SUNDAY’S
SERMON
Saints and Sinners, All
Luke 18:9-14
Pastor
Actor
Ben Affleck was once standing in line with a friend, waiting for a table in a
crowded
This is a lesson the Pharisee in Jesus’ parable
apparently has not yet learned. His prayer, if it can be called that, is
largely an advertisement. (We sometimes get a ministry advertisement thrown in
to our shared prayer time, but this fellow’s advertisement wasn’t for Peanut
Butter and Jam Ministry or for a good turn-out for the Men’s Fellowship this week.
This man’s advertisement is for himself.)
He is selling himself to God. Little wonder that Luke describes him the way he
does, “The Pharisee stood up and prayed about himself.” (v. 11) This is a very
apt description, isn’t it?—he prayed about
himself. He would do better if Ben Affleck was there to whisper in his ear
that if he has to remind God who he is, then he isn’t.
The tax collector, on the other hand, didn’t
have to tell God who he was. He knows who he is and he knew that God knew who
he is. His prayer is not an exercise in self-promotion, but a confession and
plea for mercy. He is not selling himself, but opening himself. And Jesus said,
“It is this man who went home justified.” To be justified means to be declared
“not guilty.” It means to be declared right. The tax collector is declared to
be in the right relationship to God while the Pharisee, who is so certain of
his own righteousness, is shown to be in the wrong.
This
does not mean that the Pharisee is a bad person and the tax collector is really
a good person. There’s no suggestion of this in Jesus’ parable. The Pharisee is
probably every bit as good, moral and generous as he claims to be. When he
gives his speech about how he fasts and tithes, gives alms and prays
frequently, he’s not guilty of false advertising. There’s no suggestion that
he’s a hypocrite pretending to be something he isn’t. Nor is there any
suggestion that the tax collector is really a good guy at heart—something akin
to the
No, this parable is much more radical than this.
It goes to the root of the problem of our sinful tendencies. The gospel Jesus
proclaims in this parable is radical in at least three aspects: first, the
parable tells us that God knows us as we really are; second, that God accepts
us as we are; and third, that though God accepts us as we are, God loves us too
much to leave us as we are.
The first of those three aspects is familiar to
us, though we may not live in awareness of it all the time. God knows who we
are. We don’t have to do a snow-job on God and sell ourselves to Him. Like the
line in the Christmas song about Santa Claus, “he knows if you’ve been bad or
good…” God knows. But God’s knowledge of us goes much deeper than knowing if
we’ve been bad or good. God knows our actions, and God knows our motives, intentions, our private and most
intimate secrets. God even knows what is in the depths of our unconscious
minds. Psalm 139 says it well, “While I was in my mother’s womb, while I was
being created in secret, behold, O Lord, you knew me altogether” (verse 13,
15).
Such knowledge can be a frightening thing if we
operate on the “God-rewards-the-good-and-punishes-the-bad philosophy”. If this
is the way things work, then we’re in trouble. We’re in trouble because we’ve
got things inside us that we wouldn’t want anyone else to know. There are parts
of us that are too private, too painful, and just too intimate to share with
anyone. So if we think that our acceptance by God depends on God never finding out who we really are on
the inside, then we are lost.
That’s
why the news that God knows exactly who we are, better than we know ourselves, can
be such a liberating piece of good news. We don’t have to pretend. We are who
God knows us to be. We don’t have to be afraid of God finding out something we’re
ashamed of, we don’t have to close off part of our lives to God; God knows us
with a knowledge that is deep, intimate and infinite. Paul reminds us that when
our time comes to finally stand in God’s presence our own knowledge will be
full and complete: “One day,” he says, “I shall know, even as I am fully known”
(1 Corinthians 13:12). So if we’ve got something to hide, don’t bother. God
already knows more about us than we will ever know until that day when the Lord
grants us fullness of knowledge in heaven.
God not only knows who we are, but God accepts
us as we are. I say this is radical because it goes against the way most of us
think. If something good happens to someone we know, we say, “Well, you must be
living right,” meaning that their goodness has been rewarded. When something
bad happens to us, we immediately begin to wonder what we’ve done to cause God
to punish us. It is common for us to think that God blesses those who are good
and punishes those who are bad. That’s the way we would do it if we were God,
and we project our own ideas of justice and reward and punishment onto God. The
only problem with that is that God doesn’t quite fit our expectations.
God is not created in our image. God is Other.
God is God and we are not. God acts as God acts. And Jesus says in this parable
that God is a God who declares sinners to be in right relation. By human
standards of justice, this is positively scandalous. God accepts the sinner?
Why, because they are sinning? No! God
hates sin. Then why does God accept them? Because they trust in God for their acceptance and that is the
right or “righteous’ thing to do. To throw oneself on the mercy of God is the
right thing to do and God declares us righteous when we do it. This is the
meaning of faith: believing that God will act like God and have mercy on us.
