The Trouble with the Pharisees

SERMON: 2007-02-24--sm0717--the-trouble-with-the-pharisees SOURCE DURATION: 00:40:28.000 PROPOSED CUTS: 1 CONFIDENCE: 0.95 APPROVED: false REASON: All provided candidates form a continuous devotional/worship conclusion (a type of benediction or pastoral application) that is integral to the sermon's closing material. Since there is no clear transition to music, an announcement, or unrelated audio after this segment, the final candidate must be selected. Acoustic segmentation found sustained music at the end edge and moved the boundary to the adjacent transcript segment. ACOUSTIC EVIDENCE: available ACOUSTIC MUSIC INTERVALS: 00:37:18.480-00:40:26.000 ACOUSTIC SPEECH OVERLAP: yes ACOUSTIC BOUNDARIES APPLIED: end Inline CUT markers identify each proposed audio boundary after the relevant word. --- ORIGINAL TRANSCRIPT WITH PROPOSED CUTS MARKED --- It is, I think, almost impossible for us to fully appreciate the impact these words of Jesus in Matthew 5:20 would have had upon the listeners of His day. I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses or exceeds that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven. Now, you need to remember that the Pharisees and the teachers of the law were the most religious people of their day, and they were held up as a model of righteousness, a paragon of virtue. The word Pharisee actually means separatist, and they prided themselves on being part of a religious sect that separated itself from sin. They made a virtue of keeping the commandments of God, and they did so better than anybody else. And the teachers of the law here really were scribes. That is to say, their job was to copy the sacred scriptures not only, but to study them, and then by extension also to teach them to the people of Israel. And so if there was anybody in Israel in those days that was being held up as a model of virtuous righteousness, it was the scribes and the Pharisees. As a matter of fact, in those days they had a saying that if in the whole world there were only two people that could make it to heaven, certainly one would be a scribe and the other would be a Pharisee. That's the kind of people these people were, and that was their reputation. So you can all imagine that along comes Jesus, and He says to His disciples, "Unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven." He says, "You want to make it into God's kingdom? You want to go to heaven after you die? You want to be part of the new creation that God is making?" Well, He says, "Your righteousness better exceed that of the most religiously observant people of your day." And so that immediately raises the question then, what in the world was wrong with the religiosity of these Pharisees and these religious teachers? Why does Jesus rock not only everybody else's religious understanding of what is right and wrong, but why does He so publicly blast the scribes and the Pharisees not only in this passage, but if you've ever read the Gospels, you will know that He does it consistently throughout His ministry. Well, the answer is that in trying to obtain righteousness, they did so based on law as opposed to grace. That is to say, instead of depending on God's power to enable them to be holy and righteous, they looked inside themselves, and they thought that by their own efforts they could measure up to the standards that God had placed before them. That is a problem that religious people particularly are extremely prone to. And whenever we fall back under that kind of self-righteousness under the law as opposed to living by divine grace, there are four things that I can almost guarantee you will happen. Let me walk you through those in the time that we have. First of all, your obedience will tend to the external rather than the internal. That is to say, you will concentrate more on the outside appearance of your religion than on what lives in the heart. And the reason for that is not hard to figure out because when it comes to measuring up to God's law and being the kind of righteous and holy person that he wants you to be, it's a lot easier to exercise a measure of control over your outward behavior than it is about your inward attitude and your thought life. It's easier to drag a cow to the temple and make a sacrifice to God than it is to humble yourself under his mighty hand and obey him with all of your heart. It's a lot easier to dig into your checkbook and to pass out alms to the poor than it is to take the poor into your heart or into your home. It's easier to control your outward sexual behavior than it is to control your inner thoughts and your inner feelings. It is far easier to look good on the outside and to campaign for justice halfway around the world than to exercise justice in your own heart and in your own home. That's the nature of trying to be righteous by your own efforts under the law. And the Pharisees were experts at this and so were the scribes. Outwardly they looked good, but inwardly they were far removed from anything that God was looking for. Here's how Jesus put it in Matthew chapter 23. He says, "Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees! You hypocrites, you clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees! You hypocrites, you are like whitewashed tombs which look beautiful on the outside, but inside are full of dead men's bones and everything unclean. In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous, but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness." Notice the powerful word pictures Jesus uses to describe them. As I said a few moments ago, it's no wonder ultimately they nailed him to the