This was a sermon preached at City South Presbyterian in 2024. You can listen to the podcast here, or watch it on video. Some of the block quotes were on screen and summarised but have been included in full.
There is something you do not know about me. Probably. I cannot tell you. But if you were there when I gave this as a talk, I tried to show people by playing a song on the piano.
As a kid, I learned piano. I reckon my parents spent thousands of dollars so I could learn — really — that one song. It is basically all I have to show for it — that, and I can still play most of the scales. Maybe I should have just done that.
I was not great at practicing, but I did learn — and practice — that one song, until it became part of me. I can play it without looking — or thinking — and I play it much faster than it is meant to be played, and probably much less well than it is meant to be played.
But I remember it. I know where my fingers are meant to be and what it is meant to sound like — and I know it without thinking. What the people heard when I played was automatic; it was muscle memory.
There is a phrase we use when we learn something that we can produce automatically, is there not? We talk about learning something by heart. And we know we have not learned it through some process of our heart — that organ — magically latching on to a thing. When we learn something by heart, when we get it to the stage of being natural or automatic, it is a product of practice. Of repetition. Of bedding something down deep into our bones.
And we think of this sort of automation as good when it comes to learning an instrument, or a sport, or how to drive a car — so that we are making those movements without deciding.
I stopped learning piano — practicing — because I did not love it, so only one song comes naturally to me; I only know one “by heart.” While I am almost 42 and still playing soccer; still practicing hoping more things might become automatic because even though I am uncoordinated and nothing feels automatic, I love it. I have given my heart to it, and I am hoping my body will automate some things if I keep repeating the actions. I wonder how we go though at following Jesus by heart; learning to live as a disciple of Jesus.
That is what we are thinking about this series — we are thinking about how we be who God has made us to be; those who inhabit time and space in order to seek God like he made us to (Acts 17:26-28). And we do this as those who have found God because he has revealed himself to us in Jesus so that we are now trying to be formed as disciples. Trying to be transformed as we saw last week, rather than conformed into the patterns of the world (Romans 12:2).
I wonder what your model for this transformation looks like — whether we think of learning to follow Jesus as like learning to pass an exam at school, or like becoming more like him from the heart. I wonder if our approach to discipleship should look more like learning an instrument, or a sport — something we do with our bodies — rather than something we do by thinking right. If you are doing the Practicing the Way course in your growth group you might have heard them talk about thinking about discipleship as more like an apprenticeship than a university degree.
Last week we looked at the metaphor of an elephant — where the idea was that the world and its patterns — the architecture and idols that surround us — are designed to shape us in particular ways, and to shape our hearts or minds in particular ways as we use our bodies in these spaces, pursuing what we love. And we talked about how often we slip into thinking about our minds as the bits of us that are conscious — we borrowed the analogy of the rider and the elephant from the psychologist Jonathan Haidt. We think about our minds as the rider and about discipleship as informing the rider with the right information about God, but most of what we do is shaped by the elephant — our intuitions, what we have made automatic, our instinctive sense of who we are in the world. These elephants are shaped, like when we make piano playing automatic, by what we do, what we experience, who we are around, what we learn to love, and what we practice.
And this week we are picking up a different metaphor — it is one we will expand over the next few weeks — we are going to think of our lives — our bodies, our minds, our growth and formation — and especially our heart, the core of who we are — as a house.
And rather than examining the architecture of our city, I am going to invite you to think about your life and its structures — how you are being built and formed as a human house; what the plan is, what is foundational, what is load bearing, what is giving you a shape, and how you are building your life, piece by piece. How you are building not just the plans — which might be the rational thinking part of your brain — but the structure; your loves, what is automatic, who you are actually becoming.
We are going to do this looking at the teaching and example of Jesus — and then the teaching and example of one seeking to become like Jesus — the Apostle Paul.
So Jesus, in our reading, he is located on the plains — a level place (Luke 6:17). This is interesting, right — because there is a parallel between what Jesus says here in Luke, and his teaching from a mountain top in Matthew (Luke 6:17, Matthew 5:1). What we are hearing from Jesus is like his stump speech. I heard this week that President Biden gave basically the same radio interview to stacks of different stations around the country; reporters are given pre-vetted questions so he can stick to his script. Well, here is Jesus sticking to his script — this is a core part of his teaching about what the kingdom looks like, and how we should think about being formed as disciples.
