The Arrogant Exposed

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Don Filcek; Romans 2:1-16 The Arrogant Exposed

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to the podcast of Recast Church in Matawan, Michigan. This week, Pastor Don Filsack preaches from his series in the
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Book of Romans, A Righteousness from God. Let's listen in. Good morning,
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Recast Church. As Dave said, I'm Don Filsack. I'm the lead pastor here, and a special welcome to this worship gathering this morning especially to those of you that are here for the first time.
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I'm glad that you've taken the bold step to try something different and try something new, at least new for you.
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I encourage you all to make yourself at home here. There's coffee, there's juice, there's donuts while supplies last back there, so take advantage of that.
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All of that's free. And then, just to clarify, I think many of you have been around here long enough, and hopefully,
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I say this often, and I recognize that you could have attended here for a year and still not be able to say this, and so I wanna keep our core values in front of you regularly.
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The name Recast, it has kind of a double meaning. It comes from Luke chapter five, where the disciples have been fishing all night, and they're net fishing, so they're casting out nets, and they fished all night, they got a total blank, and so he comes to them and says, hey, throw your nets, recast your nets to the other side, and in obedience to Christ, they do so, and it's then that they find that their work is productive, and so that's exactly part of the nature of the name
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Recast, but then it also is an acronym for our core values. The R and the E stands for replication, the
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C for community, the A for authenticity, the S for simplicity, and the T for truth, and the
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T for truth doesn't come last as if it's the lowest of priorities, but it actually is the one that comes to tie everything else together.
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That core value of truth is what drives the way that we do church, the way that we come together and hear from God's word each week, that his word drives us, directs us, guides us.
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It is the power to change us and transform us, and you see, I suggest to you that without a stable truth from God, this next week, we will be tossed to and fro by every wave of the culture, and the long game of our life would be to get further from God without having something rooted in his word.
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As a matter of fact, what we would put up with here at Recast would be catchy sermons about my thoughts and my opinions, which could get pretty boring over time because I certainly have quite a few opinions.
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They're strong, but they're not very helpful, and eventually, the God we worship here at Recast would look a lot like my thoughts, my opinions, my view of God, and that would get dangerous in a hurry.
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And so we're gonna, this morning, just like every Sunday, we're gonna dig into God's word to allow his word the chance to correct us, to encourage us, to grow us more and more into the image of his son,
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Jesus Christ, and that's where the power lies, is in his word. Paul set us up last week in the book of Romans, where we started a series a few weeks ago in the book of Romans.
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We're up to Romans 2, verses 1 through 16 this morning, and Paul set us up at the end of chapter one by explaining this nasty slide into depravity that marks all of human existence.
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Every human, he basically talks about these exchanges that we all have made in our lives, the first exchange.
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We've exchanged the glory of God for created stuff around us. We've exchanged the truth of God for living lies, and we have exchanged
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God's good design and purpose for us in order to go our own way and do our own thing.
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Now this morning, that kind of sets the stage, but Paul's gonna make sure that he casts his net wide enough to catch all of us in this indictment.
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He says, I'm not gonna let anybody squirt out the sides of this net. All of us are gonna be caught in the injunction, the instructions that we are all depraved, we are all broken.
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You see, because some of us could end chapter one of Romans with an arrogant attitude, and Paul acknowledges that here at the start of chapter two.
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The reality is, it depends on personality, but some of us are more prone than others to an overestimation of our goodness.
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Some of us focus very much on a poor self image, and some of us are kind of arrogant and proud, and most of us, to be quite honest, are a mix of the two at any given time.
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And so here in chapter two of Romans, God is going to address any and all of us who have ever been guilty, and I think everybody in the room is gonna be indicted by this next statement.
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Anyone who has ever thought or said the words, at least I'm not as bad as, fill in the blank.
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So I think that would, I'm not even gonna ask for a show of hands, I believe that that is, some of you are already raising your hands. I think that indicts all of us.
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I think all of us have thought of a sliding scale. At least I'm not that bad, so God must be okay with me, or something to that effect.
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And he's gonna say, no, we're not gonna allow any room for that kind of thinking. The scriptures don't give us any freedom to have a high estimation of our worth in God's eyes in terms of our behavior and the core of our hearts.
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So let's go ahead and open our Bibles, if you're not already there, Romans two, verses one through 16. We're gonna read it together.
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You can open up in your app on a device, or in your Bible journal, or grab the
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Bible that's under the seat in front of you. But we're gonna read it together, and then come back after a time of praise to study it in more depth.
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And I would suggest this, think about this as I read it, if this text doesn't leave you with some significant questions that I don't think you were listening to it.
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So let's make sure we're listening to it as I read it, follow along, and then it's gonna produce some questions that hopefully will be addressed later in the actual sermon portion of the text.
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This is just the introduction. But Romans two, one through 16. Again, recast, I say this every week.
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God's precious and awesome word. He is going to speak to us through his word. Romans two, one through 16.
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Therefore you have no excuse, O man, every one of you who judges.
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For in passing judgment on another, you condemn yourself because you, the judge, practice the very same things.
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We know that the judgment of God rightly falls on those who practice such things. Do you suppose,
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O man, you who judge those who practice such things, and you do them yourself, that you will escape the judgment of God?