cross. He said, "Outside you make sure the cup is cleansed, but inside it's full of dirt, and that doesn't bother you at all." And then he says, "You're like whitewashed tombs. You look beautifully white on the outside, but inside you're full of dead men's bones." He says, "Outwardly to people you appear like you've got it together, but inwardly your life is a mess. You are filled with hypocrisy and wickedness." Now to be a hypocrite is to be something other than what you really are. The word hypocrite comes from a Greek word which ultimately came to stand for actors or pretenders. And if you know anything at all about early Greek drama, because all the dramatic characters were men, they all carried masks to picture the different individuals. And the word hypocrisy has come to represent appearing something else on the outside than what you are on the inside. And the Pharisees and the scribes had made a fine art out of hypocrisy. They weren't just people who, you know, accidentally fell into pretending to be one thing on the outside and another thing on the inside. No, they had made a scientific study, if you will. They had carefully calculated how to live this way, and they taught how to live other people that way. And it's a fascinating thing in Scripture, people. It's a fascinating thing in Scripture that whereas Jesus has no trouble getting along with sinners and graciously forgives them and takes them into his presence, the one category of people that he always singles out are people who are religiously hypocritical. Not only because they keep themselves out of the kingdom of God, but they present a stumbling block to other people. Under the law, we become one thing on the outside and another thing on the inside. And it's easy to point fingers at the Pharisees. It's easy to point fingers at the teachers of the law. But, you know, there isn't one of us in this room today that ultimately is immune to that danger. You can sit here, sing all the songs we sing, do all the things that we do as part of corporate worship. And you know as well as I do that our hearts and our minds can be filled with rebellion towards God and in fact far removed from his Lordship. We can put our money in the offering plate for the poor and yet be more concerned about ourselves than we are about others. We can outwardly be sweet as pie to our neighbor, have a wonderfully smiling face, while inwardly every time we see them our gut wrenches and we could wish them dead. Isaiah put it this way many years ago. Jesus quotes him in Matthew chapter 15, "These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me." God's not only interested in how we look on the outside. As we'll see later on in Christ, he's very much interested in having us righteous on the inside. You still with me? And you're still glad you came to church today? Good, I'm happy to hear it. Obedience tends towards the external not only, but obedience tends to be partial or selective. That is to say, like a smorgasbord, we begin to pick and choose those commandments that we feel like we can honor. See, if you've ever taken seriously the commandment to love God above all and your neighbor as yourself and have started trying to live that way, you will discover that the bar is set pretty high. Wouldn't you agree? I mean, who of us in this place would ever have the courage to say, "Yes, I love God first and foremost all the time in my life, and I love my neighbor more than I love myself"? I mean, it just isn't within us, which is precisely why we need Jesus and why God drives us by the law to our knees. But when you don't understand grace, when all you hear are the demands of the law, then there are two things that you and I tend towards. The first is we become strivers. That is to say, we try to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, we hear how a Christian ought to live and how a Christian ought to behave, and then we set our minds to doing that. This often happens to new Christians. They have repented of their old ways and they have given their lives to Jesus, and now they're discovering this is what God wants from me sexually, this is what God wants from me in my relationships with my spouse, this is what God wants with me in terms of my honesty and my integrity. And a lot of us discover pretty quickly that it's a very heavy load because the bar is really set high. Wouldn't you agree? We strive but get discouraged and fail in our striving because it's simply too big. So now what do you do? Now you're living with a standard up here and a behavior down here, and nobody can live that way for very long before you go crazy because you cannot live with a gap between what you know is required of you and what you are doing without feeling guilty and under condemnation all the time. And so under the law, here is what a lot of people do next, we become selective in our obedience. That is to say we pick and choose those commandments that we're comfortable with and that we have some aptitude towards and we elevate them in importance over everything else. And so if I am an orderly person, then keeping my personal life in order becomes a high value for me. If I have a streak of honesty within me and that is a high value, then being honest and treating other people honestly becomes a very significant value in my life. And you can go on and on that way, and if I'm a clean person, then staying clean and keeping my family clean becomes a terribly important thing. And that's not all so bad, but what happens when you're selective under the law is that even while you're concentrating on the areas that you're good at, you are neglecting conveniently