Bad Religion: Woe to You!

Bad Religion: When Good Christianity Goes Wrong  •  Sermon  •  Submitted   •  Presented   •  42:27
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Intro

Week Three of Four
Week One
Looked to Amos and the fact that our faith is not to be a performance
God doesn’t care about the performance or the check list if our hearts aren’t in the right place
Week two
Jeremiah’s testimony to the court prophets
They just kept telling people what they wanted to hear instead of what they needed to hear.
Sometimes the message is hard, but we still need to hear it.
This week we are turning to the NT and to a story about Jesus encountering the religious leaders of his day.
Just as the OT prophets showed us that these issues weren’t unique in their day, this story of Jesus shows us that he had to deal with bad religion too.
Luke 11:37–12:3 CSB
As he was speaking, a Pharisee asked him to dine with him. So he went in and reclined at the table. When the Pharisee saw this, he was amazed that he did not first perform the ritual washing before dinner. But the Lord said to him, “Now you Pharisees clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside you are full of greed and evil. Fools! Didn’t he who made the outside make the inside too? But give from what is within to the poor, and then everything is clean for you. “But woe to you Pharisees! You give a tenth of mint, rue, and every kind of herb, and you bypass justice and love for God. These things you should have done without neglecting the others. “Woe to you Pharisees! You love the front seat in the synagogues and greetings in the marketplaces. “Woe to you! You are like unmarked graves; the people who walk over them don’t know it.” One of the experts in the law answered him, “Teacher, when you say these things you insult us too.” Then he said, “Woe also to you experts in the law! You load people with burdens that are hard to carry, and yet you yourselves don’t touch these burdens with one of your fingers. “Woe to you! You build tombs for the prophets, and your fathers killed them. Therefore, you are witnesses that you approve the deeds of your fathers, for they killed them, and you build their monuments. Because of this, the wisdom of God said, ‘I will send them prophets and apostles, and some of them they will kill and persecute,’ so that this generation may be held responsible for the blood of all the prophets shed since the foundation of the world— from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah, who perished between the altar and the sanctuary. “Yes, I tell you, this generation will be held responsible. “Woe to you experts in the law! You have taken away the key to knowledge. You didn’t go in yourselves, and you hindered those who were trying to go in.” When he left there, the scribes and the Pharisees began to oppose him fiercely and to cross-examine him about many things; they were lying in wait for him to trap him in something he said. Meanwhile, a crowd of many thousands came together, so that they were trampling on one another. He began to say to his disciples first, “Be on your guard against the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy. There is nothing covered that won’t be uncovered, nothing hidden that won’t be made known. Therefore, whatever you have said in the dark will be heard in the light, and what you have whispered in an ear in private rooms will be proclaimed on the housetops.

Text

This whole thing starts with an invitation to dinner.
Jesus is teaching and a Pharisee invites him into his home for dinner.
Who were the Pharisees?
After the return from exile, there were many different sects of religious adherants and leaders.
Pharisees were one of these
sect within early Judaism, becoming active around 150 bc and enduring as a distinct party until being subsumed into the Rabbinic movement around ad 135.
Didn’t favor working/collaborating with Rome
Honestly, they get a bit of a bad wrap, but in a lot of ways the teachings of Jesus were closest to the ideas of the Pharisees
No fight like a family fight!
Jesus does not wash in a particular way (v. 38)
This is an extra-biblical requirement
About removing the defilement of the world (esp. Gentiles and the “unclean”)
Jesus troubled these categories of “clean” and “Unclean”
Many times in his ministry he crossed these lines.
Jesus is showing and telling that internal cleanliness is more important than external.
v. 39
Then a series of three woes to the Pharisees
Luke 11:42
Luke 11:42 CSB
“But woe to you Pharisees! You give a tenth of mint, rue, and every kind of herb, and you bypass justice and love for God. These things you should have done without neglecting the others.
Tithing on the herbs in the garden but cares nothing for the Justice of God
Luke 11:43
Luke 11:43 CSB
“Woe to you Pharisees! You love the front seat in the synagogues and greetings in the marketplaces.
Enjoy the reputation of being “religious”
doing it for acclaim instead of piety
Luke 11:44
Luke 11:44 CSB
“Woe to you! You are like unmarked graves; the people who walk over them don’t know it.”
walking over an unmarked grave would defile a person
the pharisees are defileing people without even knowing it.
in Matthew 23 “Unwashed tombs”
Dead on the inside while looking like health and wholesomeness on the inside
The lawyer (Scribes)don’t want to be left out!
Luke 11:46
Luke 11:46 CSB
Then he said, “Woe also to you experts in the law! You load people with burdens that are hard to carry, and yet you yourselves don’t touch these burdens with one of your fingers.
making the law a burden instead of a gift that it was intended to be
The lawyers ought to have expounded God’s Law in such a way that it helped and inspired people
“On the sabbath, they taught, a man may not carry a burden ‘in his right hand or in his left hand, in his bosom or on his shoulder’. But he may carry it ‘on the back of his hand, or with his foot or with his mouth or with his elbow, or in his ear or in his hair or in his wallet (carried) mouth downwards, or between his wallet and his shirt, or in the hem of his shirt, or in his shoe or in his sandal’”
Luke 11:47-51
Luke 11:47–51 CSB
“Woe to you! You build tombs for the prophets, and your fathers killed them. Therefore, you are witnesses that you approve the deeds of your fathers, for they killed them, and you build their monuments. Because of this, the wisdom of God said, ‘I will send them prophets and apostles, and some of them they will kill and persecute,’ so that this generation may be held responsible for the blood of all the prophets shed since the foundation of the world— from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah, who perished between the altar and the sanctuary. “Yes, I tell you, this generation will be held responsible.
By building the tombs they appear to be honoring the prophets while, like their fathers, desiring that they stay dead.
Luke 11:52
Luke 11:52 CSB
“Woe to you experts in the law! You have taken away the key to knowledge. You didn’t go in yourselves, and you hindered those who were trying to go in.”
The way they are interpreting the law they are striving to keep the knowledge away form the people, to make them dependent on the lawyers and pharisees
Blocked from having knowledge about the God and thus blocked from the kingdom.
Jesus delivered this rebuke and then left the enraged religious leaders.
What followed was a warning to the large group of people who weren’t the religious elite but came to hear him.
Jesus warned these people that the Pharisees were hypocrites.
One day all would be revealed and judged accordingly
None can hide and nothing can be hidden from God.

