If Jesus Was Serious | Week 6 | (5-17-26)

Dr. Woods Lisenby preaches on the subject, "Hearers vs Doers."

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Did you know that in 1999 NASA spent $327 million on a spacecraft that went to Mars? It was called the Mars Climate Orbiter. And it was supposed to go and study the atmosphere of Mars from like a safe, stable orbit. Hundreds of engineers worked for years on it. The launch went perfectly. The cruise to Mars went perfectly. But then the orbiter slipped behind Mars to begin this kind of initial burn entering into the atmosphere. And then it never came out the other side. It was like $327 million, it's just like poof, gone. It played the world's most expensive game of hide and seek, and it won. When NASA went back to try to figure out what happened, the answer, it turns out, was kind of embarrassing. It turns out that there were two teams working on this orbiter. There was one team in California, one team in Colorado. The team that had been working to build the machine worked in imperial units, the kind that we use to measure pounds and inches, but the other team that was flying it worked in metric units, and neither one of them knew it. Nobody caught it until it was too late. And because of that, whenever the thing got to Mars, it had all sorts of mixed-up information. The spacecraft arrived at Mars at the wrong altitude and they dipped too far in the atmosphere and it burned up, and that's how it won hide and seek. You know, and what's crazy about this whole experience is that like NASA is really smart people. This was not some sort of like uneducated, lazy people who cut corners. These are some of the smartest people on the planet. They were doing exactly what they were trained to do. They just weren't doing the same thing. They were not communicating with each other. It was funny, you know, you spend hundreds of millions of dollars on the spacecraft and forget to ask, are we are we measuring the same thing? The same way? It kind of reminds me of uh the people that we've all heard about. Uh I am actually kind of one of these people. Uh the people who like follow their GPS without question. After getting uh my wife and I causing us to be late to three weddings in a row, I became beholden to the GPS. Because I used to think I knew the best way, the shortest direction, and stuff like that. And then Brianna's like, from now on, we use the GPS. And now, I mean, like, even I've driven from my house to this church, you know, for two years, and I still use the GPS. I don't know which way's the fastest, I just trust the GPS. But I would like to think I'm not like some of these news stories we've heard, where some people will trust the GPS so much that it gets them into trouble. Like they they did an episode of The Office about this. I don't know about quote the office sometimes, but but there's one episode where Michael Scott, the GPS, told him uh to take a right, and Dwight's in the car with him, and he's like, No, it means to veer right. You can't turn right, there's a lake there. And Michael doesn't listen. He says, No, the GPS told me to turn. So he turns up and Dwight's telling, No, no, no, there's a lake, and they literally drive straight into the lake. And they have this like cutaway shot. You know what they do? They're looking at the camera, and Michael says, And this is why you cannot trust technology. There's actually a real story of a woman in Nevada who followed her GPS up a force road in January and got snowed in for two days before search teams could find her because she trusted her GPS. You know, the people they were so beholden to the machine, uh, that it wasn't that they were they were being negligent. It wasn't even that they were being dumb. They were doing exactly what the voice told them to do all the way until they couldn't do it anymore. And there's something kind of universal about that. There's something uh very human about the engineers at NASA. Even people with the right training and the right intentions can do all the things that they think are right, but still end up somewhere they didn't expect to be. Still end up in the wrong place. They were doing something, they did what they thought they were supposed to do, but the destination was not what they expected. It sounds a lot like what Jesus was teaching in this last part of the Sermon on the Mount. What we just read, you know, we've been reading for six weeks, the Sermon on the Mount, and Jesus ends three chapters of teaching talking about this kind of problem. People uh who have every appearance of being on the right road, but who are gonna arrive at a destination they did not expect. As we kind of land the plan on this series, we keep coming back to the same question. What if Jesus was serious? What if he actually meant the words that he said? What if we stop saying, well, here's what he actually meant when he said this in the Sermon on the Mount? What if we stop couching it and realize that the way that Jesus describes the kingdom is the actual shape that he is calling us to live, the actual way that he wants us to behave. And in Matthew's gospel, Jesus talks about narrow gates and false prophets. He says that not everyone who calls him Lord will enter the kingdom. And in this particular scripture text, he gives us all of this together in one image. He says, a wise man