Saturday, January 21, 2006
Are You A Pharisee?
Thanks to the BHT for this great link - There Must be Fifty Ways to be a Pharisee
If I had to put my finger on one thing, and one thing only, that the church has wrong today - this would be it. That we have lost touch with our essential unworthiness. You can tell we don't believe it about ourselves in how we act and we don't preach it for fear of driving them out of the pews. Instead we preach about a Jesus that fills in the lonely places, or some such nonesense - all of which is true (just as the law the Pharisees followed was true), but fails to convey the genuine power of the gospel.
The good news is God loves us inspite of ourselves.
Related Tags: Christianity, gospel, Pharisee, truth, genuineness, worth, self-worth
Through my years of Bible study, however, I have gradually come to understand the essential problem with Phariseeism: It was not the Pharisees' attention to the Law and Law-keeping. For the unique people of God, serious obedience to their Law was a good thing, not a bad thing. Nor was the problem that they were seeking to show their love of God through what they did (works), rather than through faith. What a person does is crucial to proving his love of God. Indeed, actions are crucial to demonstrating faith. James tells us "faith without works is dead" [James 2:26]. Those who will stand justified before God one day will be justified in accordance with the deeds they have done "in the body" [2 Corinthians 5:10, Romans 2:5-10]. So a focus on "works" was not the fundamental problem with Phariseeism.We live in an age where no one likes to look at our essential unworthiness, and yet, that is our defining characteristic in the eyes of God. God's love makes us worthy, despite the fact we are not worthy of it. Our worth is not our own, but it is God's.
The problem with Phariseeism was that it was based on a completely false self-concept. The Pharisees did not grasp that they were morally unworthy, that they were shameful, blameworthy creatures. And they certainly did not understand that they could do nothing to make themselves morally worthy before God. They were clueless with respect to their own guilt and real shame; blind to the evil ingrained in their very beings; ignorant of their real motives, the real passions that drove their lives and choices. In short, they were desperately self-deceived. They were enemies of God who?out of a perverse sort of blind sincerity?promoted themselves as the friends of God.
Ps 51:17 - The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and a contrite heart, O God, Thou wilt not despise.Doesn't that verse take on an extra meaning when you consider how much Jesus did, in fact, despise the Pharisees?
If I had to put my finger on one thing, and one thing only, that the church has wrong today - this would be it. That we have lost touch with our essential unworthiness. You can tell we don't believe it about ourselves in how we act and we don't preach it for fear of driving them out of the pews. Instead we preach about a Jesus that fills in the lonely places, or some such nonesense - all of which is true (just as the law the Pharisees followed was true), but fails to convey the genuine power of the gospel.
The good news is God loves us inspite of ourselves.
Related Tags: Christianity, gospel, Pharisee, truth, genuineness, worth, self-worth
