So my name's Eric, one of the pastors here.
If I haven't got to meet you yet, I would love to and, and
have you come to that that class afterwards?
I'll be there in that class. But we are approaching the end
of what we call the Sermon on the Mount in the book of
Matthew. We like to walk through the
Bible, you know, verse by verse, chapter by chapter, and we've
approached the end of Jesus's famous sermon.
Now we won't really get to the very end of it until next week,
but that passage that that John, Pastor John just read for us is,
is kind of the closing remarks. And if you were here last week,
they're pretty intense words. It's a pretty intense challenge.
It's a, it's a warning, it's a, a test.
This is Jesus in, in all of his seriousness, trying to remind us
who are the true believers and what will their lives look like?
What does it look like to live in the Kingdom of God while
you're still on this earth? It's very serious.
It's very important. We are going to be looking at
then as last week we talked about who are the true and false
teachers. This week we're talking about
who are the true and false believers.
And we're just going to take verses 21 through 23 to look at
this today. Now, before we get into this, I
do want to share with you a little bit about my life story
and testimony and you and I'm not sharing it to put attention
on me, but but really this set of verses changed my life.
This set of verses came into my heart and and caused me to
wonder if I really knew the Lord or not.
You see, I grew up in Utah, but I was always going.
I can always remember going to a Christian Church and I had a
zeal for the Lord. I had an understanding of Jesus,
just the basic understanding of Jesus from going to kids
ministry and, and I got baptized at 10 years old and I knew what
I was doing when I got baptized. I, I made a profession of faith
and, and I truly believe that I understood the gospel.
But the problem was that I never really grew beyond that part.
I feel like I stayed in my infancy and in my faith in the
and, and, and allowed pressures from the outside, not fitting
in. Being a Christian in Utah was
difficult, especially when I grew up where I grew up in Utah.
And so I tried to find the crowd that would accept me.
That was the crowd that was all the rejects.
And I fit in very well with them.
And I, I got caught in addiction, partying, drugs and
alcohol. And I was doing that a lot
through my teenage years, even into my early 20s.
And when I hit the lowest point of, of that time of sin, that
prodigal time in my life, the Lord sent a, a preacher, a
messenger into my life. And I'll tell you, I found
myself. I was arrested and I was in in
Weber County Jail and one of those times on a Wednesday
night, they would allow Christian churches to go in
there and, you know, do a little Bible studies and stuff.
And one guy came in and they asked does anybody want to go to
a Bible study? And I was like, yeah, I'm not
doing anything else. You know, might as well, might
as well use my time properly, right?
And so I went in there and and they played this sermon.
It was a 50 minute sermon by from a guy named Paul Washer and
it was the shocking youth message.
Now if you're on the e-mail list, I am going to e-mail you
everybody this coming week. I want you to watch this sermon
because this sermon, it wasn't necessarily just the sermon and
the guy, but it was the words that God spoke through this man,
but more importantly, the meaning of Scripture.
Not just this guy's opinion, but the meaning of Scripture.
God used this time to challenge me because I, I, I, you know,
all throughout, even my sin and my addiction, I still claimed to
be a Christian and a believer. And in the back of my mind, I
was like, I still said that I loved the Lord Jesus Christ, but
I was not living like it at all. You would never be able to tell
that I was a Christian. You would never, you would never
know by looking at me. Maybe I said some things every
once in a while to friends around me, but you wouldn't know
by my way of life. And after hearing this sermon,
I, I went to the, the place where you know, you're, you're
back, where you're staying with all the other guys and, and
they, there was like free time. And I, I got on the phone to my
mom, you know, 'cause I'm a mama's boy, right?
And, and I said mom, and she's a strong Christian.
She's been a strong Christian my whole life.
And I said, mom, I don't, I don't know if I'm really a true
believer. I don't know if I die, am I
going to go to heaven or hell? Because the, the words of Jesus
seem to contradict my, my confession of faith that I had.
And she was trying to console me.
