It’s about six months ago now, since we had a holiday in a caravan in Burnham Market. A lot of you may know Burnham Market, because it’s a place where a lot of people from Newark go for their holidays. Now, we’d never been to this particular caravan site before, so we asked for directions there, and the lady whose caravan it was, said, “Well, which way are you going?” We said “Through King’s Lynn”, and she said, “Well, you go through the village till you come to the Burnham Garage and past the pub just beyond it till you come to some white railings, then you turn down Back Street and then take the cinder path. Well, of course we went to King’s Lynn then carried on till we came to the signpost to Burnham Market, we came to a garage and almost straightaway we were driving out of the village! Clearly something had gone wrong! The directions were perfectly good, but there are two roads into Burnham Market, and we took the wrong one,and we had missed out way totally. We had come in from the wrong direction.
I think that story has got a little bit of bearing on the reading we’ve been hearing this morning, because in the preceding chapters of Matthew Jesus had been describing the way of life in the Kingdom of God. He had been describing the values of the Kingdom of God. The point here; the point which he’s now going to apply in the reading we heard this morning is that unless you are in the Kingdom, all these values are of no use. The way of the Kingdom, the life of the Kingdom is totally revolutionary. It’s totally against way the world around us would expect us to live. The world values things which are against the values of the Kingdom. And it’s possible to think we are in the Kingdom of God, yet not to really be in it. It’s not something we get to just by simple trying to live out the Kingdom values; values described in the Sermon on the Mount. Paul, when he was giving his defence tom the Roman emperor Agrippa, said that God had “translated him from the Kingdom of Satan to that of his dear Son.” We come into the Kingdom as God translates us from the one to the other. And when we are in the Kingdom of God, then these words which precede what we heard this morning and are in Matthew chapters five, six and seven describe the way of life of the Kingdom and its values.
So many people today take these words, and try and make them a sort of manifesto of a way of living. But they are not words that can just be taken on their own. They are not just a way of life which Jesus lays down for the people of this world to follow. And what is coming to really be the application of the Sermon on the Mount, he puts various tests before us, so that we might know if we are in the Kingdom or not.
In verses 15 to 19 of chapter seven, what he is really saying is that pay come saying they are the heralds of God, but the test is:Is the fruit of what they say seen to be applicable in their lives, and as they claim to speak the word of God, has it happened. But much more generally, I would think, Jesus is saying, Do our lives bear fruit which show they are those in the Kingdom? I think we can make a slightly different comparison. If you compare gooseberries with grapes, they look the same, but one tastes good and sweet, the other, if you put it in your mouth tastes sour and sharp. Do our lives produce that sweet taste which God finds sweet, or are our lives bitter? Do our deeds give honour to God? Do we hunger and thirst for righteousness? Do we live lives which follow God’s way of righteousness? Do we know our own spiritual poverty, deeply lost without Him? If we try and live our lives on our own, then everything will go horribly wrong. Isaiah was one of God’s prophets, and we read in his book, chapter five, how he said “Woe” to various groups of people; “Woe to you” for doing this, that or the other. Then in chapter six, Isaiah has this vision of God in the Temple, and after that vision he says, “Woe to me, because I am a man of unclean lips, dwelling in a people of unclean lips” He had seen God as He was and that his own life was wrong.
The angel came and touched him with the living coal and he was cleansed.
Then in the next verses, Jesus speaks about those people who say that had done everything in his name, and he will say to them “I didn’t know you” That is another acid test: Do we know, are we known? Do we know the Lord Jesus Christ? Does He know us? It’s not just a matter of head knowledge, of giving assent to certain doctrines. It’s a case of knowing Him in a real, living way, knowing him active in our lives. For, only as we know Him, can we do things in his name. So many people would even try and put society to rights, and exorcise society of all its ills. The social worker. The politically correct worker. The psychotherapist. But they do it without knowing Christ. And to try and reform society without knowing Christ will never have any true issue. John Newton, the hymn-writer, spent nearly a whole life sailing the seas, a man who blasphemed the name of Christ. At the end he came to know Christ, and his life was totally changed by that encounter. When he came to write that hymn “How sweet the name of Jesus sounds”, he could say, “For so long I was one who blasphemed his name, now I knowhow sweet his name is”.Do we know how sweet the name of Jesus is? Do we know what it is to have his will revealed to us? A passion for Him? Do we know for ourselves the words from Song of Songs “I am my beloved and He is mine”
Then of course at the end of that reading this morning, Jesus makes the contrast between the two houses. The house built on rock and the house built on sand. And we have to ask ourselves; On what is my life founded? It’s so easy to found our life on our emotions; on how we feel. One day we’re ’up there’, the next we are ’down there’. One day everything seems right. The next day everything seems wrong. But it’s only as we found our lives on Christ that we shall hold fast, come what may. It’s only as we spend time in God’s Word, and it’s also only as we allow that Word to change and alter us, because Jesus said, didn’t he, “Everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice..” It;s a case of spending time in his Word and then applying it, and let it shape and mould our lives. Does his Word change us. If it does, then come what may, come whatever storms may blow against us we shall stand. We shall be able to say, in the words of one of the modern hymns:
Your Name is honey to my lips
Your Spirit like water to my soul
Your Word like a lamp to my feet.
