August 10

Transcript

(Transcribed by TurboScribe.)

Oh, I always love when Kevin introduces me. And Carrie, thank you for the dental floss. For those of you who weren't here last week, I made the mistake of using a dental hygienist as an illustration in my example, and Carrie nicely came up afterwards when she finished up and just reminded me that she was a hygienist for 27 years, and still is.

And she added that, you know, flossing, so if you missed this lesson, listen carefully, this comes directly from a 20 year experience dental hygienist, right? That she, you floss daily, it will add five years to your life. Is that correct? Only floss the ones you wanna keep. Okay, there's a new section to that lesson.

So just floss the ones you wanna keep. The rest you can just ignore, they'll fall out, but you'll still live five more years, right? So that's what the dental floss was for. But I want to say, in worship, I've always felt that when men lead worship, it hits the heart and it hits us at a soul level.

When women lead worship, it raises us up to the heavenlies. There's a level of your voice that cries out during worship. And I heard that so clearly this morning.

So thank you for stepping into that gift, stepping out of being a hygienist, and stepping into that role of leading us. Because seriously, when women pray, when women worship, it lifts us higher. And so men, we need to take note and listen to women when they're praying, listen when they're worshipping, because they can take us to a higher level.

That's just a side note. No, that was it, thank you, no. So I wanted to do a little recap because recaps are always good.

Because this is my fourth Sunday here with you. And so I wanted to recap because I've been kind of hanging out in Matthew for the last few weeks. And so if you missed the first three, because you've been on vacation, I know there's a lot of come and going during summertime, isn't it? There's hit and miss, you know, it's too hot.

I'm staying home in the AC and sipping lemonade, right? It's just one of those things, like who wants to listen to Jim when I can just sit home with a tall iced tea and just enjoy it. So we first talked about judging. Remember, we talked about judgement and the level of judgement that we extend is what we receive.

So we need to be careful of being know-it-alls thinking that, oh, they're this, they're that. We need to be mindful of that. And I use the illustration that when you point a finger at somebody, right? There's one pointing up, but there's three pointing back.

And so we really need to be careful. And Jesus uses the example of the speck in the eye, right? If somebody had a speck in their eye and they're 100 feet away, it's really tiny, but that's how judgemental we can become sometimes. We can focus in on one little tiny speck, one tiny little flaw and make it really big.

But if we took that same speck and brought it up close to our eyes, it's that massive stick, that massive beam that Jesus was talking about. So he says, be mindful of what you're putting out there because you bring it up into your life, it's a lot bigger of a mess inside here than it is out there. And so it was a reminder to be mindful of judging.

And then we talked about seeking first the kingdom of God, asking and seeking and knocking. We don't get because we don't ask, right? Could you imagine going into a restaurant and just, you know, fast food restaurant, you stand at a counter or your favourite coffee shop and just stand there, but don't ask for your favourite latte. You don't ask for that burger and fries with that supersized drink like Kevin gets, right? You don't ask for that.

If you didn't ask, you wouldn't get it, right? You could stand there, your waiter, your server would just stare at you all day long, but until you ask, you don't get anything. So it's that whole principle that Jesus reminds of us to ask, to seek, to knock. And it's the way things open up.

It's the way opportunities open up. It's the way things open. Imagine in our careers, if we never knocked on employers' doors, or if we never knocked on clients' doors to get the sale or get the opportunity to serve people, right? If we just stepped back and didn't knock, nothing would open up.

We could have all kinds of great knowledge, and I deal with this all the time. People got great wisdom and great knowledge and great understanding, but they're unwilling to knock on doors. They're unwilling to present things.

There's something fearful about when we knock because now we're opening up doors and now we're gonna be exposed for who we are. We have to demonstrate that we know what we're talking about. We have to demonstrate that we know what we're speaking about.

But so we talked about also how knocking, when God knocks on our hearts, the doors of our heart, right? There's no handle on the outside. It's a handle on the inside that we need to open up. And so we talked about how knocking, God knocking on the doors of our heart.

He has throughout history knocked on the door of our heart, but he won't push his way through, right? Some doors, like if you go into commercial buildings, they're designed, they're just push-pull. There's no latch or anything, right? You just push them open, you pull them open, you just go in and out. But our door of our heart is one of those things that we need to open up.

