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Hendersonville Seventh-day Adventist Church, NC

David Wright

Righteous Fruit

I'm gonna go back and grab some stories here from our chapter of the Wright Photo Album.

But somebody had the idea, and I don't have pictures from the original trip, if you will, but I tried to piece together.

The idea was to go to Cherokee, North Carolina, and we were gonna do a couple of things.

1 of the things was go down Deep Creek, anybody done that in Bryson City and you rent these inner tubes and you actually go up into the park service area, the protected part of the land and you float down on this beautiful creek and it's a good time.

And then another thing that we had on our plans of things to do was go to Unto These Hills.

It's an outdoor drama of the Cherokee people and the Trail of Tears and their displacement and so on.

And so all of this was just going to be a wonderful time with another family we enjoyed and hung out with a lot.

And I won't say the name of the individual that made the reservations, Carol Smith, but she had found this beautiful, quaint little place.

And this was before internet and before pictures and certainly before reviews, but it just sounded so nice.

Doesn't that sound like a nice place to stay?

And the rooms were spacious and they had little kitchenettes and the whole thing and there was a pool for the children and so on.

And so she thought, this will be wonderful.

And so she made the arrangements for the rooms that we needed for our 2 families, and so we drove into the parking lot of the princess.

And it wasn't quite the quaint little place that we were anticipating.

I mean the grass is tall and the landscaping is out of control and we're not sure where the front desk is.

I mean, there's issues, and then there's a sense even that there's a creepiness about this place, and the parents had to go into the room, and I won't tell you some of the things that they found in the room that they had to clean up and so on.

In fact, I think they had to go and get some kind of cleaning supplies to clean the rooms before we could stay in the rooms.

I had to text my mom, I said, did we actually stay in the Princess Hotel or did we go down the road?

And while the parents were kind of cleaning out the room, we checked out the pool.

And the pool looked very similar to this picture, very green, lots of leaves.

And then we noticed, I shouldn't tell you about this part, but there was something waiting at the bottom of the deep end, and we thought, yeah, I don't think we're gonna use this pool either.

We had expectations of a place, and our expectations happened to be wrong.

They didn't quite pan out like we thought or that we had anticipated or that we had hoped.

And today I wanna talk to you about expectations that we might have as it relates to righteousness.

That may not be necessarily wrong, but they're not necessarily accurate either.

And so we're continuing this series, Christ Our Righteousness, and this is part 7.

So what is Righteous Fruit and what does that look like in the life of the believer?

Now we talked last week about obedience, we talked about how that's in the heart of the 3 angels' messages, we talked about some of the beauty and joys that come along with that, and so I'm not here to put that to the side in any respect, But oftentimes when we think about righteousness, we think of something that I don't do or don't do any longer.

But I want to stretch our minds a little bit this morning that righteousness is more than just not doing things, but is in fact doing things.

Certainly the Lord wants us to surrender to Him on a daily basis.

The Lord wants to do a work in our lives, but that's not where it stops.

He wants to do that work in our lives so that we can be fruitful.

And that's what I want to talk about this morning because oftentimes it's that righteous fruit that gets overlooked.

To start, I want to begin by turning to Luke, chapter 7, and I hope you brought your Bibles this morning.

We're in Luke, chapter 7, and this is the story of John the Baptist as he finds himself in a situation that is not what he desires for himself.

And so we read this section of John's experience where John is really rather discouraged.

Have you ever been discouraged in ministry?

You're seeking to follow his plan, but it seems that things aren't connecting like you had hoped, like you had wanted.

Now yes, that's good for us to continue to be, you know, to fall on our knees and ask the Lord, Lord, am I doing what you want me to do?

Am I going in the direction you want me to go?

But let me at least say this, that just because things don't go well doesn't mean that God is not in it.

Sometimes we think if God is in something, it will be just blessing after blessing after blessing after blessing.

And sometimes that's true, but sometimes it's not.

Sometimes God delivers people out of prison, sometimes He doesn't.

Sometimes he delivers people and their lives, if you will.

And that is certainly the case with John.

And I'm thankful for this story of John because it helps me to not be so discouraged when things don't go according to the way I want them to.

And so that's where we find John this morning and we pick up in verse 19 of Luke chapter 7.

Luke chapter 7 verse 19, and John calling 2 of his disciples to him, sent them to Jesus, because he is in prison, so he sends his disciples to Jesus saying, are you the coming 1, capital letters, or do we look for another?

Wow, that's a big question, To send with his disciples to Jesus.

Essentially, John is saying, Are you the Messiah or are you not?

I thought, I mean John was there at the baptism and the dove and the voice, this is my son in whom I'm well pleased.

But now I'm questioning, are you the Messiah or should we expect someone else?

Because if you're the Messiah, you're not doing anything for me.

So, pssh, pssh, pssh, hey guys, come here, come here, come here.

I have a message for you and I want you to take it to Jesus and I want you to ask this very pointed question.

And they might even say, John, are you sure you wanna ask that?

Verse 20, when the men, the 2 of John's disciples, had come to him, Jesus, they said, John the Baptist has sent us to you saying, Are you the coming 1?

And then there's something very interesting that happens there in the passage.

And if you were Jesus, how would you answer?

Would you be tempted or inclined to respond with, well we won't say what we might do, but notice here between verse 20 and 21, there's no response.

It simply moves on as if they didn't even ask the question, as if the question wasn't even important.

Husbands, wives, do you like it when your spouse asks you a question and you get no response?

I asked you a question, are you not hearing me?

Gary Black was saying he got an ear test this week and he was showing his sab school class the results and he said, this little section where it says I don't hear anything, that I think is where my wife's voice lines up.

But Jesus doesn't seem to answer the question.

But it says in verse 21, in that very hour, he cured many infirmities, afflictions, and evil spirits.

He's curing many and their afflictions, casting out evil spirits and demons and so on.

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Righteous Fruit

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