Book of Romans, 8:1 - Fruit Bearing of the Believer, Pt. 1 (09/08/2019)

Now, this is before football, even before baseball, and soccer, and golf.

And I might have had some golf over in Scotland by now. Yeah, I imagine you had golf.

I don't know if you had tennis. This is about 1855, the year 1855.

And I just wanted to read to you a little bit about what it was like.

All right. Now, this is about the life of Charles Spurgeon.

And he's writing a letter to his fiancee, the woman he's going to marry and spend the rest of his life with.

He only lived to be about 57 years old. And to imagine that, to me, that's going home pretty early, because I'm 65.

But looking a little bit about what the times were like and some of the things he accomplished by the age of 57.

And it's quite amazing. So he's writing this note to his wife. And the person who wrote this book made this statement before I give you the quote here.

But he said, just like George Whitefield, who liked to preach in open air, they call them open air meetings.

They would go out into a place that would hold 20 ,000, 30 ,000, 50 ,000 people. And these men, of course, they didn't have

PA systems, did they? So they knew how to speak from the diaphragm. And they could speak in such a way that you could hear, 50 ,000 people could hear their voice.

And they said they could hear Whitefield for over a mile away. But just like Whitefield liked to preach in the open air,

Spurgeon took advantage of that when he had the opportunity. So he's writing a letter to his future wife, his girlfriend, telling her about an event that just happened and how excited he was about it.

So he says, oh, by the way, the man who wrote the book said there were actually, it was a crowded field with almost 20 ,000 people at this event.

And so he says this to his girlfriend. He says, yesterday, I climbed to the summit of a minister's glory.

Now, he's not very old at this time in his life. He's in his 20s, all right?

He said, I climbed to the summit of a minister's glory. He began preaching, by the way, at the age of 19, never went to college, never went to seminary.

And yet, he was known as the best red man in England by the age of 21. I climbed to the summit of a minister's glory.

My congregation was enormous, certainly twice as many as at Exeter Hall, which was the indoor place he was preaching at at the time.

He said, the Lord was with me, and the profoundest silence was observed. Can you imagine 20 ,000 people being silent?

That had to be loud, if you know what I mean, like just thick, thick quietness. He said, the most profound silence was observed.

But, oh, the close, he's talking about the end of his sermon, the close, never did mortal man receive a more enthusiastic oration.

He's talking about himself. Isn't that funny? That's a young man talking, right?

No one had ever heard a more enthusiastic oration, but he just got through giving God credit, though. He said, the

Lord was with me, didn't he? I wonder I am alive, he said. After the service, five or six gentlemen endeavored to clear a passage, but I was carried along amid cheers and prayers and shouts for about a quarter of an hour.

It really seemed more like a week. I was hurried round and round the field without hope of escape until suddenly seeing a nice open carriage with two occupants standing near,

I sprang in and begged them to drive away, horse and buggy, right? This they most kindly did, and I stood up and waved my hat and cried, the blessing of the

God be with you. While from thousands of heads, the hats were lifted and cheer after cheer was given.

Surely amid these plaudits, I can hear the low rumbling of an advancing storm of reproaches.

But even this I can bear for my master's sake. And the writer of the book says he had as many enemies as he had friends, and so he understood that even though this event was huge, the newspapers of the day were gonna blast him and make him look like a modernist and a liberal because he was doing something different than what the staid theologians of his day believed in.

He was creating excitement, and people were excited about what he was doing and hearing the message and hearing the word of God, and thousands of people were being saved every day of the week, not just on Sunday, every day of the week he preached.

And so one criticism followed him his whole life, and that was that he was conceited.

Wonder why, right? So listen to this, this is funny. So his biography, his biographer,

W .Y. Fullerton wrote this story that had happened.

He said, as to the question of conceit, in later years he gave a sufficient answer.

And Spurgeon told this story. He said, a friend of mine was calling upon me some time ago.

Somebody wrote this about him after his death. And his friend happened to say, do you know,

Mr. Spurgeon, some people think you're conceited. The great preacher smiled indulgently, and after a pause, he said, do you see those bookshelves?

They contain hundreds, nay, thousands of my sermons translated into every language under heaven.

Well, now add to this that ever since I was 20 years old, there never has been built a place large enough to hold the numbers of people who wish to hear me preach.

And upon my honor, when I think of it, I wonder why I'm not more conceited than I am. And he winked at him.

And the biographer says, upon which the writer remarks, that is the kind of Bonhomme that disarms criticism.

So he had a good sense of humor, too. Pretty interesting. He later became known through not only much of London, but at first, not all that many people beyond London knew about Charles Spurgeon.

And what seemed to be a terrible event took place that caused his fame to spread.

And he was preaching in a place, it was the music hall, because there wasn't a church big enough to hold the people, so they had found a music hall that would hold about 6 ,000, 7 ,000, 8 ,000 people.

And he was preaching in there, and one of his enemies had come, probably a newspaper editor or something, had come, and out of the midst of that crowd, he screamed, fire, fire, and everybody jumped up and started trying to get out of the building.

And everybody stomped over everybody, and a lot of people were crushed, and about seven people were killed, and about 28 people went to the hospital with serious injuries, and a stairwell collapsed and fell on a bunch of people, because some guy hollered fire, and there was no fire.

It upset Charles Spurgeon so much that he was depressed for many days after that event.

And the next day, the newspaper, which hated him in London, carried vivid descriptions of the disaster and the deaths and the injuries and how terrible it was, and they vilified

Spurgeon for holding services in a public music hall instead of in a church. And they said it was his fault, and one leading newspaper said, this hiring of places, in other words, renting buildings, hiring of places of amusement for Sunday preaching is a novelty and a powerful one.

It looks as if religion were at least, were at last to shift. It is a confession of weakness rather than a sign of strength.

It is not wrestling with Satan in his strongholds, to use the old earnest Puritan language, he's mocking the

Puritans there, the newspaper guy is, but rather it is entering into a very coward, truce, and alliance with the world system.