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Or do you presume on the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience, knowing that God's kindness is meant to lead you to repentance?
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But because of your hard and impenitent heart, you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath when
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God's righteous judgment will be revealed. He will render to each according to his works. To those who by patience and well -doing seek for glory and honor in immortality, he will give eternal life.
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But for those who are seeking and do not obey the truth but obey unrighteousness, there will be wrath and fury.
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There will be tribulation and distress for every human being who does evil, the Jew first and also the
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Greek. But glory and honor and peace for everyone who does good, the Jew first and also the
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Greek. For God shows no partiality. For all who have sinned without the law will also perish without the law.
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And all who have sinned under the law will be judged by the law. For it is not the hearers of the law who are righteous before God, but the doers of the law who will be justified.
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For when Gentiles who do not have the law by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves. Even though they do not have the law, they show that the work of the law is written on their hearts.
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While their conscience also bears witness and their conflicting thoughts accuse them or even excuse them on that day when according to my gospel,
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God judges the secrets of men by Jesus Christ. Let's pray. Father, I thank you for your word and sometimes it can be confusing to us at first read.
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So Father, I pray that you would be just making this text clear over the course of this morning that none of us would walk out of here with just the notion or the thought that we can go ahead and now the next part is to fix ourselves, the next part is to clean up our act or to just stop judging others, but at the end, your call is to identify that we cannot do this, we are all indicted, we are all broken, we are all a messed up, each to a person, a messed up sinner who cannot remedy our situation.
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And all of this long text and this long argument from Romans one to chapter three, indicting all of us so that we are prepared in our hearts to need a savior, to recognize the need that we have.
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And Father, I just rejoice that we're a gathering where the majority of the people in this room have recognized their need for a savior and have already come to you and have already asked for your forgiveness and been cleansed and given your righteousness.
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But Father, I also believe that we're a people that are still waging a war with sin, waging a war against judgmentalism and Father, I pray for your grace on each one of us and I thank you for your
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Holy Spirit that convicts and draws us deeper into you and further into an understanding of what your word would have for us.
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Father, I pray that we would lift our voices before you in praise because you are our redeemer, you are our savior, you are indeed our only hope in Jesus' name.
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Yeah, you can go ahead and be seated but remember if at any time during the message you need to get up and get more coffee or juice or donuts, whatever's left back there, you can take advantage of that, you're not gonna distract me.
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Restrooms are out the barn doors down the hall on the left and so if you need those, they're back there.
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And then also, please just keep your Bibles open. If you may be in a shuffle of the connection times if you lost your place, so open your device or whatever, open your
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Bible to Romans 2, one through 16. We read it earlier but we're gonna now walk through it verse by verse and kinda see what
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God's word has for us here this morning. Our text this morning says something and I just wanna be clear, this is gonna be a smidge more academic or technical than it usually is and in part because the text has some things that need to be explained in a very particular way because of the flow of the argument that Paul is making here.
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So to start off, our text would say some things that are flat out heresy if they were taken out of the context.
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I say that because if you just look with me for a second, if you were to take verse seven, imagine taking that and putting that on a motivational poster or on a mug.
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Or verse 13 and throw that on a poster or a mug and then don't use the flow of Paul's argumentation, you would get a false gospel from those couple of verses if taken out of context.
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I say this because we often approach scripture, if we're honest, sometimes we're just looking for a verse, God just give me a verse, give me something that I need today, just give me that little quip or something that I could, that motivational poster quip that I could just live by today, some little piece of encouragement.
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But scripture is best approached thought by thought, paragraph by paragraph, argument by argument.
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And so sometimes I, again, those of you that have been around for a while, you know I like to take larger chunks of scripture and in part that's because the flow is there, the argumentation is there, the things that Paul is trying to drive for is found in these larger portions.
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Now certainly there are times when a verse just stands out and pops and you can see that there's a lot of depth and richness in it, but boy, we would go astray if we didn't pay attention to the context.
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Paul's making a very long and sustained argument from chapter one all the way through the end of chapter three here, one large major argument.
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And we can't fully grasp all that he's saying here in the text until we get a clear teaching in chapter three of where the whole argument is going.
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And where the whole argument is going is for him to ultimately, finally, unashamedly say, there are none who are righteous, there are none who do good, there are none who seek after God.
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That's where the whole argument of chapters one through three is going. So I set that stage to be clear that what comes before our text and what comes after our text has a significant and should have a significant understanding on the text that we're studying today.
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I had a college professor in Bible college, that's quite a few years ago, who guaranteed that by the end of his course we would remember his outline for the rest of our lives on the book of Romans.
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He said, I guarantee you're gonna remember this. And it actually came back to me this week. It was really funny. I was like, I oughta write him back and say,
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I've lost track of him for a while, but it's a simple outline. It's sin, salvation, sanctification, sovereignty, and service.
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And that's a five -point outline for the book of Romans. And I point that out. It's valuable to think about outlines sometimes because we need to remember that Paul doesn't even begin to really speak or give any argumentation for the way that God saves us until chapter four of the book of Romans.
