Pictures That Tell a Story (Part 2 of 2)

Music playing Put your own oxygen mask on first before you help others with theirs. Jesus similarly exhorted leaders to address their own issues in their lives before they tried to reform others. So what marks an effective teacher?

That's what Alistair Begg will be talking about today on Truth for Life Weekend, where in Luke chapter 6 verses 39 through 45. Music playing Every so often in a humorous way, we've had the dreadful experience of being in a party or something where there's a group of people walking around, and they're all doing that small talk and everything. You come up and talk to somebody, and they've got some dreadful smudge or something on their face, or they've got a piece hanging from somewhere that shouldn't be hanging there, or one of their glasses is out, or whatever it is.

And you don't really know the person, and you want to say, you know, whatever it is, and you can't bring yourself to do it, and yet you should because they're going around going, Hey, and how are you? And everywhere they go, you know that everybody can see what they can see. And eventually they go to the restroom, and they must burst into tears because they realize they've looked at it like this for ages now. They're completely self-deceived. They think they look great.

They look funny. Now, it is this notion that Jesus then employs in his third picture, which is the picture, if you like, of the twig and the plank. Now, the words are pretty clear, actually. The word that is translated here, a speck of sawdust. It's used in classical Greek, usually in the plural, to describe twigs or shrubbery or bits and pieces, the kind of things that you finally rake up after you've been working in the garden. It is the word that is used in Genesis chapter 8 and verse 11 in the Septuagint version, which is the Greek translation of the Old Testament.

When you go to verse 11 of chapter 8, you have the description of the dove coming back to the ark after Noah has sent it out, and it is carrying in its beak a piece of olive leaf, branch, twig, whatever it is. It's the exact same word. It's a kurfos. The word that is used here and is translated plank is the word docos, which is the load-bearing beam in a house or in a structure. And so it is a massive piece.

There probably is not a larger piece of metal if it is cast metal or wood in your home than in the places where you find those beams. And so here's the picture. And this is a humorous picture. People say, well, Jesus wasn't humorous at all.

We never have a record of him laughing, but he uses humor here to make his point. He says, can you imagine walking around with a huge load-bearing beam sticking out of the front of your head? And you're oblivious to the fact that it's there. And you keep going up to people with this thing sticking out of your head saying, excuse me, I think there's a little twig there in the corner of your eye. The person says, could you just back up ever so slightly, please? And the guy goes, why?

Why? They say, well, the thing. What thing? Well, no, no, I don't have a thing. I want to talk to you about the thing in the corner of your eye.

Now that's the point that he's making. Why is it that you're going around looking at the twig in your brother's eye and you actually have decided not to pay any attention to the plank in your own eye? In other words, why is it, he says, that you think you can take to yourself the privilege of dealing with everybody else's spiritual condition while frankly refusing to deal with your own? That you think that somehow or another you've been given the prerogative to call people up, to invite them to coffee, to send them little notes, to admonish them in the Lord because of their twig.

When in point of fact you are a walking contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction. And if you would only take a minute, he says, and look in your shaving mirror or look when you do your eyebrows, you got a huge thing sticking in your face. How is it, he says, verse 42, that you can go around and say these things to your brothers and sisters.

Excuse me, I wonder if you would let me take this back out of your eye. When you yourself fail to see the plank in your own eye. So Jesus says, you know what, this is hypocrisy. Now what is it that people say about churches and why they don't like to go to churches?

What's the number one thing? That's right. There's so many hypocrites there, they say. I don't want to go there, they're hypocrites.

True. That's what Jesus is saying. He said, I want to talk to you about the characteristics of Christian discipleship and I want you to understand that if you don't fall in a pit as a result of listening to it and following blind guides, or you yourself become a teacher that manages to live with a self-delusion, you will be a walking hypocrite. Now what is the hypocrisy?

I think the hypocrisy is in a fake concern. Because, let me try and think of an illustration that I don't have before me. Well, let's do a dumb one that no one will get offended about. Let's do diets, okay?

