[SPEAKER_01]: You are listening to audio from Citizens Church located in Plano, Texas.
[SPEAKER_01]: For more information about this ministry or to give to this ministry, please visit citizenschurch.com.
[SPEAKER_02]: If you have a Bible, turn to Luke chapter, eighteen, and we're going to be in the verses that Miss Jenna just read for us.
[SPEAKER_02]: Nine through fourteen.
[SPEAKER_02]: As you're turning there, if you're new to citizens, welcome.
[SPEAKER_02]: My name's Jayman.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm one of the pastors here, and we are honored that you're worshiping with us this morning.
[SPEAKER_02]: If you call citizens home and you're here, it's good to see you.
[SPEAKER_02]: There's a pastor that you've probably never heard of.
[SPEAKER_02]: His name is Augustus Toplady.
[SPEAKER_02]: He was born in England in seventeen forty.
[SPEAKER_02]: When he was fifteen years old, he attended a Methodist Revival in an Irish barn.
[SPEAKER_02]: And the Lord met him.
[SPEAKER_02]: He heard the gospel, the Lord met him and saved him.
[SPEAKER_02]: And not only did the Lord save him, but he on that very night committed his life to ministry.
[SPEAKER_02]: And he did not live very long.
[SPEAKER_02]: He died of tuberculosis in seventeen seventy eight at the age of thirty eight years old.
[SPEAKER_02]: He'd never married, never had kids.
[SPEAKER_02]: And you probably never heard of him before this moment, at least his name.
[SPEAKER_02]: You may have heard something that he wrote.
[SPEAKER_02]: In seventeen seventy five, just a few years before his death, he wrote these words.
[SPEAKER_02]: Rock of ages, cleft for me.
[SPEAKER_02]: Let me hide myself and the left the water and the blood from the wounded side which float, be of sin, the double cure, save from wrath, and make me pure.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's a hymn called Rock of Ages.
[SPEAKER_02]: Most of my childhood was spent in small Baptist churches, and what that looked like is most Sundays when we gathered to worship the worship leader would say, grab your hymn books and turn to hymn number one, twenty-one, or something like that.
[SPEAKER_02]: Anyone grew up in a church like that?
[SPEAKER_02]: And Rock of Ages was him number three, forty-two in the Baptist hymnome.
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's not just one of my favorite hymns.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's one of my favorite songs.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, I love this song.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's up there with how great that are and beautiful name and don't stop believing and all those great.
[SPEAKER_02]: All the greats.
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't know if you have this experience.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's one of those songs where the older I get, the true or it feels.
[SPEAKER_02]: And it doesn't become more true just because I experience that way.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's as true as it always is.
[SPEAKER_02]: But there's a intensity to my experience of this song as I try to follow Jesus.
[SPEAKER_02]: And here's the stanza that is just the most precious to me.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like no matter where I am or what's happening in my heart, when we sing these lines, there's just some sort of layer that falls off.
[SPEAKER_02]: Nothing in my hands I bring simply to the cross I cling.
[SPEAKER_02]: Naked come to thee for dress, helpless look to thee for grace, foul.
[SPEAKER_02]: I to the fountain fly, wash me, save your or I die.
[SPEAKER_02]: Before a holy God, I don't have anything to bring.
[SPEAKER_02]: My hands are empty.
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't have anything to cover myself.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm exposed.
[SPEAKER_02]: I cannot save myself.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm helpless.
[SPEAKER_02]: I can't clean myself up, I'm impure.
[SPEAKER_02]: And as it is, in that very state of being helpless and impure and guilty and uncovered, that's the very state where Jesus will meet me.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's the very state where Jesus will meet you.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I can cling to the cross and know that Jesus will close me with His grace and cleanse me with His love.
[SPEAKER_02]: Nothing in my hands I bring simply to the cross I claim.
[SPEAKER_02]: You may have noticed when you walked in that this fall we're in a series called Becoming Like Jesus.
[SPEAKER_02]: And the plan is to be in the series for about eight weeks if history repeats itself will be in the series for a couple years.
[SPEAKER_02]: The point of Christianity is becoming like Jesus.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's a deeply held conviction that we have here at Citizen's Church, being loved by Him and becoming like Him.
