You Can Like Jesus and Still Not Follow Him|09.20.26|Transformed by Jesus, Together, for Others pt.2

Earlier this week, I was reminded again of the quote, "Actions speak louder than words." You're probably very familiar with that quote. "Actions speak louder than words." There's another quote that might even say it a little bit better though. Talk is cheap. Have you heard that one before? We know both of those to be pretty true because we've experienced them in our own lives. We all know what it's like to see the gap between what we say and what we actually do. In fact, you have probably lived out those quotes multiple times every day this month, right? That thing that you said to your wife that it would get done and it hasn't been started yet. That gym membership that you paid for, but you're not quite in the rhythm of actually using it yet. That thing that you promised your kid you'd be at, but then you missed. I mean, you meant to go, it's just, you missed it. And we do this here in church also, don't we? Right, like you've probably been praying for that person for years, but you haven't called them in a while. Or you've read every single Bible verse there is about forgiveness and yet there's still that person that you've been holding onto bitterness and resentment with for ages. Maybe you once had a recommitment moment during a service or during a class or during a Bible study where you felt God's calling and you said, yes, I'm gonna make a change. And then the follow through faded and no one noticed, including yourself. And it's not because you were meaning to lie. It's not because you wanted to miss your kid's thing. You meant to do it. But that's not the same as doing it, right? Now in most cases, the phrase, well, it's the thought that counts, doesn't hold a candle to actions speak louder than words. Talk is cheap because saying that you'll get to it later doesn't mean anything if you never get to it. And saying, not right now is the same thing as saying no right now. But it sounds softer, doesn't it? And I get it though, because there is not enough time to get everything done. There's not enough resources to get everything done. There isn't enough energy to get everything done. I'm tired all the time. I'm sure you're tired too. But most people don't know because we're pretty good at keeping up appearances in the outside and seeming like everything is okay. But underneath, the foundation is a bit more shaky than we care to admit. And so there's that gap between what we say and what we do. And that ties right into our message series this month because we've been digging into our mission statement as a church. We're trying to become apprentices of Jesus, not just attenders of church. And we exist as a church to help you become transformed by Jesus together for others. That's our mission statement for why we exist. It's on the slide every Sunday. It's on our website. It's on your bulletin. But what does it mean? Well, we're looking at each one of those phrases during these weeks because it's gonna help us understand this fully alive life that Jesus invites us into. Because being transformed to become more and more like Jesus in every part of our lives is something that happens together in community. And when we begin to open up our lives to the people around us, helping each other grow, pointing each other back to Jesus and helping deepen our faith, that actually prompts us outward, reaching others and serving others that God puts on our lives so that they can begin to experience His love and grace too. And I know what some of you are thinking right now. You're like, wait a second. I'm just trying to be a better Christian. Like I'm just trying to get better at prayer and maybe a little bit better at reading my Bible. I'm not sure I'm ready for this whole transformed life thing. That sounds like a lot of my life is about to change. And if you're feeling that way, I just wanna tell you you're not alone and it's okay to feel that and yet you shouldn't carry the weight of that. That's why we need to start in the right place. We need to start by being with Jesus. And so we start with being transformed by Jesus. And to be transformed by Jesus means to be transformed by His love, but also be transformed by His leadership and transformed by His way of life because Jesus is our King. And so today we're gonna talk about being transformed by the leadership of Jesus. He's our Lord. Now, last week we talked about God planting us in His love. And today we're learning about what it means to be planted under a King, a Lord, who has authority over our lives. And to center our time, we're gonna be looking through Luke chapter six. And so I wanna invite you to open up your Bibles to Luke chapter six. If you're using the Black Seatback Bible, it's on page 49 of the New Testament, or you can just search it on your Bible app. Luke chapter six, and as you're finding it, this is a teaching from Jesus that names this gap between what we say and what we do. And Jesus is actually gonna show us about what that reveals about our hearts. He's also gonna warn us of how dangerous that can be. And He's gonna call us into a life of learning to follow His leadership by obeying Him. Now, this is from a famous set of teachings from Jesus in the Gospel of Luke that's now referred to as the Sermon on the Plain. And it's very similar to Matthew's version that's called the Sermon on the Mount. And so this is after He's already called His disciples to follow Him. He's talking to them, and He's talking to all the other people who have signed up to say, yes, we wanna follow you, we're following you around, we're learning from you, we want to be there. And so this message isn't directed to outsiders. Jesus is talking to people who have already gathered around Him and are wanting to follow Him, are enthusiastic, just like all of us here today. And so