Harbor Church - Mid City

Investigating Jesus: On Integrity

Luke 6: 39-49 Mid-City 6/13/2010

We’re in a series investigating the person that Christianity rises or falls on—Jesus Christ. Every week we’re getting a different window into the life of Jesus. This week we’re going to look at another very famous teaching of Jesus on integrity. In our text this morning, Jesus gives us 2 things that are central if you want to become a person of integrity:

1. Get the plank out of your own eye first

2. Regularly Check the Fruit being produced in your life

Jesus says in v41, “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Brother, let me take the speck out of your eye, when you yourself fail to see the plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your eye.” This teaching is quite humorous actually, especially if you understand the picture Jesus is painting. Let me explain. See the term plank, in Greek, means a load-bearing beam. Load bearing beams are these massive planks that run horizontal and support the load of the ceiling or floors above. Think of stacking about 5 rows of 2x4’s and putting about 15 in each stack. Big, honking beams—b/c they must bear the load. So that is the picture Jesus is giving you here—you’re walking around with this massive wooden, load-bearing beam protruding from your eye.

2 Things about this load-bearing beam:

(1) V41: you pay no attention to it. Now, he says 2 things about this protruding load-bearing beam. First, in v41, he notes that it is in your eye, but “you pay no attention to it.” That doesn’t mean you aren’t aware of it, but you just pay no attention to it. You act as if it isn’t there. Some of you are thinking—how is that possible?

John Lennon: For all you Beatles fans out there, I hate to do this to you, but you probably know it anyway. Let me quote Lennon’s son. “I felt he was a hypocrite. Dad could talk about peace and love out loud to the world, but he could never show it to the people who supposedly meant the most to him: his wife and son. How can you talk about peace and love and have a family in bits and pieces-no communication, adultery, divorce? You can't do it, not if you're being true and honest with yourself." Classic, surface-level hypocrisy—say one thing, do another.

But there is an even deeper and more problematic form of hypocrisy that is much more insidious than surface level hypocrsy. Jesus mentions it in v42, “How can you say to your brother, “Brother, let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when you yourself FAIL TO SEE the plank in your own eye.

Now HOW could you possibly fail to see a load-bearing beam protruding out of your eye? Well, think about when you get something in your eye. You really don’t see it, no matter how big it is. Why? B/c it shuts you down. Your eyes fill up with water and you start blinking a million times. Again, you’re very much aware that you have something in your eye, you just can’t see it.

Then Jesus says this really interesting thing to all of us who don’t see the this load-bearing beam in our eyes. v42b, “You hypocrite.” See the Greek term hypocrite is taken from the Greco-Roman world of the day for an actor. Acting in Greek theatre involved the use of elaborate masks. There were many reasons why, but one central reasons was b/c at the time there were no female actors, so they used the masks to put on an entirely different persona, character, and even gender. So, to be hypocritical means that you are intentionally masking your identity. You’re acting. And, as Jesus points out, you are well aware that you are doing so, but after awhile you become so accustomed to the mask and playing the part that you no longer see the mask or the load-bearing beam sticking out. That is hypocrisy at its most dangerous point. You no longer pay attention to the load-bearing beam, you don’t see it. You have forgotten that you are acting and wearing a mask.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was an American author who wrote, among other things The Scarlet Letter, put it this way, “No man can for any considerable time wear one face to himself and another to the multitude without finally getting bewildered as to which is the true one.” See my friends the most dangerous level of hypocrisy is this—you have been wearing the mask for so long you have completely lost touch with the real you.

Religious Mask: Some of you have been doing this with God. You have been wearing a religious mask for so long that you no longer see the mask. You have been in church since you were a kid, and each week you find yourself trying to convince God and other people that you are good. And after awhilte you believe yourself. And you become the speck police. The problem in this church, the problem in this city, the problem in America, is all the irreligious people

Irreligious Mask: But those of you who are irreligious can end up doing the same thing. Some of you are back in church for the first time in a long, long time. And while you weren’t in church, you spent a good portion of your time complaining about all those hypocrites in church, about how ridiculously inconsistent their lives were. See you were diverting as well, you were trying to focus on the speck over there—the problem is all the religious hypocrites. See you’ve been wearing an irreligious mask, whereas others of you have been wearing a religious mask.

