In our last study we looked at the fact that Jesus made a clear indication that God’s Kingdom is stronger than Satan, more authoritative than Satan and is unmatched in every way. Satan is not real threat to God or His Kingdom. Satan is the enemy but he will never stand a chance against God and His Kingdom. Therefore there is a clear message we learned from last study that will really carry over to this study as well. That message is that you are either in the Kingdom of God or you are not. The last verse of our last study was Luke 11:23 where Jesus says He who is not with Me is against Me and he who does not gather with Me, scatters.
This shows that many people may be associated with Jesus in some way. This may be that you are born into a Christian family, you may be an active member of a church that bears the name of Christ or may have some form of respect for Jesus but this does not mean that you have been truly converted. The point that we will see in this study is that a person can change their behavior in some ways but this still doesn’t show to us the reality that they are a part of God’s Kingdom. The truly converted person will be seen as a person that hears God’s word and is obedience to God’s word.
Most people think themselves to be blessed and in the Kingdom of God simply because of some form of morality or because of some association with Christ. We must be clear what the Bible shows us concerning those that are truly a part of God’s Kingdom. It will be this that we will see in this study as we look now at our first point for this study.
1.The FLIPPANT actions of false converts.
Look with me at Luke 11:24-26 that says “When the unclean spirit goes out of a man, it passes through waterless places seeking rest, and not finding any, it says, ‘I will return to my house from which I came.’ 25 And when it comes, it finds it swept and put in order. 26 Then it goes and takes along seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they go in and live there, and the last state of that man becomes worse than the first.”
The truth of a person will be seen over time. A person can claim to be saved and then fall away into sinful patterns of life later on in life. This does not mean we doubt every person that makes a profession of faith in Christ but we must know that if a person goes into living a lifestyle worse than they did before, that is most likely an indication that they were never saved.
These verses are the reality of how this happens. A person may be able to become moral, stop whatever addiction that they have been trapped by, look good every Sunday sitting in church and still never truly been saved. I have seen people personally that has done this very thing. I had a guy I worked with years ago that told me he was a Christian. He told me his story of being freed from drugs and now being on the right path. Some months later I started to notice his weird behavior. To make a long story short, he had fallen back into drugs once again. Now I know that substance abuse is very strong so I’m no stranger to that reality but when he fell into it, he fell hard. He eventually got fired from that job and I lost contact with him.
Fast forward some years later and I ran into him again at another place of employment. Again I hear the story of how God has delivered him from drugs again. He had just been released out of drug prevention programs both times I was around him. Again several months later it was an almost exact situation. This time he even tried to get violent with me when I confronted him about his issue. Eventually he was fired from that job and again have had no real contact with him since.
I think about him every once in a while because I really tried to get him to see that the Gospel was more than God just cleaning up his life but he never really listened. I hope that he has come to that place now. I use this story as an example of what we see in this passage of Scripture. This person seems to have been released from the unclean spirit. They have cleaned their life up and everything seems to be going good until that addiction, that sin comes back into their life. The person that is only looking to be a better person when they come to Christ is not a truly converted person.
Being a better person morally will happen but that is not the singular focus of a truly converted person. This person could easily be associated with the person that Jesus explains in the Parable of the Sower in Matthew 13:20-21 where Jesus says And the one on whom seed was sown on the rocky places, this is the man who hears the word and immediately receives it with joy; 21 yet he has no root in himself, but is only temporary, and when affliction or persecution arises because of the word, immediately he falls away.
These people have no depth, no root and therefore no Godly fruit. They had morality and goodness but had nothing other than a false hope in a lie. When things go differently than they thought it should, they fall away from the faith. So we have the flippant actions of a false convert and now we will see another negative action in our next point.
2.The FLAWED actions of false converts.
Look with me at Luke 11:27 that says Now it happened that while Jesus was saying these things, one of the women in the crowd raised her voice and said to Him, “Blessed is the womb that bore You and the breasts at which You nursed.”
I used the word flawed here because these people have a wrong understanding of what truly being a part of God’s kingdom is. They see that they are attached in some way either through family ties or some religious activity as being why they are blessed by God or converted. It was a the hopes of every Jewish woman that they would have a son that was great, powerful and loved by others. They wished for the blessing of being the mother of the deliverer of their nation.
