The From a

fig tree filled with leaves can hold the promise of fruitfulness.

But on closer inspection, you can quickly determine whether a tree has any fruit or not.

Today on Truth for Life, we'll hear a warning about how some people can give the appearance of spiritual fruitfulness, when actually all they're doing is going

through religious motions.

Alistirbegg is teaching from Chapter 11 in Mark's Gospel. Here we have the Messiah King, the fulfillment of all that has been provided in the Old

Testament. He is riding into Jerusalem gentle and

writing on a donkey in fulfillment of prophetic passages from the old. He is coming into the

center of religious life looking for spiritual fruit and looking for true worship.

And what is he find?

He discovers a tree that makes a promise that it can't find. He discovers a tree that makes a promise that it can fulfill, and he discovers a temple

that is full of activity that incurs God's wrath. Now you're sensible people, you follow my line

of thought, is this accurate? The king comes into the center of religious life and what is held out as an apparent

expression of fruitfulness is not there and what should be the very

exultation of the living God as a house of prayer

has actually been turned into a marketplace and into a bizarre. And although we chose to study these two incidents separately, they really

belong together and they help to explain each other. So I think you'll constantly find yourself moving back and between them as you see

to think this out. Now I had then decided that the best way I could approach the passage

was to try and summarize our thinking under three words, each of

which begins with a letter F, that's just the way my mind often works, and they're all there.

First of all, the issue of fruit, then the question of faith, and then the matter of forgiveness.

We will only be able to tackle the question of fruit for this morning. So there we have it seeing in the distance a fig tree

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