-Transcript-
00:24 Amen. Glory to God. Welcome to the program.
00:28 Welcome to the cafe. We’re picking up here in the second part of a two-part series on fruitfulness and the foundation of such. Being fruitful for God and where our foundation is when we’re fruitful for God, those two go hand in hand.
00:43 Amen. We need a proper foundation to be fruitful. And you may say, duh, of course.
00:49 But here, KJV Cafe today, what we’re really looking at is the idea that you can’t have one without the other. And many, I believe, think you can.
00:59 Many think that, you know, hey, I can keep my lifestyle the way that I want it and do what I want for God and bear fruit.
01:09 And God clearly tells us that’s not how it works. You need to submit to me. You need to be saved.
01:17 You need to repent. You need to be saved. Believe on the blood of Jesus.
01:24 Get born again. And then you need to have the proper foundation, and then you’ll bear fruit. And what I’ve talked to our church about over the years, and our church will turn for this summer.
01:37 So we’ve been around a little bit now, amen. And of course, I’ve been preaching now seven or eight years. So I thank God for that.
01:45 But the Lord called me to plant that church some years ago. And I’ve talked to our church about this a lot. The idea that if we go through the fundamentals of what God calls us to do, like if we simply have faith,
01:56Number one, we’re justified by faith, you know, get saved, have faith, study his word, believe his word as the 100% accurate truth, our whole source of truth, believe it is the inherent living word, believe front to cover to back cover, it is all true, okay?
02:13 We believe that word, we study that word, we pray to God, pray without ceasing.
02:22 We live the best we can, not perfect. We depart from sin. We don’t play games.
02:25 We’re not willfully ignorant. Oh, I didn’t know that was a sin. You know, we know what sin is.
02:29 Paul said he didn’t know sin until he learned what coveting was. And I kind of laugh at that because I don’t think I knew coveting for a while. And then I studied it and I said, oh man, that’s a bad sin.
02:38 And I’ve got that. I’ve been living with that. So we’re not going to play games and say, we’re not going to study these sins or I’ll have a little pet sin over here.
02:48 We’re going to get rid of all that. Okay. We’re not going to gossip.
02:48 We’re not going to live out in the world. We’re not going to play games. We’re going to be diligent Christians.
02:54 When we do that, we study his word, we have faith, we pray. Fruit will just simply be a byproduct of it. Like we live as God wants us to live.
03:07 And then we’re going to start bearing fruit. And you want to have a great ministry idea, commit to reading the word morning, noon, and night. You know, not because you have to, you’re saved by grace, you’re not under the law, but you say, okay, you know what? Y
03:22 ou know, this is the year I’m really going to read God’s word.
03:23 And notice I didn’t say commit to reading all of it because people, sometimes they rush through the words. Oh, I read it all. We don’t rush.
03:32 You might spend a month on one page. Okay. But just dive in there, study it, study, study, study.
03:38 Compare scripture with scripture, study it, don’t try to seek understanding, pray over it and so forth. The Holy Spirit will give you discernment. And then as you do that, you pray to God and guess what?
03:47 I’m 100% believing God will give you a great ministry simply by that exercise right there.
03:54 The best ministries the Lord has got me involved in all came through prayer, Bible reading and so on.
04:00 So last episode, we talked about this idea of a fruitful Christian. Jesus poses the question in Luke 6:46,
04:10 Luke 6:46, and why call ye me Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I say.
04:18 And Jesus is asking, saying, you know, who are you? Right? You look at Luke 6:43-49. We’re talking about the tree here and the foundation for a good tree. A good tree bringeth not forth corrupt fruit.
04:32 Neither does a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. For every tree is known by his fruit. For of the thorns, men do not gather figs, nor of a bramble bush gather they grapes.
04:44 A good man out of the good treasure of his heart bringeth forth that which is good. An evil man out of the evil treasure of his heart bringeth forth that which is evil. For out of the abundance of the heart, his mouth speaketh.
05:06 And why call ye me Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I say? Whosoever cometh to me and heareth my sayings, and doeth them, I will show you to whom he is like. He is like a man which built a house, and digged deep, and laid a foundation on a rock. And when the flood arose, and the steam stream beat vehemently upon that house, it could not shake it, for it was founded upon a rock.
