New Kingdom Treasure

To answer the question “Have I entered the Kingdom of God?” you must look at your heart.

Note: This transcript was auto generated and may have errors.

Well, there’s a show my wife and I used to watch called Restaurant Impossible. Anybody ever watch that show? It was a great show. I loved I loved that show. It’s not on anymore, but it was one of those shows where someone goes in and renovates something from the ground up. And in this case, it was it was restaurants. There was this British guy named Robert Irvine, who was the host, and the episode always started with, with, with Robert just going in and ordering lunch or dinner just like any other customer. And so they would bring out three, four things from the kitchen for him to eat. And it was just some sort of hideous food monstrosity that he would spit out on to the table. Real appetizing. The waiter would always just be standing there like, oh, we’re so sorry. We know it’s terrible. We know it’s bad. I’m sorry I brought this to you. And so then Robert would get up and he would go back into the kitchen. And this is when the true horror show would begin, because he would go around the kitchen and find all the rotten food and the bugs, and he’d move something, and there would just be sludge and bugs underneath there crawling out. And he’d go back into the refrigerators and there’d be no fresh food in the refrigerators, and there would be warm. For some reason, the fridges were warm, everything would be expired.

And sometimes, sometimes on the really bad episode, there’d be like, mouse feces everywhere. Now you’re wondering about your favorite restaurant, aren’t you? Yeah. When was the last time you were in that kitchen? Probably never. Yeah, yeah. And also usually the owners were awful. They were usually just terrible. They would just scream at everybody. They didn’t know what they were doing. They were they were just mean, mean people. I worked at a restaurant like this in college. I was a waiter at a restaurant like this, out where the customers were. It was supposed to be like a fine dining restaurant. But back in the kitchen, it was chaos. We had a sink that didn’t have any pipes under it. So the drain, you just look through the drain and there was the floor. And so the water would just go through the drain to the floor and then go into the, into the floor drain. That was how that’s how that was set up. And the owners would just walk around and screaming and yelling at people all the time. I worked there for three months. That was enough. What I loved about the show was this restaurant. Impossible? Was that all the chaos in the kitchen, all the all the chaos in the kitchen, could be tasted in the food, right? So the food was was the the result of everything that was happening. This food that the host couldn’t even eat was the product of the disaster that was going on back that nobody, nobody could see.

And by the end of the show, the food tasted great because he worked to transform everything. Robert didn’t just go and teach these people how to cook. I mean, that was part of it. But he went in through and he transformed everything that was happening in the restaurant. He completely refurbished the entire heart of that restaurant. In the closing moments of his brief sermon on the Kingdom of God that we’ve been exploring for the past four weeks, Jesus now turned to the question of inclusion. How do I know that I am in the Kingdom of God? How do you know that you are a disciple of Jesus, living under the reign of King Jesus? I would say that this is the question that I have spent the most time helping people to answer in the past 18 years that I have been a pastor, and I imagine it will probably occupy the remainder of however long the Lord gives me for ministry. Jesus has shown us what his kingdom is all about, but we have to know whether we are outside of that kingdom looking in or inside of that kingdom. And the the answer makes all the difference, not just for your present life, but for your hope. For all of eternity. To answer the question.

Have I entered the Kingdom of God? You have to go to your heart. You have to go back to your heart. We have to go into the kitchen of your life. It’s not enough to just take a quick inventory and a quick glance at your life to see if you’re in Jesus kingdom. We have to know what’s going on in your heart and in your mind. Entrance into Jesus kingdom requires being born again. It’s such a radical shift. It’s so. It’s so monumental. It’s like you’re being born a second time into a new world. It requires spiritual renewal. Requires renovation of your heart. And so Jesus gives us four images to help us determine what is happening in our own hearts. We can take inventory of what’s going on inside of us by looking at these four images that we’re going to look at today. He gives us four pictures that contrast the heart of a person who is in his kingdom, and the heart of a person who isn’t in his kingdom. Now, before we look at these four images, I want to say just two things very briefly. And the first is when the Bible refers to the heart. Don’t just think about your emotions. I know that’s where we go when we hear the word heart. We go to emotions very quickly. When we put a heart on something, we think exclusively of emotional feelings.