Okay, a few people will get offended, that's all right. You have just come home early. Nobody's around. You beetle into the house, you grab the planter's peanuts. You start eating them a handful at a time. You open the freezer thing, you find the vanilla ice cream.

You start on that. You find a chocolate bar that somebody brought from England. You eat that.

This is not biographical at all. You eat that. And after you're swollen like a beached whale, somebody very close to you comes home and eats a quarter of a Snickers bar.

And you say, hey, hey, hey, I thought we had a deal. First, quit eating the planters, the ice cream, and the chocolate bars from England before you start talking about pieces of candy an eighth of an inch deep. Why would you be so concerned about that when you're so unconcerned about this? You see, what makes it so condemning is this. The hypocrisy is all the more unpleasant because it is an apparent act of kindness. You see?

And that's what gives us this little feeling of superiority because we think we're being ever so kind. The only reason I'm pointing this out to you is because, you know, I care for your soul. And sometimes when you hear that, you want to go blow it out your ear, don't you? Well, I do. I'm sorry.

I do. Indeed, of all the things that have been pointed out to me, if I had to take every one of them seriously, I'd be in a mental institution today, and I'm not saying that they were all without justification. But I'd rather if somebody, as happens to me, come up without any sense of disguise and nail me, than come up with an apparent act of kindness that is a means of inflating our own ego and saying, you know, I really just want to deal with this because of such and such. And the spirit of censoriousness is such that I seek to exalt myself by disparaging other people. That's the hypocrisy. I feel that I can deal with sin vicariously by finding it in my brother and sister and condemning it there without dealing with it here. So that that gives me the weird sensation of experiencing a sense of self-righteousness without facing the pain of penitence.

So that if I can find your flaw and deal with you and tell you that I only want to do so because I have a great concern for you and I love you and I'm very kindly disposed to you, and thereby prevent myself from dealing with the issue, I'm just a total hypocrite. Now, Jesus is not turning over Matthew 18. He's not turning over the notion of exhorting and encouraging one another. He's not turning over all of his instruction about go show yourself to the person, go deal with your brother before you come to communion, and so on.

He's not overturning that at all. He said, let's just get this in sequence here. Before you go on a crusade as a reformer, make sure you're reformed. Before you go on a crusade as a teacher, make sure you're taught.

Before you go on a crusade as an ophthalmologist, make sure you take that huge big thing out of the front of your face, because you're going to have great difficulty in actually seeing into the eyes of the people that you think you're going to go fix. In other words, deal with yourself first. Learn, says Jesus, to be as critical of yourself as you often are of others, and be as generous to others as you always are with yourself. That's a challenge. See, I want to be generous with myself and critical of you.

Maybe you feel the same way. He says, no, let's be as critical of ourselves as we always are with other people, and let's be as generous to other people as we want to be generous with ourselves. In other words, rigid self-examination should proceed and will often preclude the kind of judgment that he condemned in verse 37, and you will notice there in verse 42, he uses the word then and then. He says, you hypocrite, take the plank out of your eye, and then, and we might add in parenthesis, and only then or not until then will you say clearly enough to remove the speck from your brother's eye. Only when self-reformation has taken place will it be possible for us to see clearly enough to help others. You will notice, incidentally, that there is a problem there, that there is a speck there.

He's not saying that it isn't there. He's just saying, don't go there and try and take it out until you've first dealt with this. And I think we will often find that we'll have so much time dealing with the this that there won't be a lot of time for the then, and we'll spend so much time dealing with the this that there won't be a then to go there and deal with that, and that God will have other ways of dealing with that in them, because for the other person sitting over there, what they regard as a twig is really a plank, and so on.

You understand how it works? See, because what I think is a twig is really a plank. I want to treat it as a twig, Jesus says, a plank. I want to treat yours as a plank, Jesus says, a twig. He says, you want to deal with a plank, deal here.

