Beware The Fruit You Bear
Matthew 7:13-23

“Jesus calls us to examine our lives and determine whether we are sewing seeds of self-destruction!”

Jesus begins the Sermon on the Mount describing for us the attitudes of those who love the Lord – humility, grief over sin, strength at God’s disposal, an insatiable hunger and thirst for righteousness, mercy, heart purity, peacemaking, and faithfulness under pressure and persecution.

Jesus then goes on to explain the true meaning of God’s Law revealed to Moses to clear up the perversions that religious people made and make as they keep looking for loopholes that make them look righteous.

Our Deadly Attraction To Easy Paths and Bad Fruit

There are many easy ways to be religious or spiritual. In the old days you just went to the church of your choice on Sunday and lived like you wanted the rest of the week. Today, we’re much more sophisticated. We may call it spirituality or some other post modern term, but we basically do what we want an call it “being spiritual”. The common denominator is a the choice to do whatever we please. And that’s why the path of Jesus seems strange too us. It calls us to follow Him in faithfulness. Psalm 15:4 puts it like this “Blessed is the man who keeps his oath even though it brings him pain.”

“Without the Power of Jesus’ Love at work in us, our Golden Rule will soon get tarnished!”

Of course, real gold doesn’t “tarnish”… but I’d say we all know the experience of having our observance of the Golden Rule tarnish!

Why is Matthew 7:12 called the ‘Golden Rule’?”

It doesn’t matter what nation or culture you go to, when you quote the words of Jesus “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” there’s someone who’ll say “O we believe THAT!”

Or at least we all believe something like that. Most of the time we say it differently, we say something like “don’t do something to someone else that you wouldn’t want them to do for you.”

But the emphasis we find in Jesus is something distinctive. From what I can tell, Jesus seems to be the first to have said it this way – or at least he only one who said it that anyone paid attention too.

It’s because Jesus turns the desire for self preservation we find in the saying “don’t do something to others that you wouldn’t want them to do to you” into a powerful prescription – you do for others what you want done for yourself.

It’s only possible to live this way with the Power of Jesus’ Love at work in our lives.