So that's what they thought of Spurgeon, and that's what the world would say about him. Now don't you think it's funny that the worldlings were accusing him of being part of the world system?

We talk about that a lot in Tradeway, how the people of the world, I've heard Dave Evers say this tons of times, the people of the world want

Christians to think it's evil to seek to better your family financially, that if you're a

Christian, that's evil, you shouldn't think that way. Well, that came from the Roman Catholic religion, that didn't come from the Bible, Mother Teresa -ism, and the

Bible never teaches that, but it's interesting that the world will tell us who we're supposed to be, what a

Christian should be like, and their definition is always very legalistic, it's interesting. So the same, but nothing is new under the sun, the same thing was going on here.

And what happened as these newspapers attacked him, everyone in all of England was reading the newspapers, and they all heard about him for the first time, so now he's famous over the entire nation of England for the first time, everyone knows about him now, he's still in his 20s, so he's now this famous young preacher that everybody wants to come here, and now they can't build buildings big enough to hold all the people.

So once that started to happen, and over the years, Spurgeon's popularity increased until he was known all over the civilized world, not just England.

His sermons were reproduced by the millions in virtually every language on the face of the earth, even today, they are read more than any other sermons ever printed.

And he only lived to be 57 years old. Let's see.

D .L. Moody, how many of you have heard of D .L. Moody? He was a great preacher in the United States who could draw crowds.

It's said about D .L. Moody that when the World's Fair in New York City was new, a new concept, and it opened up and thousands of people would come to that, that he would pitch a tent across the street from the

World's Fair, a huge tent, and preach, and that crowd would be bigger than the people going to the

World's Fair. There'd be more people who wanna hear D .L. Moody preach than to go to the World's Fair. So he was a huge, famous preacher on this continent, whereas Spurgeon was in England.

And so Spurgeon heard about D .L. Moody and invited him to come preach at his church.

And D .L. Moody had not yet arrived on the London scene, but Spurgeon invited him to preach at his tabernacle, to which

Moody replied, in regard to coming to your tabernacle, I consider it a great honor to be invited.

And in fact, I should consider it a great honor to black your boots, in other words, to shine your shoes.

Isn't that something? But to preach to your people would be out of the question.

I'm not going to do that. And he said, because if they will not turn to God under your preaching, neither should they be persuaded though one rose from the dead.

So I'm not about to preach in your church. Isn't that something? Moody did eventually come and preach for Spurgeon.

And in writing to thank him afterwards and to invite him to come to his church to preach,

Moody said, I wish you could give us every night you can for the next 60 days.

There are so few men who can draw people on a weekday. Isn't that something?

So you read about this stuff. You think, wow, what would that be like? Spurgeon once said, somebody asked me how

I got my congregation. Now listen to this. Somebody asked me, how did

I get such a big congregation? His answer was, I never got it at all.

I did not think it was my duty to do so. I only had to preach the gospel. Why my congregation got my congregation.

I started with 80 people or so, scarcely 100 when I preached the first time and he's 19 years old.

He said, the next Sunday, I had 200. And he said, everyone who heard me was saying to his neighbor you must go and hear this young man preach.

Next Sunday, it was 400 and the next Sunday it was 800. I mean, you're talking about four weeks it went from 80 to 800 people.

Never meeting, let's see, next meeting we had 400 then 800. That was the way in which my people got my congregation.

Now the people, I won't read that part. He's talking about, he went on to talk about how they had to have a ticket.

You had to have a ticket to get in because there weren't enough seats for the thousands of people who wanted to come in. And so his members would give their ticket away to a visitor so that the visitor could come here.

It's a pretty cool story. Anyway, I just thought you might find that interesting. When it talks about his, how these newspapers would attack him and his detractors would attack him.

I like the way it words that all the way into the end, he never changed his message no matter what they said about him.

He always preached the gospel. And it says that he always remained,

I like this phrase, a Pauline Calvinist and a Puritan unto the end.

Now think about that, a Pauline Calvinist. What does that mean? It means somebody who's a Calvinist that got it from Paul, not from Calvin.

Isn't that interesting? So great stuff. Anyway, this is just the introduction.

The book's actually about prayer. It's Spurgeon's writings on prayer. I'm finding it very interesting. So times were different.

Now we have football. In fact, I need to hurry because I think the Cowboys start pretty soon. And we got everything.

And so preaching is not the most popular pastime anymore, but it was.

And God brought that to a height in England and in this country to prepare,

I think, a continent for future World War I and World War II and so forth. And so you just think about how

God raised up this boy who didn't even go to college, didn't even go to seminary, and more thousands of people were saved under his ministry than any other preacher we're aware of in history.

Well, we're in Romans 8, verse one. I'm gonna get started before the crowd finds out we're meeting so that we can get out of here before they get here because I don't like crowds too much.

So Romans 8, one. There's therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the spirit.

We're talking about the second half of that verse and have been for many Sundays. This is a verse that takes a lot of Sundays to understand fully what it means.

But the second half of the verse means that the same people who are born again, those people, once the

Holy Spirit visits them and calls them and opens their eyes and their ears and their understanding and then changes their want to so that for the first time in their life, they want to receive

Jesus because they never did the day before or the day before that or their whole life before that. And the Holy Spirit prepared them and opened their eyes, opened their ears, opened their understanding and their minds so that they desired him for the first time.

And then they received over 33 gifts from God in a nanosecond at the moment the

Holy Spirit quickened them. He said, while you're still in your sins, I quickened you. So we got saved before we made any changes.

And that's not what the modern church preaches. The modern church preaches a whole list of things you've got to do to get saved.

You don't got to do anything to get saved because you don't want to get saved. What happens is God saves you, then you want to do all these things.

So the world has it backwards. And Spurgeon understood this. He preached that so clearly you wouldn't even believe it if you read some of his sermons, how clearly he would preach the fact that I just said.

