God, Be Merciful to Me, the Sinner!

Well, good morning. It's good to have you all with us. I'm Eric, if you don't know my name, an assistant pastor here at Clearnote. I've been thinking on what to preach, and I've been chewing on the idea of self-righteousness. And I keep going back to the sin of self-righteousness. It's a deadly sin, and I was thinking about how susceptible we are to it.

Self-righteousness is a very deceitful sin. And I believe it's a sin that every one of us is in danger of. And so, to help us identify and fight this sin, I want us to go to Luke chapter 18. In Luke chapter 18, Jesus tells us a parable that is for the self-righteous, and it shows one of the sins that is so closely tied to it, which is contempt of others.

So our sermon text this morning is Luke chapter 18. We'll be reading verses 9 through 14. If you would, please stand for the reading of God's word. And he, that is Jesus, also told this parable to some people who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and viewed others with contempt. Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector.

The Pharisee stood and was praying this to himself, God, I thank you that I am not like other people, swindlers, unjust, adulterers, or even this tax collector. I fast twice a week. I pay tithes of all that I get. But the tax collector, standing some distance away, was unwilling even to lift his eyes to heaven, but was beating his breast and saying, God, be merciful to me, the sinner.

I tell you, this man went to his house justified rather than the other. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. You may be seated. Well, for us to understand this parable, we have to think about how those listening to the parable would have understood what was going on.

When we think about the Pharisees, what do we think about? Well, our view of the Pharisees is that they're self-righteous hypocrites. They're legalists. They're the religious elites who were very proud, and they lorded it over everyone else. They're the wicked men who led the murder of Christ. We think of them being called broods of vipers, whitewashed tombs, all the woes listed in Matthew 23. And all of that's well and good.

And we think of those things because that's who Jesus exposed the Pharisees to be. And so we don't, we can't disassociate those things from the Pharisees. However, that's not what the people of that day understood the Pharisees to be. They wouldn't have understood that about the Pharisees at that time. Christ was in the process of exposing them for being that. At the time of this parable, the ordinary people would have regarded the Pharisees as serious, devout, authoritative religious men.

They enjoyed considerable respect and influence. The Pharisees' reputation was not based on nothing. It was based on their knowledge of the law, their careful religious observance, and their apparent devotion to the law of God. The tax collectors, on the other hand, were considered to be dishonest and disreputable. They were traitorous as they worked for Rome, who had conquered Israel. They supported the oppressors. They made their living off of their neighbors.

Think about when the tax collectors came to, uh, John the Baptist and they asked him what they should do. He warns them, collect no more than what you've been ordered to. We know Zacchaeus was a fraud and a thief. Jesus, when he speaks about them, lumps tax collectors and prostitutes together. So why do I bring up this? Well, when Jesus told this parable, the Pharisees were the respectable religious men.

He was serious, the the Pharisee was serious about the scriptures. He was morally upright. He was devoted to worship. He fasted. He gave. He prayed. He was the kind of man other religious people respected. So, if we're to properly understand this parable, we cannot make the Pharisee into an obvious villain and the tax collector into some victim. This Pharisee might be the conservative Christian who thanks God that he is not like those liberal Christians.

He would be akin to the Presbyterian who thanks God that he is not like that shallow evangelical church down the road. He might be the man whose marriage is intact. His children behave and sit through the church service. His home is in order, and he quietly looks down upon those people whose lives are a mess. He's the person who's been in church for his entire life, has a great deal of biblical knowledge, but has slowly become more and more impressed with his own faithfulness, rather than being amazed by the grace of God.

Jesus is putting the person that we instinctively respect next to the person that we instinctively look down upon. Now, kids, a lot of kids in here, right? This isn't just something for your parents. Imagine 2 kids. One of them's grown up in a Christian home. His parents are married. He comes to church every week. He knows his Bible. He does well in school. He's generally obedient to his parents.

There's another kid. His home is a mess. His parents aren't together. He gets in trouble. Maybe he's doing drugs. Maybe he's stealing. Maybe he doesn't pay attention in school. Now we think, which kid is the good kid? We always want to say, like, the first kid, he's the good kid. And yeah, I mean, we don't want, there's nothing wrong with being obedient, right? We should be obedient.

There's nothing wrong with having a good fo-home. We want to have good homes. Those things are blessings from God. But what happens if you, being a good Christian kid, look at the other kids and are just like, glad I'm not like them. I'm better than them. That attitude, the attitude of the Pharisee. Your life may look much cleaner than someone else's, and yet you may be trusting in that outward righteousness rather than in God's mercy.

