Willow Ridge Sermons

Sunday, January 24th • Beau Bradberry

"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." — Luke 6:45

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Show Notes

Sunday, January 24th • Beau Bradberry

"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." — Luke 6:45

–
Podcast: https://pod.link/willowridgechurch
Website: https://willowridgechurch.org
Instagram: https://instagram.com/willowridgechurch
Facebook: https://facebook.com/willowridgechurch
YouTube: https://youtube.com/@willowridgechurch

Creators and Guests

Host

Beau Bradberry

Senior Pastor

What is Willow Ridge Sermons?

Sermon audio from Sunday services at Willow Ridge Church.

Hi, and welcome to the Willow Ridge Church weekly podcast.

This is where you can find audio for our current and past sermons.

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Thanks for listening.

Good morning.

Glad that you guys are with us today, whether you're here with us on campus or whether you're

joining us online.

We're so grateful to have you as we worship together.

If you've got your Bibles with you, go ahead and open them up to Luke chapter 6.

In just a minute, we're going to start reading, and we're going to jump all the way down to

verse 20 is where we're going to pick up this morning.

A couple things going on that I'm really personally excited about.

Number one, I just want to go ahead and tell you all this.

I don't know if you were paying attention to the announcements or not, but this Wednesday

night, we're going to be going out to the bowling alley, hanging out with 6th through 12th

graders.

My plan is to see I'm not a good bowler, but I'm going to act like I am, and to have some

good old-fashioned competition with some of our middle school and high school students.

I don't know that I'm going to put myself up there and compete with the high schoolers,

but for all you middle schoolers, it's on.

I'm going to take advantage.

I'm going to get the lanes with the bumpers.

That's all I'm saying.

Y'all don't get that, but I get that, right?

So looking forward to that.

Hey, parents, drop them all $5 for a couple of hours.

Be a great time that we're going to have.

But also, I don't know if you noticed, but we're having a baptism class.

Now that's new for us.

And so I want to explain some of that to you guys.

If you've placed your faith in Jesus Christ and you would like to follow through in baptism,

what we're doing across the board, from kids to adults, is saying we've got this baptism

class for you.

Pastor Dave is going to lead it, and we just want to talk to you about what our relationship

with the Lord, what that means, what baptism means, why God calls us to that, why we do

this.

And so you have the opportunity to go through and be a part of that class with Him.

It is going to be hosted through Zoom.

And so whether you're at home or you're here this morning, we'll connect you through

there, and then we will schedule after that as a baptism that we can come together and

celebrate what God has done in your life and look forward to what God is going to do in

and through you.

So if you're someone and you're thinking about that, you've given your life to the Lord,

but you haven't followed through, and Believer's Baptism is a wonderful opportunity and excited

as Pastor Dave is building that culture into us.

And really, here's what the class is all about.

This can be a side message, right?

It's not about saying, hey, look at us.

Look how many people we baptized.

But it's about making sure that we're continuing the discipleship process.

And so we'd love for you to be a part of that if that's where you are.

So as we look at Luke chapter 6, there's going to be a theme that I want us to look at this

morning.

It's what kind of every point is going to come out of, and it is going to be this.

What today we want to look at today, what we want to embrace is being versus doing, right?

Every world religion has an aspect of it of if you want to be pleasing to God, if you want

to be blessed by God, then here's what it means.

Do this.

Here are rules.

Be more obedient than not.

Do more that's right than do more that is bad.

And in that, as you do, that's where God is going to be pleased.

That's where God is going to be glorified.

But within Christianity, what makes us different in a relationship with a God that we can know,

that we can interact with, is that it's not going to be about the doing, even that's a

part of it, right?

Like we want to live a life of obedience, but where it is found, where it's rooted in, is

being, that this is who I am versus this is what I do.

And when this is who I am, it begins to come out of me of the characteristics of God and

obedience of God.

And so like what people can do is they can do a bunch of religious things, but it doesn't

make them who they are.

For example, like I play golf maybe twice a year.

