Well, hi. Today we will be completing the Sermon on the Mount. We're back in Matthew looking at Chapter 7, going through the Historic Faith Commentary Series. I'm just hitting some of the highlights. I'm leaving, trying to leave plenty of treasures for you to discover yourself inside the commentary. Now, these aren't my treasures.
These are insights of the early Christians, people who lived back in the same society in which Jesus and the apostles lived, who had the same manner of life, who spoke the same type of Greek, et cetera. So their insights are so important. And I'd say even more important than all of the things I've listed is that they lived at a time when the Kingdom of God was the focus of Christianity, not theology. And they lived before all of the theological controversy started.
Because as a result of those controversies, a lot of Christianity got changed. Doctrines got changed because people would overreact to this heresy and they'd come up with a new one of their own in reaction to that one. So that's why the further back we can get, the pure the doctrine as a general rule. So today we're talking about Matthew 7. I'm going to skip down to verses 3 through 5. We'll just start with these.
Jesus said, " Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not consider the beam that is in your own eye? Or how will you say to your brother, let me remove the speck from your eye and see, a beam is in your own eye. You hypocrite! First remove the beam out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck out of your brother's eye.
Now, one reason I wanted to talk about this particular passage today, because we're not going to be looking at every verse in chapter seven, is that I see it misexplained so often. It kind of surprises me because I thought myself that it was pretty clear what Jesus meant and that everybody took it the way the early Christians did.
But I've heard so many explanations of that passage about the speck in your brother's eye and the beam in your own eye, that I realized, okay, in our modern society, we aren't getting his manner of expression or something like that. Because what I generally hear people saying, Christians, is that Jesus wants us to get the speck out of our brother's eye. And so they go through these long explanations of, okay, this is what you need to do.
Now Jesus wants you to get the beam out of your own eye because he's wanting you to get the speck out of your brother's eye and it's like, is that what Jesus said? The early Christians certainly didn't hear him saying that. They heard him saying, " Why are you worrying about your brother's sins when you should be looking at your own sins? " The speck is what's wrong with your brother. The beam are your own sins. You work on your own sins.
And so the beam is always going to be in your eye because you're never going to be free from sin. So you're looking particularly at the small sins of your brother when you should be focusing on your own sins. That's what he's saying. He's not encouraging you to worry about the speck in your brother's eye. He's telling you not to look at that, to look at the beam in your own eye. That is your own sins. I'll read just a few quotes.
Tertullian says, " Remove the speck or rather the beam out of your own eye so that you may be able to extract the speck from the eyes of others. Amend your own lives first. " Chrysostom adds, " Do you wish to judge? Judge your own sins. No one will accuse you if you condemn yourself. " So yes, there is a place when we do need to talk to a brother or sister about sin in their life. I mean, Jesus in Matthew 18, He gives us a procedure to do that.
Although there he's not talking about specks, he's talking about major sins. So yeah, if you want to worry about the sins of your brother, take care of your own sins first and then you can talk to your brother about his sins. Or if he's committed serious sins that need to be addressed, the person addressing him should be someone certainly who is not guilty of that same sin. And it should not be in a spirit of fault finding. Jesus says you hypocrite or you actor. You act like you're concerned about your brother.
Oh, you got a speck in your eye. Let me help you. You're just acting. You're not concerned about him. You're being self-righteous. You're being judgmental. You're looking at his faults instead of looking at your own. You're the very type of person that Jesus does not want in His kingdom. So the answer isn't how to focus on getting specks out of your brother's eyes. It's how to focus on your own sin and get your own life straightened.
Okay, Matthew 7:6, Jesus said, " Do not give what is holy to dogs, nor cast your pearls before swine. " Now, the early Christians applied that saying, and it's today applied in a lot of different ways. They applied it in two main areas. One was evangelism. That is, we will share the gospel, of course, with everyone. I don't know that there would be an occasion that we would just refuse to share the gospel unless it was very clear that it was just before mockers and they had no interest in hearing.
But certainly, there would be a point in time with any person or group of people that it's obvious that they had no interest, that you were wasting your time, you're casting the pearl, the gospel before swine. And all they are going to do is to ridicule you and use it against you whatever you say. But the other way the early Christians applied this that I would have never thought about was to baptism and communion, to not give what is holy to dogs. That is, you don't give communion to an unholy person.
