, somewhere along the way around your house, there are dead trees.

And you see them. There may be green things growing and then there's this like dead thing standing up, looming over the top of all of what's alive or in the middle of it. What needs to happen to that tree? It needs to be cut down, right? What's going to happen if it doesn't get cut down? In this world, if the tree doesn't get cut down, eventually it falls down, right? Big limbs fall out of it. And the reason we cut them down is to prevent the damage. The question is, why don't people cut trees down as soon as... They die. Some trees stand dead for years and years and years. There could be many reasons for not cutting a tree down right away. Maybe if it falls, the owner says, well, if it falls, it won't break, it won't hurt anything. Maybe the owner doesn't have the money to cut it down. Maybe the owner doesn't care. But at some point, that tree is going to come down. The reason I ask you that question is to say, this idea that...

that we would come to this section here where it says that every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. I want to remove from you this idea that everything that God does, he does immediately. He doesn't do everything immediately. Sometimes he waits generations and centuries to do the things that he has said that he will do. Before Israel went into Egypt, he told them how long they would be there and what life would be like there. Over 400 years they spent in there. And he told them this is what it will be like. Scripture also tells us that the Lord is not slow about his promises as we count slowness. And so when we come to this text and he says that every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire, we ought not to look around and say, well, here I am. So I must not be a bad tree. We see bad trees or dead trees standing around in society.

Have you ever been with someone or maybe you've joked yourself if someone lies and curses and you step away and you say, oh, you're going to get struck by lightning. You can't do that. God's going to judge you. And what's the understanding and sort of the joke that everybody has when lightning doesn't fall down from heaven on the person? What they did must not have been that bad because there's no immediate consequence, no immediate judgment. I would submit to you that most of the sins that you commit don't have immediate consequences, in part at least because you hide them. But most of what we do does not have an immediate consequence.

It takes some time. Maybe it's only days. Maybe it's weeks. Maybe it's years. A lot of you have young children. You have your young children, and the one thing you want to know is, are we doing it right? And what all the older parents are thinking is, no. And the reason we know is because we made those same mistakes. But the young parent thinks, it's not bearing bad fruit right now, and at least my child's better than whoever, the kid, you know, the one that's screaming during the service like those terrible kids are wont to do. And that's a joke, okay? I was out before the service with my daughter, so she wouldn't be in here one of the ones screaming. But we look around and we think, I must be doing a pretty good job. And the older parents are going, you'll learn. The fruit hasn't become obvious yet. But in three years, four years, you'll start to see as a parent. You'll have your first glimpses into like, I think we might have done something wrong.

Maybe. Or we could at least do something better. And so the consequences that we incur often don't happen right away. We can look at it negatively like that. We can also look at it positively. If you do smart things with money, as an example, how immediate is the return on your wisdom? It's not. Years, decades, right? And so this delay between... Behavior and consequence is not something that should cause us to become complacent and to think, well, it's really not a big deal because nothing bad is happening right now. That's not how the Bible talks to us about our consequences or about our actions. The consequences are real. And we would be foolish to think that simply because they're not upon us right now that they don't exist. If we do happen to see them and we think, well, the Bible says that there's this consequence for my action and I don't want that consequence.

Have you ever thought, well, I'm going to do what I can to avoid that consequence, but I'm not going to stop the behavior. I'm just going to try to dodge the punch, you know? When the consequence comes, I'm going to try to brace myself for it or to avoid it. As you get older, you'll realize how foolish that is and that the Lord, when he comes to discipline us or when he comes to bring the fruit of our labor to us, he doesn't miss. Proverbs 6.27 asks, Can a man take fire into his bosom and his clothes not be burned? Or can a man walk on hot coals and his feet not be scorched? The first you might say, yeah, I don't have any interest in pulling a fire into my lap. But you do know there are people who, for sport, for challenge, or for stupidity, walk on hot coals. Maybe not in America and not around here, but you might look and think, well, that's really cool. They're really tough. Do you want your spiritual life to be marked by trying to be able to withstand?

the consequences of your foolishness. Meaning it's stupid to walk on hot coals. No one in their right mind should do it, right? And no one should pull fire into his lap and no one should look at their lives and say, everything is comfortable now, so I must be doing a pretty good job right now. I don't have anything to worry about. I don't have anything to concern myself with. I know what the Bible says, but it seems that I'm the exception or that God has reckoned to me differently than he says in the scripture. If we think that way, then what we're doing is gambling with our souls, betting that we'll be able to outwit or outflank the Lord and his consequences. He tells us that every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. And so when we look at ourselves, we shouldn't be looking and saying, has my life come crashing down around me yet? If that's what it takes to register that something's wrong, then you're going to have a very difficult life.

