Is The Place You Call Church Bearing The Right Fruit?
Good Morning Friends,
Today we explore the serious business of bearing the fruit of joy. To bring this approach home I share with you a thought of C.S. Lewis. You see he presented a case that our Lord finds our desires too weak. We fool around with the joys of drink and sex and ambition with infinite joy is offed to us. We settle for good instead of great. We are far too easily pleased with the wrong harvest. Is The Place You Call Church Bearing The Right Fruit?
Scripture: “Listen to another parable. There was a landowner who planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a wine press in it, and built a watchtower. Then he leased it to tenants and went to another country. When the harvest time had come, he sent his slaves to the tenants to collect his produce. But the tenants seized his slaves and beat one, killed another, and stoned another. Again he sent other slaves, more than the first; and they treated them in the same way. Finally he sent his son to them, saying, ‘They will respect my son.’ But when the tenants saw the son, they said to themselves, ‘This is the heir; come, let us kill him and get his inheritance.” So they seized him, threw him out of the vineyard, and killed him. Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?” They said to him, “He will put those wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the harvest time.” Jesus said to them, “Have you never read in the scriptures: ‘The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; this was the Lord’s doing, and it is amazing in our eyes’? Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom. When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard his parables, they realized that he was speaking about them. They wanted to arrest him, but they feared the crowds, because they regarded him as a prophet.
Matthew 21:33-43, 45-46 (NRSV)
Let me sing for my beloved my love-song concerning his vineyard: My beloved had a vineyard on a very fertile hill. He dug it and cleared it of stones, and planted it with choice vines; he built a watchtower in the midst of it, and hewed out a wine vat in it; he expected it to yield grapes, but it yielded wild grapes. And now, inhabitants of Jerusalem and people of Judah, judge between me and my vineyard. What more was there to do for my vineyard that I have not done in it? When I expected it to yield grapes, why did it yield wild grapes? And now I will tell you what I will do to my vineyard. I will remove its hedge, and it shall be devoured; I will break down its wall, and it shall be trampled down. I will make it a waste; it shall not be pruned or hoed, and it shall be overgrown with briers and thorns; I will also command the clouds that they rain no rain upon it. For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel, and the people of Judah are his pleasant planting; he expected justice, but saw bloodshed; righteousness, but heard a cry!
Isaiah 5:1-7 (NRSV)
God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.”
Genesis 1:28 (NRSV)
Then Jesus entered the temple and drove out all who were selling and buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold doves. He said to them, “It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer’; but you are making it a den of robbers.”
Matthew 21:12-13 (NRSV)
Message: The focus of many people today is to acquire wealth and property and enjoy worldly pleasures thinking that is all there is. Some places called church do the same thing. People are concerned about building things. But Jesus is the cornerstone of a whole new way of building…a whole new Temple for worship. Jesus is about building a whole new approach to experiencing God and the joy of life. That is why Jesus threw the moneychangers out of the Temple, not just to cleans it but to announce a whole new way of worship. Still to this day those with wealth are often accorded the most respect no matter the source of their wealth, even in the structure of the institutions we call church. But Jesus presents a very different option. In Christ we have a whole new way of worship that is not a transaction but much more. For as God chose Israel to point the world to God, now God has appointed the church to point the way and we are not doing a very good job of it. Friends, as some of the first words of Scripture teach, we are to keep our focus on God. We are to be fruitful and multiply for God because God has provided in creation what we need. And friends, God has in a similar way to creation itself provided in Christ all that the believer would need to produce the fruits of the Kingdom. Maybe we need to be cultivating that focus to harvest joy.
Pray we begin with love. Pray our fruit is not so wild as to be useless. Pray we discover a whole new way of worship in Christ. Pray we do it God’s way instead of our own way. Pray we not be so rebellious and envious. Pray our worship never bears the fruit of hate, injustice, oppression and idolatry. Pray we realize that God has provided what we need to produce fruit for the Kingdom of God and that the called-out assembly of God has been chosen to point the world to the way of God. Pray we choose the joy of Christ so others might see how a life that has Christ at the cornerstone can glorify God. Pray we bear fruit of love, holiness, justice and righteousness and joy for the Kingdom of God.
Blessings,
John Lawson
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