Religion vs The Gospel
Download MP3Invite you to open your bibles to Luke chapter 11. Luke chapter 11. We've been going in Luke now for about 28 weeks or so, and, we'll probably go for a few more weeks. Periodically taking a break, we took a couple of weeks off to look at some themes of Advent, but it's good to get back into Luke. And we'll begin reading in verse 37, and we'll probably go to the end of the chapter.
Jeffrey Heine:While Jesus was speaking, a Pharisee asked him to dine with him, so he went in and reclined at table. And the Pharisee was astonished to see that he did not wash first before dinner. And the Lord said to him, now you Pharisees cleanse the outside of the cup and of the dish, but inside you are full of greed and wickedness. You fools. Do not he who made the outside make the inside also?
Jeffrey Heine:But give his alms those things that are within, and behold everything is clean for you. But woe to you Pharisees, for you tithe mint and rue and every herb and neglect justice and the love of god. These you ought to have done without neglecting the others. Woe to you Pharisees, for you love the best seat in the synagogues and greetings in the marketplaces. Woe to you for you are like unmarked graves and people walk over them without knowing it.
Jeffrey Heine:One of the lawyers answered him, teacher, in saying these things, you insult us also. And he said, woe to you lawyers also. For you low people with burdens hard to bear, and you yourselves do not touch the burdens with one of your fingers. Woe to you. For you build the tombs of the prophets whom your fathers killed.
Jeffrey Heine:So you're witnesses, and you consent to the deeds of your fathers, for they killed them and you build their tombs. Therefore also the wisdom of God said, I will send them prophets and apostles, some of whom they will kill and persecute, so that the blood of all prophets, shed from the foundation of the world, may be charged against this generation. From the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah, who perished between the altar and the sanctuary. Yes. I tell you it will be required of this generation.
Jeffrey Heine:Woe to you lawyers, for you have taken away the key of knowledge. You did not enter yourselves, and you hinder those who are entering. As he went away from there, the scribes and the Pharisees began to press him hard and to provoke him to speak many about many things, lying in wait for him to catch him in something he might say. Pray with me. Lord, we ask that you would speak with clarity tonight.
Jeffrey Heine:I pray that you would give us a clear and powerful understanding of your gospel. Maybe for some of us here, it might be the first time we hear or the first time we understand, but I pray that through your spirit, Lord, you would crack open even the hardest of hearts. I pray that my words would fall to the ground and blow away and not be remembered anymore. But Lord, let your words remain, and may they change us. And we pray this in the strong name of Jesus.
Jeffrey Heine:Amen. I want to begin by asking a question. If sinners were attracted to Jesus, why is it that sinners are not attracted to his church? If sinners were attracted to Jesus, why is it that sinners are not attracted to his church? If prostitutes, thieves, drunkards, all kinds of sinners loved being around Jesus, why is it that these people do not love being around his church?
Jeffrey Heine:If they were comfortable being around Jesus, why are they not comfortable in his church? This is a question that I think the church, every church needs to wrestle with. What is so fundamentally different here about Jesus and his church? Churches do wrestle with this question quite a bit. They've come up with a variety of answers.
Jeffrey Heine:I've been in a lot of discussions as to why sinners don't come into churches, and one of my favorite answers was, well perhaps it's the pews. That's it. You know, it's the pews. After a lot of brainstorming, that was the answer. Apparently, sinners do not like pews.
Jeffrey Heine:And, you know, Jesus did not use pews and so we shouldn't use pews. And so a lot of churches got rid of pews in order to draw in some sinners. Or perhaps it's the hymn books. Maybe thieves don't like hymn books. Maybe prostitutes don't like hymn books, or maybe it's the bad coffee.
Jeffrey Heine:We've got to, you know, get better coffee and bring sinners in here, and maybe we need to get rid of suits and ties. We've gotten rid of all those things, actually. And we've added rock climbing walls and, and different things that bring people in. Now, We realize those things really don't matter. They really don't matter.
Jeffrey Heine:I've never once met a prostitute who didn't come to church because she said, hey, I don't like your coffee. I've never met met a person like that. To quote a famous American theologian, Michael Stipe of REM, Perhaps we should try not losing our pews, but losing our religion. One of my favorite songs of all time, losing our religion. Jesus certainly was against religion.
Jeffrey Heine:We have seen time and time again throughout the study of Luke, How when Jesus, the sinners are drawn to Jesus, but it's the religious who are repelled by him. It's the religious who are angry with Him. And He is angry at the religious. He the religious, they they they saw something in Jesus that was a threat to them. It was a threat to the way they lived.