This might be a baptized Christian who is in serious sin and you don't give what is holy to them, or certainly never to an unbaptized person. And likewise, you don't give baptism to somebody who is not truly repented. Now, a person doesn't have to do any particular works before baptism before they become a Christian. But they do need to repent. They need to believe.
There has to be a strong indication that there's been a conversion, that they aren't going to go back and wallow in the mud, that you're not giving what is holy again to the dogs, giving them baptism when their heart has really not changed. Now, sometimes you don't know. And like with Simon Magus, I mean, that was the apostles who baptized him. So that will happen. He showed his true colors after he was baptized. So it wasn't wrong that they baptized him.
But if someone shows it before they're baptized, no, then they shouldn't receive baptism. Now I'm going to jump down to Matthew 7:12, where Jesus gave what is known as the Golden Rule. Now, when I was in Matthew 6, I talked about the fact that in so many circles today, particularly among evangelicals, it's considered unspiritual to pray the Lord's prayer. And likewise, I've seen it. They view it as unspiritual to talk about the golden rule or live by the golden rule.
I don't mean all of them, but I've met a number who looked at it that way that, oh, that's something Catholics worry about. You know, we're on a much higher level than that. Well, certainly the golden rule is a starting point. It doesn't encompass everything there is to know about the Christian life, but if you were going to sum it up in one sentence, I think that would, to a large degree, sum it up. Therefore, all things, whatever you would have men do to you, do likewise to them.
In fact, Jesus said, " For this is the law and the prophets. " So this sums up everything that had been given, and he puts it just in a simple sentence. What you want to do, you would want people to do to you, then do that to others. And the early Christians saw both a negative and a positive application to this. Often today, people say only the pagans applied it negatively and the Christians applied it positively. That is, the pagans said, " Don't do to others what you wouldn't want done to you.
" And Jesus said, " Do to others. " And that is a true and a good observation that it goes beyond just don't do harm to other people, but it does also include it. In other words, if you wouldn't want someone to gossip about you, then don't gossip about them. I mean, the early Christians talk about it in both the negative and the positive application. When I say the negative, in the sense of don't do to others what you don't want them to do to you.
In other words, you can't live by Jesus ' teaching if you're not following that aspect of it, if you're doing things to others that you wouldn't want them to do to you. But then likewise, it's to have a proactive application of go out and do things to other people that you would want them to do to you. That perhaps the pagans didn't think so much about doing that.
But yeah, going out and visiting somebody who's in prison or visiting the sick or feeding the hungry or going to a brother or sister and just giving them words of encouragement, paying them a visit, inviting them over to dinner. I mean, there's a lot of things like like that that would be encompassed in the proactive part that we don't just sit and don't do harm to anyone else. We actively do good to others.
Now, one reason the early Christians talk a lot about the negative application of don't do to others is they said that this is actually part of natural law. One of the things the early Christians talk about a lot, not only in their discussion of Matthew, I'm working right now on Romans, and they talk about it a lot when they're discussing Romans, is that God is planted in all mankind, every society from the time of Abel on down to the present day, that humans are infused with natural law.
We do have a God-given conscience. Now, of course, Christianity, in fact, the Mosaic Law went far beyond just what's in natural law, what's written in our conscience, and Christianity goes even beyond that. But it encompasses natural law. And you know, even the worst heathen out there, even an atheist, knows that no one wants done to them what they wouldn't want to do to someone else. If I don't want someone to steal from me, then I know it's wrong to steal from somebody else.
If I don't want somebody to assault me physically, then it's wrong for me to assault someone else. If I don't want someone to lie to me, it's wrong to lie to someone else. This is written in everyone's conscience. And so it is part of the Christian life. I mean, we shouldn't look down on the golden rule like, oh. And yet Christ's teachings go beyond the golden rule. So yes, we want to advance beyond it, but we shouldn't look down on it like, oh, that's just for baby Christians.
No, that's where mature Christians should be, and they should be living out the golden rule. And they should be thinking about that on a daily basis. All right, now towards the end of Matthew 7, which is towards the end of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus talks about how to identify false prophets. And He says, " You will know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes from thorns or figs from thistles? " And I wanted to mention this because Jesus talks a lot about fruits. The early Christians talk a lot about fruit.
