Timothy Keller Sermons Podcast by Gospel in Life - Mercy, Not Sacrifice

Episode Date: December 11, 2023

Jesus tells us that to become a Christian, there has to be a smashing. Christianity is new wine: it ferments, it swells, it’s organically and chemically active, and it will smash the old, inflexible wineskins.  Jesus teaches that there’s an old way that everybody, religious or not, operates under. You will not be a Christian until all your old foundations, your whole approach to yourself and God, are utterly smashed. You must be called away from mere religion. What’s the difference between religion and Christianity? In Matthew 9, we see 1) what religion is, 2) how Jesus smashes it, and 3) a few tests by which we can judge whether we’ve moved away from religion. This sermon was preached by Dr. Timothy Keller at Redeemer Presbyterian Church on September 17, 1995. Series: Matthew 9. Scripture: Matthew 9:9-17. Today's podcast is brought to you by Gospel in Life, the site for all sermons, books, study guides and resources from Timothy Keller and Redeemer Presbyterian Church. If you've enjoyed listening to this podcast and would like to support the ongoing efforts of this ministry, you can do so by visiting https://gospelinlife.com/give and making a one-time or recurring donation.

Is it possible to know who the real Jesus is? Today Tim Keller is teaching about the authentic Jesus of the Bible. Not the Jesus who is a projection of our own desires and biases, but the real surprising Jesus who changes a person from the inside out. After you listen, we'd appreciate it if you would take a few moments to rate and review the podcast. When you do, you'll be encouraging others to listen so they can discover the real Jesus because the gospel changes everything.

Now here's today's teaching from Dr. Keller. As a teaching tonight is based on the passage that is printed in your bulletin and it's Matthew chapter 9. It's written out so if you turn to it with me I'll read it. As we're beginning this fall we're looking for three weeks, last week, this week and next week, at this passage which tells us how Matthew, one of the 12 apostles, became a Christian.

Let me read it to you. As Jesus went on from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax collector's booth. Follow me, he told him, and Matthew got up and followed him. While Jesus was having dinner at Matthew's house, many tax collectors and sinners came and ate with him and his disciples. And 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's 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. Then John's disciples came and asked him, how is it that we and the Pharisees fast,

but your disciples do not fast? And Jesus said, how can the guests of the bridegroom mourn while he is with them? The time will come when the bridegroom will be taken from them and then they will fast. No one shows a patch of untrunk cloth on an old garment, for the patch will pull away from the garment, making the tear worse. Neither do men pour a new wine into old wine skins.

If they do, the skins will burst, the wine will run out and the wine skins will be ruined. No, they pour a new wine into new wine skins and then both are preserved. This is God's Word. Now, what we're doing is for these three weeks, we're looking at this story, this account of Matthew coming to Christ. And then we're doing that in order to set up the whole year of evening teaching because right here in the beginning of the

fall it's a good idea for us to get oriented to the basics. What is a Christian? What is Christianity? By looking at how Jesus brought somebody to Christ Himself, as we look at Matthew's coming and what Jesus says about it, we really laying out some very important principles. brought somebody to Christ himself. As we look at Matthew's coming, and what Jesus says about it, we really laying out some very important principles. And last week we looked at the first principle

of what a Christian is. And that first principle was, a Christian is somebody who's called. Called. Well, without recapitulating, let me just remind you, a Christian is not somebody who has decided to take up a religion or decided to take up Christianity. A Christian is somebody who senses that he or she is being taken up by someone else. The call of God comes to a person. You're not a Christian unless you're called.

Jesus comes to Matthew and says, follow me. And anyone who really is a Christian, either in the beginning or in the middle or certainly after the process of coming to Christ and says, follow me. And anyone who really is a Christian, either in the beginning or in the middle or certainly after the process of coming to Christ is over, you sense that you have not just sat down and decided to subscribe to a religion. You don't look at Christianity and say, I like this. You sense that you're confronted with a person.