That’s what Valentine’s Day has done to us, right? So we see heart shaped cards and candies. We think of. We think of love. We think of specifically. We think of feelings of love. We don’t even think about love in its in its full state. We just think about the feelings of love. But when Scripture talks about the heart, it’s talking about the center of our entire being. So that includes what we love. It includes the emotions of love, but it also includes things like our will and our passions and our commitments and our wisdom. The heart is the motivating force behind your life. Interestingly, in that time, in Jesus time in Hebrew culture, the center for human emotion was the guts. They they would refer to their to their guts. Guts are the emotional center. But no one will eat candy shaped like a large intestine. You know what I mean? Maybe Twizzlers, but. The second thing. The second thing I want to say is a warning. And it’s a little bit more serious here. Don’t assume that your presence here this morning is the determining factor of whether you’re not in the kingdom of God. Don’t assume attendance is what would tell you that in my time as a pastor, I have known many men and women who will gladly attend a service like this. And you’ll come and you’ll sing the songs, and you’ll talk to the people and you’ll.

You’ll listen to the sermon. Do all those things and yet not have your heart transformed by Jesus grace, and therefore you’ve not entered into the Kingdom of God. I’ve known plenty of people like that. Looking at these images that Jesus presents should be a time of sober assessment for all of us. And it’s been my prayer this week that the Lord would use this time to open closed spiritual eyes and renovate dead hearts. Let’s begin with the good and the bad tree. For no good tree bears bad fruit. Nor again does a bad tree bear good fruit. For each tree is known by its own fruit. For figs are not gathered from thorn bushes, nor are grapes picked from a bramble bush. So when I was a kid, we lived on a large property for a short period of time in my upbringing, about 27 acres, and at one point during my time at this sort of this farm, my dad decided to grow apple trees in his own orchard. Thought that would be a really good idea. And so I helped him plant the trees. And I remembered thinking, as we were planting these trees, all we were going to have so many apples. This is going to be so great. We’re just going to be flush with apples. We can get apples anytime we want. This is going to be so awesome. It turns out that apples are incredibly hard to grow.

Very, very hard. You don’t just plant the tree and get apples. These trees were there for years, and they would only produce the sort of the scrawniest, ugliest, most unappetizing little apples. There’s a lot of work that has to go into cultivating trees so that they produce apples. And then the apples then are an indication of what’s going on inside the tree. It’s the same as the kitchen story that I that I told earlier. What happens on the outside is an indication of what is happening on the inside. The food on the plate is an indication of what’s happening in the kitchen. The the fruit on the branch shows you what is happening inside the tree. The product of your life, friends, is an indication of what’s going on in your heart. You can see what’s happening coming out of your life, and you can say, this is an indication of what’s happening inside of me. Bad hearts produce bad fruit in your life. Good hearts produce good fruit. You can look at your actions and your attitudes, and assess whether or not there has been a gospel transformation that has taken place inside of you. Now. What I have just said is fraught with peril and misapplication. Okay. There’s dangers all over what I just said. You could easily take what Jesus says here, or what I am teaching right now, and you could turn that into good people are Christians.

Bad people are not. And if that’s what you hear this morning, if that’s what you walk out of here with this morning, you either didn’t hear Jesus properly or more likely, I did not teach very carefully. I didn’t teach very clearly. So let me just see if I can remedy that a little bit. Good or bad behavior. So? So moral or immoral behavior. Is not the determining factor for what makes you produce good or bad. Okay, say it again. Good behavior and bad behavior is not the determining factor for what makes you produce good or bad. People who don’t know Jesus can have moral behavior. People who do know Jesus can do immoral things. The determining factor for good fruit in your life is not whether what you’re producing is moral, but whether it’s Christ honoring. Okay. There’s a distinction there. Is the motivation for your actions and your attitude. A deep and whole life encompassing desire to honor and glorify Christ. That’s the question you need to be asking. And if you’re wondering where I get that distinction, just read over the back of the rest of the sermon. This, this. What Jesus is teaching here is part of an overall teaching. And so you need to place this, this teaching about the good and bad tree into the overall sermon. Everyone loves people who love them back.