You want to deal with a twig, deal there, but not until you've dealt with a plank here. Picture four, a tree and its fruit, and with this we wrap it up. Thorns and briars do not produce figs and grapes. The identity of a tree is determined by its fruit. It will be the actions of a disciple that show what he or she is like at heart. Those who are unreformed in character can no more reform others than thorns and briars can produce figs and grapes. If you want to know whether this is a good tree, you take time to look at its fruit. If you want to know if it's a bad tree, do the same. And in the Mathean passage, Jesus says, by their fruits you shall know them.

Here he ends it, out of the overflow of his heart, his mouth speaks. Now the context again is teachers, is it not? If we allow that there is a syntax to all of this, line guides, students, teachers, specks, tree, fruit. What is the fruit then?

Let me suggest to you three things, and I'm just going to give you a word or two on each. How should we think then of the fruit? Well, think of it, first of all, in terms of the character of the teacher. What is the fruit? How are we going to see the fruit? Well, it's going to be conveyed in his character, in her character. When Jesus teaches about the vine and the branches, he says that fruitfulness equals Christlikeness. So each tree is recognized by its own fruit. What is the fruit of the Spirit?

Love, joy, peace, gentleness, kindness, goodness, self-control. So he says, okay, here's a teacher, let me tell you how to assess him. Not by his eloquence, not by his apparent giftedness, not by her abilities, not by her rhetoric, not by her great radio program, not by the fact that she's a great woman speaker, whatever it is. He says, don't use that as the test. No, no, do it in relationship to the fruit.

What will the fruit be? It will be expressed in character. And when instead of kindness and self-control, we're dealing with enmity, we're dealing with impurity, we're dealing with jealousy, we're dealing with self-injustice, indulgence, then we are justified in suspecting that the teacher is an imposter.

And if you doubt that, just read in Matthew 7, where Jesus is actually talking about false prophets. So fruit, number one, the character of the teacher. Number two, the content of the teaching. The content of the teaching. If a person's heart is revealed by his words, as a tree is known by its fruit, then we have a responsibility to judge the teacher by the teaching.

Both. Paul says to Timothy, watch your life. That is your character and your doctrine closely. Life, character, doctrine, teaching.

Okay, who are the blind guides? Those whose character is out to lunch and those whose content is not true to the instruction of the Bible. When John addresses the churches in Asia who had been invaded by falsehood, he said, I'm writing these things to you about those who are trying to lead you astray. Not everybody who shows up with a Bible has the best interests of the people at heart. Not everybody who's on TV and names the name of Christ is a true prophet. False prophets abound, he says. That's why it is imperative that you as a congregation, that we as individuals, learn the Bible. And one of the main reasons that you have to learn the Bible so much is to make sure that I don't go wrong. So that you will become such students of the book, you say, hey, wait a minute. Fruit. You're saying pear tree, you look like an apple tree.

I don't see this. Is it any wonder that James says, let not many of you become teachers, for he who teaches will be judged with greater strictness? Dear friends, he says, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God. John was concerned that his readers would apply the tests, not only of behavior, but also of belief, because sound doctrine and holy living are the marks of the true prophet. Fruit, the character of the teacher. Fruit, the content of the teaching. Fruit, the impact on the taught. The impact on the taught. That, I think, is the significance of this interaction between the student and the teacher and becoming fully trained and becoming like his teacher.

There is no question about that, you know. Unless there is a complete disengagement between the teacher's role in a classroom or in a university or from a pulpit, by and large, all things being equal, a congregation will take on the emphasis of the primary teacher of the Bible, which again makes it a sobering responsibility. When people then are fed on error, the impact will be like the spread of gangrene. And when truth is banished and error is embraced, you will find, according to the pastoral epistles, amongst the congregation, ungodliness and bitter division. Now, we understand that it is possible in any congregation for ungodliness to erupt and for division to exist in the best of places. However, those will be aberrations.

They will not be the hallmark of that congregation. But when you go amongst a people and you find that it is marked by ungodliness, a lack of application of the Bible to the existence of life and to the relationships with one another, and the sense of cliquishness and divisions and animosity and strife and manifold chaos, he says you're going to be able to see this as the very fruit of the instruction. And he says there's going to be a direct correlation between the character of the teacher, the content of the teaching, and the impact that it makes upon the people. Every school teacher knows this. It's one of the reasons, I think—this is almost a political statement— but it's one of the reasons that teachers don't want the results, you know, the result-oriented remuneration system.

