How to live the Life God intends for You?
Passage Luke 6:36-45
Speaker Ben Lucas
Service Morning
Series The Universal Christ
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36 Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.
37 ‘Do not judge, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven. 38 Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.’
39 He also told them this parable: ‘Can the blind lead the blind? Will they not both fall into a pit? 40 The student is not above the teacher, but everyone who is fully trained will be like their teacher.
41 ‘Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? 42 How can you say to your brother, “Brother, let me take the speck out of your eye,” when you yourself fail to see the plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.
43 ‘No good tree bears bad fruit, nor does a bad tree bear good fruit. 44 Each tree is recognised by its own fruit. People do not pick figs from thorn-bushes, or grapes from briers. 45 A good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and an evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of.
Holy Bible, New International Version® Anglicized, NIV® Copyright © 1979, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
This transcript has been automatically generated, and therefore may not be 100% accurate.
Thank you so much for that reading. I do hope you'll have a Bible open with you. If you would like a Bible. If you put your hand up, we can get one to you. No.
Lovely. Yes. One at the front. That'd be wonderful. Should we pray?
As we come to God's word, Father, we pray that you would be present by your spirit this morning, that you might open our eyes, that we might see wonderful things in your law. In Jesus name and for his sake. Amen. I wonder if you know anybody judgmental.
Do you know someone judgmental? We all know someone judgmental, I'm sure. And if we don't know somebody who comes to mind, we at least have experienced judgmental behaviour, haven't we?
The next thing I was going to say was before. Before someone, you know, undertook. My point was, how many of us thought of ourselves? I was going to say none of us. But the godliness in this room meant that at least two people pointed to themselves.
We don't often think of ourselves, do we? Although if we're honest, we often are judgmental, aren't we? And for those of us who thought of somebody else or some other action, I wonder how you felt about that person being judgmental. You probably judged them. I judge you for being a judge.
It's a bit of a rock in a heart place, isn't it? In the human heart. We know on the one hand that we don't want to be judgmental. We also know that some things are wrong.
And so we get stuck between these points. How can we navigate this? How do we navigate this in life? And the root of this in the human heart is that basically we tend to think that people who do bad things are those who do worse things than us. That tends to be what we think.
You've probably heard it said that the majority of people believe they are above average at driving. Did you know that? This is well documented that the majority of people think that. I know that. To know that most of you think it is just crazy.
Research has shown it's not just driving. We actually behave that way in our moral judgments. Most people think that what they do is all right and that other people are the problem. And we don't need research to tell us that, really, do we? We don't need research.
Anybody who's been alive more than five minutes knows that's the case. Way back in the book of judges. Do you remember that refrain? There was no king in Israel. Everybody did what was right in their own eyes.
That was true then. And it's still true of the human heart. Now we tend to want to do what's right in our own eyes. And so we judge others according to the standards we've set up for ourselves. It's a human predicament.
How, on the one hand, can we uphold high standards of justice and truth whilst at the same time not judging people? Can we do that? Jesus says, yes, we can. We can hold both of these things. We can have a high standard of truth and justice and we cannot be judgmental.
And he's going to tell us how we can do that in these verses. Let's look together. The first section is found in verses 37 to 38. And in this section Jesus is talking about living without condemning others. We've already begun thinking about that topic.
The title we have is judging others. When we read our bibles it's important that we remember that the titles are put in by the translators and they're not the word of God. Doesn't mean they're not right. But I suggest humbly that this could be better said. Condemning others.
Condemning others. I'll tell you why and see if you agree. Because in verse 37 when Jesus says, do not judge and you will not be judged, do not condemn and you will not be condemned. He's talking about one thing, judging and condemning. He's not saying don't judge.
And on a separate note, don't condemn. He's saying don't judge, which is condemning. It's one idea, one thought together.
And this is important because we use the term judge in several different ways. In one sense, we often use it just to mean we don't think something was right or we look down on something. This is what happens when you're out with your family and you've just finished a big main course and they bring round the pudding menu and everybody hopes that someone else will say they're having pudding so that you can have it. No one wants to be stuck eating the only pudding, do they? And so maybe you say, would you judge me if I had the cheesecake?
That's what I would say anyway. Well, in that sentence, judge simply means look down on or think badly of. But there's a much more serious way that Jesus means it. He's talking about condemning, about setting ourselves up as the judge, as acting as a judge, as if we've put the wig on ourselves and we are giving out condemnations. And what Jesus says is, that's never for us to do.
