The Tenants and the Vineyard

Today on Summit Life with J.D.

Greer. The number one substitute for true surrender is religious activity. In fact, sometimes the least surrendered people who know God the least are the most busy in religion, because religion can be a very effective way of avoiding the authority of God in your life. If you don't want to surrender to God everything, you can come up with a scheme to be busy that you think will keep God at bay. Welcome to Summit Life with pastor, author, and apologist J.D. Greer.

As always, I'm your host, Molly Vidovich. You know, sometimes it's easy to look at history and assume we won't repeat the same mistakes. We feel like we've learned from the past and look down on the actions of previous generations. Unenlightened thinkers, barbaric practices, we're better than that, right? But in reality, what is so different about our hearts today?

Don't we still have the capacity for evil and ungodliness if left unchecked? Today, pastor J.D. Greer encourages us to look within as he continues our teaching series titled Listen.

If you'd like to follow along with the transcript of each message, you can find them free of charge at jdgreer.com. Today, pastor J.D. is teaching from Matthew chapter 21, the parable of the tenants and the vineyard. Well, this is the last week of our series on the parables of Jesus called Listen. So I think it is very appropriate, Matthew 21, verse 33, that this last parable we are going to look at opens with Jesus saying, listen, listen to another parable. What we've learned in this series is that Jesus sometimes spoke in parables so that those who were not really listening, at least from their heart, would miss the meaning of his words.

Listening, we've learned throughout this series, is a critical life skill. Early on in my ministry here, I was asked by somebody in our congregation if I would do their wedding, and I knew them, and I said I'd be happy to do it. So they told me it was going to be in Mooresville. Well, Mooresville, I thought, Mooresville is just right over here, you know, so about that afternoon, about five o'clock in the afternoon, I got in my car and punched in the, you know, wedding, you know, place coordinates to go to the rehearsal. And it said Mooresville is three hours and 40 minutes because it's Mooresville, not Morrisville, which Morrisville is about 10 minutes.

Mooresville is about three plus hours from here. So I called the groom up and I'm like, I'm going to be a little bit late for the rehearsal. He said, how late? I said about three hours and 15 minutes late.

I'll be there about 1130. Listening is a very critical life skill that you got to learn. And if you don't listen with the right ears, you don't have ears to hear, then you miss a lot of what is happening. And that's what's going on in these parables. So Jesus would often open his parables, like he does this one, with an admonition for us to listen, because only those who were really listening, only those with the right posture, right disposition of heart, we have said, could perceive what he was saying. The parable that we're going to look at today, however, is an exception because Matthew tells us that everybody, including Jesus's enemies, who obviously didn't have the right disposition of heart, everybody understood exactly what he meant by this parable. In this parable, he offers an uncomfortably accurate analysis of the hearts of the Pharisees and the religious leaders and a prediction above what they were about to do to him. Personally, by the way, I love these little beneath the surface looks into the human heart that Jesus will sometimes give because it helps me understand what is going on in my own heart when I wrestle with the claims of Jesus and also helps me understand what's going on, the spiritual battle that's happening in the hearts of people who are listening to me as I preach.

So this is a beneath the surface look at the human heart. Here's the context. Jesus tells this parable, Matthew 21, shortly after he had cleared the temple square with a whip, presumably now he's standing in that same temple square. Everybody, particularly the religious leaders, is a little on edge because they see Jesus as a clear threat, a clear threat to the establishment. And so Jesus begins this parable in that context. Verse 33, there was a landowner who planted a vineyard but put a fence around it, dug a wine press in it, and built a watchtower.

He leased it to tenant farmers and he went away. Now the prophet Isaiah, Isaiah 5, had famously compared God's creation of Israel to a landowner who planted a vineyard and left it under the stewardship of some workers to harvest. But according to Isaiah, when the time came for the harvest, the fruit was sour so the landowner destroyed the vineyard. Everybody that was listening to Jesus on this day would have been familiar with that story, in fact quite well, and they understood that story as a condemnation of Israel, listen, at the time of Isaiah and an explanation for why God had sent Israel into exile. But when Jesus tells this very familiar story, he's going to add a little twist.