Jesus says, “Stop, you all have wood in your eyes,” and you know it and you’re trying to hide it by acting like your somebody you aren’t and by diverting attention from yourself. 2 categories of people: There are hypocrites, and then there is Jesus. We’re all acting, and the most dangerous place to be in, according to Jesus, is to be an actor and not know it. To become so accustomed to the mask that you’ve forgotten you’re wearing it. That is the real difference between Christians and non-Christians—Christians confess they are acting & repent. So, unless you are Jesus, then ithe first step out of hypocrisy and towards integrity is—seeing the plank, confessing it, and beginning to get it out. That is what repentance is.

(2) Regularly Check the fruit being produced in your life

Now here is the 2^nd critical step to becoming a person of integrity—regularly checking the fruit of your life. Look at v45, “No good tree bears bad fruit, nor does a bad tree bear good fruit. The good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and the evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart.” So here is a key question in your life? Your fruit doesn’t lie, Jesus says—figs don’t grow on thornbushes.

But here is the more helpful question--how do you know what judge the quality of the fruit in your life? Well, Jesus gives us 3 really clear indicators: (a) what you say, (b) we you do, & (c) what you think reveal the quality of the fruit in our life. First, think about your speech. Look at the end of v45, “For out of the overflow of his heart his mouth speaks.” Jesus says, “The things that you say flow out of your heart. Your speech reflects the condition of your heart.

When I worked for a law firm in Orlando, I was a grunt who had just passed the bar. I only worked one day a week while I was going to seminary, which made absolutely no sense to anyone else in the firm—you’re doing what? I remember sitting in my lavish corner office overlooking downtown—not so much, I was buried in the file room, and I was lucky to have a chair and a computer. But, from the file room I could hear a few of the other lawyers up and down the hall ripping into people on the phone right and left. Bleep, bleep, bleep.

And then we would go on firm retreats, and there was no distinction between the conversation of those that were married and single. All the guys were sitting around talking about what hot chicks they were hooking up with or wanting to hook up with. See out of the overflow of his heart his mouth speaks.

On the other hand, I worked at another firm where the hiring partner of a really large firm was a follower of Jesus. He is, to this day, one of the most Christ-like people I have ever encountered. His speech was always edifying, encouraging, and constructive. Now that doesn’t mean he didn’t say difficult things or that he just told everyone what they wanted to hear. But he spoke the truth in love. See this man, named Kirby Sevier, wakes up at 4:43 A.M. (not sure why 43—he told me, but I can’t remember) and stores up Jesus in his heart, and then Jesus just naturally flows off of his lips all day long. So the first indicator of the quality of the fruit in your life is what you say and how you say it.

(b) What we do: But here is another way to check the fruit of your life to determine if the product of your life is one of integrity or hypocrisy: your actions. Look at v45, “The good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and the evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart.” Same thing again in v46, “Why do you call me, “Lord, Lord,’ and do not do what I say?” See your speech is not always a tell-tale sign. If you are acting and good at acting, then the words coming out of your mouth may sound great, but do your actions match up. This is classic, surface-level hypocrisy. Say one thing, do another.

Examples aren’t hard to come by, but I read one that was quite funny this week.A police officer pulled a driver aside and asked for his license and registration. "What's wrong, officer," the driver asked. "I didn't go through any red lights, and I certainly wasn't speeding."

"No, you weren't," said the officer, "but I saw you waving your fist as you swerved around the lady driving in the left lane, and I further observed your flushed and angry face as you shouted at the driver of the Hummer who cut you off, and how you pounded your steering wheel when the traffic came to a stop near the bridge.""Is that a crime, officer?"

"No, but when I saw the ‘Jesus loves you and so do I’ bumper sticker on the car, I figured this car had to be stolen."

So the point here is this: Is the fruit of the Spirit manifesting itself in love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, self-control? Does your character reflect the things that you say are true of you?

(3) What you think about: v45 “The good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart.” Storing up good things. Thinking about them. Paul puts it this way in Phil. 4:8 “Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.” Think about these things. And Jesus is specific about what he wants us thinking about. Look at v47, “I will show you what he is like who comes to me and hears MY WORDS and puts them into practice.” Jesus says hears my words—the Bible. Friends, Jesus is saying, meditate on the Bible, ponder it. This is what will make you a person of integrity—getting His word down into the marrow of your bones.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer is one to learn from when it comes to integrity. He gave his life for what he believed in. Listen to what he said, “Because I am a Christian, therefore, every day in which I do not penetrate more deeply into the knowledge of God's Word in Holy Scripture is a lost day for me. I can only move forward with certainty upon the firm ground of the Word of God. And, as a Christian, I learn to know the Holy Scriptures in no other way than by hearing the Word preached and by prayerful meditation.” See Bonhoeffer says church really matters. The preached word of God is food for your soul and you need it, but once weekly isn’t enough. Bonhoeffer says there must be ongoing meditation of the word.

