Hey everybody. Welcome back to another edition of the Daily Bible Podcast. Hello, pastor Rod's back with us. How was your class? Yeah. Fine. Yeah. Nothing terribly exciting. Yeah. It was more instructional about the stuff that I have to do in the coming months and one of the things that he said is, you sure that the people close to you know that you're gonna be busier in the coming months. Gotcha. I said, okay. Fair enough. Noted. So he explained some of those things that I have to do and things I have to turn in and books I have to read, things like that. And that's the end of this particular class in terms of the last time I'll meet with him and the others in this class, this cohort. And then I start a new class in November. And then another class that I have to do a lot of pre-work for that meets in January. So, it's exciting. I'm excited for what's ahead. Not bad. Still liking it. Yes. Awesome. Yes. I like the accountability. I like the fact that I'm reading books that, I mean, I have books that I would like to read, but just books that I now have to read and write thoughtful responses to. Gotcha. Enjoying that. That's good, man. That's good. Well, we had a question written in by one of our own who wanted to know about Matthew five and Matthew seven. So, pastor Rod, do you wanna frame the question for us as it was written to us? Yes. In fact, here I'll just read it okay so that everybody can hear it. It says, thinking about the difference between Matthew five 17 through 20 and Matthew seven 15 through 20. So briefly, then let's, if you have your Bible, maybe it'd be worth you going there. But Matthew seven 15 through 20 is at famous section where Jesus is saying that you're. You need to be aware of false prophets. You'll recognize 'em by their fruits. Healthy tree can't bear bad fruit, nor can a disease tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good. Fruit is cut down and thrown under the fire, thus you'll recognize 'em by their fruit. So they're talking about the fruitfulness of somebody's ministry. In particular, false teachers. False teachers cannot produce good fruit. Only a good teacher, only a good tree can produce good fruit. Okay, and Matthew five 17 to 20. Do you have that one PPJI do. It says, do not think that I've come to abolish the law of the prophets. I've not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them. For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot will pass away from the law until all is accomplished. Therefore, whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven. But whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and the Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. So the follow up to that is the question. And here's how it's phrased. Can you talk about the difference between relaxed teaching, which you just heard in Matthew five yet still being a believer and being least in the kingdom of heaven compared to that of being a false prophet. So I think the assumption that's being made here is that a false prophet is likely going to relax the teaching and going to tell a Christian, or tell believers, Hey, you don't have to worry about this rule or that rule, this law or that law. The question continues, would you say that Matthew five is talking about a tier two or three issue, like lady pastors? And can you also talk about the difference between relaxed disobedience to the word versus habitual sin? To me, I see things black and white. You're either in sin or you're not, but when reading John MacArthur's commentary on Matthew five, he brings up the idea of relaxed disobedience. Is that a sin? If so, why is that? Not also classified as habitual sin. Yeah. That, wow. Alright. Pastor PJ, pick one part of it and maybe we can tease it apart a bit. Y Yeah. So the difference y you mentioned false prophets right? Versus what's going on in Matthew five. I think the false prophets are those that are teaching antigo. They are teaching a gospel that doesn't save, versus in, in Matthew five, it's not necessarily that they're undermining the gospel, but that they are not holding to and maybe, yeah. The way that you put it there, in this the person who asked this question, tier two issues probably wouldn't go so far as tier three issues, but tier two issues or. Not holding people to as high a standard as they should. That would be something that would be, you'd be in danger as one teaching somebody that it's okay to not be fully committed, fully devoted to the Lord in this particular area, instead of calling for that full and complete devotion. So you're not undermining the gospel, you're not denying the gospel like the false prophets would. And that's the bad fruit is gonna reveal that they're not in Christ. But you're not, you're also not being faithful to call somebody to the pursuit of godliness the way that they should. Yeah, I, the difference between relaxed disobedience and habitual sin is I think that modifier there before the word sin is habitual. I think if you've got somebody that is