And once we open it up and have received Jesus, once we open it up and have received his truth, we need to continue to open it up daily to new understanding. We continue to grow. It's not a one and done thing, just coming to church once and saying, yep, I believe God.

I believe in Jesus. Yep, that's it. No, it's not a one and done.

We need to continue to grow, to continue to move. And one of the things that I think that we fail at in the church, and I wanna speak to leadership here, is discipleship. We're great at teaching, we're great at telling, we're great at talking, but we're not the greatest at discipling.

And that's what Jesus was masterful at, was discipling the disciples, discipling people. And he encouraged them to disciple others. And it's something, it's a missing element in the church that we need to be aware of and be mindful of.

And as we get older, we have more responsibility because we have responsibility to that next generation coming up. I have the privilege of meeting with a young man that just stepped into a leadership position. I have the opportunity to meet with him weekly just to ask what's happening.

What do you wanna do? What do you wanna accomplish? Where do you wanna go? What's working, what's not working? And discipling him through what he's experiencing. And we need to do the same thing in our lives, especially in the Christian church. We need to be discipling.

Don't just think that the person sitting beside you is getting it. Don't just think that the person that comes every Sunday is just understanding everything that's going on. We need to be discipled.

We need to be nurtured. We need to be building relationships. It's one thing to step out of the world, out of the craziness and step into the church.

But if we're not receiving, if we're not building relationships, if we're not being engaged in relationships, it's gonna stay at a flat level. It's never gonna rise. It's never gonna grow.

We're never gonna mature. And that's what discipleship is all about. And so part of our responsibility as believers is nurturing and caring for other people.

Not just keeping it to ourselves, but sharing it with us. And then last week, we talked about the narrow and wide gate, right? We talked about how Jesus said, wide is the door for easy opportunity, for easy things, for the easy life, for getting the fast food restaurants and all the fast food stuff. That gate's easy.

That's wide open. But narrow gate is a little bit tighter because we need to make decisions. We need to make choices, intentional choices to step into that.

And so we talked about how it's important that we choose our decisions or make our decisions wisely. Because if we do today what is easy, it's gonna make tomorrow hard. But if we do what's hard today, it'll make tomorrow easier.

And I know that seems counterintuitive, but think about it. Like if you were exercising and you wanted to get stronger, if you used a half pound or a half kilogramme weight, you can't expect to grow muscle mass. You can't expect to grow in endurance.

But as we increase that, then we continue to grow. And so those are some of the things that we talked about over the last few weeks. And today I want to jump into Matthew seven, verses 15 to 23.

And I'll just read it along with you here. Somehow yours looks different than mine. So we'll go with yours.

Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves. By their fruit, you will recognise them.

Do people pick grapes from thorn bushes or figs from thistles? Likewise, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.

Thus, by your fruit, you will recognise them. Not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, we will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of the Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and in your name perform many miracles? It's interesting that sometimes we think that just showing up in church and going through religious gymnastics is enough, but there's a commitment that needs to be made.

We need to verbally, you know, the word tells us that it's by the confession of our hearts, it's confession of our mouth that we are saved. And Jesus is talking about the fruit because let's face it, we're in a time and an era where a lot of things make sense, don't they? I mean, there's a lot of influencers on television. There's a lot of influencers on YouTube that seem to have it all together, that seem to be sharing the truth.

You know, scripture tells us, I think it was in 1 Timothy 4, it says there's gonna become a time where we don't listen to sound doctrine anymore. We just wanna listen to the stuff that pleases our ear. And if you've ever had anybody speak truth into you, sometimes you don't like to hear the truth, do you? Sometimes it's like, oh, don't tell me the truth, tell me what I want to hear.

I mean, don't tell me what I need to hear, tell me what I want to hear. And we're at that day and age where we can pick and choose, or some people think that we can pick and choose what we listen to and what we accept as gospel truth. We adjust it and say, well, that was for a certain time and era, that's not for today.

And it's true in the Bible, there's historical stuff that was just accounting historical things, but there's many truths that are still relevant today as they were back then. But yet we deny that, we'd say, oh, no, that was just for then, that's not for now. We don't need to do that, we can pick and choose, we can formulate our own thing, we can reinterpret things.