This woman screams from the crowd “Blessed is the womb that bore You and the breasts at which You nursed.” In other words this type of thinking brought many to understand that Jesus’ family must be the most blessed of all especially the mother of Jesus. Now we do know that we read all the way back in Luke 1:28 that the angel greets Mary this way: “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.”
We also know that Elizabeth greeted Mary by saying in Luke 1:42 “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb!
So we have no doubt that God’s grace had poured down onto Mary but it was not because of anything she had done. This was a blessing from God given to a sinner just like we are. I know this goes against many peoples idea of Mary but I am speaking only what the Bible teaches us not Catholic or unbiblical traditions of man.
We must understand that Jesus is not trying to undermine the truth of Mary’s blessedness from God but rather the wrong idea of the Jewish teaching that showed some type of family attachment as being a sign of a person’s true status with God. For people in our time they think because they were born in a Christian family or because they have “always been a Christian” then they have a free pass into God’s blessed. But as we have briefly seen this is a flawed view of being blessed by God and Jesus will expose this even more with what He shows us concerning those that are truly blessed by God in our next point.
3.The FAITHFUL actions of true converts.
Look with me at Luke 11:28 that says But He said, “On the contrary, blessed are those who hear the word of God and keep it.”
Jesus refutes the claim that His mother is blessed simply because of being His mother. Like I said in the last point, this is Jesus’ answer to the tradition of the Jewish woman to be blessed because of having a great son. Jesus shows to them what truly being blessed is by saying “On the contrary, blessed are those who hear the word of God and keep it.”
Obedience to God’s Word is a singular action that all Christian will have. They will not be obedient in perfection but they will live a life of obedience. No one that is considered blessed can be blessed simply because of family ties, or race, or any other connection from a superficial standpoint. Being blessed comes to those that God has given salvation and it is these that exhibit a life of obedience to Him. Jesus similarly said this many times in His ministry. He says in Luke 6:46-49 “Now why do you call Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not do what I say? 47 Everyone who comes to Me and hears My words and does them, I will show you whom he is like: 48 he is like a man building a house, who dug and went deep, and laid a foundation on the rock; and when a flood occurred, the river burst against that house and could not shake it, because it had been well built. 49 But the one who heard and did not do accordingly, is like a man who built a house on the ground without any foundation; and the river burst against it and immediately it collapsed, and the ruin of that house was great.”
Again He says in Luke 8:21 “My mother and My brothers are these who hear the word of God and do it.”
James tells us in James 1:22-25 But become doers of the word, and not merely hearers who delude themselves. 23 For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks at his natural face in a mirror; 24 for once he looked at himself and has gone away, he immediately forgot what kind of person he was. 25 But one who looks intently at the perfect law, the law of freedom, and abides by it, not having become a forgetful hearer but a doer of the work, this man will be blessed in what he does.
Why can a Christian live a life of obedience? Simply because they have been transformed by God and has been given the Holy Spirit of God to live out a life of obedience. So we clearly see that Jesus has continued to show the crowd that being in God’s kingdom is not superficial, it is not just some fleshly attachment but it is a blessing that is from God. The proof of those that have been blessed and are continually blessed by God are those that hear the word of God and keep it.
This is not some new idea or teaching but only goes against the tradition of the Jewish culture. We to have many traditions in our Christian culture. Many people believe they will go to Heaven simply from believing things that have been passed down as true like, God is a loving God so He won’t send me to Hell or God is a forgiving God so I’m sure He will forgive me because I’m not that bad. People need to hear the truth and Jesus spoke that very truth. A life of obedience is what a Christian should be striving for because it is only those that will be blessed now and for all eternity.
I want to close by reading Psalm 1. This Psalm really says it all concerning how we should be living our everyday life as Christians. Notice that the Psalm speaks of the life of a blessed person and the life of a wicked person.
Psalm 1:1-6 says
How blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked,
Nor stand in the way of sinners,
Nor sit in the seat of scoffers!
2 But his delight is in the law of Yahweh,
And in His law he meditates day and night.
3 And he will be like a tree firmly planted by streams of water,
Which yields its fruit in its season
And its leaf does not wither;
And in whatever he does, he prospers.
4 The wicked are not so,
But they are like chaff which the wind drives away.
5 Therefore the wicked will not rise in the judgment,
Nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous.
6 For Yahweh knows the way of the righteous,
But the way of the wicked will perish.
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