Bragging Rights

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically from the audio and may contain small errors.

I just want to pray right now, and I want to thank God for that time of worship. Lord, thank you that we can sing loud. Thank you that we can sing your praise, that you give us that ability, that you make that provision for us. Thank you for our time, for our church body to be gathered, and to just enjoy fellowship and corporate worship. It's your name that we pray. Amen. All right. We are going to be in Romans chapter two today, and we're going to start in verse 17. And I kind of want to hit the ground rolling a little bit because we've got a long way to go and a short time to get there. It's a quote, a famous song. Is that Jerry Reed? Yes. That was an emphatic yes right there. Okay. We're going to begin in Romans chapter two, verse 17. And I just want to read that verse first. I just want you to see it, that verse, because it's going to help us kind of understand what's going on.

It says, but if you call yourself a Jew and rely on the law and boast in God. Okay, I know I realize that's just a clause. That's not even a whole statement. I understand. But it really helps us understand and point out that we are purposely, for the purpose of this sermon series, we are purposely reframing when the New Testament, or sorry, excuse me, when Romans in particular is talking about Jews and Greeks, we are reframing that on purpose to talk about the religious and the irreligious. Okay, so with with Jewish insider Religious culture these are these are people that understand that have a that have a background that helps them get Everything you start talking about the Old Testament and they are tracking like right away Okay, and it's because they're insiders. It's their heritage right they understand they understand it We last week we looked at irreligious

Greek outsider culture at length. We talked about it at length. They're very kind of focused on the physical world and they tend to be suspicious of religion, of you know like when you say you have a gut feeling they're looking for proof, right? Like that's typically insider-outsider culture and so or excuse me religious irreligious culture. You can be in irreligious culture and be a Christian, You can be in religious culture and not be a Christian. I want you to see that that's a really big difference that we need to point out. Just because I say religious, they're religious, I don't mean Christian, non-Christian. In fact, I emphatically don't mean that. But we do need to know kind of where we are. It really helps to know which culture you swim in. And nobody's all the way in one culture and out of the other. But if you're not sure, you really kind of need to know which one you're kind of prone to be in.

So I want to give you some signs that you might be in religious culture. Okay? And if these signs fit you, then you are verse 17. Okay? You call yourself a Jew. Okay? Just to my Jewish brothers and sisters in the church body right now, I don't mean to like tease your culture or anything like that. I'm just trying to make it applicable to kind of what we're dealing with today. Okay, so this isn't about being Jewish, this is about being religious. Some of these I need the credit to author and speaker John Acuff, just a few of them. Okay, you might be religious if, you might be in religious culture if you know instinctively that the Sunday after a major holiday is when the youth minister preaches. Okay, if you know that, you know that you are in religious culture. If you think that your testimony is lame because you were not in a gang, okay? You might be in religious culture.

If you associate Christian music to different eras of your life, if you're like, ooh, yes, like so for me it's like ooh, cadence called 40 acres, yes, that was college. You know, like that's, if you do that, When people talk about serious addiction or abuse, if your only reference is a true crime drama, then you might be in religious culture. If you wish there was a way to say, I direct deposit my tithe to avoid judgment, that could be you. You could be religious culture. If you carry secondhand guilt for what other people do or what other people said, if you you actually feel bad for what they did, that could be you. And if you know finally you could be in religious culture, if you know what I mean when I say unspoken. Okay, now if you're listening, if you just heard all seven of those and you're like, I don't relate at all, that's fine, that's fine. You're probably more irreligious in culture.

In other words, you didn't grow up in church or like I had a friend who would say I had a drug problem growing up. I was drug to church three times a week. So if you didn't have that problem, right? What I want to help you see is that there is religious culture that isn't necessarily Christian. And there is irreligious culture that isn't necessarily unchristian. But that those two cultures sometimes have a tough time being together, working together. They were having that problem in the Roman church. And in part, that's one reason why we have the book of Romans, which is a letter to the Roman church. We have the book of Romans because both of these cultures were coexisting and swimming in the same pond, if you will. And so there's things that we can learn as we read, not just about those cultures, but about us, right? But not if we don't know which culture we swim in.