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All of these first three are setting us up for the need for a savior. Why in the world did
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Jesus Christ, how many of you think that the cross seems like an extreme measure for the son of God? For God to send his own son,
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God in flesh, to die on our behalf. Does that seem pretty extreme? Does that seem like a pretty intense, why would he do that if we could fix ourselves?
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Why would he do that if we could be righteous on our own, if all that it took was just saying I'm sorry, or all it took was living a little bit better, living better today than I did yesterday, or something, some silliness like that.
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And so it's very fundamental that we, he spends three chapters talking about our depravity from a variety of different angles, talking about our sinfulness, talking about how thoroughly unequipped we are to reconcile our relationship with the
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Almighty God. And so all of this text we're covering today is meant to be an indictment against us.
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It isn't written with the purpose of explaining the solution. There is no solution in this text to our plight.
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We are meant to walk away from this text understanding one more component of the depravity of our sinful hearts.
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And so last week, Paul explained how far humanity had slid into ungodliness. You could go back and listen to that message if you weren't here,
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I'd recommend it. But go back and listen to the way that he explains the exchanges and the way that we've exchanged the light for the darkness, each one of us, and humanity as a whole, but each one of us as individuals have slid into that as well.
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And so he made a case last week for the wrath of God against all unrighteousness and all ungodliness.
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And so he starts off verse one of chapter two with a shift in his focus. He's talking about overt sin, very clear, things that happen in culture and society and in our hearts and in our lives that are just clearly sin.
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How many of you know what some of those things are in your own life? Like it's just overt, it's like that's just direct. That's against God, that's against others.
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Go ahead and raise your hand if you know that. You know yourself well enough to know that there's that. Some of us are like, is this a trick question?
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Yeah, all of us, I think, know that that's the case for us. And so the shift in focus is going to be to address now any one of us who aren't very eager to raise our hands, who would be arrogant enough to maybe let ourselves off the hook to some degree.
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And I, again, think that that's most of us. You see, some will listen to chapter one and will begin to come up with excuses for themselves.
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All that long list in verses 29 and 31, or 29 and 30, or I think it's maybe 30 and 31 of last chapter, it's a long list of just the, again, depravity, sins, things that we have done, and all the way down to like one of them was disobedient to parents.
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Like how many of you ever disobeyed your parents? Like I mean, just that alone, like indicted, guilty, all of us.
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So he just gives this long list of sins. But you see, some will listen to chapter one and excuse ourselves.
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And I believe that all of us at some point have basically determined that we'll look at that list and we'll pick out the really bad ones and then be glad we don't do those and we'll think that we're okay because we haven't broken the bad ones.
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We haven't done the, we haven't really murdered anybody yet. And so we let ourselves off the hook.
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But Paul here isn't gonna play around with any of that. He's not gonna let any of us out of the net of the indictment of our own depravity.
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He says you have no excuse for having a judgy attitude towards others. Right off in verse one.
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And the word you throughout this text is singular, showing that he is now set about to personalize this text to the individual.
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He is now talking to us as individuals. He is addressing, are you ready for it? He's addressing you.
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Take that on, he's talking to you. It's not a general address to the church. It's not even a general address to humanity.
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He's speaking to each and every one as an individual. He's certainly obviously writing to the church in Rome but he wants each person reading and listening to this letter to take this on for yourself.
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To pay attention, to heed these words. He is talking to you. He likely, by the way, had
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Jews in mind in this because in verse 17, the first verse for next week, he's gonna mention the
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Jews, again, in this context and they're the people who had the law. But I believe that it's appropriate to consider ourselves in this indictment of arrogance, which is really what he's talking about.
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Because after all, he was actually writing to a church of the redeemed people in Rome. And so you might ask yourself, why write this to a church who's already redeemed, who's already okay with God?
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Why is he talking about judgmentalism and things like that? Anybody have any clue why he would wanna talk to a church about judgmentalism?
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Nervous chuckle. It's beneficial for all of us to understand and take assessment of ourselves regarding the indictment of an arrogant approach to the world and to others.
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And so the flow of our text outlines like this. The first is gonna be verses one through five, the arrogant described.
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Verses six through 10 are gonna be the arrogant exposed and they're gonna be exposed in those verses by their actions.
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And then in verses 11 through 16, it's gonna be the arrogant exposed by God's impartiality,
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God's impartiality. So the arrogant described, the arrogant exposed by actions, the arrogant exposed by God's impartiality.
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So we need to look at this first description of the arrogant religious person. I'm gonna be calling them the arrogant religious throughout this, but remember, he's talking to an individual, he's talking to us.
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And so we need to just think and take on as much as we can in terms of assessing our own lives regarding our own arrogance towards others and really ultimately, arrogance towards God and thinking that our sins aren't as bad as others.
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So in verses one through five, we're gonna see that, the description. And I say arrogant religious person because throughout this text, it becomes, he paints a picture of this person to such a degree that we understand that he's speaking to those who think they're better than others based on their behavior and having the law of God.
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They have the law of God and so they think they're better than others. They know God's word, they're in church or they're in religious context.
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They're religious in their outward appearance and so because of their religiosity, they believe that they're somehow okay with God, at least better than others.