Do you remember that from a few weeks ago? You love people who love him back. Love you back. That doesn’t distinguish you from anything. That’s moral behavior as a good thing to do, but it doesn’t distinguish you. Jesus says, here’s what distinguishes you with a heart transformed by Christ. Disciples of Jesus love their enemies in order to glorify God. No one wants to be poor and hungry and sad and hated. But if you’re willing to do that because of your love for Jesus, if you’re willing to to to live a life of poverty and hunger and sadness and hatred because of Jesus for the sake of his name, for the sake of his mission, you’ll be blessed even though your life is hard. That’s the difference. That’s the distinction. That’s the difference in fruit. Following Jesus will make you more moral. It will do that because the morality of our world lines up largely with what we see in God’s law. Because God’s law is written on the hearts of his creatures. But being moral doesn’t mean that your fruit is good in this case. When a Christian is disobedient to Jesus, there is pain in your heart over that and it drives you to repentance. That’s good fruit. That’s part of the good fruit that comes out of you. Repentance is a good fruit. When someone outside of Jesus kingdom happens to behave in a way that aligns with Jesus commands, that doesn’t mean that he’s producing the fruit of obedience to Jesus.

When I when I obey the speed limit here in Minnesota, does that mean I’m also obeying the speed laws in Iowa? No. What if what if the speed limits happened to be the same in both places? How about then? Am I obeying it then? No. Still no, because it’s a completely different set of authorities. I’m not under that other authority. Jesus is saying that here, if we’re in his kingdom, if we’re under his authority, we will produce actions and attitudes and values and speech. That’s all kingdom motivated. We’re living under his authority. We’ll be listening to his authoritative voice. And producing those things which honor him. Which is to say, we will worship you. Ever heard people referring to worship as a whole life of worship? That everything we do to glorify and honor the Lord is like a life of worship. That’s what Jesus is saying here. Those in his kingdom who are rooted in the gospel, they’re going to produce worship, good fruit of worship, those who are outside of his kingdom that can’t produce that. They can’t produce worship. You can’t get worship off someone who is not made new by the gospel, any more than you can get figs off of a thorn bush. It’s impossible. You’re either rooted in the gospel or you’re not. The second image here changes the illustration slightly, but it’s you’ll see the same thing here.

The good person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good, and the evil person out of the evil treasure produces evil. For out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks. When you think about a treasure, you think about something valuable that you’re that you’re trying to protect, right? I used to love those stories of pirates and their treasure. And they would have, you know, gold casks. And they would go and they would they would bury them. Right. And they would come up with a map to get to the treasure. And then that map became people would fight over getting these maps right. Turns out, by the way, that that is that rarely actually happened, that those maps and that buried treasure, that it’s really more lore than than anything else. It turns out, according to historians, pirates were far more apt to squander their money on awful things than just to go bury it somewhere. Which is why that never made it into the Disney movies. But treasure. Treasure is something that you want. Treasure is something that you go after. It’s something that you value and protect. It directs your life. It gives you gives you motivation. And that’s Jesus analogy here. And we all have this treasure. We all have something. That’s our treasure. It’s not going to be a box of gold doubloons buried in your backyard, but it’s the thing that you prize in your heart more than anything.