Jeffrey Heine:It was a threat to the way they tried to relate to God, and they did not like it. They didn't like it so much they they would kill them. I know that we we use language like all the time, like when you really don't like somebody, you know, I just like to kill them. But we would never do that. These people did this.
Jeffrey Heine:They understood what Jesus was saying, and how Jesus spoke so much against the religious people that they actually did kill him. They hated him that much. Now the Pharisees here represent the very best that religion has to offer. They're the ones who are very respected by all the people, the ones who uphold the law right down to the last little letter. I know that we kind of look down on Pharisees today.
Jeffrey Heine:I mean, the the moment you mentioned a Pharisee, you know, even my girls know to like boo and hiss, you know, you just you don't like the Pharisees. But they were respected in their day. They were seen as good moral people. Virtuous people. They were they were honored.
Jeffrey Heine:They they tried to live lives above reproach, and yet Jesus here, he absolutely blasts them. You know, we have this very effeminate view of Jesus today. I mean, just all the all the pictures, you know, or how he's portrayed in movies or in Time Magazine or in, you know, in artwork or in PBS specials or or whatever it is. There's always this Jesus, you know, with the the long hair, a somewhat effeminate face, soft skin, gorgeous eyes, gentle lamb around him. I I read an article that says, you know, Jesus is kinda like the love fairy, and he he goes around and he sprinkles love dust on different people, and that's kind of our view of Jesus.
Jeffrey Heine:But but Jesus here is one who's really angry, really angry. Six times he says, woe to you. Woe to you. Have you ever done that to anybody? Woe to you.
Jeffrey Heine:It means horror, terror to you. The the closest kind of that that we ever come into saying this is like, you know, to hell with you. Similar, in which we say, we want bad things to happen. Bad things are going to happen to you. Woe to you.
Jeffrey Heine:He's angry. If you want to understand what a person is passionate about, you need to understand what angers them. You need to understand what they get angry about. People get angry when something they love dearly, something they are passionate about is threatened. When that thing you love is threatened, you get angry.
Jeffrey Heine:Here Jesus gets angry because He sees something that He loves dearly being threatened, and that's man's relationship with God. It's being threatened by the religious. Jesus is invited to this Pharisee's house. He reclines at the table, doesn't wash his hands. And, this isn't just a social faux pas, not like, you know, germs or something like that.
Jeffrey Heine:This was a ceremonial cleansing. The Pharisees were very particular about this. This isn't a law in the Bible, but the Pharisees, they added extra laws to the Bible because they wanted to be extra pure. And so you had to wash your hands, and you couldn't just wash your hands. There was a particular way.
Jeffrey Heine:They had rules upon rules upon rules. You had to wash it with at least as much water that could fill up a egg and a half, and the water had to be filtered, and you had to pour it from your fingertips back to the palm of your hand. That's the only way you could wash and you had to use your fist in your hands like this and to make any deviation from that was sin in their eyes. They were very particular as exactly how you could do it. And so Jesus, he watches them do it and he completely ignores it and he goes and he sits down.
Jeffrey Heine:They would have been insulted. They would have seen this as sin. Jesus is very intentional when he decides not to do this. He's making a point. He wants them to think about their religion and how empty it is, how what they're doing has no effect on their heart, that they're so focused on the outside of the cup, but they need to be focused on what is in.
Jeffrey Heine:They are full of greed and wickedness. And when Jesus said that they are full of greed and wickedness, wickedness, this would have shocked people. The Pharisees? Wicked? No, they're not wicked.
Jeffrey Heine:They're, they're the religious. They were so religious, they tithed their herbs. Have y'all tied their herbs this year? You know, take a tenth of all your herbs, your mint, your rue. That's what they did.
Jeffrey Heine:Look at verse 42. Says, but woe to you Pharisees for you tithe mint and rue and every herb. Yet you neglect justice and the love of God. These you ought to have done without neglecting the others. Jesus, he doesn't tell the Pharisees, hey, it's wrong for you to tithe those things.
Jeffrey Heine:That's not what he says. Hey, you shouldn't do that. Instead, you should be doing justice. You should be seeking justice. You should be loving God.
Jeffrey Heine:It doesn't say that. It says you should be doing both of these things. What's your motive in giving? What's your motive in tithing these things? It is is it for justice?
Jeffrey Heine:Is it for love of God? A matter of fact, tithing is necessary if we were to fight injustice. Money is necessary. Yeah. You know, much of the injustices that are here in Birmingham, you know, the, the high poverty, the, the crime rate, the poor school systems, all these things will take money to fight.