Because it's going to be far too late when you realize that the sins you've been giving yourself to, you will reap the fruit of them. In Galatians 6, Paul says this, And so it behooves us as Christians to always remember that our actions have consequences, even if those consequences are decades away. And when that time comes, the reasons that we have to offer for our behavior will not stand up and bear the weight of the consequences that we face. Just a few chapters before the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus was speaking. He was speaking to the Jews, and he was talking about trees and them not bearing fruit. And he says, the axe is already laid at the root of the trees.

Do you ever drive down the city and you see the big red X on the tree? What's it mean? That big green tree is going to die. It's not dead yet, but it has the X. The X is already laid at the root of the trees. Therefore, every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. So don't ever mistake that because the consequences that Scripture promises to us are not happening to you. Don't mistake and think that they're not coming to you. that you've avoided them. It's a hard thing to get a hold of because really the consequence that's being spoken of here is judgment and hell. And none of us, no one, not just in this room, but no one has firsthand experience with this. None of us have ever spoken to someone who's gone to hell and heard what it's like. Someone who's been there for 6,000 years already and can tell you what it's like. We don't have any personal experience with it. And much of our lives, we live by being able to learn about something.

And really, when Scripture talks about the concept about eternal judgment and about hell and about the horrors of it, most of what Scripture does is warn us away from it. It doesn't spend a bunch of time outlining what hell is like. There are some things that Scripture tells us about hell, that there'll be weeping, that there'll be gnashing of teeth, that the fire will never go out, that there will be a worm that never dies. But most of what Scripture says about it is simply warning us away from it, warning us to see that this end is coming. That an end is coming, and that is the end for all who don't believe in Jesus. And so the thing we have to just figure out is whether we're going to live by what we see and want right now or whether we're going to believe what the Bible says about what we haven't seen and haven't felt and don't want. There's a real danger to Christians in looking around at other people and saying, well, they seem to have gotten away with it. They seem to do all of the things.

that I want to do, and they don't have any consequences for it. Some of you guys have grown up in church. I didn't grow up in the church. I didn't come into a church until I was in my early 20s. And I came into church having done all of the stuff that the Christians thought was worthwhile and fun and satisfying. That's what I was coming out of, is they were going, but I think that it's okay. I can assure you there's consequences for living an ungodly life. And I can assure you that you don't get away with it. Psalm 73 is a whole psalm devoted to this topic where Asaph explains to us, sort of opens up his heart and talks about what his temptations are in this regard. Surely I've kept my way pure in vain, is one of the things he says. He looks at the ungodly and he says, their lives are so comfortable. They have all this wealth. They have all this ease. They have all this power. They have all the stuff that I want. And here I am, wasting my life,

doing what God says while not seeming to reap any of the benefits of doing what God says. And he tells us that he was tempted to throw it all away and to wander off and finally to say, you know what, it actually isn't worth it. This whole thing that we're doing is a waste of time. If you're tempted to think that in your own life, if you think, you know what, it's not worth obeying right now. I can do it later. I'm just not going to do it right now. I want you to know it's a very short-sighted way to approach life. It doesn't have anything to do with eternity or the future or your children or your grandchildren or your future spouse or what your marriage will be like in 10 years or anything like that. It is only concerned with today. And so in Psalm 73, after having been tempted toward everything that's around him and within his own heart, Asaph goes into the sanctuary of the Lord, it says, and it says, and then I perceived their end. Then I saw not what they had right now, but what they would have forever.

