Woe to the Selfishly Ambitious

Kongsvinger Lutheran Church

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Welcome to the teaching ministry of Kungsvinger Lutheran Church. Kungsvinger is a beacon for the gospel of Jesus Christ and is located on the plains of northwestern

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Minnesota. We proclaim Christ and Him crucified for our sins and salvation by grace through faith alone.

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And now, here's a message from Pastor Chris Roseberg. The Holy Gospel according to St. Luke, the 14th chapter.

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One Sabbath, when Jesus went to dine at the house of a ruler of the Pharisees, they were watching Him carefully, and behold, there was a man before Him who had dropsy.

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And Jesus responded to the lawyers and the Pharisees, saying, Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath or not?

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But they remained silent. Then He took him and healed him and sent him away and said to them, Which of you, having a son or an ox that has fallen into a well on a

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Sabbath day, will not immediately pull him out? And they could not reply to these things. And now

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He told a parable to those who were invited when He noticed how they chose the places of honor, saying to them,

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When you are invited by someone to a wedding feast, do not sit in a place of honor, lest someone more distinguished than you be invited by him.

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And he who invited you both will come and say to you, Give your place to this person, and then you will begin with shame to take the lowest place.

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But when you are invited, go and sit in the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he may say to you,

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Friend, move up higher. Then you will be honored in the presence of all who sit at the table with you. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.

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This is the gospel of the Lord. In the name of Jesus. Amen. You guys remember

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Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner? Like my favorite cartoon growing up. And one of the things

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I remember distinctly as a kid, thinking, How stupid does this coyote have to be to think that he's actually going to catch the

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Roadrunner, right? And yet he tries week after week after week to catch that old

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Roadrunner using his Acme products and it always ends up terribly for him.

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Always and again, his best efforts lead to him careening off of a cliff with that whistling sound with a big splat at the end.

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I'm going to say this up front. Have you ever stopped to think about how much you have in common with Wile E.

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Coyote? Let me explain what I mean here. The Pharisees in our text today, our gospel text, they are trying to figure out how to trap

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Jesus. This isn't going to go well for them. It never does.

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It's really as stupid as you get. Now remember, the Pharisees, they don't really accept the word of God.

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They think that they are the masters over the word of God and they've added to God's word their oral

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Torah and this is the tradition of the elders and these people are legitimately trying to save themselves by their works, by their piety, by their prayers, by their offerings, by their good deeds and things of this sort.

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And always and again, when people head down this path, they engage in delusional thinking because along this line, you're going to then think that you are somehow better than other people, right?

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You look at somebody and you go, well, you know, at least I'm not a drug user. At least I pay my taxes.

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I'm a pretty good person. And what happens is that when you start thinking this way, you think of yourself as better than everybody else.

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Maybe not everybody, but mostly everybody. I mean, you are part of the elect. You are part of the group of people that are super special.

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They glow in the dark and you get the idea, right? And after a while, you think it's time for people to start buying your books so that they can be just as holy as you are.

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It's a mess. It's an absolute mess. And people like this, they don't love

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God. They hate him. In fact, note that Jesus is God in human flesh.

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He's the very God that they claim to be worshiping and serving in their prayers and their piety. He's among them and they don't even recognize him.

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And we learn from the Gospel of John, when we check the cross references here, that already by this point, the

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Pharisees had determined Jesus has got to go. And they don't mean by Jesus has got to go, that means that we're going to arrest him and ship him off to Malta.

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No, no, no. Jesus has to go means Jesus needs to die. The very God they claim to worship, they want to kill him.

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Again, note how silly and stupid this is, but sin makes us this dumb, this delusional.

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So the text goes, one Sabbath when Jesus went to dine at the house of a ruler of the Pharisees, they were watching him carefully.

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It's pretty clear what's happening here. One of the rulers, the chief mucky mucks of the Pharisees says, let's invite

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Jesus to my house and we will set up the proverbial catch 22. We're going to catch

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Jesus. We're going to put him into a situation where he's going to be damned if he does and damned if he doesn't, and we're going to really enjoy and relish the fact that we were so clever in catching

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Jesus in his own words. And the text goes on to say, and behold, there was a man before him who had dropsy.