You sense that there's some force outside of you dealing with you. Maybe in the beginning you think that you're on your outside of you dealing with you. Maybe in the beginning you think that you're on your way because you're seeking. In the beginning you think, I'm thinking about Christianity, I'm thinking about these spiritual things, I'm studying, I'm going to a class, I'm reading books, I'm doing it. But if Christ is calling you, at some point you'll become aware that it's not your idea. It's not that I did choose thee, for Lord that could not be, this heart would still refuse

thee, that's thou not chosen me. And that's one of the hymns that goes after that, and every Christian understands that. You're called. There's an adventure to Christianity. You haven't just decided. And now here's a couple of, here's three children sleeping in the upstairs nursery, Wendy, Michael, and John. They just think it's going to be a normal night.

They don't say, let's have an adventure, but the adventure finds them. They keep the nursery doors open, the income's Peter Pan, they're taken away. That's every good adventure starts like that. You see, the protagonist aren't looking for adventure. Adventure comes and gets them. That's what it means to be a Christian.

Christian is somebody whose nursery doors have been blown open. A Christian is somebody who's been called now. Secondly, and that's what we're looking at tonight. To be called means you're called away from something and you're called towards something. So how convenient that gives us two more things to talk about for two weeks. You're called from something and to something. So how convenient that gives us two more things to talk about for two weeks. You're called from something and to something.

To become a Christian is to be confronted both by a negative and a positive. You don't understand Christianity and you're not a Christian unless you are willing to confront both. There's a negative and a positive. Far too many people miss the negative. Far too many people, miss the negative. Far too many people say, well, I'm interested in Christianity.

I can't continually talk to people who come to Redeemer and they say, well, I've always, I think, believed I was raised in a church or something like that, somewhere else besides New York. But I haven't been very religious. I'm thinking about becoming a practicing Christian. Oh, I'm pretty sure that I'm a Christian, but for many years I haven't practiced it.

I'm going to put it into practice. That's the way they think. In fact, there's a lot of talk about that. Are you a practicing Buddhist? Or are you a practicing Jew? Are you a practicing Catholic, a practicing Protestant? When I hear that, it makes my his megu's pumps in light of a passage like this.

A lot of people think that to be a Christian means, well, you know what you should be doing, and now I'm just gonna get serious about it. I'm just gonna positively move out and get more intense, I'm gonna get more prayer, more Bible study, come into church more often, being more morally consistent. Jesus Christ tells us, the Bible tells us, that there has to be a breaking up.

There has to be a breaking up of your old foundations. There has to be a revolution in. There has to be a breaking up of your old foundations. There has to be a revolution in the way you think about things. There has to be a smashing. Why? Because Christianity is new wine. And when you put new wine into an old wine skin, the old wine skin doesn't have the flexibility.

See how the metaphor works? The new wine begins to ferment. It begins to swell, it needs space. You see, it's organically, it's chemically active, and it will smash that wine skin, and that is always the case with Christianity. You'll see Paul in Philippians 3, and we looked at this, oh gosh, in the morning service back in the summer at one point. Paul talks about this, and I'll return to it. Paul says, I was a religious person, and he doesn't say, well, now I became a Christian,

meaning I just got something straight. I added something, I added Jesus. Or I got more serious. No, he says, all the things I used to look at and thought they were to my prophet, I now count them as excrement. Gee, and you know what the translation should be. That's just a nice translation.

Excrement, oh, isn't that sweet. What Paul is saying is he's saying, you know all of my religiosity, all of the things I used to be proud of, everything that I accomplished. You know what I see it as now? It's all crap. That's what he's saying. I'm sorry if anybody's offended by that, that's what he's saying. Paul has a complete revolution in the way in which he looks at things.

One of the great historical documents that's given come down to us is about one page long. It's a little semi-eliterate farmer in Middlebury, Connecticut, who was converted in 1740 at an outdoor preaching service in the Connecticut River Valley. He went and heard George Whitfield, the great Episcopalian evangelist. Some of you said, what? Yes, the great Episcopalian evangelist, George Whitfield, who was preaching. And Nathan Cole writes in, you know, with no punctuation and no capital letters, he writes down what happened to him that day. And the way he ends his little count is this.

