"Linen and Wine ", December 31, 2017 AM

Let's pray together. Father, I thank you for gathering us together here this morning, and I look with anticipation to your word and to the the clarity and the eternal power of the scriptures that you have given to us by your Holy Spirit that speak to us of our Savior Jesus Christ.

I pray that you would fill us with your spirit, that what we hear that what we listen to we would truly hear, and that you would have your way in our hearts through your word. Lord, I pray that when we leave this place today we will have a word of truth to share with each other, equipped to stir one another up to love and good works, and as we grasp hands and give hugs that we would also encourage each other to hold fast to the confession of our faith.

I pray what you teach us in your word this morning would be on the tip of our tongues, the forefront of our minds, as we look to our holy vocations on Monday. The work you have given to us, whether in the home or outside the home, with families or with strangers, and that we would be a light.

We would be the salt of the earth, fertilizing the ground for gospel growth. I pray for those who can't be with us this morning. I pray a special blessing on them, that you would encourage them, to draw them close to you.

May we all hear today truly rest in Christ and be rejuvenated in his life. I pray these things in the name of Jesus Christ, with whom you are well pleased. I want to invite you to open your Bibles and turn with me to Jeremiah chapter 13.

Jeremiah’s Commission, Judah’s Corruption, and the Warning of Coming Judgment

Jeremiah chapter 13. It's been a few weeks since we spent time and sat down with grumpy old Jeremiah. It's important to keep his ministry in context. To understand why he says the things he says, and the manner that he goes about it.

It's good to remember that he was commissioned by the Lord, even before his birth. He had no say in the matter. He was set apart by God. Before he was born, God knew him and loved him. Before he came into the world, he was selected for a very particular purpose, to preach God's words that God would put in his mouth, and to preach them to Judah and to the nations.

He was commissioned to do this, and he was preaching to a people.

Thoroughly corrupted.

The terrible thing had occurred. The prophets prophesied falsely. The priests ruled by their own authority, and the people loved to have it so. We read in chapter 5. A corrupted people to hear this message, and they were on the verge of collapse.

Their most notable landmark, of course, was Mount Zion. Where the city of God was, and soon their most notable landmark would be called the Valley of Slaughter. Due to the nature of the absolute collapse that Judah was facing, and this was so because of their condemnation before God.

God told Jeremiah that there would be no escape, and told Jeremiah to stop interceding for them, that they would escape the judgment, for it was certain to come. So this is, in some ways, in many ways, this could be seen as a very sad and heartless message, and yet the subtext throughout Jeremiah truly is compassion.

It truly is compassion, as we look closely and read carefully, we find that God is a God of compassion, in sending his prophet Jeremiah to preach the truth, and to speak of the themes of salvation. So it's important to remember those five C's of commission, corruption, collapse, condemnation, and compassion, when you think of grumpy old Jeremiah.

And to add to the grumpiness, I would like to tell you that I hate sweaters. I know, I know, it is the season to dress in layers, and it's traditional for Christmas, but I hate sweaters. They keep me warm in the 15 seconds I walk from my heated car to my heated home, and then it comes off because it's too hot.

Why would I wear sweaters? They make me sweat, and they hide my cool graphic t-shirts. And I want my true colors to come out. I say this because I ran across a quote by George Swinnick, that pride is the shirt of the soul.

Pride is the shirt of the soul, put on first and put off last. And you really see that shirt of the soul when heat comes. In interpersonal conflict in families or at work, the sweaters come off, and there's the pride showing, right?

There's another kind of heat that we need to pay attention to this morning, and that's the heat applied by the Holy Spirit, the cauterizing incisions of the Holy Spirit with the scriptures, because we need pride exposed in our lives in such a way that we can deal with it by the graces of repentance.

So we need to pay attention to the text this morning. Would you please stand with me as I read Jeremiah 13 verses 1 through 14. Let's read about linen and wine. Thus says the Lord, well, thus the Lord said to me, go and buy yourself a linen waistband and put it around your waist but do not put it in water.

So I bought the waistband in accordance with the word of the Lord and put it around my waist. Then the word of the Lord came to me a second time, saying, take the waistband that you have bought, which is around your waist, and arise, go to the Euphrates and hide it there in a crevice of the rock.

So I went and hid it by the Euphrates as the Lord had commanded me. After many days the Lord said to me, Arise, go to the Euphrates and take from there the waistband, which I commanded you to hide there.

