Hi, I'm Jonathan Pennington, and this is the Human Flourishing Podcast. This podcast is a repository of a wide variety of sermons, lectures, interviews, and other resources that I've recorded over the years. Today's episode is a sermon I preached at Sojourn East in Louisville, Kentucky. And finally, our scripture this morning comes from Luke 6, 43 through 49. If you're able, would you please stand for the reading of God's Word? No good tree bears bad fruit. Word is a bad tree bear good fruit. Each tree is recognized by its own fruit. People do not pick figs from thornbushes or grapes from briars. 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. Why do you call me Lord Lord and do not do what I say? For everyone who comes to me, and hears my words and puts them into practice, I will show you what they are like. They are like a man building a house who dug down deep and laid the foundation on rock. When a flood came, the torrent struck that house but could not shake it because it was well built. But the one who hears my words and does not put them into practice is like a man who built a house on the ground without a foundation. The moment the torrent struck that house, it collapsed and its destruction was complete. This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. Morning. My name is Pastor Jonathan. I'm one of the teaching pastors here. If I've not met you, I would love to. And I'm very glad you guys are all here today. To begin today, I'd like you to imagine with me a set of parents will call them Michael and Samantha. And they have a son, Braden, who they're having a conflict with. Now let me say I'm totally making these names out here. If you're Michael and Samantha and I have a son named Braden, I'm totally sorry because I'm not thinking of you. In fact, I was thinking of no one in particular. So I tried to think of people that I didn't know. But imagine this situation with me that they're having a conflict with their teenagers. It's a normal kind of conflict. Maybe it's curfew, debate, or a girlfriend or something of grades, normal kind of things that would happen. So there is that conflict, but regardless of what it is, how that situation is going to play out, the conflict of it and how it works out, is not actually primarily about the details of it. It's going to play out based more on the kind of frame, the mindset that I think the parents have towards the teenager in that situation and the teenager too, as well. And what I mean is this. So if Michael and Samantha approach this conflict with their son, Braden, and they're thinking of their relationship with him in terms of like financial terms, in a helpful way, I think to think of like that when you're in a relationship with your child or anyone, it matters how much you deposit, like how much you give into their souls and how much time and energy and love you give. Because sometimes with kids you're going to have to make it withdrawal or going to have to notice some things. And so you want to, you can, it's helpful to think of kind of that relationship in terms of financial terms. On the other hand, if they were to think of their relationship with their son in terms of a war, but that is the main idea that somebody's got to win and somebody's going to lose, well, you can imagine that's going to affect how the relationship works out and how the situation works out as well. What if they thought of the relationship in terms of like the growth of a tree? That when you first plan a tree, you need to have some stakes and hold, you know, some wires that guided and maybe it's wrapped tightly to protect it from disease or something. But for that tree to grow, eventually you've got to loosen it up and for the branches to grow. What if they thought about their relationship with them that way and tried to sort of think of it through that frame? Or one more way of thinking about it. What if they thought about their relationship with their son like a story that he's writing the story of his own life, a story that is almost certainly going to last longer and go beyond their lives? And they ask themselves what kind of role do we want to play in the story of his life? Do we want to be antagonistic? Do we want to be just a footnote in the story of his life? Do we want to be characters that are deeply involved or not? Now each of those ways of thinking about the situation have a massive effect on what's going to happen in that particular situation and the long-term relationship as well. And whether Michael and Samantha realize it or not, their relationship with their son in this scenario is framed by a certain metaphor. It's framed by a certain way of seeing. It's an analogy that is mashed up against their experience that helps them see it in a certain way. Maybe they're conscious of that metaphor? Maybe they're not. Maybe they'll learn the ways we see the world from our family of origin and from things that have happened to us. And so whether if they approach it like a war mindset, if somebody's going to win somebody's going to lose, they probably learn that from somewhere and now they're passing it on and that's true for all of us. We see that the conflict, the situation is one thing, but the reality is that their experience of it, their son's experience of it, is largely framed by whatever that kind of framing, that metaphor, that analogy that they're thinking of consciously or not. And that's the power, that is the power of metaphors in the way that God has made the world. They actually enable us to see things in a certain way