And so when I go out to play golf, I take my clubs, I put on a golf shirt, I've got the

golf shoes, I've got a golf hat, and on the journey from my truck to the tee box, I look

like a golfer.

I've done all the right things.

I even tee the ball up well.

But the moment I grab the club and I address it and I start my backswing, it's very evident

this guy is not a golfer, right?

It's not who I am.

Even though I can do the things that would make you think that I am.

I can go to a pharmacy today and stand in the cold and flu section and I can look at all

the different medicines and I can read the boxes and I can diagnose how I'm feeling, which

by the way, I'm not feeling bad today, right?

But if I was and I could diagnose my symptoms and I could choose the over-the-counter medicine

that I need.

But here's the deal.

That doesn't make me a pharmacist.

It doesn't make me a doctor because I'm able to have some actions that make me look like

I know that I'm doing.

And here's where this comes with Christianity.

So many of us within our life, what we're trying to do is skip the who we need to be and just

start what we need to do.

And as Jesus is going to call a group of people to follow him, where he's going to begin within

there is them becoming who they need to be, resting in who they are.

Because our faith, where we're going to find ourselves, is not going to be based in a list

of religious rules, but it's going to be found and we're going to be based in Christ and we're

going to be rooted in.

So in chapter 6, the parts that we're not going to read, but we're just going to look

at real briefly, Jesus is walking and begins to teach.

The Pharisees are going to bring up some things that Jesus' disciples are doing, that even

Jesus does.

And as he interacts with them at the beginning of chapter 6, Jesus is going to declare, like,

hey, here's who I am, right?

Like, I am divine and I have authority to say, this is important, Jesus says, I have the authority

to define and to say what pleases God.

And then Jesus retreats and he goes off by himself and he prays and he comes back and

he appoints his closest group of disciples that are going to follow him during his earthly

ministry.

We're going to see the 12 that are chosen and Luke lists them by name.

And at the very last one, he's going to say, and Judas Iscariot, who would betray him.

And so Jesus, as he is living his life, is going to follow and call the men that are going

to follow him.

And in that is the reminder of the cross, of the work that Jesus will do so that we may

come into a relationship with him, is that reminder through Judas Iscariot.

And then in verse 16, it says that Jesus looks around and he begins to teach.

And we're going to refer to this.

I read a guy that referred to this as the sermon on the plane because in verse 17, it said he

stood on level ground.

And what we're going to notice is if you've heard of before, maybe you haven't heard of

the sermon on the plane, but you've heard of the sermon on the mount.

And there's going to be some similarities between the sermon on the plane and the sermon on the

mount, but there's going to be some differences as well.

Jesus lists or Luke lists a couple of cities where the people there are present.

And one thing that's interesting is in the sermon on the mount, what we find is a largely

Jewish audience, but on the sermon on the plane, what we're going to find is largely a Gentile

audience.

And Jesus, he teaches through this.

It's shorter, but he's going to focus in on what we're going to call the blessings and

the woes based off of the words of Christ.

And so let's begin by looking at the blessings, starting in verse 20.

It says, and he lifted up his eyes on his disciples and said, blessed are you who are poor

for yours is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are you who are hungry now for you shall be satisfied.

Blessed are you who weep now for you shall laugh.

Blessed are you when people hate you, when they exclude you and revile you and spurn your

name as evil on the account of the son of man.

Rejoice in that day and leap for joy for behold, your reward is great in heaven for so their

fathers did to the prophets.

And so Jesus is going to describe what it means to be blessed.

And just as he did in the sermon on the mount, Jesus draws some areas of life where we would

say, I don't necessarily know that that's the blessing of life that I'm going to choose.

Poverty isn't necessarily what we would think of as a blessing.

Being mocked and being persecuted, you and I, we don't naturally look at that after a long

day of experiencing abuse and say, you know, that truly was a blessing.

We don't hit that point with hunger pains within us and think, oh man, I sure do feel blessed

today.

And so we want to begin to understand like, Jesus, what are you talking about?

And if we're not careful, what we can look at is we can take this on and say, this is

what I must do in order to be blessed.

But here's what I want us to notice in Jesus' words, all right?