[SPEAKER_02]: The great hope of the Church is to form Christ's likeness in her people.
[SPEAKER_02]: One theologian said at this way, the Christian life is the paradox of becoming what you already are in Christ.
[SPEAKER_02]: We want to give all of our energy to that, our resources, our prayers, just a desperate dependence on God to form Christ's likeness in the people of Citizen's Church.
[SPEAKER_02]: And we're going to give the fall to that.
[SPEAKER_02]: And we're going to consider the life of Jesus with the hope of becoming more like Him in a whole non-compartmenalized way.
[SPEAKER_02]: We want His mind, and we want His heart, and we want His soul, and we want His strength.
[SPEAKER_02]: We want to think and love and feel and act like Jesus.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I have a concern for this series, which is why we're in the passage we're in this morning.
[SPEAKER_02]: My concern is that as we move through it and we see Jesus as the standard, as this mirror we're supposed to look into, that we will subtly believe that we are loved by God to the degree that we look like Jesus.
[SPEAKER_02]: And some of us will feel like we're doing a pretty good job sometimes at that and think, okay, well, because I'm doing a pretty good job, that's why God loves me.
[SPEAKER_02]: Others of us will see that we have so much change still needed.
[SPEAKER_02]: So many parts of our lives that do not look like Jesus and we will respond to that by believing we have to earn our way back into God's love.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's a
[SPEAKER_02]: a subtle lie that I just want to protect against as we start this series.
[SPEAKER_02]: Here at this way, in the Christian life, there are different degrees of maturity, but there are not different levels of acceptance in the Christian life.
[SPEAKER_02]: nothing in my hands I bring simply to the cross-site cling.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's all we have.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's all you have, beloved.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's all you have.
[SPEAKER_02]: So where I want to start this series this morning is just with that truth that we all, we come empty handed to God and He in love meets our empty handed helpless, uncovered, impure state with His steadfast love.
[SPEAKER_02]: And hear me, that's not just the starting place of relationship with God.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's the staying place.
[SPEAKER_02]: of relationship with God.
[SPEAKER_02]: That we empty hand it hold on to his love, hold on to his, it is his righteousness that is imparted to us, not the righteousness we offer in return.
[SPEAKER_02]: So Jesus tells a story about a man who came with his morality in his hands and he went home unchanged.
[SPEAKER_02]: And a man who came with empty hands and he went home full of mercy.
[SPEAKER_02]: I just want to sit in this story together.
[SPEAKER_02]: Look at verse nine.
[SPEAKER_02]: This is Jesus telling stories.
[SPEAKER_02]: He told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and treated others with contempt.
[SPEAKER_02]: Two men went up into the temple to pray, want a Pharisee in the other tax collector.
[SPEAKER_02]: The Pharisee standing by himself prayed thus, God, I thank you that I'm not like other men, extortioners unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector.
[SPEAKER_02]: I fast twice a week, I give tides of all that I get.
[SPEAKER_02]: But the tax collector standing far off would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breasts saying, God, be merciful to me a sinner.
[SPEAKER_02]: I tell you this man down to his house justified rather than the other, for everyone who exalts himself will be humbled.
[SPEAKER_02]: But the one who humbles himself will be exalted.
[SPEAKER_02]: Have a question for you?
[SPEAKER_02]: What kinds of people did Jesus preach the gospel to?
[SPEAKER_02]: He preached the gospel of the kingdom.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's what the gospel's tell us.
[SPEAKER_02]: Jesus' message was the gospel of the kingdom and sounded like this.
[SPEAKER_02]: God is making everything right in and through Jesus who is the promised Messiah.
[SPEAKER_02]: And you can be forgiven of sin and you can share in the unrelenting covenantal love of God that will never leave you or forsake you.
[SPEAKER_02]: You have only to repent and believe.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's his message.
[SPEAKER_02]: What kind of people did he invite into that?
[SPEAKER_02]: Two kinds of people.
[SPEAKER_02]: If you look at Jesus' interactions, his teachings, stories like the Paraboli tells here, the two kinds of people in the story are the two kinds of people that he preached to and ministered to and befriended.