Jeffrey Heine:It will take money to fight. Tithing is necessary to fight these things, but why do we tithe? Is it out of love of God? Is it for a heart for justice? Now I know that there's a number of people here who are somewhat skeptical about the Bible, skeptical about Christianity.
Jeffrey Heine:I'm glad you're here. There's something that's at the heart of the Bible that might surprise you But before you throw out the Bible altogether, there's something that might surprise you. All throughout scripture, you see God's heart for justice, his heart for the oppressed. You see it all throughout the Bible. And often justice is equated with the poor and oppressed.
Jeffrey Heine:When we were to take up the cause for justice, we are to take up the cause of the poor and the oppressed. So you go throughout scripture and you're gonna hear over and over and over God saying, hey, what I don't care really about your religious duties here. I don't really care care about your sacrifices here. What I want from you is mercy. What I want from you is justice.
Jeffrey Heine:What I want is from you to love me. Micah 6 says, shall I come before God with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with 10 thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, The fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? What religious duty can I do?
Jeffrey Heine:He has told you, oh man, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God. Now about a year ago, we looked at how the Bible really does define injustice and our call as a church to fight this. You know, you don't We don't have to go far as a church to really find injustice. We have to go about a half mile down the road, and you're going to see it all over the place.
Jeffrey Heine:My my 4 year old, Natalie, most of you all know, she's the one who runs around here like crazy after the service. You could pray for me as a parent. Actually, today, right before I came over here, Natalie was drawing a picture of heaven. If you wanna see it later, you can. And she said, daddy, you know what I look forward to most in heaven?
Jeffrey Heine:And I said, being with Jesus. And she goes, no, daddy. Like, I have failed as a parent. She goes, I get to walk through walls. So we, we've got a ways to go with her.
Jeffrey Heine:But as a 4 year old and growing up in our household, Natalie is going to hear 30,000,000. She has heard 30,000,000 more words than a child, 4 year olds 4 year olds probably about a half mile down the road. She has heard because of the home she's in, the education we could give her. She's heard 30,000,000 more words, most of those positive and affirming. And as a result, Natalie's gonna have a head start in her education.
Jeffrey Heine:She's gonna be way further down the road. And when you look at this, you could blame a lot of people for for the, the differences between my 4 year old and maybe a 4 year old down the street. You could blame a lot of people. You can blame the parents. It's bad parenting.
Jeffrey Heine:It's their fault. They should have raised their child better. It shouldn't be a single family household or something like you can blame those things. You could blame the government saying no, it's lack of, funding. It's the lack of, you know, better education for the parents, or better schools, or you can blame all.
Jeffrey Heine:There's enough blame to go around, but you will never blame the 4 year old child. Nobody's going to say, hey, it is your fault, little 4 year old girl, that your world is so much different than my 4 year old world. That's unjust. That's what the Bible calls injustice. It says that as we as a church, we are to fight injustice.
Jeffrey Heine:We're to care about those things. We're to give our money for those things, our tithe for those things. Our time and our passion. We're not just to care about our moral purity like the Pharisees did, a very private religion. But were to go out?
Jeffrey Heine:The Pharisees here are much like the people that Isaiah spoke to in Isaiah 58, which we also looked at a year ago. Hear these words, cry aloud, do not hold back, lift up your voice like a trumpet, declare to my people their sin, Yet they seek me daily and delight to know my ways, as if they were a nation that did righteousness and did not forsake the judgment of their God. They ask of me righteous judgments. They delight to draw near to God. They say, why have we fasted though when you see it not?
Jeffrey Heine:And these people here are people who you want to be around. They daily pray, They seek God through his word. They seek God's law. They delight in drawing near to God. All of us would love to be part of a church like that.
Jeffrey Heine:They even fast before the Lord. And yet later in verse 6, he said, god saying says, is this not the fast that I choose to lose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the straps of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry and to bring the homeless poor into your house? When you see the naked to cover him and not to hide yourself from your own flesh. I love that last line.
Jeffrey Heine:Hide from your own flesh. These are strangers, but he says, no, they're brothers. They're your own flesh. And so justice is at the heart of the Bible. And what Jesus is saying is caring for the poor is the inevitable sign of a relationship with me.
Jeffrey Heine:You love God, you love the poor, because Jesus identified himself with the poor. He so identified himself to the poor, he was born to poor parents. He lived his whole life as a poor man. He was the victim of oppression and injustice. He was arrested on false charges, kidnapped in the middle of the night.
Jeffrey Heine:He was not allowed anybody to to give testimony for him. It was a mock trial, even as jurors beat him, and he was killed on false charges. So he grew up poor. He had poor parents. He was the victim of injustice.