Surely you've set their feet in slippery places. Surely you'll cut them down. And so one of the things that marks a Christian life and Christian thinking is this reality that hell is real, that judgment will come. Even if it doesn't come until death, it will come. And that those who've lived a comfortable life and a popular life and the sort of life we might admire in this life, if that has been their comfort and that has been what's marked them, they will be miserable. and in misery for the rest of eternity. And so Christians have to keep in mind that hell is real and that the judgment of God is coming and that while he may delay, he will in the end sort out everything according to his own counsel. And those who've lived lawless lives will be judged for it. And there won't be anything they can say to change his mind and there won't be anything they can do to avoid his wrath.

And so this reality should never be too far from our minds. The goal of me saying this isn't to keep you in perpetual fear, to make you think that the way to become a Christian is to just worry and be afraid all of the time. The reason I bring this up is simply to keep you honest. Honest about yourself. Honest about your life. We come to church and we behave well and we put on nicer clothes perhaps than we wear throughout the rest of the week and we speak with a more appropriate language and we smile a little more and we're a little more of what we should be. What I'm not willing for us to do, our elders are not willing for us to do, is to act as though the things that we want people to believe about us is all there is to us. But actually in each one of us, there's real sins and there's real temptations and there's real dangers that need to be avoided.

Because hell is out there. Judgment is coming. Hebrews says that it's appointed for a man once to die, and then comes the judgment. And so if you're going to come to church and you're going to say, after we read a passage like this, thanks be to God, which we should say from the bottom of our hearts, thanks be to God. What we're thanking him for is a warning. We're thanking him for a warning. Who are these warnings for? They're for us. They're for his people. But God's people don't need warnings. And I say, well, we're going to come to that because the rest of this passage deals with the fact that many come to him and say, Lord, Lord. But they were wrong. Lord, Lord. Many will come to me and say, Lord, Lord. They will not enter the kingdom of heaven. It's a very sobering verse because what it means is that there are many who are deceived.

Many who would come to church, spend their whole lives in church, living an outward Christian life, looking good from the outside to everyone. But in the end, they're not Christians. And this is a difficult passage because twice Jesus says, you'll know the false shepherds by their fruit. You'll know them by their fruit. You'll know them by their fruit. And then he comes at the end and says, but there's this reality of self-deception. And that that deception is going to extend even to the point where they stand before Jesus and call him Lord. And he says, no, no, you were wrong. It's the sort of passage at this point we'd like to say, I don't want to read this or I don't want to hear this. Or I want someone to tell me that I shouldn't be unsettled by it. But I'm here to tell you, you should be unsettled by it. Anyone who would have heard this and believed that Jesus meant what he said would have been unsettled by him saying this. You mean me? You mean I might be wrong about myself with such great consequences? Just earlier in the Sermon on the Mount, he talked about the wide path and the narrow path.

And all he's doing is returning back to that imagery and saying, there will be many on the wide path who think they're on the narrow path. And it's not like they think they're on the narrow path, but really they know that they're not. They really will believe in like a Romans 1 sort of given over, like really deceived sense. They will believe that they're Christians when they're not. And he even tells us what they're going to look to as confirmation. Lord, did we not? cast out demons, did we not prophesy? Did we not do many good works? And yet even though those things were done by his enemies, they were deceived while they did them. They were not Christians. They were not going to heaven. And so when Jesus teaches us to beware, beware of the false prophets, beware of following them, beware of being misled, he's teaching us that our souls depend on this, that it's not some small thing for us to play with, but that it's eternal.

It has eternal consequence, that there is danger lurking around for us. You have to realize that Satan, none of us have come face-to-face with Satan. You know, you have stories and you have movies and you have entertainment that have good and bad, and sometimes what they're trying to project or depict is some sort of terrible evil that's just a consuming... that just is going to destroy everything that's in its wake and its path. But when we think of Satan, I just don't know that we understand exactly what his intention is. Is there a more comfortable place to be for him than to have you thinking you're a Christian while not being? Who is least likely, of all of the types of people in the world, who is least likely to hear a warning from Jesus and think nothing of it other than the person who's deceived and who's like, no, that's fine, I'm okay.

