Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - What Pride Takes From You | Torah | Deuteronomy 29

Episode Date: November 9, 2022

Do you know your own sin? What's keeping you from living out God's promises to you? Are you comfortable with your sin? In today's episode, Jensen discusses Deuteronomy 29 and the danger of pride. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others, so others can find it too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter@TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passages: Deuteronomy 29 Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now.

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 Jensen Holt McNair. If someone told you today that five years from now, you wouldn't be following Jesus anymore, what do you think would be the thing that pulled you away? Maybe you've been asked that question before. Maybe you haven't. If not, it's a challenging but also super helpful question to wrestle with. I've been asked this question a few times. It seems to be a favorite of my pastors. And I get why. This question makes me come face to face with the cynical, doubting, stubborn parts of my heart and pull them out into the light. And to be honest, every time I think hard

on this question, I come up with the same answer. My pride would have gotten in the way. I think I'm pretty great. And because of that, I tend to rely on myself, be overconfident, and coast through my walk with Jesus. And it's really tempting to see this tendency. in myself and think, well, it's not that big of a deal. Honestly, I'm in good company. Everywhere I look, people are telling me to focus on myself, to put me first. I'm bombarded with quotes about how great I am, how special I am, how worthy and wonderful and enough I am every time I turn on my phone. I hear inspirational speakers tell me that God is all love, that he wants me to be happy, that old school Christians want to make me feel guilty about everything.

But God doesn't really care about my sin. He loves me just as I am. And all that noise is so close to the truth that it makes me comfortable and confident in myself while never acknowledging the sin quietly taking root in my heart. Pastor and author Tim Keller wrote, Pride is the carbon monoxide of sin. It's silently and slowly kills you without you even knowing. How can I be so comfortable? with something that is so dangerous. How can I think I'm doing just fine when really I'm slowly dying? Is he right? Well, Moses seems to think so. In Deuteronomy 29, Moses is re-establishing the covenant relationship between God and his people. This covenant is a binding contract where God

promises to be faithful and his people promise to live obediently in light of his saving grace. We've heard passages like this one before. Moses reminds the people of all that God has done for them. He reminds them to be faithful to protect their community from idolatry, and he warns them of what will happen if they fail. But in this reestablishment of the covenant, Moses says a few things that I want to focus in on. In verse four, after reminding the people of Israel, all that God has done for them, Moses says, but to this day, the Lord has not given you a heart to understand or eyes to see or ears to hear.

And then he continues to tell of what God has done for them. He slips this statement in and when you're reading, it's probably one of those verses you put a question mark next to. Like, what is Moses saying? Why is this here? This verse is different than what we've seen in other covenantal renewals. But it is incredibly important. See, Moses is pointing out the hard truth that the Israelites are incapable of being obedient to this covenant in their own power. In order to obey and live faithfully, they need God to open their eyes and ears and to give them a heart that understands. They cannot do this in their own power. And because of this truth, Moses warns against a type of person who might be among the Israelites. Verse 18,

Beware, lest there be among you a root-bearing poisonous and bitter fruit, one who, when he hears the words of this sworn covenant, blesses himself in his heart, saying, I shall be safe, though I walk in the stubbornness of my heart. This will lead to the sweeping away of moist and dry alike. The Lord will not be willing to forgive him, but rather the anger of the Lord and his jealousy will smoke against that man. and the curses written in this book will settle upon him, and the Lord will blot out his name from under heaven. That's intense. But Moses is not messing around when it comes to pride. The person who hears these laws, who hears the covenant and thinks,

I'll be good, keep doing my thing. God's going to be cool about it. That person is a poison to the community. The Lord promises to blot them out, to sweep them away. See, pride is like carbon monoxide, a silent and deadly poison because it creeps into our lives, clouds our ability to see our sin, and lulls us into a comfortable state of stubborn disobedience. Pride takes us on a slow, easy walk right towards death and destruction.

We cannot forget that Moses has already told us that we cannot be obedient to the covenant on our own ability. It is impossible. Pride keeps us from seeing that. It tells us we can do it. It tells us we don't need to cut out sin. We don't need to confront our brokenness. We don't need to fall down and accept the mercy and grace of our sovereign Savior because we've already blessed ourselves. Our pride tells us we don't need Jesus. We have it under control. In Matthew 9, Jesus has an interaction with the Pharisees, the religious leaders of his day. Verse 10. While Jesus was having dinner at Matthew's house, many tax collectors and sinners came and ate with him and his disciples. When the Pharisees saw this, they asked his disciples,

why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners? On hearing this, Jesus said, It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. But go and learn what this means. I desire mercy, not sacrifice, for I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners. The Pharisees, so caught up in their own pride, look out and see the sin and brokenness of the tax collectors and sinners, and they see them as other. They are the ones who are disobedient, not the Pharisees. But when they expose their prideful hearts to Jesus, he responds beautifully. It is not the healthy who need a doctor. but the sick. See, Jesus is the great physician, and he didn't come to call the righteous, because no one can be righteous. He came for the sinners, for the ones who know they need him,

the sick who so desperately want to be healed. The Pharisees and their pride believe themselves to be righteous, and in doing so, they reject Jesus. The preachers and teachers of the law have become the one that Moses warns God's people about. Blessing themselves, they cannot see their need for a Savior. See, the tricky thing is that this rejection of Jesus, it isn't outright. It's not the atheist yelling in the street. There is no God. No, it's me. It's me, the self-righteous 26-year-old woman with a podcast about Jesus who used to do full-time ministry taking her son to church every Sunday, but failing to grasp the depravity of her sin as it slowly grows in her heart. I am just like the Pharisees.

Unchecked my pride, your pride, our pride will keep us from sitting humbly before our Savior and receiving the mercy and grace that we need to live. Our pride will lure us into a self-fulfilling, performative faith that is a breeding ground for sin. See, Jesus came to heal the sick. He came to fulfill this covenant that he made in Deuteronomy 29. God is faithful to redeem his people and call them out of their slavery to sin through the person and work of King Jesus. You cannot find righteousness on your own merit. You are sick. You need a doctor. The pride in our hearts is poisoning us to our core. I don't want to wake up in five, ten, or forty years and realize that I've been wasting my life shrugging off sin and making myself feel like a good person through trite sayings and false gospels.

I want to finish today with another quote from Tim Keller. He writes, The gospel is this. We are more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we ever dared believe. Yet, at the very very very. same time, we are more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ than we ever dared hope. Don't get fooled into believing a self-championing false gospel of pride. You are more sinful than you ever dared to believe. Let that humble your pride. But let it also throw you head first

into the healing love and acceptance of King Jesus that is far greater than anything you and I have ever imagined. Let's rejoice today knowing that our covenant with God is not dependent on our own righteousness. He has made a way for his people to find healing. Will you take time today to face your sickness? Name your sins, humble your heart, and praise God that He has sent the great physician to bring healing to all who need it. Before you forget, sign up for the 10-minute Bible Talks newsletter. Hit the link in the show notes and you'll get an email every Wednesday that will help encourage you in the middle of the work week and bring you deeper in your walk with Jesus.

Thanks for listening.