Luke 13:1-9

It says this.

Now there were some present at that time who told Jesus about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mixed with their sacrifice.

Jesus answered, Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all other Galileans because they suffered in this way?

I tell you, no, but unless you repent, you too will all perish.

Or those eighteen who died when the tower in Siloam fell on them, do you think that they were more guilty than all others living in Jerusalem?

I tell you, no, but unless you repent, you too will all perish.

Then he told this parable A man had a fig tree growing in his vineyard, and he went to look for fruit on it, but he didn't find any.

So he said to the man who took care of the vineyard for three years now, I've been coming to look for fruit on this fig tree, and I have found I haven't found any.

Cut it down.

Why should it use up the soil?

Sir, the man replied, Leave it alone for one more year.

I will dig around it and fertilize it.

If it bears fruit next year, fine.

If not, then cut it down.

Let's pray.

Lord, we just we want to submit our lives right now to your word and the witness of your spirit in our lives.

God, we pray that you would speak into us.

Speak into us by your spirit as we go through this text.

Help us to understand what Jesus, you are teaching to this crowd.

And then, Lord, as we jump from interpretation over to application, we're just trusting that God, you knowing our story, you know the intimate details of our life, you know the private things, the secret things of our life, you know our emotional state, you know our just the physical needs that we have, you know, just the issues we have in different relationships.

God, you know all of these things.

Lord, we would ask that by your spirit, you would that you would be just transacting with us, that there would be this intersection between our life and your spirit.

We ask this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Amen.

So we've been going through the book of Luke for uh the last year.

Some of the themes that that Luke pulls out is that God has a plan.

So Luke is hammering this, that God had a plan from the very beginning.

And then when Jesus comes on the scene, it wasn't, oops, here's Jesus.

No, Jesus was the plan, right?

He was the ultimate plan of God.

He's the one that was prophesied about.

And not only was Jesus the plan, but the plan continues on into the future.

Really important for us to understand that.

Even just that fact this morning, still to this day, God's plan is unfolding.

Around you, you live in a world where God's purposes are accomplished.

When you were conceived, God had a plan for your life.

He knows every detail about you.

And so this theme that Luke taps into throughout his book is true of you as well.

The second great theme of the book of Luke is the kingdom of God.

That the kingdom of God is breaking out.

That Jesus is heralding, he's proclaiming that the kingdom of God is near.

And Jesus is calling people to enter into this alternative kingdom.

Yeah, you may live in Israel.

Yeah, you may have a Jewish lineage, or maybe you have a Gentile lineage, but Jesus is saying, I want you to follow me and be in my kingdom.

Be in my kingdom.

And Luke is bringing that to the surface throughout Scripture.

And then the third theme is just the certainty in what you've believed.

Luke has documented these things that Theophilus, who receives both Acts and Luke as letters, that Theophilus would have a sense of certainty about the things that he has believed.

So in these nine verses that we're looking at this morning, we see that there are some present.

If we go back in the context to chapter 12, there's a crowd that is there that's interacting with Jesus.

Jesus is in the last six months leading up to the cross.

He's on his way up to Jerusalem to celebrate Passover.

And he's at this time in the midst of a very large crowd.

And they tell Jesus about this instance of Pilate murdering some Galileans who were in the temple for sacrifice.

We have no other historical reference to this, and we do not have any other gospel reference to this account.

So Luke, who was a physician, he in his research on the life of Jesus came across this story on his own.

A lot of the material that we see in Luke comes, it relies upon the Gospel of Mark, which was written before Luke.

But this is an account that Luke came across, he cooperated it.

And so it's a fascinating, it's a it's a fascinating, unique account to the book of Luke.

And so they tell Jesus about these individuals that are Pilate mixed their blood, is kind of the terminology here, depending on what translation you're reading.

Pilate mixed their blood with their sacrifice, or maybe this could be a poetic way of saying, like they were murdered by Pilate, whatever it means, Pilate kills some Galileans.

And so Jesus takes these comments from the crowd and he says, He brings to the surface, he asks two questions.

Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all other Galileans because they suffered in this way?

Most of the time, when we look at Jesus' teaching, Jesus will ask questions or he'll respond, but he'll respond to others' questions.

Here, there's an account that's brought to Jesus, and he lets it lead into a teaching.

And it's a really interesting teaching, because here you have these Galileans who are doing something that would seem religious, and yet something tragic happens to them.

They're murdered in the temple.

The only historical reference that we may have to this is there was a riot in the temple, and to quell the riot, there were some Jews that were killed around this time.

But there's no real clarity whether that um whether that historical reference ties in with this account here.

But it's a tragedy.

And Jesus wants to know, he's asking a question of the crowd, if this happened to these individuals, the people that were killed, was it because they were worse sinners?

They were more guilty?

Right?

And then he answers it by saying, I tell you, no, but unless you repent, you too will all perish.

And then he asks another question about these 18 people who just tragically are killed by a tower that falls over.

Again, we have no other historical reference to this.

All we know is that a tower seems to have maybe been in the process of being built, or maybe it was an old tower.

It must have been by a crowd, because for a tower to fall over and kill 18 people, um, that doesn't happen easily.

So it must have been a pretty dense area.

But it's just a tragedy.

It's a fluke thing that takes place.

And yet Jesus uses that to say, do you think they were more guilty than all the others that were living in Jerusalem?

And then Jesus answers the question, I tell you no.

But unless you repent, you too will all perish.

So these questions, Jesus, why is he asking questions?

He's asking questions because it's a good way to teach, right?

He's wanting his listeners to engage, to invest in trying to find an answer, but also to reveal an erroneous way of thinking.

And it's this that people who have tragedies happen to them, they have those tragedies because there is some moral imperfection in them that is more severe than others.

Doesn't this sound familiar to the case of Job?

What happens with Job's counselors?

Well, Job's life is just ruined, right?

He gets wrecked.

Satan is allowed to attack him, his kids die, he gets boils, his crops and his livestock get destroyed.

I mean, talk about the like epic getting wrecked.

And yet, his friends come to him and they try to identify why this is happening.

And they say the reason this is happening is because you have an underlying problem, you have an underlying sin in your life.

They say, give God glory, testify to what you have done wrong, right?

It shows that there's this human nature, there's this aspect of the human nature where people want to, they want to understand, they want to know why this is happening.

It it reveals the fact that um of Romans chapter 1, where it says that God's, that there's a witness in creation to the existence of God.

Romans 1 · chapter mention

Right?

There is this sense that people have innately that there is an underlying purpose.

And yet, while these individuals may be coming to the wrong conclusion, there is this desire internally to know why this is happening.

Thank goodness we have the book of Ecclesiastes.

The whole point of Ecclesiastes says life is a riddle.

Live your life in faith towards God, trusting God for the results.

Right?

The whole book of Ecclesiastes says you can't figure out why the righteous die young and the wicked are prolonged in their life.

Life is a riddle.

The best thing you can do with a life that's a riddle is live it in faith.

But here Jesus is engaging this wrong way of thinking and asking them, do you think that they died tragically because a greater degree of guilt?

And Jesus' answer is no, unless you repent, you too will perish.

Then we go on to this parable of the unfruitful fig tree.

And it seems contextually to be tied in with the message that Jesus is conveying.

There's the owner of the vineyard, and then there's the caretaker.

And what we know about the culture and from Leviticus is that if you plant a tree, you have to wait three years before you can harvest any fruit from it.

And in this account, it says that the um owner has been waiting now for three years to get fruit from it.

So that would put this tree in its sixth year of existence, and it is still unfruitful.

And so the owner says, well, let's just cut it down.

It's taking up room in our vineyard.

Um, it's an abnormality.

This should be having um, it should be bearing fruit.

And the caretaker says, No, let me have one more year with it, and I'm going to give it special care.

We're going to fertilize it, we're going to dig around it, we're going to see if we can get it to bear fruit.

Just give me one more year.

