A clergyman dies and is waiting in line at the Pearly Gates. Ahead of him is a guy dressed in sunglasses, a loud shirt, leather jacket, and jeans.
Saint Peter says to this guy, “Who are you, so that I may know whether to admit you into the Kingdom of Heaven?”
The guy replies, “I'm Joe Cohen, taxi driver, of Noo Yawk City.”
Saint Peter consults his list. He smiles and says to the taxi driver, “Take this silken robe and golden staff and enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”
The taxi driver goes into Heaven with his robe and staff, and then it's the pastor’s turn.
He stands erect and booms out, “I am Joseph Snow, pastor of Saint Peter's Church for the last 43 years.”
Saint Peter consults his list. He says to the clergyman, “Take this cotton robe and wooden staff and enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”
“Now, just a minute!” says the pastor. “That man was a taxi driver, and he gets a silken robe and golden staff. How come I only get a cotton robe and a wooden staff?”
“Up here, we work by results,” says Saint Peter. “While you preached, people slept. While he drove, people prayed.” (Ed Rowell, Franklin, Tennessee; www.PreachingToday.com)
That old joke always gets me to thinking about my own life and ministry, now at Faith Bible Church. The last thing I want is to be a part of a ministry that gets no results. And I’m sure that’s your desire, as well. We as a church do not want to put people to sleep with a fruitless religion. We want to lead people to the Living God who can move moun-tains in their lives and make a real difference for all eternity.
The real question is how. How can we as a church get real results in people’s lives? How can we lead people to God on a regular basis and see their lives transformed for all eternity? How can we, as a body of believers, bear fruit for the glory of God in the coming year?
Well, if you have your Bibles, I invite you to turn with me to Mark 11, Mark 11, where Jesus addresses the problem of fruitless religion in His day, using a fruitless fig tree as an object lesson for His disciples and for us today.
Mark 11:12-14 On the following day, when they came from Bethany, he was hungry. And seeing in the distance a fig tree in leaf, he went to see if he could find anything on it. When he came to it, he found nothing but leaves, for it was not the season for figs. And he said to it, “May no one ever eat fruit from you again.” And his disciples heard it. (ESV)
Now, Jesus didn’t curse the fig tree as an angry reaction because he was hungry and didn’t find anything to eat. No. He cursed the fig tree because He wanted to teach His disciples a lesson. The text makes it very clear (vs.14), “His disciples heard it…”
Now, even though it was not the season for figs, this fig tree should have had some buds on it. It was April, Passover time, and fig trees in Palestine usually produced small edible buds in March, after which the large green leaves appeared. The buds were common food for the local peasants, but an absence of buds by April, despite the tree’s green leaves, meant that the tree would bear no fruit that year – none for the peasants or for anybody else, who might enjoy the ripened figs in May or June after the buds dropped off. (John D. Grassmick, Bible Knowledge Commentary)
It was an absolutely fruitless fig tree, and Jesus cursed it to teach His disciples a lesson. And that lesson is this: Jesus wants His followers to…
BE FRUITFUL.
He wants his followers to make a difference in people’s lives. He wants his followers to lead people to God who can change them from the inside out.
You see, the Jewish religion of Jesus’ day had become fruitless. That’s what the fruitless fig tree represents here – Israel’s fruitless religion. In fact, many of the Old Testament prophets used the metaphor of a fruitless fig tree to describe Israel’s spiritual barrenness hundreds of years before Christ (Jeremiah 8:13; Hosea 9:10, 16; Joel 1:12; Amos 4:9; Micah 7:1; Haggai 2:19). Well, when Christ comes on the scene, He picks up on that same metaphor to describe the barrenness of the Jewish religion in His day, as well. It had become a fruitless religion, not bringing them or anyone else any closer to God. In fact, their religious rituals and practices actually kept people from coming to God and became nothing more than an exclusive club for the comfort of its members.
It makes me wonder, “What are we doing in our churches today that keeps people from coming to God or at least makes it harder for them to meet Christ?”
Nearly 15 years ago, Bayer Corporation stopped putting the cotton wads in their Genuine Bayer bottles. The company realized the aspirin would hold up fine without the maddening white clumps, which it had included since about 1914.