I'm fine. I did these things. They were really incredible, actually. I don't need to worry about that anymore. There's this thing about being a Christian. You never really get to the point where you don't have to worry about this. And by worry, I don't mean wringing your hands and worrying without faith, but I mean being aware and attending to it. The same sort of being aware and attending that we're called to when we partake of the Lord's Supper. Examine yourself, and in so doing, you're to partake of the meal. What is it that you're examining for? Well, how about that you've lied to yourself about something? It's really a scary thing to know that those who were told, depart from me, you who practice lawlessness, were those who had prophesied, cast out demons, and performed miracles in his name. You think, have I done anything more godly than that? But which one of those things did Judas Iscariot not do?

Wasn't he sent out with power to cast out demons and to perform miracles? What I'm trying to do is take away this place that we all like to stand where we say, but I know there's dangers and I know there's warnings and I know they may even be for Christians, but I don't think they're for me. Somehow I've gotten just over the line into the safe place where this is not for me to have to actually consider. I'm trying to take that space away from you and say, no, Christians, All have to consider this. They all have to be aware. In the first sermon on this passage, I told you that one of the reasons that God allows false prophets into the church was to strengthen our faith and cause us to seek him more. You won't do any of that if you've decided in your heart, this doesn't apply to me. I don't need to be worried about this. When in fact, many times what I find are the people who are the least willing to be worried about this are the ones who've...

who most need to be worried about it. That there's some real problem that they're fighting hard to cover and keep under wraps. Jesus tells us that it's not those who say, Lord, Lord, or those who cast out demons, or those who prophesy, or those who do miracles, or those who come to church, or those who serve as pastors and elders, or those who lead the ministries of the church. or those who baptize their children, or those who do any of that stuff that will enter into heaven. He says, those who will enter into heaven are those who do the will of my Father. He who does the will of my Father who is in heaven will enter. And so there's a pivot here from what we believe or what we say or what we confess, Lord, Lord, being the confession, to what we do.

These two things are not held in opposition to each other. It's not that believing in Jesus doesn't matter. It's that believing in Jesus produces obedience. And so in your life, one of the things you can do is you can look at your life and be honest and say, what is it that I spend my time and my energy doing? What do I care about? What do I study? What am I interested in? What do I want to grow in? And sort of reverse engineer that and say, if this is what's important to me, then it must be attached in some way to the God that I serve.

And you work your way back and you see, is the God that is motivating you to do all of this the Lord Jesus Christ and his Father or not? And so our behavior does matter. It's not opposed to what we believe in. The two should be joined together. And Jesus teaches us here that the surest proof of our being in Christ and not ever hearing the words, depart from me, you who practice lawlessness, the surest proof of that is that we do his Father's will. Have you had times in your life where you've went, I know this is what God wants me to do? My suspicion is that if you've had that, it was probably something you were terrified of doing. It was something that you were like, I don't think I have the strength or the faith or the stamina or the wisdom or what I need to do it. But I am convinced. I am persuaded. I am sure that this is what God would have me do or say. He who does the will of my Father who is in heaven will enter.

This is one of the surest proofs. Another way of thinking about this whole passage or restating it would be simply to say that a false prophet is not a true Christian. And so it should be no surprise to us that that is what they produce, is false Christians, who together with them end up in hell, having been deceived altogether. Many of you are young, young by age, young in your marriage, young in your parenting. And one of the things that's true about you is that you have lots of needs. One of the difficulties is you don't like to admit that. You don't like to say, I have lots of needs. You like to say, I have lots of answers. And my answers are that I know how to do it better than you. And so there's a danger that young Christians would lay aside the weightiness of this, thinking that they know a better way, laying aside the wisdom of those who've gone before them. We ought to be very careful, both with...

especially with Scripture and secondly with counsel, we ought to be very careful of how much of it we can lay aside before we've thrown away the good fruit for the bad. Before we've said, you know what, yeah, that's all good for you and that makes sense for you and I'm glad for you to make those choices and live that way and I'll have those commitments, but I'm going to do it differently. Because if what you're looking at in that older person is a good tree that's bearing good fruit, You have to be very careful how much of the fertilizer and the water and the priorities that they have. You have to be careful how much of that you can take away before you just end up with a bad tree that bears bad fruit. It's very common for young people to look at older people and to say, if for no other reason other than their age, because we all love youth. Us who are a little older, we miss being strong and having energy and being able to do the things you do. And we look at you and we think you're wasting it. But we miss it.