So it's a fascinating, fascinating story.

So let's play this out a little bit.

The the big idea here, I think, is that Jesus is um he's repeating this whole idea of you need to repent.

Um, you need to repent lest you perish.

It's a sweet little section here that Jesus is going into.

And but let's step back a second.

Let's let's look at our culture.

Oftentimes Christians are accused of being preoccupied with sin, holy being holy rollers, maybe you've heard that, or maybe, you know, or holier than thou is how culture may talk about Christians or society may portray Christians.

I think that that's that's how oftentimes in the media, like in The Simpsons, how do they portray a Christian?

Or um, how's the church lady portrayed on Saturday Night Live?

It's this kind of stodgy preoccupation with morality, right?

But it's interesting, our society actually deals and trades in morality almost more than Christians.

The distinction between Christians and society when it comes to morality is that we derive our moral norms or our standards, the lines that we draw in the stand, we derive those from God.

Whereas if you're not a Christian or you're not religious, you derive your ethics kind of from social norms, which is the idea that collectively society agrees that this is right or this is wrong, right?

And that generally the outline of morality is determined by what the majority believes to be the case.

The second distinction is that Christians believe that humans are morally accountable to God, whereas the rest of society believes that individuals are merely accountable to the societal majority.

So if you cross a moral line that society has drawn, your accountability is only to other humans and not to God.

So there's a nuance there.

If you feel like you're in a conversation and you're getting pigeonholed of like, oh, you Christians, you just care about sin and you know, you're holier than thou.

That's not a fair distinction.

There's it's more um nuanced than that.

Um when I was riding home on the on the train on Friday night from DC, I was delayed because of the um rainstorm, and I watched this video.

I don't know if you know either of these characters.

On the left is Casey Neistat, on the right is Logan Paul.

Even if you don't know who they are, sorry, I know some of you don't have a view, but even if you don't know who they are, they're both YouTubers.

I think that Casey Neistat has nearly 10 million followers, and Logan Paul has uh more than that.

I don't know how many it is.

And and Logan Paul a few months ago, um one of his YouTube videos, uh, he went to Japan, I believe it was, and he um did a video in what's known as Suicide Forest, and he got footage of somebody who had committed suicide, uh uh, a corpse, and he made fun of it.

And he was um and and it was just horrendous, right?

And in society, there's this outcry, right?

He almost got banned from YouTube.

Um I don't know if he was fined, but it was just like he crossed a moral line within society, right?

As Christians, we would say he crossed the line as well as being disrespectful, but this like he grieved society.

So Logan Paul has been trying to rehab his um reputation.

He's doing a documentary about redemption.

I would encourage you to watch this video because it is an absolutely fascinating discussion between two men who are not Christians talking about uh redemption.

In fact, Casey Neistat was very angry with Logan Paul because he had this uh effect upon other YouTubers because uh it gave YouTube a bad name.

It gave other people that kind of have these big audiences on YouTube a bad reputation and it is damaging to the platform.

And so Casey Neistat is trying to, in this interview, really um ask Logan Paul, you know, how are you trying to redeem yourself?

And then what does that look like?

And and even in the intro, when Casey Neystat's making the intro, he he's talking about, like, I don't know if I should have done this, and I don't know if this is the right thing, because here's what's missing.

They know that there's a need for paying for guilt.

That's assumed.

But what is not known, and what's this kind of ambiguous idea, is what does redemption look like?

What does it look like to pay for your guilt within society when you cross a line?

It is such a fascinating discovery.

And Logan Paul, like, you just have to, you listen to him, and he's trying to, he's trying to walk two different values, the value of repentance and the value of being true to oneself.

And so on one hand, he's making excuses for what he did, and he's like, Well, that's just my brand.

And then in the next minute, he's like, but I know it was wrong and I need to change.

And so Casey's like, well, what are you gonna do to change?

He's like, well, now I'm a vegan.

I know.

It was that was like the most fascinating part of the video, because it's just like when you don't have a roadmap for redemption, when you don't have a roadmap, you come up with crazy stuff.