Chris Allen, Bayer's vice president of technical operations, said, “We concluded there really wasn't any reason to keep the cotton except tradition. Besides, it's hard to get out.” (Ed Rowell, The Tennessean, 9-12-99; www.PreachingToday.com)
Well, that’s the way it is with some longstanding traditions in the church. They become useless, often creating more hardship than help. And that’s what Jesus was cursing here in Mark 11. He wasn’t cursing the fig tree itself. He was cursing what it represented. He was cursing the fruitless religion of His day, and He was making it very clear to His disciples that He wanted something different from them. He wanted them and He wants us to bear fruit. He wants us to be spiritually productive, leading people closer to God.
The question is how? How can we, as a body of believers, bear fruit for the glory of God in the coming year? How can we lead people to God on a regular basis and see their lives transformed for all eternity? Well, let’s see how Jesus deals with the fruitless religion of His day.
Mark 11:15-17 And they came to Jerusalem. And he entered the temple and began to drive out those who sold and those who bought in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons. And he would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple. And he was teaching them and saying to them, “Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations’? But you have made it a den of robbers.” (ESV)
Well, there you have it. Jesus cleans house! He pulls the cotton from the aspirin bottle, if you will. He gets rid of the temple traditions that had kept people away from God for years!
In Jesus day, pilgrims would come from all over the country every year at Passover to make the required sacrifices at the Temple. Since many of them came from great distances, they could purchase their sacrificial animals from one of five markets in Jerusalem – four on the Mount of Olives and one in the Temple complex itself.
William Barkleay, in his book on the Life of Christ, says nearly everyone who came to the temple brought an offering. You could buy doves outside the Temple, but the Temple had appointed Temple inspectors and they would be certain to find a flaw or fault in any of the animals brought in from outside. “That’s alright,” they would say, “Just buy one from our Temple stalls. They have already been inspected.”
The difficulty was that outside a pair of doves might cost as little as a day’s wage, while inside they might cost as much as 45 days wages. Caiaphas, the high priest, had set up this market in the Temple’s Court of the Gentiles to unfairly compete with the traditional markets on the Mount of Olives, and he was getting filthy rich off of it!
Along with this, there were money-changers in the Temple area. Everyone was required to pay a yearly “Temple Tax,” but they couldn’t use their Greek and Roman coins. They had a king’s head on it and that was considered a “graven image,” forbidden by the second commandment. So the common currency had to be exchanged for a special Temple coin. The only problem was they charged exorbitant rates to exchange the money – sometimes a whole day’s wage – and the money changers were not always honest. They often cheated their customers in the exchange of coins.
If that wasn’t bad enough, the Temple’s Court of the Gentiles had become a thoroughfare. People loaded with merchandise were taking shortcuts through the court from one part of the city to another. The Gentiles had no place to worship the True and Living God. The only place set up for them to meet God had become a wild market-place and a busy thoroughfare. Now, we’re not talking about just a few animals in the Court of the Gentiles. One historian noted that “at the Passover in A.D. 66, the worshippers required an estimated 255,600 lambs” (William Lane, The Gospel of Mark, p.406). That’s over a quarter of a million!
This is what had been going on for years in the name of religion, but all it did was prevent Gentiles from coming to God. Oh, it was convenient for many of the Jews and lucrative for their religious leaders, but it missed the whole point of why the Temple was built in the first place.
It was to be “a place of prayer (vs.17) for ALL the nations.” It was to be a place where Jew and Gentile alike could get close to God. But when Jesus saw it as a thievin’ market place, bank and thoroughfare, all in the name of religion, He got mad. Then he got rid of every practice and tradition that kept people away from God. He cleaned house, but the religious leaders resisted him.
Mark 11:18-19 And the chief priests and the scribes heard it and were seeking a way to destroy him, for they feared him, because all the crowd was astonished at his teaching. And when evening came they went out of the city. (ESV)
The religious leaders wouldn’t let Jesus clean up their fruitless religion, so within 40 years the temple was destroyed. Evening came and Jesus left – not just physically, but spiritually as well. Their religion was dead.