[SPEAKER_02]: The first is unrighteous sinners, like this tax collector.
[SPEAKER_02]: A tax collector went into the temple to pray, and he represents a lot of people who were responding to Jesus.
[SPEAKER_02]: This is a fictitious story.
[SPEAKER_02]: It didn't actually happen.
[SPEAKER_02]: Jesus makes it up to make a point.
[SPEAKER_02]: He includes the tax collector, though, because real people like that were responding to the gospel.
[SPEAKER_02]: There are people who made an absolute mess of their life.
[SPEAKER_02]: Absolutely mess with their life.
[SPEAKER_02]: They spent all or most of their life living in God's world their own way.
[SPEAKER_02]: A tax collector was, you may have heard something like this before, a tax collector was someone who was willing to help the Roman Empire oppress and enslave their own people so that they could then get rich off that oppression.
[SPEAKER_02]: Their job was basically state-supported organized crime, and it hurt the people who were there, countrymen, who were like them.
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't know of a modern equivalent, how selfish though do you have to be to make a living off the suffering of your own people?
[SPEAKER_02]: So this man had committed his life to greed and idolatry, and he had failed to love God, he had failed to love his neighbor, and you hear in the Pharisees prayer what kind of people tax collectors were associated with thieves, unjust, adulterers.
[SPEAKER_02]: people who cheat and lie and make promises that they then break.
[SPEAKER_02]: And often when you hear text collectors, they're grouped with a category of people that the Bible just calls sinners.
[SPEAKER_02]: This is how Luke fifteen starts before Jesus tells his famous three stories.
[SPEAKER_02]: All the text collectors and sinners were approaching to listen to Jesus.
[SPEAKER_02]: I thought everybody sinned, everybody does sin.
[SPEAKER_02]: So, sinner was a class of people.
[SPEAKER_02]: They weren't people who sinned.
[SPEAKER_02]: They were people who were so publicly immoral that they're sinned to find who they were to those around them.
[SPEAKER_02]: It made them unwelcome by the religious unclean, to the religious.
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's not simply, it's an oversimplification to say, oh, well, the religious people were just being judgmental about them.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's too simple.
[SPEAKER_02]: They were guilty of a grigious sin against God.
[SPEAKER_02]: Jesus tells a story about them in Luke fifteen and says, they're like a son.
[SPEAKER_02]: who went to his father and said, give me all the money that you owe me so that I can use you and leave you and find life without you.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's what the tax collectors and sinners did to God.
[SPEAKER_02]: They've lived a life that breaks the heart of God, like the way a father would feel if his son wanted his things and wished him dead.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so everyone believed that they were far from God with little hope of being made right with God, especially in the culture they lived in the first century.
[SPEAKER_02]: Today we have creative ways of excusing our sin.
[SPEAKER_02]: Sometimes we can be tolerant to a fault.
[SPEAKER_02]: We don't have a sense of the sacredness, holiness, and justice of God like this culture did.
[SPEAKER_02]: So it's hard for us to understand maybe.
[SPEAKER_02]: Maybe if we imagine the worst thing we ever did, maybe if you were to imagine the worst thing you ever thought about doing, and if somehow that was made public to everyone that lived around you, that you saw in a given day, and then as you go to work or go to the store or try to go to church, that shame went before you, and that shame hovered over you, and it's because of the things that you had actually done.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's what life was like for them.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's what it was to be in this class of tax collector and sinner.
[SPEAKER_02]: How can people like that be made right with God?
[SPEAKER_02]: What chance does someone like that who incindigance God that agregiously but chance do they have with Jesus?
[SPEAKER_02]: In the next chapter of Luke, Jesus invites himself to a text collector's house.
[SPEAKER_02]: The text collector's name is Zacchaeus.
[SPEAKER_02]: When Jesus invites himself over to Zacchaeus's house, everyone complains because Jesus went to the house of a sinful man.
[SPEAKER_02]: He was not a good person.
[SPEAKER_02]: For all of his adult life, he had sinned against God and against others.
[SPEAKER_02]: Every day that he went to work, Jesus moves towards him in love.
[SPEAKER_02]: Zacchaeus is so overwhelmed that he repents in his living room.