continually teaching, somebody to relax the law and not to. To pursue the law. We call that antinomianism. That can become a form of false teaching in and of itself. But if you've got somebody that is, there's one area where they're like, you know what? That's not as big of a deal where you would ha would say, no. The Bible is clear on that, and it is a big deal to obey it. That might be an example of a one-off relaxing the commitment. It's, they're both dangerous. Neither of one of them are good, but I would say that's part of the difference. If I'm understanding the direction of the questions. Your thoughts. Yeah, I would agree with that and I think what the key to understanding the Sermon on the Mount is understanding what Jesus is trying to accomplish with it. He's not trying to say, Hey, do all these things and you'll make it guys just put, clean up your act, do the right things and you're gonna be fine. And Jesus is not trying to encourage your self-esteem here. If I could be so blunt. He's trying to destroy your facade of. Righteousness are righteous enough to stand before God. And so all of these things are really meant to draw our attention to the fact that we are insufficient in ourselves. And therefore what we need is an alien righteousness. That's how people used to talk about this. We need an external righteousness that is applied to our account, which is why he says in chapter five, verse 20, that our righteousness has to exceed that of the scribes and Pharisees. He means that in at least two ways. In the first way is the practical exceeding that is you have to. Do more in, in the sense of your righteousness before God is gonna be more than. Then what they're doing. I believe that is true. But that's because of the second thing that he means by this is that your righteousness is also going to be a gift of God. You're gonna have a justification, a righteousness that is not your own, which will result in a practical righteousness that is greater than the scribes in the Pharisees. So the internal will be changed and therefore the external will be greater. I think that's what's happening here. The bad tree and bad fruit are false prophets who are going to lead us astray and those who will want to tell us differently than what the word tells us. And Jesus is simply trying to say, look, you're gonna know who these guys are based on the fruit of their lives. Now if you see bad fruit you're gonna find bad roots. And I think that is the simple point. You're gonna recognize them by these things, which means that you as a congregation. You as a Christian have to be well armed enough to discern that. And part of your ability to discern is being a student of the word. You have to know what God's word is. So well that you can detect differences from what the so-called prophet is saying or doing and what scripture says. Now that doesn't mean that you have to be the Holy Spirit. Detector for everybody. But it does mean that you have your eyes wide open, that you're looking at your church and your pastors, and even your fellow Christians through the lens of scripture and saying, how does these things match up? I think that, I hope that speaks to your question, and if not, please write us in and tell us. Write another one where we got it wrong. We're happy to jump back in. But I think that that sums up the idea. Yeah. Knowing the word is so important. And it's such a healthy mark of a good church is a church that it's not just pastored by. Pastors that would say, well, we know the word 'cause we weren't the seminary and we did these things. But it's a church where the body is immersed and saturated with the word. We were just talking about this recently as pastors and about how much we desire and want our church to be a church where people are in the word of God regularly. And that's why we do the daily Bible reading. That's why we do this daily Bible podcast. And even the daily Bible reading, maybe you're out there sending yourself thinking, okay, you're talking about studying the word, being a student of the word. And that conveys a lot of investment and time and I just don't know if I have the ability to take, well, today we're only covering one chapter, Matthew 11. Maybe you do have that amount of time, but Matthew five through seven, that's Sermon on the Mount from a couple of days ago. Man that's three chapters and there's a ton there. I don't have that much time. And it doesn't mean to be a student in the word, doesn't mean that you have to pull out your commentaries and that you have to go verse by verse and you have to, consult all of your various study bibles, right? If you've got that time to do things like that, that's good. And there's gonna be rich fruit there. But spending time in the word of God is reading it. Reading it for comprehension. Reading it to just say, okay, what is chapter five about? Lemme summarize it in one sentence. What's chapter six about? What's chapter seven about? Maybe noting a few questions there and walking away going, okay, what