We would do better with it now, but we don't have it now. So we look at you and we think, I remember those days. But what we remember about those days was not only that we had energy and we had strength and we could stay up late and we could get up early and we could eat like crap and we could do all the dumb stuff that you're doing without the consequences, you know, the immediate consequences. We have the consequences now. But we look at youth and we say, hey, there's something good about it. And the young people look and they say, yeah, yeah, there is something good about it. In fact, it's better than you, better than you. It's wiser than you.

You're good and you're godly and you're wise and you've given me many good things, but when it comes to what I'm going to do with my own life, I know a better way. If I can tell you simply, you don't. You don't know a better way. You don't even know a new way. The fact is, when I was your age, I was cooler than any of you. I really was. And so were Dan and Wendy. You guys were cool when you were 20. Come on, 20, 25, I mean, you had the world by the tail. But we were worldly. We didn't love God. And so we've taken our lumps and gone through the difficulty of being changed by God from a bad tree to a good tree. And so our commitments have changed and our priorities have changed and our appearances have changed. And there's nothing that would make us happier. And I'm not speaking just for the Abusaras and the Georges. But there was nothing that would make us happier than to see young trees bearing good fruit and not squandering their youth bearing bad fruit. We did that.

Don't follow that part of our example. So be careful when you look at those who are older and those who are wiser, and they may be outside of our church. They may be your parents or your grandparents. Be careful how much of their wisdom and the goodness that they demonstrate. Be careful how much of it you can throw away before you just aren't going to have what they have. It's a shame when you look at them and you say, you know what, I don't want your life. I was just talking to Vanessa about people who have children. And then they have a few children, and then they give them absolutely everything. And this has been going on. It's not brand new. This has been going on for a few decades now. And sports, whether it's sports or music or whatever, it's just we're going to give our kids everything. We can't have very many of them because we have to give them this high, high level. And our whole life has to revolve around our kids. And why do parents do that for their kids? Well, sensibly, it's because they love them. They love their kids, and they want to give them every opportunity and all this stuff. What they don't realize is that they're teaching their children in the moment.

Not that kids are really important and worth sacrificing for, but that they, as an individual, are very important and that everyone should revolve their life around them. So it's no surprise when that young child who's been treated that way because of the love of his parents all through his growing up years reaches the age of majority, what does that kid not want to do? Do they want to slow down and get married? No. If they do slow down and get married, do they want to stop and have children? No, man, they've got better things to do. And so what the parents gave their lives and sacrifice for, their children, by their own actions, have decided, I don't want what you want. That was a good thing you did. You served me and gave your life for me, so what I'm going to do is demand that of everyone else and avoid anything that gets in my way. Now, we've gone far afield of our passage, but if you're young, you need to work hard to figure out what the will of God is. And you should not be surprised when it's uncomfortable to you. It will be uncomfortable. It means saying no to yourself.

What did Jesus say to those who would come after me? He who would come after me has to what? Deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me. So don't be a fool and think that your life, somehow you're going to avoid that self-denial, that burden-bearing of taking up a cross, and that you're going to follow Jesus just the same. He who does the will of my Father who is in heaven will enter. He who makes a habit of disciplining himself. He whose lives are marked by the Beatitudes. Those who are meek, those who are humble. those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, those who are peacemakers, those who suffer. You remember, maybe you don't remember, but I'll remind you. When we went through the Beatitudes at the beginning of this sermon series, we looked at them and I said, you know, these are not the things that we, we look at them more like these are good for someone else. Like they're not the things that I would want to do because they would be difficult for me. They would mean self-denial. They would mean pain. They would mean sorrow. They would mean saying no. And what Jesus says to us is that those are the things that,

are the will of God. And so whether you're young or whether you're old or single or married or have children or not or grandchildren, our aim should be to do the will of our fathers, to be able to say that the things that we do, we can say, I'm sure to the best of my knowledge and ability that this is what God has called me to. And that we would take our own desires and our own wills and we would submit them to the will of God. Which means that in many places, our wills and our desires will just have to die. That's what it means to deny yourself.

