#147- What's on the Inside?

In this episode we continue our “Emotionally Healthy Faith” series with a message from Luke 6:39–45 titled “What’s on the Inside.” Jesus’ words about blind guides, logs and specks, and trees known by their fruit challenge us to look honestly at our inner world. We’ll explore how our emotional and spiritual “DNA” shapes those around us—often in ways we don’t see—and why our own wholeness is one of the greatest gifts we can give to our families, our church, and our world.

I’d love for you to join us as we ask together: What’s really going on beneath the surface of my life, and how is it affecting the people I love? This will be a gracious, loving, practical time of reflection and hope. 

Your wholeness is your gift to others. What fruit are you bearing in your life? 

To learn more about the Trinity Church family visit our website at https://trinitychurchsugarland.org; or find us on Facebook and Instagram

Transcript

Transcript: What’s on the inside?

 After remembering Pentecost this past week, we now return to our series, An Emotionally Healthy Faith.

Our reading today comes from Luke 6, verse 39 to 45.

It reads as follows.

He also told them a parable.

Can a blind person guide a blind person?

Will not both fall into a pit?

A disciple is not above the teacher, but everyone who is fully qualified will be like the teacher.

 Why do you see the speck in your neighbor's eye but do not notice the log in your own?

Or how can you say to your neighbor, friend, let me take out the speck in your eye when you yourself do not see the log in your own eye?

You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor's eye.

 No good tree can bear bad fruit, nor again does a bad tree bear good fruit, for each tree is known by its fruit.

Things are not gathered from thorns, nor are grapes picked from a bramble bush.

The good person out of the good treasure of the heart produces good, and the evil person out of the evil treasure produces evil.

For it is out of the abundance of the heart that the mouth speaks."

 What a challenging passage of scripture for us.

No good tree bears bad fruit, nor again does a bad tree bear good fruit, for each tree is known by its own fruit.

 Our series is based upon Pete Scazzero's book, The Emotionally Healthy Spirituality, that essentially says to us that not only is our spiritual health important in our growth as spiritual beings, but we're integrated beings, and so our emotional health makes a big difference as well.

 Today, the type of message is what's on the inside, what's on the inside.

And by asking that question, we're actually saying something.

We're saying whatever is on the inside will impact what's on the outside, not only in your life, but in the lives of those around you.

And often it even impacts on our lives, on the lives of those around us, doing harm a lot of the time without us even realizing where it's coming from.

 The early 1900s, there was a lady called Mary Mellon.

She was a chef in New York, and she catered for high society, wealthy, affluent New York families.

She came to be known as Typhoid Mary because she unknowingly spread typhoid fever to household after household wherever she worked.

 Although Mary herself showed no symptoms, she was an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid fever, and the meals she prepared were infecting the people around her, causing unintentional harm, and in some cases, they see even death in some instances.

 Well, we might ask the same question about our emotions and even our spirit and our inner world.

Are we carrying some kind of unknown spiritual or emotional condition that's harming those around us?

Whether we like it or not, our baggage, the stuff we carry with us in our emotions, in our lives,

 in our spirit impacts the lives of those around us, whether we know it and do it intentionally or aware of it happening around us or inadvertently and unintentionally are touching the lives of people in ways that actually impact on their faith and picked up on their emotional and their spiritual health.

 How often do we see supposed faithful parents, people who attend church over and over again, yet somehow children seem to rebel against the spirituality of their parents?

Now, not in every situation is there a problem with the parents.

People make up their own decisions, but there could be something that we as parents carry that we inadvertently send signals to and impact on the faith of our children detrimentally, whether we want to or we don't.

 One of the big problems we deal with is Christian hypocrisy.

The fact that people look at Christianity, say people don't act the way they should act, and although they confess Christ, they don't live like Christ, and whether we know it or not, or intentionally or want to do it, we are causing harm to the world in which we live, and we're causing harm to the name of Jesus.

 The same happens with division and dissension within churches and congregations.

Things in our lives touch our congregation, and then we find that there is turmoil that takes place.

We need to deal with the me inside so that we don't have to harm the people on the outside.

 This is really something personal in our lives that we have to keep taking stock of.

Things like whether it's anger issues that we have, impatience, and all these things that we carry with us, they come out.

And this is why Pete Scazzaro uses that illustration of the iceberg.

 and says there might be 10% on the top that you see, and we might display the 10%, but there is a big part of your life under the water, under the surface, on the inside that's deeply impacting your lives and the lives of those around you.

Do we as individuals and followers of Christ who truly want to do good, love our neighbor, spread the gospel, make disciples of all nations, do we know what's under the water in our lives?