Application

Bad religion makes rules, outward appearances, elitist theological intellectualism, and social standing more important than the gospel.
What is supposed to be good news becomes burdensome and complex.
Certainly the fullness of Christ and his Word is beautifully nuanced, intricately connected, and profoundly moving.
However, the core message of God is simple: love God and love others, make disciples.
Growing in spiritual maturity is a long and continual process, but the path to salvation is short: conviction, confession, repentance, and redemption through Jesus.
Jesus strongly denounces the hypocrisy of the religious elite, not because he thought they were able to be perfect (no one is; we all will fail), but because their attempts at self-willed public perfection were keeping people from the truth of the gospel.
In recent years, it has become apparent that too many who publicly presented themselves as Bible-believing church leaders were secretly engaged in abuse: financial, spiritural, and even sexual
Others who professed a call to holiness and faithfulness hid the sins of others that they knew about, leading to even more harm being done.
This is something that we can not be silent about. We have to speak.
We must seek to root out all of the death and rot and uncleanliness that rests not only in our hearts, but in the CHurch as well.
We should welcome reporting like has been done over the last fews years.
And don’t assume it can’t happen in your church”
We can’t afford to pretend to be perfect.
One Reddit user asked the question “What is harder than everyone thinks?”
Noteworthy replies included whistling loudly with two fingers, blowing bubbles with gum, popping all the popcorn in the microwave without burning it, and crossing the monkey bars.
How do people make it look so simple?
While practice makes perfect at some of these silly tasks, we shouldn’t pretend that we know all the answers to the Christian walk.
When we pretend we’re perfect, we give a false picture to a watching world: that following Christ makes everything just dandy.
This is far from the truth.
Life in Christ is challenging.
Like thePharisees, we long to be lauded for our faithfulness, our outward awesomeness, our super spirituality.
Truth be told, anyone who has been a believer for more than a day knows that dying to ourselves, picking up our crosses, and following Christ is not an easy task.
Our selfishness and fleshly desires aren’t easily tamed.
Scripture can seem confusing at times.
Through the Spirit we do find understanding and victory.
Through grace we find hope in confessing our failures and receiving reconciliation with God.
We don’t have to be perfect to show people the truth of God.
In fact, hiding our struggles minimizes the gospel and our need for a God who is bigger than our sin.
Everyone likes to feel special.
We like to be the best in our field.
The most expert at our expertise.
Even children go through a stage where everything is a competition with their classmates, friends, or siblings.
Who is the best LEGO builder, speller, cartwheeler, bike rider?
It feels powerful to know the most, be recognized as someone, and be sought after for advice.
Perhaps that power is what draws us into the hypocrisy that the religious leaders also struggled with.
In our attempt to control our own story, present our best, and revel in our relative notoriety, we lose sight of the fact that the story isn’t about us; it’s about God.
May we not inadvertently lose sight of him in our journey to be seen as good.
Application Point: The believer should not dilute the message of the gospel by trying to appear perfect to those around them. We glorify God by recognizing our continual need for his work in our lives
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