Lord Lord

Well, we are uh continuing in our series, The Sermon on the Mount.

We've been here since the beginning of April, so it's been a minute, uh, but we have two left, so it's this week and next week, and then we'll be wrapping it up.

Uh I've thoroughly enjoyed it.

I hope you have.

I feel like I could just keep preaching this thing over and over.

I just want to start back over in Matthew 5 and just preach these three chapters over and over again because it's some of the most important uh passages in the whole Bible.

It's it's Jesus talking about the kingdom of God and talking about the culture, the mindset, the ethos of the kingdom of God.

And uh he takes really uh uh many times a very counterintuitive approach.

He talks about things like loving your enemies and praying for those who persecute you.

He talks about turning the other cheek, but not like we necessarily might originally thought.

Like it's not about getting slapped around.

It's it's actually about finding your dignity in something other than what somebody else thinks about you or something somebody else did to you.

And so there's a whole lot in there.

I'm not gonna try to re-preach the last several months, uh, but I think it's tremendously helpful.

Today I'm gonna do the very best job that I can do at doing two things.

Okay, the first one is I want to do a message in Matthew 7, verses 21 through 23.

Matthew 7:21–23

So if you have your Bibles, we're gonna look at what that portion of Scripture says.

But I'll just tell you right out of the gate, the second thing I want to do, and I'm equally passionate about this, is to give you tools and to give you the ability to continue to learn how to dig into God's word on your own and to feed yourself, especially when you come across a passage of scripture where you've got a bunch of questions.

You know, sometimes you you read something, you're like, is that saying what I think that it's saying?

And you're not sure, and so often we just quit reading, or maybe we do even worse, which is to apply our assumptions on what we think it means and not be sure, so then we don't know what to do with it.

Okay?

And this is really important because if we're looking to the Bible to give us our view of God, or we're looking to the Bible to give us our theology, then we need to do the best we can to learn how to understand the Bible and study it even better.

Here's a quote I heard this week, I thought was really good.

It says, if your image of God is unhealthy, the more you worship, the less healthy you will be.

If your image of God, this is from Dallas Willard, he says, if your image of God, in other words, what you imagine God to be, what you see in your mind's eye when you think about God, if that is unhealthy, then essentially it's counterproductive for you to worship that false God.

Maybe that mental psychological idol that isn't actually who Jesus is or who you who you think God is.

But if you keep worshiping that God, you'll be made into the image of a false God, essentially.

Okay, so that means that we need to keep getting better and better at digging into this and understanding who God is according to the Bible.

All right?

Okay, here we go.

Matthew 7, starting in verse 21, says, Not everyone who calls out to me, Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven.

Only those who actually do the will of my Father in heaven will enter.

On judgment day, many will say to me, Lord, Lord, we prophesied in your name and cast out demons in your name and perform many miracles in your name, but I will reply, I never knew you.

Get away from me, you who break God's laws.

Okay.

Let's get into it.

Um, one of the things you need to think about and keep in mind is that if you're reading the Bible in English, you're reading not only a translation, but an interpretation.

Okay?

So what I mean by that is if you open up your Bible app and you see the NIV, that's a translation, the New Living Translation, the King James Version, you're reading translations.

But if you're reading it in English, that means a group of somebody's got together and they read the original language and then they interpreted it into English.

And it's not always a one-to-one word.

Okay, it's kind of like this.

If I was speaking with an interpreter, okay, my buddy Ricardo is over here, he speaks some Spanish.

And so if I said and I was speaking in English and they were translating in Spanish, two or three different Spanish speakers might not do word for word exactly the same, but they would try to understand the spirit of what I'm saying and then communicate it in another language.

Makes sense?

So this is a cross-cultural experience that we're having when we read the Bible because the New Testament's in Greek, the Old Testament's in Hebrew and Aramaic, and that's why you could read more than one translation, and it sort of reads differently, especially how we hear it.

So, for example, in in this one, um, it says on Judgment Day, okay, on in verse 22 it says on judgment day uh in the NLT.

In the NIV, it says on that day, okay.

So this is one example.

You you if you're reading your Bible consistently, you're probably noticing these a lot.

