This week we are finally wrapping up our journey through Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. For the last two and a half months we have been working our way through the incredible vision of God’s kingdom Jesus gave us in these words. Here at the end Jesus doesn’t add any new teaching to the pile. Rather, He offers us a warning and an encouragement. Both are focused on making the same point: If we don’t put all of these things into practice, they won’t do us any good both now and when all things finally come to an end. Let’s dive into these words together as we are reminded that doing really does make all the difference.

Doing Makes All the Difference

I spent three years in seminary. While I was there, I took classes on all sorts of things you might expect a preacher to learn. We studied Greek and Hebrew. We learned various approaches to interpreting the Scriptures. We took classes on theology and church history. We learned how to defend the faith and to make strong, rational arguments in its favor. There were preaching classes, of course. Toward the end, there were even a couple of practical ministry classes and leadership classes. It was a robust program in which I learned a ton. Or at least, I felt like I did. But it’s hard to know how much you have really learned until you have the opportunity to actually put it into practice. 

I’ll not soon forget my first week on the job in our church in Virginia. I sat down at my desk on a Monday morning and just kind of took it all in. I had no idea what I was doing. Why those wonderful folks took a risk on someone fresh out of seminary is absolutely beyond me. I would never advise a church to hire someone like I was then for that kind of job. I had a head full of knowledge, a heart full of passion, and very little of anything else that was going to be actually useful for the work that was ahead of me. 

It wasn’t until I started writing that first sermon, and delivering that first sermon, and visiting that first member in their home, and doing that first funeral, and sitting down with that first couple to do premarital counseling, and then to do their wedding that I started to get my feet under me and gain the confidence that while I may never be very good at any of this, I could actually do some of it. To put that another way, it wasn’t until I started putting into practice the things I had spent the previous three years learning that I started to realize that I had actually learned a few things along the way. 

Let me draw this out just a bit further if I could. I got my Bachelor’s Degree in chemistry. I did pretty well in the program. My senior year, the faculty voted me “Chemistry Student of the Year.” I honestly didn’t remotely deserve that compared with any of my other classmates. I simply had the highest GPA in the program. After I graduated, I did a bit of tutoring through a local program where we lived in Denver, but I really wasn’t any good at that. Since then, I have used my chemistry degree pretty much not at all. 

Last year, Noah took chemistry. There were a couple of points during the semester that he ran into questions on one homework assignment or another…and I could not help him with them. I remembered basically nothing that was going to be of use to him. In more than 20 years since I got my degree, I have put it into practice almost never. I might as well have gotten a degree in underwater basket weaving for all the good it has done me. By not using much of anything I learned, I’ve lost pretty much all of it. In both of these cases, doing—or not doing as it were—made all the difference. 

This morning we are in the final part of our summer teaching series, A Kingdom Vision. For the last two and a half months we have been slowly but surely working our way through Jesus’ most famous sermon, the Sermon on the Mount. To say the teachings contained in these chapters out of Matthew’s Gospel have changed the world several times over is putting it rather wildly mildly. Yet as much as understanding all the ins and outs and details of what Jesus has to say here really does matter, the goal for this journey has been for us to grasp the bigger vision Jesus has been laying out for us here. 

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus gives us the most comprehensive vision of what life in God’s kingdom will be like the world has ever seen. God’s kingdom is present wherever His rule and reign are recognized and respected. It exists in parts and pieces now, but there is a day coming when it will finally become the single and dominant reality in the world; when His kingdom will be all there is. Learning to live in it now so we are ready when that day arrives is a significant part of what Jesus was striving to help us do over these chapters. God’s kingdom is a kingdom marked by righteousness—His righteousness. It is His righteousness taking up residence in us and being lived out through us in the world around us. This is a far higher calling than it seems at first glance. In fact, it is a calling we can’t live up to on our own. Only in Christ will that become a possibility. This standing in Christ before God is something that is primarily between us and Him and not something done for public applause even though it will have a public impact. It also does not give us permission or position to worry about how anybody else is standing before God in Christ. As long as they are indeed standing in Christ, that’s all we have to be concerned with. And, as Dave talked about with you last week, the righteousness of Christ that allows us to stand before God is something we can find if we will genuinely seek it. 