do I need to take away? What. Nugget can I walk away from for the rest of my day to day and chew on that? What can I meditate on from the time that I spent in the word today? So you don't have to have pen and paper out and do the tan method that then always now that we talk about in partners every time you come to the word of God, you can just read it to read it and know it, and you're gonna benefit from that. There's gonna be fruit born from that too. Amen. Well, let's jump into our reading for today, which is Matthew chapter 11. And chapter 11 opens with a situation that we saw recently in another one of our synoptic readings. And that is John the Baptist's question. John the Baptist in prison sends his disciples, his followers to Jesus and says now would be a great time for you to do the whole Messiah thing and to flex, because here I am in jail and I may not live much longer. And are you the guy? And Jesus responds again with his citation from the Old Testament, from Isaiah and says, go and tell John what you hear and what you see. And Jesus essentially says, I'm doing what the prophets prophesied that I would do. But the implication is, you know what? There's more to what I'm going to do than just. What you see me doing, just these things that I've already done. In fact, Jesus even says that early on. He says, you're gonna see greater things than these in John's Gospel. And ultimately the greatest thing that Jesus has come to do is to go to the cross for us. And so John the Baptist he. Was a forerunner for Christ and he was a man that Jesus goes on in this context to say, of those born of women, there's no one greater than John. And yet John was in his humanity, limited in his understanding of who Jesus was. And so here we even see John was struggling just like Jesus's disciples would do. Luke 24 is gonna show us that he's not. Fully understanding yet the type of Messiah Jesus has come to be, even though he was the one that said, behold the limb of God, who takes away the sins of the world. And so Jesus has this gracious interaction with John's disciples here, encouraging John while John's in jail, John, I'm the one, I'm the one. You can trust me. You can believe me. And don't be offended by me. Know that I'm he. And yet the implication is, but I've come to do more than what you're looking for me to do right now. I really appreciated when Jesus says to John, blessed is the one who is not offended by me. The word that we get scandalized from is the word that would sit underneath the Greek there. So the word offended is what our modern word. Scandalized comes from scandalize. And I think one of the challenges with being a Christian is that so often if you're gonna come to scripture the way that God wants you to you're going to be offended by Jesus. Yeah, I don't see how you're not Yeah, because he lives in ways that are contrary to what we think is right. And he calls us out, and I think a lot of us are so comfortable with the things that Jesus says that we probably are missing the meaning by and large. Jesus says things that are difficult to understand, difficult to digest. E even his disciples when Jesus said, Hey, are you guys ready to leave now? I think he understood that what he was saying was meant to be provocative and even con, con confrontational. And so it's important that you see if you're coming to scripture, honestly, you're gonna find things really hard, even things that Jesus says. Even the thing that he says where he's like, Hey if whoever's gonna follow me, if you're not worthy of me, if you love anyone else more than me, father, mother, sister, brother, et cetera so blessed are those who are not offended by him. And John is struggling here, and I appreciate this because. Jesus is, on the one hand, he's not saying it's okay, but he's saying, yeah, the this is hard. Yes but don't let it, don't let it get you all tripped up. I think it's important to, for you to do what John does when you have an issue with Jesus or you have an issue with something that's said in the Word, you should go to Jesus and take it to him and let him walk you through. Through his word on some of the issues that you might have. And there's going to be issues. There's always gonna be problems at your church, problems with your fellow Christians and your community groups, or, really anything. There's always a way for sin to interrupt the good things that God is doing, but don't get jostled by that. Mm-hmm. Expect that it's gonna happen. Do what John does. Take it to Jesus. Read his word. Some of the things that were hard led a lot of people to reject him as you were implying. And some of those were in the very cities that saw and heard the most from him. And that's where Jesus in Matthew turn in Matthew chapter 11 verses 20 down here through verse 24. And these are the your header in the ESV says unrepentant cities. These are those, and they're not repentant because they heard the majority of Jesus' preaching. So Chorazin Beth you've got. Capernaum, which was Jesus' home base up in Galilee, who were witness to so many of the things that he did and said the miracles that he performed, the sermons that he preached, and yet they resisted him. They didn't put their trust. They didn't truly believe in him. In fact, some of these are those that. In John chapter two after the wedding in Cana they were believing in him, but it says, Jesus did not believe in their belief for he knew what was in the heart of man. And so these are people with spurious faith or no faith at all. And so Jesus confronts and condemns these cities and makes some pretty amazing statements here that help us understand even part of the nature of eternal condemnation. And that is that there's gradations there. 