Matthew 7:15-20

Well, I want to tell you how much I've felt at home this last week and a bit.

! It's just been, it's really curious how you can live in a foreign country for a long time.

Come home to worship in a home church in many ways and find such a wall.

Thank you.

I continue to lift your church family, we do, in Virginia to the Lord.

And thank God for his work among you.

As we come to his word this morning, let's bow our heads in prayer.

Father, we remember what the psalmist says.

And we take it as a very practical indication of praise and dependence.

I rejoice in your word like one who finds great spoil, like one who finds great treasure.

Lord, help us this morning as we come to your word, not to treat it as something rote or ritual,

but to come to you as people who need this food, who should be delighted at this treasure that we found.

Because this is really the way that you feed us.

This is really the way that you sustain us and guide us.

This is the way that you rebuke us and encourage us.

And we pray that that might be the case this morning, Lord.

In Jesus' name. Amen.

Amen.

Okay, so our passage is Matthew 7, verses 15 to 20, taken from this section of the Lord's Sermon on the Mount.

Matthew 7:15–20

I like to tell myself that London is still my city, that I know the way around it.

But the fact is I'm rubbish at finding my way around London now.

GPS, if anything, has made it more difficult.

That doesn't seem to make sense to me.

Here's the case.

I remember a few years ago I was trying to get to St. Paul's to meet my brother for dinner.

There was a restaurant right there.

And I said to myself, it's a huge great cathedral.

Sooner or later it can show itself.

But it didn't.

So in desperation I asked someone who was standing nearby whether he could point me in the right direction.

He turned out to be Russian.

He gets out his map and with tremendous authority tells me,

this is the direction you should be going.

Go in this direction.

Go.

So I set off and 15 minutes later I turned up at the Tower of London.

Leave us to say I was late for dinner.

So at this point in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is telling us who you listen to matters.

That's his theme.

It's the lesson of these verses after all that he's said.

Because being a follower of Jesus requires discernment.

And there are three warnings which Jesus gives us here about those who will show us a wrong way if we listen to them.

If you want to know, he's saying, whether you can trust the person who's directing you,

you should heed these three things at a minimum.

So let's look at the passage.

It'll be helpful if you have it open in front of you.

I'll try and stick as close as I can to the text.

So verse 15, what does Jesus say?

Jesus says,

Beware of false prophets who come to you in sheep's clothing.

And this I think is the first warning.

We're called to challenge and to verify.

To beware, you may know, comes from an old English word meaning to put your guard up, to be wary.

If a soldier is on watch at his or her post and somebody approaches and they don't know them,

he or she will likely challenge the person who goes there.

And if they have a weapon, if the soldier has a weapon, they will raise it in readiness.

And Jesus is telling us this is an appropriate posture to adopt towards someone who claims to speak for God.

You're not attacking the person themselves when you are being wary,

or you're not insulting them when you are putting yourself on guard.

But in a sense, mentally, you are challenging them.

Who goes there?

Who do you belong to?

What words will you give me?

How is what you've said or what you've done in line with the gospel?

And you'll notice that Jesus says we have two vulnerabilities.

The first is we have a vulnerability of need.

The connection between teachers and sheep might not be immediately obvious to us now,

but it was a familiar metaphor in the Old Testament in Jeremiah

when God's people have rejected his authority and his teachers.

They turned deliberately to false shepherds, to false prophets.

And God himself says to these false prophets as if they were shepherds of the sheep,

you have scattered my flock and have driven them away,

and you have not attended to them.

How would those people gather a flock in the first place?

Well, because sheep need shepherds.

Remember Jesus said that when he looked at the crowds.

They were like sheep without a shepherd.

That's what makes us vulnerable.

We need shepherds.

And so we will flock to people who appear to be so.

But second, see, we have a vulnerability of familiarity.

Wolves will come to us, Jesus says, in sheep's clothing.

You remember Churchill famously said of his rival Clement Attlee that he was a sheep in sheep's clothing.

He saw him as no threat at all.

But Jesus said these false teachers are like sheep in sheep's clothing.

They are ravenous, meaning hungry wolves,

where the flock is ordinarily much more vulnerable

and so needs the shepherd to protect it from wolves.

How much more vulnerable is the flock that takes into its trust a shepherd,

who is actually a wolf?

The guard is down.

The shepherd appears to wear sheep's clothing,

but on the inside, his motivation is not to feed the sheep,

but to feed upon them.

So, although we know this phrase, a wolf in sheep's clothing, pretty well,

I think it's worth asking what danger does such a person actually present?