this message is for us. And so with that, I wanna invite you to rise as you're able for the reading of God's word from Luke chapter six, beginning in verse 43. Jesus says, "No good tree bears bad fruit, "nor again does a bad tree bear good fruit, "for each tree is known by its own fruit. "Figs are not gathered from thorns, "nor are grapes picked from a bramble bush. "The good person out of the good treasure of the heart "produces good, and the evil person out of evil treasure "produces evil, for it is out of the abundance of the heart "that the mouth speaks. "Why do you call me Lord, Lord, "and do not do what I tell you? "I will show you what someone is like who comes to me, "hears my words, and acts on them. "That one is like a man building a house, "who dug deeply and laid the foundation on rock. "When a flood arose, the river burst against the house, "and could not shake it, because it had been well built. "But the one who hears and does not act "is like a man who built a house on the ground "without a foundation. "When the river burst against it, immediately it fell, "and great was the ruin of that house. "Beloved, this is the word of the Lord. "Thanks be to God, you may have a seat. "No good tree bears bad fruit." Now the word for bad here can also mean spoiled. And any of the gardeners here in the room can tell you that sometimes you don't know there's an issue with a plant until the fruit reveals the problem by coming out spoiled, right? And that's Jesus's point here too. The fruit doesn't cause the tree to go bad. It simply reveals that there is a problem under the surface. Now tomato vines are supposed to grow up along a lattice, right off the ground, so they can grow strong, have nice big fruit coming off of them. But every once in a while, there will be a stray vine snaking along the ground, trying to reach for somewhere else from where it's planted. And any of those tomatoes that grow along that vine along the ground, they're gonna become rotten laying in the dirt. Or sometimes there's an infection from the soil that actually gets into the vine, and it produces bad fruit. And so the fruit reveals the problems with the roots, because it's trying to grow in soil that isn't sufficient. It isn't sustaining. Now I'm not gonna re-preach last week's sermon about being planted in God's love, but the same truth is being told here. Don't uproot yourself from God's love. Don't draw your life from other things that won't sustain you, because the fruit reveals what's going on inside. Now we read in our passage here, Jesus is saying that the fruit is evidence. And so what is the evidence that comes out of your life? He talks about the good person. Out of the good of his heart brings good things, good fruit, and this is similar to the time when he's speaking in Matthew's version of the Sermon on the Mount. He's out of the abundance of the heart, the lips speak. He says the same thing right here. If the good things that are coming out of someone, and it's revealing that it looks good, it's revealing what is good already inside them, but if bad or spoiled or degenerate things are coming out of someone, that reveals the bad or degenerate heart that's inside them. And so Jesus is trying to give us an order of operations for between the interior life and the exterior actions. He's saying the tree determines the fruit. The fruit just reveals what's going on inside. It's, to use a different metaphor, if the dashboard light on the car that says something's wrong with the engine, right? The light isn't the problem. The light is saying go check under the hood to find the problem. The fruit is just revealing what's going on inside. And so Jesus calls out the gap between what we see and what's going on inside. There in verse 46, he says, why do you call me Lord, Lord, and not do what I tell you? He's calling out the gap between what we say and what we do. Why do you call me Lord, Lord, and do not do what I tell you? Now, before we dig into obedience, we've got to talk about the word Lord. Can I teach you another big biblical Greek word? The word for Lord is kyrios. Can you say kyrios? Kyrios. You're learning biblical Greek. A bunch of scholars in here. It means Lord. It's a title that's used by slaves, servants, patrons, to talk about their master. It's talking about the one that they belong to. It's not just talking about like some guru, some friend that they consult. It's not just a title. It is a term of belonging. But here it's a doubled use, Lord, Lord. And it's not used when it's a warm, affectionate, enthusiastic use. And so Jesus isn't talking to people who are like slaves, who have horrible masters and call them Lord. That's not who he's talking to. He's talking to people who are enthusiastic and excited about serving their Lord. He's talking to people who are fond of him and want to follow him. Why do you call me Lord, Lord? And don't actually obey me. There's a gap between what you say and what you're doing. The fruit that's coming out of your lives is revealing that the tree isn't good on the inside. And we get this, right? Because words have meaning. You can't like introduce, we're introducing names and stuff. You say, "Oh, hey, have you met my best friend?" So and so. And you call them your best friend, but then you actively ignore them for the rest of your life. That's not a best friend. That's a meaningless term that you have right there. Or you can't just like walk into work, walk past your boss's desk and say, "Good morning, boss." And then not actually do any of the tasks they've assigned to you ever. That's a meaningless word, okay? The words and the actions aren't lining up. And so Jesus is saying, "You can't say Jesus is my savior and my Lord, but then live like we're in charge. Just live like you're in charge of all your choices and just actively ignore what the word of God says, actively ignore the nudge