And so often, instead of looking for the truth, we're looking for things that just please what we wanna hear, that make it easy for us to continue doing the stuff that we're doing, rather than facing the truth. It's sometimes hard to face truth, isn't it? If we're being honest, sometimes it's easier just to kind of live with the lies, and some of the biggest lies are the lies that we tell ourselves. We do things out of defence, out of experiences that we have as we're young, and we adopt these mindsets, we adopt this language, and we just begin to rehearse it over and over in our mind.

We could say about losing weight, oh, I'm just big boned, I'm just a big person, it's just the way I am, it's just my body, I don't, you know, and we could associate that as being our truth. We can say, oh, I never get the opportunities, or I never get the job, I never get the thing that I want, we begin to wrap off scripts in our mind saying, well, that's why I don't get what I want, because that's just the way it is. We can do that around money, we can say, oh, I never have money, because I've just, you know, it's just not meant for me to have, God wants me to have nothing.

And we can begin to believe these scripts, we can begin to believe these truths, rather than going to the word and saying, what is truth? And part of our responsibility as believers is digging into this. Listening to me talk, listening to Aubrey talk, shouldn't be enough. And you shouldn't take everything that is said from here as 100%, you need to dig into it yourselves.

You need to go in deeper yourself and look at it and say, okay, what was really meant by that? What was really, what is really truth? Is it really what he says, rather than just going away and saying, well, it must be true, he spoke it from the front, lightning didn't strike him, it must be true. But we need to test these things. Back in the day, in Corinth, and in the early time of the Bible, there was so many different doctrines, and there were a lot of rabbis, a lot of teachers going around, that's why Jesus was always being tested.

Because they're saying, okay, is his doctrine really true? What is he saying? Because everybody had their philosophy, everybody had their idea, and they would gather disciples or people would say, yeah, I buy into that truth, and they would start to follow him around. And so back in the day, they would just follow them for a little while and say, well, I like what they're saying, it kind of, it doesn't challenge me, it's easy on the ears, it goes easy with what I'm believing, so I'm gonna follow them, rather than really digging in and understanding truth. It's our responsibility to dig in and understand the truth, and to dig it deeper and decide, is this something that we want? And we can discover the truth, as Jesus is pointing out in this scripture, by the fruit.

Now you can say, on the surface, things look really good with what this person is saying, it looks really good with their lives, it looks like they got it all together, they must be speaking truth, because I can see some truth. We see this all the time on YouTube, you see people with big houses behind them in the video, and fancy cars, and wads of money in their front pocket, and we think, okay, they must be telling the truth, they must be fruitful, they must be wise, they must be smart, what they're doing must be good. But you know, there's that term called poser, right? People can pose as someone that they're not.

And a lot of these people do this, they rent fancy cars, I know a guy that when he published his first book, he stood in front of a mansion with a fancy car in the driveway and took a picture and put it on the front cover of his book, making it look like he was really well-to-do, looking like he really had it all together, but it was just to set the image. And so many times people do this today, yet we start to blindly follow them. And Jesus is reminding us that it's by the fruit of their lives.

It's the fruit that they bear, so watch them closely, watch them long enough and see if they're producing fruit. You know, it's interesting, you know, as humans, we've got the ability to make a lot more choices than most animals, most creatures on the planet, right? A dog can only reproduce a dog and they just do things instinctively unless we intervene and train them, right? A cat is only a cat. But humans, we have the ability to become so much more.

And so oftentimes we just refer back to natural instinct, back to those mindsets that we've had, back to those scripts that we've adopted, rather than really testing them, rather than really pushing through and discovering who we are, to go to a deeper level. And so really what I wanted to share with us today is to remind us that fancy words, eloquent speech, people posing in front of castles and fancy cars doesn't necessarily mean that they're successful, doesn't really mean that they're fruitful, doesn't really mean that they've got it all together. And we need to be mindful of that and look at the fruit of their lives.

I want us to take a moment and I just want to read a couple of statistics because sometimes we can get hard on ourselves, can't we? We're our own worst critics at times, right? We stand in the mirror and just kind of read the riot act going through, looking at our different body parts, thinking about something that we did through the day and we can really become hard on ourselves. But I want us to reflect on a global scale this morning. Did you know that one in three people on this planet still don't have access to clean water? Your life is looking pretty good so far, isn't it, right? You turn on a tap, there isn't one person here today that couldn't turn on a tap and get clean water.