Then I went to the Euphrates and dug and I took the waistband from the place where I had hidden it and lo, the waistband was ruined. It was totally.

Worthless.

Then the word of the Lord came to me, saying, thus says the Lord, just so I will destroy the pride of Judah and the great pride of Jerusalem, this wicked people who refuse to listen to my words, who walk in the stubbornness of their hearts and have gone after other gods to serve them and to bow down to them.

Let them be just like this waistband, which is totally.

Worthless.

For as the waistband clings to the waist of a man, so I made the whole household of Israel and the whole household of Judah cling to me, declares the Lord, that they might be for me a people, for renown, for praise, and for glory.

But they did not listen. Therefore you are to speak this word to them. Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, every jug is to be filled with wine, and when they say to you, do we not very well know that every jug is to be filled with wine, then say to them, thus says the Lord, behold, I am about to fill all the inhabitants of this land, the kings that sit for David on his throne, the priests, the prophets, and all the inhabitants of Jerusalem with drunkenness.

I'll dash them against each other, both the fathers and the sons together, declares the Lord. I will not show pity, nor be sorry, nor have compassion, so as not to destroy them. May God bless the reading of his holy word.

You may be seated. We need pride exposed in our lives. Pride is especially dangerous when it manifests as spiritual presumption. This is the kind of pride that says, because of who I am, or where I live, or who I associate with, or what I have accomplished in my life, or what I have experienced, I'm halfway to heaven.

Pride blinds us in such a way that we do not realize, in the words of George Barlow, that we actually live, as prideful people, the proud man lives halfway down the slope of hell. In spiritual presumption, we think we're halfway to heaven because of all these things that we could list.

In our pride, we list them. In our presumption, we think we're okay with God. God is okay with us. What a very dangerous situation to be in when we think we're halfway to heaven, and in fact, we're halfway down the slope of hell.

The message in our text this morning is a warning to those who are spiritually presumptuous. It's an attempt to wake them up from the night of pride. And presumption's night, as we'll see in the text, terminates on faith's horizon.

Presumption's night terminates on faith's horizon. Which I think is the theme of these 14 verses. Let's talk about the night of presumption, and if you're living in the night of presumption, you don't know that you're in the night of presumption.

That's the deceitfulness of sin, and so to wake the the people up, God gives two parables to Jeremiah. I call them parables not because they're didactic fiction. These things actually happened, but the symbolism of them are applied in such a way as to be a powerful image-based lesson.

And the first, of course, is about rotted linen underwear. You paying attention yet? This is not going to be as awkward as Uncle Gus complaining about the quality of underwear. It will be less awkward than that, but it's designed to get the attention.

What we have here in verses 1 through 7 at the beginning is a strange purchase. One of the weirder moments between God and his prophet, he orders Jeremiah to go buy some underwear. A linen waistband, and he says, don't soak it in water.

Which is what you do with linen waistbands, so they don't chafe. So that they are soft and pliable. Well, no, Jeremiah has to wear these very stiff shorts for a long time, and then God says, okay, now, now, take them to the Euphrates and bury them in the crevice of a rock where they're sure to be damp and wet and to sit there for a long time.

And then Jeremiah goes back to get the linen waistband and the unremarkable inevitable occurs. Rotted linen underwear. That's verses 1 through 7. The meaning of it, the symbolic point of it all, we find in verses 8 through 11.

The linen waistband, we find out in verse 11, symbolizes the whole of Israel, the whole of Judah. And that we have Jeremiah as the mediator of God, as the prophet of God, he purchases the linen waistband, and he puts it on, and this symbolizes and reminds the people of how God redeemed Israel, purchased Israel up out of Egypt, and then in the wilderness made a covenant with them and made them a special people to himself in an intimate, close way that no other nation could claim.

And so Jeremiah models this history of Israel and Judah by buying the linen waistband and putting it on. He does not soak it in water because Israel was to be set apart in different, distinct, unpliable, stiff against the pagan influences of the nations around them because they were special unto God.

But then what happened? The lure of idolatry drew the people away from the God who had purchased them and made a covenant with them and and they moved off into idolatry. Chapter 2 of Jeremiah has already described the Euphrates in terms of the source of idolatry.

There's a moment where God is rebuking the foolishness of his people that they grab their bucket and they travel over 100 miles up to the Euphrates and they get water out of the Euphrates and they travel all the way back home and pour it into empty,.

Broken,.

Leaking cisterns. And they go back and do it again and again and again, thus the folly, the emptiness of idolatry. Now God says take the linen waistband,.