builds his house on rock, but a foolish man builds it on sand. The storm comes for them both. It's the same rain and it's the same wind, but the house on the rock stands, and the house on the sand falls. Jesus is making a not so subtle analogy. He's saying from the outside the houses look the same, right? They both got roofs, they both got walls, the storm hits them the same, but the foundation issues show up when the pressure comes. And God knows that the pressures come. Jesus tells us that the pressures will come, that the storms will come, that our lives will not always be sunny days and rainbows. Jesus is not uh saying that uh the storms will not arrive. Multiple times in the gospels he talks about the trials that his disciples will have to go through. He's telling us it will, but then he says, the wise and the foolish man are different in this. That when the rain blows, when the rain falls and when the wind blows, the house that's built on a strong foundation can last. And this is where the passage gets kind of hard. If you if you dial back, just two more verses. Verse 21 and 22, it says this not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my father. And then in verse 22, Jesus describes the people who will be turned away on the final judgment. And he and he's not talking about people who've never heard of Jesus. He's actually talking about the people who heard the word. They prophesied and cast out demons in his name, but they were doing it so they could get noticed. And in the end, Jesus will say, I never knew you. And that word about knowledge, about knowing you in the Greek, it's about personal knowledge. It's about having a relationship, it's about doing life with somebody. Jesus is telling the very busy religious people that on the day when everything finally becomes clear, they will not, he will not recognize them. They were calling by his name, but they were not doing what he said. They didn't actually take him seriously. He even has a name for the way they're acting. He calls them evildoers. And it's kind of striking, right? Because they think that they are being righteous. The people he's talking about, they think that they are spiritual workers, but Jesus calls them evildoers because the work they were doing wasn't his work. It wasn't the work of the kingdom. In a way, he's not calling the people themselves evil. He's saying what they're doing was evil because they're operating on a different system. They are not communicating what Jesus is communicating. And that's what the text is naming for us this morning. The tension as we close out this series, the title of the sermon is Hearers versus Doers. Because I think we often hear this text and we differentiate that hearers and doers are people who do something and people who do not do anything. Right? You either just hear it and sit there, or you hear it and you do something. When I was first preparing my sermon, that was my frame of mind. I was thinking in terms of those people who say that they're Christian but don't practice their faith, and those who live out their faith every day. That seems like the dichotomy in most of our minds when we hear this text. It's how we associate hearers and doers. We think the foolish people are the lazy ones, the ones who came to church on Christmas and Easter and they forget about it the rest of the year. But that's not the story Jesus is telling. Jesus says the people who get turned away on the day of judgment are not the lazy ones, they're the busy ones. They're the ones who thought that their busyness was the same thing as following him. Which makes this text not so much about those people, and it turns it into a mirror for all of us. Jesus is holding up this mirror where we see our own reflection because there are many places in our lives where we think we are following the right thing, where we think we are doing what we're supposed to do, but really we've given our lives to something else entirely. Something that is not like the Sermon on the Mount. Something that might say Christian in name, but is actually anything but following Christ. When you look around, there are versions of faith that wear the name of Jesus like a logo. But they're running a different operating system underneath. They're not speaking the same language that Jesus is. I think of things like the prosperity gospel, right? You maybe you've heard of this, the prosperity gospel. It's a version of faith that says if you just name it and claim it, if you plant your seed that you will then harvest it. It's this version of faith that turns Jesus into a vending machine for blessings. If you think that Christ is a guarantor of your faith, that you'll have enough money if you just believe enough. If you just so if you give the pastor this much money, you'll get this much money back in return. Jesus never said anything like that about money. We just talked about it. He said the opposite of that. He said, Don't store up for yourself treasures on heaven, or treasures on earth, but instead store up treasures in heaven. He told us, you can't serve God and money. He didn't promise a Mercedes for you if you just tithe a little more. You know, that's just one of the kind of things that seem like Christian faith, but actually aren't. There's another infectious version of faith that's made its way to churches uh for millennia. This