And she probably got excited by those words and, and in fact,
from that moment on, there was a change in the trajectory of my
life. Now, I'll tell you, I didn't
quit sinning. I actually struggled some more
times with addiction. But it was then on that it was
like I, I need to know if I'm saved.
I need to know if I truly know Jesus.
And so I started obsessively trying to get to know him
through reading scripture and hearing sermons and, and in all
of that, the Lord was changing me.
See, I wouldn't, I wouldn't say that I really read the Bible
much early on in my Christian life, but this pressed me into
wanting to know everything that he ever said.
And what does he want me to do? And I've been living so
selfishly, all about my own pleasure, my desires, my
comfort, hiding my emotion from the things that I had been
through in life. I wanted to medicate it.
And I just wasn't turning to Jesus.
And then, and then when I started, you know, following
him, I got involved with the local church and more and more
people were able to speak into my life.
And today, you know, I can say that I'm in when we get to May
and hopefully I make it. I believe I will.
But 16 years clean and sober from every kind of substance,
alcohol, drugs and all the glory goes to the Lord Jesus in that.
And I'm sharing that story with you today because I know last
week was a pretty hard to hear sermon.
Probably it's harsh. These words from Jesus are, are
challenging. And we're going to get into some
more challenge because I believe that there are some of you out
there, maybe maybe your story isn't the same as mine, but
there are some of you out there that are sitting and listening
to this, that need to hear this. In fact, every Christian needs
to hear this because we all to some degree need to grow up.
We need to live our life as if we're following Christ and and
prove it to ourselves that we're in the faith.
The Bible says examine ourselves.
We need to sin less and grow in holiness.
And I think there's many of us here that are stuck in some kind
of sin and not growing at all, not moving forward any further
than where they're at right now. And they can't understand why,
why God doesn't listen to their prayers.
You know, why is things not changing in my life?
And so I want to get into this. That was a long introduction to
get to this, but I want to pull apart these verses.
We've just got three. I'm going to go through these
verses just kind of walking through them with a little bit
of background context explanation in my first point.
But then in the second point is when I'm really going to dig
into what does it look like to be a true believer?
So here's my first point. Lip service is not enough.
You've heard probably it said you can, can you, you can talk
the talk, but can you walk the walk?
I think that's what Jesus is saying here in verse 21.
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. This is pretty direct here.
He's saying not everyone who thinks that they are a Christian
is really a Christian. Everyone, not everyone who
thinks they're saved and is going to heaven.
That is not actually the truth. In fact, the verses a few weeks
ago as a part of this as it begins, it says it says narrow
is the path and few there be that find it.
The crazy thing is, though, is if we look out at our community,
if we look out at our country, more than half of the population
of America says they're Christian.
More than 85 to 90% of the population of Utah says that
they're a Christian. They call on the name of the
Lord. In fact, it even says Lord,
Lord. And if you understand anything
about when the Bible says something two times in a row, a
lot of that is in the Old Testament in Hebrew.
And Jesus is Jewish as he's speaking, and he's speaking to
Jewish people. So they would understand the
mode in which he's speaking when he says, Lord.
Lord, these aren't just people who who claim to be Christians,
but these are people who really believe they're Christians.
They're fervent in their prayer. This is emphatic.
This is persistent. That's the problem is that kind
of going back to last week, nobody really wants to talk
about the things in Scripture in between the fluffy stuff.
Nobody wants to hear the challenges from Jesus.
I tell you, we've been walking through this Gospel of Matthew
and I am surprised at how direct Jesus is like the entire time.
He's an intense guy, but American Christianity would
probably sell him to you and to us as oh, he's good with
everything that you do. He's he's your friend.
He's nice. He doesn't want to challenge you
at all, doesn't want you to grow at all, accepts you as you are.
And it may be true that he accepts you as you are, or at
least comes to you as you are. But if he comes to you as he
are, he, he won't leave you the way that you are.
He will change you. In fact, one of the analogies
Paul Washer uses in his sermon is about a logging truck.