So we need to keep reading past 217. So if you call yourself a Jew, you rely on the law, you boast in God. We see in these other verses that it's not so bad. So if you look at verses 18 through 20, right? It's not saying, you know, being a Jew is that bad. So it's saying, so you rely on the law, you boast in God, you know his will and approve what is excellent because you are instructed from the law. If you are sure that you yourself are a guide to the blind, a light to those who are in darkness, an instructor, the foolish, a teacher of children, having in the law the embodiment of knowledge and truth. Okay, let me just stop here and say, because it's about to get real bloody here, but let me just stop here and say, there are advantages to growing up in a religious culture, right? When it talks about boasting in God, that's actually not a bad thing. that's actually saying that you are,

it's legitimate pride in belonging to God, right? Like it's not a bad thing. You approve of what is excellent, good. It is good to take joy in the fact that you had a good upbringing. It is something to rejoice in that you were not hooked on crystal meth at 10 years old, okay, that's a huge plus, okay? Just in case we're keeping score at home, that's a huge plus.

Being a guide, a light, an instructor, having the embodiment of knowledge and truth. Look, when you know God's will and you walk in God's will, you will make good decisions. You will. You will create healthy community. You're going to love people really, really well. When you know God's law and you walk in God's law, good things are going to happen. That's not a bad thing. We don't need to like kind of side-eye that. We don't need to, you know, like downplay that goodness. It is good. Yet. Okay, so you heard me say it was good, right? Yet. There is a particular sin that religious cultural people are prone to, okay? So if indeed you are a religious, upstanding person, versus 21 and 22, if you do all these things, It says, you then who teach others, do you not teach yourself? While you preach against stealing, do you steal? You say that one must not commit adultery.

Do you commit adultery? You who abhor idols, do you rob temples? So religious people are tempted toward hypocrisy. And we see that. This is particularly deadly. Next two verses, 23 and 24. You who boast in the law dishonor God by breaking the law. And it gets worse, for as it is written, the name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you, okay? That's a really big deal. To blaspheme the name of God is a really huge indictment. And so we need to understand hypocrisy. We need to talk about it. And let me just say two things about it. It is remarkably easy to point out hypocrisy. If you don't believe me, then look online anywhere, ever. OK? Super easy to see. And you know what? I would say this. Look in your own heart all the time. It is easy. I mean, easy to be like hypocrite, hypocrite, hypocrite. It's easy to do, right? It's easy to call out. And it's easy because hypocrites are hated universally, right?

Hypocrisy, nobody lists that as an asset on a job interview. Well, you know, I'm hypocritical. Oh, OK, good. Won't be hiring you. We really need to grasp what Romans is trying to tell us. But if we're going to do that, we need to move beyond hypocrisy bad, or just calling it out on other people. We need to see why hypocrisy is really easy to fall into ourselves. We need to see how hypocrisy is really easy to fall into ourselves. But to do that, we need to kind of take a left turn and then we'll circle back. The left term we're going to take is circumcision. I bet you did not think we were talking about circumcision today. We need to understand circumcision. What is circumcision? Okay. Physically, circumcision is a surgical procedure that baby boys undergo. It is the rule of foreskin. You don't know what that is. Ask your parents. If your parents are not around, then ask Dan Hey.

Dan Hey, you can ask him. He'll explain it. He will. It'll be awkward too. It's less than a fast. Okay. Nevermind. Don't ask that. Hey, I regret that. Sorry. Okay. Physically, surgical procedure, right? But spiritually, it meant something completely different, right? So physically, it was removal of foreskin. though, it was an outward sign of an inward covenant, right? It marked you, literally, as one of God's people, okay? So it marked you as that. So it's a physical mark. It says, I belong to God. And specifically for this Roman church, it's really helpful to understand. Jews had that mark. Greeks did not have that mark. Okay? The only people circumcising anybody around this time were Jews. Okay? So if you were a Jew, you had the mark. If you were a good Jew, you had... you were circumcised. If you were Greek, you did not. And this was a huge deal within the Roman Church.

