-Transcript-
00:40 Welcome to the cafe. Good to have you here today. What a wonderful day it is to be saved.
00:46 Amen. It’s a wonderful day to be with the Lord, to spend with the Lord, to dive into His Word. We’re in the third part of a three-part message on the Pharisees, on the weightier things.
00:56 And I spoke in the first part, and I’ll reiterate here, that the Lord, this is Psalm 138:6, the Lord be high. He’s high. Amen.
01:06 He’s higher than high. He’s in the third heaven. He’s up there high.
01:09 Yet he hath respect unto the lowly. Oh God respects the lowdown, the humble, the meek, those that are oppressed. But the proud he knoweth afar off.
01:22 Those that are lifted up, those that are prideful, those that think that they are the captain of their own ships, those that want to be exalted above God, those that have idols in their heart that they say are fine to go against what God wants,
01:34 those that live in sin and aren’t repentant, God is afar off from them, those people.
01:42 And that is what we’re speaking of here today, is the Pharisees. And I gave that example of that security guard, and he was guarding that quote-unquote important person.
01:50 And the person is symbolic of the Bible, and the security guard is symbolic of the Pharisees. Of course, they didn’t have the New Testament in that time, but they had the Scriptures, they had the Mosaic laws,
02:02 they had the literal scrolls there, they had the Torah, they had the Pentateuch, you know, Pentateuch I believe it’s called, the Old Testament content. And they were in charge of guarding it.
02:13 What did they do to it? They changed it. They added to it. They wanted the law or legalism to become a form of holiness.
02:21 And that’s an abomination to God, and that is arrogant and hypocritical and unfair, and it takes advantage of common people. And as I mentioned, some gain out of this system and many lose.
02:35 And if you think about it, if you were under the law or if you were living a religious life, and you were saying, I’m achieving all of these protocols, and yet life is still hard, or life is still beating me up, or the sin still bubbles up in my flesh, what would you do over time? Well, you’d crack, you’d break, and that is what the law does.
02:58 No one can keep it, and we crack, and we break, and we fall apart in front of God. And then what are we liable to do? Blame God and say, God, how can you give us this law that we can’t uphold?
03:08 And so what the Pharisees were doing is they were saying, we’re gonna keep the law to the letter, we’re gonna tithe even our spice cabinets, we’re gonna give more than anyone else, and we’re gonna record it, we’re gonna pray longer than everyone else,
03:16 and we’re gonna have better-looking outfits, and we’re gonna have a seat for ourselves, and all these things. And what they were doing at the same time is they’re omitting the weightier things of the law,
03:26 the judgment, the mercy, and the faith that Christ requires us to give, to live by, to see through a lens of judgment, mercy, and faith.
03:37 And when it comes to us, that’s kind of that benign judgment, that erroring on the side of showing mercy, that love, and having that deep faith that God will richly reward those that live as Christ calls us to live.
03:52 Now one thing I did not mention in the first two episodes that I’ll share here today is that there is a challenge here, and Jesus addresses it in Matthew 23:23, our text verse, in the end.
04:05 So I’ll read the text verse, and I’ll get to the challenge here of balancing these things.
04:18 Matthew 23:23, Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, this is Jesus speaking, hypocrites, exclamation point, for ye pay tithe of mint, and anise, and cumin, and have omitted the weightiermatters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith.
04:23 These ought ye tohave done, and not to leave the other undone. And so Matthew 23:23 is what we’ve been basing the series of messages on, and the end part here, when Jesus says you should have done these things, you should have not omitted judgment, mercy, and faith.
04:41 He also says, and not leave the other undone, which I think is very fascinating. And so what Jesus is saying is, it’s not bad to try to please me, to try to follow the law, because God gave you the law to keep you out of trouble,
04:58 to help you recognize your sinful nature, to give you a baseline on where you need to repent, give you a baseline on what the expectations are, and what’s best for you, and what will bring you peace, bring you happiness.
05:09 Ask anyone that’s really messed up, that’s a Christian, they’ll say that God’s laws are there to protect you, and I believe that that’s true.