the areas that you're not so good at. And so your righteousness becomes very selective and it becomes an other way of bringing the standards of God down to the level that you're comfortable with. Let me give you an example. I had a good friend a good many years ago in whose life keeping the Sabbath or keeping Sunday holy was a very high value. And when he discovered one of his fellow Christians cutting their lawn on Sunday, he was absolutely incensed, couldn't understand, couldn't believe that you can call yourself a Christian and cut your grass on Sunday. And he made no bones about speaking that out. But see, I knew this fellow pretty well. He was a good friend. Actually, for a number of years, one of the elders in one of the churches I served, and I knew that he had a wicked temper. And I knew that every time we tried to confront him with his temper, he just brushed it off because he knew that was an area that he couldn't get under control and because it was an area that he couldn't get under control, not only didn't he want to be reminded of his temper, he just wanted to minimize it. And so here he is, elevating the importance of not working on Sunday, but completely minimizing the commandment to love his neighbor and not skewer them with his wicked anger and with his temper. Now, without trying to get into a discussion of what you ought to do or what you ought not to do on Sunday, from God's point of view, what do you think is a worse sin, cutting your grass on Sunday or killing your neighbor with your bad attitude and your bad temper? See, under the law, we become extremely selective and we pride ourselves in our virtue, a virtue as we'll see in a few moments, that enables us to look down our noses at everybody else who isn't quite as good as we are, who doesn't have it together in the same way. Here's how Jesus put it, again in Matthew chapter 23, "To the Pharisees and the teachers of the law who had this refined to a fine art, woe to you teachers of the law and the Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices, mint, dill, and cumin." That is to say, they took the law of tithing extremely seriously to the point of even tithing their spices. That's better than most of us do. "But you have neglected the more important matters of the law. Just as mercy and faithfulness, you should have practiced the latter without neglecting the former. You blind guides, you strain out a gnat, but you swallow a camel." Let me ask you this morning, how many times have you strained out the smallest of flies, but you have swallowed a camel? To the degree to which we live under the law, our obedience will tend to be external, our obedience will tend to be partial, and we will most likely become judgmental. That is to say, we will get puffed up with pride because we're so good in our chosen areas of expertise, and we will be able to look down our noses at those poor souls that can't measure up to our standards and to our law. Because you see, if you take God's law seriously and you really strive to love him with all of your heart, soul, strength, and mind, and your neighbor as yourself, you know what you discover? You discover that whether you're a churchgoer or have been raised on the wrong side of the tracks, totally outside of the kingdom, all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. Now, as Jesus goes on to point out in the rest of this chapter, and we'll just touch on it later this morning and look at it in more detail, the Lord willing, at a future point, but as Jesus goes on to point out the only difference between the guy that sits in jail because he is a mass murderer and one of us sitting here wanting to scoot to the opposite side of the church because somebody irritates us is one of degree and not of kind. And the only difference between the person who runs around and his wife or her husband and the person who just wanders in his thought life is one of degree and not of kind. And if you really take seriously the righteousness that God is requiring of your life and of my life, there isn't room for pride in any of our lives because we know that but for the grace of God, we wouldn't be any different from the person who is homeless or the person who's been married five times over or the person who can get his drug habit or his alcohol habit under control. Given the same circumstances of life, you and I might well make the same choices and if you think that could have never happened to you, then folks, you don't know your own heart and you are deceiving yourself because it's only the grace of God that we are what we are. And so when you no longer go by God's standards but you start creating your own standard of righteousness, if your own sense of honesty is what you measure everybody else by or your own sense of cleanliness or your own sense of righteousness or your own sense of Sabbath observances which you measure everybody else by, then inevitably you're going to look down your noses at other people and you say, "Why don't they get it together? If they worked as hard as I do, they wouldn't be in debt. If they manage their family better, their kids wouldn't be giving them the kind of trouble that they're experiencing. And if they worked harder, why they could enjoy all the good things the North American life could also yield to them." And once you become judgmental, you create a barrier that will never bring them to Jesus. And again, you know, the Pharisees are an incredible example of that. Jesus, in Luke chapter 18, tells the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector in the temple. Maybe you remember the story. And he says, "The Pharisee