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The arrogant religious person passes judgment on others. You see that right away in verse one. That's part and parcel of the description of this individual, they would judge others.
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And I wanna be clear that it's not always wrong to pass judgment. So we might hear this text and go, okay, okay, back away,
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I have no problem. Our culture is anti -judging anyways, isn't it? I don't judge anything. Don't ever judge and you'll be okay.
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Like tolerance is one of the greatest virtues of our culture and so why in the world would we need to hear this in America, right?
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Don't ever judge? Okay, check, got that down. But I wanna be clear that it's not always wrong to pass judgment.
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Jesus Christ himself, our Lord and our master said, before you go to rebuke a brother or a sister, which is really interesting because he takes for granted that there's gonna be a time in your life where you're gonna need to go to rebuke somebody.
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Somebody's sinned, somebody's done something wrong, somebody's done something wrong against you. You're gonna go do this thing. Most of us, probably many of us maybe have never done this in our lives and we ought to have.
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And instead, we've talked about things behind people's back and we've stirred up strife and division and things like that.
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But anyways, that's another message. But Jesus said, when you go to rebuke a brother or sister, first in humility, he says, and it's a plan where it's meant to be kind of somewhat humorous.
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Take the log out of your own eye before you then go and take the speck out of your brother or sister's eye.
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He doesn't say never go rebuke. He doesn't say never go judge, never go correct, never go with the word of God and say, hey, brother,
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I feel like you're kind of going astray here and love would have you come back. Love would have you not go down this road because you're not gonna like the results.
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But he says, go in an attitude, Jesus said, go in an attitude that acknowledges your own brokenness first.
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Go with a humility that says, I am a broken, messed up, jacked up individual too. And I'm just as open to your critique as you should be to mine.
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And that's part of what it means to be mutually encouraging, mutually edifying, mutually building one another up in the body.
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You can speak into my life, I can speak into yours. And that's part of what it means to be a member of the body of Christ is this relationship where we go and don't let things fester and don't let things grow and don't let a segment of the church begin to have animosity towards an individual without going to them and talking with them.
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God forbid that that would happen. Go in humility, go with the full knowledge of your own sin, he says.
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And the arrogant religious person is the kind of person who would pass judgment on others eagerly while practicing, it says in the text, the same things.
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And the Greek word there that's the idea or the concept of same things is the exact same things.
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I think that all of us know what this is like to some degree in our lives. Where we're guilty of a sin and it presses in on us in such a way that we're eager and quick to judge it in others because we readily see it.
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So we bend the truth a lot. So who annoys us the most? People who bend the truth a lot. Liars annoy liars.
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Arrogant people annoy arrogant people. Do you get what I'm saying? And so we have the full knowledge of our, we may not have the full knowledge of our own sin but we go and we address that exact same sin in others.
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And they pass judgment on those who practice the same things. And that's the description, by the way, of quintessential hypocrisy.
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I'm in secret doing this thing but I'm out openly declaring against the same thing.
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Do you see the hypocrisy in that? But the arrogant religious are people who practice sin and the word practice there, it's a little bit of an eerie word when you think about it in terms of sin because it isn't just practice, it's not the word just do.
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It's the word practice, like practice basketball. You go to a basketball practice to run drills and plays for the sport and you're getting better at it.
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You're enhancing your capacity for it. You're enhancing your cardiovascular ability to get up and down the court and pass plays and make it crisp and all of that stuff.
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That's the phrase for practicing sin here in the text. So that everyone who has ever judged another individual on earth has equally practiced sin.
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Do you understand that? Anyone who's ever passed judgment on another has practiced sin themselves. So what is this calling for?
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It's not to judge, it's moving us and ought to be moving us towards humility. But Paul states rhetorically in verse two that we know that the judgment of God falls rightly.
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He's saying, by the way, when it comes to judging things, we know already, you don't even have to state it, we know that the judgment of God falls rightly on those who practice the types of things listed out in verses 29 through 31 in the previous chapter.
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We already know that. We know that God's righteous judgment, those who know God and he says all of us have some sense of the knowledge of God, back in Romans one, all of us have some sense that judgment is just and right.
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There is indeed a judgment that comes down on those who do these things. And so there is a standard.
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Be clear that there's a standard. So it's not wrong to judge based on God's word, his standard, but it is wrong to judge others without accurately and honestly judging ourselves first.
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And I believe that what the arrogant religious are missing are two primary things in this entire realm of judging.
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The first thing that they're lacking is humility and the second thing they lack is honesty. And that's in some mixture in their lives.
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They are either not humble towards others and therefore they think themselves better than others, but that might also be in part because they're not honest about their own depth of sin in their own chest and in their own actions.
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I would suggest to you that we can be quite deceived about how truly dark our hearts have become, right?
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How many of you at times have just had something exposed in your own heart and you're like, where in the world did that come from? That's a scary, that's a scary idea.
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The arrogant religious are not only defined by what they lack, they certainly lack humility and honesty, but in verses three through four they're defined also by what they possess.
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In verses three through four they possess an arrogant presumption upon God. First it says that they suppose, in verse three, they suppose that they are beyond the judgment of God.