has happened in nations around the world for as long as there's been Christianity. Is this thing called Christian nationalism? You might have heard of it before. It drapes Jesus over the flag of any particular nation and says that Jesus only cares about that country's power. It treats the gospel as a political instrument. It makes us think that God has only chosen that particular country to do his will. It's what led to the crusades at one point. We should be suspicious of anybody who says God's kingdom is rooted in one country. Because the kingdom Jesus opened doesn't respect national borders. It included Roman citizens and Samaritan women. Our faith began in the Middle East and made its way through country after country all the way here and then keeps spreading across the world. Any faith that says that God only blesses one country at the expense of others is somebody else's faith, and it's not Jesus'. And these are the obvious ones, right? These ones seem obvious. Prosperity gospel, Christian nationalism, these are ones that we can name, and it doesn't take a whole lot to notice. But there are more subtle ways that this happens. If you look around, there are other places where our faith gets shaped by things other than Jesus. Right? Where maybe we're more impacted by algorithms than by the Sermon on the Mount. Because you'll see if you look around that there are podcasters and other people who are trying to tell us what Christianity is, but leaving out the words of Jesus from the Sermon on the Mount. If we're not careful, we'll make the mistake of hearing somebody who sounds confident and bold and loud and replacing their version of faith for the quiet, embodied life that Jesus gave us. That's the disconnect that Jesus is naming in this text. Jesus is warning us about things that look like Christianity, but they don't take Jesus seriously. The Instagram Square, it's built to look good, but the kingdom of God is built to hold things together. The scary thing is that all these false versions of faith, they don't seem false at first. They seem nice. Oh, I can get more money. Oh, uh, this sounds like what I already want to hear. And that's uh what we should have to stop and ask is what are we hearing? Are the things that people are telling us? Does it have to do anything with what Jesus actually taught? Can you hear the Sermon on the Mount? The best thing that this text does for us this morning is that Jesus doesn't just leave us with the warning, he gives us the answer. He shows us what it looks like. In that same paragraph, he heard uh Jesus said uh uh there will be two houses built, one on rock and one on sand. For six weeks, we've been talking about uh these three chapters where Jesus has been telling us what his look what his words look like, and if you live by them, your house will be built on a strong foundation, and if you don't, it will not. And so he says this building the foundation looks like love your enemies. Pray for those who persecute you. Don't be anxious about your life, forgive others, don't store up for yourself treasures on earth. The truth is that these are not impressive things by the world's standards, these are not highlight-oriented ways to live our lives, they're not things that are gonna get a whole lot of accolades or praise. Most of these are quiet. Many of them are hard. They're the kind of things that take obedience when nobody is watching, and it asks you to give something of yourself rather than keep things for yourself. Loving your enemy does not trend on social media. Going to somebody who has harmed you and offering forgiveness is really tough. Going and forgiving somebody for the seventh time seems insane. But these are the things that Jesus said matter. They mattered so much that he not only taught them, he showed us them with his own life. He ate with the people that everybody else discarded. He washed the feet of people on the night that they were going to betray him, and then he forgave the people who were killing him. None of that gets called impressive from a cultural sense. None of it gets the accolades and the praise that Caesar got. But just as Jesus was teaching the way, he was walking the way. He was showing us what it looked like. Did you know that today is Ascension Sunday? Churches all around the globe today are remembering that at the end of the Easter tide, Jesus ascended into heaven before Pentecost. And after he ascended, the book of Acts shows us what the people did next. The Sermon on the Mount stopped being a sermon and it turned into a movement. The people began caring for each other, and all those of the empire wrote off. They sold their possessions and shared with us people in need. And the letters that came out of this church kept coming back to these same things. Did we hear the Sermon on the Mount? Paul wrote that the love is fulfillment of the law. James said that faith without works is dead. And the whole New Testament is built on the question of this morning's parable. Have you actually heard what Jesus is saying? Or are you just living in a way that seems like it fits your style? The point of this whole series has been to ask: are we taking Jesus seriously? Do we believe him? Did he mean it? Does it matter for us? And in this text, we hear that if we do, we get our house, our life, our community on the most stable foundation there