05:15 And so what Jesus is saying here is, don’t omit one or the other. And so they were omitting the weightier things, these very important things, like judgment, mercy, and faith, but don’t omit the other.
05:26 And I think there is a tendency of some to have a works-based salvation, or have a works attitude about them, where they’re feeding the poor, and they’re giving all everything that they have, they’re giving to charity, and yet they’re kind of omitting that other part of not having any idols, of not coveting, of not giving.
05:46 I had a preacher tell me once that they’ll have some people that give a lot and won’t do anything, they won’t do any ministry work.
05:55 And they’ll have others that work a lot, but they won’t give. And that preacher said it’s very rare to have one that gives and works.
06:01 And I took that to heart, because they had been in the ministry many decades, and at least several decades, I’d say. And I took that to heart, because that’s kind of the idea behind this, don’t omit one for the other.
06:14 It’s good to go ahead and follow the law, and it’s also good to weigh the weightier things, and to show judgment and mercy, and to have faith that God will reward.
06:21 Because you think of those weightier things as countercultural, those things that go against the world’s view. What does the world say?
06:28 It says, keep all that you can up, that materialism is good, that your status is defined by your possessions, by your job title, by your pedigree, and all these things. And God says, erase that.
06:36 Paul, who is very accomplished in the Scripture, says he counts it all as dung, as horse manure, that all these accomplishments that he had accumulated. I went through many years of education. I went to many schools.
06:49 I had many great teachers. And I’ll be honest with you, even today, I struggle with trying to remove that. Not the education necessarily, nothing wrong with education, but to remove some of that pride that goes along with it.
07:00 That idea that I’m somebody, or I’m deserving of something, or jobs, or whatever it is. I get caught up in it like the rest of us do.
07:08 And what the Lord Jesus Christ is saying is, remove all of this notion of worldliness, and at the same time, don’t get so holy and giving and all these other things, that you forget to follow the letter of the law.
07:22 And so what the Pharisees had failed to do, was they forgot to do the weightier things, and to show mercy on people, and not to add to His Word, and not to do all these things.
07:32 But the fact that they followed the law, and taught the law, and a strict upholding of the law, wasn’t necessarily bad. And so I think that’s good to keep in mind, that balance.
07:40 But let’s focus again on the weightier things. Let’s focus again on the idea that Jesus Christ is our Lord and Savior, and God Himself speaks through this Scripture, literally, red-letter text, telling the Pharisees,
07:53 but it might as well be anyone, that we should show judgment, mercy, and faith. And how we do that is so important in our lives.
08:00 How many times do we look at things through the lens of what we’re going to get out of it, or what the world would tell us to do?
08:07 And how many times do we need that godly counsel, coming from God’s Word, convicting the Holy Spirit within us, to live for Him in a way that’s radically unworldly, and radically biblical.
08:17 And also too, keeping to the way things are. Not just being so, oh, I’m in love in Jesus, and I don’t follow any of the biblical commandments.
08:28 The Bible itself says, Jesus says, if you love me, you’ll keep my commandments. And we need to follow that. James says that, you know, that works, our faith is dead.
08:38 We need to follow that. We need to understand that we need to serve the Lord, and also live by His commands. And as we walk that line, He’ll bless us unbelievably, with peace, and with understanding, and with wisdom.
08:50 And we’ll have just that beautiful feeling of working hard, doubled inside with joy of that work being for the Lord. And that idea of being that full-round Christian that the Lord calls us to be, and saying, you know what, we didn’t omit either side. We did both, and we did the best that we could at both.
09:07 Not for our glory, but for His. Amen. And in heaven, we will see our reward.
09:15 What a great day that’ll be. I’m so excited for that. Amen.
09:18 Glory to God. So we’ll pick back up here in the third part of this message on believing, and why that’s all we can do is believe. We must believe, and that’s all we can do.
09:25 Where do we see this in our lives today? The world is putting their hope and trust in man. God says put your hope and trust in Him, and not your own heart or man. Our heart is deceitful.
09:41 It can fool us and trick us. Seek Him by faith, for He is a rewarder of those that diligently seek Him. So by faith, believe that He is who He says He is, and He’s a rewarder of them that diligently seek Him.