[SPEAKER_02]: And Jesus says, today's salvation has come to this house for the Son of Man came to see, can say, that which is lost.
[SPEAKER_02]: In Luke chapter seven, Jesus is eating dinner at a Pharisee named Simon's house in a sinful woman walks in.
[SPEAKER_02]: She belonged to the class in category of sinner.
[SPEAKER_02]: And she belongs to that class because of her public sexual sin that everybody knew about.
[SPEAKER_02]: She likely spent most of her adult life sitting against God and others.
[SPEAKER_02]: Her presence at this dinner is an offense to everyone except for Jesus.
[SPEAKER_02]: And she falls at his feet.
[SPEAKER_02]: and she wipes his feet with her tears, and he looks her in the eyes and says, your sins are forgiven.
[SPEAKER_02]: In the story Jesus tells in Luke fifteen, the older brother says about the younger brother that the younger brother devoured the father's things with parties and prostitutes, and he comes home begging to be a servant, and the father refuses to let him come home as a servant and restores him as a son.
[SPEAKER_02]: In this story, the tax collector prays a simple prayer.
[SPEAKER_02]: It walks into the temple with this lifetime of sin against God, sin against his people, standing far off would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breasts saying, God be merciful to me, a sinner.
[SPEAKER_02]: And Jesus says that that man goes, oh, justified, loved and accepted, and God is pleased and delighted in him.
[SPEAKER_02]: Do you see what's happening?
[SPEAKER_02]: These unright like the worst of the worst class and category of sinful person comes to Jesus.
[SPEAKER_02]: And when they come to Jesus, they come with all of their creative excuses for why they've done the things they've done.
[SPEAKER_00]: No.
[SPEAKER_02]: They come with their resolve to be better.
[SPEAKER_02]: They come with the list of good that they have done to try to outweigh the bad.
[SPEAKER_02]: No.
[SPEAKER_02]: They fall in the ground, they cry on his feet, they stand far off, they pray a humble prayer for mercy, and Jesus meets their empty handed repentance with love.
[SPEAKER_02]: Nothing in my hands I bring simply to the cross cycling.
[SPEAKER_02]: naked come to thee for dress, helpless look to thee for grace, foul eye to the fountain fly, wash me, save your or I die.
[SPEAKER_02]: And when people come with that kind of humble repentance every single time their humble repentance is met with the righteousness of Christ in their place, and some of us have this story.
[SPEAKER_02]: Some of us have made a huge mess of our life.
[SPEAKER_02]: Some of us knew what it's like for our sin to be so unignorable that we have no defense.
[SPEAKER_02]: Some of us have done the things that we swore we would never do and we are here because there is a moment in our life where the Lord and His love heard our empty handed prayer.
[SPEAKER_02]: God have mercy on me, a sinner.
[SPEAKER_02]: I have nothing to offer.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm clinging to the cross and what we found was that was enough.
[SPEAKER_02]: He heard, he answered, he saved you, some of you believe it.
[SPEAKER_02]: Some of you need to hear that for the very first time.
[SPEAKER_02]: It is no small thing to live a life that breaks the heart of God.
[SPEAKER_02]: And no life of sin is greater than the mercy and grace of God.
[SPEAKER_02]: The same Jesus who met these people at their worst died for you on the cross, rose and victory over sin and judgment.
[SPEAKER_02]: And he brought you here today not to shun you but to save you.
[SPEAKER_02]: and you have only to come empty handed in grace, needy, and what you will find, friend, what you will find is that there is more mercy and Christ than there is sin and you.
[SPEAKER_02]: Two men went up into the temple to pray, won a fair see in the other tax collector.
[SPEAKER_02]: The Pharisees standing by himself prayed to us, God, I thank you that I'm not like other men, extortioners, unjust adulters, or even like this tax collector.
[SPEAKER_02]: I fast twice a week, I give times of all that I get.
[SPEAKER_02]: Unrighteous sinners are not the only kind of people that Jesus pursues.
[SPEAKER_02]: In fact, this story he tells is not directed at them, verse nine.
[SPEAKER_02]: He told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and treated others with contempt.
[SPEAKER_02]: There are two ways, please hear me, please hear me.
