WWUTT 2331 A Good Tree Bears Good Fruit (Luke 6:43-45)

Jesus said, out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks. What do the words you say, say about you?

Do they reflect that you are good of heart or bad? When we understand the text.

This is when we understand the text, a daily Bible study in the word of Christ. For he is before all things and in him, all things hold together.

Tell your friends about our ministry at www .wtt .com. Hey, once again, it's Pastor Gabe.

Thank you, Becky. In our study of the Sermon on the Plain, we're in Luke chapter six, looking at finishing up Jesus' sermon this week.

We have verses 43 to 49 to get through. Today, we're gonna focus on that section where Jesus teaches about a tree and its fruit.

This is verses 43 to 45. Hear the word of the Lord. For no good tree bears bad fruit, nor again does a bad tree bear good fruit, for each tree is known by its own fruit.

For figs are not gathered from thorn bushes, nor are grapes picked from a bramble bush. The good person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure produces evil.

For out of the abundance of the heart, his mouth speaks. Now, this comes right after Jesus was teaching on the log in your eye.

Remember this? So he says, how can you see the speck that is in your brother's eye?

But you do not see the log that is in your own eye. You need to take the log out of your eye, and then, this was verse 42, you will see clearly to take the speck that is in your brother's eye.

You'll take out the speck that's in your brother's eye. Once you've got the log out of your eye, you'll take the log out of your own eye. So take care of the sin in your life.

You're calling out everybody else's sin when you've got the same transgressions that you've been committing in your life.

What hypocrisy? How can you be telling everybody else they have to correct their sin when you've not corrected yours?

It's like a big old log sticking out of your eye. And the person who does this, his sin is compounded on by the fact that he's acting holier than thou, that he thinks he's better than everybody else.

I can tell you about your sin when I've got this big sin in my life. And so Jesus says, take care of the log that is in your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take out the speck that is in your brother's eye.

So in view of that, we're not just jumping from subject to subject here. There's a flow that's going on.

So we go from that into this, where Jesus says, no good tree bears bad fruit, nor again does a bad tree bear good fruit.

He is instructing his disciples to see, be able to discern between those who are producing bad fruit and those who are producing good fruit.

Take the log out of your eye, take care of your sin issues, your blind spots.

And then once you have, then you will be able to see clearly to identify these things.

See who it is that's bearing good fruit and who it is that bears bad fruit. It's in Psalm 19, where David says, who can discern his errors?

Declare me innocent from hidden faults, hidden faults. What sort of faults are in my life

I don't even know about yet? Expose those things so that I know what I need to work on, that I can lay it down before God and be forgiven and cleansed in righteousness.

Verse 13, keep back your servant also from presumptuous sins.

Let them not have dominion over me. Then I shall be blameless and innocent of transgression.

So a person has a righteous eye that they are able to see and help out brothers, warn the church against those false teachers, direct them toward good teachers, help a brother that is stumbling in sin, either being wooed by false teachers or himself.

He's repeating things that are not true, that are not according to the word of God so that he may be a good tree and not a bad tree.

But we have this direction toward discerning the good from the bad. Verse 43, no good tree bears bad fruit, nor again does a bad tree bear good fruit.

For each tree is known by its own fruit.

For figs are not gathered from thorn bushes, nor are grapes picked from a bramble bush.

So you know a fig tree because it's producing what? A fig tree is producing figs. So you know that's a fig tree.

You do not find grapes on a bramble bush. Where do you find grapes? You find it on a vine.

And so you know that's a grape vine. This is a vineyard. This is where grapes are being grown so that they may be harvested for wine.

And you recognize each plant accordingly by its fruit. So it's gonna be the case with the person who is bearing good fruit.

You will know that he is of God when you see the fruit that he is producing.

But you will know that he is not of God, again, by its fruit, its bad fruit.

It's producing terrible results. It may even be a planted tree in an orchard.

It's supposed to be producing fruit, but what's coming from it is bad. And it reveals that the tree is bad.

If the fruit is bad, the tree is bad. We had this tree that was out in front of our house that was an apple tree.

I was actually excited when we bought the house because I thought, wow, we're gonna get to have our very first fruit tree.