'cause he says it would've been better. For you to repent it. In other words, it's gonna be, he says it's gonna be more tolerable for Tyre and Seden. Now, we've read about them not long ago in the Old Testament. These were Phoenician cities. These were some of the cities that came under the judgment of the prophets saying, God is gonna come against you, Tyre and Seden. And Jesus is saying Here, it's better for them than it will be for you. And then he's gonna say it's even better for Sodom and Gomorrah than for Capernaum here because they didn't see the things that you saw or hear the things that you heard and then reject me. So this is a reminder to us that the one. Of whom much is entrusted, much will be required. And that is not just for oh, the church and believers, that's also for the unbeliever. The more exposure you have to knowledge about God and about Jesus, and the harder you harden your heart against him the more you will suffer for that in in eternity. And so it's a good warning to us to make sure that we've got our heart right before the Lord. Amen to that. I think it's important to notice here that God is not, he's not a communist. Everybody doesn't get the same thing, and that's true not only for judgment, that's true for rewards. The rewards that you derive on the day of Christ rewarding you is gonna be contingent upon what you do in this life. So everything that you do is enormously valuable. Jesus doesn't even ignore a cup of cold water given in his name. And so you see the principle working on both sides of the equation, whether it's judgment, Jesus takes. All the things into consideration, including how much knowledge or how much light you had. And in, in addition to that, what you did with that. So one thing that's especially dangerous to do if you don't want more judgment is don't come to a church like ours. Don't go to a Bible teaching church. Sure. Because this is going to give you more information, consequently more light, and therefore more judgment on the day of judgment. On the other side of that, if you want more rewards, more of the honor and glory that Christ promises. Then come to a church like ours. Yeah, go to a church that's teaching the Bible. They're gonna help you navigate life in such a way to derive the most value and benefit possible in the next life. And maybe people are put off by that. Shouldn't you just do good? For goodness sake, pastor PJ, as opposed to to be motivated by rewards seems Gotcha. Crass, the, you know, carnal and fleshly. Gout holds that out for us. Paul says I'm looking forward to receiving the crown when I die and gonna be in heaven. I know that it's gonna be rewarded in me by Christ at that point. And so, there, there's a good motivation there because when we receive those rewards in heaven, they're not gonna be tainted by the flesh. When we get reward here, when we work for. A bigger paycheck here, a bigger house here. Yeah. It's tainted by our flesh. Congratulations on new yacht, by the way. Thanks, man. It's it looks really awkward in my house, but yeah, and that can feel like, oh man, that, that's really heavy. That that Jesus says that about Corzine and Bese and Capernaum. And yet when we understand the teachings of Jesus correctly, which is where he goes in the rest of the chapter here. It's not a burden to respond to him in faith and repentance. It's not a burden to follow him as the master and the Lord that he is, and that's end of chapter 11, is another well-known text from Jesus, but Jesus is turning to those around him, it says at that time, so right on the heels of this, he prays and he says something hard to understand and we're gonna get to this in a few days with the parables. But he says I'm grateful that you've hidden these things from those with the otherwise ability to understand and given them to those that. That are least expected. And then he says, come to me all who labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, from gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is life. This was not what they were experiencing from the Pharisees, from their religious leaders. This was not the what being a disciple of the Pharisees looked like. And so here Jesus is even contrasting himself saying if you truly come to me in, in. And follow me. What you're gonna