Let me walk you through it. Verse 34, when the time came to harvest fruit, he sent his servants to the tenants to collect his fruit. The tenants took his servants, they beat one, killed another, and stoned a third. Again, he sent other servants, more than the first group, and they did the same to them. They did the same to him. Finally, he sent his son to them.

They will respect my son, he said. Now, let me just add here, if you're kind of thinking through this, if you were listening to the parable, you'd have to ask, well, if they killed the first servants, why would the owner then choose to send in his son? I mean, if I were a principal at a high school and I was having lunch with my wife in my office and I got word that one of the classrooms had gotten unruly and beat up the substitute teacher that was there, and so I sent a vice principal down to check it out and they beat her up, and then I sent a security guard down to check out the situation and they beat the security guard up, I'm not going to look at my wife and say, hey, sweetheart, would you mind walking down and checking out what's going on in that classroom? Well, of course not.

I mean, my wife could probably handle it because she's strong and she's pretty feisty, but you still wouldn't do that. Why would the owner, after they'd killed three or beat up three of the people that he sent to them, why would he send in the most precious person in the world to him into a situation that he knows is extremely dangerous? That's a great question with a very important answer that we'll come back to toward the end. Verse 38, but when the tenant farmers saw the son, they said to each other, this is the heir.

Come on now, let's kill him. And then we'll take the inheritance for ourselves, which by the way, is just to show you the insanity of sin. This guy is clearly wealthy enough to own multiple properties and hire servants to tend him.

So you figure if he's wealthy enough to own multiple properties and hire servants, then he's probably wealthy enough to also hire a security force to deal with one if it had been stolen, but such as the insanity of sin. And that's what these tenant farmers think. Verse 39, so they seized him, the son, and they threw him out of the vineyard and they killed him. Therefore, when the owner of that vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?

He answers his question. He will completely destroy those terrible men, they told him, the people listening told him, and they will lease his vineyard to other tenants who will give him his fruit at the harvest. Jesus said to them, well then have you never read the scriptures?

The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. This is what the Lord has done and it is wonderful, marvelous in our eyes. Therefore, I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people producing its fruit. Whoever falls in this stone will be broken to pieces, but on whomever it falls, it will shatter him. This is a quote, by the way, from Psalm 118, which was one of the five Psalms of the Hallel that was sung throughout Passover by pilgrims that had come to Jerusalem, which meant that that was going on all around Jesus and people were singing the song, it was familiar, people may have been singing it while he was up there teaching. Well, Jesus takes one of the key themes, the key phrases of that Psalm and he says, this is about me.

I'm the one that everybody's singing about. I'm the stone that is about to be rejected by you builders. I'm going to be rejected by you religious leaders, but I'm going to become the primary cornerstone of a new building.

Or if you don't understand the building metaphor or know what a cornerstone is, think of it as like him saying, I'm the player who got cut from the team that becomes the star of a brand new team that ultimately wins the championship. Verse 45, when the chief priests and the Pharisees heard this parable, this parable and the couple before it, they knew, they knew that he was speaking about them. It was common knowledge that Israel had a long legacy of abusing the prophets. Israel's own history tells that story. Every Jewish boy at the time had grew up learning, for example, that the prophet Jeremiah had been beaten up on multiple occasions, thrown into a pit and then stoned. The prophets Elijah and Amos were banished and forced to hide in caves. Ezekiel was murdered after a sermon that he preached. Habakkuk and Zechariah were both stoned by the Jews living in Jerusalem. In fact, Zechariah got chased into the temple and stoned right near the altar.

Isaiah, Isaiah the prophet was put into a log and cut in half by one of Israel's kings. So they knew the stories of these prophets that had been, been beaten and murdered and killed. But here was the, here was the twist. Here was the thing. They thought that that was something in their past. They thought that it was something that would never occur in their day. They were too righteous. They were too advanced. They were too morally upright for that to ever occur by them in their generation. The irony of course, was that they were about to do something even worse than any of their fathers had ever done. And there's an important lesson.