and they often actually cut us off from seeing things in a different way. Now the reason I'm starting this way and talking about this is not because I'm actually going to talk about parenting today even though maybe those ideas might help you think about if any of your relationships are thinking in the kind of the metaphors that you might. The reason I'm talking about is because we're going to see in our text that we just heard read that Jesus gives two very, very important metaphors. He gives us very important images that are given to us so that we might see ourselves in a certain way that we may not have thought of and so we may see God in the world in a certain way as well and that has a huge impact on how we live. So if you're just visiting here today we are preaching through the gospel of Luke which is wonderful. We have been in chapter 6 for several weeks. Today we're concluding the last part of Jesus is what's called the sermon on the plane that started back in chapter 6, verse 20, then powerful messages about money and prayer and loving our enemies and paying attention to the plank and our own eye while we're trying to get the speck out of someone else's. And now Jesus is going to bring all those powerful teachings to a head to a conclusion in chapter 6, verses 43 to 49, by talking about trees and fruit and about houses and foundations. And again, those are metaphors. Those are images that he's giving us lenses to understand ourselves in the world. Earlier this week I had to, one of my eyes has definitely been over a year so I've gotten prescriptions. I had to go to the optometrist. I don't know if she's here today, she's an amazing optometrist here in our church floorly. And I'm sitting in the exam chair. She swings over the foreropter, it's called. That's the name of that thing with all those lenses on it, right, with the big thing. She puts in for my eyes and I'm trying to read the F-X-L-B, trying to read these things that she's going through these different lenses. Can you see this? Is this one better? Is this better? Right? And that's exactly what's happening here. I want to give you lenses to help correct some of the blindness or at least near-sightedness that we might have to help us see clearly who we are and what God cares about. And so we're going to look at these two metaphors and see how they might affect us. If you have a Bible, I'd love you to open that. There's a few Bible there as well. We're going to be in Luke chapter 6 again, so I can verse 43. Let's look at these two metaphors. Here's the first one, trees and fruit. Let me read these verses for you. No good tree bears bad fruit, nor does a bad tree bear good fruit. Each tree is recognized by its own fruit. People don't pick figs from thorn bushes or grapes or briars and 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 with the hardest full of. The first metaphor is this one that if you start paying attention to is actually very, very common in the Bible and in the world, not just the agriculture world, but all through the Bible, this idea of trees and fruit. Think back to the very beginning of the Bible, Genesis 1 and 2. This is very much a part of what the creation story is about, is that God says to everything be fruitful and multiply and reproduce according to your kind. And then of course in Genesis 3, the whole story gets messed up because of a tree and its fruit, they were not supposed to eat oven and rebellion against God. They did. And it continues on, there's lots of things we could look at, but it's not hard to think of Psalm 1. You may know this really important Psalm that is all based on the idea that some people are going to find flourishing as they meditate on God and orient their lives towards Him and what He's revealed Himself to be and some people are not. And the ones who are not, they're going to be, they're described as ultimately as just like chaff, meaningless, it's blown away, it's dust and it's forgotten. But the ones who give themselves to think about the Lord and pursuing Him, their lives are going to be like trees planted by a stream of water that yields its fruit and season. And if you keep going on, we can jump ahead to the New Testament, John, Matthew 3, John the Baptist is preaching, the Pharisees and scribes come to Him and He says, you know, you have all this external religion, but you still need to repent. And in that repentance, you need to bear fruit that is in keeping with the repentance. In other words, all this external religiosity might have is not actually the fruit that God cares about. Jesus is going to talk the same way later, think of John 15, very famous passage where Jesus is with His disciples and He says, that I'm the vine and you are branches and just like in our backyard, if you had a vine growing between our neighbor's yards and the reports of it, they got cut off from the rest and those parts died. And that's what Jesus is saying is that if you did not abide in me, you will no longer live and dry up and die. You think of Galatians 5, where again, Paul's describing two different people in the world, those who are with Christ and Christ and those who are not. The ones, lives, those who are not, they bear a certain sort of behaviors, clearly, but those who are in Christ, how do you know them? Because their lives bear the fruit of the Holy Spirit, love, enjoy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness and self-control. And then finally, Revelation 22, literally the last chapter of the Bible, pictures this new creation where God's people are