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Now I wanna be careful here to clarify that under the new covenant there is indeed, there is indeed a genuine positional safety for anyone who is in Christ Jesus.
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It's not presumptuous to say, hey, I believe in the cross of Christ, I've asked him to save me, he is my
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Lord, he is my king, I'm seeking to live for him, I'm safe, right, I'm okay with God. That's not presumption, that is faith, that's saving faith.
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Paul is not warning here about losing our salvation. He is speaking primarily to, remember in context, he's speaking primarily to Jews here who have a presumption of being okay with God in this context based on ethnicity, who
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I was born to. I was born in this family, I was born to this religious sect, I was born to this religious group, and therefore
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I must be okay. And they are not basing anything on the blood of Christ, but it's presumption to base your security on anything, your security in your relationship with God on anything other than blood of Jesus, that's presumption.
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And I think in that sense, the same error could just as easily creep into the Christian faith and into churches just as easily as it did in Judaism in the first century here that Paul is addressing.
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You see, we could be just as easily guilty of presuming upon God's kindness and his patience because we think we went to the, we went or go to the right kind of church, or our parents had a really strong faith, or we've done a lot of really good things, or we have consistent quiet times in the word, or we really help out in the community at the food pantry, or we give to United Way, or maybe we've even memorized a lot of scripture.
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So we could presume upon God's kindness based on our outward actions.
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But presumption is never based on faith. Presumption is based on anything except for faith and trust in the finished work of Jesus Christ.
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Presuming upon God's kindness is equivalent to putting trust in anything but the cross that declares that we couldn't save ourselves.
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So if you have the cross of Christ and his forgiveness, that is never presumption. That's called salvation.
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There's a difference. And so this kind of presumption is so utterly terrifying because in verse three, it leads people to assume that they will escape the judgment of God when they will not.
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For this reason, I believe that the arrogant religious are some of the hardest people to win for the kingdom. They're certainly the ones who
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Jesus rattled the most while he was here on earth. The arrogant religious are the ones he tried to shake awake with the most harsh words that Jesus Christ ever spoke with his physical mouth while he was here on this planet.
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You see, the arrogant religious presume on his kindness. It says in the text in verse four, they presume on his kindness, his tolerance, and his patience.
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Well, the beauty of that, right, I mean, that's a negative statement, but the beauty of it in the middle of verse four is that Paul is actually declaring that God has kindness, tolerance, and patience to presume upon.
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You ever thought about that? God has kindness toward humanity in general. God has tolerance toward humanity in general.
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God has patience toward humanity in general. But what he's declaring is that the arrogant religious misunderstand why
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God is patient with us. You see, we can be lured into thinking God is okay with our sins.
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That happens in a very practical way. We can begin to look at real life around us and realize that we can get away with sin.
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How many of you realize that in your life? You've sinned plenty and you haven't been smitten by God and boom, and the lightning bolt hasn't come out of the sky and scorched you.
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And you're like, wait a minute. I could do that again. And maybe the lightning bolt won't hit again.
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And after a few years of that, you're like, he's patient, must be all good.
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I speak harshly with my children and my house didn't burn down. You look at pornography. The screen doesn't blow up sending shards of glass into your face.
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And so we begin to take God's slowness to wrath and we twist it into tacit acceptance, not realizing that the delay in his wrath is for one primary purpose, to give us time to repent, to give us time to forsake sin and to run to him for mercy.
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And I say run to him, I say it in that way because our hope for defeating sin is found in him.
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It's found in freedom at the cross. It's found in going back. Anybody who finds themselves in a cycle of sin that you wanna break, keep going to the cross.
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It's not about your effort. It's not about pulling yourself up by the bootstraps. It's not about your own strength overcoming sin.
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It's his cross, it's his love, it's his mercy. Keep going to the cross and then seek help.
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Have some other people to gather around you to pray for you and I mean, sin loves to grow and fester in the darkness and in the dark corners.
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Expose it to the light. There's power and there's strength in numbers and brothers and sisters gathering together and praying for one another and encouraging one another.
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His delay is meant to lead us to repentance. God is, by the way, it doesn't say he delays, that his patience, his tolerance, the time that he gives us in our sin is not to get our act together.
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That's not what it says. He's not buying us time to get our act together. He's giving us time to run to him, to run to him and I say that in part because the fundamental issue is declared about the arrogant religious in verse five.
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At the heart of the issue is always an issue of a heart that is either for God or against God and we can't change our inner nature.
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See, here it is expressed in arrogance, judgmentalism and sinful behavior because the issue is a hard and impenitent heart, he says.
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He indicts the arrogant religious as having an impenetrable, impenitent heart. See, the humility that is required to run to God for salvation is absent and so there is no softness to the heart of the arrogant religious.
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The image of a hard heart evokes images of a lifeless stone that doesn't respond to stimuli.
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When the second modifier clarifies the first, the first modifier is a hard heart, the second is an impenitent heart.
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A hard heart is by nature impenitent. It means non -repentant.
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The Greek dictionaries, as I research and I study this word, Greek dictionaries are willing to give this word a more narrow religious definition, even in its secular use.
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It wasn't used a lot out in the culture unless it was in a religious context but it's defined as an unwillingness to turn and run to God.