And so what I want to do is I'm gonna kind of show you what to do when you come up against that to get a little bit more information on the table and to get maybe a better interpretation.

Okay, um, let's start out with this.

Let's let's make our way through this text.

Um, the first thing that that would jump out in verse 21, it says, Not everyone who calls out to me, Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven.

Okay, let's start with uh that question is like what does he mean by the kingdom of heaven?

And the first thing we want to get with this, by the way, is when we see Lord, Lord here in Matthew 7, to us it's not that big a deal because we're always talking about Jesus as Lord, and we pray, dear Lord.

Um, the idea of Jesus being our Savior and our Lord is old hat to us at this point.

It doesn't even show up on our radar.

To Matthew's audience and to Jesus' audience, when he says Lord, Lord, this would have been a shocker because, okay, by the way, this is the first time that Jesus is referred to as Lord in the whole book of Matthew.

So we're in chapter 7.

It's not the statement's not been made until now.

Through the the ear of the hearer at that time, Lord was a term that was used for Caesar as and related to the empire of Rome.

And so to refer to anyone other than Caesar as Lord was to take your life into your own hands.

Because that would be treason.

That would be saying someone else is king.

Again, it means nothing to us.

We're always calling everybody king.

What's up, king?

Okay, we do that all the time.

It means nothing.

We don't care because we don't have a king.

In this day, when they called G to call Jesus Lord would be to be pledging allegiance, calling him king of his kingdom, and that's a threat to Caesar in the Roman Empire.

Make sense?

So he says, just because you call me uh Lord, Lord, doesn't mean you'll enter the kingdom of God or the kingdom of heaven, it says here, which is a Jewish reverential term.

It's being reverent to the kingdom of God.

So anytime you see in your Bible, kingdom of God, kingdom of heaven, they're not different, it's the same thing, it's just a different way to say it.

So what does he mean by kingdom of heaven, right?

Which when we read it at first, you might read it and go, is he talking about a celestial city or is he talking about something here on earth?

Of course, we looked at this last week.

If you start, if you go back to Matthew 4, so the what precedes the Sermon on the Mount is Matthew says, Jesus went everywhere announcing the Yuan Gilean or the good news of the kingdom of God, the kingdom of heaven.

Yuan Gilean was a term that they would have known around Hellenism.

So when they would go city to city saying, hey, we're bringing Greco-Roman culture, we're bringing uh Hellenism, which is better education, uh, better art, um, better uh health care, okay, better everything, better technology, more comfort.

Okay, they would go city to city saying, Yuan Gileam, we have good news for you, Hellenism's here.

So this is a term that's kind of taken from that and saying, hey, Jesus talked about the good news, not of the Greco-Roman culture or of Hellenism, but the good news of the kingdom of God, which begs the question, what is the kingdom of God, which is what sets up the Sermon on the Mount.

Jesus is talking about what here are the values and the way of thinking within this kingdom.

So more than likely, this is this seems to be, if we're being true to the context, that he's talking about the kingdom of God, right?

Thy kingdom come, thy will be done in the Sermon on the Mount, Lord's Prayer, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

So then he says, only those who actually do the will of my Father will enter.

Okay, now this goes back to, now this is why it it's really cool to go straight through these verses because we're building on this.

If you've been here the last couple weeks, you remember last week we talked about um false prophets, right?

And it was it's in the text where he said, Hey, narrow is the gate that leads to life, and few find it, and wide is the road that leads to destruction.

And then he says, Hey, you got to be careful because you're gonna have to really aim at this.

It's gonna be difficult.

And one of the challenges you'll have are false prophets or false teachers or false leaders.

And then he goes, How will you identify these false leaders?

He said, You'll know them by their practice, you'll know them by their fruit, or he says, by how they act.

So what he's doing is, talking about what we talked about here, orthodoxy means right opinion or right belief, and orthopraxy means right practice.

So he's saying it it you're gonna have to be really, really wise and careful because there are people who will show up and they'll say the right things, but with the wrong motive, and the character and the fruit of their life is toxic.

Okay, so he's like, that's what a false prophet is.

It's not just that they said a wrong thing, it's that who they are.