Maybe you may not necessarily want to drink it, but it's clean water nonetheless, right? You might filter it a little bit, but it's clean water. Half of the world's population, so that's almost 4 billion people, don't have access to healthcare. Yet in Canada, we could go if we got a hangnail, we could go to the hospital and get it looked at.

It's looking pretty good so far, isn't it? Nearly 3 billion people, so that's about a third of the planet, don't have a place to call home. And 20% is now this couch surfing, right? They don't have a place to live, so all they're doing is just bouncing from place to place. They live on their aunt's couch or their friend's couch or their friend's floor or someplace until they get kicked out and they move someplace else.

Almost 3 billion people, one in 10 throughout the world are classified as homeless. One in 10 people lack adequate food. How's your fridge looking this morning? You had a choice whether to eat breakfast or not eat breakfast, right? But one out of 10 struggle with having basic food.

And if we bring it into Canada, we could look around the room and we could begin to look at each other and know that one out of five Canadians suffer some form of addiction. One in five, there's maybe 100 people here. That's potentially 20 of us just in this room.

These are Canadian statistics. Two out of five, so that's 20% of Canadians suffer from loneliness and it increases as it gets older. 65 plus is even more.

Can you see the need for the church? To care, to mentor, to disciple, to support. Two out of five, that's 20% of our population will have financial stresses of some sort. Two out of five, of course, broken relationships.

We will all experience those things, but on an ongoing basis, we have broken relationships, workplaces, personal lives. One in five will suffer anxiety and depression. That's 20%.

So I say that not to bring the level down, but to help us to look at our lives and say, I'm not doing so bad. According to world standards, one of the exciting things, I was hosting an event at our house and we're talking about missions. And if you've ever, how many have ever experienced short-term mission or done any mission work? We've got a few people here that have.

It opens your eyes. You know, I was just sharing a story of how students, we would take students down. We've probably taken 250, 300 students over our lifetime down into Central America.

We brought them all back, by the way. We brought every one of them back. There was once we almost, no, I'm kidding, but we brought them all back.

But afterwards, we would meet two weeks after we came back from the trip and we would ask them, we would kind of debrief just to make sure they're adjusting back to culture because we would take them for 12 days. And so there was a bit of culture shock. And I remember one young guy, he sat down, he says, I can't eat any more food.

I said, what are you talking about? He said, because I experienced that level of poverty and homelessness and people not having enough. He said that picture of doing outdoor food giveaways where we would make a big pot of soup and then the kids would line up. We would see 130, 140 kids come with broken tin plates and plastic bowls and stuff and plastic buckets to get a scoop of soup because that was the only hot meal they were gonna get through the week.

He said that was etched in my mind so badly or so deeply that when I went to school and my schoolmates were throwing away their lunch, I would say, don't throw that away and he would eat it. He was consuming other people's lunches because he couldn't bear to see more stuff get wasted. But those are the experiences that happen as we step out into the hall and we get exposed to those things.

Some of us, the biggest exposure we get is when we stop at the corner traffic lights and see somebody asking for some handouts or going into a grocery store, seeing some. Some of us, that's the only exposure we see that. But locally, we know that it's increasing.

That's why we do these food drives because there's an increase on the demand at the food bank. And I think one of the things that we're called to as believers is to dig in and do more. Because we're taught over and over again, that's part of the reason why I wanted to hang out in Matthew and go through this stuff is because Jesus said, seek first the kingdom of God and everything else will be added unto you.

I know I keep going back to this point but I want us to get it that we live in an upside down kingdom. Jesus flipped everything else upside down. Like the first will become last.

The last will become first. Give everything away and more will be given unto you. He challenged rich people that wanted to follow him saying, how do I follow you? How do I become? He said, just give everything away and follow me.

It doesn't make any sense. I'm rich, I'm wealthy. I've got all this stuff.

You want me to give it all away and follow you? It makes no sense. He turns everything upside down. Why? Because he wants us to focus more on him than the stuff.

We spend most of our life chasing these things at this bottom level, looking for food, looking for clothing, looking for a house, looking for a place to stay, working up the corporate ladder, doing all these different things. We spend all our time doing that where we don't really live our fullest lives. And Jesus came not just to make bad people good.

He came to set people free. He said that I come to give you life and life more abundant. Who would like to have an abundant life? But automatically, when we think of abundance, we think of a fat bank account, don't we? We think of lots of cars in our driveway or a fancier house.