Well, all of that brings us to the end of the Sermon and the end of our journey. And what Jesus offers us here at the end is a capstone that makes all the rest of what we have talked about along the way matter. The rest of the Sermon has obviously been really good, but if we miss this final part, the rest of it really isn’t going to matter for us. So, if you have your Bible handy, join me in Matthew 7 one last time as we unpack Jesus’ powerful conclusion to this incredible kingdom vision. 

What Jesus says here at the end breaks down neatly into two parts, and both parts actually make the same point. They simply do it with different rhetorical approaches. I want to start this morning with the second part, which picks up in v. 24. Look at this with me. “Therefore, everyone who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain fell, the rivers rose, and the winds blew and pounded that house. Yet it didn’t collapse, because its foundation was on the rock. But everyone who hears these words of mine and doesn’t act on them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. The rains fell, the rivers rose, the winds blew and pounded that house, and it collapsed. It collapsed with a great crash.” 

I used to love making sandcastles. They weren’t ever very good—mostly just walls with misshapen towers in the middle of them. But as far as I imagined them, they were grand fortresses guarding innocent villages. The kick with building sandcastles, though, is that you’ve got to do it when the tide is out. That’s when you have access to the good building sand. If you try to use the sand further up the shore, it’s so dry that it’s basically worthless for any purpose beyond burning the skin off the bottom of your feet. I mean, you can haul water up to it, but why bother with that when you’ve got the good sand right there. This, of course, is where the problem enters the picture. If you build a castle down in the good sand, it isn’t going to last through the next tidal cycle. The tide is going to rise and wash it all away. By the next morning, there won’t be a trace of the previous day’s masterpiece. 

Jesus said that hearing His words without putting them into practice is little different from building a sandcastle like this. Knowing that hating your brother in your heart is indistinguishable from murder as far as its impact on your relationship with God goes is fine, but if you go on hating your brother in your heart anyway, what has that knowledge gained you? Knowing that you should pursue the spiritual discipline of prayer primarily in private so that it has the opportunity to accomplish in you what God intends for it is good, but if you keep praying primarily in public and neglecting those private times, you will continue to remain spiritually dry. Knowing that assessing the character of the people around you is not your responsibility at the very least until you have straightened out your own business with God is important knowledge to have, but if you keep butting into other people’s business, offering up unsolicited “advice” about their decisions, you will still end up as a hypocrite nobody wants around. Knowing what’s good and right to do without doing it is a meaningless exercise. 

The people who walk that path are fools, Jesus said. You don’t want to be a fool. The things Jesus said and the instructions He gave for His followers weren’t for no reason. It wasn’t like He just got up one morning and decided to spout off some rules that would make His followers’ lives more difficult. God’s kingdom is permanent. It is the thing that will still be when nothing else is. Because of this, living in such a way that we are a part of His kingdom matters. 

There’s more here, though. Doing the things that demonstrate our citizenship in God’s kingdom matters not simply because it means our ultimate end will be good. Living according to the expectations of God’s kingdom will make our lives better here and now. This is because life in God’s kingdom is better than life outside of it. And why wouldn’t it be? This world is marked by chaos and selfishness and destruction and greed and envy and violence and hatred and tribalism of the worst kind. But in God’s kingdom, love is the law. Righteousness is the rule. Justice pervades every single interaction. God’s character sets the tone for how everything goes. Kindness and gentleness and graciousness and mercy and compassion and patience and self-control are normal there. In other words and again, life is better in God’s kingdom than in any kingdom of this world. So, if we start living now like we’re already there, life is going to get better and we will get better at life. 

Now, that’s not the same thing as saying life will get easier. Notice that in both of these situations Jesus imagines there is a storm. Storms are going to come, and sometimes they are going to be intense. But if we are living in line with the character of God’s kingdom, those storms aren’t going to be able to blow us off of our foundation. They may rattle the windows and even blow in the doors, but the house that is our lives will be founded on the rock, and it will not be moved. Don’t miss the difference between the one and the other, though. What was it? The doing. The one person did what Jesus said, and the other didn’t. The difference is in the doing. 