Jeffrey Heine:God has identified himself with that. One of the ways we love Jesus is to love the people he has identified with. Jesus is telling these Pharisees here that in the midst of all of your religion, don't miss the heart of God and don't be so hard on these pharisees. The reality is that most Christians neither tithe nor do they care about injustice. It's a reality.
Jeffrey Heine:Now, now Christians, we're gonna, you know, we're gonna watch the news and when it reports some injustice, we're all gonna go, Oh man, that's terrible. And that's the extent of our care for injustice. When we read this story, I want you to picture Jesus coming into your home, looking at the way you live, seeing the things that you do, and then hear his response to you. And we need to be careful. Don't make the mistake of thinking, okay, I get it.
Jeffrey Heine:So what I need to do here is that, you know, I need to keep doing all those, you know, good moral things and, you know, tithing and all that stuff. But I need to add a heart for the poor. I need to go out here and I need to start, you know, fighting for injustice. That's, that's I need to, I need to add this and then if I do that, God's going to be pleased with me. I'm just lacking in that area, but the moment I pick that area up, then everything's going to be fine.
Jeffrey Heine:Do not, do not, do not walk away from here thinking that. Jesus is critiquing that kind of religion. That is what he is critiquing, that you just need to do one more thing in order to be accepted by him. He's saying, no, he's critiquing that. This whole dialogue here, and we're going to see in the coming chapters, is a critique against religion.
Jeffrey Heine:He's saying, you need to lose that religion. Religion has failed. Religion does not change the heart. Religion does not get you any closer to God. There is a fundamental difference between religion and the gospel, and you have to see this.
Jeffrey Heine:They they are not the same. They are fundamentally different. I was talking with one of my neighbors and, and things turn to spiritual matters. When you're a pastor, everything turns to like something about the church. And, he says, you know, all religions are really the same.
Jeffrey Heine:He didn't say that in a questioning All religions are the same. That's what I gave it up a long time ago for the gospel. Because religion and the gospel are opposite. The the very heart of religion is I obey. I do these things, then I am accepted.
Jeffrey Heine:I do, and then God loves me. That's the very heart of religion. There's going to be rules that you have to follow, rules you have to do, and then God will embrace you. That's every religion. And if you don't do those things, God will be angry with you.
Jeffrey Heine:You know, for Islam, it's going to be following the 5 pillars. You know, for Buddhism, you're going to have the, the eightfold path of enlightenment and some of those things are good. Not lying, not gossiping, not stealing, not killing. Those are, those are some good things, but there's that eightfold path you have to go to, go through. For Hinduism, they they have 4 ways, 4 things you can do in order to be freed from that endless cycle of death.
Jeffrey Heine:But every religion, it says you have to do this in order to be saved, in order to be accepted by God. The gospel says, no, I am accepted, therefore, I obey. I'm accepted, therefore I bet. At the very heart of what we believe, we see a bloody cross and we see Jesus, our Savior, absorbing the wrath of God for us because we have all failed to do what we were supposed to do. That's the heart of what we believe.
Jeffrey Heine:That's the gospel. Every other religion points to some other way to be saved. Jesus alone points to himself, and he says, I am the way. Look at me. And when we see his atoning work on the cross and we see that and it hits us, that changes us.
Jeffrey Heine:It changes us from the inside out and we begin to have that heart for the poor. We begin to have the heart for the people. God has a heart for. We begin to love God. Once we realize we were accepted by him.
Jeffrey Heine:You know, the default of the human heart is religion. You gotta understand that even if you're a Christian, the default of your heart is always go back to religion. I need to do, I need to do in order to be accepted by God. This is how most of us think we should relate to God, and it is my job as a pastor to beat it in your heads continually. Actually, that's what Martin Luther said when commenting on Galatians.
Jeffrey Heine:He said, beat it in their heads continuously, the gospel. Because that's what Paul does. I mean, think about it. The letter to the Galatians is a letter to a church. The entire letter is the gospel.
Jeffrey Heine:So he's writing a letter to people who already believe the gospel. He's writing already to Christians, and yet he's explaining to them what they already believe because he realizes he got to pound it in. You've got to pound it in. That's why almost all the time you hear me pounding in the gospel. So it gets to every little core of your being Because there's this pull in our hearts to become religious.
Jeffrey Heine:You know, it manifests itself in a lot of different ways. If, if you're religious, one of the things I've noticed is you have lots of ups and downs in your life if you're religious. Ups and downs in the way that you feel about yourself. You know, if, if you actually set your alarm early, get up early, Read your Bible and pray early in the morning. Get off to a good start.