The Holy Spirit comes and quickens us, regenerates us. And then the effect of that are all the things that most churches say you got to do to get saved.

The truth is you're already saved before you ever do any of that stuff. And you wouldn't do it to get saved because you had no desire to.

If you did, you'd have done it the day before, right? You heard me say it a million times. That's just how it is. So the same person that is in fact saved, the

Bible says, there's therefore now no condemnation for that person. Look, it's not that we don't sin anymore, is it?

I mean, we sin sometimes because we still have an old nature, but we're not sinners if the

Bible meaning for that is that your predominant movement in life is towards sin. No, it's not, not anymore.

It used to be you turned your back on that because he saved you, not to get saved, but because he saved you and you love him so much because of what he did for you when he opened your old dark eyes and your deaf ears and changed your heart where you hated

God to where you love God. And you love him so much for that that you turned your back on that and now you're walking towards the heavenly finish line, right?

That's the predominant walk. Do we mess up? Yeah, we mess up. And that confuses the world because they think you're saved by works.

The whole world religions and most Christianity today thinks that you're saved by, yeah, you gotta believe in Jesus, but you gotta.

And if you add anything to that, the Apostle Paul said, then Jesus is of no avail to you.

If you add something to one drop of his blood to save you, he's no avail to you, you're not going to be saved.

Isn't that scary? So how many of our friends add this and this and that and the other to it? Well, you gotta believe in Jesus, but you gotta do this too.

You gotta repent. You gotta have faith. You gotta go do good works. You gotta tithe.

You gotta go to church. You gotta hold out till the end, all these things. Well, there's some truth in all that, but the truth of it is that those are things that you will do because you are saved.

None of them are things you do to get saved. That's where it gets backwards because salvation is a free gift and you don't do something to earn a gift, do you?

You don't, do you? So you confuse the very definition of the words when you believe in salvation by works or a mix of works plus Jesus.

It won't work. No one can be saved that way. It won't work. You can't be saved that way.

So the person who is regenerated by God, salvation is of God, when he saves you, then a flood of joy comes into our life, a desire to serve the one who saved me is there and we begin to repent, which means to change your mind about who's

God. We thought we were God the moment before we were saved. We thought we were God. The moment after we were saved, we knew we weren't

God. We figured out there is God and I'm not him. That's what we figured out because the

Holy Spirit revealed it to us in a nanosecond and we received Christ as our personal Lord and Savior and his

Holy Spirit came to indwell our bodies. He gave us the faith of Christ, which resulted in faith in Christ.

He gave us the desire to repent. He gave us the desire to do everything good we could and to not do the bad things we're used to doing.

All of that flooded in in a nanosecond and it's all grace and it's all by the

Lord. So that group of people, there is no condemnation upon that group of people ever again because Jesus died for every sin they would ever do.

It's already paid for. He paid the sin debt. He ransomed us out of hell into heaven.

He ransomed us from he who had us captive, the devil, and he set us free, right?

Isn't that how it works? So when you look at the second part of the verse, these people have no condemnation.

No condemnation, which people? The ones who walk not after the flesh, but after the spirit. But you have to understand it's talking about a predominant walk, not a perfect walk.

If you read the whole context of Romans chapter seven, which came before this verse, Romans chapter six, all the way back to the first of Romans and all the way back through even past verse, chapter eight verse one, you'll see the context is not teaching this means you have a perfect walk.

What it means is you have a walk that is toward the one who saved you predominantly.

And it's tantamount to being filled with the spirit, first indwelt by him, but then filled with the spirit.

So we've been going through the scripture and we've been finding some of these things that result from our salvation and how that causes us to be this kind of person who is walking predominantly towards the

Lord and away from the world system, away from sin, towards the Lord. So we talked about fruit bearing for a while because that's a big part of it.

And in Matthew, I'm sorry, Mark chapter 11, starting about verse 11, we saw the story where Jesus was going to go to Jerusalem and look at the temple.

And the first thing it says about him was at first he walked past this fig tree that was green and full of life.

And he went over and he was hungry and he tried to find a fig and there was no fruit on the tree. So he cursed the tree and then they went on into Jerusalem, right?

And it says he looked round about all things in the temple. He just looked at everything in the place of worship.

And then when they went back, that tree was dead. And as apostles wondered at it, they said, how could he kill a tree by speaking to it?

And it's dead in one day. And what's the message here? Well, the message was that tree wasn't bearing any fruit.

So it's a teaching on fruit bearing, which should be one of the greatest results of our salvation is that we bear fruit.

In fact, it is a fact that everyone who's truly born again does bear fruit. Some 30 fold, some 60 and some 100.

We don't all bear the same amount of fruit, but we all bear fruit or we're not really saved. And it's not the fruit bearing that makes us be saved.

It is the result of the salvation. I mean, a tree doesn't bear fruit because it's a tree. It bears fruit because it's got a root and the nutrients come from the root.

And the picture of fruit bearing in the Bible is that Jesus is the root and he bears the fruit.

I mean, he creates the fruit within us and we bear it or hold it on our limbs. And people see it in us, but it comes from Jesus Christ.

So all of that is borne out in these stories that we've kind of already gone through. And so we noticed that in that story, the first thing that Jesus did was that he looked around and he took a really close look at the church.

Of course, back then it was the temple. Now it's the church. And my point was, he's doing that today. Jesus is going around the

United States of America and all over the world, but I'm thinking of the modern American church today. And he's going into those churches where they're hooplaing and shouting and singing and tapping their toes and doing everything, doing the same,

Lord, Lord, have we not done many things in your name? And he's looking around to see if it's real or not.

All right, is this from the Holy Spirit or is this a counterfeit spirit or is this a spirit of pride or what is this?

And he's looking at it to see if it's worldly or to see if it's from God. And he makes no mistake on it when he looks.