He says, his preaching gave me a heart wound and by God's grace, my old foundations were broken up. And I saw that my righteousness could not save me. Now, what's he saying? You can't be a Christian unless something's been smashed. Unless your old foundations, your whole approach to yourself, your whole approach to God, your whole approach to religion, your whole approach to everything you've done. Everything is smashed, new wine, smashing the wine skins, you see.

So what is Jesus telling us here? Jesus is saying, you can't be a Christian unless you're willing to be called away from what I'm going to call religion. A Christian is somebody who has been called away from mere religion. You can't be a Christian unless you say a difference between what I'm going to call here, mere religion and Christianity.

And somebody says, well, what does that mean? Please, let me show you. Jesus teaches us here the nature of religion. Now, I'm using that term. Jesus doesn't use it, but I'm going to use it because I think it's easily the best way to put what he says. There's an old way that everybody Jesus says, everybody, whether you think you're religious or not,

whether you're an adherent of this religion or that religion, whether you insist you're an adherent of no religion, whether you think you're a liberal or you think you're a conservative, he says, everybody but me, everybody but people who have grasped the gospel, everybody has an approach to spiritual things called religion, and you're not be a Christian until you utterly repudiate it. Utterly reject it. Move away, smash it. You have to be called away and see the difference between religion and Christianity.

All right, well, what is that? Let me just show you here. Jesus, first of all, gives us some insight into what religion is. And then secondly, we see how Jesus smashes it. And then lastly, let's give ourselves a couple of tests by which we can judge whether or not we have moved away from religion or to what degree we have. Look, here's three quick things, but they're very important.

Notice, first of all, let me just lay this out. Religion is a way of dividing the world into two kinds of people. Religion is a way of justifying yourself. Religion is a way of approaching the power behind life. Religion is a way of dividing the world into two kinds of people, justifying yourself so as to approach the power behind life.

Notice Jesus and the Pharisees use two words back and forth that are very curious. If you study the New Testament, you'll find it very curious. You notice it says, while he was having dinner at Matthew's house, tax collectors and sinners came. And eight with him and his disciples. And the Pharisees said, why is Jesus, why are you all eating with sinners? And on hearing this, Jesus says,

it is not the healthy who need doctors, but the sick. I have nothing to say to the righteous. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. Now the reason this is curious is because elsewhere in the New Testament, both Paul and Jesus reject this way of talking about righteous and sinners. For example, Paul says in Romans 3, there is no one righteous, no not one. And Jesus in his very book, Matthew in verse 19, there's a place where Jesus says to somebody,

nobody's good, don't call any human being good. No one is good but God alone. Now, if Jesus says that and Paul says that, why are they using these terms here? I'll show you that Jesus has actually decided to enter into the use of these terms because this is how the Pharisees talk. And he's entering into these terms so that he can smash them in a minute. He's gonna enter into the use of these terms because this is how the Pharisees talk. And he's entering into these terms so that he can smash them in a minute.

He's going to enter into the category so he can smash the old wine skins. But for a minute, before we see how he does that, let me just show you what's going on here. Religion divides the world into good people and bad people. Matthew was a classic example of bad people. Matthew was a tax collector. Tax collectors were Jews who collected taxes for the Romans, but it wasn't just that they were hated because they were helping the oppressors, the imperialists, but rather because they were they bribed because they line their

on pockets because they were corrupt. And it's classic for us to say, well, there's little sins and there's big sins. There's good people who do little sins. I'm a good person. I do little sins. Of course, nobody's perfect. Air is human. However, then there's the bad people who do the big sins.

And everybody, religion, divides people between the good and the bad, between little sins and big sins. And what are the big sins? Well, things like bribery and extortion, crime, traditionally, crime, in sexual irregularities are big sins. And so we see the bad people in town and the good people, the good people, they do things that are wrong, but they're little sins. Now some of you say, yes, I was raised in a town like that. One of the reasons why Saturday Night Live had so much success with Danic Arvies' member character, the Church Lady.