Paul talks about it. The other apostles, John the Baptist talked about fruit, that this is the essence of the Christian life, is producing fruit. It's not just a matter of believing. It's not a matter of once saved, always saved. It doesn't take a lot beyond repentance and confession and faith to get on the vine. I'm talking now about John 15, the parable of the vine and the branches. Yeah, there's not a lot involved in getting on the vine, but staying on it, we have to produce fruit.
And to produce fruit, we have to have Christ living in us. We have to be filled with the Holy Spirit to produce godly fruit. And so this is the essence of the Christian life is this fruitful, I call it an obedient love faith relationship with Christ that is producing godly fruit, the fruits of the Spirit and other things that way, that is clear in our life.
So when a Christian is not producing godly fruit or is producing a lot of ungodly fruit, then we know that this is not somebody without necessarily judging someone and saying, well, they're not a Christian. I think we can say they're not living by Christ's teachings. They're not producing godly fruit. If they claim to be a prophet, well, then we can say you are a false prophet, that if you are a true prophet, you would be producing godly fruit. You will know them, he said, by their fruit.
So beware of false prophets. Look at the fruit that they are producing. And then at the conclusion of the Sermon on the Mount, or at least what I think of Matthew 7:21 down to the end, he said, " Not everyone who says to me, ' Lord, Lord, will enter into the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. " Now, it has surprised me so much how Christians can read those words and let them just go totally past them. That, no, it's all about just faith, faith alone. As long as you get saved.
And he said, it's not. He said, I'll go back and read that. It's the one who does the will of my father. Well, of course, they try to get around that by saying, well, see, the will of his father is to believe in him and they'll pull out a proof text, you know, to that effect. And yeah, you can play games with the Bible that way. But this is at the end of the Sermon on the Mount. He's just been telling them what His will is, what the will of His Father is.
So we don't have to guess or reduce it down, " Oh, it's just believing in Christ. " Or maybe we should do the opposite. Believing in Christ means a lot more. It may be beginning with believing that He's the Son of God, that He died for our sins, that we are saved through His shed blood. That might be the beginning step, but believing in Christ also means living in Christ, believing what He taught us, and living by what He taught us, because we don't really believe He is our Lord if we don't do what He says.
In fact, in Luke, He says, " Why do you call me or say to me, Lord, Lord, and do not do what I tell you? " So that's what he's saying here again in the Sermon on the Mount. If you're not doing what I tell you, don't call me by the title Lord, because Lord means you're acknowledging me as your master. And yet, obviously, you don't acknowledge me. Well, then he said these people, and it sounds like he's describing Judgment Day and that these people are surprised.
And they said, well, we did all of these miracles in your name. The mighty works. This is talking about miracles. We cast out demons. We did all of these things. And he says, I'll confess to you, I never knew you. I'll read it. Many will say to me that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in your name and cast out demons in your name, and done many wonderful works in your name? And then I will declare to them, " I never knew you. Depart from me, you who practice lawlessness.
" So miracles are no proof that we are a true follower of Jesus Christ, that we are even a Christian, let alone a true prophet or a true teacher. And yet, even though Jesus specifically tells us that, knowing that our inclination would be to think, oh, if he's doing a miracle, then he must be from God. Or even more so, if I'm able to do a miracle, well, obviously, I'm pleasing God and I've got God's power in me. Because these people weren't just saying they were doing it.
They're saying we were doing these mighty works. And Jesus says, that is no indication at all. Now, we don't know if and the early Christians talk about this. Does this mean that they actually weren't doing these things, that the prophecies were fake, casting out demons was fake, the miracles were fake? Possibly, maybe it just appeared that they were doing those things. But on the other hand, it could be true. I mean, Satan is given power to do miracles.
The false priests there in Egypt were able to do different miracles. So, yeah, miracles can be done through Satan's power, or God may even give us the power to do something. There have been people in the Old Testament who performed miracles, but who weren't pleasing to God in the end. So, he's just saying, it doesn't matter if they're counterfeit, if they're genuine, you don't have to worry about, did it come from God? Did it come from Satan or whatever?
The bottom line is, if you're practicing lawlessness, then I don't know you. You are not my follower and you're going to be cast out on Judgment Day. You are not going to inherit the Kingdom of Heaven. Well, people try to get around that. And you know he says his basis there is you who practice lawlessness. The Greek word there is, I believe, anomia. I'm going by memory here. Yeah, anomia, which literally means without law.
