Listen to this. This is the very word of God. Let me sing for my beloved my love song concerning his vineyard. My beloved had a vineyard on a very fertile hill. He dug it and cleared it of stones and planted it with choice vines. He built a watchtower in the midst of it and hewed out a wine vat in it. And he looked for it to yield grapes, but it yielded wild grapes. And now, O inhabitants of Jerusalem and men of Judah, judge between me and my vineyard. What more was there to do for my vineyard that I have not done in it? When I looked for it to yield grapes, why did it yield wild grapes?
And now I will tell you what I will do to my vineyard. I will remove its edge, and it shall be devoured. I will break down its wall, and it shall be trampled down. I will make it a waste. It shall not be pruned or hoed, and briars and thorns shall grow up. I will also command the clouds that they rain no rain upon it. For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel. And the men of Judah are his pleasant planting. And he looked for justice, but behold, bloodshed. For righteousness, but behold, an outcry. And then for our New Testament reading, and the text for this morning’s sermon, we turn to Luke chapter six, Verses 43 through 45. Here are the words of our Lord Jesus.
For no good tree bears bad fruit, nor again does a bad tree bear good fruit, for each tree is known by its own fruit. For figs are not gathered from thorn bushes, nor are grapes picked from a bramble bush. The good person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure produces evil. For out of the abundance of the heart, his mouth speaks.
That’s the reading of God’s word. Let’s ask his blessing upon it now. Lord, as we come to your word now, we pray that we might approach you, and we pray for the minister of your Holy Spirit among us, that he would be our teacher, and that the word would indeed go forth, not in word only, but also in power, and with full conviction, and in the Holy Spirit. We pray in Christ’s name. Amen.
So we’re just looking at three verses this morning, and you might be thinking, Steve, three verses. At this rate, we’ll still be in Luke by the tricentennial. But these words of the Lord in the Sermon on the Plain are so rich and so full of instruction, it’s appropriate that we tap the brakes a little bit as we go through this particular portion of Luke’s gospel.
And considering the words of our Savior, In these verses, it brings to mind that saying that the eyes, the eyes are the window to the soul. Have you heard that saying before? The eyes are the windows to the soul. In other words, the adage means that a person’s eyes reveal their inner thoughts, their feelings, and even perhaps something about their character.
That’s not a 100% reliable barometer for a person’s character or indicator of the person’s true inner thoughts and feelings. But Jesus gives us a paradigm here that is far more reliable. He says something similar, but not regarding the eyes. He’s speaking rather of our words. And by extension, he speaks of our actions as well. because our words and our actions are like fruit, fruit that comes from our hearts.
So, we’ve been traveling, progressing through the Sermon on the Plain, as it’s called, and like the Sermon on the Mount that we find in Matthew’s Gospel, this sermon, this passage, this extended passage of the Lord’s teaching contains a sample of Christ’s central teachings, selected and arranged not ultimately by Luke, the human author, but ultimately it was the Holy Spirit who breathed out these words for Luke to record for us to provide a sample of the central teachings of our Lord Jesus Christ. And so at the beginning, we saw the Beatitudes. We heard instruction about showing love to our enemies. We received warnings against having a judgmental disposition, having a judgmental spirit within us.
And when we come to these verses, we receive a lesson using illustrations from nature, a lesson in which Jesus draws examples from trees and from fruit. And this passage teaches us that the content and the condition of a person’s heart are revealed by the fruit of his words and actions.” That’s the message of these verses. The content and condition of a person’s heart are revealed by the fruit of his words and actions.
You see the outline in your bulletin. If you’re taking notes and want to follow the outline, the first point will be this inviolable principle that Jesus introduces for us. And secondly, we’ll consider our words and beyond. So it’s words, but not just words. And then finally, this text really drives us to the issue of our great need. So first of all, let’s consider this principle, which I say is inviolable. I think Jesus would say it’s inviolable. He makes a series of absolute statements in this passage. So look with me again at verse 43.
It says, for no good tree bears bad fruit, nor again does a bad tree bear good fruit. He doesn’t say on occasion, a bad tree might produce some good fruit. The word bad here, it’s translated bad in your ESV Bible comes from a Greek word that means rotten or decayed. Or one particular commentator who wrote his own translation, he used the word sickly. So if you can imagine a tree that’s diseased, it’s not gonna bring forth good fruit, which is essentially the point that Jesus is making. If a tree is healthy, the fruit will be good. If the tree is bad, the fruit won’t be good.