And this is the kind of comparison that Jesus is drawing. The Pharisee is not a foreign boogeyman to us. The Pharisee is the one who sits in our pews. The Pharisee is the one who preaches sermons to us, the one who can sing our songs. The Pharisee knows his Bible. The Pharisee has a morally respectable life. We need, as we read this parable, to consider that we might be the Pharisee, not the publican.

And what Jesus does here is very powerful, because if we're not careful how we read this parable, what we'll do is we'll read it and we'll say, God, I thank you that I'm not like that Pharisee over there, but I'm like the humble publican. So I have five points I want us to pull from this. First, the self-righteous trust in themselves. Second, the self-righteous despise others. Third, sinners plead for mercy.

Fourth, the sinner is justified. And fifth, God humbles the proud and exalts the humble. So let's look at these. First, the righteous trust in themse-the self-righteous trust in themselves. Luke tells us that Jesus told this parable to people who are trusting in themselves that they are righteous. That is the essence of self-righteousness, isn't it? The essence of self-righteousness is that you trust in yourself and your own righteousness.

It's confidence in yourself. But notice how the Pharisee begins the prayer. God, I thank you. It's a good start to a prayer, isn't it? We must examine how we pray and speak to God. Off the bat, what the Pharisee is praying doesn't sound wrong. How many of us have said, but for the grace of God, there go I? Doesn't that sound what the Pharisee is starting out by saying?

But actually, saying but for the grace of God, there go I does highlight the problems with what the Pharisee is saying. The Pharisee's prayer is all about himself. He begins by thanking God, but just as a means to talk about how great he is. I'm not like others. I don't steal. I don't live off the government. I go to church each week. Do you notice the Pharisee has no request in his prayer?

The, the Pharisee's just informing God of how great he is. In fact, you almost get the sense from what the Pharisee says that God should be thankful that the Pharisee's coming to the temple to pray to him. It's such an arrogant way of approaching God. He trusts in his own works. He says, I tithe, I fast. And, you know, tithing and fasting are both great things. We should do them.

They're commanded by God. But neither tithing nor fasting give you standing before God. For the Pharisee, it isn't nothing in my hand I bring. For the Pharisee, it is in my hand I bring my tithing, I bring my fasting, I bring my good moral life, I bring my church attendance, I bring my knowledge, I bring my obedience. And again, what's wrong with any of those things? Well, they're not.

We, we should have those things. They should be marks in our lives. But if we think that those things are what give us merit with God, and we put our trust and our hope in those things, we've become like this self-righteous Pharisee who puts his trust in himself. Self-righteousness is dangerous, it's deadly, because self-righteousness exists alongside of outward religion. That is, there's a right way to say and do what the Pharisee is saying, and what he's saying he's done, except for the, uh, comparing himself to others.

We'll get to that point next. But the moment that we begin putting our trust in all the things that we do, and thinking that those give us standing before God, those things become a snare to us. The mercies God has wrought in our lives should cause us to boast in him, not in ourselves, not in the things that God has done in us as if they were our own good, but boast in Christ for the things that he's done in us.

Self-righteousness is not righteousness. Self-righteousness equates goodness or supposed goodness in ourselves as equivalent to Christ's. This is explicitly taught in Roman Catholicism, where you have a treasury of merits, where your righteousness, if you've become a saint, gets put up with Christ's righteousness. That's why it's so deadly. Self-righteousness is so deadly because it removes our faith from Christ and inoculates us from realizing the need of Christ's righteousness, and it just puts it in ourselves.

It puts it in false things. We know that we need righteousness, and yet self-righteousness causes us to stop relying on God's righteousness and makes us rely on our own. Two, the self-righteous despise others. Hand in hand with self-righteousness is that it compares itself to others, and it breeds contempt and despising for other people. And how could it not? Because we certainly can't compare ourselves to Christ and look at God and his holiness and then come away being self-righteous.

The only way for us to come out looking good and having anything to hide behind self-righteously is by comparing ourselves to other people. And so of necessity, self-righteousness breeds contempt. The Pharisee says, I'm not like other people, even like this tax collector. This... Who is it for you? Who do you just look down on and think you're so much better than? The Pharisee's great problem is not that he's wrong about the tax collector's sins.