We think of that as being abundance. But what he's saying is these are the principles. These are the things that will increase in your life as you follow me and everything else will be added unto you.

In other words, this is the big picture. This is the big thing to focus on is the kingdom of God, seeking his righteousness, seeking that place, seeking that position, seeking to be right with him, and then everything else will be added unto you. But it doesn't make sense because we're taught in school to get good grades and get a good job and save our money and do all that stuff.

That's what we're taught to do. Yet the kingdom, you know, Jesus comes along and says, hey, give it all away and I'll give you more. That makes no sense.

But that's what he's calling us to do. The proof is always in the fruit. Looking at people's lives, are they doing what they say? Are they living out what they're saying? You know, because as humans, we can do that.

We can demonstrate fruit by living that example, by living the truth, by living what we say. But looking at the fruit, now we can pretend, we can pretend that we've got it all together. We can pretend that we know everything.

We can put ourselves in positions of authority. We can step in and, you know, we become parents. We can become teachers, we become doctors, lawyers and pretend that we've got it all together.

Or we can begin to practise what we preach. We can live that out. God is the old expression that says, do as I do or do as I say, not as I do, right? You remember hearing that? I heard that growing up and I hear it, you know, I still hear it from time to time, but gone is that because people want to see the fruit.

They wanna see it demonstrated. They wanna see an illustration that who you are is really who you are. What you're saying is really what you're saying.

What you believe is really what you believe. And we have a large percentage of the planet on the outside of the church looking in, looking for fruit. They're looking to your life and to my life to see fruit in our lives.

And what did Jesus say is the biggest fruit they would see is that we could love one another. We would demonstrate it with the love that we have for one another. The church or the world is desperately looking for fruit from the church, from believers.

Being a believer, it goes a little bit deeper than just saying that, oh yeah, I go to church. It was kind of like stepping into a kitchen and saying, I'm a chef. You know, or going down to the corner garage and stepping into the garage and say, I'm a mechanic.

Even though you could hold a wrench and stand in a garage and say you're a mechanic, but you're really not a mechanic. And we can do the same thing coming into church. We can come into church and go, oh, you know, I'm a believer, but are you really? Is it something that we're saying at the surface level or has it gone deeper? And that's only a question that you can answer for you.

It's not something that I can answer for you. It's nothing you can answer for me. It's only something that we can answer ourselves.

So on this final Sunday that I get to share with you, I want to lead us in a prayer because I want us to get to the place where we look at ourselves and rather than being critical when we're looking in the mirror, we're looking at ways that we can improve ourselves looking in the mirror. I always teach people that there's three things that we see when we look in the mirror. We look and we see our reflection, right? You see yourself in the present moment.

And you could be, you know, combing your hair, flossing your teeth, doing that kind of stuff, right? You're preparing for something, but you're just kind of in the moment getting ready. But as you look at your reflection, you're getting yourself ready for something that you're stepping into. You're doing something for the future, right? That's the second thing you see.

You see a future thing. So you might be getting yourself ready to go out, to go to school, go to work, meet a neighbour, hang out, do something, right? You're getting ready for something. But as you look in the mirror, you can also see the reflection on the wall behind you, can't you? So you can see what's in your past.

You can see what's behind you. So when we step and look in the mirror, we're not only looking at a present reflection, we're preparing to go into the future, but we're also looking at the back. And it's oftentimes when we're standing in the mirror looking at the reflection that we think of things that we've done.

And I encourage people to look at that and take that opportunity and say, okay, maybe I didn't have the greatest day. You know, maybe I kicked the dog and yelled at my neighbour or did something. But you could look at that and say, what could I do better as I move forward? We can use that opportunity to reflect.

Rather than beating ourselves up, saying, oh, I'm a lousy person, I'm never gonna get it right. My nose is too long, my hair is too short, or whatever it is. We could kind of rehearse those kinds of things, but we could stand and look in the reflection, say, how can I step forward and become a better person? What could I, how could I use that experience and move forward? And as we begin to apply that to our lives, then we can step out into the fullness of who we are.

And it doesn't come by changing 20 things at one time, it comes by just changing one thing and taking one step in one area and shifting one thought, just moving in a different direction in one area of our life that we begin to step into the fullness of who we are. And all that can happen just by looking at ourselves in the mirror. So the next time you look at yourself in the mirror, and I guarantee that you will.