Now when I say that, I think, well, this sounds miserable, doesn't it? How is this winsome? How is this attractive? Who wants to do this? And I think we've just lied to ourselves as Christians, and I don't want to lie to you. People do really hard things because of the difficulty of it. They climb mountains for the views. Yes, sure, but for the difficulty of it. They get up early. They go to bed late. They discipline themselves to pass their classes. They discipline themselves to finish their jobs. They discipline themselves to perform under the eye that's watching them. Why should you discipline yourself to do the will of your Father who's in heaven? So that you will not here depart from me, you who practice lawlessness. You see, we might deceive ourselves about what we're doing. And we might be able to spin a story about why what we're doing is good and right and appropriate. Or there was no other choice, really.

But God searches our hearts, and God knows and weighs out our motivations and our intentions. And so while we might be able to spin a story about how what we're doing is okay, we have no promise from God that he will submit to and agree with our story about ourself. And so we ought to be mindful of that and realize that we can deceive ourselves into thinking, well, this is why I did that, and this is why I'm doing it, and build a whole life around our own wisdom, only to find out when it's too late. that we lied to ourselves and believed our own press. And we paid the price for it with our souls and with eternity. In Matthew 25, Jesus talks about this judgment. He gives us a picture of it where all of the people, there's a judgment going on. All the people are going to be separated into sheep and to the goats. And what did the goats say? When did we see you and not feed you or give you water? They had a list. They were like, we did all the right stuff. We did it all. When did we see you and not do it?

What do the sheep say? They say something very different. They say, when did we ever do these things to you? I mean, we had our heads down. We were trying to serve you. We were busy taking care of the orphans and the widows and the ones in prison and the hungry. We were real busy with that. When did we ever do that for you? So much as you did it to the least of these, you've done it unto me, is what Jesus says. And after that, he says to them, well done. There's one of two things that you're going to hear. on the last page of your story. It's either going to be, well done, good and faithful slave. Enter into the joy of your master. And there's no better words that you could ever hear. And there's no sacrifices that you could make in this life that won't be paid for within excess by those words. The other option are these ones in our text. I never knew you. Depart from me, you who practice lawlessness.

I don't want you standing before God on that day to be surprised. I don't want you to be surprised. I want you to be honest. And I want you to be honest while there's time for you to repent. That's what I want. Because there's going to come a day when the reality is going to be set and it's not going to be able to change anymore. I can tell you when I was young, I wasn't a Christian and I was a fool and I was worldly and I was all of these things. But God was merciful to me. and changed me before it was too late. And it was a painful process for me, for Vanessa, for those who are around us, but thanks be to God that he did. And so my goal in saying these things to you is not to make you feel miserable. It's simply to get you to own up to the fact that you could be deceived. Inevitably, to some level, you are deceiving yourself. We ought not to think more highly of ourselves than we ought to. This is a constant temptation that we have to be aware of. If we're not aware of it,

We will want people to lie to us. That's why false shepherds will always have an audience because there's plenty of us that want to be lied to and told that we're better than we are. Much better to have God tell us who we are and to show us the way of escape before it's too late. So how do you know if you're a Christian? How do you know if you're doing the will of the Father? I wish I could give you just a bullet point list and be like, if you can check these three or five or 25 boxes, then you can be assured. I can't give you that. I can give you things that point in that direction, but here we have guys casting out demons in Jesus' name, and they weren't regenerate. So instead of giving you a checkbox that you might take comfort in, I'll ask you a few questions. Do you love Jesus Christ? Do you love him? Do you know what love is? Love is not something that you come to logically. If you're married, you've fallen in love. And it didn't make sense, and it's probably caused you some problems.

