In the US they do a lot of research and one such research was on Perspective. Research was done on mice. They put them in buckets of water and let them swim around to see how long it would take for them to drown. They found on average mice would swim for about 30 minutes and then give up.
Then they took another group of mice and put them in a bucket of water and had them swim. But with these mice, every five minutes they were picked to get a view over the rim and then put them back. They kept swimming past 30 minutes and even past an hour.
The conclusion: The mice that got some view over the rim could swim for about 36 hours before they gave up.
This morning I am hoping we will get a view over our rim and get a perspective concerning our situation and God’s concern for our situation.
God expects us to bear fruit for His kingdom. We will focus on 3 different kinds of fruit from:
Matthew 21:18-22
1. The fruit of our relationship with Jesus
2. The fruit of the Spirit
3. The fruit of our lips
Verse 21-22 are the most preached verses from the Bible. “If you have faith and do not doubt, when you pray, you will receive what you are praying for.” It is a beautiful promise.
Jesus’ proclamation that with faith we can move mountains is beautiful.
ILLUSTRATION:
A Church was under construction and they had a date for the inaugural service of the new building. They had a problem. Literally they had a mountain there and did not have the resources to clear it so that they can have a parking lot. Building was completed and they invited people around to come. So the pastor said, “This Sunday everyone who is devoted to prayer and believes that Jesus answers prayer, please come.” Out of 700 people, about 30 people came and they prayed earnestly, “God move this mountain from here so that we could have the parking lot.” The
Pastor then said, “Alright, we will begin the service here next week.”
That Monday morning there was a knock on the church office door. The man said, “I am from a construction company and we are building a very large building couple of miles from here. We do not have enough dirt to build our foundation. And we like permission to remove this mountain of dirt behind this church. We will pay for any part we will flatten.”
The next day they came in with bulldozers and flattened the property. They laid the pavement and built the parking lot for the church. The next Sunday morning the church met as announced, with the mountain having been removed.
God is faithful.
But I like to suggest to you that the main point of this passage is not this, but on BEARING FRUIT.
Jesus comes up to this fig tree. In that area of the Middle East, Fig trees would sometimes begin to flower early and when they flower, they would also have buds and bear fruit. Jesus saw that the fruit must have been there, but there was no fruit. So He cursed the tree.
Matthew 18:23-27
The religious leaders were having a discussion. They were not discussing “Was John the Baptist from God or man?” Instead they were saying, if we answer this way, this will happen. If we answer that way, that will happen. They were not concerned with the truth. Rather than asking what the truth was they were reasoning among themselves, therefore they did not answer. They knew that the baptism of John was from God yet they did not want to acknowledge him.
APPLICATION
You cannot play games with the truth and bear fruit for the Kingdom of God at the same time.
With our earthly wisdom we want to be wise in what we say. If you want to be obedient to God, be wise in what you say, and always tell the truth. Jesus said, do not cast pearls before the swine, but we should still have pearls to cast. The truth should be in our mouths.
Matthew 18:28 – 32
Belief, Faith, Obedience are the elements which cause people to enter God’s kingdom.
This is difficult for many to accept. It is the faith in Jesus that people have problem with. Most people have some kind of faith and in fact it is that faith that prevents them from having true faith in God. It is that faith in Jesus that causes us to bear fruit in the Kingdom of God.
Matthew 18:33-43
As Jesus enters the city, there is a fruit tree not bearing fruit, so He curses it and it withers and dies. Jesus is speaking to the Scribes and Pharisees, the religious leaders! In today’s terms, it would be the church leaders. And I count every single person in this room to be church leaders. When God calls you, He does not simply call you to sit and warm up the plastic chairs in the church, He calls you to minister. Everyone who is called of God is called to minister. So Jesus is speaking to us. If we do not bear fruit, He is going to throw us out, and will replace us with someone who will bear fruit. Be careful!
Matthew 18:44 – 46
The priests and the Pharisees were not idiots. They recognized themselves as not bearing fruit that claimed to be in the Kingdom of God, and abused those who represented God in truth. They were the son who said who would go out into the field and work, but then did not actually do the work. This on the last few days before the Passover was one of the last straws that started breaking the camel’s back. They were ready to put Jesus’ opposition to an end, even if that meant killing Jesus.
Notice in verse 43, “Therefore I say to you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people, producing the fruit of it.”
Notice also in the parables the sons are sent to harvest the field. They were supposed to bring in the harvest. The landowner lends his property out to them who would collect the fruit and give it to him in season. They do not. So he is going to give it over to other people, who would give the fruit. There is a repeated theme here. God expects us to bear fruit.
One of my favorite passages is in John 15. The promise that we can all have what we ask for in faith without doubt, is given to Jesus’ disciples, and not to just anyone.