We as a family had never had a fruit tree before. So here we have this apple tree, and it'll be neat when it's producing apples in the spring and we'll eat and enjoy them right here in our own home.

I think we bought the house in October, moved into it in late October. So we're already hitting the winter months, not gonna have fruit for a while, but I'm looking forward to the spring when we'll see this tree begin to produce fruit and we will be able to enjoy its harvest.

One tree, but it'll be a great harvest for us. Well, we took care of that tree. It didn't put a whole lot of work into it, but we thought we were taking care of it, watching it well.

And then it was producing fruit in the spring. We were excited about it. We saw the blossoms come out.

We're watching the apples grow on it. I would even come home from work, park the car in the driveway, walk down to the end of the driveway, check the fruit first, go back into the house.

We're looking forward to these apples. Well, once they got big enough, I thought, I'm gonna go ahead and sample one of these apples.

So I plucked it and I bit into it and oh my goodness, it was so awful. It was such an awful apple.

I was like, okay, these are obviously not ready yet. But even when they got to the point of being ready, it still tasted just as bad, if not worse, than that first time when

I tried that apple. And so I realized, okay, so getting this tree to produce fruit is gonna take more work than I've been putting into it.

And so Becky and I both put a lot of work into it. Next time, we're gonna have some good apples off of this tree.

I had a friend of mine who had a chainsaw because I didn't own one at the time. And I said, here, get rid of these bad branches.

Let's get rid of the bad branches on this tree that we know are not gonna produce anything and maybe it'll help it to grow and produce these good apples.

So we got rid of the bad stuff. We tried to give it some good soil. We tried to give it like good nutrients into the ground.

We read up on websites and what we needed to do to care for this tree and get it to produce for us.

Some good apples. And we really, really put some effort into this.

I chased a possum out of the tree one night because he was in there eating the fruit off of the tree.

So I chased him out of the tree, hit him with a softball, just threw it at the possum, got him out of the tree.

And then I tried to chase him down after, but he got away from me. Anyway, Becky was even like watching it for bugs and stuff like that.

And she'd spray the bugs off of it. We did different things, really nurtured and took care of this tree. Thought we did enough to produce some good fruit.

Well, there was one night we were hosting Bible study at our house and a friend of mine, Augusto, he's walking up the drive and he plucks an apple off of that tree.

And I didn't see him do that, but I was standing at the door as he was walking up to welcome him in.

And he sets one of those apples in my hand as he's walking up. It's got a sour look on his face.

And he says that apple and I can see it's got a bite taken out of it. And he just looks at me and goes, these apples are no good.

And then comes on in and I was so disappointed. I was going, we put so much work into that tree.

I had to finally acknowledge the root was bad. Like it was bad all the way down to the root.

No matter what we did, we were never going to get out of that tree good fruit because it was bad right down to the very root of the plant.

I had talked about this a little bit on Thursday in our study of Jeremiah five, which we'll come back to Jeremiah five later on this week.

But when the Bible makes reference to the heart of a person, it's talking about the moral center of a person's character.

It's not just talking about the organ of the heart. It's not just this talking about a person's core, but right down to the very center of a person's desires, the very innerness of a person to the very deepest seed.

What is it that that person desires from their heart? It will be manifested on the outside. Jesus said in Matthew 12, it's out of the overflow of the heart that the mouth speaks.

I've even said it's out of the overflow of the heart that the fingers type. Talking about what we say on the internet, what you see on social media, people type it on Facebook, on X, on even making videos on YouTube or TikTok, what they show pictures of on Instagram and then type in the description on the side, what they blog about, articles they write, all these things.

We are more connected to one another than we've ever been at the same time kind of separated from each other.

But we are into other people's lives whom we would otherwise not even know if it wasn't for the internet that connects us.

But it also gives us more ways to express ourselves than a person would ordinarily have without the medium of the internet like we have today.

And as said in the book of Proverbs, now this is in Ecclesiastes, a fool multiplies words.

And so now that you have more ways to make more words, fools are coming out of the woodwork.

You can find them all over the place. They're all over social media. Foolish people showing you who they are through the words that come out of them online.

It's out of the overflow of their heart. They speak, they type, comes out in text messages as well, in emails, the way that we talk to one another.

You will know a tree by its fruit. The kinds of things they do on the outside reflects upon and reveals what a person is like on the inside.