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Now this is not a word we use nowadays. In fact, I know that this has something to do with congestive heart failure, but I googled it anyways in my sermon preparation.

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The first thing that came up with dropsy is a fish disease. You know, if you keep aquariums and fish, fish can get dropsy.

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But that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about, well, one of the words that we use for something like this is something called edema.

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This is the idea that your body all of a sudden begins retaining water. Your ankles swell, your knees swell, your chest swells, and fluid starts building up inside of your cardiac cavity in here.

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It becomes hard to breathe. And while heart failure is imminent, and back in the day there was no way to treat dropsy, it was a death sentence.

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So here they've put a fellow before him, it happens to be a Saturday, it's the Sabbath, and of course there's the rub.

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This is the trap. If Jesus heals on the Sabbath, he's breaking the Sabbath. If Jesus doesn't heal this fellow, well, then

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Jesus really isn't caring and loving and kind and merciful and maybe even not even powerful enough to heal somebody with something as terrible as dropsy.

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And so here is this fellow, and Jesus begins first with a question to the lawyers and to the

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Pharisees. Always attorneys and Pharisees, they seem to go together. It's only the self -righteous who can really afford lawyers and attorneys like this.

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So Jesus said, so let me ask you guys a question. Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath or not? What's your expert opinion, right?

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And they say, nothing. We're not going to help you out here,

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Jesus. It's up to you to decide whether or not it is lawful to heal on the

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Sabbath or not. So Jesus took him, healed him, and sent him away.

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Note Christ saves lives. Jesus truly cares for people. And always and again in legalistic systems, you'll note that human suffering really kind of shows up low on the things that need to be addressed.

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Instead, all they really care about, they don't care how much you're suffering, how poor you are, how naked you are, how hungry you are.

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They don't care about any of that, as long as you obey their rules, right? As long as you do what you're told.

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Make sure you don't dance, drink, smoke, or chew, and that's all we care about. Obey us.

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And note here that in setting up a system like this, what these people are doing is putting themselves in the position of God.

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They have exalted themselves way up high. So Jesus heals him, sends him away, and then

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Jesus, since they were being silenced, goes ahead and fills the silence with his own words. And so he asks another question to them.

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So which of you having a son or an ox that has fallen into a well on the

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Sabbath day will not immediately pull him out? And they could not reply to these things.

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So their trap has now exploded in their face, and they go careening off the cliff.

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Splat. Right? But note here that Jesus came to seek and save the lost.

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That includes the Pharisees. Jesus does not will for them to perish. He truly wills that they would repent and see the delusion of their ways, that they would see how sinful and wicked they truly are, and how much like the devil they are.

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So Jesus then proposes to them a parable that sounds a lot like what we read in our

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Old Testament text in Proverbs 25. And he says, when you are invited by someone to a wedding feast, do not sit down in a place of honor, lest someone more distinguished than you be invited by him, and he who invited you will come and say to you, give your place to this person, and then you will begin with shame to take the lowest place.

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You see, what is this getting at? This is getting at human selfish ambition, that sinful, satanic desire to be noticed by everybody, to have everybody make it clear that you are important, that you are the most important person ever, that you are better than everybody else to basically have the praise of other people.

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In fact, Jesus gives us a very lengthy list of the symptoms of this real problem that affects us all, not just the

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Pharisees, tempts each of us daily. In Matthew chapter 23, a very lengthy chapter,

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Jesus goes after the Pharisees hard, and he rebukes them in the strongest of language, and details their sin in minutia, in great detail.

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In fact, I'm going to read this out, even though it's long, I think it's helpful here. As I'm reading this out, don't think merely about them

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Pharisees. Note here, your sinful nature, your old Adam, is a

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Pharisee of Pharisees. This is what we are all like because of our fall into sin.

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As Jesus says, people are born children of the devil because of our fall into sin.