stood up and prayed about himself, 'God, I thank you that I am not like other men, robbers, evildoers, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week, and I give a tenth of all I get.'" Now, here's what's interesting about this Pharisee. He's absolutely right about what he is saying. He is not like a robber. He's not like a thief. He fasts twice a week. Interestingly enough, nowhere in the Bible does it say, "You ought to fast twice a week," doesn't even say you ought to fast once a week. For the people of Israel, all they had to do was fast once a year. But if you're going to be a good Pharisee, you got to make sure you get your points in. And so once a year becomes once a week, now becomes twice a week, and you're that much better than everybody else. But what the Pharisee says about himself is absolutely true. He's got all of these virtues. But if you know the story, in the end, it is the publican, the tax collector who walks away justified before God and accepted by him and not the self-righteous Pharisee. Why? Because the publican knows his sin and his need for God's grace and God's forgiveness. He doesn't even dare look up. He bows his head and he cries out, and he says, "Oh, God, be merciful to me, a sinner." And the Pharisee, on the other hand, he's strutting around because he thinks he's so good, but he forgets that no matter how he excels in the areas where he is excelling, his heart is far removed from the humility of faith that God is looking for. And you know what God is looking for in the church is a community of people who've come to know their own sin, who've come to know the saving power of Jesus, who learn to look on the hearts of people rather than what lives in the inside or what they look like on the outside, and who can create a culture and an environment where sinners from all walks of life can come and find healing and restoration through faith in Jesus Christ. Unfortunately, sometimes churches become self-righteous. Sometimes we become holier than thou. And the winsomeness of Jesus that enabled sinners to come, repent of their sins, be cleansed and renewed, is sometimes missing in Christian communities. And that becomes an obstacle then to the saving grace of God and Christ. Philip Yancey, in his book, "What's So Amazing About Grace," begins chapter one with a story that he also relates in his previous book, "The Jesus I Never Knew." It's a true story that was told to him by a friend of his who works with the down and outers in the city of Chicago. And here is the story as his friend related it to him. It's pretty graphic, so bear with me. His friend says, "A prostitute came to me in wretched straits, homeless, sick, unable to buy food for her two-year-old daughter. Through sobs and tears, she told me she had been renting out her daughter two years old to men interested in kinky sex. She made more money renting out her daughter for an hour than she could earn on her own in a night. She had to do it, she said, to support her own drug habit. I could hardly bear hearing her sordid story," says the friend. "For one thing it made me legally liable. I'm required to report cases of child abuse. I had no idea," he says, "what to say to this woman. But then at last I asked if she had ever thought of going to a church for help." And he says, "I will never forget the look of pure naive shock that crossed her face. 'Church?' she cried. 'Why would I ever want to go there? I was already feeling terrible about myself. They just make me feel worse.'" And Yancy goes on to say, "What struck me about my friend's story is that women much like this prostitute fled towards Jesus, not away from Him. The worse a person felt about herself, the more likely she saw Jesus as a refuge. Has the church lost that gift? Evidently the down and the out of flock to Jesus when He lived on earth no longer feel welcome among His followers. What has happened?" I'm glad to report that a church like this, by the grace of God, while I'm sure we're not perfect, is often a place where people like that from every walk of life can come and find Jesus and find wholeness. And how incredibly important that instead of erecting barriers of self-made righteousness, we look beyond the superficialities, we look beyond the behavior, we look upon the heart. God, said the prophet Samuel concerning David many years ago, does not look upon the outward appearance, but looks upon the heart. And I've discovered over the years, and I bet you you have too, that under all the injury, the pain, the filth, the confusion of broken lives, there often lies a treasured heart that is incredibly precious in the sight of God and that Jesus died for that it could be redeemed so that it could be, you know, a diamond in His crown of righteousness and glory. There is more joy in heaven over one sinner that repents than over 99 who have no need of repentance. Are you hearing me? Judgmentalism erects barriers that keep people out of the kingdom. Jesus says in another place concerning the Pharisees, "You travel all over the world to make one single convert," and He says, "Then you make the more children of hell than you are yourself." So under the law, our obedience tends to external. It tends to be partial. We easily become judgmental. And then very quickly on this, our obedience easily becomes self-serving. That is to say, it becomes a way in which we can carve out our reputation and our place. If we can't be anything else in the world, maybe in the church I can be honored for my dedication, for my self-righteousness, and for the way that I know how to operate within the system. Jesus put it this way about the Pharisees. He