And he says, he says, I would be a a liar here today if if I
came, if I came here late and, and, and I showed up late to
preach and, and it was just silence for a while.
And I show up and, and, and the guys are like, why were you
late? And I'm like, well, because got
a flat tire on the freeway and, and I got out and I was changing
the tire and I kind of didn't notice that there's more
vehicles coming. And this 30 ton logging truck
was coming and I kind of fell into the road and this 30 ton
logging truck ran me over. And so that's why I'm late
today. And and you would say, well,
you're either crazy or you're lying because something is
powerful as a 30 ton logging truck cannot come into contact
with you and you not be forever changed for the rest of your
life. That's the same thing when we
come in to the presence of the Lord and say Lord, Lord, or we
tell other people, oh, I'm a Christian.
But nothing has changed from the day that you said you put your
faith in him. In fact, you become more
worldly. Your heroes are of the world.
You look out at every other person rather than the godly
people or the people mentioned in scripture or or people at
your church. But everybody else is your hero
and your idol. And you want to follow them.
You want to be just like them. There might be a chance that
you're giving just lip service as I had to challenge myself in
this. This can be your, your favorite
athletes, your actors, your musicians.
How many of them do we see when we're watching football or when
we're watching some actor, you know, give their opinion about
something or, or even musicians, even Christian musicians.
And we're like, yes, I love it when they they say the name of
Jesus. But if we really looked at their
lives, would we be able to see Jesus Christ?
Or is he just some kind of accessory added kind of like me
putting on a cross necklace. Put on a cross necklace.
I must be a Christian, right? Or this or it's just cool
looking at least. And yeah, I believe in Jesus.
Like it's an accessory, but it's not really who I am.
It doesn't mark out all of my being.
That's what he's saying here. Not everyone who thinks they're
a Christian is a Christian, and there's a lot of people who do.
Do you do the will of God? Are you adding Him to your life
like a genie instead of wanting to do His will as the Lord
prayed earlier on, He taught us how to pray in the Sermon on the
Mount and it said your will be done.
He said pray then like this, Our Father in heaven, hallowed be
thy name, let your Kingdom come and your will be done on earth
as it is in heaven. How often are we praying?
Lord, I want your will to be done.
Or instead are we saying, Lord, why aren't you doing my will?
I asked you to do this thing and you wonder why isn't he
answering your prayers? God wants us to be conformed to
him in his will. And notice here how it says my
father all throughout the Sermon on the Mount.
Actually, he says our father or even your father to the
disciples. But here, as we know in the
context of this, the setting is he's preaching to his disciples,
but there are a bunch of other people standing around him,
Jewish people, some of the religious leaders.
And this is where in a sense he's separating the true
believers from the false ones and saying my father, he ain't
your father. This can also explain people who
say the name of Jesus but yet hold to other religious beliefs,
like they're all as some kind of jumbled mess of all this
different, you know, religious beliefs like karma and
astrology. And I love some of the sayings
of Buddha and I like some of the teachings over here.
And this guy said some good stuff.
And I just lump it all together. And as long as I have Jesus
mixed in there, I can tell the Christians I have fire
insurance. I'm going to move on because I'm
going to come back to this. I want to talk in the second
point about what does it mean then?
What does it look like to do the will of our Father?
But moving on to the second verse, on that day, many will
say to me, Lord, Lord, didn't we prophecy in your name, cast out
demons in your name and do many mighty works in your name on
that day. What's he saying?
That's the day of judgment. That's the end when we all come
to meet our Maker and he walks through all the things that we
have ever done that was sinful. And you know what?
It's probably going to be just about everything we did because
everything we do is tainted with the sin nature that we possess.
Even even our good deeds, the Bible says they're like filthy
brag. They're tainted on that day when
God judges the works of all mankind.
People are going to say, but I professed you, but I I fervently
prayed to you. I talked about other, talked
about you to other people. I was the fierce fieriest one in
my Bible study. I told my neighbors about you.
