Introduction
As some of you know, we have had quite a lot of work done on our house this year; including a kitchen extension the addition of a downstairs W.C.
We bought the toilet bowl and wash-hand basin from a large bathroom specialist in the town centre. It is a good shop. The choice is amazing, the products are excellent and the staff are helpful. But the experience of shopping there made me really sad.
Why is that? It’s because this particular retail outlet is situated in a converted church building. And as we walked around looking at all the products on display, I couldn’t help but imagine that huge auditorium, decades back, as a living church, packed with worshippers, the word of God being preached and people regularly getting saved and baptized.
And now I’m looking at lavatories and taps and shower cubicles...
Of course, everywhere you go in the UK you see church buildings that long ago became retail stores, libraries, museums, community centres, art galleries, concert venues, even mosques and temples.
How did that happen? Churches don’t just suddenly die overnight without warning. Usually, they slowly become sick, go into gradual decline and eventually perish for - I think - one of two basic reasons.
Some die because, instead of sticking with sound biblical doctrine, they embrace and promote false teaching (such as denying the resurrection, or the deity of Christ or approving same-sex marriage blessings).
Other churches slowly die because they lose touch with the gospel of grace, and become religious and legalistic.
This is when people perpetuate church traditions without knowing why. They just say, “Well, we’ve always done this.” Church becomes all about keeping things going. People make you feel guilty and condemned if you don’t do more to keep the dreary old show on the road.
This is worthless religion. There is nothing attractive about it at all. It’s a drag. It’s all about pleasing people, not pleasing God. The Bible calls this cycle of drudgery ‘dead works’. There’s no real faith involved. There’s certainly no joy.
Churches living under grace, by contrast, have faith hardwired into their DNA. When someone asks, “Why are we doing this?” you never hear, “Well, I don’t really know.”
You’re much more likely to hear something like, “We're doing this because we believe we’ve heard from God and he’s calling us to step out, believing for what he’s promised, and as we do that, faith is rising in our midst.” That’s the sort of thing you hear all the time in a healthy church, living under grace.
There’s no heaviness, or guilt, or manipulation, or pressure or culture of pleasing people. Instead, when grace is taught in a church, people understand that they’re acceptable to God by faith; not by a slavish attachment to dead works.
My brothers and sisters, this is so vital. It is fundamental.
Scribes and Pharisees
In Jesus’ day, the dead works people were called Pharisees and experts in the law. We’re going to meet both in today’s passage from Luke’s Gospel.
Let me give you some background. The experts in or teachers of the law (sometimes they’re called scribes) are scholars, religious lawyers with letters after their names. They’re well-respected pillars of the community.
The Law of Moses in the Bible has 613 commandments that the Jews have to abide by. But for these teachers of the law 613 isn’t nearly enough! So they publish books that say, “Oh, but you’ve got to do all this as well.”
They add tons of new rules and traditions to what the Bible says. Then they say that it’s more important to follow their rules (which are easy to understand) than the Bible (which is hard to understand).
Below these experts in the law are the Pharisees who are not university educated like the scribes; they are what we might call dedicated laymen.
The Pharisees have to choose an expert in the law to be their mentor. They hang on his every word, they take notes, they live strictly by all the extra rules that the teachers of the law add to the Bible. And they look down on anyone who struggles to match their religious intensity.
How is Jesus going to engage with these people?
Well, let’s read Luke 11.37-54…
When Jesus had finished speaking, a Pharisee invited him to eat with him; so he went in and reclined at the table. But the Pharisee was surprised when he noticed that Jesus did not first wash before the meal.
Then the Lord said to him, “Now then, you Pharisees clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside you are full of greed and wickedness. You foolish people! Did not the one who made the outside make the inside also? But now as for what is inside you—be generous to the poor, and everything will be clean for you.
“Woe to you Pharisees, because you give God a tenth of your mint, rue and all other kinds of garden herbs, but you neglect justice and the love of God. You should have practiced the latter without leaving the former undone. “Woe to you Pharisees, because you love the most important seats in the synagogues and respectful greetings in the marketplaces. “Woe to you, because you are like unmarked graves, which people walk over without knowing it.”
One of the experts in the law answered him, “Teacher, when you say these things, you insult us also.”
[Well, of course! Because the Pharisees, remember, are only doing what the experts in the law say they should do].
Jesus replied, “And you experts in the law, woe to you, because you load people down with burdens they can hardly carry, and you yourselves will not lift one finger to help them.
