Kingdom Life: Does Jesus Know You? (Matthew 7:15-23)
We're doing a very slow landing in the Sermon on the Mount. If you've ever had to circle an airport before landing, you know it's a bit disappointing—you just want the plane to land already. But this is a very important finish to this sermon for Jesus. He brings three different teachings around the same exact point. We've already done two, and we're going to do two more—one today and one next week to close up the Sermon on the Mount.
It's really important to Jesus that we take the body of teaching that he just laid out to the disciples—about what kingdom life looks like—and then actually apply it. That we actually obey his word. He's the authoritative prophet, the standard of truth. He said, 'This is what the law means. This is what you are to do with it. This is what I expect from you.' And then he gives all these warnings that say, you're in one of two categories: those who do obey, who are walking in faithful repentance and constantly fighting to obey, or those who do not.
Scripture Reading: Matthew 7:15–23
"Beware of false prophets. They come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will recognize 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. A healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a diseased tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus you will recognize them by their fruits. Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. On that day, many will say to me, 'Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?' And then will I declare to them, 'I never knew you. Depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.' This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God, everyone."
Exposition
This is a heavy, heavy warning from the Lord. One of the passages that I think is most frightening in all of Scripture—that there are people who come to Jesus saying, "Lord, Lord," claiming that he is their Lord and Savior, and yet he will say to many on the day of judgment, "Depart from me, I never knew you." He calls them workers of lawlessness. This is serious. There is judgment. There is eternal life on the line. And Jesus wants us to take that very seriously.
The Two Paths
Last week, we talked about how there's an easy path and a hard path. The path of the kingdom is not an easy path. The invitation of the world is broad—do whatever you want, and God will save you. "You just need to be good enough, maybe." Everybody thinks they fall into that category. Our flesh, our sinful nature, really desires that easy path. But the Bible tells us we have "itching ears"—we want to hear something in particular. We want people to say, "Yeah, you can do whatever you want. The easy path is fine." So we embrace messages from false prophets who welcome us onto that easy path.
But Jesus says, you need to pay very careful attention to their fruit. Trees that are healthy bear good fruit. If a tree is unhealthy—that is, if these people are false teachers—they're going to have bad fruit. You need to pay very careful attention. It's not just that they say they're Christians, that they've got the sheep's clothing on. You need to pay closer attention than that. What is the culture of their life? Do they actually obey the teachings of Jesus?
But it presses even further into your heart—this fruit test is not just for those outside who are teaching to you. The fruit test is meant to be applied to your own heart. What kind of tree are you? Do you bear healthy fruit? Jesus is pressing into this in today's teaching. Do our works—which is really a symbol of our fruits—expose our unhealth or do they prove our true faith and obedience?
Jesus and the Heart
All throughout the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus doesn't stop at the surface level. He doesn't say, "As long as you're not murdering anybody, you're fine. As long as you don't commit adultery, you're fine." No, it goes deeper. It goes into the heart level. Are you lusting after someone with your eye? Do you have anger towards somebody that stirs up hatred? These things are the same before God. There's a severity—a heart-level sin that God sees. He sees all of it.
We talk a great deal here about healthy hearts because Jesus cares deeply about our healthy heart. If our hearts are not properly founded—if we don't have true faith, if we don't have a healthy, abiding relationship with Jesus, repentance and faith—then we will not be able to build anything productive or fruitful. Our households will be unhealthy. The church will be unhealthy. We will be no light, we will be no salt to the world. Jesus presses in here for his people, and he says, 'I care about your fruit. I care about your actions. It's not just that you say, "Lord, Lord." I want to see good fruit coming out of you.'
Obedience and Salvation
Look at verse 21, where he shows us that obedience is the determining factor of where our heart is, of the health of our heart. He says, "Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven."
Obedience here is summarized by Jesus as doing the will of the Father. What is the will of the Father? We can know God and not sin by hiding God's word in our hearts. That's God's will revealed in Scripture—the law of God. Jesus brought particular, focused teaching on what the heart of God's law is. So the will of God is summarized: it's the law of God presented by Jesus. It's everything that Jesus taught and did.
Now, some of you might be asking right away: How does this work with "salvation is by faith alone"? How can we say we're saved by believing in Jesus, but obedience is the determining factor? Ephesians 2:8–10 helps us here:
"For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them."