there and there's a river of life flowing through and what's next to the river? Trees. And particularly the tree of life that we can eat of and find true life. So this is an important metaphor. This is not the only instance of it. And the point here in our text from Luke 6 is that trees are going to produce according to their kind and they're also going to produce according to their health. So peach trees produce peaches, grapevines produce grapes, all of bushes produce olives, hemlock, poison ivy produce according to their kind. And also, if a tree is healthy, then the kind of fruit it produces, apples, lemons and pears are going to be healthy and if it's not, if it's malnourished and diseased, it will produce scarred and tasteless and moldy and inedible fruit. And in verse 45, if you look back there, he basically, he slightly changes the metaphor to talk about a treasure house but the point is exactly the same that what is inside of us will eventually come out that the fruit of our lips reveals what's really inside of our heart. Now, of course, the reality is that in the brokenness of the world and brokenness of reality, even a good tree will sometimes produce one apple that's not edible or not good and so too, of course, in our lives, even good people do and say dumb things that's always inevitable. But the universal principle is the same that sooner or later, and you talk about the abundance of one's life, it's going to manifest what's inside. So, that's the first metaphor. Look at the second one, starting in verse 46. He says, why do you call me Lord, Lord, and do not do what I say, as for everyone who comes to me and hears my words and actually does them, puts them into practice, I'll show you what they're like. They're like a man building a house who dug deep, down deep and laid the foundation on rock. And when a flood came, the torrent struck that house but could not shake it because it was well built. The one who hears my words and does not put them into practice is like a man who built a house on the ground without a foundation and the moment the torrent struck that house, it collapsed and its destruction was complete. Again, building and foundation, another metaphor, another image you see throughout scripture, we can think of a bunch of buildings, the temple and the tabernacle, we can think of how the church is now, the temple of being built together by all believers so that God's spirit might dwell in it with the Jesus, the chief cornerstone and the apostle's teaching is the foundation. All that language is very common. And here, I think the point again is clear, we've all heard stories of and maybe seen videos of like beautiful mansions built on the cliff side of an ocean and because it wasn't embraced or wasn't built properly, they collapsed, doesn't matter how beautiful they were. And there's a foolishness there and it's not difficult to make the analogy that many people do live foolishly and rashly and pridefully and when everything's going fine, it's fine but they neglect wisdom and relationships and so when storms come, the result is only a crisis of destruction. But I think, you know, there's a way this works out that's a little bit more close to home probably for many of us and for me, literally close to home. I remember a few years ago noticing in our 50-year-old house that there were some cracks in some of the kind of drywall, a couple of places, then I noticed outside, there were some places where the masonry wasn't quite right and it was separating, et cetera. And there wasn't a tornado that caused it, there wasn't a hurricane that caused it, it wasn't an earthquake that caused it, it was just that for quite a few years, I had neglected like paying attention to the gutters and so little by little, you know, some of the water was seeping down and getting near the foundation and causing some settling, I fixed the gutters, I actually have no idea if the foundation's okay, so if you happen to run a foundation, repair business, let me know, I have no idea but I do know that what happens is if you don't pay attention to that, that sooner or later it will have a ripple effect through the house. Doors won't be able to shut, floors can buckle, walls are not square, and eventually cause problems in the roof and cause further leaks and I think that's a very powerful image for our lives and anyone's life that little neglect over time can greatly erode a foundation. So those are the metaphors, they're not, you know, totally unfamiliar but I think we still need to ask a couple questions. What actually is Jesus saying with these metaphors and then what are we supposed to do with this? He's concluding his sermon with these metaphors, what is he saying and what are we supposed to do with them? Well here's the first question, again what is he saying? Well, as I was studying this text I had asked myself like what, do these fit together, these just kind of two random metaphors, I don't think they are, I think together they are saying one thing and that is that our internal person, our character will sooner or later be revealed on the outside. Our internal person sooner or later will eventually be revealed on the outside. The tree that's healthy is going to produce a certain kind of fruit, the heart is going to manifest itself through the tongue eventually, the quality of the foundation of the house is going to be shown in response to rains. I think that's what holds these things together, that the inside is what really matters and sooner or later that's going to come out, no matter