05:19 But he that heareth, and doeth not, is like a man that without a foundation built a house upon the earth, against which the stream did beat vehemently, and immediately it fell, and the ruin of that house was great.
05:33 I’ll tell you what, Jesus is saying here, I mean, he’s preaching the message for you. He gives you three points.
05:40 He says, you know what? This person that comes to me, Luke 6, 47, whosoever cometh to me, heareth my sayings, and doeth them, I’m going to show you who they are.
05:53 I’m going to show you that foundation, that solid foundation. So we see that the recipe for a solid foundation is Christ, is coming to him, hearing him, and doing the things that he’s telling us to do.
06:01 And you say, Brother Clark, that’s easy. Well, if it were easy, everyone would do it, and yet I’m going to tell you today that it’s a very rare breed that does all three.
06:10 Jesus himself said, look, the harvest is plentiful, but pray to the Lord that he sends more laborers.
06:16 Laborers are few. And again, I believe being fruitful is being a laborer for Christ. Why are they few? Because it’s a hard thing.
06:24 The fruitful Christian comes to Christ. They’re not running from Christ. If God is calling you to something and you’re running away from him, how do you think you can be fruitful for him? You can’t.
06:33 Okay? You have to come to him. You don’t come to him. You know who came to him and said, my term’s not yours? I can think of one, at least.
06:42 You got Cain and Abel. Cain says, okay, God, I’m coming to you in my terms. How did that work out? He kills his little brother.
06:48 He becomes a vagabond. He’s miserable. His whole life is ruined and his little brother is testifying from the ground with his blood.
06:54 Okay? We don’t go to God on our terms. We go to God on his terms. The creation doesn’t tell the creator what to do.
07:00 The creator tells the creation what to do. We realize our place. We realize our form that we’re made out of dirt.
07:06 We go to God. We submit to him. We say, Lord, become Lord in my life and I will do the things which you say.
07:16 Now how about this? To do the things which he says, we’d have to know what they are. How can you be fruitful for God if you don’t know what they are? You say, well, what do you mean?
07:27 Well, Jesus says to follow his commandments. He even says, if you love me, keep my commandments.
07:32 We’re not saved by living by his commandments. We’re saved by the grace of God, by grace alone, through faith alone and Jesus Christ alone.
07:38 But once we’re saved and we want to be fruitful and we want to have that foundation because we love Jesus, we made him Lord of our lives, we want to follow those commandments.
07:51 How can we follow them if we don’t know what they are? I printed a list of the commandments of Jesus out one time for our church and it was very long. There was like 50 commandments on there and that list was incomplete. It wasn’t all of them.
07:59 It was just, I knew after we got through 50 commandments, the church would be ready to go. Amen. They’re probably ready to go after five or six, but you get the idea.
08:05 How can, the point I was trying to make was not that we had to learn every commandment that day.
08:11 The point I was trying to make is that there are a lot of commandments to learn and we have to hear them. The Bible says, what does it say about faith? How do we have faith? Right?
08:19 Faith cometh by hearing, right? Here we go. Romans 10:17, so then faith cometh by hearing and hearing by the word of God.
08:28 And so how do we have faith? How do we grow our faith? How do we believe in God more and more? We get into his word. How do we know his commandments?
08:37 We get into his word. So he that cometh to him, he that hears his commandments and then he that doeth them and the example I gave last time, and I won’t go back into this for time’s sake, but you know, everyone knows for the most part, most adults know what it takes to live really healthy and most adults don’t care.
08:54 Okay. You know, everyone knows that that cupcake is not great for you, but most people are going to grab that cupcake anyways. Okay.
09:01 Yours included. All right. So we understand what it takes mentally and yet physically we don’t do it.
09:07 And what Christ is saying is you understand spiritually what to do when you hear him and you get in his word, you study his word, but physically you’re not doing it.
09:15 I told you to be sacrificial and give and you don’t give. I told you to love your neighbor.
09:20 You don’t love your neighbor. I told you that gossip is wrong and you gossip all the time. I told you to depart from this sinful thing and you won’t do it.
09:25 I told you not to covet and you covet everything under the sun. You see, what we’re doing is we’re hearing him, but we’re not doing it. And the Bible says that we are to be doers of the word, doesn’t it? Doers of the word.
09:35 I’m searching up now to make sure I’ve got it. James 1:22, but be ye doers of the word and not hearers only deceiving your own selves because we deceive ourselves when we think that we’re living for the Lord, when we’ve come to him and we hear him and we don’t do it.