Let me add here in there for us. We probably shouldn't look so quickly with disdain on the sins of people in past history and assume that the reason that they did those hideous things was that they were so backwards and sinful. And we by contrast are so advanced and enlightened. You see the Bible teaches that we're made out of the same sinful stuff that they are. We've got the same fallen heart, which means given the same circumstances and pressures, we would likely have acted the same way that they did. When we hear about past generations of Christians, for example, enslaving or exploiting or abusing others, don't shake your head in self-righteous disgust and say, what was wrong with them? Instead, you ought to say, what is wrong with the human heart?

What's wrong with my heart? Stories of human depravity should not make us feel proud and smug. Stories of human depravity ought to make us feel humble and repentant because it's the same heart in us that was in them.

We are a race that has routinely scorned and ignored the prophets and routinely uses whatever positions of power it obtains to privilege itself, even if it means exploiting others. This all comes to a head in the crucifixion where we see in the crucifixion clearly displayed man's heart toward God. When God was fully revealed in Jesus, we hated him and we killed him.

And that wasn't just a problem for people in that generation. Several weeks ago, when we were going through the stories leading up to the crucifixion of Jesus, I showed you that Jesus looks like he's on trial, but it's actually the whole human race that's on trial. God has given us a picture of our attitude to the authority and the glory of God. Well, see, that's what the religious leaders of Jesus's day didn't get. They assumed that all their advances in religion somehow indicated that they had a different kind of heart, that they were just better people. You see, that's one of the dangers of religion. Religion can keep you blind to the depravity of your heart. You see, a lot of times when people grow up outside the church, apart from the constraints of religion, they see the full sinful capabilities of their hearts put on display. And so when they get saved, they really repent and they say, God, I've seen how bad I can get. I've seen how messed up I am.

I need you to save me. And when those people stand in church and we start singing Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me, man, they sing that with enthusiasm and sincerity because they've experienced firsthand how much of a wretch they actually can be. But see, we who grew up in the church, we learned to curb our behavior to a point that we can stay blind to the sinful potential of our hearts, a wickedness that is every bit as present in people who grew up outside the church. Listen, your and my heart is essentially the same as that which was in generations of the past.

That's true regardless of what color you are. It's true regardless of what religion you practice, how good the home you grew up in was, or what political affiliation you line up with. Your heart outside of Christ is fundamentally the same as that of those who exploited and abused others, who killed the prophets and who crucified Jesus.

The only difference between us and them are forces and graces outside of our control that have curbed or contained our simple tendencies. So the point is, don't look back self-righteously at them and say, what was wrong with those people? Instead, the abuses of the past ought to make you look inward and say, what's wrong with me? Keep a posture of humility about your own heart and ask God to reveal in you whatever rebellious or exploitive tendencies there are. So what are your rebellious tendencies?

We've all got them, but most of the time we either excuse them or ignore them. Being bathed in God's word not only exposes these things, but gives us a path to removing them and replacing them with truth. Something to consider as we break from our teaching for just a moment here on Summit Life. You know, one way to be sure we continually see God's word saturating our life is to participate in our daily email devotional from Pastor J. D. Couldn't we all use encouragement first thing in the morning to remind us of God's love? I know the busyness of life can quickly choke out any joy that we feel in our walk with God, so let's remind ourselves moment by moment of His desires and path for our lives. It's a quick read, but it helps you stay grounded in truth. And the best part is, it follows along with our program here, so you can stay caught up if you ever miss a day. Sign up for this free resource at jdgreer.com slash resources.

That's jdgreer.com slash resources. Take a little extra time each day and cement these truths deep into your heart so you can know Him better. Now let's return for the conclusion of today's message. Once again, here's Pastor J. D. So what I want to do then is focus for the next few minutes in light of that on the analysis of the human heart that Jesus provides in this parable because it is true for us in this generation as it was for the first years there in Jesus' generation.

I'm gonna give you four points here. Number one, what we see in this analysis of the human heart is that some unbelief is willful. The tenants in this parable didn't murder the son because they were confused about who he was. They didn't think he was an imposter coming in. They hated him, verse 38, because he challenged their ownership of the field. By this point in Jesus' life, the religious leaders had convinced themselves that Jesus was dangerous and that He needed to be killed. But in telling the story, Jesus pulls back the veil in their hearts and shows us that theirs was a willful rejection. It was, if you could say, willful confusion.