Right?

You know that there's a need.

Like, so now he's gonna try to give back the proceeds of his videos to suicide awareness, you know, and but it's this like flailing about.

But notice the bones of a Christian framework for redemption are there in his thinking, but he's detached from a God, a God who judges the world and who can give true redemption.

It's it's amazing, it's an amazing concept.

You know, the early church wrestled with this as well.

In the first century, there was horrendous persecution that took place.

Um, Emperor Nero and other emperors that followed martyred Christians.

And so there was widespread persecution of Christians, and some Christians would crack under the pressure and they would renounce Christ.

But the church at this time they were they were like this.

They were small bodies that met from house to house.

It it was a radical privilege to be a part of a church family.

There was, you cared for one another.

It was your social circle, right?

By coming to Jesus, you were oftentimes leaving your old social circle and taking on new friendships.

And so these Christians that would deny Christ, they would be ostracized from the church.

They would save their life by denying Christ, but then they would be remorseful.

And they would miss their Christian family, and their conscience would prick them, and they realized I need to get back into the church.

And so what does the church do?

How do we know that this person is truly repentant?

How do we know that they that we're not just freely giving them access to the privileges of what the church represents and just letting them back in?

It's a difficult question, right?

How do you know whether a person is truly repentant?

And this is where we get the idea of penance from.

If you have a history with the Catholic Church or maybe the Orthodox Church, you know that there's this idea of confession, right?

And that you confess your sins, and then it's the job of the priest to let you know how you're going to make penance.

The word penance and repentance are similes, they're related words, mean very similar things.

And the priest is diagnosing here the actions that you need to take to show your repentant of your sin.

And then once you do those acts, what does the priest give you?

He gives you absolution, right?

If you're not from the Catholic background, these are maybe foreign ideas.

But the history behind that process that is even practiced by the Catholic Church to this day goes back to the very first and second century of the church as it wrestled with the idea of bearing.

Fruits of repentance, that there is a need for repentance.

We understand the idea that there is a payment that has to be made for sin, that with guilt there is a required punishment.

But the Bible doesn't leave us lingering for an answer to these things.

It's very clear that the Bible says the payment is due.

When we are wronged, when we are wronged and there is in us a sense of animosity and a breach in the relationship, we are wired to know that there is a need for payment to take place.

There's a need for a payment to take place.

The most important payment is described in the Bible as Jesus' death on the cross.

The reason that Jesus died on the cross was because mankind could not adequately pay for its sin.

Mankind could not put away its own sin.

There needed to be a sacrifice on behalf of sin.

If we go back to Genesis 3, we see the nature of sin.

We see the rejection of God's word was the sin itself.

Now you look at the garden, right, and you see Adam and Eve taking the fruit and eating the fruit.

That was not some radical moment of passion, right?

It wasn't a murder of somebody.

Have you ever thought about how simple the sin in the garden was?

That it was just a simple disobedience to God's instruction.

And that's what sin is.

Sin is, we've got to unpack it from the cultural trappings and recognize that sin itself is just a disobedience to God's word.

It's a rebellion against God.

It doesn't have to be done with a lot of hoopla, it doesn't have to be done zealously necessarily, it can be done with absolute laziness.

But sin is a simple disobedience to God's word.

As a result of their sin, death comes into the world.

In fact, Romans 3.23 says, All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.

Romans 6.23 says that the wages of sin is death, right?

But the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

The wages of sin is death, but God's gift to us is eternal life.

The Old Testament has been talking about this, right?

It foreshadowed a payment through the sacrificial system.

There was a need for sins to be paid for, and God gave this sacrificial system.

And then when Jesus comes on the scene, what does John the Baptist say of Jesus?

Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.

Jesus came to be the payment for sin.

What Logan Paul needs, and what you and I need is Jesus' payment on the cross for our sin.

We're a guilty people, and that's what Jesus is saying in the text.

He's saying, not just the ones that are murdered by Pilate, not just the ones that had the building fall down on them, all of us are gonna perish unless we repent.