We are never the judge. There is a judge, but it's not you and it's not me.
And so we would be usurping God's place. Imagine you were playing football on a pitch. That may be easier for some of us to imagine than others. Imagine you were playing and on the team, you felt that someone else was offside. But you're not the ref.
Okay? You can feel very strongly about this. We can feel very strongly about this, can't we? But if you're not the ref, you can say what you think. It's not your place to say.
Your role is not to offer the final verdict. Well, similarly, God is the judge. We are not the ones offering the final verdict. We are not the referee.
I wonder whether anybody here is thinking if that's the case. Can I ever say anything to anybody?
The answer is yes. We know this because in the context of the whole Bible, Jesus himself explicitly tells us to go and tell other people to confront our brothers and sisters in certain situations. So both of these things must be true. We must not judge, but we must be able to confront one another. And the difference is in the heart.
The difference is in our attitude as we do that. Because it's one thing, isn't it? To set ourselves up as the judge. To act as the referee in all situations, giving out our final verdict and speaking to a brother or sister in Christ as one sinner to another, as I'm doing this morning. I'm not here standing, giving you a dictate from my own opinion.
I'm a sinner talking to a sinner about what God thinks. And that's a totally different heart posture. And so we speak to one another, not judging, not condemning, but we can speak to one another.
And the impact of this is profound. Because this means that church is a place that offers no condemnation to anybody. It should be a place that there's no condemnation for anybody. No one is held down by anybody in this room under condemnation. That's not our role.
That's not our place.
And what that means is we don't simply overlook or wink at some sins we think are all right.
We welcome and don't condemn all people, even if their sins are really serious. We don't pretend they're not serious. But we also aren't condemning them ourselves.
We make space for everybody here.
Well, the second thing Jesus talks about is having a true view of yourself. And we find in verses 39 to 42 that Jesus gives us three pictures. Three pictures. First of all, the blind leading the blind. Then the student and the teacher.
And finally the plank in the eye.
Well, the first picture, the blind leading the blind. This is about leading one another when we really don't know what we're doing, isn't it? And the thing is, if we are our own moral centre, we are blind. If we are our own standard of what's right and wrong, we are like the blind leading the blind. We cannot but lead into a pit.
There's no two ways around it, because each of us will have our own different standards and it will all be chaos. What do we need? We need our eyes to be opened to see God in Christ Jesus, who teaches us all truth. And then we can lead a right. The second image is the student and the teacher.
Clearly in this image, God is our teacher, isn't he? We read in verse 36, be merciful, just as your father is merciful.
Be like your teacher. Be like your teacher, God. He is merciful.
Jesus says everyone who is fully trained will be like their teacher, not above them.
And this shows us that we're not to take what God says. And to think, I'm going to just improve that a little bit. I'm going to do version 2.0. You know, we're not above our teacher. The best is to be like him.
But sometimes. Sometimes as christians, we tend to try to be above him. We can try to be holier than Jesus. Do you know what I mean by that? Sometimes we can try to be more strict, as if that was a better representation.
But we're to be merciful as our father is merciful. We mustn't be holier than God.
Well, the third picture is the plank in the eye, and this has to be one of the funniest bits in the Bible. When you stop and think about it, we know it so well, many of us, that we can just read over it very quickly, can't we? But thinking about the speck in your eye, that's hard, isn't it? That's so annoying. When you have a speck in your own eye, you notice that, don't you?
You never get a piece of sand in your eye and don't notice it. That's really annoying. You rub it and you ask people if they can see anything in it. So the idea that you have a plank coming out of your eye and you can't even notice that it's there, I mean, gravity wouldn't allow it to be there, would it? But you can't notice it.
It's just funny. This is funny. I mean, it's humorous. You would have to be so insensitive, wouldn't you, not to be able to notice this. But Jesus says, because of our blindness, when we make ourselves the moral centre, we like having this plank in our eye, judging others, condemning others, when we just can't see what's plainly before us.
And what's that? That we are sinners in need of forgiveness. And so we speak to others, not sinner to sinner, but as judge. But that is not right. That is not our place.
And this is the source of so much conflict around us, nation and nation, as well as person to person, because we all seem right in our own eyes. And if that's the case, then when two different people think they're right and they meet each other as their own moral centres, they go into clash, aren't they? One nation thinks it's right because of X, Y and Z, the other nation thinks they're wrong because of X, Y and Z. They firmly believe. They each firmly believe they're in the right and it can only lead to conflict.