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You'll note that this list sounds a lot like how the devil operates, but this same thing operates in you, and it operates in me, and we need to be saved from this.

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It says in Matthew 23, Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples,

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The scribes and the Pharisees, they sit on Moses's seat. So do and observe what they tell you, but not the works they do.

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For they preach, but they don't practice. Let me explain what's happening here.

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What's the Moses seat? If you were to Google that and look at ancient archeological sites from Judea, from the time of Christ, each of the synagogues had what was called a

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Moses seat. This was something, technically, that is established by God in the

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Old Testament. God had ordained that the Levites, the tribe of Levi, that not only would they serve in the temple and do the sacrifices and the things required by the

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Torah when it comes to the sacrifices, but they would also be charged with the task of teaching

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Israel, teaching Israel the word of God. And so Sabbath after Sabbath after Sabbath, the people would take a day off from their labor, and they would rest in the synagogue and hear the word of God taught to them by the

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Levites. Now, the Pharisees weren't necessarily Levites, but they came in and they sat on Moses's seat, which is the teaching seat in the synagogue.

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And so Jesus here recognizes that the Moses seat is a legitimate office. Think of it like the pastoral office, right?

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And you'll note that some pastors dispense the duties of the pastoral office correctly, others they don't.

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Some pastors serve their congregations, others ride them hard and make their congregations serve them.

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Keep that in mind. So Jesus notes the Moses seat is legit, so do and observe whatever they tell you as long as they're preaching the word.

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But the works they do, don't do those. They preach, but they don't practice. They tie up heavy burdens that are hard to bear.

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They lay them on people's shoulders, but they themselves, they're not willing to move them with their finger. They do all their deeds to be seen by others, for they make their flacketeries broad, their fringes long, and they love the place of honor at the feasts and the best seats in the synagogue, greetings in the marketplaces, and being called rabbi by others.

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But you are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all brothers.

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Think of it this way. Have you ever had the unfortunate experience of steering into a social media account put out by a so -called

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Christian influencer? These accounts are really weird, and I mean this.

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They're great on photography and marketing. They're thin on biblical theology. Imagine if you would that this was an old analog

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Bible, note the gold leaf and stuff like this. And so the Christian influencers, they would make sure to have it opened to just the right passage, check the light, check the shallow depth of field on their camera, make sure that's looking good.

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Oh, and strategically place a good cup of chamomile or some kind of coffee over here, and make sure that there's a pencil, a pen, and two different colored highlighters.

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Just there in the shot, oh, set this up. And then what do they do? Click, right?

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Make sure that they can be seen in a selfie in front of all of it, right? And they'll say something.

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I was so blessed this morning, so blessed. I was reading through the book of Ephesians, and the

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Lord just really spoke to my heart. I could feel the anointing in the room today. This is how they talk.

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This is how they write. You'll note that people, when they do that, they're not really interested in reading the scriptures, are they?

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They're interested in you thinking they're reading the scriptures. And with perfect social media presence, they project this pietistic image of themselves where everyone just says, oh, you are so holy.

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You are so tight with Jesus. No, you're not. You are a child of the devil, right?

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But we're all tempted along these lines. Let me give you another example.

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This doesn't only happen when it comes to piety. This also comes in the world of dating, right?

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You discover her, or you discover him, and you want to figure out how to get the inside track so that you can get that person's attention.

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And what do you find out? You find out that this person that you're really interested in is really into existential philosophers like Sartre and others.

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So what do you do? Well, you order some books by Sartre so that you can read them.

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No, no. Instead, what you do is you just take those books by Sartre and you strategically place them in your house so that when they come over to your house on a date, they go, oh, you read

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Sartre? Of course I do. It's the best ever. Really? What's your favorite passage? Oh, look, the cookies are about to burn.

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We better get to, uh -huh, right? Putting on pretenses to impress people.

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It's all deception, and it's wicked beyond all belief. And so Christ is having none of it.

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In his rebuke of the Pharisees, he says, you are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher and you are all brothers.

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In other words, in the kingdom of Christ, we're all family, right?