Which then flows into verse 44, where it says, For each tree is known by its own fruit. Now, I’m not an expert in trees. And I know that some kinds of trees have leaves that look very similar. An arborist, a skilled arborist, might be able to tell a tree by its leaves. Without seeing any of the fruit, he might be able to look at the leaf and say, oh, that’s the leaf of a pear tree. Oh, this is the leaf of an apple tree. I can’t do that. Most of us, perhaps, cannot. But the true test of a tree is its fruit.
And you probably will not run into a person who will point to a tree and think that they can persuade you by saying, well, you know, this tree, it bears oranges, but it’s actually an apple tree. Trust me on this. People don’t say that. People won’t say that.
And as we go on through verse 44, it says, “‘Figs are not gathered from thorn bushes, nor are grapes picked from a bramble bush.'” So you see, you’ve got the illustration of good fruit, products of the ancient Near East, products of the land of Canaan that would have been familiar to Jesus’ hearers.
Figs, grapes, And he’s saying they’re not found on such plants as a thorn bush or a bramble bush. Matthew Henry, commenting on this very thing, said, you may, if you please, stick figs upon thorns. and hang a bunch of grapes on a bramble, but they neither are nor can be the natural product of the trees.” Maybe you’ve heard a similar illustration, like you can’t staple apples onto a pear tree or something like that. Matthew Henry beat you to that illustration a long time ago. Whatever you put on the tree, it doesn’t make it that kind of a tree. And all this talk of trees and fruits is really to make a point about human nature.
Jesus isn’t preaching an Arbor Day sermon. He’s talking about people. He’s talking about souls. He’s talking about hearts. And that becomes very clear when we get to verse 45. If you look at the first Part of that verse, the good person. See, we’re not talking about trees anymore. The talk about trees was an illustration about people. The good person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good. So there’s personal spiritual application then of verse 44. People, in other words, produce fruit. And their fruit is consistent with their nature.
David, when he was being pursued by Saul, you know the story where he hid in the cave, and then God’s providence, Saul, needed to use the bathroom. So he went into that very cave where David was hiding. And David did not take advantage of that opportunity to kill Saul, but he did go forward and he cut the corner off of Saul’s robe, secretly, quietly. Then his conscience convicted him. So he went out as Saul with his army. is right there, and he calls out to Saul. And Saul was so taken aback by the fact that David spared him, that he then didn’t take David, capture him at that point.
But David, on that occasion, spoke a parable, a parable that’s not recorded, at least not verbatim, anywhere in Scripture. It’s apparently just a parable, a saying that was known among the people of that era, And it’s found in 1 Samuel 24, 13. This is David crying out to Saul.
He says, As the proverb of the ancients says, out of the wicked comes wickedness. Out of the wicked comes wickedness. You won’t find exactly those words in the book of Proverbs in our scriptures, but you find other sayings like that. And I wonder if ever you’ve responded inwardly to sayings like that the way I have on occasion. Another example of something like that is in Proverbs 12, 17. Whoever speaks the truth gives honest evidence, but a false witness utters deceit. Out of the wicked comes wickedness. Have you ever read that verse in Proverbs, or maybe one like it, and thought, well, that doesn’t seem all that profound. That kind of seems obvious. What’s so wise about that? Why does it belong in the Proverbs of Solomon? Well, here’s why.
Because God knows that there will be people who say, I know it’s bearing oranges, but it’s actually an apple tree. I know it doesn’t look like it, but I really am a Christian. That’s why we need these Proverbs that when we come to them seem obvious. But Jesus is saying fruit makes things obvious too, but we deny those things. There are two ultimate possibilities here. that Jesus is presenting for us.
The tree is either good or it’s bad. It’s either healthy or it’s diseased, and it’s either going to bear good fruit or it’s going to bear bad fruit according to its condition and the kind of tree that it is. There are many varieties of trees and fruit, and the as it says in verse 44, each tree is known by its own fruit. So we can know an orange tree by the fact that it bears oranges, and that sort of thing. But that’s the point of that passage, you know, the tree by its fruit.
But when it comes to the ultimate issues here, Jesus is talking about spiritual well being. And when it comes to spiritual well being, there’s only two kinds of tree. They’re good trees, and they’re bad trees, you compare that to so many other things that Jesus has taught.