[SPEAKER_02]: There's a way to be to grow up in and around this your entire life and miss the heart of God.
[SPEAKER_02]: There are two ways to run from God.
[SPEAKER_02]: There are two ways to live a sinful life.
[SPEAKER_02]: And all over Jesus's ministry, you see Him pursue both lives.
[SPEAKER_02]: He pursues the unrighteous and the self-righteous.
[SPEAKER_02]: And He calls both the unrighteous and the self-righteous to repentance.
[SPEAKER_02]: And what many of us do is we spend a lot of energy avoiding the unrighteous life by embracing the self-righteous one and both miss the heart of Jesus.
[SPEAKER_02]: A Pharisee was a professional at morality and religion.
[SPEAKER_02]: No one would put the Pharisee in the class with the extortioner and the adulterer.
[SPEAKER_02]: They were morally admirable.
[SPEAKER_02]: Their culture admired them, held them up as examples of godliness.
[SPEAKER_02]: If there was, if we were to put it in our context, if there was a school full of tax collector kids and a school full of Pharisee kids, we would email someone to try to get our kids in with the Pharisee kids.
[SPEAKER_02]: He fast twice a week.
[SPEAKER_02]: He gives ties of all that he gets.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's more than the law even required.
[SPEAKER_02]: Here's my point.
[SPEAKER_02]: We would not.
[SPEAKER_02]: If we were in the temple that day, we would not have watched the tax collector come to the temple and then watched the Pharisee come to the temple and thought the Pharisee is the one who needed the gospel preach to them.
[SPEAKER_02]: We would not expect Jesus to tell parables of repentance to the morally admired.
[SPEAKER_02]: But he does.
[SPEAKER_02]: all over his ministry.
[SPEAKER_02]: You see this.
[SPEAKER_02]: Remember the woman who cries of Jesus' feet?
[SPEAKER_02]: They talked about her six months ago.
[SPEAKER_02]: Simon, the Pharisee, who threw the dinner, is so bothered.
[SPEAKER_02]: that Jesus let her get that close, and Jesus tells him a story about someone who loves much because they were forgiven much, and someone who loves little because they were forgiven little, and he's confronting him.
[SPEAKER_02]: In Luke XV, in this story, Jesus tells us about two sons, an unrighteous son who runs to the far country at the beginning of the story, and a self-righteous son who runs to the porch at the end of the story.
[SPEAKER_02]: The self-righteous doesn't run as far, but he still leaves home.
[SPEAKER_02]: Here you have a tax collector seeking mercy and a Pharisee who's praying his spiritual resume and the message of repentance is directed, not at the one asking for mercy, but at the one who thought he didn't need it.
[SPEAKER_02]: See something, friends.
[SPEAKER_02]: See this.
[SPEAKER_02]: There are two ways to live apart from God.
[SPEAKER_02]: And Jesus preaches the gospel to both lives.
[SPEAKER_02]: In fact, what we often see Jesus do is he will use the repentance of the unrighteous to confront the unrepentance of the self-righteous.
[SPEAKER_02]: Listen, here's how he diagnoses the sin of self-righteousness.
[SPEAKER_02]: I tell you this man went down to his house justified rather than the other for everyone who exalts himself will be humbled.
[SPEAKER_02]: But the one who humbles himself will be exalted.
[SPEAKER_02]: See something.
[SPEAKER_02]: What you don't see Jesus do in these interactions is you don't see him try to convince the self-righteous that they've lived the same life as the unrighteous.
[SPEAKER_02]: Jesus preaches about a deeper righteousness that everyone falls short of, so hear me, everyone is unrighteous.
[SPEAKER_02]: I know that Jesus teaches us that.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's Matthew five.
[SPEAKER_02]: But he doesn't, in these interactions, look to the self-righteous and say, you know what, you've cheated just like the tax collector.
[SPEAKER_02]: You've lived just as greedy as the thieves.
[SPEAKER_02]: You've been just as unfaithful as all the adulterers.
[SPEAKER_02]: You are as sexually deviant as the woman on the ground.
[SPEAKER_02]: He doesn't try to convince them that they've lived the same life as the unrighteous, because in some ways it's just not true, but mostly because they have a bigger problem than that.