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And in families, none is greater than the other. We're all children of God.

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And call no one your father here on earth, for you have one father who is in heaven. And neither be called instructors, for you have one instructor, the

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Christ, the Messiah, Jesus. So the greatest among you, and listen to the words, the greatest among you shall be your slave.

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The greatest among you shall be your slave. But the world that we live in, the greatest among us, are they the slaves?

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Think about this. I think some of the hardest working people in all of Grand Forks are the people who pick up my trash every single week.

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These people, without fail, work in hot and in frigid cold, and they're out there doing an important work.

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But when was the last time you really thought, you know what, those trash guys, they are literally the best among us.

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You get a trash guy, you know, who goes out on a date or maybe puts on his social media, you know, what do you do for a living?

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Well, I pick up trash. How many girls are going to swipe right on that, right?

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This is not how we operate. This is not how the world operates. The trash guys, they're at the bottom.

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But Jesus says of them, the greatest among you shall be your servant. Whoever exalts himself will be humbled.

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Whoever humbles himself will be exalted. And now Jesus really tears into the

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Pharisees. But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you're hypocrites. You shut the kingdom of heaven in people's faces.

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For you neither enter it yourselves, nor do you allow those who would enter to go in. And I want you to note here,

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Pharisees are religious leaders, and Jesus has basically said you go into hell, and not only are you going to hell, but anybody who comes to you seeking to actually enter into eternal life, you are making sure that they don't.

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That's how wicked and deceived they are. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites.

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You travel across sea and land in order to make a single proselyte, and when he becomes a proselyte, you make him twice as much a child of hell as yourselves.

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And we hear this in our modern day and age, and you sit there and go, did Jesus really just say that?

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Yeah, he did. You'll note that he'd probably get kicked off of TikTok if he put out a

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TikTok with this kind of language in there, for the grave sin of extremism.

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And yet Jesus makes it very clear who these people are really about, where their end in eternity is, and he's not speaking kind words by any polite standards.

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Woe to you blind guides who say, well if anyone swears by the temple, it's nothing.

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But if anyone swears by the gold that's in the temple, well then he's bound by his oath.

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And here you can see that their delusional false religion has led them to not properly weight things when it comes to those things that are important as opposed to those things that are not.

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They're not able to make the proper distinction between the sacred and the secular, and as a result of it, like the greedy people that they are, they don't care anything about God's temple.

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What's the thing they care about? The gold, right? And so, if anyone swears by the temple, well that's nothing.

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But if anyone swears by the gold that's in the temple, and boy do we love gold, he's bound by his oath.

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You blind fools, Jesus says, for which is greater, the gold or the temple that has made the gold sacred?

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And you say, if anyone swears by the altar, well that's nothing. But if anyone swears by the gift that is on the altar, well then he's bound by his oath.

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The altar's nothing, right? The altar's no big deal, but the money, the gift that's on the altar, right?

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You'll note that with self -righteousness and this kind of delusional way of thinking, it's all about me, myself, and I, money, power, control.

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So Jesus says, you blind men, which is greater, the gift on the altar that makes the gifts or the gift, which is greater, the gift on the altar that makes the gift sacred?

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So whoever swears by the altar swears by it and everything on it. Whoever swears by the temple swears by it and him who dwells in it.

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And whoever swears by heaven swears by the throne of God and by him who sits upon it. Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites.

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You tithe mint and dill and cumin. Yeah, that's right. These guys literally tithe all the way down to the herbs in their garden, right?

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Mint, dill, and cumin. But you've neglected the weightier matters of the law, justice, mercy, faithfulness.

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They didn't care about justice at all because they were, well, these are the same guys who had

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Jesus crucified. They manipulated the justice system in their favor in order to get rid of those who they considered to be dangerous or rivals, people who would threaten their power and their prestige.

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And as far as mercy is concerned, there's not a hint that the Pharisees had even one ounce of mercy inside of them.

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And note here, I'm not merely talking about Pharisees. I'm talking about you. I'm talking about me.

