(Text and Audio)
Title: The Tree, The Fruit, and the Unspoken Seed
One of the challenges of preaching through books like we do here at Heritage is that we sometimes miss, or forget that the passage we are looking at today is part of a greater context.
For the last three weeks we’ve been looking at how Jesus responds when the Pharisees accuse him of casting out demons by the power of Satan.
Today and next week, we will bring that dialogue to a close by looking at the final thing that Jesus teaches the Pharisees and the masses gathered to hear him teach. But in order to properly understand the full context, I’d like for us to go back to the start of this story in verse 22 and read the entire encounter before we finally focus in on the last five verses in vv.33-37 that we will be studying today and next week.
(Read/Pray)
A Verse By Verse Analysis:
- 33 “Either make the tree good and its fruit good, or else make the tree bad and its fruit bad; for a tree is known by its fruit.”
- What we produce, identifies us.
(Examples)
- There seem to be only two types of trees.
(Why does the world resist this teaching?)
- A tree is identified by it’s fruit, but determined by it’s seed.
(Can we change our nature? Who or what can? How then is salvation such as fascinating a miracle?)
- 34 “Brood of Vipers! How can you, being evil, speak good things? For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.”
- Jesus clearly identifies this group of Pharisees as evil, and a brood of vipers. He can’t make those claims without using judgement.
(Again, an example that Matthew 7:1 “Judge lest not ye be judged” does not mean that we can’t make discerning judgements on things or people, but rather that we don’t have the power to condemn them eternally.)
- Jesus sets an example of calling what is evil and wrong into the public eye.
(How do we, as the church, do the same?)
- Just as a tree produces fruit according to it’s seed, so a mouth speaks according to the heart.
(Story of Ben and Sach…that came from somewhere…in my case fear and ignorance. My point: these words that our mouth says, they come from somewhere. James reminds us to guard our tongues because they are like a tiny rudder that has the power to wreck a huge ship, or a tiny spark that can set an entire forest on fire.)