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It is the very nature of the response of humanity to the first sin. What did Adam do first thing in the, when
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God came down to walk with him in the garden as he had done in the past, what did Adam do? He hid.
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He ran from God where I'm convinced that the nature of that relationship, what do you think was common when
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God would come down to walk with Adam and Eve in the garden? What do you think that looked like? He's here, he's here, run, run, run to him to spend time with him, the one who created you.
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I don't imagine, I just can't even imagine what that must have looked like, what that must have been like. And then for the first time,
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Adam, where are you? Well God knew but he asked the question to drive home the point, where did you go?
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Why aren't you running to me anymore? The impenitent heart is one that runs away from God.
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And the fact of the matter is, how many of you ever been scared of God? You sinned, you broke his law, you broke his rules, and you live in fear and Satan would love to foist over on you the idea, and certainly his judgment is toward those who do not run to him and so that's a little bit, sometimes you feel like you're in a conundrum, a bit of a catch -22, but run to him.
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His mercy is deep, his grace is wide, his love is unending for anyone who would come to him and say, please show me mercy, give me mercy.
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I've failed for the 175th time on the same stinking sin.
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Have mercy, Father, I want victory. That's repentance. It's not that there's not 175th time, it's not, repentance doesn't look perfect in our lives, does it?
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It's not like, oh, I sinned once and I said I'm sorry and I'll never do it again and I never do it again and that's what repentance is and anything shy of that is not repentance.
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No, that's not it. We're fallen people and I'm not saying plan for sin and wage an all -out battle with it, but keep running to him, keep going to him.
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The issue is an issue of the heart. The humility that is required to run to God for salvation is absent from the arrogant religious.
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They have a hard and impenitent heart. And I would suggest to you that further, the picture of that heart is a self -sufficient heart, a heart that doesn't believe it needs help, a heart that thinks it's better than others, a heart that trusts in itself.
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And in all of these things, in all of this description, I'd ask you to analyze what you see and hear. It's to you that he's talking.
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It's to each and every one of us that he's talking. The final description of the arrogant religious is at the end of verse five, there it says, storing up wrath for the day of God's righteous judgment on the day that that will be revealed.
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So please take a moment to consider the desperate plight of the religious arrogant. He's describing people who know
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God, who know his standard, people who judge others by the law while breaking the law in the same places.
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They presume on God's patience, assuming that they will escape judgment based on the wrong criteria, some kind of good that they've done or some kind of thing that they've accomplished, but by not repenting and running to God for mercy, they're merely adding more and more to their final judgment.
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And this may be the status of some of you here in this room. It is likely the status of many people that we know.
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And so our unsaved friends and neighbors are storing up wrath for themselves according to this text.
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So we must not be guilty of bringing them a gospel of your best life now. They need to hear the good news that the wrath of God toward our sin can be removed by faith in the finished work of Jesus Christ.
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It is, the thing that we're saved from or the thing that we're saved to is not more wealth or better business deals or a better family life or even salvation from a boring life.
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Jesus bought something much more valuable for us on the cross. He bought for us escape from the righteous wrath of his heavenly
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Father, and that is what is at stake in our salvation. That is the message that we bear and bring to a broken and fallen and dying world, a message that without it, we would be condemned as well.
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And so now the text takes a turn in verse six. Paul has described first for us the arrogant religious, but now he's gonna spend the rest of the text exposing them.
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And he does so through explaining the way that the law works and this is where it gets a little technical. Anyone who is self -confident that they keep rules better than others is gonna need a refresher course in the way that the law works.
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You need to understand the law. If you're gonna live by the law, you think you can achieve salvation through being better than others, then buckle up.
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See, the currency of the law is the deeds of individuals. Laws judge the actual behavior and deeds or works of those that are under that law so that you don't get a ticket for thinking about speeding.
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You don't get a ticket for writing a book about speeding or posting a status about speeding.
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What do you get a ticket for? Speeding. It's the action, it's the behavior, it's the deed that is measured.
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And therefore, that's the currency of law. And that's what verses six through eight are explaining.
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We know that we are not saved by the law. That's explicit. That's the argument that Paul is making throughout the entirety of the book of Romans.
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But in this section of the text, Paul is explaining to those arrogant religious who have elevated the law as the most important thing.
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He's explaining it to them. So if you wanna make the law everything, he says, take this on.
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Because the law is no respecter of persons. Will only concern itself with works and deeds.
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Not concerned with where you were born, who you were born to, what your ethnicity is, none of that stuff. The law is the law.
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And so verse seven says that the way that God's law works is that for those who have a consistent patience in doing good, if you're consistent and patient and consistently doing good, then you'll inherit eternal life.
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You heard me right. If you're consistent and you obey the law in every point and you're patient in doing good, then you'll have eternal life.
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Here, Paul is highlighting the standard of holiness in legal terms. Law -based judgment is based on behavior, based on works.
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And those who do good consistently, he says, will be rewarded. But in verse eight is the other side.
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Those who do not obey the truth, but instead obey unrighteousness, will come to wrath and fury.
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Now these two verses, some of the commentaries wanted to make this hypothetical. Like, well, he's just throwing out a hypothetical scenario that isn't real.