Why not if you're any good? I mean, every salesman worth his salt wants results-based remuneration. What, you just want to stand up and talk and you don't care what happens? You want to just stand up and share your wisdom and let the children run around and do what they like? Or do you want to actually take seriously the fact that no pupil is above their teacher, but when they are fully trained, they will become like their teacher and face up to the responsibility that if they stink, it's probably because you stink? And we're not talking about making them geniuses.

We're talking about advancing the ball. Come on, you're a teacher. Let me tell you how we'll know your fruit. We meet your class. Do you see what this means in relationship to these things?

In the most direct, unequivocal, unavoidable terms, listen carefully, loved ones, and with this we close. If people come amongst Parkside Church, and in the daily interchange of conversation, in the gathering to talk, in meals, in coffee, in attending events together, and so on, they pick up the flavor of judgmentalism. They pick up a spirit of divisiveness. They pick up all that is negative and untoward. Then they may actually simply be picking up the emphasis of the teacher.

But if they come amongst us, and they find that there is a commitment to righteousness, and to peace, and to joy in the Holy Spirit, then they will know that it is the fruit of the instruction. Fruit takes time to grow. That's why it's useful to stay around for a while. And one of the reasons I don't want to go anywhere is because of you. Because of your patience. Because of your forbearance. Because of your love. Because of your willingness to say, Oh, don't worry about that. He's not really like that all the time. That was a bad one.

He'll come around. Because if you knew what I was really like, you'd never listen to me preach. And if I knew what you were really like, I wouldn't preach to you. But over the long haul, then we're able to say, you know, the character, the conduct, the message, the motives, the influence, are not perfect in any one of us.

But they're trending, at least in the right direction, you know? There's a genuine, honest, open spirit of contrition before the Bible, of honesty before the Scriptures, of saying, teacher and students alike, we are not what we are yet to become, but we are different from what we were. You can never lead souls heavenward unless climbing yourself.

You need not be very high up, but you must be climbing. And that we are altogether learners from the one true teacher, the one who knows the answers, Jesus. The one who says, why do you actually call me Lord, Lord? And do not do the things I tell you. Which brings us to picture number five, which allows us to anticipate next week. That is Alistair Begg with the conclusion of a message titled, Pictures That Tell a Story. You're listening to Truth for Life Weekend, and we hope you'll keep listening.

Alistair will be back in just a minute to close today's program. As we just learned, sound doctrine and holy living are the marks of a true prophet. But sometimes even the best of leaders can get things wrong. It's why it's so important that all of us understand the Bible, so that when God's word is taught, we can discern truth from error. Today, we want to recommend to you a book to help you do just that. The book is titled, Know the Truth, a Handbook of Christian Belief. This is a book written to guide us through the key theological truths of the Bible. Each chapter explains what the Bible teaches about a particular topic that is core to our faith.

For example, there's a chapter on humanity that explains the nature and extent of sin, our relationship with God. And there's an updated section in the book that addresses topics like postmodernism and pluralism. You will be greatly helped by the book, Know the Truth.

It's newly updated. It's highly recommended from Alistair and the entire team here at Truth for Life. It will serve you well as an ongoing reference to core Christian doctrines. This is the last weekend we'll be featuring the book, Know the Truth, so if you'd like to learn more, visit our website, truthforlife.org, and search the title, Know the Truth. Now, here's Alistair to close with prayer. O Lord our God, you who search us and know our hearts, you who know when we sit down and when we stand up, we thank you for the immensity of your love. Thank you that when we are ungrateful, you remain kind. When we are wicked, you remain true to your word. Thank you for giving us one another. Help us to do what the Bible says, and thereby to make the gospel of Jesus attractive to those who are wondering about him. May the grace of the Lord Jesus and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit rest upon and remain with each one of us today and forevermore. Amen. Amen.