WRONG WAY: Jesus rejected the Pharisees’ approach to faith.
- Luke 11:37-38.
- Jesus gets invited to dine with a Pharisee and He goes. That in itself is interesting: Jesus is engaging with those who are His most vociferous enemies.
- Why did He do that? I think there are at least a couple reasons.
- First, there are some of the Pharisees who end up believing in Him. Not all of them reject Him out of hand.
- Second, I think, as this passage illustrates, He wanted to make it clear to His disciples and to the Pharisees that He stood in sharp opposition to what the current religious authorities were teaching. Jesus didn’t come to mildly tweak the prevailing religious approach. No, this is new wine in new wineskins. These confrontations are unpleasant but at one level necessary. And it also furthers the timeline that will lead to His arrest and crucifixion.
- Jesus is bold in His pronouncements here.
- He uses “woe” over and over again. This is no mild suggestion. He is rebuking them. He is pointing out how far short they’ve fallen.
- Sometimes you get so used to how things are that you have no vision for how they should be. Or should have been all along. The Pharisees have established their way of doing faith and they think they are God’s defenders. Everyone else is messing up but they are the ones who are actually standing up for Him. Jesus obviously deeply disagrees. And He’s going to let them know exactly where they are off.
WHAT JESUS WANTS OUR FAITH TO LOOK LIKE:
- There are several ways to share the points that Jesus makes here. He obviously points out where they are off-track by iterating the “woes.”
- I want to take those points and approach them from the perspective of what Jesus is pointing people toward. That is, what Jesus wants our faith to look like.
- So I’m going to share the way Jesus wants our faith to be. Of course, I’ll unpack the negative point that Jesus is making, but I want to focus the larger points tonight on what He wants us to look like.
- Within that exploration, it’s a good moment for each of us to ponder whether our faith as we are presently living it out looks more like Jesus’ vision or the Pharisees’ practice.
1. Genuine inner change.
- Luke 11:39-41, 44.
- The Pharisee who invited Jesus to dinner is bothered that Jesus did not do the ceremonial washing before the meal. Let’s be clear: this is not a hygiene issue but a religious ritual issue.
- Jesus uses this as a jumping off point for the criticisms that He wants to level toward Pharisaism. The host was concerned about proper washing of the hands. Jesus turns that point into the proper washing of the heart.
- In v. 39 Jesus talks about the meticulous attention that the Pharisees gave to the washing of the cup and dish. They were very concerned about ceremonial cleanness. They had a host of rules to make sure they were able to maintain that outward cleanness.
- Jesus is unimpressed.
- Why? He transitions from that ceremonial cleanness to heart dirtiness. Inside the Pharisees’ hearts was “greed and wickedness.” They were so focused on the outward things that they missed the inner things.
Jesus slams the point home in v. 40 that the inside needs to be something they pay attention to as well.
- Verse 41 is a little challenging. I think the point He is making is that a genuinely changed heart will be concerned about the least of these and will overflow in the direction of the poor.
- I’m going to include v. 44 in this point because it makes an adjacent point.
- What’s the point about unmarked graves? If you are standing on an unmarked grave, it’s something that likely looks good outwardly (nice grass!) but is dead inside (rotted bones just beneath your feet). It would be like a Pharisee religious leader looking respectable in his flowing robes while his heart was rotten and dead toward God.
- The point Jesus is getting at is that outward conformity is not what He wants. He is not interested in masking evil in hearts. He is not interested in covering up wickedness. He is not playing for good P.R.
- He wants genuine inner change. He wants people’s hearts to be different and genuinely loving God. He wants people to actually be good in the divine sense.
- How does He intend to do this? Well, we know the larger story because we’ve read the rest of the New Testament. The short version is that we acknowledge our sinfulness, believe in what Jesus accomplished in His death and resurrection, receive the new spiritual heart and becoming a new creation, and then walk forward in the Holy Spirit. You’ve heard me preach this numerous times. Jesus’ salvation is effective for transforming us into beings who can actually live for God. He has opened the door to a way of living out our spiritual lives that will actually make us like Christ. Will we be perfect? No. Will we be genuinely and deeply changed? Yes. Will we be able to live in a way that brings much glory to God? Yes. Will we have transformed hearts? Yes.
- This is what salvation is to look like. This is why I get so exercised over the “cheap grace” approach to salvation that is commonly preached in Baptist churches. It proclaims that you just need to say you “believe in Jesus” and then you’re saved. No need for following Him. No need to change. It’s just “saved by grace” that gives you forgiveness of sin but not victory over sin. It’s a “salvation” that leads to no inner change.
- In reality, this is not genuine salvation. It’s not real belief in Jesus. Real belief includes following Him. It’s not a proper understanding of being saved by grace. That's not intended to be an excuse for sin but the door by which we access a transformed heart.
- So we need to consider whether we have genuine inner change. This is what Jesus is interested in.
- This is why our lives are supposed to be the billboards that attract others to Jesus. We are to be transformed.