 Do we know what's happening on the inside?

How is it that which is on the inside?

Do we know how it is in fact impacting those around us?

Our lives and the lives of those around us are deeply impacted by what's going on under the surface.

And so we need to stop and take a look.

 A couple of points I want to make from this passage of Scripture.

The first is this, your wholeness is your gift to others.

Your wholeness is your gift to others.

In Luke 6, 39-40, those first two verses, He told them a parable.

Here's the parable.

Can a blind person guide a blind person?

Will not both fall into a pit?

A disciple is not above the teacher, but everyone who is fully qualified will be like the teacher.

 Are we blind guides leading unintentionally or taking people on a journey and unintentionally leading others into a pit?

Is that what's happening?

Are we inadvertently undermining the very mission that God has given us to fulfill?

Being teachers that carry stuff within us and instead of people reaching what God wants them to be, we cap them?

 In Matthew 28, 19 and 20, we know that scripture so well.

Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.

What are we teaching them as we go out to make disciples?

 You know, it's interesting, there's a good couple of years ago, we had this incredible understanding and the knowledge and kind of the knowledge base of DNA and how it impacts our lives, how it impacts the people around us, the generations, our children and our children's children.

And we came to know that this thing called DNA that we carry in our bodies is just this absolutely wonderful, wonderful thing, but also terrible, terrible thing.

 Whether we like it or not, we give our best to our children, but we also give our worst to our children.

We don't really have a choice in it.

 We don't have a say in the matter.

You know, when we look at kind of ailments and the things that when you go to the doctor, they say, has your parents, your grandparents, do you have a history of dementia?

Do you have a history of cancer?

Are these the kind of things that are in your family that you have passed down from generation to generation?

 We say things like, I got my parents' teeth, or my eyes are from my father's side of the family.

And these are statements we make that show that somehow something has been passed down to us.

I wonder how spiritually and emotionally we're not doing exactly the same thing.

We have within our emotional and our spiritual DNA something that we're passing on to the people around us.

Firstly, to our loved ones, the ones closest to us, and all that stuff, the good, the really good.

 And they're really, really bad.

We are passing on to the people around us.

 the best and the worst.

Aggression, dysfunctional behavior, bad habits, hatred, maybe a love for God, the good side of things, a love for neighbor.

You know, the idea that we should not walk past those people around us that are suffering, but to pick them up.

These are things we pass on, but we pass on the good, but we also pass on the bad.

And are we aware of what's going on inside?

And are we aware of the things that we are unintentionally passing on?

 I don't think we're always on.

Well, you know, the truth is it says the blind, no matter how well intentioned they might be, can only lead another so far without something happening and them coming to harm.

Blind leading the blind.

 In Luke 6, verse 40, it says a disciple is not above the teacher, but everyone who is fully qualified will be like the teacher.

Where is Jesus going with this, and how am I to apply this into my life, my calling, and even working out my life as a disciple of Jesus Christ?

Well, there are some things we can learn.

One is we should watch out who leads us.

 Who's leading you?

We're quick to follow people.

We're quick to say, I follow Paul.

I follow Paul, Silas, Peter, all these people.

These are people.

I follow so-and-so.

 Well, are we following blind guides and are they leading us into a ditch?

How many Christians have fallen, find their faith shipwrecked because they followed the wrong person?

You will become like your rabbi.

The people you follow will shape you to be like them.

But then there's another point to this as well.

 Watch out how you lead others.

As much as we are looking for godly leaders, we need to be godly leaders.

We are called to go into all the world, make disciples.

We need to be teaching others.

So what we teach them has to be something that comes from inside of us.

Are we blind guides trying to teach people something that we don't know?

Are we blind guides teaching from a place of brokenness and hurt?

 Are we the glass ceiling preventing others from growing in God?

We need to look inside.

One of the greatest gifts we can give to God and give to the people around us is our own wholeness, a faith that is self-reflective, growing in God, understanding our weaknesses, and giving those to God as well.

That brings me to my second thought here.

 Pretending doesn't solve the problem.

We can pretend that everything is okay when it's actually not okay.

 You remember chapter 7, 19, Paul writes, for I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.

And that's the reality of every Christian around the world.

It was Paul's reality.

It's my reality.

It's our reality.

We want to live a life that emulates Christ, but it doesn't take long for us to get frustrated or angry or impatient.

And we say, but I'm doing the things that I don't want to do.

 Well, what do we do when we fail?

What do we as Christ followers do when our walk and our talk do not align with the convictions that we profess with our mouths?