find is not that, that this is gonna be burdensome and difficult, such that you're gonna wanna reject me but you're gonna find that my yoke is easy, my burden is light, and there's a joyfulness in following me here. Verse 25, Jesus is thanking God for hiding these things from a certain group of people. Now, I want you to, here's what Jesus says. He says, you hidden it from the wise and understanding, and yet revealed them to little children. Now, of course, Jesus is not talking about the truly wise and the truly understanding. So it's important to see even from this context here, I just wanna point out to you how greatly Jesus emphasizes humility. Dependence, a willingness to say, I don't know everything. Mm. When, whenever someone violates this principle and comes to you with this self-sufficient understanding, or this, I heard one person say recently I'm telling you this, with an unbiased filter on the truth, and I said, oh, really? You've been able to successfully remove yourself from any bias or any shade of. I don't know of having your own mind leaning one way or the other. I don't think there's any such thing as someone who's truly unbiased. We all have our biases and we're oblivious to many of them, but Jesus is calling us to be aware of the fact that it is the truly wise and the truly understanding. The truly those who truly understand who, who receive him. And there's no other salvation besides Christ. All things have been handed over to me by my father. No one knows his son except the father. No one knows a father except the son. Jesus is revealing some straight fire truth here, where he is giving us some really in interesting insights and. Yeah. And then he says. If you're laboring and you're heavy, come to me and I'm gonna give you rest. And that's the good news of the gospel. And that's why it's not for the understanding of the wise. I'm reminded of even one Corinthians chapter one when Paul says it's foolishness to the wise of this world, to those that wanna understand it from a human perspective. And that's why you look at so many other religions that are out there, be it Islam or Hinduism or anything like that. It's all about, we want skin in the game. We want to be able to contribute to it because that's what. Our logical brains make sense of, well, we need to earn our way into this. We need to work hard enough to get our way into this. And Jesus is saying, no, come to me and I will give you rest. You'll find rest in me. Because you'll find that salvation comes through faith and repentance through, through saying, you can't do it. You can't save yourself. And coming to the son to have the father's love and mercy and grace revealed to him through the forgiveness that's ours as we put our trust in Christ. Just a sweet passage at the end of this in chapter 11. For sure. Yeah. Really quickly, that instinct in Christ is sanctified because he does give you skin in the game. Yes. After salvation. Yes. Your salvation is a free gift. You can't earn it. There's no way you can make your way to him, but once he gives it to you now, he's like, all right, go for it. Yeah. Get them heavenly rewards, buddy. Yeah. Get after it. Yeah, no, that's true. That's true. Yeah. He still does give us a yolk. He doesn't break us completely free from a yolk. Yeah. There is still something to say. There's work to be done. It's a great yoke too. Yeah. No better one. Yeah. Alright, let's pray and then we'll be done with this episode. God we ask for just grace from you to be able to understand. What that looks like to run after you even not trying to earn more of your favor or merit more of our salvation, but to respond rightly, to take up the yoke and to recognize that a yoke is, an implement for work. And yet it's a yoke that's easy and light because we love Christ and we want to, and you've given us the Holy Spirit to help us as we labor for you in this life. So again, make us a church that on the judgment day we'll have plenty of rewards. Stored up for ourselves, make us a church, God, that will have none of us fall preyed it to being condemned, even in spite of all of the knowledge that we were exposed to while we were here on earth. Lord, make us a church that believes in Christ and that follows him with everything that we are in, that exalts him with our lives. And so we ask this and pray this in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen. Keep in your Bibles tuned in again tomorrow for another edition of the Daily Bible Podcast. Bye.

​Well, thank you for listening to another episode of the Daily Bible Podcast, folks! We're honored to have you join us. This is a ministry of Compass Bible Church in north Texas. You can find out more information about our Church at compassntx.org. We would love for you to leave a review, to rate, or to share this podcast on whatever platform you're listening on, and we hope to see you again tomorrow for another episode of the Daily Bible Podcast. Ya'll come back now, ya hear?

Yeah. I would agree with everything that you said