He teaches that there are two paths. There’s a path that’s straight, and it’s difficult, and there’s a path that’s wide and easy. Two gates he speaks of, one that’s narrow, one that’s broad. At the end of this sermon, just as at the end of the Sermon on the Mount, he’s going to talk about two ways you can build. You can build a house on the rock, or you can build it on the sand. Or he’ll talk towards the end of his ministry about when he comes again, he sits on his glorious throne, and he’s going to separate the nations as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. Two categories.
That’s the thrust of Jesus’ teaching throughout. And that’s what we have here. Good trees or bad trees. There’s no middle ground, in other words. There’s no third way. And that’s the inviolable principle here. A good tree bears good fruit. A bad tree bears bad fruit. The good person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good. The evil person out of the evil treasure of his heart produces evil. That’s the inviolable principle.
Now, we talk for a moment now about words, but not just words. That’s why I said words and beyond. The chief example of our fruit, fruit that’s produced by our hearts, chief example that he gives is our words. So we see in the end of verse 45, for out of the abundance of the heart, his mouth speaks. In a parallel passage in Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus really emphasizes words even more heavily, which is why years ago when I preached through Matthew, I titled that sermon, Words Are Fruit. Words Are Fruit. Out of the abundance of the heart, his mouth speaks.
There’s a contemporary English version of the scriptures that translates that phrase this way. The things people say come from inside of them. Or, I don’t know if you ever heard of the McDonald idiomatic translation. But it reads this way. One’s mouth pours forth what is plentiful in one’s heart. Or as Philip Riken put it, commenting on this, the tongue is the sound system of the heart.
That stuck with me, I guess maybe because just a few weeks ago at sound camp, family camp, I helped out running the sound board, doing sound support for family camp. So I think of a sound system. And if you can imagine a singer or somebody playing an electric guitar, but it’s not plugged in anything, it’s very difficult to hear. But as soon as you plug that microphone or that guitar into an amplifier, boom, you can hear everything that’s going on. Reichen says our tongues are like that to what’s in the heart. The tongue is the sound system of the heart.
You ever seen some celebrity or someone, a politician perhaps, who gets caught in one of those things they call a hot mic moment. They’re talking, they’re saying something to somebody else that they don’t really want to share with anybody else. And they don’t realize they’re standing near a microphone that’s on. And the next thing you find out, they find out is that the whole world heard it.
Our tongues do that for us. Our tongues do that for our hearts. They make hot mic moments for what’s inside of us. Because words are fruit. They serve as a window to our hearts. As Hendrickson put it, whatever a person has set his heart on, will sooner or later be revealed in his speech. Our words are the overflow of our hearts.
So what, to quote Matthew Henry again, he said, what the mouth ordinarily speaks, speaks with relish and delight, generally agrees what is innermost and uppermost in the heart. Not but that a good man may possibly drop a bad word, but for the most part, the heart is as the words are. It therefore concerns us to get our hearts filled not only with good, but with abundance of it. Matthew Henry was a Puritan, and I love how gently he put that. Not but that a good man may possibly drop a bad word. But you see, he’s obviously in full agreement, as you would expect with the text.
The doubt of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks. Our words reveal the content of our heart. Our words reveal our true character. But beyond words, our actions are also fruit. We can even mislead people with our words, can’t we? And we do it all the time. We can deceive others by the things that we say, but fruit in this spiritual sense is inclusive of all the ways a person might possibly express themselves. And verse 46, which we’ll get to next time, Lord willing, shows the critical importance of our actions. where Jesus rebukes some of his followers, some of his hearers, by saying, why do you call me Lord, Lord, and do not do what I tell you?
So our actions are fruit as well. And all over the New Testament, we have this analogy of fruit, especially when you think of Galatians chapter five, and it speaks of the fruit of the Spirit, meaning that if the Spirit is inside a person, If a person has been made alive in Christ and the Holy Spirit has come to reside within them, you’re going to see fruit produced in their lives that’s consistent with the Holy Spirit. Fruit of the Spirit, if you think about some of those things, nine different aspects of the fruit of the Spirit that are given to us there and listed for us in Galatians 5.
And those things have manifestations, not just in words, but also in actions. So the content and condition of a person’s heart are revealed by the fruit of his words and the fruit of his actions. And it all begins within, from inside, and it manifests to a watching world. Patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, go on down the list. Most of them have some very tangible expressions in our actions. They work themselves out.
So therefore, because that’s the case, good fruit strengthens our assurance. Think of that and be encouraged by it. Because anytime you see and can observe good fruit in your own life, it helps reinforce that assurance of salvation, that assurance of pardon that the Holy Spirit wants us to have. Quoting Ryken again, he says, good fruit helps to assure us of our salvation because it shows that we have the good root of grace.