Okay, and so now this is now it makes sense that he would immediately follow that up with this, where he says, not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, in other words, and this is Jesus talking, not everybody who slaps my name on their work is actually doing my will.

But he said it's actually the one who does the will of the Father, okay, which then begs the question, what is the will of the Father?

We're gonna get back to that in a minute.

So now we keep reading, okay, verse 22.

It says, On judgment day, many will say to me, Lord, Lord, we prophesied in your name and cast out demons in your name and perform many miracles in your name, but I will reply, I never knew you.

Is that scary to just me, or is that scary to you, right?

When you read that, you're like, you start to imagine this conversation, like a really awkward conversation at the pearly gates.

Is no one else uh worried or have ever thought about this conversation?

Like when you read this, it's like, what do you on Judgment Day?

Many will say, I'm just worried, I'm gonna get up to the pearly gates and I'm gonna be like, open up your book, Greg Ford.

Go ahead and look it up, I'd like to come in.

And they're like, Who?

And I'm like, Greg Ford.

Okay, it's well, Gregory Andrew Ford, go ahead and look it up.

And they're like, man, we don't see you in here, man.

And I'm like, are you sure?

Check again, because I went and got a degree in theology, and I studied every week, and I tried to feed the folks good word, and I tried to be a good dude, and I said Jesus was Lord, and I said, Lord, Lord, are you sure?

I'm like, we don't have any record of you, man, in here.

You gotta go somewhere else.

Okay, that this is what we think it's saying, but it's that's this, I don't think this is what it's saying.

Um okay, so so I'm about to give you, I'm about to give you some stuff here.

Okay, this is about to be so worth coming today, all right?

And if you're not taking notes, now's the time.

Get your phone, get your notes app out, because I'm gonna give you some stuff.

And and this, by the way, when you get your phone out, don't get on LinkedIn or whatever you're doing.

Okay, get in the notes, because I'm gonna give you a resource that if you never come back here ever again or listen to a word I say, this will serve you as long as you use it.

You ready?

Okay, okay, so there is a there is a a free website called Biblehub.com.

Biblehub.com, write that down.

Okay, this is gonna be this is gonna help you so much.

You're gonna you're gonna go nuts on this, okay?

You you're gonna start going to the dentist office and you're you're gonna hope they put you in the waiting room so you can go to biblehub.com and get blessed.

Okay, this is how it's it's about to go down.

Okay, so you come across Matthew 7.22.

It talks about on the judgment day, okay, what's gonna happen.

So, and then you're looking in the NLT, which is a translation, which means it's a what?

Interpretation, right?

Okay, so you're gonna go to the, you're gonna go, I don't even know what to make of this, and you're gonna open up Bible Hub and type in, go ahead and pull it out.

Matthew 7, 22.

And what it's gonna bring up is a bunch of translations, and so then you can your first step is you can begin comparing uh these translations.

Alright?

So you open that up and you'll look, and you were in the New Living Translation, it says, On judgment day, many will say to me, Lord, Lord.

And you're gonna compare that right away.

You're gonna look up and see New International Version says, Um, in that day.

It says, Many will say, on that day.

And then the English standard version will say, Many will say to me, on that day.

Okay?

So you're like, well, what is well, this one says on that day, that one says judgment day, and then you're about to now a whole new world.

We're gonna open up like the line the witch in the wardrobe uh we're in the Narnia, and you're gonna open up the thing, and you're okay.

Look at this.

You see on the top, right under no, oh man, come on, man.

You jumped the gun.

I was about it was about to be awesome.

Yeah, thank you.

So you go there, okay, and you see these four tabs.

The one on the far right says Greek.

So now we're gonna go to the original language.

So you punch that button, right?

And we're gonna find out because we just read it in English.

We gotta know what it says in Greek.

So so when you click that, you got it?

Now you can bring it up.

And so now we're gonna look and see what is the word that they translated in one version kingdom, and the other version that.

Or I'm sorry, judgment on the one and that on the other.

And so it says the word that, it's got the Greek word there, and then the definition says that, that one there.

So another it'd be like saying, hey, hey, bring me that one.

Or it says that it has the word yonder, which basically means off into the future, okay?