And my grammar may be off on this, but I hope it conveys what we're trying to get to.

I don't do blessed.

I am blessed, right?

I don't do blessed.

Jesus says that we are blessed.

In the verbs in which he uses, we begin to see blessing as what is given to us, as what's

imparted to us, as what God is giving us.

And so you and I don't figure out what we need to do so that we can be blessed.

But instead, blessing is who we are, so that I am blessed.

I mean, think about this.

In his words, Jesus says, like, don't go make yourself be poor.

He says, I am poor.

You are poor.

I don't do hungry.

I am hungry.

And I love this one.

I don't do weeping.

I weep.

And here's what I mean by this, right?

Like, when we talk about weeping, where does weeping come from, right?

Weeping doesn't come from your external means in order to get you to weep.

Weeping is an outside reaction to internally what is happening to you, right?

Like, I don't weep because I hurt my arm.

I weep because I hurt the arm and my body reacts to the pain that is within me.

And so weeping comes from within me.

It's based in who I am.

I don't do hate here.

I am hated.

And we begin to see this understanding of what Jesus is pointing to as he's got this group

that is following him.

It says, like, right, Jesus has just called these 12 to follow him.

And he looks up at them, is what the scripture says.

And he begins to define who they are if they are in him.

He defines what blessing looks like.

And everything that Jesus is going to do, everything that Jesus is going to pour into them is going

to be counter culture from what they've experienced and from what you and I, if we're honest, what we experience

and oftentimes what we even want.

So what's Jesus talking about?

Jesus says that we're poor.

And what this means is that we're poor.

There's this spiritual poverty where we're desperate for God.

Jesus says that we are blessed if we are hungry.

And what we are longing for is to be satisfied by God and God alone.

Jesus says that we are blessed if weeping is who we are because we are discontent with the sin of ourselves

and the sin of this world.

And what we long for is godly sorrow.

That we are blessed if we are hated.

Because what is in us produces something that produces the obedience because who we are.

You see, Jesus is pointing us to that a blessed life is not the life that we earn.

But a blessed life is the life that is given by God to us.

It's the gift of grace that was in our lives.

And so Jesus looks at him and says, you want to be blessed?

You want this to be the markings of who you are?

Then this is what this means.

And it's going to continue on in this message of the Sermon on the Plain.

He's going to define that and give some practical steps for people who say,

I want to pursue a life that looks like this.

He's just going to tell them where it's found.

But it's not only the blessings, but Jesus gives the woes as well.

I want to look down at verse 24.

But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.

Woe to you who are full now, for you shall be hungry.

Woe to you who laugh now, for you shall mourn and weep.

Woe to you when all people speak well of you, for so their fathers did to the false prophets.

We see the opposite of what was before.

What was before is what they did to the prophets.

They persecuted the men of truth and the women of truth, but not so with the false prophets.

Here's what I want you to notice with the woes.

All of the woes that Jesus gives are temporary.

Every single one of them.

Money and wealth, temporary.

Satisfaction from food, temporary.

Laughter, temporary.

Those who speak well of you, temporary.

In every single instance, every woe that Jesus warns us about are the things that are temporary.

I was listening to a pastor a couple weeks ago.

I was waiting outside for a meeting to take place.

I couldn't go into the building yet and I was listening to a sermon and the pastor was talking

about this and here's what he said and I'd never thought of it this way and it just impacted

me greatly.

He said, what we sinfully fill our lives with and sinfully find our satisfaction in will one

day end up in garage sales and landfills.

Blew me away.

That one day all of those things that I value, those things that I find comfort in, will one

day sit in my driveway and I'll try to negotiate a quarter either way with someone.

That one day when I pass from this life to eternity with Christ, what those who are behind, what

my son and daughter will do is they'll go through the stuff, keep some things that they want and

drop the rest off at a goodwill or a landfill.

Those things that we sinfully find our satisfaction in, those things that we sinfully find our joy

in will one day be the next generation's trash is what Jesus says.

Right?

You find your satisfaction in your wealth.

What if the market crashes?