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I'm talking about our sinful natures, right? Jesus says to them, these you ought to have done without neglecting the others and you blind guides.

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You strain out a gnat and swallow a camel. Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites.

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You clean the outside of the cup and the plate, but inside they are full of greed and self -indulgence.

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You blind Pharisees first clean the inside of the cup and the plate so the outside may be clean.

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Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites, for you are like whitewashed tombs which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people's bones and all uncleanness.

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This is the false facade that is put forward by the self -righteous, always trying to make people convinced that they have got their act together, that they legitimately are holy and all this

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Christ says, you are nothing but whitewashed tombs. A lot of good whitewash does on a tomb, right?

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Because the inside of those tombs, it's just disgusting. And so you also outwardly, you appear righteous to others, but within you are full of hypocrisy.

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You are full of lawlessness. Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites, for you build the tombs of the prophets, decorate the monuments of the righteous, saying, well, if we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.

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Thus, you witness against yourselves that you are the sons of those who murdered the prophets. Fill up then the measure of your fathers, you serpents, you brood of vipers.

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How are you to escape being sentenced to hell? Listen again to that phrase, you serpents, you brood of vipers, your mother is a snake, is what

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Jesus is saying of these people. And it's a hint that takes us back to the Garden of Eden, to the serpent who plunged us into the misery that we find ourselves in, through the temptation that he spoke to our first parents in saying, if you eat of the fruit of this tree, you will be like God.

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So don't you want to be like God? Well, of course I do, I mean, after all, I'm super important, right?

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And Jesus says, you are brood of vipers, and he asks the question, how are you to escape the sentence of hell?

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That's the question that all of us need to answer, because you'll note that in Jesus ripping into the

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Pharisees, there's things that we all have in common with them, and it's actually frightening and terrifying.

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In so many ways, we also are full of selfish ambition, we are full of vain conceit, we are full of the delusion that somehow we can attain salvation by our good works, by our piety, and all of this,

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Jesus says, is nothing more than a good wash of paint on a tomb full of dead people's bones.

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So how then are we to escape being sentenced to hell? How is anybody to escape that sentence?

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You'll note Jesus makes it very clear, the one who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted, and the key there then, the gospel is found in that last bit, the one who humbles himself will be exalted.

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Think of it this way, each and every one of us, we are all guilty of exalting ourselves in the most ridiculous, stupid, and well, sinful ways that you could possibly imagine.

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Our hope is not in our piety, and if it is, you need to change your hope altogether, but our hope is in the one who actually humbled himself perfectly, and he did so for you, he did so for me.

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In fact, Paul says it this way in Philippians chapter two, if there's any encouragement in Christ, there's any comfort from love, any participation in the spirit, any affection and sympathy, complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind, do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, do nothing.

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And it's important to note that Christians need to hear this admonishment, because we still have a sinful nature, and our sinful nature does many things from selfish ambition and from vain conceit, and so it is only then through the power of the

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Holy Spirit that we can obey this command of the Holy Spirit to do nothing out of selfish ambition or conceit, instead, we are to do things in humility, and we are to count others as more significant than ourselves.

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Every single person that you come in contact with as a Christian, the right frame of mind is to count every one of them as more significant than you.

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And if you were to think of it this way, if you were to really adopt this command, if you were to really have this mind that we are called to have in Christ, to count others as more significant than ourselves, then you'll note this, that every single invitation you receive, whether the person be great by the world's standards or the least by the world's standards, as long as you consider that person to be greater than yourself, then everybody that you are with, it would be an honor to be with them.

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It would be an honor to serve them. It would be an honor to love them and to care for them.

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And that's the mentality that comes only through the cross. Look then not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others.

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And if your sinful Adam says, yeah, but if I look after the interests of other people, when am I supposed to take care of my own interests?

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Just search the internet, do a social media search. Do it on TikTok or on Instagram, or even on Facebook or Twitter.

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Do a search for, it's time to love me, right? And all the articles and resources that are out there telling you, you deserve to have some me time, to love yourself and to love yourself well.