All right, and so there are repercussions that come from it because if you keep reading the story, he went back into that temple later and he took a whip and he whipped, he literally whipped the men who were in that temple selling stuff for a profit in God's house because they had animal sacrifices back then.

And they said, oh, your animal's not clean enough. You gotta buy mine. They charged 10 times the amount. And they were looting the people and the widows and everybody.

And Jesus drove them out with a whip, turned their tables over, destroyed their equipment, sent them out of there and said, this is a house of God.

This is a house of prayer, not a house of merchandise. And I think Jesus is looking at the church in America today and saying the same thing.

I think he's saying, look, you're here to draw a crowd. You look at Spurgeon, you wanna be like that.

So you do all this modern stuff to get a crowd there, but you're not like Spurgeon because you can't preach the old time

Puritan gospel because you don't even know it. That's what I think Jesus is saying predominantly, not everywhere, but predominantly in this country.

I think if you look at Spurgeon and the fact that within one generation they had rejected his message and before he died, they kicked him out of his denomination because he was a

Pauline Calvinist and no one likes that. They don't like God to be in control, which is what Calvin taught.

God is in control, not man. No, no, no, no, the modern church wants, where'd that come from? That came from Rocky. Hey, have you gone out to the website and noticed that Ben Mitchell has rebuilt it and you can click on a button and find all of my mentor's sermon, not all of them yet, but they'll all be loaded,

Rocky Freeman. You need to listen to those as fast as you can listen to them. Anyway, time out. Okay, so no, no, no, where was

I? Whatever it was, Rocky wouldn't have liked it, neither did I. So when

Jesus looks and he sees that kind of thing in the church, he just, he takes a whip out, he starts to beat the people up and he starts to clear it out.

And what happens in the book of Revelation, it says he takes the candlestick, which is a picture of his presence, and he removes it and that church becomes just an institution, which is a huge building with a lot of people in it.

It's not even real. And you won't grow if you go to that church. You won't grow, you'll get excited.

Time you hit the house, it's gone. Time you sit down to watch the Cowboys, it's gone. You don't grow because it's not the true old -fashioned gospel.

You know, you talk about a Pauline Calvinist, which is what Spurgeon was. They kicked him out of the denomination before he died because they didn't like that message anymore.

And you know what? It wasn't that long before England ceased to be the nation upon whom the sun never set, which the mightiest empire the world had ever known, and it went through and out the other side of World War II, and now it's just a very small island.

It's still sort of a major nation, but it's certainly not a superpower and never will be again because you know what they did?

Spurgeon was barely gone and barely buried, and they rejected his message. By the time my parents went to England for the first time in the 1950s and 60s,

I guess, they would go into those huge tabernacles. There'd be like six people sitting there on a

Sunday. Isn't that right, Nana? They were empty. The churches were empty. I think you even saw the church where Charles Spurgeon preached, and it was empty.

That, I think, is a preview of the United States of America, only it's not happening the same way.

It's really more subtle trick that Satan is playing in America because he is not emptying the churches.

He's filling them with tares because the churches aren't preaching the true Bible gospel anymore.

They're preaching modernistic, worldly message that people like, and it itches, it tickles their itching ears, and they bring the preachers in.

It'll preach that way, and they fill it with huge crowds of tares, people not even saved. Some of them are, but there's more tares than not in a lot of these churches.

And so we're looking, thinking there's huge revival in this nation. But it's just like Dr.

Criswell said when he was alive and the pastor of First Baptist Church. He said, I doubt 5 % of my congregation even saved.

5 % are probably actually born again. Can you imagine, this was back when things were even better than now, back in the 50s, 60s, 70s, when that was still a mighty church, he said that.

Wow, so where are we today? Well, we got our churches filled, but I don't think they're filled with the true gospel.

And I think it's the same as England went through, and I think we may see something tragic happen to this nation in the next few decades.

Because when you turn away from the true gospel, God takes his hand off of it. And when he removes his hand, we find out we're not as smart as we think we were.

We didn't actually cause all this prosperity and peace. God did. And we remove ourselves from him and it goes away pretty fast.

And I think we're seeing that as we see a nation where kids are coming into schools and killing kids.

Can you imagine you guys that are my age or slightly younger than me or maybe slightly older than me, can you imagine when you were a teenager,

I think as a guy does, you're gonna ask your girlfriend out for a date and you have to worry that when you take her to that movie, you might get shot.

You didn't grow up feeling like that, did you? You didn't worry about those things. Like you're gonna go to school tomorrow and you're gonna worry about some kid from school coming in with a gun and can shoot 30 people before they can stop him at your school.

You never had that thought. You can't tell me things aren't changing. You ever check out how many earthquakes there are now compared to how many there were in the 60s?

Way more. And they kill far more people and they're happening more often. And we just ignore all this stuff.

Jesus said, look, in the last times, men will be implacable. What does that mean? They walk in with a gun and you say, wait,

I got a wife and kids and they kill you because they don't care. And there's nothing you could say to him to make him not kill you.

That's implacable. That never existed in my lifetime till now. Even the mafia had rules.

There were people they wouldn't kill, right? These, listen, we're in the end times.

And the Bible says this, forsake not the assembly of ourselves together. That means coming here to be together.

And so much the more as you see the day approaching. What day? What's the day?

That's when he comes in the clouds for us. So when you see the second coming getting closer, you need to be in church consistently.

Well, we live in a society where coming to church is just convenient. It's almost like in Italy, the traffic laws, what do they say,

Charlotte? They're suggestions. A stop sign's like a suggestion. Maybe you stop if you want to.

And I found that to be true. So I kind of liked it actually. But anyway, so guess what

I did? I didn't stop. I played chicken with them. If I get there first, they'll stop. Almost worked every time.

But anyway, going to church is a suggestion in the modern church. It's not something you have to do, right?

So anyway, I think everyone gets the idea of where we are. Now, so what do we do though?

