Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Does Jesus Make People Self-Righteous? | Who Is Jesus? | Luke 18.10-14

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life and the time it takes to get to work. I'm Keith Simon. And I'm Patrick Miller. Before we hop in, I want to tell you what we are going to start doing in January. Starting right at the very beginning of January, we are going to read through the Gospel of Mark together. And our goal is that people who are setting goals would join us. I just find that at the beginning of January, a lot of people say, I want to start reading my Bible for the first time, or I want to start reading it again, or I just want to read it more. And that's a great aspiration.

Starting point is 00:00:39 Maybe you're thinking that for yourself. And so I hope you'll join us as we read through the gospel of Mark. We actually will have, it's really cool. It's called a guided Bible reading plan. It's a little devotion. It has three devotions in every single week, and it walks you through questions that not only explain Mark to you, but help you apply it to your life. But here's the key. If you're listening to this, you're doing something already in your life to get the Bible into your life. But my guess is that you have a friend or maybe a spouse or a parent or a coworker who would love to be in the Bible, but they're not going to do it unless they have a friend to do that with. Why don't you think about that person and invite them to not just listen to 10-minute Bible talks,

Starting point is 00:01:16 but to download that little devotional and begin making this a new habit, a new goal in their life, starting right at the beginning of the year. We have links to that in our show notes. The TV show, The Office launched maybe 15 years ago, I think it was around 2005, and it was my junior year of high school, and I was hooked. I loved that show from the very beginning. One of my favorite characters was Angela, partially because she's kind of the ultimate Hollywood stereotype of what a Christian is.

Starting point is 00:01:46 She was uptight, judgmental, weird, and she's always wearing turtlenecks because, and I quote her, clothes at the gap are too flashy. She judges Pam for being the, quote, office mattress, which, of course, isn't true at all in the show. And at one point, she actively confesses the fact, that she was exposed to witchcraft and wizardry via Harry Potter against her will. If the only Christians that you knew were the Christians that you meet on TV, I don't think

Starting point is 00:02:12 you'd ever become a Christian. At least I wouldn't. Now, that's okay because of course it's a caricature. It's comedy. That's what you do in comedy. But like most caricatures, it's rooted in some truth. There are a lot of self-righteous Christians. I've been a self-righteous Christian in my life. They'll judge who you vote for on both sides. They'll condemn people if they don't support their cause, whether that's being pro-life or pro-B-LM, they join the crowd of people who are doing all of the public shaming of leaders and individuals for bad behavior and distasteful tweets. And it all leads to an obvious question. Does following Jesus make people self-righteous? But before we can get there, can I point out an obvious fact? It's not just Jesus

Starting point is 00:02:57 followers who are self-righteous. Our whole culture revels in self-righteousness. It's not the the old self-righteousness, which was rooted in a moral code or certain practices of virtue. Today, we aren't selling scarlet a's to the clothing of people who commit adultery. We actually tend to celebrate it in our movies and TV. No, today we are self-righteous by excluding people from public discourse, from public office, academia, and business because they don't fit our particular ideological orthodoxy. Internet shaming has got to be America's newest favorite pastime. the politically correct police troll people for tweets that were posted over a decade ago for ideas that often the trolls themselves believed a decade ago.

Starting point is 00:03:40 Outrage, which is the newest form of moral superiority, is used to signal my superior virtue. It turns out that humans love the feeling of being superior to other humans. And by humans, I mean me. No one trained me to love this, but I know I do. I know I love feeling superior. Why do I gossip? Well, it's partially because it makes me feel morally superior to the person I'm gossiping about. Why do I get sucked into ideological echo chambers online? Because it proves the moral deficiency of people who disagree with me. The more I reflect on it, the more I realize Jesus doesn't have to make us self-righteous. We already are.

Starting point is 00:04:21 I've never met someone who doesn't think that he or she is morally superior to at least half of the population. It turns out that the caricature of the self-righteous judgmental Christian is really just a mirror for our entire country, for every human who's ever lived. We may draw our lines of exclusion in different places, but the principle still stands. We love self-righteousness. So what about Jesus? I mean, if anybody had the grounds to be self-righteous, it had to be Jesus. He loved his friends perfectly. He spoke the truth in love.

Starting point is 00:04:55 He loved his enemies. He forgave without. limits. He healed the sick and gave good news to the poor. He never used a woman as an object for his pleasure. He never took up the sword against any man. He suffered injustice nonviolently for the sake of many. But was he self-righteous about all of his moral accomplishments? Not at all. He knew that the crowd would crucify him one day, but when he saw them, he didn't have self-righteous outrage at them. He felt compassion. When they were hungry, he didn't say, well, you know what you're going to do one day, he fed them. When they were sick, he healed them. Did Jesus call out Judas and shame him as

Starting point is 00:05:34 being his betrayer in public? No, the night before his crucifixion, the very night that Judas is going off to betray him, Jesus kneels down as a servant and washes Judas's feet. He deserved the worship and the service of all people, but this is what he said. The son of man came not to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many. So perhaps it's no surprise. that an early Christian song quoted by the Apostle Paul, Jesus has not praised as the one who made himself morally superior to all people, but instead he's praised as the one who humbled himself to the point of death on a cross. He became sin, the very one who didn't actually know any sin, even though he was rich, for our sake, he became poor so that through his