So it's an easy example to use. So we see it here, verses 25 and 26 of Romans chapter 2. It says, for circumcision, indeed is of value if you obey the law. I realize it's going to be confusing. Let's just push through these two verses. It's indeed of value if you obey the law. But if you break the law, your circumcision becomes uncircumcision. So if a man who is uncircumcised keeps the presets of the law, will not his uncircumcision be regarded as circumcision? Okay, I think it's probably best at this point to just use a different example to provide clarity. So instead of circumcision, let's pick a yard sign, okay? Yard sign of church membership, okay? This is a totally generic one. We're not, these aren't available in the lobby. It's not there, okay. Okay, so let's take a yard sign, right? You get a yard sign, put it in your yard, okay? Great, all right, that's good.

That sign in your yard marks you out as a church-going person of some kind, and most people will believe that you are a Christian. So that sign in your yard, that sign, that yard sign, is only valuable if you are a great neighbor. And I don't mean a good neighbor. I don't mean the neighbor who mows his grass when he needs to. me and the neighbor that makes semi-polite short conversation. I mean, you ask about their life, you keep up with them, you help them out, you let them borrow things, you make sure they're good during the freeze. I mean, you're a great neighbor.

If you are not a great neighbor, that yard sign is not any good to you. It's not any good for them. In fact, that yard sign is now detrimental, right? Because you've gone through the trouble of marking yourself out, but then you're a jerk. Right? So if you're not a great neighbor, then get rid of the sign. Please, that's why some of you won't put the South Burleson Dodger sticker on the back of your car. Dan Hay raising his hand again.

Because if you're a bad driver, that sticker on the back of your car is not any good, okay? Now, let's conversely, if you are a great neighbor, I mean, if you are a great neighbor, then you don't need a yard sign to show it. Okay? So, you following with me now? So, the yard sign of circumcision, all right? I'm going to be like really obvious at this point. point. If you are relying on a church attendance sign in your front yard as proof that you are a great neighbor, you are relying on the wrong thing. Okay? All right. If you, the same, this is verses 25 and 26, if you, the Jew is relying on circumcision as proof that you belong to God, then you are relying on the wrong thing.

Right? In fact, it's saying it's somebody, if a Greek, who is not circumcised. If they're walking in the fear of the Lord, if they're obeying, if they're following If they're loving Jesus, right, then they don't need circumcision to show that. And if you're relying on it, you're relying on the wrong thing. And this is why hypocrisy is so easy to fall into, even though we all know to watch out for it, right? Even though nobody's running in line to become the hypocrite, okay? Nobody's doing that. And it's devastating, okay? All these things are still true, but we still fall into hypocrisy. Why? Because there is a way, an easy way to obey God's law without relating to God personally. There's an easy way, probably the easiest, to just do what God said to do on the surface without really relating to him personally. Okay? It's that you live wisely without knowing true wisdom, capital W, wisdom, the

Lord. You grit things out and show strength, but you don't rely on the strength of the Spirit. 2 Timothy 3:5 says that people can have an appearance of godliness, but deny its power, and that's it, and that's an easy thing to do. And And maybe we can just, maybe we can say it a different way, right? Maybe we can say it this way. Hypocrisy happens when relationship becomes routine. Hypocrisy happens when relationship becomes routine. This happens to all of us in many different aspects of our lives. And I'll just, because I'm a dad, and I've been a dad of young kids before, right? The routine can become, get off work, get some kind of food, go to practice, raise home, get baths, indoor showers, get kids to bed, put on a movie, pretend to start a conversation, of sleep. Repeat. It's a routine. I didn't have to open up to anybody. I didn't have to talk about my day.

