Sermon on the Mount series #11
Beliefs Matter
Matthew 7:13-29– 4.27.8  Dennis Mullen  

            Conventional wisdom of this age:  All roads lead to God.  All religions come out in the same place (or at least most do).  (From an early Dennis Miller routine:  “I know we’re supposed to respect everyone’s religion, but come on…these guys aren’t even close!) 

            The wisdom of the age, the predominant religious belief is that the way to God is a broad way, a wide road, and that 85-90% of the world’s people are on it by default, and you have to mess up pretty badly, become a real black-heart to fall off the path to God.

            Think of the interstate between here and Knoxville.  Every couple of years it gets a little wider.  The shoulders get better, the exits get expanded and improved, and of course every year the traffic gets a little thicker too.  Millions of cars pass over I-40 every year, I suppose.  Most of them arrive safely.  Very few, relatively speaking, break down along the way or have accidents.  That’s how people believe it is with the road to God too.  Something unusual has to go wrong before you fall off the highway and fail to reach God.

            That is probably THE easiest thing in the world to believe, as far as religious beliefs go.  To reserve a place in heaven for EVERYONE except the worst of us, the most inhumane and selfish and mean…that’s pretty agreeable as long as you don’t examine it too much, and so it’s what most people believe.

            Problem:  It isn’t what Jesus taught.  THIS is what he taught: 

            MT 7:13 "Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. 14 But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.

The common religious belief in America is that if you go with the flow, the flow of the crowd will keep your behavior decent enough to get you into heaven.  Jesus said the opposite.  Going with the flow is the sure way to get yourself lost.  The road that leads to life is small, a side-road with a narrow gate, and few find it.

Now I’ve told you what I think most people believe about religion.  Let me continue to over-generalize and tell you what most religions believe.  MOST religions believe that the Kingdom of Heaven is an exclusive club, which of course doesn’t let just anyone in.  Religion says that if you want to get into the exclusive club, Club Heaven, you have to ramp up your devotion, your giving, your service to the poor, your self-sacrifice.  You have to pray more than anyone and sleep on the concrete floor and go to church as often as possible and do everything the preacher says (well, THAT happens to be true).  And it sounds like Jesus is saying just the same thing here.  Is he?

I watched the Boston Marathon this past Monday.  Robert Cheruiyot from Kenya won the men’s race.  For awhile, it looked like he might break his own course record for Boston, but he didn’t quite do that.  Still, very impressive.  The Boston course is one of the harder ones among the major marathons in the world.  Cheruiyot has won Boston four times and he’s also won in Chicago and other places and he is in his prime.  But he may not make the Olympic team from Kenya.  Why not?  There are dozens of world-class marathoners from Kenya and only three spots on the Olympic team.  It’s the ultimate exclusive club.  You can be extremely talented and devote years of your life to making the team and never make it.  Most religions are a little more open than that, but they preach the same idea.  Is that what Jesus means by the narrow gate?

Not at all.  It doesn’t take special ability or training to get through the narrow gate, and just because “only a few find it” doesn’t mean it’s hidden or that it requires some secret understanding of Scripture or some special revelation to find it.  No, the problem is that the human stampede is always heading somewhere else, and if you follow the stampede (and most folks do or it wouldn’t be a stampede), it will lead you away from Jesus and the Kingdom of God.  More literally, if you decide to follow your flesh, to live for pleasure and entertainment, to lift up money and success as the highest values, those pursuits are NOT leading you to God because those values are the opposite of what Jesus teaches and stands for and calls for.  The way is narrow because it runs through One Man, the man Jesus Christ the Son of God.  He says in John 14:6 - "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”  Peter said about him in Acts 4:12 - Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved.

            It is very important for you to know as you talk about your faith with others that Jesus claims to be THE way, the exclusive way to God – not one of a hundred doors that you could choose.  In fact, if there were other ways to be saved, what kind of Father would God be to sacrifice his own son?  But Jesus is the only way and without him, people are lost. 

            One of our most important objectives as a church (stated on the flap of your bulletin) is to REACH our neighbors and world with the relevant message of Jesus Christ.  The Bible calls that evangelism, and Jesus gave it to us as our mission in Matthew 28:19-20 - 19 Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age." 

            Some of us in leadership here have been talking about the core values of this church, and one of them, copied straight from Southland Christian Church in Lexington (when Mike Breaux was the Sr. Minister) is this:

Lost people matter to God, so they matter to us.

To be honest, this is one value that is more espoused than practiced, meaning we say it but don’t do it…or at least not enough of it.  That has to change.

But our belief is that people are lost without the Lord; they are on a wide road to destruction.  When we share the good news, we may not be able to make the gate wider or the road to life broader, but we shine a light on them, make them easier to find, and help people see them as the true and best way.  Or in other words, we shine a light on Jesus, making it easier for people to seem him and convincing them by our beliefs and life that he is the way, the truth and the life.

Yet to say that the way is narrow, that it passes only through Christ, is not to say that it’s only for a select few, or that most people aren’t worth saving or don’t have the ability to be saved.  The heart of the Gospel tells us who it is for: ¹⁶ "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.
¹⁷ For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.  (John 3:16-17).

“Whoever believes.”  The title of this sermon is Beliefs Matter.  That’s because what we really believe changes the way we behave, and so if we believe things that turn out to be false, we’ll pay a price.  I heard Bob Russell speak on this once, and he said that, for example, if you believe that children should never be disciplined, that they should constantly challenge authority and be free to express themselves however they want, that’s going to have a profound impact on the way you raise them, and on how they relate to their teachers, and youth ministers and coaches, and to the guards at the state penitentiary.