Both Luke and Matthew have this first metaphor of a tree producing fruit — it is literally making fruit — this will be important as we roll on. But Jesus says good trees make good fruit (Luke 6:43, Matthew 7:17). You can tell if a tree is good from the fruit, and if the fruit is good from the tree.
And just like that, humans are trees. If fruit is being made, it is coming out of the heart of a person (Luke 6:45). The good things are stored there — literally, treasured there. Our lives that we live, what we make and what we say, are a product of our hearts.
Jesus is picking up an Old Testament idea here — one you will find in the wisdom of Proverbs — that we should guard our hearts because everything else flows out of this part of us (Proverbs 4:23).
And straight up, the next bit in Luke — well — it is a shift in metaphor, but I think Jesus, as he talks about building a wise life as building a house, is talking about building a wise heart that will produce this sort of fruitful, kingdom-shaped life. There are a couple of links we lose in our English here — Jesus literally says “and do not ‘make’ what I say” (Luke 6:46) — it is the same root word for what the tree produces — and then in the next verse where we get “practices” — which I think is a great word — it’s the same word again, this “making” word (Luke 6:47, Luke 6:43).
A tree makes good fruit when it is a good tree. Jesus is asking why do you speak as though I am Lord if you are not producing the fruit, the practices, the way of life that comes from his words. It is not just about belief, this discipleship caper — the link between who we are and what we do is about this link between our heart and our actions.
And to be a disciple — someone who calls Jesus Lord — is to take Jesus to heart; to learn his way by heart — through practice — where our practices reflect his practice and his words (Luke 6:46, Matthew 7:24). Jesus is the ultimate good tree — his words and actions come from his heart, and for us, fruitful, wise life looks like being like him because he is our Lord.
There is this formative cycle between doing what Jesus says and our hearts being fruitful, so that our actions then reflect our hearts.
And here the stump speech continues with this metaphor of a house — of our lives as a house (Luke 6:48, Matthew 7:24). Those who hear Jesus’ words and put them into practice — having them shape what we make, what we do with our bodies — these people are humans, wise humans, who build a house on a secure foundation. A rock.
So that when flooding waters come they do not shake the house — the life of the person — because it is well built (Luke 6:48).
The point of this metaphor is to construct a well-built house, right? To build wisely — starting with the foundation you build on. Starting not just with listening to Jesus’ words but putting them into practice. It is almost like the well-built house is about a heart that has treasured up and stored goodness so that it produces goodness and is not destroyed.
The alternative to the wise builder is the one who hears the words of Jesus and does not put them into practice (Luke 6:49). Just pause there — he does not say the fool does not hear the words of Jesus. The fool is the one who hears — perhaps even believes. Perhaps, to throw back to the model of our ‘mind’ in chapter one, this is the person who just thinks life is about the rider, where you just have to hear and believe, but where that does not translate into wise building, into elephant training, into treasuring and being formed by the words of Jesus as we practice them and make fruitful life.
The person not building a house on the rock — but just on any piece of ground, with no foundation — their life gets swept away when the storm hits; it is destroyed (Luke 6:49).
If we want to be wise builders — houses that are formed as good, disciples of Jesus, truly human — we need not just a building plan, but to build well. Not just a foundation — Jesus — but the practice of doing what he says, which is how we store up treasure in our hearts; how we learn by heart to live with the new hearts he gives.
Jesus teaches plenty of stuff in the Gospels that his stump speech — whether it is the Sermon on the Mount or the Plains — invites us to practice; to make our way of life. There is another consistent message across the Gospels — a summary of what we are invited to practice; to take to heart and learn by heart as we build our lives.
In Luke it is recorded as Jesus meets a guy who reckons he has got it all together — an expert in the law — who asks what must I do to inherit eternal life. Jesus asks him, “What does the law suggest?” (Luke 10:25-26).
And this bloke says, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength and mind” (Luke 10:27). This is a command to treasure God; to have our heart shaped; to learn his ways through how we honour him with our bodies. And this flows through into how we love other humans. Our neighbours. Jesus says, “Yep. Do this” (Luke 10:28). In Matthew he calls this the first and greatest commandment (Matthew 22:37-38), and that all God’s word hangs off these two commands (Matthew 22:39-40).
So I guess we could start there.