I even served your church. I served, I fought against evil.
And here's the thing I would say about this.
This is where these people are probably confused in that
religious works aren't going to get anybody to heaven.
You see the people who think that it's it's working to get
there thinking again that Jesus is a part of the equation, but I
play a part. That's a lot of the religion
that exists in the world. Did you know that Christianity
is the only religion on earth, true Christianity that says God
does all the work. You do nothing.
Every other religion adds some kind of works based formula to
the whole thing. And they're going to be sadly,
sadly mistaken when they get to heaven.
And think when I when I say, hey, Lord, like we made churches
and your name was on the side of the building and we were the
most moral people in our state, in our country, in our
neighborhood. We fought against evil.
We got involved with politics. We did things in your name.
Even preached in your name. Going back to the false
teachers, this applies to them as well from last week.
The false prophets who come to you in sheep's clothing
pretending that they're one of us but inwardly are just wolves.
They're faking it. A person can seem righteous and
have powerful words and even works and yet still be unsaved.
And I think we, we have a hard time grasping that, right.
There's this false spiritual warfare.
Some people are so obsessed with miracles and fighting against
the enemy and thinking that that's ultimately going to earn
them some kind of favor. And there's a story, there's a,
there's, there's an example of this in the Bible in Acts
chapter 19, verse 11, The sons of Sceva is what they're called,
these Jewish exorcist, it says. And God was doing extraordinary
miracles by the hands of Paul, so that even handkerchiefs or
aprons that had touched his skin were carried away to the sick
and their diseases left them and the evil spirits came out of
them. So you've got the true apostle
Paul who nobody has that type of power since because it was given
to him directly by Jesus Christ to confirm the message.
But then you have all this counterfeit stuff it says.
Then some itinerant Jews saw this and they undertook to
invoke the name of the Lord Jesus over those who had evil
spirits saying, I adjure you by the Jesus who Paul proclaims.
Seven sons of Jewish, the Jewish high priest named Skiva were
doing this. But here's what so this guy's
literally possessed and he comes and they say, I adjure you by
the Jesus who Paul proclaims because they're thinking that
there's just power in the name. And I know, I know somehow in
our Christian culture and music, sadly we get all of our thought
theology from from music and not necessarily from Scripture.
People kind of say, yes, there's power in Jesus name.
There's power in Jesus name. Yeah.
What does that mean though? Does it mean that anybody can
just go running around, say Jesus, Jesus be healed, Jesus,
the demons come out. Is that, is that what it means?
Well, here's what the here's what the demon says to this guy
says the evil spirit answered them.
Jesus, I know and Paul I recognize.
But who are you? And the man in whom was the evil
spirit leaped on them, mastered all of them, overpowered them so
that they fled out of that house naked and wounded.
They were embarrassed. This was one instance where they
thought they were invoking the name of Jesus as this.
Fees like this lucky rabbit's foot or some powerful force that
I don't actually have to be close to, but I can use for my
own gain. Here's the crazy thing about
that passage. First, it says Jesus.
I know the demons know Jesus. So that means that we can even
think we know Jesus, or in a sense know a lot of information
about Jesus and still not be headed to heaven.
The demons will never get to heaven.
They are fallen angels. So the demons know Jesus.
The demons know Paul, but they said who are you?
Who are you? I think we think about that
like, yeah, I'd rather not have demons know me.
But the reality is that means that you haven't revealed
yourself as the follower of Christ actually doing anything
to take the war to the gates of hell that are here on earth,
putting a target on your back. Because that is what Christians
are called to do. If they don't know you, then
there's no reason to fear you. Moving on to the next next verse
it says, Then I will declare to them, I never knew you.
Depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.
I never knew you. So the demons didn't know him
and neither do I. Now that word new in the
original language, Genoskos means not just know or know some
information about it is it is an intimate knowledge.