Ten or 15 years ago, there was a lot of talk about the possibility of a major earthquake hitting this area, and some of my friends even bought special earthquake insurance as a result.  The talk has died down (though maybe the danger hasn’t) and most of us, I suspect, prove by our inaction that we probably don’t believe this is a likely danger.  Our beliefs shape us and determine our behavior and maybe even our destiny.  So beliefs matter.

So when John 3:16 says “whoever believes in him…” we mustn’t water down the word “believes” so that it means next to nothing. True belief changes behavior.  True belief caused the apostles to change their entire course of their lives and even die for Jesus.  True faith caused Paul, when he was sitting in jail waiting to find out if he would be killed for believing, to say: 20 I eagerly expect and hope that I will in no way be ashamed, but will have sufficient courage so that now as always Christ will be exalted in my body, whether by life or by death. 21 For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain.  (Philippians 1) I listened to Rob Bell speak on this recently, and he did such a good job pointing out Paul’s meaning – “Because I believe in Jesus, I’m not going to turn my back on him, even now when things are going so badly.  I’m not going to say angry things to the guards so that in two or three days they’re going to say:  ‘You know, you claim to be a man of peace, but you deny it by the way you talk to us.’  I will not be ashamed but I will exalt Christ in my body by how I behave, and how I behave stems from what I believe – namely, to live is Christ, to die is gain.”  Beliefs matter.  Beliefs change us.  If your beliefs about Jesus don’t change you, you need to figure out what you believe in even more than Jesus, whether it’s in protecting yourself or finding the easiest and most pleasurable path or becoming well-liked or even famous.  Trace the path of your consistent behavior, and you eventually arrive at your deepest beliefs.  Beliefs produce action.

That leads us to the next section (v. 15) about folks who work in Jesus’ name but don’t really believe in him. 

MT 7:15 "Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves. 16 By their fruit you will recognize them. Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? 17 Likewise every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. 18 A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit. 19 Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. 20 Thus, by their fruit you will recognize them.

What is this fruit he’s talking about?  Hungry people fed?  Poor people housed?   Sermons preached?  Books sold?  Missions trips conducted?  Some of those are important and helpful, but all are secondary.  The best fruit is genuine love – for Christ and others – and eventually it shows if you have that or if you are merely a religious player.  That’s why, in the list of the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5:22, love comes first, and some say love IS the fruit of the spirit and joy, peace, patience and the rest are secondary to love.  And Paul actually speaks about this difference between love for God and people vs. what we do for God and other people in 1 Corinthians 13 - 
1 If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 3 If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.

            Belief produces action, but it also produces fruit, especially the fruit of the Holy Spirit, a genuine love for God and for people.  The longer I live, the less impressed I am by people who can quote the Bible or who talk about everything they DO for God, and the more I am drawn to people who genuinely love people, even people they disagree with, or people who don’t love them back or who can’t do them any favors.  I don’t have enough of that kind of love in me.

            Jesus drives this point home about false teachers by saying:

            MT 7:21 "Not everyone who says to me, `Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. 22 Many will say to me on that day, `Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?' 23 Then I will tell them plainly, `I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!'

            Think for a bit about that tragic moment in Numbers 20:12 where the Lord tells Moses - “Because you did not trust in me enough to honor me as holy in the sight of the Israelites, you will not bring this community into the land I give them.”  Exactly what did Moses and Aaron do to deserve such a punishment?  Well, after years of self-sacrificing service, leading Israel out into and through the wilderness, after years of being misunderstood and complained against (and remember Moses had other options…he was the Prince of Egypt in his previous life!) – after all that, Moses got a little angry about their complaining about having no water, and he said to the people: “Listen, you rebels”, he said to them, “must we bring you water out of this rock?”  Then he struck the rock twice with his staff and water gushed out and for that God said, “You’re not going in.”  Fred Craddock calls it getting the death penalty for getting jelly on the tablecloth.  Scholars don’t even agree for sure what he did wrong.  Was it that he claimed credit by saying “Must WE draw water for you?”  Was it that he struck the rock instead of touching it?  Was it that he called them rebels and treated them with contempt?  I can’t say for sure.  Maybe it was all of that.  It still seems so minor compared with all the other things Moses had done for God.  I can picture Moses saying, “But Lord, Lord, did I not lead out millions from Egypt in your name, and perform mighty miracles?”

            In the book Stone Crossings, L. L. Barkat says that by this punishment, God may have saved Moses from himself.  She says that the way Moses speaks to the people here shows that maybe he’s handled the things of God for so long that he is beginning to confuse himself with God (a common temptation in ministry). So God shuts him out of Canaan.

            But this isn’t the end for Moses. At the end of Deuteronomy, God takes him to a high mountain and shows him the Promised Land. GOD does this, as a man might do for his friend. And then Moses dies there on that mountain, and God buries him...as a man might do for his BEST friend. Getting shut out of the Promised Land wasn’t the same as getting shut out of God’s presence. Quite the opposite.

            It makes me wonder:  Was Moses just a few steps away from denying God, or at least taking over God’s place?  Was he a little too close to becoming like one of these false prophets who got so busy working for God that he lost sight of loving God Himself? 

            Am I in such a position?

            Are you?

            Maybe it was God’s greatest act of mercy to remove Moses from the next stage of the journey and thus pull Moses back to himself. 

            Belief, after all, produces action.  But more than that, more than anything…it produces love.

            Perhaps the best paragraph on the importance of what you believe and practice is the next paragraph, the one about the wise man who built his house on the rock…but I’m going to save that till next week, when I wrap up this series by looking back at the whole Sermon on the Mount.

            For today, I want to invite you to let your belief in Jesus pull you into action, and into acts of true love…

Morrison Hill Christian Church - P.O. Box 59 - 1008 E. Race St.
Kingston, TN  37763   (865) 376-5205