09:51 That’s Bible right there. What would the Pharisees have done if they had faith? They’d stop trying to trap Jesus and kill Him. They’d start believing He is who He says He is.
10:00 They’d stop trying to pervert God’s laws for their own name and glory. They’d value truth over vanity. So what does this all come down to? God wants people to follow Him, and not to add or take away from His program for His people.
10:13 You know, what would cause someone to do this? To add to God’s program behind closed doors? To omit the way to your things? I mentioned it in the intro, it’s pride. What does it mean to add to God’s doctrine?
10:26 It perverts it and creates unattainable standards for some, and it profits others. And what we see here is that between this pride and this manipulation or perversion of God’s Word, we see the Pharisees creating a circumstance that angered the Lord greatly, and it should advise us or instruct us on how to act and live.
10:46 This was hurting the poor. This was hurting the needy. When you research the Pharisees, they were approachable to the middle class.
10:55 And you say, well, weren’t they priests? No, as I understand it, those were the Sadducees. The Sadducees were the priests.
11:02 The Pharisees were another group that were like the scribes, and they were more approachable to the middle class, or the everyday people, as you would call it.
11:13 And those people were going to the Pharisees for their doctrine. And as we understand from the Bible that Jesus would speak with authority, it would surprise people, because the Pharisees would just repeat things in a manner that was saying, hey, this is how it is. This is what’s from God’s Word.
11:26 But they were creating this like oral tradition around the Scriptures, and they were creating new laws, legalism, rules, and that’s what it means to be a Pharisee, is to add to, and to pervert, and to hurt those that need God’s Word the most.
11:39 Think about it. Those that need to have faith, and mercy, and judgment applied to them the most, are those that have the least.
11:46 And God is calling us to reach out to those, and to help those, and to show right judgment, and to show mercy, and to have the faith that He is real. I encountered a problem recently, and I didn’t understand it.
11:58 But what I said to my wife, and we talked about it, is God is real, and we know He’s real, and we know He’s sovereign, He’s allowed it, and we know that He will judge us based upon how we act accordingly to His Word.
12:13 Again, we’re saved by grace alone, through faith alone, and Jesus Christ alone. We’re not trying to do our works just to earn favor with God. We can’t do that.
12:21 He loves us unconditionally, and we’re not under the law. But at the same time, we start thinking about these ideas of, well, let’s err on the side of mercy, and let’s err on the side of judgment, as in God’s the judge, and if we just show mercy, and we have faith that He’ll reward us, that we’ll act less like sinners, and more like saints, amen.
12:41 And we’ll do things that maybe would make our flesh grieve, but make the Spirit proud, make the Spirit happy. And I believe that’s what we can learn here today, is that God has a heart for mercy, and for right judgment, and for faith.
12:55 And that we have to be hard on ourselves, and easy on others, especially those in the faith. We need to love them, and we need to help them, and we need to be long-suffering with them, as God has loved us, and helped us, and been long-suffering with us. And these are the weightier things that the Pharisees omitted.
13:22 And this, I believe, is the reason why the Lord has this in the Scripture, that again, He is high up, yet has respect to the lowly, and the proud are far off. Pride is an abomination to God. Pride is what had the devil expelled from heaven.
13:29 Pride will lead the devil to an unquenchable fire in hell for an eternity. And pride, many people carry today, even if they don’t know it. And to get rid of that pride is to remove all of these obstacles that we have to show mercy to others.
13:36 Think about why you wouldn’t want to give to somebody, why you wouldn’t want to help them out of a bad situation. A lot of times you’ll say, well, I had to do it on my own. Like, that’s true.
13:45 God did it for you. Amen, God. Every good thing comes from God, by the way.
13:50 That’s a little extra here today. But pride gets in the way of giving to others, or of humbling to ourselves, to a servant mentality of saying, well, it doesn’t matter who we are, what our name is, as long as God is glorified and God is exalted, and allowing ourselves to suffer a little bit for the case of Christ. That’s what we are to do today.
14:09 I hope this has been a help and a blessing. I thank you so much for listening today. Continue to stay in His Word.
14:13 Continue to stay strong for Him. Take care, and God bless. Amen.