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You deserve the best that life has to give, right? It's all satanic.

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It's all a form of selfish ambition. Instead, we are to look to the interests of others. And so with this, then

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Paul then steers us directly into the mystery of the incarnation in the gospel itself.

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Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus. Who though he was the by nature God, he did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped.

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Instead, he emptied himself by taking on the form of a servant, a slave. Being born in the likeness of men and being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.

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You'll note that each and every one of us, we are guilty of exalting ourselves. The one who exalts himself will be humbled.

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But Christ is the one who perfectly humbled himself. He is God of God, light of light, very

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God of very God, begotten, not made, as we confessed in the Nicene Creed. And Christ, who is the highest, came to earth as the lowest in order that we might be saved.

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He humbled himself, becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.

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And that's what it took to redeem and to reconcile us to God. We who have exalted ourselves above God even himself, let alone others.

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We who have engaged in this delusional idea that somehow we are better than other people.

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Then have engaged in the selfish ambition of climbing over people's backs to exalt ourselves over other people.

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Christ did the opposite. He bore even the sin and the iniquity and the guilt that you have incurred by that demonic and satanic way of thinking and acting.

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And he bled and died on the cross, an ignominious death, so that you and I can actually be forgiven.

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He became obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. And you'll note then the gospel here in this context is not only good news, but also frames then how we are to live our lives and what remains of our time here on this cursed creation.

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We too are to humble ourselves, consider others as more important than we are, to serve

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God, to serve others in humility. This is what Christ has done for us.

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And so the one who humbled himself now, it says, therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that the name of Jesus, every knee shall bow in heaven on earth and under the earth and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is

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Lord to the glory of God the Father. So brothers and sisters, it's time to come to grips with the fact.

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You and I have too much Pharisee in us. I have too much Pharisee in me, and so do you.

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And that, therefore, we need to confess all the different ways in which we have been delusional in thinking that we can somehow buy into this false, sick way of looking at the world and other people and even

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God and repent of it and ask Christ to forgive us. And the good news is that he does.

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And being forgiven and washed, having all of our sins washed in the waters of baptism,

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Christ, now through the Holy Spirit, produces in us the fruit of the Spirit. Have you ever heard sanctification being referred to as having your mind transformed and be more like the mind of Christ?

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That's a good way to think of sanctification. But you'll note then, if that's truly what sanctification is, and it is, that it has a lot less to do with not dancing, drinking, smoking, or chewing than it does with humbly loving and serving others.

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That's true holiness. Is it any wonder then that Paul in our Epistle text admonishes us to live a life, to walk in a manner that is worthy of the calling to which we have been called, doing so with all humility, gentleness, patience, in fact, bearing with one another in love and eager to maintain the unity of the

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Spirit in the bond of peace. This is only attainable through the power of the Holy Spirit to those who formerly had exalted themselves, who have been humbled by the preaching of the law, and have hope that there is forgiveness of sins in Christ because of the good news of the gospel.

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We then, in order to walk in a way that is worthy of the calling to which we have been called, the way of Christ is the way of humbleness, gentleness, patience, goodness, kindness, and love.

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Only attainable for those who recognize that their self -righteousness gets them nowhere with God.

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In fact, self -righteousness will get them to hell rather than to heaven. So let us take heart, brothers and sisters,

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Christ has humbled himself and God has exalted him. We are forgiven in him, and so let us cast aside vainglorious ways of living and thinking and instead humbly telling the truth about who we are.

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Let us consider everybody as better than ourselves, and in so doing, fulfill the law of Christ.

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In the name of Jesus, amen. If you would like to support the teaching ministry of Kungsvinger Lutheran Church, you can do so by sending a tax -free donation to Kungsvinger Lutheran Church, 15950 470th

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Avenue NW, Oslo, MN 56744 And again that address is

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Kungsvinger Lutheran Church, 15950 470th

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Avenue NW, Oslo, MN 56744 We thank you for your support.

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All of our teaching messages may be freely distributed as long as you do not edit or change the content of the message.