The problem many of us have is that we are scandalized when God acts like God.
Samuel Colgate, the son of the founder of the
Colgate business empire, William Colgate, was a devout Christian. He was
educated at Harvard and Baptist Theological Seminary. He was licensed to preach
the gospel by the Presbytery of New York in late 1899. And he told of an
incident that took place in the church he attended. During an evangelistic
service, an invitation was given for all those who wished to turn their lives
over to Christ and be forgiven. One of the first persons to walk down the aisle
and kneel at the altar was a well-known
Finally, Samuel Colgate rose and said, “I guess
we blundered when we prayed that the Lord would save sinners. We forgot to
specify what kind of sinners. We’d better ask him to forgive us for this
oversight. The Holy Spirit has touched this woman and made her truly repentant,
but the Lord apparently doesn’t understand that she’s not the type we want him
to rescue. We’d better spell it out for Him just which sinners we had in mind.”
Immediately, a motion was made and unanimously approved that the woman be
accepted into membership in the congregation.
God accepts us as we are. There’s not a sin too
black, not a deed too awful, not a thought too horrible for God to forgive.
What cuts us off from God’s forgiveness and the freedom such forgiveness brings
is our thinking that we have to prove ourselves. Trusting in our own righteousness does not bring
God’s verdict of not guilty. Trusting in God’s righteousness does.
But if we say that God accepts the sinner,
doesn’t that appear to condone sinful behavior? If Jesus doesn’t require us to
change before He accepts us, then what’s the use of being good at all? Why not
sin boldly and have a good time? After all, there is pleasure in sin…for a
time. Ah, but here that third truth comes into play. God knows who we are; God
accepts us as we are; and God loves us too much to leave us as we are. When Jesus
justifies us on the basis of our faith in Him, He also transforms us and makes
us better than we are.
The theological term for God’s forgiving and
claiming work in us is justification. The theological word for God’s cleansing
and purifying within us is sanctification. God starts with us just where God
finds us, whether in the palace or the pit, but God never leaves us there. God’s
purpose is not just to rescue us from hell, but to get us ready for heaven. So God’s
in the business of making us like Christ, or as Paul writes in Ephesians 4:15,
helping us “to grow up spiritually.” Maturity in Christ, spiritual adulthood,
perfection in love—these are ways to describe God’s work in our lives.
This sanctifying work of God’s spirit within us,
does not turn us into stained-glass saints nor people who walk around piously
with their hands folded in prayer all day. God’s work within us is the most
practical, down-to-earth (or perhaps we should say up-to-heaven) work
imaginable.
When
we open our lives to God’s gracious presence, when we no longer trust in our
own morality or good behavior or willpower, we find the most amazing things
beginning to happen. As we experience more of God’s love for us, we find
ourselves becoming more loving toward others. People with bad tempers find that
God’s spirit within them enables them to control their temper. People with
enslaving habits find a resource that is beyond themselves and a source of
strength to overcome those diseases of the soul. People with too much love of
money and material things find that their values begin to change along with
their grip on their possessions. People with deep insecurities begin to see
themselves and love themselves as God loves them and sees them.
This doesn’t all happen at once, of course. Spiritual
maturity is a life-long process. It’s a journey. We don’t become saints
overnight, but that is the direction of lives. That’s the nature of the
Christian life—becoming conformed to the image of Christ. Whether it’s our gossip, ambition, lust, prejudice, materialism,
pride, self-righteousness, or whatever else our besetting sin may be, the Holy
Spirit will not be content until Christ’s image is perfectly formed in us, and
that is why God will not leave us as God finds us.
What aspect of the gospel speaks most to your needs? Is it the fact that God knows you, and knows you intimately and fully? If so, then accept the freedom that God offers you. Open yourself to Him, confess who you are to Him, and you will find Him gracious. Perhaps it is the second aspect which speaks most keenly to you—that God accepts you as you are and declares you righteous on the basis of your trust in Him. That too is liberating. Not only do you not have to hide your real self, but you do not have to make yourself good. Accept His love. Accept His forgiveness which He offers you in Christ. Accept His claim upon you. Accept your adoption into the family of God. Or maybe you’ve experienced that much of the gospel—the knowledge that you are loved and accepted and justified—but you have not experienced the transforming work of the Spirit in your life, because you have not understood or because you have not been open to allow the Spirit to work. If so, then open yourself to the Spirit as fully as you are consciously capable of doing; give the Spirit the freedom to cleanse away all that is incompatible with the love of Christ, accept the Spirit’s discipline, then commit yourself to growing into maturity. It is God who makes us like Christ. We will have better morals or better ethics or more willpower when we allow God to change our inner nature into conformity with the nature of Christ. When Christ is formed in us, then we will be better people with better behavior. It is the work of God’s grace and the product of faith. From beginning to end, we are saved by God’s grace.
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