[SPEAKER_02]: Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.
[SPEAKER_02]: The sin that Jesus goes after in the life of the self-righteous is the sin of pride.
[SPEAKER_02]: And there is no pride as dangerous or as subtle as the pride that hides in the other side of our morality.
[SPEAKER_02]: Because that pride tells us we don't need grace like others.
[SPEAKER_02]: It sings a different song.
[SPEAKER_02]: All my good behavior I bring to my own righteousness, I cling.
[SPEAKER_02]: Andrew Murray, he wrote a book on humility, and he talks about this parable, and he makes this point that is helpful.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's a long quote, and I hate it, but it's really helpful.
[SPEAKER_02]: There is no pride so dangerous, so subtle and insidious as the pride of holiness.
[SPEAKER_02]: Two men went into the temple to pray.
[SPEAKER_02]: They want to Pharisee the other attack structure.
[SPEAKER_02]: There was no place or position so sacred that the Pharisee could not enter there.
[SPEAKER_02]: Pride can lift its head in the very temple of God and make His worship the scene of itself exaltation.
[SPEAKER_02]: The confessor of deep sinfulness and the professor of highest holiness must both be on watch.
[SPEAKER_02]: And in listen to this, it's a warning.
[SPEAKER_02]: Just when we're most anxious to have our heart be the temple of God, we will find the two men coming to pray.
[SPEAKER_02]: And the tax collector will find that his danger is not from the Pharisee beside him who despises him, but the Pharisee within who commends and exalts himself.
[SPEAKER_02]: Pride is so insidious, he's saying, that the unrighteous met with mercy can so quickly become the self-righteous who believe they don't need it anymore.
[SPEAKER_02]: Both lives exist in my heart.
[SPEAKER_02]: Both lives exist in your heart.
[SPEAKER_02]: A man came out to me after the first service and he just said, you know, I lived most of my life before Jesus as a tax collector.
[SPEAKER_02]: I did awful, awful things.
[SPEAKER_02]: He said, but I've lived most of my life after Jesus as a Pharisee.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that pull of the heart, either towards legalism or licentiousness, either towards unrighteousness or self-righteousness, exist in all of us.
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's so familiar to us, we may not even see it in our life.
[SPEAKER_02]: Richard Lovelace says that theologians, he says that this way, many Christians in their day-to-day existence rely on their sanctification for their justification.
[SPEAKER_02]: If you don't know those words, that's okay.
[SPEAKER_02]: He's saying many Christians look to their obedience to God to prove their acceptance with God and not the other way around.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's self-righteousness.
[SPEAKER_02]: We're lying.
[SPEAKER_02]: There's sanctification for their justification.
[SPEAKER_02]: Hear me, God delights in your obedience.
[SPEAKER_02]: He does.
[SPEAKER_02]: God doesn't, God wants our obedience as the fruit of our salvation.
[SPEAKER_02]: He does not want our obedience as the source of our salvation.
[SPEAKER_02]: Tim Keller expounds on this way, he says, this, the default mode of the human heart is works right to us.
[SPEAKER_02]: The current of the heart is works righteousness.
[SPEAKER_02]: We do not ordinarily live as if the gospel is true.
[SPEAKER_02]: Christians often believe in their heads that Jesus accepts me, therefore I will live a good life.
[SPEAKER_02]: But their hearts and actions are functioning practically on the principle I live a good life therefore Jesus accepts me.
[SPEAKER_02]: I bring my good behavior.
[SPEAKER_02]: I cling to my own righteousness.
[SPEAKER_02]: I rely on my sanctification for my justification.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's the battle of the soul, especially in a religious area like ours.
[SPEAKER_02]: To believe in my head, nothing in my hands I bring, but to function in life, this is actually all on me.
[SPEAKER_02]: I live a good life, therefore Jesus accepts me.
[SPEAKER_02]: And Jesus wants more for you than that.
[SPEAKER_02]: The self-righteous life is a really miserable way to live.
[SPEAKER_02]: The Pharisees standing by himself prayed thus, God, I thank you that I'm not like other men, extortioners, unjust adulterers, even like this tax collector, I fast twice a week.
[SPEAKER_02]: I give ties of all that I get.