2. Pursuing the big truths.
- Luke 11:42.
- The “woe” in v. 42 has to do with big things and small things. The Pharisees were attentive to the small things. In this case, tithing even the smallest of their produce. They would have looked at that as a matter of being meticulously faithful. God had instructed them to tithe and the Pharisees were going to obey that all the way even down to tithing the mint they harvested from their garden. It was, to them, a sign of being faithful in a small thing.
Now, is that a bad thing? No. Jesus finishes the verse by saying that they should keep doing that. He’s not criticizing that they were doing that.
- The problem, though, is that they got focused on the small things, like tithing their mint, to the exclusion of the big things. The Pharisees had a rules-based system. One thing that often happens in that type of a system is that you end up spending a disproportionate amount of your time and attention on where the lines are. Another is that you can come to feel that the true sign of maturity is doing the smallest of things, with the presumption that if you’re doing the smallest of things that automatically means that you’ve got the big things covered. But it doesn’t actually work like.
- What often happens instead is that the small things become the focus and the big things get overlooked. In this case, Jesus complains that they are overlooking “justice and the love of God.”
- What might that have looked like?
- On justice, one example we know of from other passages is that the religious leaders had turned the Temple into a religious mall where they exploited the poor as they came to make their sacrifices in order to profit. That, of course, is unjust. It is exploitation. And what made it worse was that it was done in the name of Temple worship. Thus they were using God to do injustice. But they would have looked at their humming Temple system and thought, “We’ve really got this going well.”
- On the love of God, one possibility is that they became so focused on the rules and being the final arbiter of who was in and who was out that they lost sight of loving God. Being obedient to God is not the same thing as loving God. That's something that is common even today. We are busy with religious roles and duties and in the midst of all that we don’t really have a lot of love for God. Busy for God? Sure. Obedient to God? We think so. Love God? Not as much as we should.
- I remember as a young pastor being so busy with a growing church and building a new sanctuary that I realized one week that I hadn’t had an extended time of prayer for a few days. I was busy with religious stuff - God stuff - but I was neglecting the heartbeat of my relationship with God - actually talking to Him. It was a stark wake-up call for me to reprioritize and to make sure I didn’t forget the big things.
- In sum, they were so focused on the small things that they neglected the big things. Again, Jesus doesn’t end the verse by saying, “Ignore the small things.” Rather, He encourages them to attend to the small and the big. But we do need to make sure we are not ignoring the big things.
- It seems odd to think that we could do this but I think a good analogy is our Biblical knowledge.
- When we start out as Christians, we don’t know much of anything about the Bible, so we soak in all the good preaching we can get. We seem to learn something from each one.
- But after we’ve been a Christian for 30 years, there is so much we’ve heard before. And so we get more engaged when the preacher gets into a smaller, less common subject. This is ground we haven’t tread before. We might learn something new here.
- I remember early in my ministry having one of the ladies in the church who came to all three services each week question me about Sunday evening sermons. She told me she didn’t understand why I was preaching the Sunday evening sermons on Sunday evenings. They were more interesting, she thought, so I should start preaching those on Sunday mornings. I explained to her that I thought the reason she thought the Sunday evening sermons were more interesting that the Sunday morning was on Sunday evening I tended to get into slightly more obscure points. Why? Because I knew that everyone that was likely to be there were people who had been Christians for a long time, so I could presume they knew the basics. On Sunday morning, I had many people there who knew almost nothing about the Bible and so I had to unpack the fundamental truths on a regular basis, which made it less engaging for her.
- The point is after we’ve been Christians for a while we can take the centerpiece stuff for granted and start to dwell more often at the edges.
- Jesus here pushes us toward making sure we keep the main thing the main thing.
3. Wanting God’s glory.
- Luke 11:43.
- We can get focused on our own glory and reputation. We enjoy people praising our religious devotion. We like being seen as a leader of the congregation. We have people deferring to us as experts in the Scripture.
- Now, of course, we tell ourselves that we aren’t doing it for ourselves. No, we are just serving God. But, often, secretly the rewards we want is the praise of those around us.
- We should be living for God’s glory.
- Why? Because He is the One who saved us and is transforming us. We owe everything to Him. We should want our lives to bring as much glory to Him as possible. He is the One who is worthy.
- So our focus should be on God’s glory, not our glory.
- It is a problem, though, in religious life, that people will often praise us for our service. And we can get addicted to the praise. It can become the source of our self-esteem.
- But that makes our spiritual lives about us and that's not where the focus should be.
4. Opening doors that genuinely help others.
- Luke 11:46.
- Jesus doubles-down in v. 45. The experts in the law are sure Jesus doesn’t realize the impact of what He’s saying. - They object. “Hey, when you’re insulting the Pharisees, you’re also insulting us too. You surely don’t mean to do that because what we do is so commendable.”
- Jesus wasn’t mistaken and so He turns His sights on the shortcomings of the experts in the law.
- Jesus’ first criticism of the experts in the law takes us back to a point I made a moment ago: the religious of the day was rules-based.