You know, the Church Lady. Prudish. Dividing everybody into good and bad. I do a few little sins, but they're just little sins, but you do bad sins. And everybody laughs at that because many of us came from towns in Middle America where that's exactly how everybody divided folks up. And you say, yes, but I'm beyond that. I'm a tolerant person now.

I live in New York. But you see, look, I'm trying to press you on something. Religion is much more pervasive than you know. Religion is not just the way formal traditional religions operate. It's the way the heart operates. And my dear friends, the only difference between liberal and conservatives is where they divide the world. They're both religious. I was reading in the New Yorker or magazine a little interesting

editorial about what happened to Bob Packwood, and this is what it pointed out. It's at back in the 1950s, Joe McCarthy, member, the the red baiter, he was very much hated because of going after people and accusing them of being a communist. And it was, it mentioned in the article that Joe McCarthy was a known sexual harasser. He was always pinching his secretaries on their breasts. He was always trying to embarrass them with dirty jokes. He was always doing that sort of thing, but he was faithful to his wife. It says people tried very hard to bring Joe McCarthy down, but nobody even thought about

that. Nobody ever thought about bringing that up. Why? Because back then, that was a little sin. If you were faithful to your wife, but you harassed your secretaries and you were oppressive to women in that kind of way. That was a little sin. Being faithful to your wife, that was important. If you adultery was a big sin, but sex outside of marriage was a big sin, sexual harassment

was a little sin. Now the New Yorker magazine says, it's just reversed. He says, now this is a big sin. The sexual harassment is a big sin. The sexual harassment is a big sin. And sex outside of marriage is not enough to keep you out of office, but this is. Now, here's what the point is. The point is, I'm not trying to say how stupid that is. I'm trying to say that the difference when a liberal and a conservative is that you divide

the line, you say, these are big sins, these are little sins. I only do little sins. I don't do the big sins. They're the bad people. They're what's wrong with this world. They're what's wrong with this country. I'm okay. Everybody does it. You can say you're a skeptic. You can say, I'm not religious at all, but religion is the pervasive way that you divide the world up. And why do you do it? You do it because you want to justify yourself to the power behind life. Now again, I'm trying to point out that this is pervasive. What I mean is, in traditional conservative formal religion, this means the reason that you do these great things, the reason that you stay out of big sins and you only have little sins and you do all your religiosity is so that you can say, God owes me. When I pray,

God owes me. I have sacrificed. I've made sacrifices. I've just said no all over the place. I've just said no to this and said this and this. I believe in traditional values. I've done all these things. I go to church. I tie. I fast. I do all these things and therefore God owes it to me. To save me. God owes it to me to hear my prayers.

God owes it to me. Okay. That's religion. You convince yourself you're better than other people so that you can say God owes me. Hi, I'm Kathy Keller and thank you for listening to The Gospel in Life podcast. My guess is that most people think they know the Christmas story. Every Christmas we see displays on lawns and in front of churches of the baby Jesus,

resting in a manger surrounded by Mary, Joseph, the three wise men and cute farm animals. We hear Christmas carols played everywhere we go, yet despite the abundance of these Christian references throughout our culture, how many people have really examined the hard edges of the biblical story. In Tim's book Hidden Christmas, he provides a moving and intellectually provocative examination of the Nativity story. The book takes you on a journey into the surprising background of the Nativity, where you see the wonderful message of hope and salvation within the Bible's account of Christ's birth. As you read about the actual event, you'll be confronted with a remarkable redeeming power of God's grace.