[SPEAKER_02]: If we were to take that self-righteous way of living and just name the symptoms, the self-righteous life is judgmental.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you that I'm not like other men.
[SPEAKER_02]: Self-righteousness relies on the failure of other people to feel justified.
[SPEAKER_02]: I need, if it's up to me, I need other people to live worse than me, which means I start to cheer for their failure.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's why our culture celebrates when people publicly out themselves for having hidden sin.
[SPEAKER_02]: Treat it like entertainment, like it's a reality show, because it makes us feel better about ourselves, because we've never done those things, or at least it's never been on a jumbo trot.
[SPEAKER_02]: The list of sins that bothers me is always shorter than the list of sins God in the self-righteous life.
[SPEAKER_02]: If the Pharisee thought that self-reliance was just as bad as sin as adultery, he would have been on the ground with a tax collector.
[SPEAKER_02]: But self-righteousness does not care about being like God.
[SPEAKER_02]: It just cares about not being like the people I don't like.
[SPEAKER_02]: And everyone's list is different.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you, God, that I'm not like my political enemies.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you, God, that I'm not like the people who commit the sins I never struggle with.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you, God, that I'm not like self-righteous people.
[SPEAKER_02]: We can have a self-righteous response to self-righteous people.
[SPEAKER_02]: See, as Lewis says, one of the marks of pride in my life is that it competes with pride in others.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you, God, that I'm not self-righteous, like they are, is like holding on to the embers of pride in thanking God, that I'm not on fire.
[SPEAKER_02]: Let me say this one.
[SPEAKER_02]: There are some people in this room
[SPEAKER_02]: that have done things others have not.
[SPEAKER_02]: There are some in this room that have committed sins that others never will.
[SPEAKER_02]: There is no one in this room that needs Jesus less than anyone else.
[SPEAKER_02]: No one.
[SPEAKER_02]: The self-righteouss, they have a performed spirituality, so they're judgmental of others.
[SPEAKER_02]: They have this performed spirituality.
[SPEAKER_02]: These men are praying in Jesus' story and we hear their prayers.
[SPEAKER_02]: And in the self-righteous prayer, there's no adoration for God.
[SPEAKER_02]: There's no dependence on God.
[SPEAKER_02]: He just prays his resume.
[SPEAKER_02]: Jesus says about the Pharisees in Matthew six, they love to pray in public and be heard and seen by an audience so their prayer is performance.
[SPEAKER_02]: their spirituality, their giving, their Bible knowledge.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's just performed spirituality because self-righteousness needs the approval of others to feel justified.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so we perform our spirituality to others.
[SPEAKER_02]: Something came to mind in my own life.
[SPEAKER_02]: I pray for my daughter every night.
[SPEAKER_02]: And when I prayed Lord, thank you for adding, thank you for her life.
[SPEAKER_02]: We love you, Amen.
[SPEAKER_02]: And Jesus, none of that.
[SPEAKER_02]: I want one of those pastor prayers.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I said, what do you mean?
[SPEAKER_02]: She said, you know, there's like there's long pasture prayers that you pray on stage.
[SPEAKER_02]: In look, it was late.
[SPEAKER_02]: I was trying to get to bed, part of her wants a long prayer because she wants to stay up later.
[SPEAKER_02]: I felt deeply convicted over that.
[SPEAKER_02]: My daughter experiences a difference between how I pray at church and how I pray at home and not all like that.
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't want to have pastor prayers.
[SPEAKER_02]: I just want jaymen prayers.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's my name.
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't want to talk to God differently in front of you than in front of my family.
[SPEAKER_02]: Something dangerous about that.
[SPEAKER_02]: Beyond that, I want my most honest, intimate, meaningful prayers to be the ones I pray when no one else is around.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like there's a danger in what I do that I end up talking a lot about God.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I don't talk a lot to God.
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't want to talk more about God than I talk to God.
[SPEAKER_02]: And all of that is getting my attention.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's highlighting these ways that I have learned to perform my righteousness in front of others.
[SPEAKER_02]: As if the holiness and love and beauty of God is not enough, but it takes an audience to make me want to pray really good prayers.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's what self-righteousness will do.