But I reckon there is one other bit of Jesus’ teaching that is worth having in mind here as we think about our hearts and becoming disciples. And it is that we do not do this as people disconnected from Jesus, not as individuals left to our own devices, our own ability to work our way into new habits.
If we are calling Jesus Lord and our hearts are longing to, and treasuring him — then this itself is an act of God’s transforming, heart-changing grace in us. We are not earning our way in as we seek to be disciples. This is a pattern of life for those who have listened to what Jesus says and are seeking to put his teaching into practice because he is our Lord, our foundation, and we are in the process of being transformed not just to be like him, but by him as we live with him and listen to him.
A disciple — an apprentice — has a teacher. And we also have this picture from Jesus of coming to him to have our hearts transformed not just by habits of working to improve ourselves, but the life-transforming habit of not relying on ourselves, but coming to him. Jesus invites us — those of us tired and overwhelmed by the world and its patterns; those of us buffeted by the storms and recognising that anything we build will never be strong enough to hold us secure in the storms, or in the face of death — who feel the constant gnawing sense that we need to do better, work more, build a better us on our own. Jesus invites — commands even — us weary ones to come to him, to learn his ways as we rest (Matthew 11:28-29), as we pass him this burden and learn from him, like a trainee learns from their trainer as they carry the load, and as we learn to be like him — gentle, humble in heart, good — while we find rest for our souls; rest from the relentless pressure to do better.
This is why he can say his yoke — the bit of wood on the shoulders of a beast of burden, connecting them to the one walking beside them so they would share a load — this is why he can say his yoke is easy and his burden light (Matthew 11:29).
Even as we also embrace the paradox of denying ourselves daily and taking up our cross — dying — and following him (Luke 9:23, Matthew 16:24). But note, part of this dying is dying to the idea that we are kings or queens of our own lives; that we are Lord; that we have to save ourselves and build our own security and always be better. And it is hard to write that story into our bones; to die to the false gospels that say be better, do more, self-justify, self-improve, self-satisfy, and to the bits of our heart that still believe that deforming lie. We have learned that story by heart — some of us — from the world, from our families, from our inner voice, and our loves for false gods.
Jesus offers a different foundation, one that will last, one we can build on differently as we inhabit his life and take on new habits that we learn by heart.
I reckon we see a pattern of discipleship in Paul, in 1 Corinthians 3. Paul picks up the words of Jesus and calls himself a wise builder (1 Corinthians 3:10). At this point he is talking about the way he has taken the words of Jesus and not just used them to form himself as a house disconnected from others, but to produce fruit — loving and serving the folks he is writing to. He has laid a foundation for them and now he wants this church to build with care; to produce their own wise lives.
Jesus is the foundation not just of the church — as a corporate reality — but for Christians. And this passage keeps the corporate and the individual in tension. Each one should build; each one is a house (1 Corinthians 3:11). But we all together are God’s house — his temple — where the Spirit dwells in our midst (1 Corinthians 3:16).
This week we are thinking about the individual part — how we live in the world in our body and pursue a wise life with a heart that produces fruit because we practice what Jesus teaches ourselves. Next week and the week after we are going to expand to think about the corporate realities we are part of as we inhabit space together.
Paul will take this idea of being a temple of the Holy Spirit to apply it to how we use our bodies — reminding us that Jesus, our Lord, redeemed us. We — the church — are the fruits of his life, his listening to God, what he is building. That we have the Spirit is part of God’s plan to recreate humans; giving us new hearts that can love and obey God as fulfilment of the prophets. So as those bought at a price, we are invited to honour God with our bodies (1 Corinthians 6:19-20).
This is what it looks like to build with care on the foundation laid for us by Jesus (1 Corinthians 3:10); to learn the life of Jesus by heart so that what we treasure in our hearts brings forth good, not evil, as we practice what Jesus teaches (Luke 6:45).
Building with care is not just about thinking, it is about creating this way of life in the body that honours God — that means good things come out of a heart that treasures Jesus and a life built on him (1 Corinthians 3:11, 23). Paul is a wise builder, building on the foundation of Jesus toward the reality that we are now of Christ, just as he is of God.
As Paul unpacks this idea in the next chapter, he urges the Corinthians to build this life by imitating him, and in his absence, by imitating Timothy — who is also faithful in the Lord, who is an imitator of Paul following in this chain of imitators (1 Corinthians 4:16-17).