What do we do in a time like this? Well, you can try as hard as you want to go out this week and make this size double the size next

Sunday. You can talk to everybody you want to and we'll see how you do.

I can remember a time in this church where I was pastor of it when I baptized over 91 people one year.

And the founding pastor criticized me because he said, well, how many of them were adults?

And I said, seven. As if the kids didn't matter. But anyway, can you even imagine baptizing 91 people a year?

I mean, you can remember those days, Sharon. Is it happening now? Well, it's not for lack of effort that it doesn't happen now.

It's just like times are different. Yeah, you can remember time like this as young as you guys are.

Where young couples would say, hey, we're about getting ready to have kids. I need to find a church, right? You remember that?

So you can just go visit. I mean, if you're smart, you knock on doors of young couples because they're getting ready to go to church and you invite them to church, your church grows.

That was a great plan back in the 70s. Does it work now? No, because now young couples are saying, well,

I'm just about to have to learn how to do cheerleading and get them into softball and get them into, what's the other things?

Soccer mom. I got to get them into gymnastics. I got to get them into golf and tennis and baseball and all the things we love.

They're not thinking about getting them to church. They're too busy. So we definitely live in different times.

So what do we do in a time like this? We can't do it for the crowd.

We can't do it for fame. So why do we do it? Well, and what do we do?

Well, one of the things that we have to do, and we started talking about this last time, is first we got to talk about fruit, fruit bearing.

And we got to talk about two kinds because Jesus said, you know them by their fruit. So we've got to notice people who don't have the right kind of fruit.

And you say, well, we're not supposed to judge. Actually, the Bible says the opposite. The Bible says the world is not supposed to judge us.

We're supposed to judge everything it says. By judge, I mean, discern it. Discern whether it's good or evil.

So we started talking about this a little bit last time that as far as false prophets,

Jesus said there will be many false prophets that will arise up in the end times. Well, do they look like a false prophet?

No, we studied last time. It says they look like angels of light. They look like ministers of righteousness.

So how do you tell? You tell by two things. And this is reviewing a little bit from last time. You remember what they are.

The first one is their life, the fruits of their life. What are they like on Saturday night,

Friday night? I know they're great on Sunday morning. What are they like all week? And secondly, their words.

Does their gospel match the Bible gospel or is it different? Those are the two things we look at.

Now, last time the main thing Jesus did was he went into that temple and he looked around.

He took a hard look at everything. That's what we have to do. A hard look at everything. Is it right?

Does it match scripture? Secondly, he cast out that which was worldly. He got rid of it.

That's what we have to do. So we talked about a little bit last time in Matthew chapter seven, starting with verse 15.

Beware of false prophets which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.

You shall know them by their fruits, Jesus said. And he went on, we talked about that a little bit.

Wherefore, by their fruits you will know them. In 2 Corinthians 11, 12, it says, for such are false apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves.

In other words, God's not transforming them into a great Charles Spurgeon. They're transforming themselves into apostles of Christ.

And no marvel, for Satan himself transformed himself into an angel of light. Therefore, it is no great thing if his ministers also are transformed as ministers of righteousness, right?

And in Galatians 2, 3, said that these people come in privily to spy out your liberty.

Now, what does that mean? Galatians 2, verse three. It means they come in secretly and you don't know they're false at first.

You don't know they're false at first. And they come in to spy out our liberty. What does that mean?

We're not legalists here. We believe in salvation by grace. We believe we grow by grace unto grace.

That all of it is God's hand in our life causing us to be anything we could be, right? We're not, like you can't make a list of rules good enough to make me good.

Because you give me a rule, the first thing I'm gonna do is break it. I'll turn it into a suggestion, right? That's our nature.

And yet, the whole crowd that's legalists, they're always gonna put you under guilt and put you under rules.

And that is the first thing a false prophet will do. He will sneak in your church privily. It means secretly you think he's a good guy.

He begins to teach. He says, well, you do know this. I mean, there's so many catchphrases I could tell you. Like, you do know this, that Jesus didn't come to destroy the law but to fulfill it.

And we have him and we have our salvation so that now we can keep the law. So we really need to start worshiping on Saturday because that's the true

Sabbath. You'll hear him start saying things like that. It sounds really good, especially if they're a Jew. If they're a

Jewish believer. They're gonna sound so much higher than you'll ever be and they wanna pull you up to that level of keeping more rules than anyone else can keep.

And boy, it will destroy a church quicker than anything in the world is legalism. And you know what I've noticed about these legalistic preachers?

They tend to run off with the organist or the church secretary and other things like that more than any other preachers.

You know, I don't know why, but I think God hates legalism and I think Satan mocks it.

So I don't know, but that's been my observation. You notice we don't have an organist in this church.

So. You know them by their fruit, ladies and gentlemen.

Watch the fruit. Now I wanna take you to another place. Go to 2

Peter 2, verse one. So we're talking about bad fruit first because I wanna end with the good stuff, which probably next

Sunday. We're gonna talk about good fruit, good fruit. What kind of fruit are we supposed to bear?

And there's two kinds of things we can talk about with fruit. We won't get to that today, but I could ask you the question, what's the difference between gathering fruit and bearing fruit?

Because the Bible says we're supposed to do both. Isn't that an interesting question? Think about it this week. What's the difference between gathering fruit and bearing fruit?

We're supposed to do both. But let's look at these false people that wanna come in and destroy.

Because the first thing you have to do to grow and to become a fruit -bearing church is to get out of the church, to root out and turn the tables over of the people trying to bring the world into the church.

You gotta get that out first. You've gotta purge the church of these kinds of people and acts and activities before you can accomplish anything for God.

So that's, we're talking about this first. That's the right order. Second Peter 2, one says, but there were false prophets also among the people, even as there shall be false teachers among you.

So God is saying there's never been a time in the history of man on the earth that you haven't had

Satan infiltrating God's church. They didn't always call it the church. I understand that, but we'll call it the church for now.