Sin is that serious.

Sin is that serious.

You see, Logan Paul may be able to do his documentary, he may be able to rehab his reputation, but at the end of the day, he's gonna die, Casey's gonna die.

In fact, there's nobody before God's throne that is innocent.

We are all guilty in need of redemption.

So it's interesting how this one man who made a YouTube video and he crossed a line, how by society's standards, he has to scramble for redemption.

But there is this danger that exists within society where we all want to place ourselves in the position of the judge to determine what his repentance looks like.

It kind of can give us a sense of self-righteousness.

But Jesus is saying, look, you're all in need of repentance.

But there's another really important factor that Jesus brings out in this parable, and it's this in Romans chapter 2, verses 4 through 6, it says, God's kindness is intended to lead you to repentance.

Romans 2:4–6

God's kindness is intended to lead you to repentance.

But because of your stubbornness and your unrepentant heart, you're storing up wrath against yourself for the day of God's wrath when his righteous judgment will be revealed.

God's not messing around.

God's not messing around when it comes to sin.

When God is kind to you and gentle with you, don't take that kindness as a sense of God doesn't care about your sin.

Oh, God doesn't, he's he's looking past your sin.

No, God sees the heinousness of your sin.

He sees the darkest wickedness of my sin.

And he needs, he looks at it and he knows that there is a need for payment to be made.

There's a need in our life for us to turn to him for that payment.

And he says, look, the kindness that's there, the fact that the caretaker of the vineyard wants to fertilize the soil and give it one more year to bear fruit.

That's the kindness of God.

Here's what that looks like, right?

Went to Whole Foods.

This is a fig, right?

This is this is what Jesus or the caretaker of the garden was hoping would be on that tree.

Right?

This this represents for Jesus in the parable the repentance, the fruit of repentance in our lives.

I think I have one more verse that I just want to highlight.

It's this one.

In 2 Corinthians, the church in Corinth was zealous for God.

It was extreme, right?

It was like the extreme sports of churches.

They were into spiritual gifts, they were into prophecy, the gift of tongues, but they were also looking past a grievous sin that was in the church, where it was sexual sin.

There was a man that was sleeping with his stepmom.

And Paul has to tell this church, look, you've got to put, you've got to put this guy out of the church until he's repentant of this sin.

This church was even proud that they were letting this man in his sin stay in the church.

And so in the first letter, he says, look, you need to cast judgment.

You need to put him outside the church until he repents.

But then we get to 2 Corinthians, and what we find is that he did repent.

He did repent, and now Paul has to say, look, he's repented.

There's change in his life.

You need to bring this guy back in lest he feels overwhelmed by his own sin, lest he feels consumed by the sin.

And this is what he says was in his life.

This is the mark of repentance.

2 Corinthians 7, 9 through 11.

See what this godly sorrow has produced in you.

What earnestness, what eagerness to the clearing of yourselves, what indignation, what alarm, what longing, what concern, what readiness to see justice done.

At every point you have proved yourself to be innocent in this matter.

You see, the first step, after you and I are convicted of sin, the first place you and I need to run to is Jesus.

We need to ask Him for forgiveness in our life.

And then the second thing that you and I need to do is we need to bear the fruit of repentance in our life, right?

And this is what it looks like.

There's an earnestness, there's an eagerness to clear ourselves.

There's an indignation towards this sin.

There's an alarm, there's a longing, there's a concern, there's a readiness, right?

That in every point you've proved yourself to be innocent in the matter.

Dear saints, you know what it's like to experience conviction of sin.

Because we are all experts at sin.

Right?

We're all guilty, like Jesus says here.

Unless we repent, we will perish.

Let me encourage you.

God loves you.

God deeply loves you.

He is the farmer that wants to tend your life and fertilize and care for you as a tree so that you will produce good fruit in your life.

But know this that God doesn't look lightly upon sin.

It's not a light matter for him.

Death is the wages of sin.

And we have to let God deal with it in our life in a very serious way.