what the outside looks like. Not sure where I first heard this or so I can't give full credit because I'm not 100% sure, but someone described this as the difference between a Christmas tree and a fruit tree, this is powerful. What's a Christmas tree? A Christmas tree is a tree that once was in the soil and once was connected to a root system and was beautiful and was growing, but then we've cut it off and we've put it in our house. And now we decorate it and it's got some lights and it's got some tinsel and it's got some beautiful ornaments. It might be a maroon on that trip, whatever it is and it looks great, but even if you've got it in a little thing of water, it's already either dead or dying. It will not last because it's been cut off. Versus a fruit tree. A fruit tree is one that's tapped into the soil and the roots and it will out of season, maybe it won't be fruit, but eventually, it will produce a kind of fruit. Christmas tree versus fruit tree, Jesus is asking us to think about that. Our rock versus clay, Kenneth Bailey describes what Middle Eastern kind of ancient and today, even architecture is like and what the climate and the soil is like, that in the summers in the Middle East, you've got this really hardened clay. And if you've ever tried to dig through clay here or anywhere, it is a ton of work. And so, when you're building a building in the Middle East, it was very tempting, especially in the summer, to not do all the work to dig through this super hardened clay to get all the way down to rock. And it seems fine. It's hard. You have to work hard to dig out it, but what happens is once the winter rains come, it does not matter how hard that clay appeared to be, it turns into the consistency of chocolate pudding. And so, if you didn't do the work to dig down deep, whatever you've built is going to be lost. This is a powerful image. And I think we need to ask ourselves, what ways, is what I'd use to say these, what ways are our lives like a Christmas tree, not a fruit tree, or like a house built on clay, not on a rock. One thing I've just noticed again last couple of weeks, I mean, it's been around a long time now, but is that one of the ways that I think people claiming the name of Christ who don't really manifest the fruit of it is in social media outrage. On either side of any issue, I don't care which side it is. This sort of outrage where people are upset about something, and whether they're right or wrong doesn't even matter, but what the words and the attitude and the tone is the opposite of the fruit of the spirit of love and joy and peace and patience and kindness, gentleness, faithfulness and self-control. I think that's a pretty good checklist before you post, run through those, is that true? And if not, don't say it. But I also think in terms of the ways that we might attend church, maybe you come on a Sunday morning, maybe you give money, maybe you give a lot of money, maybe you give a little money, doesn't matter, but you're not really invested in the life of other people. You're not, you're kind of checking off the box, I came on Sunday morning and I gave my check. I just want to ask you to consider whether you might be a Christmas tree, not a fruit tree. Maybe there was a time in the past where you were deeply involved and you were connected and you were thriving and so now, you know, it still kind of has the appearance of that, but you know that there's something wrong. There's something disconnected and you're just looking good on the outside but you're not connected anymore. But you're just not condemning you, he's inviting you, inviting me to pay attention to that. And did you notice that he talks about the good things that a good person brings out of their heart? What are those good things? Well, we might be tempted to think that these are like big fancy gifts or something they're not. Just go earlier into the sermon on the plane, he describes what these good things are that we can manifest in our lives, loving and doing good to our enemies in chapter 6, not condemning and misjudging those around us. Being a good neighbor, looking forward, we'll get to chapter 10 later in the Good Samaritan, showing mercy to those in need. Guarding ourselves against the deceitfulness of riches, we'll see in chapter 12, also in chapter 12, living according to the future hope rather than just the current ideas, rejoicing in God's grace towards others, we'll see when we get to chapter 15, not being resentful towards the good that others have. These and a million of the things are the kind of non-flashy, good things that when we become a good tree, bear fruit in our lives. So I think that's what Jesus is saying and then let me ask the second question. So what are we supposed to do with this? Did you notice that in the text that he says, the difference between those who are wise or not is the ones who are not only here but they do what he says. Minds me of James, chapter 2 as well, you have faith but show me your faith by your works because if you just say you have faith but if it doesn't actually, if you don't actually do something that shows that maybe you don't. So what do we do? I want to give you a loving challenge and I give you an encouragement. Here's the challenge. It's going to sound kind of weird at first but I'll explain it. Put your hand or put your hands on the rudder of the sailboat of your life. Put your hand on the rudder of the sailboat of your life and let me explain what I mean and this comes from another brother here who has used this analogy, I've changed