Take it up to the Euphrates,.

Bury it in the crevice of the rock, and then go back and get it when I'm ready for you to. And lo and behold, it's rotted,.

Utterly.

Worthless.

And God says just so, just so, I'm going to destroy the pride of Judah and the pride of Israel, the great pride of Jerusalem. He says we're going to destroy all of that just in this way. So one of the key questions we have to ask is what was their pride?

What was their pride? I think it's fairly clear that their pride, the great pride of Jerusalem, was that they were especially selected by God. Nobody else could claim the things that Judah could claim.

Nobody in the city could claim the things that Jerusalem claimed. The stench of spiritual presumption is very strong in Jeremiah. In chapter 7 in verse 4, we have the refrain being chanted by the worshippers.

And what are they saying? They're saying, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord. We're so blessed. We have the temple. And they think that that means a great deal for their spiritual condition, that they have the temple.

And we read about the people, they think they have the warrant of God. God's on our side. Shalom, shalom, peace, peace, when there is no peace. Prophets prophesy falsely. The priests rule by their own authority.

The people love to have it so. They think they have the warrant of God, but the messages are coming from rogue priests and rebel prophets. Spiritual presumption. They think they're halfway to heaven and they're halfway down the slope to hell.

And God, in his mercy and in his compassion, sends his prophet in front of them waving rotting underwear. Saying, this is what God thinks of your sense of eternal security. Because you presume that you are close to me, but in fact you are not.

Their bodies may live on Mount Zion, but their souls are soaking in the idolatrous waters of the Euphrates. This is what God is trying to do. He's trying to wake the people up from their spiritual slumber.

What did he make them to be? Look at the end of verse 11. What did he hope for them? What did he intend for them? He caused the whole household of Israel, the whole household of Judah, the nation as a whole.

He brought them close to him that they might be for me a people for renown, for praise, and for glory. But they did not listen. So what was God's intention for the whole of the nation? As a whole, they were to live as the image of God.

That as God's goodness was mediated through them, his glory would be manifested in them. But they would not listen. They would not listen. That's a key phrase. They would not listen. And soon, not just their souls, but also their bodies would be at the Euphrates, where they would sit down on the banks of the river.

And instead of singing the songs of Zion, they would weep. Psalm 137 says. Parable number two. Wine goes in a jug. This is as simple as saying, shoes are made for feet. And God gives this message to Jeremiah to give to the people.

Every jug should be filled with wine. They say, yes, thank you, Captain Obvious.

That's true.

Don't you know we already know that? Is this your great wisdom, O prophet of God, that you come tell us that we're supposed to fill up every jug with wine? And they're insulted because it's such a simple statement.

It's such an easy logical connection that why do you even have to say it? But he has to say it because they're missing another very simple logical connection. And it's that sin brings forth death. They don't make that connection.

They're not making that logical progression in their thoughts. They think that they have the temple of the Lord. They think they've got prophets and priests telling them that they're just fine. Their kings rule on the throne of David.

Their priests minister in Solomon's temple. Their prophets take up the Holy Scriptures. Their people live on the holy city on God's Mount Zion. So we're all okay. Therefore, we can worship the Queen of Heaven.

Therefore, we can worship Baal. We can do all these sexual immoralities. We can do all these things to oppress the poor. And we've got all these things, but we're fine.

No.

Every jug should be filled with wine and death is the end of sin. They also respond this way to Jeremiah. Oh, don't we very well know that every jug is to be filled with wine? Because in the in the law and the prophets and in the writings all the way through, wine in abundance, every jug filled with wine, wine in abundance is a symbol of eternal life, eternal blessing, the new creation.

And they know those passages really well. Those are the passages the prophets have been preaching. Peace, peace. Look, look at all these wonderful promises that everything's going to turn out just fine.

And those are the passages they preached. And they didn't preach the other passages. Those didn't really sell well. Micah observed this as well in his book in chapter 2 verse 11. He said, if a man comes to you and speaks of you, speaks to you of wine and liquor, you make him a national spokesman.

Like, oh, this will be the national prophet because he preaches about wine. And it wasn't that they like to get drunk. Maybe some of them did. The point was that they wanted to hear about prosperity and abundance and everything is going to be fine.

That's what they wanted to hear. And so they say, we very well know that every jug is going to be filled with wine, Jeremiah. This is coming to us. We know it's going to come. I mean, this is our, this is what we are going to get for eternity.