Some people learn by way of stories. They need to hear examples and illustrations before they are going to be able to really wrap their mind around an idea. For these folks, parables are great. But there are other folks who just need to have the facts dropped in their laps. Jesus actually started with that here at the end of the Sermon on the Mount, but the parable made the point a little softer, so we started with that. Let’s go back up a couple of verses now and hear the same point we’ve been talking about, but a bit more…directly. 

Verse 21: “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven. On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, didn’t we prophesy in your name, drive out demons in your name, and do many miracles in your name?’ Then I will announce to them, ‘I never knew you. Depart from me, you lawbreakers!’” 

Now, I’ve got to be honest with you: This has long been one of the most unnerving passages in all of the Scriptures to me. We can’t miss a word of what Jesus says here. Just because someone calls on the name of Jesus doesn’t make them right with Him. Walking an aisle, praying a prayer, and even getting baptized does not make someone a follower of Jesus. It can simply mean they’ve put on a new costume to hide their brokenness. But I thought those were all really important things for someone to do on their journey of becoming a Christian. They are, but they are also external things that are easy to fake. 

There will be people on the last day when Jesus returns to judge the living and the dead, and to send people off to their final location, who will go to Him and point to all the good things they have done in His name over the course of their life. They’ll point to sermons they’ve preached. They’ll point to spiritual healings they’ve been a part of. They’ll even point to miracles they’ve done. All in Jesus’ name. But look again at the response of Jesus to these folks who by all external appearances were fully and fiercely committed Christians. “I never knew you. Depart from me, you lawbreakers!” Can you even imagine spending your life doing things you thought were for Jesus only to have Him declare that He doesn’t know you? And, of course, this doesn’t mean Jesus doesn’t know something. This is talking about relational knowledge. Jesus is telling these folks that they were never in the relationship with Him they imagined themselves to have. 

Okay, but these people were all doing things for Jesus. Didn’t I just say “the difference is in the doing”? What gives? Doing does indeed make all the difference, but the kind of doing matters. Look again at the kinds of things these folks who thought themselves so committed to Jesus were doing. They were prophesying, driving out demons, and doing miracles. These are all powerful and miraculous signs of God’s presence. They are the kinds of things the Holy Spirit would empower Jesus’ earliest followers to do after His departure in order to demonstrate the power and legitimacy of the church. These are all also external things. They are things that can be faked. And in this case, it seems that a whole bunch of folks were faking them. 

Put all of this in the context of the whole Sermon. If you are doing a bunch of things for God that are little more than a show for the sake of earning the applause of others, those won’t earn you any praise from Him. They won’t gain you access to His kingdom. They certainly won’t position you to reflect His righteousness in any meaningful way. Religious activities pursued for their own sake are worthless. They are meaningless. Far from advancing you toward God’s kingdom, they are a net detraction from any kind of positive movement in that direction. There is only one way that we will be able to stand before the throne of God one day and confidently receive the access to His eternal kingdom we have been waiting and hoping for our entire lives. It won’t be by crying, “Lord, Lord!” Rather it will only be “the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.” When it comes to following Jesus, the doing makes all the difference. 

Sure, but again, the people in this illustration did a bunch of seemingly great things for God. Why didn’t their doing matter? Because they didn’t do the will of God. They just did religious things. There’s a difference there. Religious things don’t get anybody into God’s kingdom. Doing God’s will does. When it comes to following Jesus, the doing makes all the difference. 

Well then, what’s the difference between the two? The answer to that is really a matter of intent. The same things pursued from two different motives are really very different things from God’s standpoint. As for what God’s will is, that sometimes gets treated like it’s hard to know, but it really isn’t. He tells us. 1 Timothy 2:1-4: “First of all, then, I urge that petitions, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for everyone, for kings and all those who are in authority, so that we may lead a tranquil and quiet life in all godliness and dignity. This is good, and it pleases God our Savior, who wants everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.” God’s will is for you and everyone else around you to be in a saving relationship with Him through Jesus that is rooted in what’s ultimately true about the world. And part of His will for how this happens is by our praying for everyone—and especially political leaders—so that we can enjoy a quiet and peaceful life.