it a little bit, I'm very thankful for it, he doesn't know where he got it, maybe he made it up either way. So my footnotes are not very good today, sorry, but here's the idea, you and I can think of our lives as three different kinds, one of three different kinds of boats. On the one hand would be a raft where your life is just flowing and you're not in control, you don't feel like you're in control and you feel that you don't have power to do anything and you're just a float, right? The other extreme of that, maybe is how others of us show up, we describe as a galley ship. You're just rowing, rowing, you're working hard, you see the issues, I'm just going to row from you, double down, another side hustle, work hard, row, row, row, row, figure it out, do it, I'm in charge, I can control these things, neither of those is the reality, the reality is that we are in a sailboat and the sailboat cannot go anywhere apart from God's spirit, from his breath breathing upon us and guiding us, empowering us, but we do have to have our hand on the rudder. There is what we do matters, not because we're the power behind it, we're not the wind behind it, but what we do are decisions, our choices, our habits, our actions, our attitudes, those things do actually determine what happens in our lives, we're not the initiator of the power, we can't sustain the power, but we're also not just passive. The problem with these two extremes are the raft, it's just my life, I'm just passive in my relationship to whether it's money or relationships or God, over here is again I'm just going to work my way, neither of those are the reality and neither of those will give you life. We've used this quote here from Dallas Wheeler before, and multiple times I want to say it again, I think the way Dallas Wheeler said this is great, he says, grace, God's grace is not opposed to effort, it's opposed to earning, grace is not opposed to effort, it's opposed to earning, God's grace towards us says that this galley shift way that many of us do, that's not reality and that's not going to do anything for us, but except for burn us out probably. But neither is grace, when you read the New Testament of the whole Bible, neither is grace just created this this passivity in us. I'm not saying, Jesus is not saying by talking about trees and fruit and digging deep to build a foundation, the UNI have to do a bunch of moral stuff to acquire a relationship with God, that's not the gospel, but neither is Jesus saying that what we do is irrelevant. It does matter, we do need to dig deep, we need to prune, we need to pay attention to the health of our soul. Legalism commands that we work hard to do a bunch of moral things, the gospel invites us by the power of the spirit to become a different kind of people. I say that again, legalism tells us there's a bunch of stuff you have to do. The gospel says, I'm inviting you, I'm inviting you by the power of the spirit to become a different kind of person. I love how the Christian musician Sarah Grove said it many years ago, this is grace and invitation to be beautiful. God's grace is an invitation for us to become restored into the image of God, imitate me as I am a Christ and a reformed Jewish image as Paul will say. How does this happen? How does character, how does our interior person actually become beautiful by the power of the spirit? Well, just like with any other activity that we want to grow in, our actions matter. If you want to be a better golfer, if you want to be a better violinist, if you want to be a race car driver, you're not going to get a better at those things by just reading about them, thinking about them, showing up at the country club and watching other people play. The only way that our character is going to be transformed is actually in the doing and getting on the golf course, in taking a violin lesson, in learning to drive, I guess not in a race car way, we're not encouraging that necessarily, but the point is our actions do affect us in a deep way. And notice again, that Jesus says the difference in the wise and foolish builders is not the hearing, not the observing, it's the hearing plus the doing. Some people in Jesus' day heard him, a lot of people, and did not keep following. So too, not everyone in church, not everybody who claims Christianity is actually part of the kingdom of God. I mean, did you feel the close to the bone thing he says? Some people even call him Lord Lord, but they're not actually following in his ways. That should be sobering, because this is the challenge, because it's not guilt tripping us, Jesus is not trying to scare us into heaven, this is a wake-up call for us to all realize that we can be self-deceived, we can be very self-deceived. Jesus have had their eyes opened, but even those of us who have had our eyes open, we can get near sighted, we can get hardened, we can get blinded in some sense by our own sin and self-deception. So I think if we're going to take Jesus' words seriously and not just blow them off, we need to put our hands on the rudder of the sailboat, of our souls, we're not going to make ourselves change, but we can line ourselves up with God in prayerful repentance and ask him to blow by the spirit and empower us and change us. So that's the challenge, and I know it's a challenge. Here's the encouragement. Every Christian can do the work of the inward journey. Every Christian can do the work of the inward journey. And light of what I just said about the challenge, it would be really easy for us to fall back into this kind