09:50 And here, remember the context of this verse in Luke six is about being fruitful for Christ and the foundation and that foundation of a home built, being built on a rock as God would have it.
10:02 I grew up in a very old home that was built on a rock. It was made out of rock, but it was literally built on a rock and the floor was polished rock and I don’t know if the polished rock on the floor was actually part of the rock underneath or not, but it was literally built on a rock, on a massive rock. And I felt very safe.
10:19 There was one hurricane that came through the big one, whatever it was, Hugo or whatever it was. And I felt very safe in that home then. And I would feel very safe in that home today.
10:31 And that home has been up for over a hundred years at this point, I believe. And that home is a very safe home because it is built on a rock. It’s not going anywhere.
10:37 And what the Lord is telling us is once your foundation is set, so your fruitfulness will be with Christ, right? So you will be fruit if you have that foundation.
10:46 If you have come to Christ, if you have taken the time and made the effort to know him and his commandments, which takes diligent study in his word. And then you are doing those things.
10:59 You are living out those commandments. You will be fruitful. Luke 6:43-45, for a good tree bringeth not forth corrupt fruit, neither doth a corrupt tree bringeth forth good fruit.
11:10 For every tree is known by his own fruit. Think about that. Every tree is known by his own fruit.
11:17 If you are a corrupt tree, okay, corrupt, what’s corrupt? That means perverted. That means not right. You cannot bring forth good fruit.
11:25 You are cheating on your spouse and you think you’re going to go win souls on Saturday or on Sunday, forget it. You are living a lie.
11:37 You are stealing from your company and you think you’re going to go on a mission trip and make a difference.
11:44 You won’t. You are fill in the blank, secretly coveting every day. You are living in total unbelief and you think that you can go out there and make a difference in the kingdom of God.
11:56 You can’t. Every tree is known by his fruit. The example here is, for of thorns, men do not gather figs.
12:06 There’s thorns that say I’ll go somewhere else. Nor of a bramble bush, they also have thorns and so forth, gather they grapes. They’re not going to go to the bramble.
12:15 I looked up this stuff. The thorns and the bramble represent the unfruitful soul. Brambles are known as bushes that have thorns, like rose stems.
12:21 Those are big thorns. My son got one in his hand and he was acting like he needed surgery yesterday and my wife had to put multiple band-aids on it. He said, Mom’s taking care of me, Dad.
12:30 You would have thought he had gotten sliced with a knife. He got a thorn in his hand. But guess what? They do bear fruit.
12:38 There is fruit on those trees. Just guess what? People don’t go take the fruit from there because it’s corrupted. It’s not worth it.
12:46 It’s a pain. It’s not something people go to for their fruit. And I think God is communicating the same thing, that you can go out there and think you’re a soul winner, think you’re this, think you’re that.
12:57 But if you have that weak foundation that’s built on earth, if you are living a earthly carnal life, then you’re not going to bear fruit for him.
13:04 And you know what about the bramble that’s really just kind of disheartening? They’re easy to grow. They’re popular.
13:10 They’re easy to grow. They’re everywhere. Guess what? Unfruitful people are everywhere.
13:17 But the fruitful Christian, the one with that solid rock foundation, that’s a rare breed. So the whole point of life is to know every tree by their fruit.
13:27 In re-revelation, Jesus Christ himself separates the sheep from the goats, and it’s symbolic of the fruitful and the unfruitful.
13:33 And I wish I had time to go into greater detail here, but understand that this is inevitable. That Christ is preaching this great truth and this great parable, and I really urge you to get into Luke 6 and study it independently of this message. Because of the time factor, I don’t have time to dive in as deep as I’d like to.
13:51 But understand that God is giving us a great truth, that we need to get right with him first and then we’ll bear fruit for him, not the other way around. And that in these last days, what else is more important than bearing fruit for him? What else comes before it?
14:02 Does the beach house come before it? Does the RV come before it? Does the fishing trip come before it? Does the shopping trip come before it? Does the car come before it?
14:12 Does the new house come before it? What comes before living for the Lord? Nothing should. Nothing should.
14:21 God should be first. Seek the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added unto you.
14:27 Thank you for listening. Take care. Tune in next time. God bless and amen.