I mean, they thought that Jesus was a fake, but what He's saying is deep down there's actually something willful and intentional going on. In the book of Romans, Paul describes this. He says that a great deal of our behavior can only be explained in terms of a deep dynamic of emotional and spiritual repression. And that underneath everything else, the thing that we really repress is a hatred of God Himself. Romans 8.7 says that our sinful heart has an inward hostility toward God. Romans 8.7, the mind governed by the flesh. And all that means is the natural heart, the human heart without Christ is hostile to God, right?

I mean, everybody touch your chest for a minute. That heart that's in there, that spiritual heart is naturally hostile, not ambivalent, not a lover of God, not a good person that's confused. It's hostile. Your natural heart is hostile toward God. It does not submit to God's law, nor can it do so even if it decided that it wanted to.

I mean, think for a minute about what that means. Our natural heart cannot submit to God. Your natural heart possesses a deep hostility to the authority and the glory of God. Your heart, repentance begins by recognizing that and looking to God to change it. By the way, this is how you know that the Holy Spirit is beginning to open your eyes, because it takes the Holy Spirit to see that sin is not just a violation of the rules. Sin is an entire attitude of resentment that you have toward Christ's authority and His claim over your life. The sign that the Holy Spirit is working in you is that your sin, listen to this, starts to feel personal between you and God.

It's not just a feeling of shame that you haven't kept the rules good enough or that you're a worse person than everybody else. You know the Holy Spirit is working in you when it starts to feel personal, like I have resisted Jesus and His authority and His claim for being deserved the glory of my life. What all this means is that for many people, their unbelief is not because of a lack of evidence in the head. Their unbelief comes from a heart problem.

I heard this the other day, I think exemplified in Richard Dawkins, who's the famous atheist, British atheist, who wrote the book God Delusion. He was asked this question. They were like, is there anything that God could do now to get you to believe in Him? Now, he prides himself on being open-minded. His answer to this question was no. Even if God showed up in the room, I would want to know what sort of psychological or naturalistic explanation was going on here. You see, what's happened is his atheism has now gone to anti-theism, which is a refusal to consider the evidence that ultimately springs from a hatred of God.

It doesn't want it to be true. Aljuis Huxley, who was a philosopher who coined the term agnostic about 75 years ago, wrote a very famous book called Brave New World. He said this in one of his journals. He said, I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning. For myself, as no doubt for most of my contemporaries, other atheists and agnostics, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. Liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality of Christianity, the sexual morality of Christianity, because it interfered with our sexual freedom.

There was only one admirably simple method of justifying ourselves to be able to do what we wanted, and that was agnosticism. What I'm trying to get you to see is that sometimes there are hard things that are behind unbelief. I remember hearing a story one time about a high school girl in a class where her class was given the assignment to take on some historical figure that had occurred in an unusual period of history and to explore that and tell that story. So this girl chose Jonah and did a great presentation on the history of Nineveh and the social dynamics that were at work between Nineveh and the people of Israel and got up and presented it. Well, after all the presentations were done, the cynical teacher gets up there and commends all the different presentations, but then begins to launch a tirade about being able to separate truth from fantasy and being able to, you know, not choose mythical figures to write historical papers on and just goes on and finally this girl comes up and says, were you talking about me there?

Because he'd given her a C- on what was an excellent presentation. He said, well, absolutely I was. He says, everybody knows that the stories in the Old Testament are just myths. There was no base interest in reality.

There was no such persons as Moses or King David or certainly no Jonah. But the girl said, well, but all these figures have the same historical documentation as other figures. And the teacher said, listen, any educated person dismisses any supernatural natural explanations for any historical event, just prima facie, just from the beginning.

We're just going to get rid of that. And then he said, he said, these stories don't even make sense. I mean, how could Moses possibly have led the children of Israel through the Red Sea? How could Jonah have survived in the belly of a fish for three days? And the girl said, what?