Faith in Jesus is not just some external thing. It's not, "I believe in Jesus, he's over there, and now I go whichever way I want." No. Faith in Jesus means we are created anew in him. We are the workmanship of God, created in Christ Jesus for good works. When we put faith in Jesus, something happens at the heart level. We are born again and united to him by the Holy Spirit. And what begins to happen is good fruit emerges from that tree.
Jesus said, "Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks." When a Christian puts faith in Jesus, you're not being saved by works. But faith actually will begin to work—it will come out of you. Trees that are healthy don't have to work really hard to bear good fruit. They just bear fruit because they're a healthy tree. Martin Luther said in his 95 Theses that the entire life of believers should be one of repentance. And I believe that's true—constantly our hearts should be saying, "Jesus, I was wrong in this area. I'm going to change my mind."
A Life of Repentance
Here's what often goes wrong for Christians: we think we need to be perfectly always walking in the same path toward him. But you won't be perfect in this. We need to be striving to be perfect, but someone described repentance to me in a way that I found so helpful. A life of repentance is more like a yo-yo. You're constantly moving toward Christ, but there are ups and downs. You're going up the stairs toward Christ, but there will certainly be downs. There will certainly be failure. And when the Holy Spirit brings conviction, when a brother or sister comes to you and says you're off the path, you need to repent. Do you turn? Do you get back near Jesus and say, 'God, show me where I was off?'
The question is: Where are we departing from Jesus? Where do we walk away from giving our full yes to him?
Mighty Works Are Not Enough
Look at the middle section where Jesus shows us that a productive ministry is simply not enough. He says, "Many will say to me on that day, 'Lord, did we not prophesy in your name? Cast out demons in your name? Do mighty works in your name?'" Those are big deals. But then he says to them, "I never knew you. Depart from me, you workers of lawlessness."
Jesus wants us to know that it's not enough to just have done a handful of good works in your life—not even mighty works. You may have led someone to Christ, or many people to Christ. But I grieve to say there will be people that will shock us—it will blow our minds—when Jesus will say, "I never knew you. Depart from me, you workers of lawlessness."
"Workers of lawlessness" refers to your deeds—what kind of fruit is coming from your life. It's not that you forever lived a perfect life. We will be imperfect in this journey. But the point is whether you are constantly repenting. So that he cannot say, "You're a worker of lawlessness," but rather, "You kept repenting. You kept turning back."
The Problem of Compromise
How many of us would like the Lord to look at a glass of water and say, "Look, it's a clean glass of water," when we're thinking, "There's just a tiny little drop of poison in there. It's just a tiny drop. Lord, please don't look at this as an unclean glass of water"? Or another analogy: we want Jesus to look at our life and say, "Your house is clean," when hiding up in the attic is some nasty black mold or some nasty sin. We want Jesus to say the house is clean. Or we say, "Lord, I've got a healthy body. I just have this cancer going off to the side. Everything else is fine. You need to stop paying so much attention to that little thing."
But guys, he does. He cares about those little things in our life that we say no to him about. He cares about it all. Jesus would say to us, "If I'm not Lord of your life in that area, I'm not Lord of your life at all." He has to be Lord of every part of our lives.
I Never Knew You
Those last words grieve me so much: "Depart from me, I never knew you." For a Christian who loves the Lord, the idea of knowing Jesus—of having relationship with him—is just the sweetest thing we can imagine. Knowing him means eternal life. It means the peace that passes understanding. It means we get to know our Maker, to understand our purpose and our identity. It means everything.
And the idea that he would say, "I never knew you," cuts to the heart. These are the most tragic words anyone could ever hear. To know Jesus is to have life. Do you feel that this morning? Does your heart hate the thought that he could ever say, "I never knew you"? For a true Christian, for someone who has a clean heart united to him, it should grieve us to think that Jesus would ever look at our lives and say, "I didn't know you. You rejected me. Back there when I called you to lay that sin down, you said no to me. You kept on your path instead of coming to me when I was beckoning you, saying, 'Come. I don't want you to be on the path of destruction.'"
Oh, that our hearts would hate those words! Hate the idea that Jesus could not know us. But he says many will hear those words. Many will say, "I was a Christian. I went to church. I did such and such. I gave to the poor." And Jesus will say, "I never knew you."