- As such, the experts in the law were focused on trying to figure out ways to be obedient to the original law. To do that, they decided the best approach was to create more and more specific rules on the exact right way (in their minds) to follow the law.
- So it wasn’t just “don’t work on the Sabbath.” It became “you can only travel exactly this distance on the Sabbath” and “you can only have something this big in your pocket when you are walking on the Sabbath without violating the Holy Day.”
- Their thought was that the more specific they made it the more precisely everyone could follow the law. More specific was more clear, which would take away uncertainty and make it easier to obey.
- In truth, though, it did the opposite. The endless and complex rules created a situation where no one could obey all that. It began to feel like trying to obey the U.S. tax code when you don’t have a C.P.A. to walk you through everything. “There is too much to remember. There is so much I don’t know. I can’t keep track of everything. I know I’m doing things wrong but I don’t even know what they are!”
- To use another analogy, it’s a little like a golf swing. Those of you who golf know that if you try to have ten swing thoughts going through your mind as you swing, it’s going to end up being a disaster. It’s just too much to try to juggle at the same time.
- This is the heart of Jesus’ criticism in v. 46. The experts in the law weren’t helping people. They were burdening the people. It was too much to keep track of, too much to remember, too much to do.
- The experts in the law had forgotten the point of their role. It was supposed to be helping to get people to God. How can we help people follow God?
- Instead, they were churning out complex and indecipherable instruction that only served to frustrate people. If the people complained, did the experts in the law respond compassionately? No. They wouldn’t lift a hand to help.
- It’s a reminder to us that part of our role is to help people actually get close to God. How can we help people live this out? How can we help them see spiritual progress?
- As I’ve preached many times, this salvation that Jesus has given us is one that He intends for us to actually live out. He wants us to be people who produce the fruit of the Kingdom.
- We are supposed to be part of the answer, not just adding to people’s burdens.
5. Living differently than past problem people.
- Luke 11:47-51.
- These verses are perhaps the most difficult to interpret in this passage. What is Jesus getting at?
- Let’s just focus on the big idea. In the Old Testament the prophets and messengers of God were often trampled upon by the people of God. Why? Because they didn’t want to follow God. The Pharisees and the religious leaders had obviously read the old stories and they honored the prophets and messengers of God. Yet even as they did that they were in disobedience to God in how they were living. That is evidenced by their rejection of Christ. Where did that leave them? They were applauding the Old Testament prophets and messengers of God while simultaneously acting like the Old Testament disobedient people of God. In that sense, they “approve of what your forefathers did” (v. 48).
- This is also why Jesus says the judgment will fall down to them. This doesn’t mean that those who disobeyed back in the day will not be punished. Rather it means that the Pharisees and religious leaders of Jesus’ day have not learned the obvious lessons from their ancestors. They are in an advantageous position because they should be able to learn from those stories and avoid the same mistake. Instead, they are repeating it. Because of that, their guilt is greater and they “will be held responsible for it all” (v. 51). That is, their responsibility is greater.
So the big idea here is that they didn’t learn from the mistakes of the past but continue to repeat them.
- How are we to respond to this?
- We need to make sure we aren’t repeating the mistakes of those who came before us.
- One of the biggest things we can bring up at this point is that Jesus told the religious leaders that the Kingdom was being taken away from them and given to a people who would produce the fruit of the Kingdom (Matthew 21:43). This is obviously really important to Christ if it’s the main reason He’s taking the Kingdom away from Israel.
- Of course, it’s a big problem today in the church in America that preachers proclaim a cheap grace that offers forgiveness but has no vision of a transformed life. Two things about that. First, it’s not the vision of the work of Christ in us that Jesus gave us. Two, it’s repeating the mistakes of the past. These verses help us to realize what a dangerous mistake that is.
6. Focus on Christ.
- Luke 11:52.
- I need to begin this final point by acknowledging that there is uncertainty in interpreting this. Jesus here mentions that they have taken away “the key to knowledge.” Unfortunately, He doesn’t go on to specifically define that. That leaves us without certainty on this point.
- One possibility that some argue for is that “key to knowledge” is a proper understanding of the Word of God. The religious leaders had misinterpreted the Scripture and missed big ideas.
- It is certainly possible that this is the “key.”
- I think it’s something else, though.
- I think it’s Christ. Jesus is the key to understanding what God is doing in the world. Jesus is the key to grasping what God wants to do in our lives.
- The second sentence points me in that direction too. They were not entering because they had rejected Jesus. In encouraging others to reject Jesus, they were hindering them from entering the Kingdom as well. Jesus is, after all, the way, the truth, and the life. And they were discouraging people from seeing Jesus as the Messiah.
- Again, stating this as a positive to go with the point in your sermon outline: focus on Christ.
- Ultimately we do not follow an idea or a book. Ultimately we follow a person. If we want to be close to God, the place to start is by knowing Christ as well as we can. We follow a person.
- He is the key to knowledge. Understanding Him opens up everything else.