Something in the future.

Okay, so now we just got a little bit of bad news because we didn't get a lot more clarity because we're like, what is that there, that day, it could mean it we know it means future, but we don't know exactly what kind of future.

So it could be the eschaton, which is where we get eschatology.

It's the end of days.

So maybe it's talking about the end of days, like the the end of end of days.

It could be the end of my life, so maybe after we die and and we have to give an account after we're dead, or it could be in the temporal world that we live in, but there will be a reckoning for our behavior sometime in the future.

In other words, there'll be that moment that we've all had where we did something we thought was right, and then all of a sudden we realize, oh my goodness, I was sincere and I was stubborn and I meant well, but I did damage.

And so he's saying, listen, if you don't, if we don't understand this and we don't get this right, it'll either happen in this temporal life someday down the road where we go, I can't believe I did that.

It'll be at the end of your life when you die.

We we don't exactly know, or it could be at the eschaton at the end of all days.

We just know sometime in the future we will not escape this moment of reckoning.

Does that make sense?

Okay, so then now the next part that we're questioning, or we we're trying to figure out what it means, is it says, on that day, whatever it is, we'll say, we prophesied in your name, and we cast out demons in your name, and we perform many miracles in your name.

So to me, this text it really feels like this isn't a person who twisted their mustache and tried to pervert God's word.

This is somebody who really thought they were doing the right thing.

They really were trying to do good works, um, you know, with God's name on it.

And so they're saying, hold on a second, but we did these things in your name, which by the way, now the in your name thing, let's think about that.

You remember all the way back in the book of Exodus and the Ten Commandments?

And it says the third commandment is thou shalt not take the name of the Lord in vain.

Remember that?

That's uh Exodus 20, verse 7.

Exodus 20:7

Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.

I was like, well, what does that mean?

Because you think of taking the name of the Lord in vain, we usually think of that as saying bad words or like, you know, just throwing out God, except when you're praying for the food or you're singing worship songs or hymns or reading the Bible.

Like if you just say God like that's that's gonna really offend God, and he put it in his top ten of things that you shouldn't just say God, which by the way, I do think we should put reverence around the name of God and not just go around throwing that out, but that's that's not that that's not the point of not taking the name of the Lord in vain.

Look at it in the NLT in Exodus 20, verse 7.

Exodus 20:7

It says, You must not misuse the name of the Lord your God.

You must not misuse.

Okay, so when you go to your Bible hub after today, because I know you're gonna go nuts with this Bible.

I know some of you, you're like, What took you so long, dude?

Why have you kept this a secret for okay?

You today you have it now forever.

So you're gonna go to Bible Hub and you're gonna go and you're gonna go into Exodus 27, because now you're like, I get to learn the Ten Commandments and to really learn what's in there.

So you're gonna go to 20 verse 7 and you're gonna click into the Hebrew, which is what it's written in, and you're gonna go, what does this mean?

And when you go to the take the name of the Lord in vain, take is a word that means to carry, to lift, carry, or use, and then in vain means to do for evil or selfish or or idolatry purposes.

So what it's saying is the point of that command is to use the name of the Lord with all of the authority and power and nobility and everything connected to the Lord God's name and to put it on something that is not his will but your will.

Think of it like this if you have young kids, okay, and you go and you tell one of them, hey, I want you to do the dishes, and then you leave.

And that kid, probably the oldest kid in the family, goes to the younger kids and said, Mom said she wants you to do the dishes.

You know what I'm talking about?

What did they do?

They knew their name meant nothing.

They couldn't go in and say, I'm telling you to do it, so they had to use mom's name in vain.

They knew that behind mom's name is all of the authority, okay, and all of the fury, okay, and all of the punishment, and all of the blessing, everything that comes with who mom is.

So I'm gonna go in and I'm going to use your name for selfish purposes.

I'm gonna put your name on something that you never said or did or intended.

So what he's talking about is the danger to ourselves and the danger to the people around us for us to take the name of the Lord.

And now Jesus says he puts his name in the mix.

He says, those it's not enough to just call me Lord, Lord, and think because you slap the name Jesus on it, that what it contains is all now sanitized.