Timothy will remind the Corinthians of Paul’s example — his way of life in Christ Jesus, which lines up with what he teaches (1 Corinthians 4:17). Timothy is a disciple of Jesus and an apprentice of Paul. Paul’s way of life is not just words, it is this visible pattern. He will say later they should imitate his example — what they hear and see in his life, and Timothy’s — as they imitate Jesus. This is part of how discipleship happens: finding wise people who are imitating Jesus who will teach us. But it is also about following a way of life that lines up with the message of Jesus, and with his life.
I asked earlier what the model of transformation you have in your head is — how you would go about learning a new way of life by heart — and what that looks like when it comes to discipleship. A lot of the resources I have been reading for this series are from a guy named Dallas Willard, or a second generation of pastors and counsellors deeply impacted by him. Willard’s book Renovation of the Heart sketches out his basic idea that discipleship is about character formation that comes about as a result of our inward renewal — a renewal brought about by the Spirit as we connect with and imitate Jesus; as we become apprentices of his way, those yoked to him who do what he says.
One of his offsiders was a guy named James Bryan Smith. He came up with a shape to summarise both Willard’s framework and the New Testament. It is a kind of picture of the building blocks that seem to lead to this sort of transformation. If you remember that triangle from the video last chapter of unseen forces shaping us, these are a kind of antidote.
He suggests our path to transformation involves embracing the story of Jesus as our story, so that we learn how Jesus lived and what he calls us to, and having this enacted and embodied in communities where we find examples that we want to imitate and where we act as examples for each other. This formation is not just about introspection, it actually happens in relationships where we experience and practice the love of God and love of neighbour together. And the third corner is about practicing things; exercising — learning Jesus by heart, becoming who we aim to be by imitating Jesus repeatedly, practicing his commands as we encounter them in the Gospels and the New Testament. And the Holy Spirit is at work in each of these activities.
This seems to me to be a reasonable shape. We will look more at our community and relationships over the next few chapters. But I wonder what practices you might adopt to learn the way of Jesus by heart; what rule of life or way of life you might build to be a wise builder who is treasuring him in your heart.
His book has a bunch of suggestions for soul training, but so do some of the other books I will mention like The Other Half of the Church and the Practicing the Way course. Over the course of this series we will be thinking about the rhythms and structures — how we live in space and time. We want to build into our lives so we are practicing the way of Jesus, glorifying God with our bodies.
This starts with us. It starts with how we feed our hearts through the way we use our bodies, which is a question of who we serve, who we are ruled by. Are we going to be people ruled by Jesus, who call him Lord and practice what he says, who build our life-as-a-house on him as a foundation, shaped or structured by his rule at the level of our practices?
Or will we be ruled by someone or something else, serving someone else, having our hearts — our habits — shaped by the habitats set up by other masters who are not as gentle, or forgiving, who place heavy burdens on our shoulders?
If we are not deliberate about embracing a rule of life where we are ruled by Jesus, then other people — other rulers — will fill that vacuum. Or we will be practicing some other way and being formed accordingly. This sort of practice — taking on new habits, shaping the elephant, writing things into our bones so they become automatic, building our house wisely — it is not easy. It is not easy to learn to put off the heavy yoke of the world, what we are used to, to replace it with the easier burden of Jesus. Automating godliness.
It is hard work to unlearn things, and at times you might feel like I do on the sports field or at the piano. But hopefully it will be life-giving and liberating. And at its core the idea is to build on Jesus, to be planted in him, yoked to him.
Discipleship is about practicing the teaching of Jesus, imitating him, imitating those in our lives who imitate him, so that we learn him by heart. But it is not about self-mastery, it is about finding life loving God and knowing his love wholeheartedly so that we can love others. It is about making time and space to spend time with Jesus, in prayer, in listening to his word, so that we can put it into practice. It is about learning and experiencing that he is good, that he is humble in heart and gentle, learning to stop striving to carry our own burdens, being overwhelmed by busyness and the burden of self-improvement or self-transformation, coming to him for rest, taking up our cross and dying to those false gospels and the patterns of the world they create and that sustain them while destroying us daily.
And because we know Jesus is good and that he is leading us to life, being prepared to suffer when we reject those patterns and experience the cost, or even being prepared to suffer like Jesus as we engage in costly love for our neighbours because we are learning the goodness of God. This is what it means to produce fruit — fruit that comes from a heart shaped by Jesus and practicing his commands.