The tax collector really was a sinner. His problem was that he took the other man's sins as evidence of his own righteousness. He didn't look at the sins of the tax collector and grieve. He looked at the tax collector's sins and congratulated himself, put himself on a pedestal. And it's like, man, I am so thankful I'm not as bad as those losers. It's so easy for us to use another person's sin to reassure us of ourselves of our own goodness.

I, I don't think we can be heavily involved with news or social media without falling into this trap. So much of the commentators and the talking heads just want to tell you how right you are and how bad everyone else is and how their problems are causing all the problems in the country, and gosh darn it, if everyone didn't just think like you, the place would be a lot better.

And aren't you so smart for not having fallen into all the traps that they are? And they just make us so self-righteous. It feeds into our pride. It's such a warning to us. We... have to be careful for anyone who just wants to feed us and puff us up and tell us how good and moral we are and tear down everyone else for how all the crimes in the country are because of those people and their sins.

Because of their ethnicity or they're not American or whatever they want to say, and just be like, all the problems, it's those people out there. It feeds our self-righteousness. We have to be careful, though, because the deceptiveness of self-righteousness can be so so deceptive. We don't want to become self-righteous about the Pharisees' self-righteousness. Jonathan Edwards writes about spiritual pride, and he said that it is astonishing how easily people can be deceived about themselves.

And Matt, he's, this is what he says. He says, imagining themselves most humble when they are most proud. And that's why self-righteousness is so dangerous. You can become so proud of how well you recognize pride. You can become so proud of how you aren't like other people. We hear a sermon on self-righteousness, and immediately we start thinking about, well, so-and-so's not here. Man, they really need to hear a sermon about self-righteousness.

We look at the Pharisee and we say, how could anyone be that arrogant? And again, that's the prayer of the Pharisee. Lord, I'm glad I'm not as proud as that man. It's a deceptive sin, and it, and it, and it traps us into a comparison game of us against other people, where we always are coming out on top. Well, that's the self-righteous, right? But the sermon is, God, be merciful to me, the sinner.

So point three is that the sinner pleads for mercy. And, and notice all this self-righteous, stuffy pride, arrogance, self-righteousness of the Pharisee, and notice how contrasted that is to the publican, the tax collector. Notice how Luke describes the body lang-or Jesus tells us of the body language that is here. The, the tax collector comes in, but he stays away. He, he slowly comes in, he's feeling the weight of his sin.

He, he won't even lift his eyes up. His soul is in turmoil, he beats his breast. Contrast that to the pride of the Pharisee. It's abundantly clear that this man realizes his sin. And notice what this tax collector does. He doesn't defend himself. He doesn't compare himself to others. He doesn't point to the good things that he's done. He doesn't tell God why he isn't as bad as so and so.

The Pharisee says, look at me, look at me. The tax collector says, have mercy on me. The Pharisee brings his resume to God. The tax collector brings his guilt. I think R. C. Sproul said, the only thing we contribute to our salvation is the need for it. And that's what repentance looks like, right? Repentance isn't saying, yeah, sure, I've, I've made some mistakes. Sorry about that, I've made some mistakes.

Repentance is coming before God without excuses, without comparing ourselves to someone else, how they provoked us to our sin, and it's their fault. Repentance doesn't come with boasting. Repentance is not acknowledging that I'm a sinner, and I don't have any righteousness to plead of my own. And that's how you must come to God. It's God with whom we have to deal, God with whom the heavens aren't clean in his sight.

That's how perfect and holy he is. It doesn't matter how we compare to whoever your favorite person to compare yourself to is, because the standard isn't any other man or woman. The standard is God himself. Perfection. So, the tax collector says, God, be merciful to me, the sinner. And where are they at? Where is this sinner standing? He's in the temple. The temple where there's been constant sacrifices.

What he's asking is this idea is that he wants a propitiation towards him. Make atonement for me, be gracious to me. He's asking that there would be someone who would turn the wrath of God away from him and satisfy the holy justice. Be merciful to me, a sinner. And then there's this just shocking thing that Jesus says, isn't it? It's the fourth point. The sinner is justified.

This man went to his house justified. Not the clean, unoffensive Pharisee, but the tax collector. Justified. The Pharisee came in all clothed in his self-righteousness, and he left just as self-righteous as he came. The tax collector came in as a sinner, but he left justified. He left clothed with the righteousness of Christ. And it wasn't because of his humility earned justification. If humility was why, then humility would become a work earning him justification, and he would now have grounds for boasting, just like the Pharisee.

