Oh, am I a Pharisee?
Part six.
Hey, welcome to today's Little Lesson.
I never thought this would go into six lessons, but it is.
Maybe the Holy Spirit thinks that I really need to listen to what I'm saying here, and
maybe he thinks you need to listen to it too, I don't know, okay.
We've been looking at the Pharisees and finding ourselves.
Oh my goodness, have we been finding ourselves.
It's been brutal, but faithful are the wounds of a friend.
I'm tell you what, Jesus is our friend, and he's trying to get us to conform to his image.
Sometimes, that can be brutal, because when your eyes are open to the fact that, "Oh my
goodness, I'm no different than the Pharisees in this regard, I too love the places of honor
and the respectful greetings when I go out there, because of my ministry."
"The greatest," Jesus said, and this is where we closed in our last lesson, "Shall be your
servant."
The Pharisees were not servants.
They were exalting themselves so that others would serve them, but Jesus warns, and you
can have it either way, Matthew 23, verse number 11, this is a bedrock Bible principle,
"Whoever exalts himself shall be humbled, and whoever humbles himself shall be exalted."
Oh, boy, and that that's not just talking about in the afterlife someday, let me tell
you.
It's talking about right in the here and now, many times.
God is so patient and gracious and merciful.
Not everyone who exalt themselves gets immediately humbled, and I suppose for some, it doesn't
happen until they stand before Jesus, and all their works are burned it up in the fire
of judgment because all their works were done for the wrong motives, as Paul warned in his
letter to the Corinthians, but still, God in His mercy and His love might humble us,
even as we exalt ourselves in this life.
Yeah, because He loves us, hoping for us to have our eyes open to the real condition of
our hearts and our minds.
"Whoever exalts himself shall be humbled, whoever humbles himself shall be exalted."
It's interesting because, let's see, "He who humbles himself," and then he resists exaltation,
at least self-exaltation, right?
Yeah, but there's nothing wrong with God praising us or seeking his praise or seeking his reward.
What Jesus is warning against here is the self-promotion, self-exaltation, that God
is not the one doing it.
Our job is to humble ourselves.
God promises that if we do that, he will exalt us.
No one's yet plumbed the depths of everything implied in that, okay?
Back to the Pharisees and verse number 13, "But woe to you, scribes and pharisees, hypocrites."
Now, the word for hypocrites, I understand, in the Greek is just another word for an actor,
a play actor.
That is, you're pretending to be what you are not really.
That's the big test.
Are we like pharisees?
Are we consistent?
Is our public persona the same as our private persona?
"Because you shut off the Kingdom of Heaven from people, for you do not enter in yourselves,
nor do you allow those who are entering to go in."
Well, a lot's packed into that, and we will spend a little bit of time here.
Pharisees shut off the Kingdom of Heaven from people by, of course, their false teaching.
Boy, we certainly don't have any shortage of that within the church world today, do
we?
Of course, the Pharisees, what they were preaching was a legalism that was void of salvation,
as it truly is by grace through faith, but I would say the pendulum has swung moreso
to the other side of the clock tower in our day, where what's much more commonly preached
is a salvation of false grace, where all you have to do is just pray a little prayer and
then you're good to go, whether you have any change or transformation or any obedience
from thereafter.
It's all by grace.
Anyone who says that we have to obey is a legalist.
These are the things that are being taught in so many, quote unquote, "Christian," circles.
They're not even Christian circles.
I say "quote unquote" because that's not Christian doctrine.
That's not Biblical doctrine, but that's so pervasive in our day.
The scripture warns against that repeatedly.
If you've watched the Little Lessons for any length of time, or anything that I've been
teaching for years, you've heard that message over and over again, loud and clear.
Pharisees are false in their doctrine, and they're leading people astray, and a horrible,
horrible crime, preventing people from entering the Kingdom of Heaven, shutting it off from
people because they're shutting off the way, nor do you allow those who are entering.
People that start getting a glimpse of the truth, you run in there with your false doctrine
and your twisting of the word of God, and then, you fool them to thinking that they
were wrong and being misled, and then you reel them back in to your darkness.
Hopefully, nobody watching this video is guilty of that, but I guess it's possible that somebody
may have stumbled upon it.
Okay.
Verse number 14, "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you devour
widows' houses, and for a pretense," so this is again false.
It's not the real reason that you're doing what you're doing.
"For a pretense, you make long prayers."
We don't know the historical, actual event that's occurring here, but I think we can
put the pieces together, that the Pharisees were preying on the weakest people within
Jewish society, in many cases, widows, elderly widows who are oftentimes vulnerable and lonely,
and then gullible.
Coming to them, and under the guise of spiritual ministry, "Oh, let me pray for you, you dear
widow," and then praying these long prayers that seem like, "Wow, you really do care about
me," but at the end of your long prayer, you say, "I've got some financial needs, and the
Lord has promised to supply my needs through people like you," whatever the lines are.
Jesus saying, you're financially robbing these widows.
Not literally robbing them where you're going and actually stealing, I hope not anyways,
but voluntarily coercing people to voluntarily give up their money to you, by your pretense
of your long prayers.
That's a question to ask.
"Am I a Pharisee?
Am I motivated more by money?
Is that really what's got my clock ticking?
Or is it true love for God and fellow person?"
We only minister to those with financial resources.
When money is always being mentioned, ad infinitum, and we have this today, of course, the prosperity
preachers who are getting rich off of gullible people.
They're Pharisees.
They're pharisaical in that regard.
Okay, well, out of time for today.
Thank you so much for joining me.
Hope to see you next time.
God bless you.