My friends, if we don’t want that to happen here, then we dare not resist Christ’s efforts to clear out our traditions that keep people away from God. If we want to maintain our spiritual vitality, if we want to bear fruit for the glory of God, if we want to lead people to God on a regular basis, then we need to let Christ clean house in our churches today. We need to…
LET CHRIST GET RID OF THE FRUITLESS RELIGION THAT KEEPS PEOPLE FROM HIM.
Specifically, we need to let Christ clear out the hypocrisy in our own lives.
In verse 17, Jesus accused the religious people of His day of turning the Temple into a “den of robbers.” He was quoting from Jeremiah 7:11, where nearly 500 years before, the prophet Jeremiah accused his countrymen of the same thing. They were lying, stealing, and oppressing the poor. They were committing adultery and murder, and then they would run to the Temple and say, “We are safe.” They were trying to hide behind their religious rituals in the Temple, but Jeremiah makes it very clear that God has been watching.
You see, religious ritual cannot cover our sin. We can’t hide behind our church attendance. We can’t hide behind our tithes and offerings. We can’t hide behind the singing of hymns and the praying of prayers. We can’t even hide behind having said a prayer asking Jesus into our hearts – one of our evangelical rituals.
It’s not that these things are bad. It’s just that they cannot hide our sin. Only Jesus can cleanse us from sin, and we must trust HIM to do so, not any ritual. Trust Christ to get rid of the hypocrisy in your life. Ask Him to clean it out of you like he cleaned out the Temple, and let Him begin the work of changing you from the inside out.
After 28 years of ministry, I am convinced that the greatest hindrance for people coming to Christ today is the hypocrisy they see in some of our church members. And we need to let Christ clean that out of each and every one of us if we’re going to be fruitful in what we do as a church.
In November 2004, maintenance workers at the Duke University Hospitals in Raleigh and Durham, North Carolina, had drained hydraulic fluid from the elevators into some empty detergent drums and then forgot to get rid of the drums. Through a strange series of events, the drums were mistakenly redistributed to the people who clean surgical instruments. It took two months and 3,800 surgeries before anyone figured out something was wrong.
Obviously, washing surgical instruments in hydraulic fluid is not an effective means of sterilization, potentially creating a lot of damage. At the time, no one was sure what the petroleum residue might do to people, but the hospital's CEO assured the public, “We want to give people the message that we care about our patients.” No doubt they did care, but if their instruments weren't safe, they were a threat to their patients no matter how much they cared. (Associated Press, 6-13-05, www.PreachingToday.com)
So it is with the church. We may care about people, but if there is sin and hypocrisy in the containers of our religious rituals, then we will do them more harm than good. If we want to be effective in our ministry as a church, leading people to God, not away from God, then we need to let Christ clean out the fruitless religion. At the very least, we need to let Christ get rid of the hypocrisy in our own lives. Then second, we need to…
PRAY.
We need to get on our knees before God with humble hearts full of faith and forgiveness. We need to ask God to do the impossible, believing that he will!
Mark 11:20-22 As they passed by in the morning, they saw the fig tree withered away to its roots. And Peter remembered and said to him, “Rabbi, look! The fig tree that you cursed has withered.” And Jesus answered them, “Have faith in God. (ESV)
You see, the fig tree was not only a lesson in failure – the failure of fruitless religion; It was a lesson in faith.
Mark 11:23 -24 Truly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says will come to pass, it will be done for him. Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours. (ESV)
If we want to see God move mountains in people’s lives, and if we want to see God use us to bring people closer to Him, then we must pray with absolute faith and confidence in God. We must pray believing that He will answer our prayers.
Pastor and author Tony Evans was in Columbia, South Carolina, to preach at a crusade being held in the University of South Carolina football stadium. Thousands had gathered for the evening session, but news reports indicated a serious thunderstorm was on the way. In fact, the storm was expected to hit at 7:00 pm – the exact time the meeting was scheduled to start.
As the sky grew darker and darker, the threat of cancellation was a very real possibility. A group of preachers and other church leaders decided to gather for a prayer meeting. Evans noted that all the preachers prayed what many would consider safe prayers –ones quite undemanding of God. Then, a woman named Linda spoke up, asking if she could pray. Linda's prayer went something like this: “Lord, thousands have gathered to hear the Good News about your Son. It would be a shame on your name for us to have all these unbelievers go without the gospel when you control the weather, and you don't stop it. In the name of Jesus Christ, address this storm!”