That’s your treasure. Whatever it is that you prize. Jesus says that the good or evil that you produce comes out of the treasure that sits at the center of who you are. And this is this is very much like the fruit image from before. In fact, this image of the treasure is meant to illustrate, to give further understanding and explain that that prior image. But it also builds on that image. Because here Jesus says that you can figure out where your heart is by what you treasure. So where’s my heart? Well, let me ask you, what do you value the most? What’s most valuable to you? What is that thing which you feel you must protect above all else? Because whatever it is, that will dictate what comes out of you. If it’s the gospel. If the gospel is what you prize above all else, then your actions will be gospel centered. And if it’s an idol. Then it will be idolatry. This is easier to see with an example. So let’s use an example to see how an evil treasure in a person would produce evil in your life. Having having successful children is a good thing to want. If you have kids, you want them to be successful. That’s just. That’s just how it is. There’s nothing wrong with hoping that your children will make great decisions.

You want them. Isn’t that what you want more than anything? See, my kids just make great decisions and have successful lives. But if having a successful and rich and powerful family that’s more accomplished than everyone else is the treasure of your heart. If it’s the motivating life goal that sits at the center of you. Well, then everything you do would be to make that happen. Because the treasure in your heart is the pride of glory from other people, so everything you do will flow out of that pride. So you’ll begin to insist that your child is special. My child is special and should have special treatment. Like I make sure my child is always first. I got to make sure my child is first in line is is the one that’s being exemplified. I got to make sure my kid is the star in the show or the star on the team. Got to make sure that my child is is being lauded by other people. This is how, by the way, you end up with parents calling colleges to talk to their professors about their grades. Okay. You’ll teach your children to value making choices that will build up and set them apart. But you might not teach values like humility or learning to appreciate the successes of others. And what’s going to happen over time is that you’ll be filled with pride and vanity when your children are honored by the world, but you’ll be filled with anger and jealousy when they’re not honored by the world.

And out of the evil treasure of your heart, you’ll produce evil. Do you see how important it is for Christ to be the treasure in your life? You see how important it is for the gospel of Christ to be the controlling factor at the center of who you are. You see, when Christ is your treasure, when you seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness first. What comes out of you, then are those things that honor the Lord. When you prize Jesus in His gospel, in your heart, when that sits at the seat of control, when the gospel is in control of your life, what happens is that your actions follow on that. So going back to our example, if you’re if you if you treasure Jesus, that will motivate you practically how you guide your children. If you if you prize the honor of Christ above all else, not the honor of your kids. But if you the honor of Christ above all else, well, then, then you’ll teach your children to honor the Lord above all else. So when when you tell them to work hard for success, it will not be 2 to 2 for success in itself, to glorify themselves, but so that they will worship the Lord with their hard work.

Your attitude when they they fail will not be shame and anger, but will instead pivot to a desire to guide your children to honor the Lord even in their failure. How do I honor the Lord even when I don’t do as well as I want to do, and I fail to achieve my goals? Your hopes for them are still going to be high, because that’s that’s a good thing. You’re going to of course you’re going to hope. But because it’s a good thing to want your children to succeed, but you’ll want their success to be worship, that’ll be the difference. I don’t want them to succeed because I want them to be prideful, or I feel my own pride and my parenting. I want them to succeed because that success is worship. You’ll want it to be God honoring success achieved in righteousness, not in cutting corners or stepping on the heads of their peers. And by the way, you can do that with anything. We just did it with children. But you can you can do this with anything. When, when, when Christ is your treasure, your marriage, which is a good gift from God, your marriage becomes a picture of the gospel. Ephesians five. Right. It becomes a way of worshiping. Money becomes a tool that you use for the Kingdom of God. Free. Time becomes time to delight in God’s world.

