How To Impress God

If you put your trust in anything--church membership, church attendance, baptism, religion, good works—anything at all other than Jesus Christ, to make God accept you, you are fooling yourself. The Pharisee thought that God would be impressed with all that he was doing. So now we learn the first clue on what impresses God.

What impresses God is when you don’t try to impress God.

I heard about a fifth grader that came home very excited from school one day. She had been voted "prettiest girl in the class." The next day she was even more excited when she came home, for the class had voted her "the most likely to succeed." The next day she came home and told her mother she had won a third contest, being voted "the most popular."

But the next day she came home extremely upset. The mother said, "What happened, did you lose this time?" She said, "Oh no, I won the vote again." The mother said, "What were you voted this time?" She said, "most stuck up."

Well this Pharisee would have won that contest hands down. He had an "I" problem. Five times you will read the little pronoun "I" in these two verses. He was stoned on the drug of self. He suffered from two problems: inflation and deflation. He had an inflated view of who he was, and a deflated view of who God was. He couldn’t see the truth because his “I’s” were too close together. His pride had made him too big for his spiritual britches.

C. S. Lewis once said, "A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and of course, as long as you are looking down, you can’t see something that’s above you."

This Pharisee had fooled himself about himself. He says, "God, I thank You that I am not like other men." But he was like other men, because "all have sinned and come short of the glory of God."

There was a man on trial charged with burglary. As he was standing there, the judge said, "Sir, you can let me try your case, or you can choose to have a jury of your peers." The man thought for a moment, and said, "Your honor, what are peers?" The judge said, "Well, they are people just like you." The defendant said, "Forget it, I don’t want no thieves trying me!"

VERSE 11 says, he

"stood and prayed thus with himself."

The original Greek manuscript actually says, "he stood and prayed to himself."

When you approach God with pride, you wind up talking to yourself. Someone said, "The only person God sends away empty is the person full of himself." Prideful prayer is nothing more than an echo in your own ears.

2. HUMILITY IMPRESSES GOD.

The contrast Jesus gives would have been easily recognized to those hearing this parable. A tax collector was as different from a Pharisee as the Pope is from a Postal Worker.

Tax collectors were the scum of Jewish society. They were the IRS of the Roman government. They charged exorbitant rates, they skimmed extra money off the top, they would steal candy from a baby, and a welfare check from their own mother. They were considered traitors to the nation of Israel. Just look at Zacchaeus, whom we spoke about this morning in LUKE 19.