They presumed upon their spiritual status. They had a lot of honors that they depended on. That's why God, when he's speaking with Jeremiah, talks about those kings who sit for David on his throne. What a high honor.

That to have the title of priest, to have the title of prophet, to be one who lived inside Jerusalem. All these very prestigious matters, these honors, indeed, these theological honors. They presumed upon their titles and their status and God says, yes, there's going to be an abundance of wine.

Oh, yes, there's going to be a great abundance of wine. And I want to fill all the inhabitants of Jerusalem and all of these honorable folks with drunkenness. And he's not talking about a physical kind of inebriation.

He's talking about the drunkenness of disaster, of judgment, of wrath. For, also in the Old Testament, wine is also a picture not just of blessing, but also of judgment, of everlasting judgment. The wine that you're expecting to be filled with, it's not going to happen, but you will be filled with wine and every jug is going to be filled with wine up to the top to the fullness of all possible judgment.

And then, as we see, the vessels are all filled with wine. You take this clay pot full of wine and this clay pot full of wine and.

They are shattered together.

You know, there's nothing to recover when you have a clay pot and a clay pot both filled with wine and you shatter them together and they go to pieces. There's nothing salvageable out of that mess, is there?

It's an absolute, final, utter kind of judgment that God is talking about here. And he says, I'm not going to have any compassion on them. I'm not going to hold back. There's not going to be something where it's almost but not total.

This is going to be, he says, I will not have pity or be sorry or have compassion so as not to destroy them. This is going to happen. And the manner in which the judgments are being spoken about here in the text envisions the coming Babylonians.

They're going to be, their great pride of Jerusalem will be destroyed. The temple is going to be destroyed. The pride of Judah is going to be destroyed. They're not going to have their land anymore. They're going to be taken away to the Euphrates, to Babylon, to live.

And when the fathers and the sons are smashed together, that they, each one breaks the other. To understand that, all you have to do is read Lamentations and see betrayals and read about cannibalism and all the horrors that came with the siege that the Babylonians put on the city of Jerusalem.

God's trying to wake them up. God's trying to wake them up. Rotted, lit in underwear and shattering jugs of wine. He's trying to wake them up, get their attention. But they do not listen. Ezra, the scribe, summarizes this era in Judah, 2nd Chronicles chapter 36 verses 15 and 16.

Here is the summation of the problem. The Lord, the God of their fathers, sent word to them again and again by his messengers because he had compassion on his people and on his dwelling place. But they continually mocked the messengers of God, despised his words and scoffed at his prophets until the wrath of the Lord arose against his people until there was no remedy.

That's a sad note. That's what's going on here in Jeremiah 13. They're not listening. I think that we need to pay attention, and they didn't listen, but we better. And we need to hear the message that's being taught to us and the theme is about spiritual presumption.

That they think that because they had this status, has this linen waistband of the Lord, a close intimate relationship with God, and they had all the fixtures and privileges, that they trusted in these things and they spiritually presumed things about themselves that were not so.

That they could sin and sin and sin and sin and God was just fine with them. We need to be warned about the dangers of presumption. I see two dangers about presumption. The first is that spiritual presumption prepares sinners for hell.

Spiritual presumption prepares sinners for hell. Many are the threads. Many are the threads woven into the veil Satan uses to blind his slaves from the light of the glory of God in the face of Christ.

But every one of those threads is spun from pride.

Pride is the cold.

Crushing wave that fills the lungs of faith and chokes the voice of repentance. Many of our upstanding neighbors and outstanding citizens are but spiritual corpses rolled along by the tide of pride in an ocean of death.

Because presumptuous minds craft idolatrous thoughts. God loves everyone just the way they are. He has no problems with anybody no matter who they are or what they do. He has no real problems with me.

I have many good qualities. No one I know is so bad as to deserve such a thing as eternal punishment. I've never done anything against God. Why would he be mad at me? Each of us must worship God in his or her own way.

Who knows? Maybe God will look upon our sincerity and accept us all. I'm better than most any Christian I've ever met. I'm doing just fine. I can always make an extra prayer when I'm getting close to death.

No one I know has ever gone to hell.

Oh, why would I? Wave.

After wave.

Overwhelms the sinner's heart until the black veil swallows him or her up forever in outer darkness where there's only weeping and gnashing of teeth. Spiritual presumption prepares the sinner for hell.

Jeremiah will not leave Judah without a witness against their spiritual presumption. God and his compassion will not leave his people in their spiritual presumption without an effort to wake them up, be it rotted underwear and broken wine jugs.