Starting point is 00:06:21 poverty we might become rich. Whatever Hollywood caricatures say about Christians, they tell us nothing about Jesus. He was not self-righteous. He was humble and forgiving to the people he should have thought he was morally superior to. In fact, it's his humility and forgiveness that is actually able to set people free from self-righteousness. That's the question that we need to be asking. We are all self-righteous people. We all love feeling superior. What we need is to be set free from that self-righteousness. Okay, so how? How does his humility and forgiveness set us free? Well, at the read of all, self-righteousness, there's a need to prove ourselves. That's why we're self-righteous. It's not just that we love feeling superior. It's that we need to prove ourselves to ourselves, to ourselves, to others, to God.

Starting point is 00:07:07 Self-righteousness is always a masquerade. It might be a masquerade for a lot of different people. It might be a masquerade for people on our social media. It might be a masquerade for the public world. It might be a masquerade for our family and our friends. But we put on the mask of self-righteousness, moral superiority, because we want to be loved and accepted. Because we don't really believe that anybody could love us for the real us. We don't want to know what people could say if they could hear our true thoughts, our darkest desires. Who could really love us if they really knew us? Well, maybe the truth is no one, except Jesus, because Jesus isn't self-righteous. Jesus wouldn't take the ugliness in our hearts and use it against us. We know that Jesus

Starting point is 00:07:50 could love us because he's humble and because he's forgiving. Jesus assures us that what he wants is honest transparency, not the masquerade of self-righteousness. He forgives people who come to him honestly with their sin about what's really happening inside of their hearts. One of my favorite parables of Jesus is about two different characters, Luke 1810. Two men went up to the temple to pray, one, a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. Now, the first character, like the story says, is a Pharisee. So he's a master of this masquerade of self-righteousness.

Starting point is 00:08:24 He genuinely believes that his lifestyle. is going to bring God's kingdom of justice on earth. He excludes anybody and everyone who jeopardizes his vision of what justice should look like on earth. Jesus says this. He goes, the Pharisee stood by himself and prayed. God, I thank you that I'm not like these other people. I mean, this sounds like a tweet from today.

Starting point is 00:08:46 I'm so glad I'm not one of those people, robbers, evildoers, adulterers, or even like that tax collector. I fast twice a week. and I give a tenth of all that I get. I mean, can we talk about the ultimate virtue signal? He's out in public proclaiming who he's glad he's not and showing who he really is. This is straight out of modern day social media. He is a master of the masquerade.

Starting point is 00:09:11 Now, the other character is a tax collector. He's a Roman sympathizer, a pawn of the empire's colonial aspirations. The Pharisees sees him in the same way that we'd probably see someone in the clan. But listen how Jesus continues. But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, God, have mercy on me a sinner. He's not good at the masquerade, is he?

Starting point is 00:09:38 There's no masks, just honesty, just transparency. I'm as bad as I look. I'm a sinner. So who, according to Jesus, is ultimately going to participate in God's kingdom of love, justice and mercy? Jesus says this. I tell you that this man, the tax person, tax collector. Rather than the other, went home justified before God, for all those who exalt themselves

Starting point is 00:10:01 will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted. Jesus wants to end the masquerade. He does it by opening his humble and forgiving arms, to people who set down their masks, to people who admit the truth. I'm not righteous. I'm a sinner. Jesus called self-righteous people whitewashed tombs, who care more about the outside of the cup than the inside. Jesus cares about the inside, but he can only deal with it if we're honest about it, if we stop trying to cover it up with all the masks. Jesus has never made anyone self-righteous. We came to Jesus already self-righteous on our own. Jesus offers the cure for self-righteousness, love and forgiveness. The masquerade of self-righteousness will only exhaust you with fakeness. It'll give you

Starting point is 00:10:49 fleeting joy, brief moments of superiority, but they'll be snuffed out in a second by the truth that we're all just fakers in the end. Jesus offers a life of authenticity and transparency, where we heal the ugliness inside by being honest about it, not hiding it. So today, I want to challenge you to be honest with Jesus and receive his love, his humility, and his forgiveness. Quick reminder, we are starting Mark in January. So set a goal, read your Bible. More importantly, find a friend to do this with. Who is that friend? I want you to stop before you do anything else and text that person right now and say, hey, I've got a great idea.

Starting point is 00:11:29 Let's read our Bibles together in January 2020. We're going to start in the Gospel of Mark. I've got a devotion that you can read, a podcast you can listen to. They're going to feel cared for, and they're going to be excited to do this with you. Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed this content, please subscribe and give us a rating. That helps other people find this podcast more easily. Also, ask yourself, who could you share this podcast with?

Starting point is 00:11:55 Texting an episode to a friend or a family member is a great way to help them grow spiritually. If you want to go deeper, check out our show notes for book recommendations.

Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Does Jesus Make People Self-Righteous? | Who Is Jesus? | Luke 18.10-14

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