[SPEAKER_02]: It will rob us of this intimacy that's available to us.
[SPEAKER_02]: There's a gift that God has given us that we don't have to earn, but instead of receiving it, we perform in front of others.
[SPEAKER_02]: And here's where it leads.
[SPEAKER_02]: This is the worst symptom.
[SPEAKER_02]: We never feel secure in our own self-righteousness.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know this, beloved, you know this.
[SPEAKER_02]: Jesus says everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, one who humbles himself will be exalted.
[SPEAKER_02]: There's a sense of security with God that you only find on the other side of humility before God.
[SPEAKER_02]: And what happens is there is a side of self-righteousness where my self-confidence turns into self-contempt.
[SPEAKER_02]: Because I know I'm not doing enough.
[SPEAKER_02]: Eventually the criticism of others gets turned around.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's a self-inflicted wound and I'm hypercritical in myself because I know how truly weak my own righteousness is and beloved.
[SPEAKER_02]: We will miss God, living life like this.
[SPEAKER_02]: We can live this for days or weeks or years.
[SPEAKER_02]: Some of us a whole lifetime of depending on self and judging others and performing our spirituality and despising ourselves because we know how frail our righteousness is.
[SPEAKER_02]: What chance do the self righteous have with Jesus?
[SPEAKER_02]: The one who's pride has kept us from him.
[SPEAKER_02]: Here's the challenge for so many of us.
[SPEAKER_02]: Our first reaction is to try and justify ourselves.
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, I'm gonna work really hard to stop being so self-righteous, and that's not it.
[SPEAKER_02]: Here's the good news.
[SPEAKER_02]: Jesus invites the self-righteous into the same repentance as the unrighteous.
[SPEAKER_02]: Jesus is not a Pharisee to Pharisees.
[SPEAKER_02]: He is not self-righteous with the self-righteous.
[SPEAKER_02]: Christian, regardless of where you are in any of this, no one in the room is more loved by God than you are.
[SPEAKER_02]: There are not different degrees or there are different degrees of maturity.
[SPEAKER_02]: There are not different levels of acceptance with Christ.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so the cure for the self-righteous is the same as that for the unrighteous.
[SPEAKER_02]: Empty handed repentance.
[SPEAKER_02]: You don't need to bring anything.
[SPEAKER_02]: Leave the life of unrighteousness and leave the life of self-righteousness and throw yourself empty handed at the feet of Jesus and receive the perfect righteousness of Christ.
[SPEAKER_02]: Nothing in my hands I bring.
[SPEAKER_02]: Simply to the cross, I cling.
[SPEAKER_02]: Father, we love you.
[SPEAKER_02]: Father, we need you.
[SPEAKER_02]: The tax collector and the Pharisee exist in my heart.
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, forgive me, God.
[SPEAKER_02]: Forgive me that I am so quick in my unrighteousness to reach for self-righteousness as my salvation.
[SPEAKER_02]: You are so kind, oh God.
[SPEAKER_02]: You are so kind to look at both groups.
[SPEAKER_02]: You are so kind to look at both spirits, God.
[SPEAKER_02]: And you're so kind when you see all of that existing in the same soul to invite by your grace and mercy, humble repentance, that you will, that you will.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's as sure as you are good, you will meet it with mercy and love.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so you're not God looking out at this room and thinking of anyone.
[SPEAKER_02]: You need to bring more than just your empty handed repentance.
[SPEAKER_02]: As if someone in the room is some sort of special class of sinner and they need to bring extra.
[SPEAKER_02]: You're not looking at anyone in the room and saying, you ran out of chances.
[SPEAKER_02]: You've offered your empty handed repentance too many times before and you've hit your quota and there's nothing left.
[SPEAKER_02]: You are by your grace and mercy
[SPEAKER_02]: Once again, offering to your people the loving invitation, come as you are, come.
[SPEAKER_02]: Confess on righteousness, confess self-righteousness, and be forgiven, cleansed, clothed in righteousness, washed wide us up.
[SPEAKER_01]: The foul eye to the fountain fly, wash me, save your or die.
[SPEAKER_01]: We need you.
[SPEAKER_01]: Help us.
[SPEAKER_01]: Amen.