He could say with the Pharisee, Lord, I thank you that I am humble, unlike so and so who's proud. No, he's not justified because he accumulated enough good works. Going to the temple and praying did not cleanse him. The tax collector abandoned all confidence in himself and cast himself upon God's mercy. And this is the mark of the Christian. They understand themselves to be sinners in need of God's mercy.

There's nothing in my hand I bring, simply to thy cross I cling. Naked come to thee for dress, helpless look to thee for grace, right? It's that. I don't have anything that Christ doesn't give me. Luke 5:31 and 32 says, and Jesus answered and said, it is not those who are well who need a physician, but those who are sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners, tax collectors to repentance.

The Pharisee came in well, and he left well. He he there is no change in him. He was self-righteous, he left self-righteous, but not so the tax collector. He came in sick. One might say dead even, and left alive. Because that's who Christ came. He came not to call the righteous, but the sinners to repentance, which means for us to be a righteous one, we must begin where this tax collector began, that he's a sinner in need of mercy.

Not protesting all his good things, self-accusing. Well, this then Jesus, what Jesus does is he, he closes this whole section with a principle that we find throughout scripture, and that principle is that God humbles the proud and exalts the humble. Jesus sums up all of this, giving us a promise to live by. He who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.

And of course, you know why, how the, uh, um, proud are humbled. We're told in James that God resists the proud. How many of us, you know, you walk in a room, I know guys do this, right? You walk in a room at points, and you look around and, and, and you kind of look at who you could take and who you might have trouble take. And God resists the proud.

Do you want to take on God? When he says he humbles the proud, it's because God is opposed to the proud. What a fearful thing to be a proud man. Because God himself will be your enemy. The Pharisee exalts himself while the tax collector is humbles himself, and God deals with each accordingly. This is what we see throughout scripture. Satan was the most exalted of all created beings.

In his pride and self-righteousness, he was thrown down. You think of Nebuchadnezzar, Herod, the rich rung young ruler. The list would go on and on and on. We can think of all the examples in scripture of proud men being raised up in their pride and being abased, and and we all know their stories and and realize that's not the man who we want to be. On the other hand, we have men like Joseph, men like King David, Esther, humble men and women who were exalted in their humility and raised up to be mighty men and women of God.

But of course, who's the preeminent example of all this? Well, it's our Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus, God in heaven, the exalted creator of all living things, living in an indescribable glory. And yet what are we told? He laid it all aside. He emptied himself so that the creator of the world would be born of a woman, born under the law. And his humiliation continues until he dies the ignoble, the gross, shameful death, death on a cross, so that he could save himself a people.

But it didn't stay there. Christ was resurrected with great glory, and now he's exalted and lifted up to the right hand of God the Father Almighty, from whence he will one day be revealed in all his glory, and he will judge the living and the dead. And so we see that our great example is Christ, who was humbled and humiliated, and yet bore with that until he was exalted and glorified.

And one day that will be fully revealed, and on that day there will not be one person left standing. His glory will be so great, even those who love him will fall down, unable to stand before the glory that will be revealed. He's not just a mere example of humility, though. He is the one who saves sinners. It's his righteousness that's given to us. So we must abandon all self-righteousness and look only to Christ.

We must look only to Christ. There's nowhere else to look. Our, our righteousness that we think we have, Paul tells us, are but filthy, filthy rags. Menstrual rags, that's what he says. Who are the people whose sins make you feel better about yourself? I'm glad I'm not like... Whose presence makes you go, I am, at least I'm not like them. I may be all sort, but I'm not like them.

When you confess your sin, do you immediately begin to explain why your sin wasn't actually your fault? Do your years in church, your theology, your morality, your marriage, your parenting, your giving, your ministry, your doctrinal knowledge quietly become the reasons why you think God should look favorably upon you? In other words, where are you trusting for your righteousness. The answer is not to try harder to be less self-righteous.

You'd just be trying to be a better Pharisee. We don't need to become better Pharisees. The answer is to come before God with nothing in your hand. Not to cling to who you think you are or your picture of yourself, but to come before God empty-handed and say, God, be merciful to me, the sinner. That's a cry that God has answered. He sent his only son, the Lord Jesus Christ, to be the propitiation for us.

It is the holy righteous Jesus who has accomplished our salvation and has justified his people before God. And that's where we put our trust and our hope. So stop looking sideways at other sinners to see whether you're better than they are. Stop bringing God your resume. Stop trusting in the things that you've done, and look to Christ. Look to Christ, and with that humble tax collector, say, God, be merciful to me, the sinner.