is. Taking him seriously will require for us to be careful about what we hand our lives over to and who we let influence us. Those other versions of Christianity out there, they are loud and they are confident and they want to replace the actual words of Jesus for their own. But rest assured, you're gonna know them by their fruit. Jesus says in the New Testament, we hear that we will, our fruit will be the product of our actions. And any theology that tells you to hate your enemies is not the way of Jesus. And you will not find the love of Christ there. There's no asterisk on that, right? You don't get to say, well, uh, love your enemies unless they vote differently than you. Or you don't get to say, uh, I'm gonna pray for my persecutors unless they belong to the wrong group. No, full stop. Love your enemies. Jesus doesn't hedge. Any version of faith that manipulates your worry into trying to get you to give them more money, it is not the faith of Jesus Christ. Anybody who tries to manufacture certainty to make sure that you know that they have everything figured out, that is not what the kingdom offers the world. Jesus doesn't promise a stress-free life, but he does promise a peace that the world can't give you. And any theology that tells you to be silent when your neighbors are being harmed, is not the theology of the kingdom. All of these are red flags. Things that you should notice as somebody else says to them that makes you question, is that what Christ actually wants? But there's just a couple more that I want to name to make it really practical for you. If you are in this church, in any church or any group that claims to be Christian, and you see somebody or you see a group of people that agree on everything all the time, you should be a little suspicious. Because perhaps something is being suppressed. If there's not room for healthy questions, if there's not a place to bring your doubts or disagreements, you know, arguments and disagreements, they happen all over the New Testament. Acts 15 is all about the church's first fight, and it wasn't over a carpet color. It was about who belongs and who doesn't. The Bible, the New Testament is not afraid, it doesn't hide its disagreements. Disagreements are not evil, but when they're done poorly, when they're not handled well, they become evil. And that's what we often see. But it is okay to bring questions, to be able to ask, and any place that says questions are not welcome is a place that is hiding from something true about the kingdom. Another red flag is when your faith runs on being better than other people, then it has forgotten what Jesus has said about others. Remember the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount? Blessed are those who are poor in spirit, blessed are those who mourn. If your spiritual life is mostly about being right while everybody else gets put in their place, you've signed up for some different kingdom than the one of Jesus Christ. The Sermon on the Mount shows us the upside-down kingdom. It shows us the alternative to what the world and the false gospels promise us. God's kingdom is slower than the algorithm, and it asks more of us than the slogan. It doesn't promise us an easy victory, but it shows us that we'll be in the house that's standing in the end. You know that Mars climate orbiter. It burned up over the planet after it spent 10 years, 10 years, a decade to get there. The GPS drivers, they stand on the edge of the lake wondering what happened? How did this go so wrong? None of them got there because they didn't try. They got there because they weren't following what is true. Jesus is offering us something better than what anybody else can offer us. And we need to take his word seriously. The promise that Christ offers us is that our house will be built on a firm foundation, and when the hard things come, which they will, we will be able to withstand it because we know the truth of Jesus Christ. That's the promise under this parable. That's the promise and the hope for all of us of what it means to follow Jesus. Yes, it might be hard. Yes, storms will come, but if we live the way that Jesus calls us to live, if we take Him seriously, then nothing can separate us from the love of God. Nothing can tear down the house that we built. If we build this church on the strongest foundation of Jesus Christ, then no matter what comes, we will make it through. And so, the question for us this morning is this what if Jesus was serious? What if he actually meant the things that he said? The parable that he chooses to end everything with is the truth that lies underneath every Christian life. There's the difference between hearing and doing, and doing but not hearing. The crowds there at the end of the sermon. They were so amazed at Jesus' teaching. It says uh that they were amazed because they they knew he meant it, that he could back it up. Do you know the same? Now that you've heard him for multiple weeks, what he has said, do you believe it? Are you willing to live your life by it? May we be a people who hear his words and we ask. Act on them. May we build a house on rock that holds when the storms come, because we know that Jesus was serious about what he said, and we are serious about following him until the very end. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and all God's people said, Amen.