that God puts on your heart." That's saying, "Well, I mean, Jesus is like my friend. I keep him around when he makes me happy. But as soon as he starts like calling me to step up or encouraging me to grow, I don't know." If we cut him out at that point, then one, he's not even a friend, but he's definitely not our Lord. But Scripture tells us Jesus is your king. And we've already said talk is cheap. When the words that we say aren't aligned with the evidence of our obedience, it just reveals that there's something fake going on inside of us. And so if that's the fake thing, well, what does the real thing actually look like? Jesus tells us in the next verse, look at me in verse 47. He says, "Here's the one who ends up with a firm and secure house. This is the one who comes to me. Here's my words and acts on them." Notice those three. "Comes to me, here's my words and acts on them." They're all present tense. They're all habitual and recurring again and again. And they all have a sequential order. "Comes to me, here's my words," and put some action first, "Come to Jesus." Here at New Life, we talk about the life of an apprentice of Jesus is someone who spends time to be with Jesus so that we can become more and more like Jesus, so that we can join him in his work. But it starts with being with Jesus, having a relationship with Jesus. Just last week, Pastor Tim and I were talking about how the life of an apprentice of Jesus starts with relationship and connection to him, not just knowledge, not just actions, being with him. It's honestly what we talked about last week, being planted in the love of Jesus so that we can be rooted and establish him and drawing our life from him. And so Jesus says, "Well, the one who comes to me and then hears my words." So notice that it's receiving from Jesus. It starts with relational proximity, being close, so that we're able to hear him because we can't hear him when we're actually spending all of our time reaching for other things or other people to be our Lord, right? We come to him as our Lord. We spend time with him as our Lord so that when we hear what he has to say, then we know what to do. He says, "Here's the one that comes to me, hears my words, and then acts on them." Because we want there to be alignment between what we say and what we do. And so if we say Jesus is our Lord, well, then we wanna put his word into practice. We wanna actually obey him with our lives because we believe that he has authority over us, but that we also believe that he's good. And he knows the fully alive life that he created us for. And so then Jesus, his very striking image, it was a famous image of two different houses that are built. He says, "Okay, here's the man who comes to me, hears my words, and acts on them." He built his house by digging down deep and laying his foundation on a rock because when the flood came, the torrent struck the house but it couldn't shake it because it was well built. But the one who hears my words and does not act on them, the one who lacks obedience, that's the one who skipped steps and used shortcuts and built without a foundation, this guy didn't come to me. He wasn't drawing close to Jesus. And the moment the torrent struck the house, it collapsed. I noticed that it wasn't like a little bit of damage from this flood. It was a great ruin, complete destruction, catastrophic. Now, both houses experienced the flood, right? So obeying Jesus doesn't mean that there's never gonna be hardship in your life. But coming to Jesus, receiving his words and acting on them means that the foundation of our life is secure because Jesus is the one who secures your life in the storm. But a lack of obedience, it leads to a lack of a secure foundation. Now, some of you have experienced great collapse in your life. Some of you know exactly what it's like to experience great ruin when your life isn't built on Jesus. Maybe that great collapse is actually what brought you back to Jesus. But there's others who are listening to me right now. And you're in a pretty decent spot in your life, right? Things are pretty normal, pretty comfortable, maybe even pretty mundane. There's no big collapses recently, no big ruin. And you might be tempted to hear this warning from Jesus and think that it's for someone else. Yeah, those other people who are on the brink of collapse, like they really need this. But just because you're not in the middle of a storm right now doesn't mean that the foundation of your life is secure. Because both houses look the same from the outside, right? But the one that was without obedience was less solid, less secure, less established. When we treat our relationship with Jesus as something that we just do on Sundays and then we go back to the rest of our own lives the rest of the week, it leads us to a flimsy faith. If we're just paying lip service by saying, "Jesus is my Lord and Savior," but then we don't actually put his words into action, we are missing out on what the fully alive life is that Jesus offered us. And we have this flimsy faith, this thin experience of what faith is. I've heard it said that it's like the person who went on a great road trip to Yosemite National Park. They were gonna see Half Dome, all the incredible vistas, the waterfalls, the giant sequoias, and they get all the way there and they just go into the gift shop and they spend all their time in the climate controlled, curated, sanitized gift shop, buy a poster off the wall of Half Dome, a little plushy of a moose, and go home and say, "Man, Yosemite is great." They missed out on the adventure of actually seeing the National Park. That's what life is like when we as followers of Jesus settle for a Sunday only, we put it in its own box and then go back to our own life Christianity. We miss out on the adventure of exploring the kingdom of God, putting Jesus' words into action and obeying Him