And if they're bad all the way down to the root, then what they will produce is bad fruit.

Now, this isn't always gonna be the case in the sense of like, you know, people can make a good first impression.

It's over a period of time, you're going to see in them whether they are truly good or truly bad.

A lot of times, you know, a person's only skin deep or something like that. They have a very surface level impression that they're able to leave with people.

But once you get deeper into them, you find out how really problematic, how troubled, how sinful this person really is.

In Romans chapter 16, verses 17 to 18, Paul gives this warning to the church. I appeal to you brothers to watch out for those who cause divisions and create obstacles contrary to the doctrine that you've been taught.

Avoid them. Listen to this, verse 18. For such persons do not serve our

Lord Christ, but their own appetites. And by smooth talk and flattery, they deceive the hearts of the naive.

Some of the most evil people I've ever known were some of the nicest people that you'll ever meet.

You've heard it said about serial killers, right? Whenever somebody who is guilty of some heinous crime gets arrested and it turns out they were just like the

Joe next door or something like that. And they'll interview the neighbors and the neighbors will all say, it's the nicest guy.

I never would have suspected him of doing such a thing, such an evil thing. And there are people who lead us astray into godless lives, who would lead us astray into godless lives if we're not careful, because they're just so charming.

They're so friendly and kind. There's a guy on the internet, I've responded to his stuff before, his name is

Dan McClellan. He speaks such soothing tones whenever he talks. The guy is a snake.

I mean, the stuff that he says, it's like, in what way can

I get you today to doubt that God's word is true? I doubt that that's what's on his mind when he sits down to record a video, but it's almost like that's what he's thinking through and then comes up with the most deceptive lies out there.

You can almost see or hear Satan hissing through him. Did God really say?

Did God really say? And he'll shame Christians into believing things that have caused the deaths of LGBTQ people.

You weaponize the Bible against them and you have cost the lives of LGBTQ people because you believe that the

Bible says that homosexuality is sin. And he's a Bible scholar. This guy's a Bible scholar, has a degree in Bible.

He's also a Mormon and he's socially liberal. So dangerous in a lot of different ways, but this guy will just hiss the lies of Satan in his videos and does it in these sweet tones and these bright eyes that are unblinking and looking right at you through your computer screen and deceiving the hearts of the naive with smooth talk and flattery.

There's all kinds of teachers, all kinds of people that are out there doing these kinds of things. And it sounds like on the surface, it looks like good fruit.

Those look like good apples that are coming from that tree right there. But then you take it and you bite into it and you find out it is rotten.

And then as you look deeper, you find out it's rotten even down to the root. A bad tree cannot produce good fruit.

Verse 45, the good person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good and the evil person out of the evil treasure produces evil.

For out of the abundance of the heart, his mouth speaks. The true nature of a person's heart can often be seen in how they talk.

And when you get them off script, when you're speaking with them in certain contexts, you're going to see their heart more truly than when they're trying to put on a front.

When you have them in a, I was going to say venue, but you have them in an atmosphere,

I guess, in a crowd, in a situation where they have to put on a face and they're able to keep up the mask, they're able to put on the disguise really, really well.

Then what it is you see from that person is the front that they're putting on, their mask.

You're just seeing them as far as their mask. Remember, we talked about this last time too, with regards to the hypocrite, where Jesus previously had said, you hypocrite, first take the log out of your eye and then you'll see clearly to take the speck that is, take out the speck that's in your brother's eye.

So the hypocrite is a mask. And some people in certain environments, all you see is the mask and you probably have to get them out of that environment and into a different context in order to hear them speak in such a way where they're off script.

And then you're starting to see from them and hear in their words, a little bit more of the person that they really are inside.

Now, this person speaks about loving others, but then when you get them away from those others, how does he speak about those others?

One thing that my wife and I have resolved to do, we made this deal before we got married and praise

God, we've held to it ever since we've been married, but we were never going to speak ill of one another, even outside of each other's presence.

We're gonna do it in each other's presence either. To this day, Becky and I have been married 15 years and we have never said an insult to each other.

I have never called her a name. She has never called me a name. And we've held onto that.

Praise God for that. As it's only by the grace of God in our lives, as we've shared before in our testimony, it's not in our nature to be that way.