It is a a relationship. I've used this illustration
before, but this sounds like a good time for for some brevity
here for a second. But you can say that, you know,
Pastor Eric, you know, and you can be like, you can get some
information right about me, like, you know, he's tall, dark
and handsome. But the reality is, is a lot of
those two of those things are wrong.
And you're going to have to decide which two of those are.
But you can you, you can know a little bit about a person, but
do you have a relationship? Because if we were friends, you
would, you would know. If you spend time with me, you
would know I'm not tall and I'm not dark.
OK. So does Jesus know you?
That's the, the, the, the more important question.
You can say I know Jesus. Lord.
Yeah.
I've got AI got a necklace, you know, representing who he is.
I wear some Christian T-shirts. Sometimes I listen to some
music, but tell me about him. Tell me about why he came.
Tell me about who he is. Tell me that he's God, second
member of the Trinity, who came, lived a perfect life, and died
for your sins. Tell me.
Tell me about what Jesus teaches you.
Then if you know him and you have a relationship with him,
where is He forgiving you? Where is he challenging you?
OK, he says, depart from me. I never knew you.
We were never close. Basically.
That's what he's saying when your name comes up.
I didn't know we weren't close. Of course, God knows all of us
because he's omniscient. He knows everything.
But does he know you in that intimate relationship sort of
way, like an adopted son or daughter?
That is the challenge here. There will be many whom will
hear those words and it is very sad.
I do not want that to happen. And I may seem passionate when
I'm preaching through these passages, but again, it's
because the Lord changed my life through the challenge that I've
seen in here. I don't like that there are
false teachers. I don't like that that we live
worldly sometimes in Christian as Christians and have to wake
up. I've been in in ministry for
over a decade and I see people all the time come and go and
come and go and come and go. And I will tell you that more
people come and go than the ones that stay committed to the Lord
Jesus. And I hate seeing that.
I hate it. But maybe in teaching the things
that he said, people might stop and think and be challenged.
Gosh, maybe I don't want that to be me.
And I want to do everything I can to make sure that Jesus
knows me and I know Jesus. The last part of that verse, it
says workers of lawlessness. We've talked about this word
before. Antinomian means against any law
or commands in scripture. Anti means against or no and
nami or namas means law and so antinomian means I don't want to
hear anything that Jesus tells me what to do.
I don't want to hear. I don't care about the the moral
commands and laws of God. I all I want is fire insurance.
All I want is Jesus to save me and I don't want my life to
change. I like my pleasure.
I like these desires. I like this greed I have.
In fact, there are sin lists in the Bible.
Now. It's not exhaustive, but man, I
mean, how often do you hear people read these lists of sin
in in Scripture to try to get you to say, am I living like
that? Is that me?
Lawlessness is just another word for sin going against God's
moral law. Second Timothy 31 But understand
this, that in the last days there will come times of
difficulty. For people will be lovers of
self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient
to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable,
slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not
loving, good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit,
lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having the
appearance of godliness, but denying its power.
Avoid such people. That's what Paul says to Timothy
in his last letter. You're going to see people come
into your church because Timothy is the pastor that he trained up
and he says here's what you're going to see.
There will be times of difficulty.
You're going to have to deal with people who proclaim to be
Christians, but outwardly they they're living just like the
rest of the world in sin, as if God never gave positive commands
to follow. Here's another one, Galatians
519 through 20. Now the works of the flesh are
evident. Sexual immorality, impurity,
sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife.
There's a lot of words in there, jealousy, fits of anger,
rivalries, dissentless divisions, envy, drunkenness,
orgies, and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you
before, that those who do such things will not inherit the
Kingdom of God. So if we say we're a Christian,
but we're we're living out some one all of these things on these
lists, we we can't say we're headed to heaven because we are
workers of lawlessness. We don't care about what God has
said. All we want is what he can do
for us, not not anything that we can do for him or submit to him.
An example of this recently, by the way.
So I think it in, in, in that there was a Baptist Church in
Minnesota where those protesters went in in the middle of church
and protested. They're worshipping God.