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But you see, I don't believe it's hypothetical. These verses are setting out a genuine order of the law of God.
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If you can keep it, you will have eternal life. If you can obey this law, if you can follow it to the
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T, then go for it. This is not gonna be until the end of the argument that he's gonna clarify for you.
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You can't, but go ahead and try. See, that's the way that law works.
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If Israel could have kept the Old Testament law, they would have stayed in God's favor. If you could keep the law in every point, you'd be okay, too.
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But in the larger argument of the Book of Romans, this only serves to condemn us further, each one of us, because none of us, by patience and well -doing, seek for glory and honor and immortality.
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You see, what he's saying here in this verse is literally that each one of you has been offered honor by God, glory by God, immortality by the
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Almighty, every one of us. That's offered. Just obey. And you see, the crazy thing is that even the pledge of immortality, if you keep this law, has not kept your hand out of the cookie jar.
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Do you get it? The pledge of honor from the Almighty, the pledge of glory, the pledge of immortality, if you follow this law, has not kept you following the law.
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How broken is our wayward heart that even the greatest of trophies, the greatest of treasures offered to each and every one of us is not enough to keep us in obedience?
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Do you feel indicted? Do you recognize that you need something else? That's what
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Paul is driving our hearts to, to the reality of the weight that we cannot bear so that we might glory all the more when we get to chapters four and five and six and see the beauty of the salvation wrought at the cross of Jesus Christ?
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Him bearing all of that crud for us. Him doing what we could not do.
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Do you see how desperate our plight is? Do you see how far gone we actually are?
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That's what this text is driving us toward here. It's not hypothetical. If you could have kept the law, you would have been okay.
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But he's indicting the arrogant religious sinners based on the law and on the basis of our own standard.
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They are worthy of wrath. They are worthy of fury, worthy of tribulation, worthy of distress.
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My wife was reading something just this morning and it happened to touch on this passage. It was really interesting. I'll just throw it in here as an illustration.
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But one of my favorite philosopher theologians, Francis Schaeffer, I literally have this beard because of him.
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He had the same beard. He was a Swiss guy and he had no mustache. Anyways, caught on in college.
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I loved reading. I've read tons of his stuff. But he says about this text, he called it the invisible tape recorder.
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Now, that's dating him a little bit. He passed away probably 15 years ago now. But he called it the invisible tape recorder passage.
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Each one of us has an invisible tape recorder hanging around our neck, so to speak, imaginary, obviously. And that tape recorder is recording every time that you have ever judged another person.
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And then it's like God is going to say, hey, let's just judge you according to your own standard. At the end of time, the judgment day, we're gonna open up this tape recorder, we're gonna play it back to you, and we're only gonna judge you according to the things that you've judged others for.
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Everyone indicted. Every single one of us condemned based on our own voices saying what is right and wrong.
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Do you see that? And that's the picture that we have here. Wrath, fury, tribulation, distress at the final day of judgment for anyone who would set the law as your standard.
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Anyone who would attempt to and believe that you're good enough to get into heaven, good enough to reconcile your own relationship with God.
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And it's stark terms, terrifying future judgment described at the judgment for those who do not accept
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God's way of salvation. Verses nine and 10 merely reiterate this in clarity. Those who do evil incur judgment no matter what ethnicity.
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To the Jew first and also to the Greek. It's a little bit of play on words because he said that salvation comes to the Jew first and also to the
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Greek. Now judgment comes to the Jew first and also to the Greek. Lest you think you're better because the gospel and the good news came to you first,
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Jesus came to the Jews. He's like no, but on that standard, you're judged first too. You've been given more.
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And the one who too much is given, much is required. And so actually all of this of course drives towards the point, he's exposing us by our actions, by the very things that we do.
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And again, once you get into chapter three, he will say definitively what is extremely valuable in our argument today.
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Romans 3, 12 says this. All have turned aside. Together they have become worthless. Not one does good, not even one.
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None of us. None of us meet this standard, not one of us.
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And so he says here we are all exposed by our actions and by judging others. Without Christ, each and every one of us is a self -seeking, arrogant lawbreaker, worthy of condemnation.
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And it's not a pretty picture, but an important one for us to see. We are exposed as lawbreakers by our actions.
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And lastly, Paul exposes the arrogant religious by God's impartiality. You see, for the
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Jew reading this, and you gotta understand a little of the history and the context, the Jew reading this during the first century, there was still one more loophole on their mind.
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There was still one thing that they would say, okay, yeah, you list these things. I'm a little bit better than all of that.
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Yeah, you talk about the law and all that stuff. But what you don't understand, Paul, is I was born a
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Jew. I was born to God's precious chosen people. I know
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God's law. I've got it here. And I was born into his family.
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He likes me better. So, Paul, whatever you're saying doesn't really apply to me, because I'm kind of in with God.
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And so he just dispels this quickly with saying God doesn't have favorites. He shows no partiality in judgment.
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Some have broken God's commands and sinned without even knowing the law, and some have sinned under the law. How many of you think that that's even worse, a little bit?
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Like you knew what you were breaking, and you still did it. Some break the law in ignorance. But the issue isn't whether or not you know the law.