You find your satisfaction in food or pleasures of the body.

Well, what happens when that moment is over?

You find your satisfaction in the happiness of this earth and in the laughing that comes from

that.

Well, what happens when you mourn?

You find your satisfaction in the approval of people.

And what happens when they turn on you?

All those things that we've accumulated, all of those things that we've earned, all of those

things that we worked hard for, Jesus says, if we find it in this, it's worthless.

It's worthless.

So then, Jesus, what do we need to do?

What does our life need to look like so that we can be blessed?

I don't know about you, but as I read this, I begin to drift away from the concept of being,

of being found in who I am.

And I say, Jesus, then this is what I want to do.

Jesus, I want to have a life that's satisfied in you and in you alone.

And what does this begin to look like?

And I can imagine that the people who are with Jesus, these disciples, who many of them

have walked away from everything that they hold dear, they're kind of wondering, okay,

this is what I signed up for.

I signed up for hunger.

I signed up for persecution.

I signed up for poverty.

Jesus, this is what I signed up for.

Then what does the life look like?

What do I need to do?

Jesus, what is the standard?

And here's what I want to show as we look at verse 27.

If we're going to live this life in our white knuckled, pull myself up by my own bootstraps,

this is what I'm going to do in order to live a blessed life.

Jesus is going to give us an impossible request.

But if we're going to live our lives through the transforming power of the gospel, about it's

who I am and what will come from that, then we stand a chance for the hope.

Look at verse 27, the impossible request.

Jesus says,

And so at the very beginning, what Jesus does is you want your life to be one that glorifies God.

You want to end this, to have something.

If this is who you are, then I'm going to give you, I'm going to challenge you to do the one thing that you can't fake.

Love.

I want to challenge you to do the same thing that you can't fake.

I want to challenge you with something.

Find a difficult person.

And in your own ability, in who you are, try to love them.

Don't try to just do nice things for them.

Try to legitimately love them.

I'm going to tell you, it's impossible.

It is absolutely impossible.

Why?

Because we're too selfish to muster that up within ourselves.

But we begin to think through what they've done to us, what they've said about us, the complications of our life.

And so Jesus says, but I say to you, love your enemies.

Right?

Love them.

The one thing that you and I can't fake.

And so Jesus says, if this is who you're going to be about, then what you need to see,

what you need to experience, is you need to experience a transformation that comes from me and me alone.

And so what begins to happen within this is the internal love is going to produce something so that you do good for them.

Why?

Because it's who you are.

That you seek to bless them.

And here's the definition of blessing so that we all understand this, right?

Blessed means that we have something that we don't deserve.

And so for the people who make your life miserable, what you begin to long for them when you love them is blessing,

even though they don't deserve to be blessed.

But it's what you desire for them anyways.

And then Jesus says, and you pray for them.

You pray for those who abuse you.

This goes completely counter to everything outside of Christ that you and I are.

And Jesus is going to address that the only way that this can happen, right?

Think about the miracles of last week.

It's the miracle that begins to happen through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in our lives.

But you love your enemies.

In that, then you have your reward.

Because your reward is not found in what you do, but it is found in who you are.

Look at verse 43.

Jesus explains what this looks like in the life of an individual.

He says,

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 grapes picked from a bramble bush.

The good person out of the good treasures 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.

All right, so we're going to have an agricultural lesson, all right?

Now, nothing groundbreaking here, right?

Like I'm not, I haven't gone to school for this, but here's some things that we know just because of life, all right?

Dead trees, number one, don't produce fruit.

They don't.

Dead trees don't produce fruit.

Alive trees produce fruit.

But also this, false trees, right, do not produce fruit either.

I read a pastor this week who was talking about this.

And here's the phrase that he used is, as you and I, when we try to muster up fruit from ourselves in our own ability, and he described it as stapling fruit.

He said, your fruit staplers.

And what we're trying to do is to take something that is dead, to take something that's not alive, and to manufacture and put something on it so that the world looks at that and says, that's fantastic.

So it'd be like this.

I kind of live in scrub oak country.