You certainly could do something selfish, you could do something even sincere, stubborn, and misguided, and put Jesus' name on it, but it still is what it is.

And so, what is Jesus doing here in Matthew 7?

He's kind of bringing them all the way back to the Ten Commandments and the fulfillment or the spirit of that law, which is we must be very careful before we just put the name Jesus on something that really is our will.

Now, let's look at this and we'll keep going for a second because there's probably some more unanswered questions in here or things that we don't know what to do with, which would be something like this when he says, We prophesied in your name, and we cast out demons in your name, we perform miracles, many miracles in your name, but he'll reply, I never knew you.

Right?

So if you're if you're interrogating the text, which I encourage you to do, interrogate it.

Write down all the stuff that doesn't make sense.

Write down the questions, like I don't get this, and then dig into it.

Don't just go on to the next verse.

Stay there.

Use Bible Hub now and other stuff to get some more stuff on the table.

So if so, for those inquisitive people to ask good questions, you're going, what in the world is he talking about?

How in the world could you prophesy, cast out a demon, and do a miracle if Jesus doesn't even know who you are?

How is that possible?

Is there some place we can sneak in and jack Jesus' power without him knowing about it?

And then go drive out demons or prophesy or do miracles?

Miracles, and then Jesus is like, Oh, somebody stole my power.

Like, is that what what is going on?

What is being okay?

So we're going back to Bible hub, and we're going to go in and say, What is going on?

And so you you're going to go in and we're going to go read the Greek.

We're going to look at what's being said here, and we're going to get options on the table.

We may not know exactly, but we're going to maybe get more than what we just got in English.

Okay, so if you go ahead and pull pull that up, uh bring up that the next one.

So we're going to look at the the the top there, which is says demons, right?

So we cast out demons or we drove out demons.

And this could be an evil spirit or a demon.

Maybe that's what it's talking about.

It's saying that someone is possessed by an evil spirit and we drove them out.

Or it could be a heathen deity, right?

And so to these people uh in that day, they were you had people who were monotheistic who served Yahweh, and then you had pagans that served these Greco-Roman gods, and so it could be that.

Um, also we look down at miracles where it says dunamis, which is force, especially miraculous power.

And so it could be, it could be that literally they're doing miracles, or it could be that they were doing big, mighty works, big, huge things, powerful things, and then giving God credit for that thing.

Now we know just logically, the the thing I brought up earlier, there's no way you could steal Jesus' power and do miracles, you know, make warts fall off or legs grow or make something appear abracadabra in Jesus' name, and he never knew you.

So we know he's not saying that.

What Jesus could have been using was essentially hyperbole to kind of shock the system, to go all of these grand, great things that you're doing, these miraculous things, okay, they don't offset you not doing the will of the Father.

Okay.

Um, all right, I'm gonna give you one more and then we're gonna we'll bring it home.

Um okay, so there's another translation that I think is worth adding to your repertoire.

It's the message translation, written by the late great Eugene Peterson.

And so let me explain what the message translation is.

It's like this.

Okay, if I back to my buddy Rico, if I was speaking in English, he was translating in Spanish, and I said, All right, Rico, translate this in the beginning, and then he did it in Spanish.

I said, God created, and he do it in Spanish, in the heavens and the earth.

And if we did it that way, that's one way of translating.

Another would be if I talked for two paragraphs, and then I said, Okay, man, go ahead.

Like I didn't stop every few words, I just said the whole paragraph, then it probably wouldn't be the same translation as if he did it that way.

So he would stand back, he would listen to what I'm saying, the spirit of what I'm saying, and then give it to you in paragraph form.

That's the message translation.

So it won't necessarily say Matthew 21 or 7, verse 21.

It'll say Matthew 7, 21 through 23, and he'll give you the spirit of that in essentially our language.

Okay?

So here are these three verses in the message translation.

He says, knowing the correct password, saying master, master, for instance, isn't going to get you anywhere with me.

What is required is serious obedience, doing what my father wills.

I can see it now.

At the final judgment, thousands strutting up to me and saying, Master, we preached the message.

We bashed the demons.

Our super spiritual projects had everyone talking.