 Well, quite honestly, we move to a place where we go from being authentic to being hypocritical in our faith.

Hypocrisy really is simply the behavior that contradicts what one claims to believe or feel.

And so we're not consistent with our convictions.

Our actions aren't consistent with our convictions.

And so we want to do good, but we do bad.

And so we shift into this place of hypocrisy.

And I want to make a statement today to say we can be accurate.

 accidental hypocrites.

Hypocrisy can be accidental.

Now, it can be intentional.

I think some people follow Christ out of the sense of personal gain.

The Bible speaks about that as well.

Personal gain, following Christ out of personal gain, maybe financial or relational benefits that people feel they can derive from being within Christian networks.

From a business point of view, they consider it as a networking opportunity to be part of a significant church.

 And so there is kind of intentional hypocrisy, but there's also accidental hypocrisy.

Sometimes we do the wrong thing out of pure ignorance.

 Sometimes it's because we've been taught some kind of traditional Christianity that are the form of godliness, but never actually lived it out in practical ways.

And so we go through the motions thinking this is what Christianity is.

But actually, we are far from having a true authentic relationship with Jesus.

But then there's something else we could do.

We could hide our shortcomings.

 Because we know our lives are inconsistent, we kind of move them into the shadows and we try to hide or mask them, which really is a form of hypocrisy.

 And so we find that even in the struggle for sanctification, we feel like failures, and so we withdraw, and there's a problem right there.

So how do we handle it?

We pretend.

We pretend it's all okay.

We pretend everything is together.

We put on a mask.

We move into this place of hypocrisy, and we never deal with the deeper issues of the heart.

 In Luke 6, verse 41 to 42, Jesus actually touches on this very point in the context of our passage.

He will say in the middle of this, you hypocrite.

There's almost a tongue-in-cheek type of humorous analogy he uses.

He says, why do you see the speck in your neighbor's eye, but you do not notice the log in your own eye?

 What a huge exaggeration.

There's that sense of humor in that.

Or how can you say to your neighbor, friend, let me take out the speck in your eye when you yourself do not see the log in your own eye?

You hypocrite.

There it is.

First take out the log out of your own eye.

Then you'll be able to see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor's eye.

Think for a minute if you had to go to an optometrist or an ophthalmologist and

 They were blind.

They said, I'm going to work on your eyes.

I'm going to help you see better.

But they were completely blind.

They were seeing impaired.

How confident would you believe that person could be to solve your problem?

 Now, with modern technology, we might even get imaginative of how they might solve that problem.

But ultimately, if you have somebody looking into your eyes, you want to know that they can actually see what's going on, understand and discern the problem in order for their hands to do the right thing to fix the problem.

 That's kind of this analogy.

How are we, when we are blinded by our own shortcomings, able to be teachers, to be guides, to reach out to someone and say, take my hand, I will lead you to higher ground.

But we ourselves are walking around not able to see or to understand.

 There's a very sharp rebuke to the Pharisees that comes in Matthew 23.

I'll read one or two verses from verse 13.

Jesus says to them, "'Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you lock people out of the kingdom of heaven.'"

 sometimes unknowingly and let's be honest when jesus speaking to the pharisees they clearly have questionable motives we see that in places like matthew 6 where he says they want visibility there's pride there's an arrogance they want recognition so clearly there's a problem with their motives here and more than likely they will fall into the category of intentional

 Okay.

But the principles are the same.

Due to the hypocrisy, they lock people out of heaven.

And it says, for you do not go in yourselves.

And when you others are going in, you stop them.

Woe to you, scribes and pharaohs, hypocrites.

And then he says this, for you cross sea and land to make a single convert.

And we, as a church, believe in going into all the world, crossing sea and land to make converts, to tell them about Jesus Christ.

And then he says, but hang on.

 And you make the new convent twice as much a child of hell as yourself.

And so in a sense, we're not saying, hey, we're stuck in this place where we have this deep sense of intentional hypocrisy we're dealing with.

But maybe inadvertently there's a speck in our eyes or a log in our eyes.

And instead of reaching out and helping people, we pretend everything is okay.

We try and help people, but we actually are hurting and harming those around us.

 Making disciples for the transformation of the world starts with self-reflection.

Is there a log in my eye?

And if there is, I'm committing to working on it and making myself whole.

Remember, one of the greatest gifts you can give to the world around you, to God and to the world around you is your own personal wholeness.

Let's wrap up with this.

 Last point, what's on the outside is a clear indication of what's on the inside.

How do we know what's going on the inside?

You might be saying to me, well, is there a log?

How do I discern what's

 What fruit do you bear in your life?