Old Testament, New Testament, whether it's the temple of the church or the tabernacle or whatever, Satan has always tried to infiltrate his people in among God's people.

In the Old Testament, they called them children of Belial. In the New Testament, we call them tares or goats.

And they walk in, the tare looks just like the wheat. You can't hardly tell the difference, but you can tell the difference if you observe them for a while.

It just takes a little time and you can tell the difference. And we're supposed to tell the difference. So God says, this is not new.

Every generation since the beginning of Adam and Eve when they left the garden has had this happening.

So false prophets, in other words, false teachers come in and they sneak in and it has this word again, privily, it means secretly.

You're not aware that's what they are when they first get here. All right, now it says they will bring damnable heresies.

Now, to me, that is an awakening word because it doesn't just say they're gonna teach some false stuff and it's kind of bad.

And if it's there, you can just kind of like, it's like eating fish, eat the meat, spit out the bones.

It's not like that because he calls them damnable heresies. What does that mean?

It means if a person believes their doctrine, that person goes to hell. Now, how can it get more serious than that, ladies and gentlemen?

These people come in secretly. They look like angels of light. They look like messengers of righteousness and the stuff they're whispering at their home

Bible studies or wherever they try to do it to you is a damnable heresy, which means if you believe it, buy into it, live your life according to it, you never find heaven.

Now, I don't think that can happen to you if you're already saved, but you could happen to your children or your grandkids who aren't saved yet, who are in this church and somebody slips in and teach them something.

So it's important to understand this. They come in secretly and they bring in damnable heresies, doctrine, teaching.

Doctrine just means teachings that are not the way to heaven. They are not the way to the one true

God. They're not what God taught is my way. They're the world's way, Satan's way and the way of the flesh.

And they bring that into your church, even denying the Lord that bought them.

Now, that is an interesting verse, even denying the

Lord that bought them and bring upon themselves swift destruction.

Now, you have to understand when we deal with the gospel and we deal with the calling that there are two types taught in the

Bible. There is the general calling and there is the effectual calling. General calling just simply means that the gospel goes out to the whole world.

Does it mean everyone's gonna hear it with ears that hear? It doesn't mean that. But these people bring in teachings into the church that bring damnation to people that believe their teaching and it brings swift destruction to those who are teaching it.

And many shall follow their pernicious ways. So they're gonna have huge followings.

And I think in the end times, I believe you're gonna see the mirror image of Spurgeon's church. You're gonna see the true preachers like Spurgeon having smaller churches and the false preachers being filled with followers because look what it says and this is talking about the end times.

It says when you get to the end times, things are a little bit different. You have people who have already crept in secretly and they're in the church and they're in those pulpits and they're preaching and they're bringing destruction to themselves and their hearers but many shall follow their pernicious ways.

Many shall follow them. So we can't get discouraged about it if God already told us it's gonna be like this, can we?

I mean, we should be excited about it because it's fulfilled prophecy which means God's telling us the truth, the Bible's true.

And it goes on and it says many shall follow their pernicious ways by reason of whom the way of truth shall be evil spoken of.

One of the things these false prophets do is they mock those who tell the truth. If you have a man who's telling people that God's in control, these people will say that's ridiculous.

It's ridiculous. If that were true, then why do anything? If God's running everything, why do anything?

Don't worry about it. Just go live like you wanna live and they'll mock it. They will mock the truth and try to find every logical way they can throw up a block to make people think that the true way can't make any sense.

That's one of the things these folks are very good at. And then it says through covetousness, and I remember one time when

Jesus said that a false prophet does what he does for his belly's sake. What that means is he does it for money.

That's what it means. He's in it for the money. And so here we see that this agrees with it because it says that they're covetous, which means they want things.

They're out to get a whole bunch of things and have the money to get the things they want. And through covetousness, shall they with feigned words, that means faked words, make merchandise of you.

Now what does that mean? That means that you, they are not there to minister to you.

They're gonna use you to build their ministry. That's how they do it. They will make merchandise of you.

They'll take your money, your time, your strength, and they'll use it to build their big tabernacle full of people.

So they make merchandise of their followers and use them to build their own ministry. And these very people that do this, it says their judgment is now of a long time.

It lingers not and their damnation slumbereth not. In other words, these people are going to hell.

These preachers that everybody thinks are so awesome are going to hell if they're preaching damnable heresies.

What is a damnable heresy? If you say, I believe you get saved by Jesus plus, and you name something else.

Or you say, here's what you gotta do to get saved. Boom, boom, boom, and you name them.

Those are damnable heresies. Because Paul said, look, what you guys are saying is you wanna believe in Jesus, you wanna believe in my

Jesus, but you're gonna command everybody to get circumcised under the law of Moses too, right?

That's what you're saying. And he looked at them and he said, look, I'll tell you this. If you believe that, Jesus Christ will avail you nothing.

Now how are you gonna get to heaven without Jesus helping you, right? If he doesn't avail you, you can't get there.

This is serious, serious business that we're looking at in our day and time. We're looking at a whole flocks of people who are hearing damnable heresies every

Sunday and being taught by a man who's going to go to hell when he dies, right?

Isn't that what this says? I'm not, and I don't say I know who they are. I'm just saying, isn't that what this says? And it says this happens in the end times.

We keep thinking, well, this is all from the future when really it's right now. It's in here, it is here, and it is now, and their damnation slumbereth not.

But chiefly, them that walk after the flesh in the lust of uncleanness, they despise government.

What does that mean? That means they do not believe in any form of church hierarchy.

Like they don't believe you should have elders and deacons and that the elders rule the church.

They think we should vote on what happens in the church. And yet you read this Bible, you won't find a place anywhere in it when it says you run a church by vote of the church members.

Nowhere in there, it's not in the Bible. And yet, so they are presumptuous.

They speak evil of dignities. In other words, if you had men like Criswell who literally can lead a vast congregation, they would mock him.