They're not doing anything. It says this church isn't even
really a political church, but they go in and protest.
But this, that's not why I'm telling you the story.
I'm telling you the story because a famous anchor named
Don Lemon goes up to this pastor and he's like, Hey, what do you
think about this protested in your church?
You know, and that pastor held it together very well.
By the way, I was very surprised and by that like, but he's like,
we're just here to worship, worship Jesus and Don Lemon
goes, I worship Jesus all the time.
I'm a Christian and I was like, Oh my gosh, you know, that is
the that is the exactly what I'm talking about here.
Why do I say that? Let me be a little bit more
clear because he's an open practicing homosexual.
And in First Corinthians 69, we just read the sexual immorality.
But then in First Corinthians 69, it says, don't you know that
the unrighteous will not inherit the Kingdom of God?
Don't be deceived. Neither the sexually immoral
idolatries adulterers nor men who practice homosexuality.
It goes on and on. But again, he's just the extreme
example of how Can you believe in the Jesus that I believe in,
but yet justify your way of life because it makes you happy?
Do you think that that's that's that's God's will for our lives
as he just wants to make us happy.
He wants our joy, but he wants us to be holy.
He wants us to be like his Son. He wants us to follow his words.
He wants us to go against our nature and our desires.
Even the sins that feel good, make us happy, or seem fun says
depart from me. That's talking about hell.
That's talking about the judgement.
And again, this quote by Chapter Spurgeon really challenged me,
so I thought I would share it with you.
It says the unsaved Sinner loves the salvation from hell.
The true Christian loves the salvation from sin.
Everyone desires to be saved from the pit, but it is only a
child of God who pants to be saved from every false way.
You remember that prayer that Jesus said again, the Lord's
prayer at the end he says deliver us, lead us not into
temptation and deliver us from evil.
That means the evil inside of us, the temptations inside of
us. Do you ever look at God and as
you, as you look at yourself and you're like, oh, I sinned again.
I hate this, Lord, help me. Help me, please.
Like you want to be. That's why sometimes we say like
Lord Jesus, come soon, not just because the outward world is
sinful, but even us as Christians still sin, but we
hate it. That is the difference.
We don't justify it. We hate it.
We don't, we don't minimize it, rationalize it away.
And here's the good news about that.
We need to hear as we transition, even though there
will be some who it says will be separated from God, says away
from me, depart from me. We need to believe that Jesus
took that punishment so that we can escape that punishment.
So I'm not against the idea of telling people, yes, hell is in
your destiny if you don't repent and believe in Jesus.
But a true believer in Jesus will look at how he hung on the
cross bleeding and tortured, and we say my sin put him there and
far be it from me to keep on doing the thing and justify it.
That put him there and made him suffer.
That was the thought in my own heart and my own life because I
can't keep living this way. I want to honor the Lord with my
life. Now I'm telling you, I am not
sinless at all. We're all going to struggle
because we're in the flesh to. We're going to struggle against
the temptations of sin and sin for the rest of our lives.
There's a difference. I'll get to that.
It's it's, it's called repentance.
But let me get to the next part of this.
If Jesus is your Lord, you will obey him as that verse 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,
you will obey him willingly because you want to do his will.
That word Lord means curious. It means master.
He's your master. He's the good master.
But you're supposed to obey, right?
There's there's an obedience to like, yes, you have all
authority over me and have your way with me.
Let me do your will and your bidding because you are worthy.
You deserve it. This life is not my own.
You bought it with a price on the cross.
You bought my life with your blood.
I need to quit living as if somehow I am the king of my own
life. It's humbling because we all
want to be that we all want to be in control.
We all want to make our own choices, but God is saying make
choices that honor me and follow me.
Now this idea that you can pray a prayer and confess Lord and
that's it and you never have to live for Jesus your life doesn't
change I think is because of a misunderstanding of this verse
that gets talked about a lot. It's in Romans 10/9.
It says because if you confess it with your mouth that Jesus is
Lord and believe in your heart God raised him from the dead,
you'll be saved. People been using it like it's a
formula. Why do we do formulas?