Well, the danger, though, lies in the fact that we don't see the wolf.

What we see and pay attention to is the wolf's clothing.

We see and assume that this teacher is like us.

I think this is obviously our vulnerability generally in our own day and age.

This person sounds like me.

This person looks like me.

This person produces the right sound bites.

They're saying the kinds of things that I would say if I could.

They must be a friend.

I can let my guard down.

We assume that being like us, we can trust this person when they're teaching us

because they will have our best interests at heart.

So I think this is the terrible danger for Christians,

and this has been the testimony of history.

Those Christians who let down their gospel guard

are enormously vulnerable to being led astray.

Such people are to horribly mix our animal metaphors,

sitting ducks, for deception.

So we're told, I think, to challenge and to verify.

Second, we're to observe and match, verses 16 to 17.

Jesus continues,

You will recognise them by their fruits.

Are grapes gathered from thorn bushes or figs from thistles?

So every healthy tree bears good fruit,

but the diseased tree bears bad fruit.

Having warned us that there are wolves we don't easily see,

Jesus shows us now the way to spot them.

You can recognise this because,

although the wolf can disguise its identity,

the tree cannot notice disguise its fruit.

Grapes, he tells us, are not grown from thorn bushes,

nor figs from thistles.

If you're tasting a thorny grape

or trying to choke down some thistly fig,

it may be because it's not all that it's claiming to be.

You may have difficulty recognising a false teacher,

even when they're right in front of you.

But Jesus says you will recognise them by their fruits

if you're paying attention,

if you're looking out for their patterns of behaviour.

Why is Jesus putting it this way?

Well, frankly, because we ourselves can be so reluctant

to join the dots and to,

with a beloved teacher or a preacher or a leader,

hold them accountable in this way.

We are disinclined to doubt such people.

And there are really two sides to this, I think,

to evaluating the fruit or teaching of a preaching ministry.

One is what we might call technical,

and the other is biographical or organic.

On the technical side,

we should have clear expectations in our own mind

about the way that someone should teach the Bible.

Look for the text, first of all.

A friend and I were at a Bible conference three years ago

in the Midwest,

and one of the big names in Reformed Evangelicalism

gave the opening address,

where he warned us by giving us nine things

he thought we should be watching for

to look out for false teachers.

And one of those, he said,

was you should be watching out for people

who don't teach from the Bible.

And the irony was that he himself,

in his nine points, as magnificent as they were,

didn't refer to the text of the Bible once

in his otherwise excellent talk.

It's not rocket science, is it?

A Bible teacher,

that is someone who derives their authority to speak

because they claim to know and be directed by the Bible,

should more than occasionally refer to the Bible.

Preachers have different styles,

but you should be able to trace the argument line

and the conclusion from the text

that they say they are expounding.

Here's another example.

I was visiting a friend in Idaho some years ago.

We went to worship at his church.

I don't recall what the Bible passage was,

but the application was,

watch out for Hillary Clinton

and the US government are bringing in weapons

through the town to suppress the local population.

Whether that was true or not,

I'm pretty sure Hillary and the US Army

are not called out in the pages of Scripture.

Maybe Revelation.

Thirdly, look for balance.

Is there one aspect of Christian teaching or experience here

which is being emphasised,

and other parts which are being wholly neglected,

again, in a broad aspect of someone's teaching ministry?

This isn't necessarily false teaching,

and it's not picked up immediately,

but persistent teaching in one direction

to the exclusion of other vital gospel themes

indicates an unbiblical imbalance.

Paul tells the elders in Acts 20,

I did not shrink from declaring to you

the whole counsel of God.

Now, it may be difficult for a preacher to cover everything,

but the question, I think, for us,

even in a given passage is,

is there balance there?

Is the balance that's given in the text of the Bible

presented in the sermon?

One of the ways that we often get caught up,

Presbyterians love to focus on divine sovereignty,

the idea that God's in charge,

and of course he is,

but human responsibility is equally the theme of scripture.

Is it also being presented?

Fourthly, be careful of teachers

who are majoring on the minors.

Often this will be their own pet theory,

their unique interpretation of a given text.

It will often be exotic,

which is part of the reason that we're interested in it.

The rule is, I think,

that if a teacher has their own view,

they should make that clear in the sermon.

They should say,

hey, you know, guys,

be watching out for this.

This is my own crazy idea about the text,

which I found.

I remember a visiting speaker

when I was at college on the south coast,

a brilliant man,

double first of Cambridge,

and he asked the question of the atonement,

what happened to sin at the cross?