If you are a follower of Jesus and you want to be a person of integrity, then the bottom line is that you will have to spend time daily meditating and thinking about Him. In fact, a HERMIT put this better than anyone I have ever read or talked to on this. I came across this little book when I was in a used book store in London shortly after college. This British chap walked up, pulled an old book off the shelf, bought it, and then walked over to me and handed it to me. He said, “Read this, it will change you” and walked away. From the looks of the book, I had absolutely no interest. It was a paperback book with the picture of a hermits hut on the front and had the scintillating title of “Peter Calvay—Hermit.” I smiled, looked heavenward and said, “OK, Jesus, I’ll read it, even though it looks like a lame book.”

It was fantastic. It was about a priest who realized that he had been religious all his life but, in the end, was faking it—he had no relationship with God. But he came across a number of people who all had this vibrant spirituality and they each credited this random hermit named Peter Calvay as their spiritual director that had brought them into this life-giving relationship with Jesus. So he got in touch with the hermit and here is what the priest said to him, “I have known for the past 20 years that God loves me but I’ve not changed. I’m just the same old me.” “Well I don’t know about that” Peter said generously, “but there’s all the difference in the world between knowing that you are loved, and experiencing being loved. Knowledge alone is not enough. Knowledge will never change anyone incisively and permanently, but experience will, if the experience is deep enough, lasting enough.”

So, at this point, he sounds like all the mystics—it isn’t just knowledge that changes you, but experiencing God. And the beginning of experiencing God comes when we listen to Him speak. The priest interrupts, “Could you be more explicit in what you mean by listening to God? Does he speak to us as He spoke to Moses on Mt. Sinai, or in a dream as he spoke to Joseph, or do we hear voices, like Joan of Arc?” “Let me put it this way,” Peter said, in no way offended by my unintentional facetiousness. “How does anybody speak to anybody else? There’s nothing mysterious about human communication. We get to know someone else by listening to the words they use. Spaces between people are bridged by words. They enable us to find out more about them. This is why the Bible has always been regarded with awe by all Christians, because it contains the Words that bridge the space between God and man: God’s words. It even goes a step further by showing how God’s words were eventually embodied in the flesh and blood of a man, the man Jesus Christ. This is why all authentic Christian prayer begins not by flinging oneself into obscure transcendental states of awareness, but by trying to get to know and love Jesus Christ. St. Jerome said, that to be ignorant of the Scriptures is to be ignorant of Christ, and so it goes without saying that the starting point for getting to know Him is to read the Scriptures.”

Then he talked about how all the early Christians listened to God by reading the Bible slowly, meditatively, prayerfully. He said, “They would read a few verses at a time, poring over them, entering more profoundly into their dynamic inner meaning. They would pause in moments of deep silence, to allow the same Spirit who inspired the Scriptures in the first place, to inspire them also. When they had fully savored one particular text, they would reverently move on to another and repeat the process, leaving pauses for silence, for the word to seep into the marrow of their being.”

If you want to be a person of integrity and you are a follower of Jesus, then you must spend time in the word and have Jesus take you past mere knowledge of God and into an experience of His love in every text.

Let’s take our text as an example. As I meditated on this text this week and pondered it, what took me beyond mere intellectual facts and into an experience of God’s love was to see myself and Jesus in the text. See I realized that I was indeed one of the hypocrites Jesus mentions in the text. That I am the one with a load-bearing beam sticking out of my eye. And I do just what Jesus says--I either pay no attention to my own sin or I put on a mask & act it really isn’t there, even though down deep I know it is. Jesus knew this, and so he took on flesh and he lived with perfect integrity. He thought about His Father and stored up Him and the word in his heart, so that when he was confronted with the devil in the desert, his speech was Scripture (what he had been storing up) and his actions matched his speech. In fact, his integrity landed him on a plank, bearing the load of my sin. And as I mediated and pondered the love of the lovely one, for me, a hypocrite, I began to experience God. An the more I ponder Him, the more I begin to think like Jesus, act like Jesus, and speak like Jesus. The more I become a person of integrity. Friends, may we treasure Christ.

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