of, okay, well I'm going to work hard, I'm going to do, I'm going to be more things, give more money, come to more things, that's not the point. And especially if this is how you live the rest of your life, which is how I live the rest of my life as well, some of you do, it's easy to fall into that, but either way, the raft or the galley ship, whether today you are a CEO or a teacher, a writer, an accountant, a doctor of some sort, a machine operator, pilot, we were disabled, maybe you're home with children, whatever you do, what I want you to understand is that that is actually the least important thing about you from God's eyes. He does care about your work, our work does matter whatever it is, but he does not care about your title, your income, your accolades, your gifts, your talents, your success, your failures. What he cares about is who you are and who you're becoming on the inside. And that's really hard to believe, especially if you're successful. But in any case, he is not impressed with anything, let me just think about that, he just laughs at any of our foolishness that we think we're so great at, anything, or that we think we're such a failure. What he cares about is who we are and how we're growing to be more like him. The encouragement is that if you're showing up today and you're maybe starting to get burned out and frustrated with this or you're showing up today and you feel like a failure and you feel like you don't have anything to offer, we are all in the same place. Because none of the outside talents or successes or failures or gifts or in abilities, none of those actually matter to God. What he cares about is who you are and who you're becoming, so it's not going to be flashy. This sort of tree-bearing fruit is often not going to be flashy, it's going to look like if you're married, faithfulness, things that nobody's ever going to see. It's going to look like often when someone's in need that you respond with compassion and help them. It's often going to look like nothing flashy that some people never see again of loving your enemies and not condemning those who've hurt you. It's often going to look like private prayer, prayer that people don't even know where you are honest before the Lord and interceding on the behalf of others. That's the kind of stuff that the fruit looks like usually. It's not going to be flashy and it's something that everyone can do if you and I will turn in our hearts and humility to the Lord. So I'm encouraging you today to value what God values. What God values is that he wants to make our tree healthy. He wants to have a foundation in our lives of love and mercy and peace, patience and kindness, gentleness and joy no matter what you do or whether you're good at it or not. That's an encouragement and I also need to say it's hard work. It is really hard work to do the interior work to actually pay attention. As a preacher, there is nothing worse than a Saturday night fight with your wife. And because it's something we all experience and it just feels like why on a Saturday night and maybe for you it was driving to church on Sunday. Shut up, kids. Or whatever it is. Or maybe it's a conflict between you or someone else. I had to do the hard work and this morning I had to do the hard work of saying why am I showing up in this kind of not a big blow over something but I had a disagreement or conversation last night. And I just did not show up well. And it stinks to have to look inside and say what is going on inside of me that I'm showing up this way. It's way easier to concentrate on gifts and talents and opportunities and skills. God doesn't care. God doesn't care how good or bad you are in your outward success as much as he cares about your heart. And so Jesus is inviting us to use these metaphors, to use these images of paying attention to the health of your tree, to keep foundation. And here's the last thing I want to say related to this. What's beautiful about these metaphors? So he's given us some, I've given you some others, boats and whatever else I said, all the other metaphors I said. What's so wonderful about Jesus' metaphors of the tree and the building is that if you lean into them, if you think about them, they're not just saying, okay, here's these ways to relate to God in duty. But these metaphors show us that what God wants to work in us is also for our good. Think about those metaphors. He's saying, I want you to be a healthy tree so that you'll bear fruit, right? So that you and I get to actually experience this fruit of being a person of love and being a person of joy, being a person of mercy and kindness. Those things are so satisfying to live those ways. So it's not just this thing that we have to do to externally relate to him. He's saying, this is the way because this is going to bless you. So too, he's saying, dig deep, not so that you can obey me, but so that you might build a house that when difficulties and trials and crises come, you don't lose everything. You can build a house that can be dry and safe and warm with people you love. He's inviting us to say, do the digging deep, not so you can earn favor with me, so that you might have a house that you would want to live in. So even these metaphors are God saying, I love you and want to bless you, and I want you to find life. As Jesus says, I've come not to condemn the world, so that you might find life and life more abundant. Thank you for listening to the Human Flourishing Podcast. To learn more or get in touch with me, visit my website, JonathanPennington.com.