and saying yes to Him and seeing Him lead us. We miss out on that adventure. And so instead, too many people that I know, that you know, settle for a Sunday only faith, the sanitized, curated, climate controlled version of following Jesus. When we show up on Sunday, we share a Bible verse on social media or on a stitched pillow, but we don't actually act on His words. And even when our life looks fine on the outside, we don't realize how weak our foundation actually is. Now I know that danger because I've actually lived it. There have been times in my life when I thought my life was built on a solid rock foundation, but then a storm comes and knocks out a whole corner of the foundation that was actually just hard packed sand. And I didn't realize until the storm came. And now here I am, and the whole thing is pretty shaky in the house of my life. Cracks are starting to form. I'm leaning back into this side of the room of my life. I don't wanna go into that part of my life because I'm just afraid that I'm gonna fall through the floor. I need God's help to shore up the foundation of that part of my life, to rebuild, to make sure I'm securely founded on Christ. I needed to see the gap between what I said I believed about Jesus and how I actually lived and how that gap was causing weakness and vulnerability in my life. But the incredible thing about obedience is it's not just a thing that we do because of God working in us, it actually also does something to us. Jesus has shown us that not only is obedience a fruit that grows in our life, as God gives us more and more chances to say yes to his nudge, obedience is actually a habit that actually forms us. First, here's how obedience grows out of us. We can only obey Jesus because we first hear him. It says, "The one who comes to me and hears what I said and then puts it into practice." The only way we're able to put it into practice is when Jesus gives us something. Jesus is the one who gives it to us. The apostle Paul says in Ephesians chapter two that we're called to do the good works that God prepared in advance for us to do. So obedience is given to us by God. But also, the more that we say yes, the more that we say yes to that nudge that God gives us, the more that saying yes actually forms us in the habit of saying yes. And the more that we see him at work in our lives and the more our faith grows. And so Jesus wants to make it clear to us that obedience is necessary. It's a necessary part of the life of a follower of Jesus. It doesn't earn your way to a secure foundation because Jesus is the one who secures your life in the storm. Jesus is the rock that creates strength and security. Our obedience isn't the foundation. Jesus is. The obedience is digging down to get strengthened. But Jesus is the secure foundation for us. He's the one who came into our human existence, lived the perfect life of perfect obedience to the Father, becoming obedient even unto death. And that's why God raised him up to the highest place and gave him the name that's above every name. That at the name of Jesus, every knee should bow and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father. See, Jesus as your savior rescued you from sin and death. But Jesus as your king, Jesus as your Lord, now secures you in the storms of life. And he calls you to hear his words and obey them. Jesus as your Lord calls you into the wild adventure of saying yes to him and following him in the kingdom of God. And so truly, I just wanna encourage you this week to just obey what the Lord tells you to do. Obey what the Lord tells you to do. Obey that nudge before you talk yourself out of it. When you sense God telling you to draw near to him? Say yes to that. When you sense God inviting you to enter into his presence through prayer, say yes to that. When you sense God inviting you to reach out to someone else and bless them with one of the blessed rhythms, say yes to that. Just say yes and take a small simple next step in that direction. Now some of you aren't waiting to hear what God's gonna say to you this week. You already know what God said to you because you've been delaying on it for a couple weeks now. But you gotta be careful because I've heard it said that delayed obedience can lead to disobedience. We heard earlier telling God not right now is the same as saying no right now. But Jesus is inviting you to draw near to him, to hear his words, to put them into practice. Jesus inviting you to say yes to what he tells you to do and experience his life of adventure, the fully alive life that he created you for. Jesus is inviting you to take small steps in the direction that he leads you, even without knowing the whole plan. Because you can trust that he's a good king who knows how to bring about his glory and our good. We can trust that he's the Lord of life who defeated death and secures us in the storm. So we can give him our yes out of gratitude, not performance. See, submitting to his authority in our lives, it's not a burden that we carry, it's the foundation that makes us secure in life. And it's as we make it a habit to hear his words and act on them. We become formed in that habit as God transforms our lives and heals our hearts from the inside out. And the good that is brought out of our hearts, it's like good fruit given for the good of others. And that good fruit is shared with the people around us in our neighborhoods and our workplaces across the whole Sauk Valley so that God's glory can saturate our community, shining his light through our lives across the whole area so that every man, woman, and child in the Sauk Valley could have a daily encounter with a follower of Jesus so that they can see God's kingship on display in our lives as we draw close to him to receive his words and put them into practice because Jesus is our Lord and he secures us in the storm. Isn't that good news? Amen.