Because that's how we are humanly.
We we want to know, give me the step by step process so that I
can benefit. Basically all I got to do is say
a word and believe. Who knows what that word means,
right? So oftentimes people have said
so pray this prayer after me. Now I'm not against in the sense
of look, the sinner's prayer is, is teaching you to be humble
and, and to pray yourself to the Lord and to say certain things
and confess certain things and it's good.
But if no fruit ever comes after that, then you might question,
just because you said this thing, did you really even
understand what you were doing? If Jesus is Lord, just saying it
again, going back to lip service isn't the formula that saves
you. It's actually submitting to him
as Lord. It's it's that your life follows
your mouth. If he's your Lord, then you
surrender and you obey him. You follow him above all your
desires, your opinion and your feelings.
You follow him as Lord and you believe in your heart.
You believe in your heart that Jesus is God who really died and
rose again. And let me tell you something,
the 1st century Christians who confessed this.
They literally saw that Jesus died and rose again.
And the Bible says that those guys turned the world upside
down. When's the last time our
generation has turned anything upside down other than the
economy and and the whole world? You know, in a bad way.
But we're not turning the world upside down for Jesus anymore.
The evidence of truly confessing Jesus as Lord and believing He
rose from the dead foot should cause you to have so much faith
that you're willing to take risks to go against the grain as
they did in the 1st century church.
Not just fit in and go along to get along and worship and and
lip service. Isaiah 13 says this.
People draw near with me, near with their mouth and honor me
with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.
So our heart is where we is, the seed of our mind, our will and
our emotions. We make decisions from our
heart. Yes, we feel things from our
heart and we have action that comes from our heart.
So what is God's will then? How do I align my heart in my
life with with God's will to follow?
Let my heart be in line with his heart, because his heart is his
will. Well, we got to get a new heart.
Ezekiel 3626 says I will give you a new heart and a new spirit
I will put within you, and I will move the heart of stone
from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.
And I will put my spirit within you and cause you to walk in my
statutes and be careful to obey my rules.
Here's where I want you to have it clear.
It is by faith alone that we trust in Jesus Christ and we
have salvation. It is not by work, but faith
never stays alone. It is faith alone, but faith is
never alone. True faith has works after it as
a fruit as we've heard in this passage.
You will know them by their fruit.
You will want to do things. In fact, he says I will cause
you to do things. And so in in doctrine and
theology, there are some things that we don't quite understand
about. Well, God's got to do this heart
change in me. But, but if I'm not feeling this
heart change, has he done the heart change?
Well, if you long to want to follow the Lord, that's even a
good sign. If you long, if you know that
you're a Sinner and you you feel terrible about your sins and you
want to follow the Lord, that's a good sign.
Because normally sinners are so prideful that when you bring up
sin, they've got every excuse under the sun.
It's beautiful. We don't take any credit for the
things that are happening in our lives.
What the Lord has done in my life, I get no glory from and He
gets it all. There's nothing special about me
that makes me right with God and able to follow Him.
Now I do have a will and I have choices, but I have failed so
many times in those choices, even as a Christian.
But praise God, He is causing me to grow holier and holier again.
And we think about the 10 commandments as like, oh, this
is just some burden. I got to follow this law now.
And it's like, these are things that are good for you.
The things in the Sermon on the Mount that he's covered are good
for you. Like not being angry with your
brother, not being anxious about money and all the things that
you're worried about, not being a hypocrite he's talked about.
Fight against lust, fight against adultery, fight against
retaliation, love your enemies. It's all summed up and love God
and love others. That's the whole law summed up.
It is. It's all about love.
Even following the law, it's about love.
Why do you? Why do you want to do what he
said? It's because you love him.
Jesus says if you love me you will keep my commandments.
So first to do the will of God is to repent and believe.
Then secondly in the right information.
Then secondly we want to renew our minds.
Romans 12/2 How do I do the will of God?