Jeffrey Heine:Driving to work, you put off that liberal NPR, and you you've endured Christian morning radio. You get to work, you're actually nice to your coworkers. You come home. You you don't stop off at a bar. You know, no happy hour.
Jeffrey Heine:I'm not gonna drink. I'm not gonna cuss. I'm not gonna do those things. I'm not gonna go out with a guy, see some r rated movie. I'm not gonna do that.
Jeffrey Heine:I'm gonna come home. You make it through your day, and as you're laying down, you're thinking, alright. Had a good day today. Me and God, we're like this. That's right.
Jeffrey Heine:And God, I mean, man, man, I'm I'm feeling close to the Lord today. But then if another day you wake up and you, you know, it's a little late, you've hit the snooze too many times, you don't have your morning bible time, you don't have your prayer time, maybe you you cuss at some kind of coworker, maybe you drink a beer, go home, watch Grey's Anatomy, you know, whatever it is. And also you feel like, I failed. God and I were no longer close. And all sudden your self worth, you just dive down because you didn't meet your standards.
Jeffrey Heine:You didn't meet the standards you thought you were supposed to meet in order to have a right relationship with God. And so, if you're doing well, all of a sudden you think, yes, God and me are so close. If you're doing poorly, also you think he has not accepted me. He's not loved me. And so, you're going up and you're going down.
Jeffrey Heine:You're going up and down. Probably a lot of you are feeling pretty good about yourselves right now. If your relationship with God is based on performance, because you're 3 days into the new year. You've made your new year's resolution. You've only had to read your Bible 3 days in a row and you've got a perfect record.
Jeffrey Heine:So a lot of you are patting yourselves on the back and some of you're like, I've already failed. Everybody else here is more righteous than me. But know that religion will always fail you. Always. You know, we didn't read this, but afterwards, chapter 12, Jesus says, in the meantime, when so many thousands of the people had gathered together, they were trampling on one another, he began to say to his disciples first, beware of the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy.
Jeffrey Heine:Nothing is covered up that will not be revealed or hidden that will not be known. Therefore, whatever you have said in the dark shall be heard in the light, and what you have whispered in private rooms shall be proclaimed on the housetops. So no matter how righteous you think you are, no matter how moral you think you are, everything's gonna be exposed someday. Nobody's gonna stand. And even if, yeah, you say, well, I'm not a religious person.
Jeffrey Heine:I'm irreligious. I could care less about religion. You know what? You still failed your own moral standards. And one day it's all going to be exposed.
Jeffrey Heine:Religion will fail you. If you get your self worth from trying to be good moral people and upholding the law, it's going to bite you. And Jesus blast that kind of person because it's anti gospel. You cannot relate to God this way. He has accepted you unconditionally.
Jeffrey Heine:Tim Keller, I put the little quote in, the front of your worship guide. He says, here's the acid test. If you're a Christian, you have a spirit of wonder that permeates your life. You're always saying how miraculous, how interplanetary. Only Tim Keller would say that.
Jeffrey Heine:How unreal. You're always looking at yourself and saying, me, a Christian? Incredible. Miraculous. Unbelievable.
Jeffrey Heine:A joke. But a person who's trying to put God in their debt debt, there is none of that spirit of wonder at all. You know, one of the problems, one of the reasons that sinners are repelled by us is because we have a us to them mentality. We tell them you need the gospel, and that is wrong. What we need to say is we need the gospel.
Jeffrey Heine:It's not you need it, it's we need it. I am absolutely no different. I cannot stand on my own righteousness And perhaps if, if the sinners, if the prostitutes, if the drug addicts, if the thieves, if they began to sense that's that wonder we have in us, I can't believe I'm a Christian. I can't believe I'm accepted. They begin to sense that in us instead of, well, obviously I'm a Christian.
Jeffrey Heine:Look at my life. Look what I do. If they can sense that that wonder in us, perhaps that will draw them. Draw them to Jesus. Pray with me.
Jeffrey Heine:God forgive us, avar, fair sec, ways, pharisaical ways of our religion, how we want to do, do, do. We want to hold you in our debt. It's reflected in so many ways. It's reflected how we sing to you. We sing like, like we've been forced into a choir.
Jeffrey Heine:We're doing somebody a favor. We've lost that sense of wonder how we have been saved, not because of how we live our lives or what we do. We've been saved because of a blood splattered cross because of Jesus absorbing the punishment for us and rising victoriously in life. That's our salvation. That's our hope.
Jeffrey Heine:That's the hope for the people who live around us, the people who live a mile away, the people who live in other countries. It is a hope for all of humanity. May we treasure that? We pray this in the name of Jesus. Amen.