This month, when you give to gospel and life, we'll send you a copy of Hidden Christmas as our. Thanks for your gift. To receive your copy, go to gospelandlife.com slash give. That's gospelandlife.com slash give. And thank you for your generosity. Now here's the remainder of Tim's sermon. Now let's take a look at what's many people call skepticism. There's plenty of people to say I'm not religious and I'm trying to show you who you are everybody is Let's say well, I don't even believe it in a God, but All right, let me give you a couple I know a couple people who are atheists very very thoughtful well-worked out atheists One's a man one's a woman they both have wanted to be married and they're pretty upset about the fact that they're not yet. Nobody here.

Well, maybe, but... Now, they feel it's unfair. They're not just distressed. They're mad. Why? They feel like this is unfair. There's a lot of people who are far less diligent, kind, tolerant. There's a lot of people that you feel superior to who are having a better life than you and you're ticked and you're mad. And you feel like it's not fair. Now listen, let me just show you. You can intellectually say, I don't believe there's a God. So therefore

I'm not religious. If there's no God, what are you mad about? How dare you say life's not fair? What the heck is fair? Everything is just matter in motion. Everything is in accident. But you see, I'll try to point out what the Bible says is you know there's a power behind life and the way you defend yourself against that power. The way you say you, O life, are being unfair to me. I deserve better. Is you divide the world into good and bad and then you say, I only do little sins. See everyone's Jonah was really upset by the way, things were going, I won't go back into

all that. He was upset about things were going. And God comes and says, do you have a right to be angry? And He says, I have a right to be angry. I'm angry enough to die. Now what does that mean? When things don't go your way and you feel like it's not fair, that just shows how your heart works.

You're really better than other people, whether you believe in a God or not, you are bringing your sacrifices. The things you've done, oh there's the conservative and the liberal sacrifice, the conservative says traditional values, the liberal says I'm being a good person, I'm a tolerant person, I have social conscience, I do all these things, it's not fair what's happening to me. You defend yourself against how your life is going by your good works, by your sense of being superior to other people. People say, oh, that's not true,

I'm an open-minded person, but you see, if you look carefully, you'll see you feel superior to people who feel superior to anybody. Because you know, people who say, I'm open-minded, I don't have, I don't really believe I'm better than anyone else in yet, a lot of people live here because they can't stand close-minded people You just look down your nose at middle class America the rest of the world the other side of the Hudson You feel superior. I live here look at your hearts

The Pharisees were obvious. The Pharisees brought their sacrifices, literal sacrifices, they brought their animal sacrifices, they brought their ties, they brought their offerings. They looked down their nose at everybody and they said, God owes me a good life because I have been better than other people. They're obvious, but everybody does it.

Everybody does it. Everybody does it. So you see, Jesus Christ comes and he begins to say something incredibly radical. He says, I have nothing to say to people who live like that. Because you see, since he's descended into using the terminology of religious people. If sinners means people who do bad things, then righteous means people who think they're over the line, that they're good, that God owes them a good life. Like I said, there's plenty of people who think what Jesus Christ is saying is nonsense.

Jesus Christ comes and says, I have nothing to say to you, unless you understand, unless you believe that you stand in the very same place morally before God as the murderer, as the traitor, as the rapist. If you don't get rid of this entire and this entire approach to things, you will just screen me out, you won't hear anything I have to say, you'll just make no approach to things. You will just screen me out.

You won't hear anything I have to say. You'll just make no sense to you. And like I said, there's a conservative and liberal approach. Conservative say, what is Jesus saying? What is he doing there, eating with the tax collectors in the sinners? What are we talking about?

Jesus says these are the only people. These are the only people that will understand what I have to tell you. You've got to see yourself as a moral failure or we can't go on. And the conservatives don't understand that. The liberals don't either. They say, sinner, how primitive. I'm okay. I'm better than most people, of course I air.

This is ridiculous. Don't you see what Jesus is saying? You'll think it's all ridiculous. And you do. I'm not, you won't hear his call. Well, somebody says, why? How in the world could he make such a claim? How could he say this?