It's not like we're just naturally happy, cheerful people. We've been in bad relationships where we were shooting barbs at one another.

Both of us have experienced that. So when we found each other, we just made this deal. I'm never gonna call you a name.

You never call me a name. And we've held to that. It has been the conviction in our hearts and it has been the

Holy Spirit of God that has kept us true to that commitment. But we also made this deal that we would never speak ill about one another when we were out of each other's company, when we were in the company of others.

And when I'm around other guys and they start ripping on their wives, I'm not gonna join them by ripping on mine.

First of all, I don't really have a problem with Becky that I wanna rant about. So there's that.

But at the same time, I am not gonna feed into this monster that they're creating of just a bunch of guys getting together, ripping on their wives, and now

I'm joining into it, encouraging them and also putting my wife down. As it said in 1

Corinthians 7, no one hates his own body, but he cares for it and nurtures it.

All right, is that 1 Corinthians 7? That's in Ephesians 5, isn't it? Yeah, the instruction that's given to husbands to love their wives as Christ loves the church.

So there in Ephesians 5, no one hates his own body, but he cares for his body. And so a man needs to love his wife, care for his wife.

And so this needs to be the case with all husbands. And so as a husband and even as a pastor and as a friend to these men,

I'm gonna direct them toward speaking positively about their wives. And the way that I begin doing that is by speaking positively about mine.

They're ripping on their wives and I'll just start praising my wife. And then you can see it among those guys.

They'll start to feel guilty because Gabe loves his wife. And even here apart from his wife, he's still speaking positively about her though he's got no brownie points to earn here because she's not here to hear him make these comments.

And so from there able to direct these guys into speaking more affirmingly of their wives with whom they are one flesh.

So if they're ripping on their wives, they're ripping on themselves. They're tearing themselves down. What does it say about them when they would be insulting about their wives?

They're saying they're just as foolish as they wanna say that their wives are foolish. It reveals the character of their hearts.

When you kind of get them out of their element and into a different place and what you end up seeing is that out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth will speak.

So what's coming out of your mouth and what does it say about your heart?

Have you given much thought to that? Do you give much thought to the words that you say and what it says about you?

It's in Psalm 141 where David prays, Oh Lord, I call upon you, hasten to me.

Give ear to my voice when I call to you. Let my prayer be counted as incense before you and the lifting up of my hands as the evening sacrifice.

Set a guard, Oh Lord, over my mouth.

Keep watch over the door of my lips. Do not let my heart incline to any evil, to busy myself with wicked deeds in company with men who work iniquity and let me not eat of their delicacies.

It's in Psalm 19 verse 14. I actually read on the Jeremiah podcast verses 12 to 13 this past Thursday.

I didn't get to verse 14, which is the last verse of Psalm 19. So let me read that here. Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight.

Oh Lord, my rock and my redeemer. The words of my mouth are gonna come from the meditation of my heart.

So what are the words you're saying say about you? Are you listening to them?

Do you catch what it is you're saying? Can you tell what kind of character is being reflected in what you say?

What would somebody else's impression of your heart be based on the words that you say?

Would they say that you're a good tree producing good fruit? Or are you a bad tree producing bad fruit?

It's worthy of consideration. It's worthy to stop and meditate upon. Think about those things and correct those things where they need corrected.

Let me read again that section of Psalm 19 I read on Thursday. Who can discern his errors?

Declare me innocent from hidden faults. Keep back your servant also from presumptuous sins.

Let them not have dominion over me. Then I shall be blameless and innocent of great transgression.

Heavenly father, bring good fruit out of us. Help it to be that our hearts are so inclined to do what pleases you that it's just automatically gonna flow out of our lives.

Good fruit, people will see it. They will know that we belong to the King. The treasure in our heart is

Christ. So what is produced from our hearts is Christ -like. And may it give glory to you as said in the

Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5. Shine your light before men so that they may see your good deeds and give glory to your father in heaven on the day of visitation.

So may our good works, our words that we say, all of this point back to Christ who dwells within us.

It's in Jesus' name we pray, amen. Thank you for listening to When We Understand the

Text with Pastor Gabe Hughes. If you'd like to support this ministry, visit our website, www .wutt

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