And his theory is that God somehow

sucked it up into the cross,

at Calvary,

as if the cross was a big vacuum cleaner.

It was a creative idea,

but not obviously the idea of the passage.

And this is the connection, I think,

with what's organic or biographical.

Who is this teacher,

who is a preacher really up there for?

Who is he representing?

Is he up there for what God has to say,

because that is the role of the biblical teacher or preacher,

to expose what God has said,

or is he up there for himself,

and consequently is he putting his ideas

into the passage that aren't properly found there?

Is Jesus the hero of the story and the sermon?

Is Jesus the hero, evidently,

of this person's life?

So this is the question, I think,

for any Christian teaching ministry.

They won't all look the same,

but are they about Scripture?

Would you be able to say to a friend,

when you talk about a church that you've been going to,

I think you can reliably say it at this one,

but perhaps of another,

are they reliably sticking to the text?

Are their conclusions,

the conclusions of the passage?

Is the hero of the story,

the Jesus of the Bible,

or something else?

And positively,

is there an organic way to tell good fruit?

In a sense to ask,

are the contents inside the box

matching the labelling on the outside of the box?

Because Jesus says, verse 17,

every healthy tree bears good fruit,

and every diseased tree bears bad fruit.

One of my favourite stories in this regard

is about Corrie ten Boom,

the Christian writer and speaker,

who you will know would often speak

after the war around Berlin.

She was speaking at one point on Micah 7,

which is one of her favourite texts,

it was,

how God forgives our sins

and then puts our sins at the bottom of the sea

and puts a sign on the surface saying,

no fishing.

Some of you may know the specific story

of how she was speaking in Berlin in 1947,

and after her talk,

as people were coming up to greet her,

she saw one particular person approaching

and she recognised him immediately,

even though this was some years after the war,

he had been a guard

at Ravensbrück concentration camp,

when members of her family,

including her own sister,

had died.

And the man came up to her

and he told her

that he had become a Christian

since that time,

and he was sure that God

had forgiven him

for what he had done,

and he said,

but I need to hear it from you.

Will you forgive me?

And this is what she writes,

and I've always been so struck

by the organic nature of this

when it comes to the Gospel.

And I stood there,

I whose sins had every day

to be forgiven,

and I could not forgive him.

Betsy had died in that place.

Could he erase her slow,

terrible death

simply for the asking?

Jesus, help me,

I prayed silently.

I can lift my hand,

I can do that much.

You supply the feeling.

So woodenly, mechanically,

I thrust my hand

into the one stretch out to me,

and as I did so,

an incredible thing took place.

The current started in my shoulder,

raced down my arm,

sprang into our joint hands,

and then this healing wall

seemed to flood my whole being,

bringing tears to my eyes.

I forgive you, brother,

I cried with all my heart.

I think that's Gospel fruit.

I think that's a teacher

who's done the hard work

and is prepared to humble herself

before the Lord

when it comes to walking the walk.

That is the evidence

of the inside matching the outside.

So I think for any of us,

is the Bible simply something

that we are being taught

and have intellectually accepted,

or is it being lived out

in the fruit of a changed life?

It takes wisdom, doesn't it,

to discern what is from God

and what is not.

But we are being told

there are clues.

Our Lord is telling us here,

walls are not as disguised

as they suppose.

You can identify the tree

by looking at the fruit.

And thirdly and finally,

wait and hope,

verses 18 to 20.

We are to be hopeful

even as we wait.

Growing up, we had this apple tree

in our garden.

I've often thought

that sounds like

an idyllic British childhood,

growing up with an orchard

and a gun.

This was a ratty old apple tree,

barely surviving.

I remember as autumn faded,

almost to give a kind of

unwarranted honour to the tree,

I would pick the apples

on the tree

and taste them

to see if they had ripened.

And often they were quite small

and they were sour,

odd, bitter, hard.

And I've learned since

that you can eat

wild crab apples,

because that's what they were.

And you can cook them

even better.

But if you eat them

straight off the tree,

a steady diet of them

swallowing their seeds

and their core,

you will slowly be

poisoned yourself

by metabolised cyanide.

And the Latin word

for crab apples

is malus,

which means evil

or wicked.

I think time

is the perspective

at the core

of this passage.

It will require

some time,

sometimes,

to evaluate ministries

or time

for them to show

what they really are.