How could he say that everybody's a sinner? How could he try to smash this whole thing down? Does he really believe that? And here's, he comes and he gives you the standard. And the standard, you know what he says, he says, go and learn what this means. Boy do I love that. He says, I'm going to quote you something from the Old Testament. I want you to go and learn what it means. He doesn't expect them to understand it right away. Being a Christian takes thinking. He says, this is deep, this is profound. It's going to take you a while to figure this out.

I want you to study it. I want you to think about it. I want you to meditate on it. I want you to have discussions with other people about it. I want you to talk to me. Go and learn what this means. I desire mercy, not sacrifice, and right there You have exactly what you need to smash you down and put you up. What does he mean? He's quoting from Hosea, and he's probably quoting from Isaiah. There's a couple of places where this thing is said in the Old Testament, where the prophets come and say, you fools. You're bringing your sacrifices to church.

You're bringing your offerings. You're all this religious ritual. Don't you understand that's not what God really wants? Isaiah 58, Hosea 6, but this is what Jesus is saying. First of all, he's saying, look away from your sacrifices. They're going to screw you up badly. A lot of you are looking at your sacrifices, and here's a test to make sure, to know whether or not you are hoping that God, the power behind life, will give you a good life because he owes it to you. Here's how you can figure that out.

You're always feeling upset. You're always feeling grumpy. You're always feeling anxious like your life isn't going the way it ought to. Maybe you come to church. Maybe you come to church all the time. Maybe you study your Bible, but you're always, there's a low level of anger that if you're really religious,

you're kind of repressing, because you don't want to admit it to yourself that you're this mad at God. You know what that is a sign of? Phariseism, you know what this is a sign of? Religion. You know what this is a sign of? The old system by which you make God owe you.

You sacrifice, you bring it. Jesus is saying here, look away from your sacrifices. Why do you think you're all messed up? Why do you think you're all anxious? Why do you think you're so worried all the time? Because you feel like God owes you more. Well, He says, look away and look at mercy.

Now, what does that mean? Well, I bet you it means a couple things. First of all, it means look at what God really wants from you. Look at the love he really requires. Look at the law. Look where it says, love God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind. And look where it says, love your neighbor as yourself. Those are utterly rational things to ask.

If God really created you, and 97% of Americans seem to believe this, that's what they tell me in the polls, if God really created you, then you owe him everything. You should show him tremendous love all the time. He should be number one in your life, is he? Of course not. And love your neighbor as yourself is just the golden rule. Just treat the neighbor the way you would want to be treated.

Meet your neighbor's needs as a way that you would meet your own. Does anybody do that? Of course not. And Jesus says, look away from your sacrifices and look at the mercy, look at the love that God requires of you. And you'll be humbled into the dust. You know what this is? This is a mini version of this of the Cerm humbled into the dust. You know what this is? This is a mini version of the sermon on the mount. In the sermon on the mount, Jesus says,

you've heard it said, don't kill, but I say to you, don't even resent. What's the mean? Look, here you are, and you're guilty of little sins. You know, a grudge here and there. And here's somebody over here who is murdered. He says, don't you realize the difference? Just as the entire oak tree, just like just as the entire oak forest at one time was in the acorn,

and all it needed was to let its power out was the proper environment, water and you know, and sunlight and so on. He says, so murder is in your heart, no matter who you are. And the only difference between you and that person are the restraining forces that have kept your acorns on the shelf instead of letting them fall into some nice cool damp mud. If you look at your heart instead of your sacrifices, if you look at what God has required of you,

it'll humble you down, it'll smash you. But then, I think lastly, he's also saying this. He says, if you look away from your sacrifices, on the other hand, to the only mercy that will save you, and what is the only mercy that will save you? Me, I have come. Here I am eating with task collectors and sinners. And what he's really trying to say is, the only way that

you will ever get out from under, the problems you have is to look away from your sacrifices. Don't look and see what you have done. Look at what I have done. Don't look at your sacrifices. Look at mine. And that's the thing that will smash the ol' wine skins. Now, I have to close here with a test. Close here with a test. How do you know, whether you've really broken through,

how do you know you've broken the ol' wine skins? How do you know your old foundation has broken up? I'll give you a two acid test, actually the same acid test. The way you deal with moral failure. Look at Jesus Christ eating. You know what eating means? Eating was so much more to them than it is to us. To sit down and eat meant to have intimate fellowship with somebody.