And I know they did. I wrote a piece one time and sent it to the Baptist Standard to get it published, taking

Criswell's position and defending him against what the Baptist Standard was saying about it.

And naturally I didn't print it. But you know what? My dad sent my letter to Dr. Criswell and Dr.

Criswell sent it back with an envelope. And on the back, he called me Mitchell, not David. But he said, Mitchell, I've never read a better writer than you.

Thank you. Isn't that cool? I need to find that envelope though. That's the only way I can prove it ever happened. It's in my house somewhere, filed away.

But people will mock these guys. I remember they'd mock him on the radio. They would mock him everywhere they could.

And yet he was the powerful man of God of that day. So it says these people chiefly walk after the flesh.

What does that mean? They're not following the spirit. Now our verse in Romans chapter eight, verse one says, those who do not walk after the flesh, but they walk after the spirit are the ones that have no condemnation.

These men are walking predominantly after the flesh, the Bible says, and the lust of uncleanness.

In the midst of all their covetousness, they're also unclean. Men, you better watch your wives if you have one of these kinds of preachers.

Listen, I knew one personally. I didn't personally know him, but I was around him and heard him preach many times.

And they found out that he was counseling his young men's wives, giving them pastoral counseling, and had taken advantage of more than a score of the women in the church.

And they caught him because he was photographing it. And he threw the photographs in the dumpster and a little boy saw it.

And this same group, they always idolize their preachers. So this little boy said, oh, I want to get something that belongs to my preacher.

And he gets it, takes it home, shows it to his dad, who happened to be the head of the deacon board. And it was a bunch of bad pictures.

And that's how he got caught. And do you know that he had the gall to tell them, well, King David had that problem and they didn't kick him out.

And one of those deacons was smart enough to say, but David wasn't a preacher, he was a king. He had a lower calling than you, you're fired.

Right? Hallelujah, they got rid of him. Well, this is the kind of people this is talking about.

They walk predominantly after the flesh. They lust for uncleanliness and they despise government, which means they don't want to have a mentor, to have anyone that can tell them how to do things.

They're presumptuous, which means they'll like, you'll see them come into a church and be brand new.

And they'll come up and they'll say, well, I want to be head of the deacon board. No one knows them yet.

And they just presume that you're going to give them a position like that. That's called being presumptuous. It's very unattractive by the way.

And God says, it's not right, but this is how they are presumptuous. They're self -willed. They're not afraid to speak evil of dignities.

In other words, church leaders that have earned their positions, they'll speak evil of them. And they shall receive the reward of unrighteousness as they that count it pleasure to riot in the daytime.

And this is a reference to when Moses came down from the Mount and they were having a, basically an orgy.

Right after they had seen God. Well, this is how these people are.

Spots are they and blemishes, sporting themselves with their own deceivings while they feast with you.

They break bread with us. They fellowship with us and they're not real, they're tears. And they have eyes full of adultery that cannot cease from sin.

You know them by their fruits, right? Part of the fruit is their life. They cannot cease from sin.

So you're going to catch them eventually and you'll know who they are if you watch them long enough. They can't cease from sin.

They are beguiling unstable souls. So what do they do? They preach a false gospel to people that don't study.

Right? They preach a false gospel to people that never read the Bible, don't study, don't want to study much.

And they beguile these people. And it says that they cannot cease from sin.

They beguile unstable souls. A heart they have exercised with covetous practices.

Cursed children they are. Which have forsaken the right way and have gone the wrong way and have gone astray following the way of Balaam, the son of Bosar, who loved the wages of sin.

Now let me just, let me stop there for a minute. What, who is that talking about? These false preachers.

They love the way of Balaam. Do you remember the story of Balaam in the Old Testament? There was a king who called for Balaam, who was supposedly a man of God.

He was a prophet. And wanted Balaam to curse the nation of Israel so that he could defeat them in battle.

You remember the story? So he gets his men to go out and get Balaam and wants him to come and to put a curse on Israel.

Well, Balaam actually did know how to communicate with God. And God communicated with Balaam. But the thing

Balaam did was, God told him you better not, you better not curse Israel. But Balaam went with these men anyway.

And it made God angry. If you read the story, what's interesting, if you read that story carefully, and that's all you had, if that's all you had was that story in the

Old Testament, you wouldn't really think Balaam did much wrong. Because there was even a time when

God told him to go with them. Well, let me explain something to you. We talked about this at Sunday school, as Bill so often does.

He'll treble over my sermon a little bit, talk a little bit about something that's gonna be in my sermon.

But you were talking about these false prophets. And we were talking about how

God, you just mentioned that God can even cause lost people to do what he wants them to do, right?

He can even cause lost people to do that. Well, in this case, Balaam, I think was a picture of a false prophet.

But he had some power. He had gifts, spiritual gifts, where he could do amazing things.

But he used it for the wrong reasons. And this idea where God told him to go with them when really

God didn't want him to is just a picture of the fact that God will direct evil people to do what

God wants to happen because of God's sovereign purposes. So there was a lesson to be learned by him going with them, but it doesn't mean it was

God's will, or let's put it this way, it doesn't mean he was obeying God when he did it. He was actually being disobedient when he did it.

And it's the same story where he was riding on a donkey and that God opened the eyes of the donkey where he could see an angel with a sword drawn about ready to kill

Balaam and the donkey. And the donkey wouldn't go, he stopped. You remember the story? He stopped and he went this way.

And then the angel went this way and the donkey goes this way. And he goes this way and then he goes back and he gets so scared, he goes up against the wall and he crushes

Balaam's foot that was broken, crushed the bones in his foot. And he gets out and wants to beat this donkey.

And about that time, God opened his eyes and he saw the angel with the sword. And the fear of God came all over this man.

So there's a lot of interesting stuff to be learned in that story, but you wouldn't really gather that he did anything wrong by reading it unless you had a whole

Bible. If you got a whole Bible and you go to Revelation at the very end, the last book of the Bible, in chapter two, verse 14, look what it says about this man.