Do we see that?

Do we see the compassion? Do we have that compassion? And do we have that sense of danger? Perhaps we do not sense the danger of spiritual presumption in the lives of others because as saints we tolerate it to some degree in our own lives and spiritual presumption prevents saints from holiness.

True holiness. We should not think that we are in no danger of the savage undertow of spiritual presumption. Jesus told us and Paul said that great are the deceits and the deceivers in these last days.

Late into the night and early into the morning devils labor to deceive even the elect. We who trade tread wearily on the currents of tribulation. Our eyes easily flitter away from the lighthouse of grace.

We can easily sink into the calm of complacency and very often we presume upon promises that are best claimed by focused warriors, panting runners, and muddy farmers. Spiritual presumption puts us into a place where we claim this, this, and this, and just say well hey sir oh sir oh.

La dee da.

Here's another day. Here's another week. We just move on. Where's the urgency? Where's the pressing forward? Where's the laying aside of the sin that easily besets us? Spiritual presumption prevents us from growing in Christ and knowing him more and loving him more.

So it prevents us from holiness. What are the types of presumption that we need to be aware of? There are many types. I don't know how best to categorize them, but my efforts come in two forms to tribalism and triumphalism.

The types of presumption. Tribalism sounds like this. I come from a Christian family. I was raised in church. My parents are Christians. My spouse is a Christian. I got a good church. Oh, I go to church.

Not so much anymore, but still it's still there. I mean we have the right denomination, right? Here's the one that.

Perhaps.

Ensnares the most. God bless America, and I hope he does. I hope he does. And the Christians make the best citizens of all. But just because we have a Christian heritage filled with Christian men who wanted to do Christian things doesn't mean therefore that God's in love with us.

And we're the best thing to ever happen in the history of the world. We can claim these things, and maybe not just one of them, but maybe all of them become this interlocking network of reasons why, yeah, God's pretty, you know, excited about us.

God loves us. And we're citing all these presumptuous things. Tribalisms. And there's triumphalism as well. We have a sense of high achievement as when we think about why God loves us, or why we're acceptable to God.

Maybe it's not tribalism. Maybe it's triumphalism because we have had ecstatic experiences.

You know,.

We've had it when it ran down our spine and into our gut and out through our toes. And it's happened more than once. But even Muslims get goosebumps. Maybe it's been something where we believe that we've heard a special word from Christ himself.

He's personally intervened and told us what website to surf to. But even Roman Catholics think they get a direct word from Christ with every new Pope. And many people claim that they have a secret prayer language or a very public prayer language that nobody knows what it means, but only God does.

And they babble off at the mouth, and they think that this means that they are close to God. But even Hindus speak in tongues. Well, these things don't mean anything. Ecstatic experiences don't mean a thing.

They should not be the linen with which we clothe ourselves. And neither should our intellectual orthodoxy be. Intellectual orthodoxy is a pride that is especially insidious, A .W. Tozer says. Because perhaps we have an expression of the faith handed down once for all to the Saints, and this expression answers more questions than most, and is more historically attested than most.

So be it. But that doesn't mean I'm closer to Christ. It doesn't mean that I know more of God and his grace in my life.

Be very careful.

The types of presumption we may lean back into, that we may begin to clothe ourselves with. Because spiritual presumption prepares sinners for hell, and it prevents saints from holiness. The good news is that presumptions night terminates, it ends on faith's horizon.

I want you to see the horizon of faith here in Jeremiah 13. One way we do that is by looking at Jeremiah. He's a man of faith. What's different about Jeremiah compared to his fellow citizens there in Judah and in Jerusalem?

What's the difference between them? Why is it that Jeremiah is a believer? He truly believes in God, he's following God, and the Judeans who think they can worship the Queen of Heaven and Baal and God whenever they want to.

What's the difference between them? Oh, just go read chapter 1, you see the difference. Because of the grace of God in Jeremiah's life. And that's a good way to start off, and we could begin to see that Jeremiah is a special commissioned prophet of God.

He's had the most spiritual upbringings ever. He was a prophet before he was born. Look at this guy. You know what? He had better underwear to boast in than anybody else around him, and he could have, but he didn't!

Why not?

Because Jeremiah believed in Christ. Oh, that's too much. You know, Matthew is way over here, and this is Jeremiah. How can we say he believed in Christ? Well, because Christ came to Jeremiah over and over.