So, this is how others see fruit in your life, by what you say, by what you do. The true character of a person’s faith is shown by his works. That’s what the Apostle James wrote. But someone will say, you have faith and I have works. Show me your faith apart from your works. And I’ll show you my faith by my works.
Well, then finally, We come to the great need, because this passage certainly highlights the fact that we have a need, and it’s very great. And this need relates to our hearts. Out of the abundance of the heart, our mouths speak, and sometimes that fruit isn’t very tasty. The heart is the heart of the matter. The good person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good. The evil person, it’s implied in the second part of the phrase, but obviously the evil person out of the evil of his heart produces evil. The words that come out of you, things that you do, the things that I do, the words that come out of me originate within.
So what if you’re not bearing the right kind of fruit? What if you’re bearing bad fruit? And you know it. Let me tell you what you don’t need. You don’t need behavior modification. In the long run, spiritually speaking, In the long run, it’s no use just to stop doing X and to start doing Y, to break this bad habit and to develop better habits. That’s not the answer. That’s not what’s needed.
Say you have a pear tree. I don’t really like pears, so I’m gonna use pear tree as the bad example. We’ll say pears represent sin. And you have a pear tree, and you get your clippers and you remove every pair from that tree. And then you watch that tree. And every time you see the beginnings of fruit, you clip it off. It’s not going to stop being a pear tree, is it?
It never will. And it cannot truly bear any other kind of fruit than pears. So the solution isn’t behavior modification. That pear tree has to become a new tree, has to become a different kind of tree. And that’s what sinners need. And someone might object, I can’t do that. To which I say, exactly. You absolutely cannot do that. You cannot become something you’re not. But God can make you something you’re not. The gospel can do it. God can change you. You must become a new tree. Or how else did Jesus put it? Didn’t he say, you must be born again? Can you do that? No, but God can. God can do it. Our great need is the transforming work of the gospel. And that’s always been our need.
That’s always been the people’s need, which is why back in the Old Testament, Jeremiah 4.4, what is the admonition that the Lord gives through his prophet to his wayward, rebellious, sinful people who are bringing forth bad fruit?
He says, you need to circumcise the foreskins of your hearts. They can take a flint knife and circumcise a child. They did it all the time. But nobody ever circumcised a heart. Because the point was, this is something God needs to do. This is something you’re not able to do. We need to borrow language that Ezekiel used more than once. We need God to take away our hearts of stone, give us hearts of flesh. Our great need, in other words, is the grace of God in Jesus Christ. Nothing man can do can take the place of it. We can’t see into the hearts of others. We even have difficulty judging our own hearts if we’re honest about it.
Yet we can see the fruit produced by the hearts of others and ourselves. And we can make a sound evaluation based on it. Jesus gives us full license to do that. And we can make a sound evaluation of fruit that’s borne by others and ourselves. The true character of any person will show itself over time in what the person says and does. That’s a fact. And I’ll say these words were not given primarily for us to examine the fruit that other people produce. We can do that. And sometimes we must. But remember what we saw in verse 42. How can you say to your brother, brother, let me take the speck out of your eye when you yourself do not see the log that is in your own eye? The primary purpose of Christ’s teaching here was to guide us in self-examination, testing our own fruit. So today, let’s look at the fruit we see in our own lives and ask ourselves whether it’s good fruit or bad fruit. If the fruit you’re producing isn’t good, you need to become a new tree. You need to cry out to God to make you a new tree.
In the gospel, that’s exactly what the Holy Spirit does. Psalm 1 says, the blessed man is like a tree, firmly planted by streams of water and doing what? Bearing fruit in its season. Jesus, our Savior, is that blessed, righteous man whose delight is in the law of the Lord. And through his saving work, he brings many sons and daughters to glory. He makes us like himself. He makes us fruitful. He makes us holy. Thanks be to God that he does.
Let’s pray. Lord, we thank you for the power of the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. We pray, Lord, that you’ll be transforming us and making us more like him. Lord, we who have been made new creatures in him, we pray that you’d continue to multiply your grace to us, that we might walk with him, that we might bear fruit, Good fruit unto him. Lord, if there are any present here today who do not yet know that transforming power of the gospel, would you bring that power to them? Take away hearts of stone, Lord, give hearts of flesh. Make us new trees. Cause us by your powerful grace, by your gospel power to bring forth good fruit. And may you receive all the glory. We pray in Christ’s name. Amen.