I didn't have to do anything. I just ran through that routine. If you do it enough, then it's just going to supplant the actual relationship you have. You're just going to run through the routine, but you're never going to connect with your spouse or your kids. You're not going to grow as a person. You're not going to really invest in your ... You're just doing what needs to be done. And yeah, it's great that you take out the trash on time. That's cool. But, you know, like Daz, let me just speak my heart to you. Look, if you're reliable, that's cool. If you do things when you're supposed to do them, that's cool. That's good, but that's basic. wife and your children, they need you, not just your reliability. They need your heart. And I'm sure there's a way that women do it. I'm not going to venture to guess what that is, but I'm going to speak for my heart as a man, as a husband, as a father. It is easy

to just do, because I can do, I can physically do a lot of hard things and it's real impressive. Like I mean, sure. But if I'm doing all those really hard and impressive things, but I'm not connecting, I'm not opening up. If I'm just on my phone the whole time, then things are off kilter, things are out of balance. And I am now slipping into a routine instead of at the cost of a relationship.

Now this is, look, it's easy to get stuck in a routine with a marriage, friendship, work, with all this things. Easy, easy. But when we take a relationship with Jesus and we do that with it, when we turn the relationship into a list of rules that we need to keep, you can start to see where it gets a little bad, okay? When we start to turn our relationship with Jesus into a routine that we maintain, we cannot, we lose the ability to tell the difference between living our best life and following the Holy Spirit. We lose our ability to discern between being safe and being a Christian. I bet you didn't know those weren't the same thing, right? If you can't tell the difference between being safe and being a Christian, then you've probably turned some kind of relationship into a routine. You probably... some part of your relationship with the Lord into a routine.

So we know hypocrisy is bad. And we know, we can see now that it's kind of easy to get into, But there's one level deeper that we need to go to to really kind of get our hands all the way around hypocrisy, to really understand it, to really see it for what it is. Yeah, it's easy to get into. Yes, we all kind of trade out relationship routine. But in order to kind of do that, we need to go all the way back to Romans chapter 2 verses 1 and 2. And we're going to kind of start. So we're going backward in time a little bit, backward in the verses. Romans chapter 2 verses 1 and 2. And we'll just read it and then talk about it. It says, therefore you have no excuse, O man, every one of you who judges for and passing judgment on another, you condemn yourself. Because you, the judge, practice the very same things. We know that the judgment of God rightly falls on those who practice such things.

Okay. First of all, I want to say, as we're reading Romans, this is where the switch happens from irreligious to religious, right? At the beginning of chapter two, verse one, it says, every one of you who judges, okay? We're not really talking about irreligious culture at this point. Irreligious culture is not, they're not overly concerned with other people following rules, it's just not kind of their bag, right? They do things different.

But every one of you who judges, we are squarely talking about religious culture. And it says that they practice the very same things, what things, well, it's in, you have to kind of go back a couple of verses in chapter one, verses 29 through 31, that it's a big long list that ends with foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. We talked about that last week a little bit. So practicing those very same things, what verses 1 and 2 describe is that people in religious culture are going to be passing judgment while ignoring their own sins. We all understand that as hypocrisy, right? That's what that is. So this is hypocritical of them, but why do they do this? It's not just how easy it is to slip into, but why? Why?

Is it so easy for a relationship to become routine? Romans chapter two, verse three. It says, do you suppose, oh man, you who judge those who practice such things and yet do them yourself, that you will escape the judgment of God? That's a pretty indicting question. Do you suppose that you're going to escape the judgment of God? This is the core issue here. This isn't some peripheral off-handed question. This isn't some rhetorical device. This is the question that hypocrisy happens when you believe that you are exempt, that you are somehow, that the rules actually don't apply to you. And we see this in the next two verses. They kind of drive it home. Romans chapter two verse four, it says, or do you presume upon the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that God's kindness is meant to lead you to repentance.

In religious culture, it's not just that the temptation is toward hypocrisy, but the temptation is toward unrepentance because you believe, and it's easy to do this. So I'm not trying to throw barbs at heart. You believe that the Lord's kindness and his patience toward you are owed to you. You believe in your heart that you are somehow deserving of those things because you've been on good behavior. The reality is that the religious also receive the wrath revealed. We talked about this last week. Let's read Romans chapter two verse five. It says, but because of your hard and impenitent heart, unrepentant, you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath when God's righteous judgment will be revealed. Okay, so let's take a breath here. We're gonna pull back to 10,000 foot view on Romans, okay? Last week we talked about this idea of wrath revealed. And we talked about how wrath is what you feel

when you see an injustice being done. So we had the example of a Down Syndrome kid being bullied. Okay, when you see that happen, you want to fix it. You want justice to be carried out swiftly. You are passionate about it. All that you're feeling right there is wrath. You want to see justice happen quickly, swiftly, expediently. That is what happens when we talk about God revealing his wrath and that wrath is being stored up. The reason that that is happening is because all of us in that scenario think that we're the, in that example, that we're the Down Syndrome can get bullied. When truly we are all the ones bullying the Down Syndrome kid, you understand what I'm saying. It's really important that you grasp that.