Application
What do our works expose? What does our heart produce? What is the fruit of our tree? What kind of tree are you? I want us to be challenged with this.
This word lands on people in two different ways. Growing up, I encountered people who would hear this kind of word and it would send them into a tailspin of doubt, worry, and fear. They didn't know how to be assured that they would be saved. They were scared. They thought there was no assurance of salvation for them because they saw all their sin, all their errors.
If that's you, I want to remind you: Christ died for you. You're not perfect, but you are growing increasingly in his image, saying yes to him, fighting for it. Jesus would say to you, "No one can snatch you from my hand. I have you. I'm holding you. I'm keeping you. You are united with the Holy Spirit."
But there's another type of person I've encountered many times: those who bring sin to them and they have a flippancy about it, or they dismiss the rebukes of others. They rarely spend any time seeking God's heart in his word. They rarely give thought to it. And I think that those people need to hear a different warning. If you do not take thought about your soul, if you do not worry about your life and what fruit you are producing, you should fear. If you're not in relationship with Jesus, taking seriously this life of repentance and faith, giving your full yes to him and regularly asking God, 'Show me, Lord, if there be any grievous way in me'—then you should fear. You should fear for your salvation.
This is why Jesus gives us such a firm warning. He gives us these words so that we don't have a flippancy about our faith, but so that we constantly look and say, 'God, what fruit is my life bearing? What fruit does my family bear?'
The Call
I want us to be people who are not constantly in fear and without assurance of faith, but who zealously seek the Lord with all of our heart. People who can say, "Lord, I want to love you with all of my heart, with all of my soul, with all of my mind, with all of my strength." That is what God desires for his people—that we would be devoted to him, constantly giving our yes to him. Constantly.
If you were daily putting your faith in Jesus, he has given you the Holy Spirit, empowering you to live lives of obedience before him. Paul said, "It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives within me. And the life I now live, I live by faith in the Son of God." This is not a life where you say, "I believe in Jesus once, and the rest is up to me." No. You put faith in Jesus and keep relationship with Jesus. You keep this abiding relationship with Jesus. Keep putting faith in the one who has united himself to you. And as you do, he will continue to draw you into his presence, draw you into his image, make you more like him.
He is the one who saves us, keeps us, and helps us. And there's a day coming, friends, when he will set us free completely from our sin. There's coming a day where there's no more sin nature. We will be fully remade, with new bodies, no longer connected to this sin nature.
We can't white-knuckle our way to heaven, guys. That's not how this works. Repentance and faith. The hope of the gospel is not centered on you and what you can do. Did you hear me? The good news is not that you can do enough. It's centered on Jesus, who has already lived the life that you were called to live. He died the death that you deserve for your sin. He rose again. He poured out his Holy Spirit in you to empower you to live out the law faithfully.
He wants to cleanse us of the poison. He wants to sweep the house clean. He wants to fill us again with the Holy Spirit and sanctify us in his image, from day to day, from one degree of glory to another. This is our hope—that we would be rooted in Christ. And as we are rooted in him, we will bear fruit, showing that our faith is real, that we're going to be his, that we're going to see him face to face. He's going to say, 'Well done, good and faithful servant.'
Come to him today again. Put your faith in him. Abide in him. Be rooted in him. That's what the call is. And you will bear much fruit to the glory of God.
Conclusion
My mother recently told me something that amazed me. She said the thing that amazes her most about God right now is the conviction of the Holy Spirit. Notice the difference between the conviction of the Holy Spirit and the accusation of Satan. The conviction of the Holy Spirit is an invitation to more of himself. Accusation tries to drive us away from God, saying, 'You were never good enough for God.' It breaks trust.
But the conviction of the Holy Spirit, the way that he doesn't leave us to our destructive path but says, "Come to me. You're on a destructive path. Come back to me"—that's something we need to embrace more and more. When you feel the prick of the Holy Spirit, say, "Thank you, Jesus. Thank you that you want to know me. Thank you that you want to be near me. You're saying to me right now, 'Where are you? What are you doing? I want to be close to you.' That thing is an idol. It's going to hurt you. Come near me."
Brothers and sisters, faith is proved by your works, by your faithfulness, by your obedience. We need to obey Jesus. Let's spend a moment praying. Ask him to show you areas where you're departing from him, and invite him to help us know that our calling and election is sure.