What does the fruit of your life look like?

Luke chapter six, verse 43 to 45, no good tree bears bad fruit, nor again does a bad tree bear good fruit.

 For each tree is known by its own fruit.

Figs are not gathered from thorns nor grapes from bramble bushes.

A good person out of the good treasure of their heart produces good, and the evil person out of the evil treasure produces evil.

For it is out of the abundance of the heart that the mouth speaks.

You know, we are taught,

 by this passage very clearly that when we discern and i'll use the word judge here we might this word judge sounds like you are not allowed to judge yes matthew 7 teaches us that but when jesus teaches us about judging he's prohibiting the condemnation and judgmental mentalism that comes from this pharisaical nature that that's rooted in hypocrisy and arrogance and really but he does say we still have to discern

 We have to be wise.

We have to see what's happening in front of us.

We have to have discerning judgment to recognize false teachers, to address sin.

And the difference really in judging in a godly way, and we can go to John chapter seven for this as well, is humility, mercy, and even an awareness of our own failings.

So when Jesus teaches us here, look at the tree.

He said, you can judge a tree, but the way you judge it is by its fruit.

 Where we get this wrong is we tend to judge by what we believe other people's intentions are.

Good, we think their intentions are good, or we think their intentions are bad.

These are bad people, so we judge them according to their intentions.

 Or we judge them according to what we believe the motives of their heart are.

What are the motives of your heart?

And so we assume a lot about the person.

We assume their intentions.

We assume their motives.

We assume what's going on in their lives.

And then we judge them.

And Jesus says that's not how we judge.

There's only one way.

We look at the fruit.

What fruit is there?

So as you look in the mirror,

 And you look at your life, ask yourself, what fruit is there in my life?

Now, you can go to the nursery and you can buy a tree.

And on the tree, there's a big tag that says peach tree.

You can plant that tree.

And then when the lemons come out on that tree, you will know that's a lemon tree.

Now you can take the label.

 You can show it to the tree and say, you are a peach tree.

It is still a lemon tree.

You can go back to the nursery and say, I bought this from you.

It says peach tree.

And the person at the nursery will say, it is definitely a peach tree.

You can bring them to your yard.

You can show them the lemons on the tree.

No matter what they say, the tree is a lemon tree.

No matter what you hope it wants to be, no matter what you wish it to be, no matter what you assume it to be, the fruit is what it is.

And

 That is how we approach the world around us.

We look at fruit.

No matter how much we, in our own lives, whoosh, or maybe even self-motivate ourselves, or even pretend to produce good fruit or peaches, if there are lemons in our lives, then that is what we are, and that is something we need to deal with.

Now, some of you right now are saying, I am a peach tree.

 Well, maybe you are, but maybe, just maybe, you should ask the people around you and say, in the love of God, how do you see me?

Where are my faults?

Where are my flaws?

What is the fruit that you see in my life?

And how can I be more like Jesus?

Well, if you look at your life and you're seeing fruit that you're not particularly happy with, what do you do?

 And I'll just quickly run through this.

Firstly, honestly acknowledge the fruit in your life.

Don't cover it up.

Don't pretend.

Honestly own and acknowledge what's happening in your life.

The second thing you want to do is you want to ensure that your life is fully surrendered to Jesus because it is Jesus is the root that changes to cause good fruit in your life.

 I'd encourage you, number three, go easy on yourself.

And go easy on those around you that might have a bit of bad fruit.

We're called to love our neighbors, not to sit and judge their fruit all the time in a hypocritical, pharisaical type of way, be condemnatory, no, no, no.

We're there to love people and love them into good fruit.

Number four, commit to doing the good that you need to do.

Commit to doing the work that is needed to transform your life.

 through spiritual practices, your journey of sanctification, emotional healing, whatever it needs to be done, you want to be the best version of you for this world.

And if you really need to, and a lot of us do, humbly seek help from some others around you, godly people that can help you be all that God wants you to be, and then never, never give up.

 keep moving in the right direction, recognizing bad fruit in our lives.

And we need to recognize the bad fruit in our life.

And together with Jesus and our faith community, we must commit to finding wholeness.

Luke 4.45 ends by saying, "'It is out of the abundance of your heart that the mouth speaks.'"

 No matter how much we pretend, no matter how much we cover up, no matter how much we want to assume, wish or hope, whatever is in the heart, whatever is on the inside will come out eventually.

 And if it's going to come out, let's start to transform our lives in a positive way because your wholeness is your gift to others.

Take the time to make that gift beautiful, loving, and a blessing to all who are to receive it.

God bless you.