Hobbies themselves, even even hobbies. Things you enjoy doing. Those become an opportunity for worship and for witness. Make any of those things themselves. Your treasure. And they will lead you to idolatry. Make Christ your treasure and all of those things become. God glorifying joys. You see how it changes the perspective? It’s out of the abundance of the heart that the mouth speaks. Whatever is in you is what is going to come out of you. You will not produce what you don’t have. Jesus is not simply hoping that you will be better behaved. The gospel isn’t about making sure that your behavior is better. Make sure that you’re doing what God told you to do. Okay, so now what the gospel is about. It doesn’t just change your behavior. The gospel changes who you are. In your heart. It changes what you treasure. And what follows on that? Is behavior that honors and glorifies God. The third image. Gives us yet one more perspective on the question am I in the Kingdom of God? Why do you call me Lord, Lord, and not do what I tell you? It’s a pretty simple sentence, isn’t it? Do you know what the word Lord means? We say it a lot in church. We sing it a lot in church. But, you know, have you ever noticed how if we use a word too much or too often, it sort of loses its significance? It’s like the word gentleman.

So if I if I’m in front of a group of guys and I say, oh, hello, gentleman, all they heard was, hi, guys. That’s it. That’s all they heard. They didn’t hear anything special, right? Maybe I just said, oh, fancy word there. But all they heard was. Hi, guys. Hello, gentlemen. That means nothing, right? It just means guys. But it didn’t always. It didn’t always mean that it started as a very specific title for a particular class of British nobility. And then it became it came to refer to any courteous or respectable man. And now we just use it whenever the mood strikes us to refer to any man at all. See how it’s changed over time. I don’t care about that word. I don’t care about the word gentleman. But if we do the same thing with the word Lord in Scripture, if it just becomes a name of God that we don’t care too much about, we lose something very important here. See, because the word Lord means master. Master. When you when you say someone is Lord, you are saying that you are the obedient servant to this person. Paul, in a few places in the New Testament refers to himself as a bond servant of Christ. Sometimes that word is translated slave. For. For someone to call Jesus Lord is to say when? When it comes to my life, when you when you consider who I am, my direction, my fate, and all that I am, Jesus is in control.

Jesus is Lord over all of that. Jesus sets the course. He gives them marching orders for everything that I do. Which is why Jesus is perplexed here. Why do you call me Lord, Lord, and not do what I’m telling you to do? Doesn’t even make sense. Doesn’t make sense. Not not doing what Jesus says is completely out of line with a confession that he is Lord. Don’t call him Lord unless he’s your Lord. Jesus is is talking about the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of God. The kingdom. He’s not talking about the Democratic Republic of God. He’s not inviting us into the free state of God. Okay. Kingdoms have kings. The invitation is to come and to find joy and life, but to find joy and life under the reign of King Jesus. And you will find it there. You will find everything that you need. Everything Jesus has shown us in this kingdom will set you free from the bondage of sin, and it will give you love and joy and hope and peace in this world. But it is all found under the lordship, under the sovereign control. Under the reign of King Jesus. He’s the one who guides us. Not with his suggestions, but with his commands. But even then, in these early years, back when Jesus was on the earth and walking around teaching.

Right there on the plane. Even then, there were people in the crowd who had enough respect for Jesus to call him Lord, but who didn’t listen to him. Historically, our American culture has created the opportunity for church seats to be filled on Sunday mornings with people who will gladly call Jesus Lord but not do what he says. And I’m thankful for that. I’m thankful we live at a time that anybody can come and we open our doors. We want everybody to come and to hear what Jesus has to say. There is always an open chair. There’s always an invitation to come and to sit. We want a culture that anyone can come to our services. And if that’s you this morning, if you’re here and you don’t follow Jesus, but you’re just sort of checking Jesus out, if you’re just checking out Calvary, if you’re not sure what you’ve done with the gospel. We are so, so glad that you are here to hear more from Scripture. But if you’re calling Jesus Lord and you’re not doing what he says, there’s a good reason to think that you’re not in the kingdom that you think you’re in and your sins are not covered by Jesus the way you think they are. And what you need. Is to repent. What you need is to not tell yourself lies anymore.