To embrace, to say, come into my life, to eat with somebody, to say, let's have a personal relationship. Jesus Christ eats with sinners. In fact, He says, I only eat with sinners. Now, first of all, are you like Jesus? How do you deal with moral failures? When people come and tell you about something they've done, where they've really failed, they've let themselves down, they've let God down, they let your family down or something.

How do you treat them? Are you impatient? Are you indignant? Do you say, why can't you pull yourself together? Do they sense that you really can't understand how they could have done such a thing? Even if you're not so stupid as to say, you did what? How could anybody do that? If that's your response, you are righteous in the sense that Jesus is talking about.

You don't believe that murder and all these awful things are in a corn form in your heart. You don't believe that. You don't believe that you're a sinner like anybody else. And as a result, you can't be sympathetic and you can't give people like that hope. People don't tell you their problems. People don't feel embraced by you. You can't give them hope.

You can't say, oh, Jesus runs to people like you. Jesus runs to the helpless. Jesus runs to the repentant, Jesus can't resist. People who come to Him and open their hearts like this. Do you say that? Do they get that impression or they feel like you're kind of cold? You don't know what to do with people

who do that sort of thing. How do you treat moral failures? That tells you whether you're a Pharisee or not. That tells you how much of a Pharisee there is in your life still. But not just that. How do you deal with your own moral failures? Do you not see when you let yourself down,

when you fail and you're devastated and you can't face God and you can't face others and you can't face yourself in the mirror? Because you've utterly failed. That is all Swiss sign that your old wineskins never been smashed. When you let yourself down, when you let other people down, do you beat yourself up? Are you flagulating yourself even tonight? Are you knocking yourself around? You know what that shows?

That shows that Jesus is in your Savior, you're your own Savior. Your God has died. There's nothing more despairing than that. Your real Savior is in ruins. But if Jesus is your Savior, if you've transferred over, all of your trust to Him, Jesus eats with sinners. That's the reason why Paul says, I lose to look to my righteousness. I used to look to everything that I had done. And I thought, this means God owes me a good life. I now realize that the only, my only hope is to be found in Jesus' righteousness.

It says to be found in Him. Jesus eating with these sinners is something that will just knock you flat if you understand it. It means no matter what you've done, no matter who you are, the distinction that Jesus recognizes is not between the good and the bad. The only distinction that divides humanity now is between the proud and the humble. That's the only one that counts. It's the only one that counts. It's the only one that matters.

Are you willing to say, Lord Jesus, I am not worthy, you don't owe me a good life, you don't. You owe me nothing but wrath. The minute that happens, he rushes in to eat with you. But if you say you owe me a good life, the minute that happens, he says, I have not come for you. Wow! That's Christianity.

That's the gospel. That simple has profound. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. Let's pray. Our Father, as we sit down and we partake of this meal, we pray that you would help us to smash the old wine skin, to move away from religion, that whole approach to things. It's the reason why we are always upset with you, upset with ourselves, beating ourselves up.

It's the reason why we can't deal with other people, the reason why we can't handle failures in ourselves and other people. I'll help us to smash that, or if there's still Phariseism in us, even though we're Christians, we pray that you'd help us to shoot that Pharisee that's still left in there and throw them out. We pray in Jesus' name, amen. Thanks for listening to today's teaching. It's our prayer that you were encouraged by it and that it helps you have a deeper understanding of God's Word. You can find more resources from Tim Keller at GospelOnLife.com. Just subscribe to the Gospel On Life newsletter to receive free articles, sermons, devotionals and other resources.

Again, it's all at GospelInLife.com. This month's sermons were recorded from 1994 to 1997. The sermons and talks you hear on the Gospel and Life podcast were preached from 1989 to 2017, while Dr. Keller was seen your pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church. you