Time is the perspective

we often miss

in evaluating

good trees

from bad trees.

when Jesus says

a healthy tree

cannot bear bad fruit

and a diseased tree

cannot bear good fruit,

what are those things?

They are ultimate pictures

of a whole life

evaluated

from God's perspective.

It's not helpful,

I think,

for us to be suspicious

of everybody,

nor is it helpful

to take up

the dubious hobby

of heresy hunting.

Because what you usually

discover at the end

of the day,

if you're honest,

is not only how

off-base this person

might be,

but how off-base

your own heart can be.

We've all done it,

I think,

in the last few years,

the rush to judgment

when Christian ministries

have failed spectacularly.

And you want to tell yourself,

well,

I knew it all the time.

I think we have to be

intentional with ourselves.

we have to be brilliant

about the way

that we evaluate

a teaching ministry

and our own hearts,

too.

Even if someone

is diverting a little,

but regularly

from the gospel,

we should be looking out

for something

that takes time

to taste.

Are the apples

of this teaching ministry

sweet?

Are they producing growth?

Is there the authentic

taste of Christ

about them?

Not of perfection,

necessarily,

in this person's life,

but of the humility

and joy

of the gospel

that's shown

not only in their teaching,

but in the way

they live.

And if you're not

finding that,

the encouragement,

I think,

is to find counsel

about that thing,

but also to find

a better diet

and to select

a different teacher.

I have found

that one of the authorities,

the false authorities

I often have to contend with,

is my own self.

The Bible tells us

our consciences

wrongly condemn us.

In a way,

they're teaching us.

Our own hearts

can deceive us.

Our minds

are so easily swayed

and run after

the latest thing.

They need

transforming,

Scripture tells us.

They need renewing.

We're to set

our minds

on things above.

I remember

George Burwer,

the former leader

of Joffre Asian Mobilisation,

used to talk to himself

audibly

and say,

Mr. Body,

we're not going there today.

In the same way,

I do that sometimes

with my mind.

Mr. Mind,

we're not going there

right now.

And I think

when it comes to teaching,

we have to be

in the same mind,

not just

uncritically accepting

whatever feeling

or thoughts

crosses our minds,

but rather

to get into the habit

of preaching

the gospel

to ourselves,

renewing our minds

from the promises

of Scripture.

I was moved by a story

from the New York Times

last week.

This is about

something that happened

in Washington

right by the White House

a few weeks ago.

There was a lightning strike

and three people

were killed

instantaneously.

And one person

survived.

A 28-year-old woman,

a woman called Amber,

with burns

all down

one side of her body.

Her heart

stopped immediately.

The EMTs

were there,

emergency people,

and they came

and they managed

to revive her heart.

It lasted

for another 11 minutes

and then stopped again

and they revived her again.

And she's describing

her experience now

and she says

she's in awful pain.

She feels like

she's going to die

most days.

But when she does that,

she remembers

her aunt

who battled cancer.

And when it's at

its worst,

she cries out

at the top of her lungs,

I'm grateful.

I'm grateful.

And I thought of that command

in 1 Thessalonians 5,

which may be

that woman's aunt knew.

Give thanks

in all circumstances

for this is the will

of God

in Christ Jesus

for you.

And you think about

all of those times

in your life

where in one way

or another,

whether it be

from a pulpit

or from a teaching ministry

or from a book

or from what

your own experience,

perhaps the experience

of pain is telling you

and in a sense

it's attempting

to teach you

at those moments

we need to apply

gospel hope to it.

We need to remember

gospel promises.

So I want to end

by saying this.

This is the encouragement

I think ultimately

from these verses,

isn't it?

Jesus says

a healthy tree

cannot bear

bad fruit.

And ultimately

Jesus says

every healthy tree

bears good fruit.

So what ultimately

makes one tree

or another?

The Bible says

in Philippians chapter 1

Philippians 1 · chapter mention

He who has begun

a good work in you

will bring it

to completion.

He will bring it

if you will

to ripen him.

You didn't plant

the seed,

he did.

You haven't caused

the growth

no matter what

you might ultimately

think he has.

You won't determine

ultimately

all the fruit

of your life

and what it will

produce.

He will.

Yes, you must

avoid the counsel

of the wicked.

Yes, you must

plant yourself

as Psalm 1 says

by streams

of living water.

Yes, you must

bear fruit

in keeping with

repentance

as you can.

But if it's

something like

my experience

you'll bear

a number of

crap apples

too daily.

But wait,

he's saying,

and hope

because even

through the storms

and amidst

the wolves

God is ripening

you

for his glory.

That's right.