And do you know what I'm going to say?

You missed the boat.

All you did was use me to make yourselves important.

You don't impress me one bit.

You're out of here.

Every head bowed and every eye closed.

What do we do with this?

Because I think I think it would be a mistake to come to the conclusion that what Jesus is trying to do here is to try to get us to be perpetually paranoid that we're getting it wrong.

Some of y'all, that is your default position.

You always think you're getting everything wrong all the time.

And one of the things that's demoralizing to you, even in your faith, is you're just sure that everything I do for God is wrong.

And so you have a paralysis by analysis, and it's a systemic issue in your own mind.

And so I don't think what Jesus is trying to do is to get us to be afraid to do anything for fear of judgment and being cast off and whatever.

I really don't think that's the spirit of this text.

I think what he's trying to do is lovingly speak the truth and caution and saying, be careful that you don't fall into a position where you are just slapping the name of Jesus on something and then using that to justify, even in your own head, things that could actually do damage to people.

Which, when you really look at the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount, but he says the law and the prophets and all of the left side of your Bible is summed up in this love your neighbor as yourself.

And I know that's tremendously simple, but I think it's supported in everything we've talked about in the last few months.

And so what Jesus is doing is before it's too late, before that day, whether it's some day of reckoning later where we go, why did I do that?

I meant so well, but I was so wrong.

Whether that's in our lifetime, whether it's after death or at the end of days, sometime in the future, he says, you cannot avoid this.

So what he's trying to do is get us right here, right now, not to be perpetually paranoid, but to be perpetually humble, to be always repenting.

We think that repentance is for that person who makes the long walk to the altar for the first time.

But repentance is something that we all the time do.

Lord, help me see my bias that would cause me to create a mental psychological idol, a graven image.

I'm not literally bowing to a statue, but I'm I'm bowing to a statue psychologically that I've created of you that may not actually be you.

And I'm bowing down and worshiping it, but I'm getting more and more unhealthy.

And I'm being made into the image of a God that's not you.

So I don't want to violate uh all the way back from Exodus to Matthew 7, where he's saying, be very careful.

Be very careful.

This isn't to make you paranoid, it's to make us humble.

It requires all of us, no matter how many years we've been in the Word, no matter how many decades that we've been serving God, no matter how many sermons that we've preached or how much Greek we know, to always be walking in the Spirit, to be coming to Him, going, search me, O God, and know my heart.

See, Lord, is there anywhere that I have settled for orthodoxy and yet my orthopraxy doesn't match?

Is there anywhere that I've slapped the name Jesus and I've said, Lord, Lord, and I've had a false positive, but I'm not doing your will.

And this is where we go, well, Greg, just tell me what is God's will.

What is God's will?

Because I don't want to mess it up.

And I wish I could just say, get out your pen and paper.

Here it is, here are the five things.

But really, what it is, is it requires us to be in a constant state of relationship and dependence on God.

Because I'm gonna tell you what might be God's will today might be for you to have a crucial, hard conversation with somebody and tell them the truth in love.

And no matter how loving you are, that truth hurts so bad that it feels like a wound in rejection.

And so you're gonna have to face some of that rejection, but you spoke up and you did God's will.

And in six months in a different situation, it might feel the same, but this time God's will might be for you to button your lip and stand down and be patient and kind because right now is not the right time.

It's understanding how God thinks.

This is why I said I just feel like I could go Matthew 5, 6, and 7 for the rest of our lives.

Because it keeps driving us into the heart of Jesus and going, I I don't want to just have the right answers.

I don't want to just know the password.

I don't want to just be able to crack the code and explain it.

I want it to seep into my life, into my heart, into every pore, every fiber of my being, and so that I'm walking in his will.

So don't walk out of here perpetually paranoid, but be consistently humble.

Repent.

Let's repent.

Let's get curious again.

Lord, what are you saying to me now?

Help me understand, God, the heart of Jesus.

Help me understand the fulfillment of the law.

Help me understand what the action looks like literally in my relationships with the people around me.

And so this is the intent.

This is what Jesus is wanting us to do.

So without wasting any time, let's just do it right now.

Let's turn to Him.