And it's rather fitting in the day and age that we live in, that so many Christians say, " Oh, Christians aren't under laws. We're not under any commandments. " And it's like, well, Jesus gave us commandments. He talks about lawlessness. Well, it's certainly a theology of lawlessness. Not everyone who holds to evangelical theology lives a lawless life.
I mean, I know many, many evangelical Christians who do live godly, exemplary lives, so I'm not putting all of them in the same basket, but the theology lends itself to that. I will say that. But the loophole people try to use this, he says, " I never knew you. " They said, " Ha ha, see, they were never saved. " Well, Jesus didn't say you were never saved. I mean, he could have said that. I never knew you because you never got saved. You were never baptized, you never confessed me, you never believed in me.
So that's, yeah, you never started on the walk to begin with. But he didn't say that. He said, " You who practice lawlessness. " His problem was with how they lived, not with, " Oh, you never got saved in the first place. " And I didn't find one single early Christian who understood Jesus to be saying, " Oh, you never got saved. " In fact, none of the ones I read saw any difference between the expression, " I do not know you and I never knew you.
" To them in the Greek, I mean, there is a difference in the Greek wording, but the meaning in Koine Greek was the same to them. I don't know you. It means I don't acknowledge you. I don't recognize you as my follower. Whether he says, I never knew you, I don't know you. It means the same thing. It was a figure of speech. It wasn't a loophole that he was giving, or he would have explained that if that was it.
But oh, like I say, people take that and it's rather obvious meaning because all the early Christians understood it the same way. I mean, there was no dissension there among them. It's that obvious. And people say, ah, see, his whole point is you've got to get saved. Or you can only get saved by trusting in the blood of Jesus Christ, not in your own works. And see, these people were trusting in the works or they were trusting in their miracles or this and that. Jesus didn't say any of that.
That's not the application Jesus made. In fact, to make it crystal clear, in case someone was to do this, and of course Jesus knew people would do that very thing. He closed the sermon on the mount with an illustration, and that was building on the rock. And what did it mean to build on the rock? It says, " He who hears my sayings and does them will be like to a man who builds on the rock. " Or actually, it's build on rock. It wasn't building a house on a big boulder or something.
It was building it on the bedrock is how the early Christians understood it, that you've got a real foundation. You dug down to where the bedrock was and you built the house from there instead of just putting it on top of the sandy soil where it had no foundation. And he said, " The one who builds on the sand is the one who hears my sayings and does not do them. " So, I mean, he leaves no room for any doubt of what his message is. And his message is that we need to obey what he says.
And that's not the same thing in saying, " Okay, we can somehow earn our way into heaven by doing this. " Salvation is a gift. It's a gift at the very beginning, and no works are required of us at the time of our baptism. It's not wrong to have them, but God does not require that of people. The ones who Paul baptized on his missionary journey, some of the accounts we read, those people were straight pagans who just heard the gospel and he baptized them, you know, like the Philippian jailer or the ones on Mars Hill.
I mean, he baptized them right away. So they had no works to bring to baptism. And it remains a gift, no matter how closely we live by Christ's teachings, and none of us live by them perfectly, it still would not entitle us to eternal life even if we did live by them perfectly. But we don't. We fail so much. So in the end, it's still a gift, but it's a conditional gift that we do make Jesus our Lord. We are walking faithfully with him. We are bearing this godly fruit that he talks about. He does not require.
William Law puts it this way, and I'm going to just close on this point. He doesn't expect of us the obedience or the perfection of, say, an angel or the obedience or the perfection that a perfect human could give. All he requires of us is the obedience, the perfection, the love that a fallen human can give. We are able to do a lot. We're not able to reach perfection in the sense of having absolutely no sins whatsoever. But we are able to live an obedient, have an obedient love, faith, relationship with Christ.
We're able to walk obediently with Him because He will give us the power. Now, without His power, we're not going to get very far. But if we walk with Him, if we abide in Him, then He will continue to abide with us, and His Spirit will live within us. And we can live a faithful Christian life. It's not beyond the means of a fallen human being who is saved. As Paul said, I can do all things through the grace of God. So, yes, we do have power to live obediently to Christ.
And as I said, the Sermon on the Mount is easily the centerpiece of the New Testament teaching. The early Christians quote from it, those three chapters more than any of the other chapters of the New Testament. And the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus makes it clear that how we live does affect our salvation, that obedience to Him is essential for salvation. We'll close on that note.