At the conclusion to Matthew seven, words we didn’t actually hear this morning, “The crowds were amazed at Jesus’ teaching, for spoke as one with authority” These words this morning have the authority because they came from God himself. Jesus said he only said those things he said, only did those things he did because they came from his Father. All that he taught came from God’s throne itself.
Right at the beginning there’s a contrast between two gates and two ways. And I want to picture it in this sort of way. There’s a path with a throng of people going along it, and then there comes a point where the path divides. One path is a broad path which leads gradually downhill. Most of the people carry on along that path. There was a gate into it, but it’s almost broken down. So you carry on along that way without even realising you’re going along it. It;s a broad way, full of pleasures. It’s a broad way where people are just preoccupied with each other, or perhaps preoccupied with themselves. It’s a way leading gradually downward and downward, and it’s the way of preoccupation, of preoccupation with the world, preoccupation with pleasure, leading down all the time and eventually going over a precipice. It is the way that leads to destruction. And at the end of those three sections, doesn’t Jesus give strong warning to those whose lives don’t show the marks of being in the Kingdom. He says, “Every tree that does not bear good fruit is thrown into the fire”
Then he says he will say to them “I never knew you. Away from me you evildoers.” “Then the rain came down, the stream rose, the wind blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash” The broad way which, if we don’t do anything about it, which we naturally go along with the whole of humanity will eventually lead of that precipice to the place of destruction. And that is the way we will find ourselves going along automatically, unless we choose the other way, and these words of warning of Jesus are not given by an Old Testament prophet, but from the lips of Jesus himself; the one who had compassion on the crowd. They are like sheep without a shepherd and he’s warning them, if they didn’t choose the other way. These words which seem so severe are what is going to happen without Christ, without God there comes one day destruction, there comes an eternity of being lost.
So, Jesus’ invitation is to choose the other way, to go through the narrow gate onto the narrow path; the narrow path which is the way of the Kingdom. The way described in chapters five and six of Matthew. It’s the way of the Beatitudes. Those who do hunger and thirst after God; that narrowness that hunger after his righteousness. There’s that knowledge of poverty, that pureness of heart, which is the narrow way, and it’s a hard way, a difficult way. Jesus never promised that following him would be easy. But almost out of sight, that path leads to a verdant pasture. At times we almost get a glimpse, but like climbing a mountain we sometimes think we’ve just about reached the top, but we haven’ reached the top. At the top of the ridge there’s a greater height. But we know that at the top is the place of verdant pasture.
It’s the narrow way, the way of the Cross; repenting, believing, it’s the way of forgiveness through the death, through the Blood of Christ shed on the Cross. It’s a way of denying ourselves, so that we enter through the narrow gate. That narrow gate is almost like a turnstile. It’s something which only one person can go through at a time. We have to choose to go that way. No-one can lead us through for it’s too narrow. And we can take nothing with us. We have to leave behind all our sins. We have to leave behind all our good deeds. God says that even are good deeds are “like filthy rags”. We have to leave behind our self-righteousness and go clothed only in the righteousness of Christ. “Unless your righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees you will not enter the Kingdom. We can’t take our plans, our hopes, our worldly wishes with us. And we can’t take our religion through. We think sometimes because somebody sits in a church they’re in the Kingdom of God; because they’ve been baptised and confirmed they’re in the Kingdom of God. Now I’m not saying baptism and confirmation are no good, but I know that although baptised and confirmed, I discovered later that I wasn’t in the Kingdom, and went through that narrow gate.
The one who invites us to go through is the Lord Jesus Christ; the One who died for us, the One who desires that we don’t go on that broad way leading to destruction
For each one comes the time to choose. Then we have to make that choice. Do we ignore his call and stay on that way leading to destruction, or choose to follow him, to go through that narrow gate, that way that leads upward to life