I don't know. When I get to heaven, I'll ask Jonah. And the teacher said, well, what if Jonah is not in heaven? And the girl said, well, then you can ask him if he's not in heaven. There's a willfulness sometimes to things that we say are objective.

There's a sense in which I'm just not even going to consider that because I don't like the implications of if it were true. All throughout his ministry, Jesus explains that if you've got the right posture of heart, if you really want to know, if you've got ears to hear, if you desire to know God truly, then the truth about him will be evident to see. By the way, before I move on to our second point here, you got to note that this rejection of Jesus can also take a religious form, not just an atheistic form.

I mean, after all the tenants that we're learning about first represent the chief priests, not atheist. This might be one of the most important things to learn, especially if you're a church going person, the number one substitute, the number one substitute for true surrender is religious activity. In fact, sometimes the least surrendered people who know God the least are the most busy in religion because religion can be a very effective way of avoiding the authority of God in your life. If you don't want to surrender to God everything, you can come up with a scheme to be busy that you think will keep God at bay. In her novel, Wise Blood, the Southern novelist Flannery O'Connor talks about one of the characters she describes as being someone who avoided sin. Listen to this, he avoided sin so that he could avoid Jesus.

In other words, as long as his life never got desperate, as long as his life never got messed up by really bad sinful choices, as long as he never felt ashamed, well then he never had to reckon with who Jesus was, how much he needed his grace, and the claims that Jesus made on his life. You see, sometimes religious activity is a way of keeping God at bay because you don't have to deal with real surrender because you don't feel desperate for God and his grace in your life. For a lot of people, it's like the goal of their religion is to keep Jesus in time out.

Your parents know how when your kid gets naughty or noisy or just annoying, you want to put them in time out and they go stand in the, I'll just say the corner, and they're over there in time out. And that's where people want to keep Jesus. It's like he's there when we need him. We don't want him all away. We want him in our lives.

But our goal is to keep him kind of out of our lives and not interfering with what we're doing. So when you sin and you do something wrong, then all of a sudden Jesus gets the freedom to come out of time out. And Jesus is over there. He's over in the corner and all of a sudden there's a sin. He comes out and he's like, ha, I got you now.

I got something to get you. You really messed up. And so you do whatever religious thing you got to do. You say your Hail Marys or cross yourself or go to church, tithe, read your Bible. And you're like, ha, I've done enough. Back in time out. And Jesus is like, oh, back in time out.

And he goes over there back in time out and waits on you to come get him. That's not repentance. It's not a relationship with God. That's an attempt to avoid God. I'm doing just enough to keep God and his claims away from my life.

I don't really want to surrender. I just want to do enough to make sure that I stay away from the judgment of God. That's what these religious leaders Jesus was showing them. It's like you've used religion to avoid God's rightful claim on your life, that he is the one with all authority and he's the one that deserves all glory. Are you just hearing this program right now or are you able to truly listen to what God is saying through his word?

This is Summit Life, the teaching ministry of Pastor JD Greer. Do you ever feel like your soul is scattered, torn between too many things, too many voices, and not enough quiet? Jesus knew that would be our reality, which is why so many of his parables deal with things like listening, trusting, and taking action in faith. Our new study guide, Parables in Peace, will walk you through these stories with practical tools for reflection and response. You'll dive into parables like the wicked tenets we were studying today and the hidden treasure, learning to see them not as just lessons but as invitations.

Each session includes a selected passage of scripture, reflection, application, and prayer. It's available this month to all of our gospel partners and monthly supporters. We'll immediately email you a copy today as our way of saying thanks for your financial gift to support this ministry. Join our mission today when you give by calling 866-335-5220.

The number again is 866-335-5220 or go online to give and request your copy at jdgreer.com. While you're on the website, don't forget to sign up for our weekly newsletter. Get ministry updates, information about new resources, and Pastor JD's latest blog post delivered straight to your inbox.

It's a great way to stay connected with Summit Life and it's completely free to subscribe. Sign up when you go to jdgreer.com. I'm Molly Vitovich. Be sure to tune in again Friday when we conclude this powerful teaching series called Listen right here on Summit Life with J.D. Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by J.D. Greer Ministries.