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The issue is what you do, says Paul in verse 13. Really, the issue when it comes to judging by law is what you actually do, not what you know.
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Guilt is established based on behavior. Ignorance doesn't hold up in a court of law.
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I didn't know murdering was wrong. Further, Paul says the Gentiles who didn't have the written law of God still had the law written on their hearts.
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The fact is, what he's declaring here, is that there is literally a universal law. And the fact that it's a reality among humanity, even though it's quite suppressed in some cultures and some places,
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Paul is explaining one of the most clear indications that we as humanity are a creation of a holy and righteous
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God. Every human society that has ever existed that we have any record of on the planet had laws and rules.
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You ever think about that? Why have we not found some tribe somewhere that didn't have any rules or laws or rituals or customs or regulations?
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We're created by a God who is moral, who is holy, who is righteous.
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And the arrogant religious ought not to think that they are something special because they have God's word. Instead, that just puts them in a worse position because they have in writing the very laws that they're breaking.
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Finally, in verses 15 and 16 here, as we draw to a close and our text comes to a close, Paul says that even the
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Gentiles will stand before Jesus, the judge, and they will have some sense, somewhat conflicted in their hearts, but some sense of right and wrong that they have done.
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And on that final day, the standard of judgment will be Christ himself. According to the gospel,
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Paul proclaimed. What is in the end of the text the standard of judgment? He's been saying, well, you wanna be judged by the law?
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Here's what it looks like to be judged by the law. But at the end of days, it's gonna be based on Jesus Christ.
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And he will judge people based on whether or not he knew them. Were they subjects of his kingdom?
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Were they sheep in his flock? Were they purchased by his blood?
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So if you're here and you're presuming on God's patience today, he's eager to give you a new heart.
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He's eager to give you a new heart. He will exchange your hard and impenitent heart for a heart of flesh that will beat and respond to his love.
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If you would humble yourself, if you would honestly admit you are not enough, you cannot save yourself, you are honestly not better than others, and if you will accept the sacrifice of Jesus to save you from your sins, he will give you the hope of forgiveness and eternal life even today.
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I'm glad that we come to communion each week. That's been an intention from the very beginning.
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I recognize that the threat that a lot of churches feel about taking communion every week is that it'll become routine.
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It is a routine. Whether it's a routine that you do once a month or once a quarter or once a week, it's still a routine.
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And at the end of the day, it just brings us back. It brings us back to the main point.
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It forces us, whether you intentionally do it or not, whether you take the opportunity or you let it pass by or you let it go past your mind, you're given an opportunity every week to get back down to the reality.
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You see, in a text like this that leads us down into the darkness, it's all the more valuable that we conclude with light. Communion is meant to set our focus on the reality of a better hope.
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The cross of Christ is humbling, for sure, but consider what a better hope is found in Christ, a better hope than competition with each other to hope that I'm better than you, a better hope than acting like and pretending with a mask on that I'm better than everybody else, a better hope than hard and penitent hearts that cannot respond with love for God and love for others.
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Instead, what we have in the message of Christ and the message of communion is the granting of a new heart, a new change, a new righteousness, a righteousness granted to us by the sacrifice of His Son.
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So if you belong to Christ and have acknowledged your need for Him to save you, you've asked Him, then during this next song, come to one of the tables and take a cracker to remember
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His body broken for us and take the cup of juice to remember His blood that was shed for each and every one of us.
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You can take that cup back to your seat for some reflection, you can take the cracker and juice to standing in the back, take it at your own pace, but take it with joy, take it with joy that your sins, your arrogance, your pride has been taken to the cross by your
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Savior. And then let's go out from this place eager to bring the only hope of eternal life to our world.
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And let's make sure that we move out to our community with humility and with love.
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Let's pray. Father, I thank you so much for your grace. And just even as this text paints such a harsh picture of the reality of our own hearts, and it would be very easy to talk about the arrogant religious as if that's some group of people out there, but I'm convinced that it's many of us in here.
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Either we are acknowledging our sin and we're broken over it, or we're still in a state of trying to compete with others.
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Maybe we can just try to compete with ourselves, or trying to just self -improvement projects, and self -help, and all of that.
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But at the end of the day, this just paints such an amazing picture, such a stark, amazing, clear, but dark picture of our hearts.
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So Father, I pray that if anybody here is left in that dark place, if there's anyone here who just doesn't know where the light is found,
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Father, that you would lead them in boldness to come and talk with me as I'm at the door, or come and talk with Dave who's up here, or the elder on duty, or whatever.
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But Father, I pray that you would move in them with boldness to come and say, I feel that darkness, I feel that judginess,
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I feel that competition with the world around me so that I can be better than everybody else. And Father, I pray that today might be a day of salvation for them.
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But then Father, for those of us who are purchased by you and then slide back into that, I pray that your grace would cover us, that we would come back to the cross and recognize that we couldn't do it for immortality, we couldn't do it for glory, we couldn't do it for honor, but you did it for your love for us and your faithfulness.
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And so Father, I pray that you would receive more honor this week through everyone that's gathered here who's heard this message, because you are the one who deserves all honor for our salvation, in Jesus' name, amen.