“Woe to you, because you build tombs for the prophets, and it was your ancestors who killed them. So you testify that you approve of what your ancestors did; they killed the prophets, and you build their tombs. Because of this, God in his wisdom said, ‘I will send them prophets and apostles, some of whom they will kill and others they will persecute.’ Therefore this generation will be held responsible for the blood of all the prophets that has been shed since the beginning of the world, from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah, who was killed between the altar and the sanctuary. Yes, I tell you, this generation will be held responsible for it all.
“Woe to you experts in the law, because you have taken away the key to knowledge. You yourselves have not entered, and you have hindered those who were entering.”
When Jesus went outside, the Pharisees and the teachers of the law began to oppose him fiercely and to besiege him with questions, waiting to catch him in something he might say.
Talk about making friends and influencing people! If you want to know how to lose friends and alienate people, here’s an object lesson from Jesus on how to do it in four simple steps:
- 1) get invited to lunch,
- 2) spend the entire meal insulting your hosts and calling out their hypocrisy. Then,
- 3) when someone protests that what you’re saying is offensive, tear into them as well and
- 4) walk off.
That, my friends, is what Jesus does here. Jesus reserves his most incendiary and chastening words, not for alcoholics, sex workers, junkies, compulsive gamblers and ruffians, but for well-heeled, respectable religious leaders.
Six times here he says, “Woe to you...” It must have brought a bit of a heavy atmosphere down on their fancy dinner party.
Jesus also said, on other occasions, “Blessed are you…” and as Steve rightly said last month, he spoke more blessings than he did woes, never forget that! But let's not gloss over the fact that he spoke both.
1. Religion Says, ‘We’re the Good People’
It all kicks off in v38 when the Pharisees show surprise when Jesus doesn’t wash his hands before the meal. This is nothing to do with hygiene. It’s actually an elaborate ceremonial ritual that the teachers of the law had devised.
They specified how much water you had to pour, what vessels to use, how you must pour it, how long the whole thing has to last and so on. And they did it to purify themselves from the defilement of having had contact with sinners before sitting down to eat.
Here’s the first reason we have to lose religion. Religion says that the world basically contains two kinds of people; good people and bad people. How do you know who the good ones are? Easy. "People like us, dear." They’re the ones like us. Bad people – well, they’re the ones like them.
So the Pharisees, the Bible says, go around praying in a loud voice so everybody can hear; “O God, thank you so much that I am not like other people - robbers, evildoers, adulterers - or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.”
And Jesus admits here in v42 that they do give a full tenth of their mint, rue and garden herbs. You can just picture them with a ruler and scissors on the parsley bush.
The Gospels tell us that they parade their generosity for all to see. They announce it with trumpets when they put money in the offering to be noticed by others.
Like all religious people, the Pharisees tend to think that other people are worse than they are. They are, as we say, holier-than-thou.
So religion says there good people and bad people. And we’re the good ones. And you’re the bad ones.
But the Bible says there aren’t any truly good people - except Jesus. Instead, there are messed up people who know they need forgiveness from God and messed up people who think they’re just fine without God.
Jesus goes to the religious people here - and he loves them - and he tells them the truth about who they are. And it offends them deeply because they think they're so good.
And all the way through the Gospels they say to Jesus, “How dare you!” They hate him, they try to trap him, they plot against him, then they arrest him, they rig his trial, and in the end they get him killed.
Jesus also went to messed-up people; loose women, drunkards, tax collectors and petty criminals - and he loved them too - and he told them the truth about who they were as well.
And they usually said, “You’re right, we are totally screwed up. Our lives are the pits. How are we ever going to get out of the mess we’re in? Is there anything that can be done? Can you help Jesus? You can? Great!” they said, “Where do we sign up?”
They say that Frank Sinatra, before his deathbed confession, looked very worried. He looked back on his pretty colourful life with the rat pack and said: “This may take more than one priest.”
Actually, he didn’t need more than one priest. He didn't even need one priest. He only needed one Saviour – but at least he didn’t pretend he was a good man when he knew he wasn’t.
Jesus is interested in the heart, not in outward appearances. So he says in v39, “You Pharisees clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside you are full of greed and wickedness.”
Imagine Jesus looking intently at you and saying that! “How ‘holy’ on the outside. How rotten on the inside.” It must have been devastating!
I plead guilty to being quick to see impurity of heart in other people and slow to cultivate a pure heart myself. Are you the same? How often I need to ask God, in his mercy, to open my eyes to see the Pharisee in me, so I can repent of it.
As well as thinking they’re the good people, the Pharisees love to parade their self-righteousness for everyone to admire. William Barclay says, they “basked in the sunshine of their own self-approval.”
They crave status and people’s fawning admiration. It says in v43 that they just love the most important seats in the synagogues and respectful greetings in the marketplaces.