Thus ended the prayer meeting.
Everyone took their places under the dark, threatening sky. The leader of the crusade told the people, “We'll go as long as we can.” Umbrellas sprouted up among the crowd. A man sitting next to Linda opened his umbrella and offered to shield her as well. Linda refused.
Evans says he and his wife watched as the rain clouds came up to the stadium and then split in two. The storm rained on both sides of the stadium and came back together on the other side. All of those gathered for the crusade stayed dry.
As Tony Evans points out: “How did Linda get what the preachers didn't? She had the boldness, the shameless audacity, to ask.” (Taken from a sermon by Tony Evans at The Brooklyn Tabernacle Pastors and Leaders Conference, 4-16-07; www.PreachingToday.com)
My friends, that’s what happens when God’s people pray in faith. God supplies everything we need to do His will. In fact, He can move clouds, even mountains, if that is what is needed to bring people to faith in Christ. All we have to do is pray in faith believing He will. But not only that, we have to pray with forgiveness in our hearts towards one another.
Mark 11:25 And whenever you stand praying, forgive [literally, let him go, set him free], if you have anything against anyone, so that your Father also who is in heaven may forgive you [or set you free from] your trespasses.” (ESV)
The Greek word for “forgive” here was used in Bible days to describe the loosening of a ship from its moorings, or the release of an individual from accusation or obligation. You see, the lack of love and forgiveness in our own hearts keeps us tied down. It keeps us from doing God’s work. So we need to release people from their offenses towards us. We need to let them go. We need to set them free, so that we too can be free to do and be all that God wants us to do and be.
On August 12, 1978, Darryl Stingley, a top receiver for the New England Patriots, was leaping for a pass thrown by quarterback Steve Grogan. That’s when Jack Tatum of the Raiders laid a hit on him that broke Darryl's neck and left him a quadriplegic. As a result, Stingley spent the rest if his life in a wheelchair, and his death 29 years later was related to the injury he suffered on that fateful day in 1978.
When the press interviewed Stingley ten years after his injury, he said, “I have relived that moment over and over again. I was 26 years old at the time, and I remember thinking, What's going to happen to me? If I live, what am I going to be like? And then there were all those Whys, whys, whys?”
Then he said, “It was only after I stopped asking why, that I was able to regroup and go on with my life.”
A crucial part of moving on was forgiving Jack Tatum, the Oakland Raider who had ended Stingley's career. Tatum hit violently, and how he played has been debated in football circles for years. He even wrote a book entitled Final Confessions of an NFL Assassin. Though disturbed by reading that it was Tatum's intent to hurt those on the opposing team, Darryl Stingley forgave the man who changed his life.
“For me to go on and adapt to a new way of life,” Stingley said, “I had to forgive him. I couldn't be productive if my mind was clouded by revenge or animosity.”
When Darryl Stingley passed away in April of 2007, the Reverend Edward C. Brown, Stingley's cousin, conducted the paralyzed player's funeral. He stated, “Darryl was a good man. He didn't stop serving God just because he had a life of suffering and pain… he lived a life focused on the future and not on the past.”
In fact Darryl had visited others in the hospital who were paralyzed. He helped the inner city youth of Chicago, and wrote a book, Happy to Be Alive, that told of his trying experiences. (“Milestones”, Time, 4-23-07, p. 22; Peter Smith, Darryl Stingley and forgiveness, www.courier-journal.com, 4-9-07)
Do you want to be loosed from the bitterness that’s holding you back? Do you want to be set free to serve God wholeheartedly and effectively? Then in your own mind, let go of the one who has hurt you. Loose him or her from any obligation to pay for their sins. Set them free, and you will find that God has also set you free, as well.
Do we, as a church, want to bear fruit for the glory of God this year? Do we want to lead people to Christ on a regular basis and see their lives transformed for all eternity? Then let Christ clean out the fruitless religion, and let’s get on our knees and pray.