“If you have faith and do not doubt, anything you ask for, you will receive.”
Jesus prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane, didn’t He? It was the cup of suffering, the death on the cross that He wanted removed. Did He get His prayer? His prayer was answered without doubt. The answer was it was not possible. You cannot win the salvation of the world through Jesus Christ to heaven without Jesus dying on the cross! “Therefore, Son it is not possible for this cup to pass from You.” So Jesus is not giving us a blank cheque and saying, “Fill in the details. Whatever you want, it is yours.” Instead He is talking to people, who are following Him, the disciples, who have left everything to follow Him. To those same disciples in John 15, READ John 15:1-8.
Do you see the connection? “Ask anything in My Name and it will be given to You. It will bring glory to the Father if you bear much fruit.” “If” is a conditional clause – “If My Word abides in You and you abide in Me, you will bear much fruit.”
This is where fruit comes from.
1. Fruit of our relationship with Jesus
The first place our fruit comes from is through our relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ. This is the image we need to get. It is like our feet are grounded. Our roots need to go deep into the Word of God. This is why we are going through the Bible. We are not taking just a verse each Sunday and examining all the implications of that one verse. We are going in a survey style because it is His Word that is alive and sharper than any two edged sword. We need to be deeply grounded in His Word. That is our root. If we have trees without root, you have a tree without fruit. Without that kind of relationship with Jesus, we will bear no fruit that lasts for eternity.
ILLUSTRATION:
A man was walking on the road. He passed by the tree every day. He heard a kind of a sound. He realized the sound came from the tree. He heard this, “aarrgh…” He said to the tree, “Why are you making this sound?” The tree answered and said, “I have got to bear fruit…aarrgh..it is so hard.”
I think some Christians think of their lives this way. It is so difficult to bear fruit for the Kingdom. It is so difficult to be joyous, to have peace. The tree does not bear fruit by striving, but by abiding, by being what God has designed it to be, the tree bears fruit.
2. Fruit of the Spirit
One of my favorite verses in the Bible is in Galatians 5. READ Gal.5:19-25.
The word ‘fruit’ is singular there, the fruit of the Spirit. One of the fruits of the Spirit there is faith. So if you ask believing you will receive anything. It is not something that you make yourself work up. Faith is something that is a direct result of our relationship with God. As you come into a deeper relationship with Him, as you abide in Him, your faith is built up, because you see that He is faithful.
If we lack this kind of spiritual fruit, we need to ask God to give us the Holy Spirit. If you are angry and bitter and do not have joy and are depressed, you need to pray for the gift of the Holy Spirit. It is a gift from God. A lot of psychologists would lose their money if a lot of Christians would just ask for the gift of the Holy Spirit. Jesus said that the Father will give to anyone who asks, and He will give it.
3. Fruit of our lips
Hebrews 13:15 – “Through Him then, let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that give thanks to His name.”
Out of the abundance of our hearts, the mouth speaks. If from our hearts we have cursing and complaints and murmurings that means that is what is in our hearts. God wants to replace that then.
I was reading this week an article by Bryan Doyle. It talks about humming birds.
Humming Birds have race car hearts that eat oxygen at an eye-popping rate. Their hearts are built of thinner, leaner fibers than ours. Their arteries are stiffer and more taut. Their hearts are stripped to the skin for the war against gravity and inertia, the mad search for food, the insane idea of flight.
They are tiny little birds and their hearts beat 10 times a second. So even if you put your huge ear to its chest, it would be hard to discern the heartbeat.
The price of their ambition is a life closer to death; they suffer more heart attacks and aneurysms and ruptures than any other living creature. It’s expensive to fly. You burn out. You fry the machine. You melt the engine.
The biggest heart in the world is inside the blue whale. It weighs more than seven tons. It’s as big as a room. It is a room, with four chambers. A child could walk around it, head high, bending only to step through the valves. The valves are as big as the swinging doors in a saloon. This house of a heart drives a creature a hundred feet long.
Every creature on earth has approximately two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime. You can spend them slowly, like a tortoise and live to be two hundred years old, or you can spend them fast, like a hummingbird, and live to be two years old.
What kind of heart do you have? Is it beating to the rhythm of songs of praise to God? for eternity? Or is your pulse set to the city, the job, the constant striving for possessions and property, the ways of the world, the pulse of hell?
God would give us a heart transplant. He wants to give us insides which move to the flow of heavenly torrents, because out of the abundance of our hearts the mouth speaks and the fruit of our lips should be praise to our Lord and Savior. The fruit of our heart – the love, joy, peace, patience, the wisdom, the grace, the understanding, the mercy, the healing, the prophecy, the words of wisdom, discernment – all of these things flow from the heart, and God wants to place an eternal heart within us.