says, "Watch out for the teachers of the law. They like to walk around in flowing robes and be greeted in the market places and have the most important seats in the synagogue and the places of honor at banquets. They devour widows' houses and for a show make lengthy prayers." Religion and religious observance can become our way of trying to carve out our own place. And again, there isn't a one of us in this place today that outside of the grace of Jesus Christ is totally and completely immune to it. My father used to tell the story back when he was a young man, when the church would be without a pastor, they would have elders do reading sermons. That is sermons prepared by other pastors that would be read then by the elders. And in his day there were two streams of sermons that were available for reading. One by the old timers that was considered more orthodox and more conservative, and one that was a newer strain that didn't always pass the mustard for those who were particularly critical or traditional. And the difference between the two was that the old style had a bigger booklet than the younger or the newer. And so there was this man in the congregation who was one of these watchmen on the walls of Zion. You know the kind. They're always on the watch for heresy and they're always trying to, you know, a little bit like the Pharisees looking for somebody to cross the line. And every time one of these newer sermons was read, that man by his posture and by his behavior made it very, very clear that he was in total disapproval of what was happening, you know, body language, all that sort of thing. So there was this young elder who had to read a sermon, and he didn't really like these long, lengthy, convoluted old ones, and he wanted to read one of the newer ones that was, in his estimation, much more contemporary and much more current, but he was afraid of this man's reaction. So he said to himself, "I know how to fix his little red wagon." And he took that smaller booklet, pasted it inside the bigger booklet, if you can picture this, read the sermon, and wouldn't you know his critics sat there paying full attention, obviously in full agreement with all that was being read, because he was not discerning enough to hear the difference between the one and the other. Now if this elder did that out of wisdom and, you know, to really be able to communicate the Gospel for all the right reasons, that would be okay, I think, maybe. But if he did it out of the fear of man, if he did it out of the fear of man, then he was using religion as a way of securing his own place, and being a Pharisee and being a teacher of the law very easily moves you into a direction where you're doing things simply for the approval of man. And when you start doing things for the approval of man, then you have already fallen far short of the great commandment, which is to love God above all. So how do we sum this up? Jesus says if you live under the law, as do the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, your righteousness is not going to pass the standard that God has created. It'll be external, it'll be incomplete, it'll be filled with judgment, and it will ultimately become extremely self-serving. It won't be about God, it won't be about other people, it'll be all about you. And he says God the Father isn't interested just in having us observe the letter of the law. He wants us to observe the spirit of the law. And so then he goes on in the rest of this chapter to describe for us six illustrations of what is the righteousness that God is looking for. And maybe you can take some time in the course of this next week to look at the remaining verses of this chapter. And then when we come back to it, probably Lord willing, next Sunday morning, we're going to see that it isn't good enough not to murder somebody. You can't even carry hate in your heart. It's not good enough not to run around on your spouse. You mustn't even lust after another relationship. It's not good enough not to swear an oath. Your yay must be yay and your nay must be nay. And it's not good enough to love your friend and to hate your enemy. God wants you to love your enemy even as he loves his enemies. And when you and I begin to understand that that's the purpose and the function of the law, then it will drive us to our knees and it will drive us to Jesus, who alone can forgive us for the many times we fail and who alone can come and live within us by the power of the Holy Spirit so that more and more we become the children of God that in Christ we already are. [CUT] [PROPOSED CUT 1 START at 00:37:18.480; remove through 00:40:28.000] He came to live, live a perfect life. He came to be the living word, our light. He came to die so we'd be reconciled. He came to rise to show His power and might. That's why we praise Him, that's why we sing. That's why we offer Him our everything. That's why we bow down and worship His King, 'cause He gave His everything, 'cause He gave His everything. He came to live, live again in us. He came to be our concrete King and friend. He came to hear and show the lost ones His love. He came to go, prepare a place for us. That's why we praise Him, that's why we sing. That's why we offer Him our everything. That's why we bow down and worship His King, 'cause He gave His everything, 'cause He gave His everything. Hallelujah, hallelujah. That's why we praise Him, that's why we sing. That's why we offer Him our everything. That's why we bow down and worship His King, 'cause He gave His everything, 'cause He gave His everything. [CUT] [PROPOSED CUT 1 END at 00:40:28.000; resume after this marked segment]