But to repent of living under your own reign in your own way. And turned to King Jesus and trust him as your Lord and as your Savior, and actually follow him. Because the final image is both a wonderful assurance for those who do follow Jesus. And it’s a warning to those who don’t. Everyone who comes to me and hears my words and does them, I will show you what he’s like. He’s like a man building a house who dug deep and laid the foundation on the rock. And when the flood arose, the stream broke against that house and could not shake it because it had been well built. But the one who hears and does not do them is like a man who built a house on the ground without a foundation. When the stream broke against it. Immediately it fell, and the ruin of that house was great. So Jesus closes his tour of the kingdom and invites us in with an image of what it’s like to to live there. If you come to Jesus and you hear his words and then respond in faith and obedience. Well, it’s like building a house. What’s the first step when you build a house? Well, any contractor will tell you that it’s to survey the land and to then build a foundation. So you have to know what’s going to be underneath the house. You’ve got to dig down in, you’ve got to find solid rock so that when you lay the foundation, it will hold up.

And then you build that foundation on that rock and that house. Everything that you build above will be firm. Jesus lordship in his kingdom provides the stable foundation on which you can build your life. Have you ever noticed how many people lately are vocal about how their lives are falling apart? This is this is more and more people just openly just talk about how how difficult the world is, how difficult life is. And the storm of Covid is all but over. But but the new storms, like economic instability and depression, are exposing foundationless homes, and people are willing to talk about that. Jesus isn’t saying that being founded on his words in his kingdom, covered by his grace, will prevent you from experiencing any of the storms. He’s not saying that when you follow me, you won’t experience any of the stuff that happens to the people around you. That’s difficult, but what it will do is give you the strength to endure that storm. Our circumstances are going to shift. They’re going to shift with every tragedy, every tense relationship, every economic downturn. And if money and relationships or happiness or are the foundation of your life, that’s what you live for. Those storms will break your foundation and then your life will get overturned. But if if your life is built on the firm foundation of an eternal, sovereign, all powerful and all knowing Lord, then those circumstances will be hard, but they won’t topple you.

They won’t tip you over. Without Christ and his teaching as the solid foundation of all that you are. Well, then you’ll have no foundation at all. Jesus likens this to building a house on the ground. Now, if you’re familiar more familiar with the sermon on the Mount, which most people are from, Matthew, you remember hearing about the sand, the shifting sand that you could build on there. That’s one way of seeing that imagery. But here Jesus likens it to simply building on the ground, just starting off, whatever, whatever way this is shaped, whatever moisture content is in there, whatever, whatever it is, we’re just going to start with this, and we’re just going to build our house on top of it. I talk to people all the time who have very strong convictions that shape the choices that they make. Very strong convictions. And I say, well, how do you know that your convictions are true? What are they founded? I asked them, why do you think this way? How do you know that your convictions are right? And a lot of times, most of the time I’ll even say they don’t actually know. They just believe those things. But they don’t. They don’t actually know why they’re true. It just it feels right to them.

It just seems right to them. It’s what their friends value. But they never bothered to ask the question of the foundation of their worldview. And so their houses are built on their feelings, directed by the shifting winds of popular cultural trends. It’s no wonder that to me that there is so much angst and pain in our society. There’s no foundation to whether any of the storms. That’s folks are experiencing. I know the metaphors have come fast and thick this morning, and I hope you spend some more time thinking on these, reading these things and meditating on them. But I want you to understand that all of these pictures, all of these pictures have one thing in common. They are images of a kingdom that is so much better. There’s so much better. There’s. There’s so much desire right now for solutions, so much desire for solutions that will fix our world. Friends, Jesus has them. Jesus has the solution because he brought the kingdom of God into this world. Come and have your heart changed. Be recalibrated by his grace, so that you’ll produce the good fruit so that you will have the good treasure. Come and listen to the Lord Jesus, not just Jesus with his suggestions. The Lord Jesus who reigns because he will direct your steps. Don’t just go off today casually referring to Jesus as Lord. Listen to the Lord. Dig down deep and found your life on the rock of Jesus grace. Let’s pray.