Along the way, you know, marriage is hard. But how do you explain the love between a man and a woman? You know, Proverbs says there's three things I don't understand, four, and one of them is a way of a man with his maiden. Like, how do you explain love? How do you write it down and say, check these five boxes and then it's okay to get married because it'll be good? I don't know how to explain to you what love is, but you'll know it if you've fallen into it. Do you love Jesus? It's not the same sort of romantic love. But do you love him? Does he have your heart? Does he have your heart? Will you hear these words from him and be thankful that he's given them to you? How do you quantify whether you love Jesus? I didn't ask do you love him perfectly, even today. How do you know if you love Jesus? Well, do you hate your sins? There's something true about Christians. They sort of walk around throughout their lives, whatever they're projecting to other people, to the extent that the Holy Spirit's gotten a hold of them and they've...

they're growing toward maturity, they just become more aware of their failures, at least some of them. We might wish they were, you know, speaking of other Christians, we might wish they were more aware of their failures than they are. But there is this growing sense inside of you that you're aware that you're failing at things and that you're not doing the right thing. And it's because you don't want to do the right thing. And you sit there and you have these arguments with yourself in your head. Why don't I want to do that? No, the kid's crying. No, I'm just going to act. I'm going to act like I'm going to sleep so my wife can get up or my husband can get up. You know, you do these things. In the middle of the night, here comes your sin and it gets a hold of you. And you're like, I'm a lazy dog. I'm just a lazy dog. This is a lack of love. Then you get up out of bed and you're like, I'm going to go get the kid. Are you aware of your sins and are you growing to hate them, to see them more and to hate them more? Do they cause you any grief? Sin causes Christians grief. It's an affliction to them. At the end of Romans 7, when Paul is...

preaching to himself and telling us about that argument that goes on inside of his health. It's like, finally, someone who understands. The good that I want, I do not do, but rather the evil that I do not want, I do. And when I do it, I know that it's wrong because the law of God tells me that it's wrong. It only makes me more miserable and less able to fight against it. And then at the end he explains, wretched man that I am, who will set me free from the body of this death? That's what goes on inside of Christians who are trying to do the will of God.

When I meet men who are like, I know what I'm going to do with my life, and I know what I'm going to do, and this is how my life's going to be, and they've got a whole plan for everything, and it's all laid out, and it's all neat, and it's clean, and it's just seamless. I think, well, we'll see. And what I'm thinking is, I hope it doesn't go that well for you, because it would not be good for your soul if it did. I hope your pride, and your selfishness, and your laziness, and your lust, I hope you trip over them just a little bit. I hope they cause you some trouble.

So that you'll learn a little bit about humility and start down the path, the narrow path. That's what I hope. Do you suffer and go without the comforts of this world because of your commitment to obeying God? I think many times we look at Christians and we look at their lives and we think, well, they do that because that's what's easy for them. They get married because that's what's easy for them. No, anyone who's been married will tell you marriage is not easy. Well, they have kids because it's easy for them. No, actually, it turns out when you have your first child, you realize it's not easy.

They're really stinking hard to take care of. You don't know what you're doing. Well, they're just generous. They just enjoy giving of their time and their resources. That's just easy for them. Wrong again. They're just very hospitable people. They just love having, they're just extroverts, you know? They just love having people around. They're just made that way. Wrong again. Maybe there is some inclination that way, but even people who are hospitable get tired of people coming in their house and messing things up, taking up their time. From time to time. So what can you point to in your life and say, I've done this because I'm convinced this is what God would have me do. And it's been hard, but it's been good. These are the sorts of questions we should learn to ask ourselves. These are the sorts of questions that we can take comfort in because we say, you know, I wouldn't do this for any other reason other than God compelled me to do it. And while it's been hard for me to do, I have been content to do it. And I have seen God bear good fruit in it. When Judas was healing people and casting out demons, I don't think Judas was thinking,

man, if only these people would believe in Jesus. I don't think he was doing it because he thought, man, I love that man because he's forgiven me of my sins. I think he was doing it to build himself a name and wealth and power such that the Pharisees would approach him or at least hear him when he came to them. So your job as a Christian is to do the will of your Father who's in heaven. And you're going to want to talk to other people along the way about whether you're doing a good job or not. whether you're heading the right direction, whether the decisions or the troubles or the afflictions that you're having are the kinds of things that Christians go through. This is what the Christian life is. This is the narrow path. This is the way to heaven. This is the way to avoid hearing those terrible words, I never knew you, but rather those beautiful words, well done. Let's pray.