All they care about is looking good and presenting your shiny clean image for all to admire. They want you to think they are better than everyone else but if you were a fly on the wall of their private world, you would see that they are utterly false.
2. Religion Burdens People with Guilt
Then Jesus starts on the teachers of the law - what’s their problem?
Jesus says to them in v46, “You load people down with burdens they can hardly carry, and you yourselves will not lift one finger to help them.”
This is the second reason we have to lose religion. Religion loads people down with burdens.
What burdens? It’s all that guilt. It’s all that condemnation. It's all those complicated, man-made laws. It’s all those dead works.
I’ve been reading a biography this week about the musician Van Morrison. He grew up in East Belfast in the 1950s, where they used to chain up swings and roundabouts in the park on Sundays because it was the Lord’s Day. God forbid that you might have any fun on the day when you should be in church!
That’s what the teachers of the law were like. Religion says this: “If you give up drinking, and tell no more lies, and stop swearing, and cut out all the excess, and brush yourself up, and become a better person, then God will love you.”
But grace says: “No! God already does love you. It doesn’t depend on you becoming a good person first.
And God showed just how much he loved you by sending his very own Son to live for you, die for you, rise again for you and come to live in you by the Holy Spirit.
The Bible says, “God demonstrates [God proves] his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, [that means when we were still all over the place, when our lives were messed up... think about your life as low and as far from God as it’s ever been… it was precisely then that] Christ died for us.”
So religion says, “God will love me if I make myself good enough.” Grace says “God loves me so much already.” And if you are in any doubt about how much God loves you just look at the cross.
My kids always knew – at least I hope they did (I tried to tell them) – that they could put custard in my bed, they could dip my books in the toilet and write graffiti on the kitchen walls... To be fair, they knew that I wouldn’t be all that happy about it. But crucially, they knew I would never, ever stop being their dad or stop loving them if they did.
How much more is God absolutely committed to us, to loving us, to staying our Father if we are his children, to picking us up when we fall.
The gospel of grace is simple. A child can understand it.
The teachers of the law on the other hand, the religious people, made it confusing and difficult. Jesus says in v52, “Woe to you experts in the law, because you have taken away the key to knowledge. You yourselves have not entered, and you have hindered those who were entering.”
Beware of churchy people who sound so clever, make it so difficult and convoluted that people give up reading the Bible because they feel they’re not clever enough.
3. Religion Resists the Holy Spirit
The last thing about religion (and more briefly) is that it always resists the Holy Spirit. This is the third reason we have to lose religion. Religion resists the Holy Spirit.
Jesus said that the Holy Spirit is like the wind; you don’t know where it came from or where it’s going and you can’t control it. When the Holy Spirit comes in power, he ruffles feathers.
John Wimber used to say, “Church isn't about being neat and tidy; that’s what the graveyard is for. Life is oftentimes found in mess. The nursery is messy and noisy but that’s where all the life is!"
Jesus says here that these experts in the law vehemently oppose any move of God until it’s long gone – because it’s messy and noisy. And then, when the danger is past, they hypocritically build memorials to it.
I thank God for Mike Pilavachi, J. John, John Stott, Nicky Gumbel and many more – all of them Anglicans who have greatly blessed the church throughout the world.
But in the 18th Century, the Church of England systematically opposed one of its own vicars, John Wesley. He was banned from every parish pulpit in the land. So, he preached in the open air instead. Thousands were converted to Christ; there were signs and wonders in the streets, countless people were baptized in the Holy Spirit and hundreds of churches were planted.
And the Church of England denounced all of it. But now, there’s an ornate memorial to him in Westminster Abbey. Even then, they managed to carve his birthday wrong on the marble!
And don’t let’s think this could never happen to us. It could. We could just as easily oppose a move of God out of fear and self-preservation, and end up speaking well of it once it was over.
Ending
I end with this: I was on holiday in central France some years ago and I noticed that, in some places, the river Loire was much reduced from what it had been in the past. There are dozens of little lakes and pools a good stone’s throw from the wide, sandy river banks.
Those pools are only there because a river had flowed there in the past. The pools are where the river used to be.
The pools are great – people paddle in them; but they are just a shallow inheritance of a bygone era.
I started by talking about churches that die. They start to die when they are content to live off a legacy of the past.
Are you satisfied with what God did years ago in your life? Is neat and tidy religion enough for you now? Are the shallow pools of leftover religion enough for you these days?
Or do you long for that running, flowing, bubbling, living water that you only experience in the river?
Let's stand to pray...
Sermon preached at King's Church Darlington, 19th September 2021
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