The only possible way out of this is to see that with God's standards, they don't come from us and that we relate to each other, not as ruling over each other, but sinner to sinner. Well, the last thing that we see is about bearing good fruit. In verses 43 to 45, Jesus talks about trees and fruits and he says, christians do good works. Christians do good works.
Whoa. I hear you say, you didn't say, maybe you're quietly thinking in your heart, I thought we were saved by grace. Now you're talking about works. Let's just think about what Jesus is saying here. He says that a tree is known by its fruit.
In other words, if you were to go into an orchard and you see a tree and it has an apple on it, it's an apple tree. You see a tree that has a pear on it, it's a pear tree. You see a quince, you think, what's that? Whatever, you see the fruit that shows what kind of tree it is. An apple tree.
Can't bear a pear, can it? I don't think. No, it can't. It can't.
Now, those trees are still the trees. They are. An apple tree with no apples on it is still an apple tree, isn't it? In the same way, just as there are winters in which fruit trees don't bear fruit, there are winters in the christian life in which it seems as if we're not bearing those fruits of good work, but we are to expect, as christians to bear good works. We won't always notice them.
Actually, Jesus says, doesn't he? At the end of Matthew, that people will say, when did I do this? When did I do this? And then Jesus will tell you, that will happen to many. So many here will be thinking, I'm not sure what good works they are.
Well, when Jesus comes back, he'll tell you, we expect good works to come with the christian life. Not that good works make us a Christian, but they are certainly to be expected. We're saved by grace through faith alone. But faith is never alone. Faith is always accompanied by works that don't save us, but they're always to be expected, and they come.
And so, as Jesus says, a tree is known by its fruits.
The fruits here being talked about are specifically of words. Jesus says, verse 49, sorry, I'm looking at the wrong bit. Verse 45. The mouth speaks what the heart is full of.
As we grow as christians, to be like our teacher, to be merciful, as our father is merciful, we will be filled with merciful words, with good words, with fruitful words, encouraging words. These are the treasures that will be coming out of our heart by the spirit of God.
Now, there may be some here who worry about this, who think, I don't seem to see good fruits in my life. You know, am I an alive tree? Am I a good tree?
We've already mentioned a little bit about that. But it's also worth saying that even that desire to bear good fruit is a work of the spirit of God, because we wouldn't care. A pear tree doesn't sit around thinking, I wish I could make an apple.
So the work of the spirit of God is already attested in us just by wanting to bear the fruit of the spirit. So we shouldn't despair. There's no cause for despair. At the same time, it should be a warning and an encouragement. If we go on for years and years and years and years and don't bear the fruit of the spirit according with righteousness, that's not a good sign.
That's not a good sign because a tree is known by its fruit. And so maybe this morning this passage would encourage us to self examination. Are we growing in the graces of the spirit and to prayer? Lord, bear that fruit in my life. Fill my heart with the treasure house of good that will bear this wonderful fruit.
This morning, thinking particularly about this topic of judgement, bearing fruit, not being judgmental, which is so difficult, isn't it so difficult?
We repent today, don't we, for being judgmental? We often are, in the sense, as we've defined it, of setting ourselves on the judgement seat because we want God's standards, not our own. And we want to speak to one another with a heart posture, sinner to sinner, not one standing over another. This community, this church community, should be a place that upholds radical, non judgmental behaviour, if you like. By which I mean we don't just overlook things, we hold high standards.
At the same time, there is nowhere beyond the pale of God's grace and there is no one that we personally can hold under condemnation.
This can be really hard in practise. I wonder if in the piece in a minute, you turned to your side to find Vladimir Putin on one side, maybe Donald Trump on the other side, how would you respond? I'm not speaking so much as what you would say. I don't know what I would say. But how would your heart respond?
Would it say, this is no place for you, leave in how you feel?
Or would your heart be thinking, as one sinner to another, I dearly hope you find Christ and repent. That's the radicalness of what Jesus is saying this morning. Let's pray for him to work it in us.
Father, we thank you that you are merciful and good. We thank you for your son, Jesus, our teacher and I pray we would grow to be like him by your spirit. Pray that we would be the community you would have us be speaking to one another, ministering to one another, sinner to sinner, not standing over one another. In Jesus name for his glory, we ask. Amen.