Or how about 1 Thessalonians 4:3-5: “For this is God’s will [that pretty much spells it out there, doesn’t it?], your sanctification: that you keep away from sexual immorality, that each of you knows how to control his [or her] own body in holiness and honor, not with lustful passions, like the Gentiles, who don’t know God.” God’s will is for you to become more and more like Him every day (that’s sanctification), so that you are pure and holy, living a life marked by self-control. 

And then there’s 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18: “Rejoice always, pray constantly, give thanks in everything; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.” I mean, are there any questions here? God’s will is for you to rejoice always, pray constantly, and give thanks in everything. 

For all the questions we ask about God’s will for our lives, the sought after answers are almost always specific details of some kind. Do I go left or right? Take this job or that? Marry this person or not? Move here or there? We agonize over decisions because we don’t want to make the wrong one, but the truth is that in most of these situations, God’s will isn’t focused on the nitty-gritty details. It’s focused on the big picture kingdom living we can and should be doing no matter how the specific details wind up playing themselves out. To put that another way, you can honor God no matter which way you decide to go in the vast majority of the detail decisions of your life by being connected to Christ, intentionally walking the path of becoming more like Christ, and living with a spirit of constant praise, prayer, and gratitude to Christ. Those are the kinds of kingdom-doings that make the real difference. When it comes to following Jesus, the doing makes all the difference. 

So then, how’s your doing? It’s so easy to fall into a pattern that sees us involved in very little kingdom doing. Instead, we get all caught up in the doings of our own lives and interests. That’s understandable because we live with those every single day, but it doesn’t change the fact that when we aren’t involved in kingdom doings, we aren’t building our lives on the foundation that will actually support us well when the storms come. When we are mostly just doing the things we want in all the various situations we face, perhaps throwing in a few checkbox, religious doings just to keep up appearances, we aren’t living as citizens of God’s kingdom. And if we aren’t living as citizens of God’s kingdom here and now, then when we get to kingdom customs on the last day, we shouldn’t expect that Jesus is going to recognize our passport. That is, He’s going to say, “I never knew you.” When it comes to following Jesus, the doing makes all the difference. 

If you are someone who would say, “Yes, I am a follower of Jesus,” then your lifestyle should match your claim. That profession means you are claiming to be a citizen of God’s kingdom. As such, the people around you should be able to recognize you for who you are. More importantly, Jesus should be able to recognize you for it. That’s going to happen when you are living according to His commands, when you are doing the things of God’s kingdom. You should be known by love. The various other fruits of the Spirit should be evident in your life. You should be working for justice for the least, last, and lost within your sphere of influence. Purity and holiness should characterize all of your dealings. You should be working to make disciples everywhere you go. All of these and more like them are the kinds of things that identify you for who you are. When it comes to following Jesus, the doing makes all the difference. 

Friends, if life in God’s kingdom really is better than life in any kingdom of this world, then we should be doing everything we can to make that life as accessible as possible to as many people around us as possible as often as possible for as long as possible. That starts here as we make certain that every person who walks through our doors has a profound experience with God’s kingdom because of how we are loving and serving one another. If you aren’t already involved in the serving part of that—especially with our kids ministry where we are in high need of more committed teachers so we don’t burn out the incredible volunteers who have already stepped up in a big way to make sure that your kids are experiencing God’s kingdom—then it’s time to fix that. But this doesn’t stay here. We then take it with us everywhere we go, giving every person we meet a glimpse into the glories that are awaiting us when God’s final kingdom comes in hopes that this vision will draw them into that kingdom for perhaps the first time. When it comes to following Jesus, the doing makes all the difference. 

So, let’s commit to the doing. Let’s commit to being kingdom citizens, demonstrating by our active and obvious embrace of Christ’s righteousness whose we are and where our home really is. Let us be as impressed with Jesus’ words as the crowds were. “When Jesus had finished saying these things, the crowds were astonished at his teaching, because he was teaching them like one who had authority, and not like their scribes.” Jesus still has that same authority, which means the doing really does still matter. When it comes to following Jesus, the doing makes all the difference.