So the Holy Spirit reveals some things about him that didn't even show up in the story to our eyes, but God knows the hearts, doesn't he?

He knows the hearts of men. What we saw in the story was the outwardly stuff that happened. And let me tell you something about false prophets.

If you read the story of Balaam, he looks like a powerful man of God who's pretty cool. The king wanted to pay him enormous amounts of money to prophesy against Israel so that the king could destroy

Israel in battle and believe the man had the power to make that happen, and he probably did. And you look at the whole story in the

Old Testament, you won't find one thing wrong with Balaam. Not one thing wrong, because you're looking at the outside of his life and the actions he's doing look pretty darn powerful.

But if you want to see how God saw the inside of the heart, here's what God said, Revelation 2, 14. But I have a few things against you.

And now he's talking to a church that has people full of people like Balaam in their church, teaching people the

Bible in this particular local church that's being written about. And God is rebuking them for letting them in the church, for not kicking them out.

So look what he says. I have a few things against thee, because thou hast there in your church them that hold the doctrine of Balaam.

Now, the Holy Spirit is gonna show us what was on the inside of Balaam, who taught

Balak, which was the king, who wanted to destroy Israel, which God wasn't gonna let happen, because Israel's God's people.

So he taught this king. See, that doesn't even come out in the Old Testament story.

That information's not given to us until here. He taught the king to cast a stumbling block in front of the children of Israel to try to cause

Israel to fall. He taught the king that if you can just get the

Israelis to eat the meat of the animals that were sacrificed, and then teach them to commit fornication, that's all you'll have to do.

You won't have to beat them in battle. What about America?

What if you could teach the United States to build their churches even bigger? Better music, which

I wish we had more musicians. I know Glenda would say, gosh, if we had, and Bobby would say the same thing, if we had like 10 that could do what we do, we could have a lot of big music in here.

We got two, so, right? It'd be great. And they have all this stuff.

And so you don't, it's like Satan is saying, look, I don't have to go in there and really just bring an enemy forces in and nuke

America to destroy her. All I've gotta do is get the preachers that they perceive to be the powerful men of God to get them to compromise a little bit.

Like I'm not even gonna teach them to offer to these idols, but just the ones that did offer to the idols, take the meat they used from the animals that they offered to the idols and eat the meat.

It'll be okay, just do that. So just bring a little bit of the world into the church. Don't go out there and just be evil, but just bring a little bit of what they do.

Be a little bit worldly. Just be a little, listen, if you'll be a little bit worldly, you'll be more attractive to the world and your church will grow even bigger.

So just bring a little bit in. But then he went on and taught them to fornicate, which meant like you teach them to crawl first, which is eat the meat that's been offered to the idols.

So that doesn't seem so bad. It's just meat, right? And then you teach them to fornicate. Well, probably that's okay because God made us this way, right?

So you teach them to be worldly and fleshly and the rest will just happen.

You won't have to destroy them. They will just collapse as a nation. They will implode.

That is what's happening, ladies and gentlemen, to the United States of America right now. And the

Bible foretold it. It goes on and it says he was rebuked.

This false prophet was rebuked because of his iniquity. The dumb ass speaking with a man's voice forbade the madness of the prophet.

This prophet was mad. He was a fool if he thought he should go off with this king and listen to him and curse

Israel. These types of prophets are wells without water.

They're clouds that are carried about as a tempest to whom the midst of darkness is reserved forever.

Where do you think they go when they die? These kinds of preachers. They go to the darkness, to hell.

And they're like wells where you go to because you're thirsty, but there's no real water in the well.

And you're still thirsty when you leave. To whom the midst of darkness is reserved forever.

For when they speak great and swelling words of vanity, they allure through the lust of the flesh, through much wantonness, those that were clean escape from them who live in error.

People who already sort of knew the truth, they pull them back into the error. While they promised them liberty, they themselves are the servants of corruption.

For of whom a man is overcome, of the same is he brought into bondage.

Whoa, frightening times, frightening times. Well, next Sunday, we'll have a happy message.

Because next Sunday, we're gonna start with John chapter 15, verse one. And we're gonna start talking about good fruit because we just looked at the bad fruit, didn't we?

That is the bad fruit in any church that's modernistic, that's worldly. And it happens under the scenes, it happens privily.

You don't know that they're a false prophet until it's too late. And many people end up hearing damnable heresies and it affects their lives maybe for all eternity.

That's the direction that Satan has for the world. But in the midst of it all, the

Lord Jesus wants us to be bearing fruit. And there are three big groups of types of fruit that we'll talk about.

And then we're gonna talk about the source of that fruit. And then we're gonna talk about the difference between bearing fruit and gathering fruit over the next 10

Sundays. All right, let's stand and have prayer together. Father, we thank you for your word and how you not only give us instruction in righteousness, but you give us warnings about unrighteousness.

You give us not only the need for and you give us gifts to the church like Dr.

Freeman and so many we could name that are such great gifts to the church as we listen to them like Charles Spurgeon, people like this.

We listen to how they preach the gospel in truth and in power and what wonderful gifts.

But also you warn us that Satan will sneak in secretly false prophets that we're unaware of at first who bring damnable heresies and who loot us and take advantage of us and try to steal our liberty from us and bring us under law.

And so Lord, protect us from these and help us to spot them immediately when they show up in our congregation.

And we just pray, Lord, that you would allow the Holy Spirit to root them out as the word of God is preached and taught here because it has to make them uncomfortable.

And Lord, we just pray you'd watch over us and our children and our Christian school and keep all of us in the right way.

Help us not to fall under the temptations of Balaam to try to gain favor from the world by following the world a little bit.

As they allure us, help us to be safe from that. Lord, help us to go into this world as salt and light.

That's all we can do in our days, just be salt and light, but we can do that. And Lord, be with us in our time of fellowship.