It says don't be conformed to this world, but be transformed
by the renewal of your mind by testing that you may discern
what is the will of God. Keep learning the will of God.
It's all in the scripture. Pray for that desire that He
would put in your heart to want to just seek out what is your
will, Lord? What is your will?
Oftentimes people think that that's all about prayer.
Lord, tell me your will in this decision I've got to make.
And they're waiting to hear some kind of audible response or
something or they're when God has already spoken and there's
so much in here. Keep renewing your mind with
this to find out the will of God.
Third. Then as we do will we do do his
will we fight sin first John three it says no one born of God
makes the practice of sinning for God seed abides in him and
he cannot keep on sinning because he's been born of God.
By this it is evident who are the children of God and who are
the children of the devil. Whoever does not practice
righteousness is not of God, nor is the one who does not love his
brother. These scriptures are in in the
Bible. These verses are in Scripture.
I don't know if people have showed them to you or not, but
this is a challenge. Again, nobody's going to live a
perfect life, but we need to ask ourselves, are we fighting sin
and trying to follow the Lord? Are we looking at when we do
sin? I shouldn't do this.
This is how unbelievers live, not me.
I'm a believer. I'm going to do something about
this. I'm going to get help.
I'm going to talk to someone. I am going to confess my sins to
someone. John Owen says if you are
fighting sin, you're alive, take heart.
But if sin sway unopposed, you are dead.
No matter how lively this sin makes you feel.
Take heart in battled Saints. So I want to answer the major
question then how do we know if we're saved if everybody in the
rooms now I don't know if I'm that's a good place to be, but
don't stay there, OK? It's simple.
It is the gospel. It's repentance and faith.
It's faith alone, but repentance is the other side of the coin of
faith. Repentance means change your
mind, change what you believe, change what you think is right,
align it with what God says is right, believe the right
information about who Jesus is, the right doctrine, and right
living. If that is the trajectory you're
on, you can know that you're saved.
It's not just a one time thing that we do, as many people say,
all we got to do is get you to this point.
No, it's an ongoing everyday battle for the Christian to
fight his flesh, his or her flesh.
Ask yourself, how much have I grown in the last couple weeks
or months or years? Quit looking for the one moment
and trying to remember that one time when you prayed the prayer
and instead try to look at how God has been working in you over
the past days, weeks, months, and years.
And you can know that you're a Christian.
And here's the good news is that He does the work in us as well.
As I've already said, He's predestined to us to be
conformed to the image of His Son.
That's what Romans 829 says. He's going to do it.
But there's a dual accountability.
Even though God is sovereign and He's working in US, these
commands still stand. And it says, Therefore, my
beloved is you've always obeyed. So now not only as in my
presence, but much more in my absence, work out your own
salvation with fear and trembling.
For it is God who works in you both to will and to work for his
good pleasure. Make sure that you know Him, but
more importantly, make sure he knows you.
And be encouraged that God, If you're stuck in sin, if you're
struggling with sin, if you seem to be stagnant and not growing,
or you're even a Sinner here who's never professed Jesus as
Lord in your life, you can do so.
You can submit to Him. If you feel that call, if you
have the ability to even repent, then it must be God working in
you. He has the power to change even
the worst of sinners into obedient Christ followers.
And I can tell you that from experience.
So I'll end with this main idea. There are many people who say or
think that they are Christian but are not truly Christian.
Mental assent and saying the words aren't a formula for
salvation. True faith works its way out
into living for Jesus because he died for us.
A real profession and evidence of a changed life is our
assurance of true faith. Let's pray Father, I pray that
these words wouldn't fall on deaf ears today.
Lord, help us to be changed by Your word, because it's through
your spirit and Your word that we take the correction and you
give us the power to do something about it.
And we always rely on Jesus knowing that he did die for our
sins, all the ones that we're even going to commit, but we
just don't use it as a a license to keep doing it.
Help us to hate our sin and to love your truth, but we need you
Lord in Jesus name, Amen.