I don't know if you guys have scrub oaks in your yard, but I got a lot of scrub oak kind of toward the back of our property.

And I hate them.

And every so often you got to go and you got to cut it down, and it feels like as soon as you cut it down, right, in three days there's one bigger than where the one that you cut was, right?

So imagine this.

Imagine if you came into my yard, and what I've done is I've taken a scrub oak, and I cut it down, and I threw it to the back.

But now I take it, and I dig a hole, and I put it down in the hole, and I fill it with dirt.

And you see the crooked bins, and there's no leaves that are on it.

And I go to the store, and I get a bag of apples, and a bag of oranges, and a bag of pears, and maybe because whatever, a few watermelons.

And I come, and I grab the bag of apples, and I staple all of them to the tree, and then I go, and I get the oranges, right?

I don't even get a different tree.

And I staple the oranges to that tree, and then I get the pears, and I staple those to the tree.

And then it'd be really impressive, because I'm really good at all these things that I'm going to do, right?

I take the watermelons, and I attach them to the tree.

And then I call you back to my yard, and I say, well, look at this.

Look at what I've been able to do.

Look at what I've been able to accomplish.

Look at this tree that is dead.

Look at this tree which has no roots.

Look at this tree that doesn't even bear fruit.

But look at what I've been able to do.

I've been able to take apples and make them, and I've been able to take pears and make them,

and I've been able to take oranges and make them, and I've been able to take watermelons and place them on there.

And what begins to be seen and what begins to be seen and what begins to know as the South Carolina sun bakes down on it is all of this is fake.

It's all manufactured.

And the truth is that when you and I say that in and of myself before love exists in who I am, I'm just going to muster up and fake some generosity.

I'm just going to muster up and I'm going to fake some compassion.

I'm just going to muster up and fake some purity.

So on the outside that people can see what I've done, people can see what I've accomplished, people can see what I do.

But the truth is, it's dead fruit on a false tree.

And that, and that is our reward.

You know, the phrase, fake it till you make it, right, doesn't apply to the gospel.

It doesn't apply.

That the true transformation of who we are comes from the power of God changing the heart of man.

That's why scripture, as Paul writes and describes his situation, he says that what the power of the gospel does is it takes a dead man and it makes him alive again, right?

That's why we begin to see that what the gospel does, according to scripture, is it takes a dead heart, it takes a heart of stone.

And that what God does is he removes the heart of stone and he gives a heart of flesh, a soft heart that can work and move and be transformed.

That it all begins not with you and I trying to figure out how do we check the fake religious boxes and put the fruit up on the tree,

but how we say that, Lord, within me, Lord, that this is what I need you to do, that in my very being, Lord, transform me, that this is who I am.

Because you can walk into work tomorrow with a thing of coffee and a donut and walk to that person who you can't stand and give a false Pharisee sense of love.

Or you can pray that God will take that who was your enemy and transform your heart and bring from you love that glorifies God.

Jesus closes this last part with one last teaching that I want you to look at.

Verse 46, he says, why do you call me, Lord, Lord, and do not do what I tell you?

Now, let's pause here for a second, okay?

Because you're like, well, you just said it's about being.

It's not about doing, right?

Well, I want us to talk about the obedience that God's going to call us to.

The foundational obedience that needs to exist in our life.

That's what Jesus is pointing to.

Verse 47, everyone who comes to me and hears my words and does them, I will show you what he is like.

The key, everyone who comes to me, Jesus says.

He is like a man building a house who dug deep and laid the foundation on the rock.

And when a flood arose, the stream broke against that house and could not shake it because it had been well built.

But the one who hears and does not do them is like a man who built a house on the ground without a foundation.

When the stream broke against it, immediately it fell and the ruin of that house was great.

Jesus talks about the same situation happening to two things that look very similar.

But there's one difference, the foundation.

The house that my family and I lived in before we lived in the house that we live in now.

I want to be honest with you.

It was the most beautiful house that I've ever lived in.

When you would pull up to that house and you would stand outside and you would look at that house.

It was a gorgeous brick house with a detached garage with a breezeway.