That's one way we know that Jeremiah knew Christ and believed in Christ. Verses 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 11, 12, 13, 14. What does this say? The Lord said to me, I bought the linen waistband in accordance with the word of the Lord.

Verse 13, verse 3, the word of the Lord came to me a second time. What is this? The word of the Lord comes to Jeremiah and begins to speak, and he speaks the word of the Lord. Thus says the Lord, I am the word of the Lord.

I come to Jeremiah, I say something of the Lord, and later on Jeremiah says the Lord himself told me. Who is this that comes to Jeremiah as the word of the Lord, speaking the words of God, and he himself is the Lord?

Who is this? He is Christ. No one has seen God at any time, but the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father. He has explained him. This is Christ coming to Jeremiah time and time again, the word of the Lord coming to Jeremiah and speaking to him one time.

Verse 1, second time. Verse 3, another time. Verse 8, so on and so forth. The word of the Lord comes to Jeremiah and speaks to him. How do we know that Jeremiah believed in the Lord? How do we know he believed in Christ?

Because grace is evident in his life. That he believed, he listened, he obeyed these strange instructions, he spoke these messages to the people. We can tell that he believed because of the evidence that he believed, but he doesn't then take up these evidences of grace and say, this is why God loves me.

He does not put it on as linen underwear that will surely rot according to the test of God. But he is a believer, and we see the evidence of it. Every presumption that Jeremiah could come up with, or that Judah could come up with, every presumption we could come up with will fail God's test and in the end be totally worthless.

I will make the pride of Judah, I will destroy the pride of Judah and the great pride of Jerusalem. He destroys it because it is precisely that spiritual presumption that keeps the people from repenting and believing and following him.

It's the presumption that stands in the way, and it must be destroyed, it must be revealed as utterly worthless. Ephesians 5 .14 says, Awake sleeper and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.

We need to know the difference between presumption and faith. We need to know the difference between presumption and faith. Well, we know presumption is totally worthless. How about some stories from Luke 18?

Turn over there, Luke 18, beginning in verse 8. In the transition between Jesus' instructions about prayer and the next set of parables and encounters, we have this question that Jesus asks. One that sets us up to understand the difference between presumption and faith.

Here's the question at the end of verse 8. However, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth? Will he find faith on the earth? Begs the question, what does faith look like?

Ah, the next story.

The next story.

And he told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous. Presumption. And viewed others with contempt, a sure sign of pride. He says this, Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector.

The Pharisee stood and was praying like this to himself. He's praying to himself. God, I thank you that I am not like other people. Swindlers, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week.

I pay tithes of all that I get. Do you hear what he's saying? Look at my linen underwear. It is good. It is clean. It is bright. This is good stuff. And he thanks God for it. Oh, he believes in grace.

He's a man of grace. For he says, I thank you, God. I give you the credit that I'm so good. See, he thanks God for it. He doesn't say, God, aren't you impressed with me? He thanks God for the outworking.

What he believes is all the good stuff that he does. He gives the credit to God. And he says, I thank you that I'm such an awesome person. So he believes in grace. But what's his linen? His linen is all the stuff I do.

But, verse 13, the tax collector, standing some distance away, was even unwilling to lift up his eyes to heaven, but was beating his breasts and saying, God, be merciful to me, the sinner. And the word merciful is in the Greek propitious.

God, give me a propitiation. God, atone for me, the sinner. Jesus says, I tell you, this man went to his house justified. This man, the tax collector, who said, I'm a sinner, I don't even deserve to look up into heaven, I need propitiation.

He's the one who's justified, not the other. Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted. Oh, there's a difference between presumption and faith, right there.

There's presumption in the Pharisee. There's faith in the tax collector. Do you see the difference?

Next story.

They were bringing even their babies to him, so that he would touch them, but when the disciples saw it, they began rebuking them.

Why?

Because we're at the 12th, and he's got way more important things to do than mess around with your babies. Babies we don't need. Able-bodied followers is what we need. Like us. That can stop babies from coming in.

Jesus called for them, saying, Permit the children to come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. These upstanding colonels and generals in the kingdom. Jesus says, you know what?

The kingdom belongs to infants like these. Are you like one of these? Truly I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom like a child will not enter it at all. Meaning, we don't come into the kingdom as professionals, as strong, as something to offer to God.

We come in like little infants with nothing to offer. I've got nothing that God needs. I've got nothing that the church needs. There's nothing in me that will contribute to the kingdom. I come in as an infant.