It had trim on the outside of the house over the brickwork to make it look very ornate.

You would walk in and it had high ceilings and it had gorgeous hardwood floors and it had the handrails and everything on the walls that you could possibly imagine that it was there.

It had a beautiful staircase with fancy chandeliers and light fixtures and everything that was there.

And when it came time for us to put this house onto the market, we decided that before we do this, let's find out if there's anything wrong with this gorgeous house.

With this beautiful house, with this house that as you walk up, so many people would want this house.

And so someone came and did an inspection for us.

And I want to tell you, we got some bad news.

You see, there wasn't anything wrong with the doors and the windows.

We had taken care of those.

There wasn't anything wrong with the eye appeal.

What was wrong with the house?

And the guy brought me over to the right side of the house.

And he said, I want to show you something.

And he brought me over and there was a crack that ran all the way from the bottom where the grass touched the house all the way to the top window.

And I'd never noticed it before.

And he said, you got a problem.

You got to get this crack fixed.

And I said, well, that's not a problem, right?

Like, we can get some grout.

We can get something.

Like, we can patch this and make this work.

And he said, no, you can't.

Nothing you can do to patch this, to make this work from the outside.

The problem with the house is underneath.

The problem with the house is the foundation.

The problem with this house is it's not structurally sound.

And I remember thinking, well, what about the chandeliers?

What about the windows?

What about the doors?

What about the paint on the wall?

What about the decorations?

What about the hardwood?

What about all of this?

But the truth was, none of those things mattered if the foundation wasn't set.

Jesus described a situation where two houses were built.

And it didn't matter that in both houses it had good walls.

It didn't matter that the roof on both of them kept the water from coming in.

It didn't matter that the doors would swing as they should.

It didn't matter that the windows were positioned in the correct way to where the afternoon breeze would fill the home.

It didn't matter that the floor was where the floor would be if the foundation was off.

And so he said, the one whose life will stand, the one whose life will hold true,

is the one whose foundation was found.

And foundation was found in him.

You see, you and I so often in our life, what we spend our life focusing in on,

in our relationship with God, in our faith, are the outside things.

The things that people can see.

The things that people can respond to.

The things that people can give us credit and praise.

I'm telling you, people came to our house as when we sold our house.

And you ask, what did you like about the house?

Well, we liked how it set off the road.

We liked the curb appeal.

Not one person said, you know what?

That foundation is quality, right?

Not one person.

But everything else was worthless if that wasn't set.

You and I, my fear is in our life that we're walking around and we're consumed about walls when our foundation is not set.

We're consumed about a new window when everything that we could be is not who we need to be because it's not found in him.

So here's the point, I think, in the story of what Jesus is saying.

But you're serious.

But what do we do?

I've got to have an action.

I've got to have an application.

I've got to have something that I step toward.

But here's what I would tell us.

Start digging.

Stop trying to put a wall on a foundation that doesn't exist.

Stop letting your focus be on how do I need to modify my behavior and begin to dig your life into who Jesus is.

Begin to desire and long for knowing him and spending time with him and growing with him and crying out to him.

Begin to place your life rooted in who he is for his glory and for his name.

But here's the thing.

Digging's hard.

Digging's not easy.

Digging breaks your back.

And no one gives you credit for it.

But it's where everything is going to come from.

You want to be blessed?

You want to experience life with Christ?

Christ alone?

You want to know about the hope of what it's found?

Stop stapling fruit and start digging into him.

Would you pray with me?

God, I come to you this morning.

Lord, and my fear for so many of us is that we're trying to live these lives of stapling fruit, false fruit, fake fruit on dead trees.

And we look at ourselves and we see what we've done and we think we're impressing ourselves and impressing others.

Lord, but what we lack is life.

And what we begin to find is where life begins, where life is upheld, where growth happens and takes place, is in a depth of foundation that is found in you and in you alone.

So Jesus, as we begin to look through our lives and the examination of our heart and all of the things that we've tried to do in and of ourselves, Lord, may we wrestle with the one question.

Lord, we can't wait for it.

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