That you're not sitting there not deserving judgment. None of us are. In Romans 1:18 it said that wrath is revealed against those who suppress the truth. That is shorthand for kind of this irreligious cultural thing that they do. They know what's true, but they kind of ignore it and they kind of just do whatever they want. Here, here, wrath is revealed against people with hard hearts. And if we're going to see the gospel as good news, we're really going to get that, that we need to see ourselves in this. Because we are, and just to use a couple of different illustrations, if you can imagine, you know, there's a sheriff in a local town, There's a son of that sheriff. The sheriff's son is driving drunk and gets pulled over.

And that sheriff's son believes, and maybe he's right, maybe he's not, but he believes he will not get in trouble for doing that. It's the principal's daughter skipping class, right? Principal's daughter skipping class, breaking rules. Surely she's gonna get in trouble, no. The principal's daughter, the sheriff's son, do not believe that they will receive justice for their actions. And that's us. That in some ways, at some point, we believe that there's something about us, whether it's our heritage or morality, our lack of suffering, something in us that believes that we get a path, that it won't happen to us. And Jesus actually gives us a terrific parable on this. It's so good. And I'm not going to read the whole thing. I'm just going to read just one little excerpt, but let me set it up. Jesus says that there was once a Pharisee and a tax collector. And the Pharisee here represents the religious kind of culture,

and the tax collector represents this very irreligious culture, very, you know, kind of outside, you know, the religious cool club. And in this parable, they both walk into the temple to pray. And here's what it says in Luke, it's in Luke 18, but I'm just going to read verses 11 and 12. It says, it says, the Pharisee standing by himself, this is Jesus describing the Pharisee, the Pharisee standing by himself, prayed thus, God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector who's standing right next to him. I fast twice a week, I give tithes of all I get. I really want you to see his prayer right here because he says, In effect, thank you that I'm not like this man, but that's a delusion. He's exactly like that tax collector. He's exactly like those extortioners and those adulterers. He's exactly just as unjust as all those people that he named and

any other person he could name. that in that parable, the Pharisee suffers a delusion of grandeur, a delusion that he'll get a pass. Why does he do that? Verse 12, I fast twice a week. I give tithes of all I get. He believes that by his religious action, he is differentiated from everybody else. And Jesus saw this all over the place. He saw this with the Jews of his day. The Jews of his day would say things like, we have Abraham as our father. Meaning, because I can trace my lineage to Abraham, I'm in your out. I'm in the covenant because of who my great-granddaddy was. Do you hear that? Hubris, they believed, they believed that they would escape God's judgment by birthright. And in Burleson TX, it is not different. It's only the standards that have changed. Nobody's claiming that Abraham was their great granddaddy. They're saying, I'm not going to hell because I'm a decent person.

I'm not going to hell because I grew up in church. I'm not going to hell. I'm going to escape God's judgment because I pray a lot. I'm going to escape God's judgment because one night I went to this youth event and I loved it. In Burleson, people believe they will escape God's judgment because of religious decency. Because in their heart, in their mind, they believe that God's judgment, the judgment, the wrathful judgment of God is reserved for really bad people, like rapists and murderers and people that don't vote like me. That God's judgment is reserved for them, not me. And when? And when somebody who is... And we talked about this in All Roads Lead this morning with Dan Ahe was talking about how a lot of people in Burleson in particular, in the DFW Metroplex, that a lot of people are deists, right? That they kind of know or believe that God exists, but when you get on the details

of like who exactly God is, everything gets real fuzzy and they get real universalist real fast, that when people like that are caught in an addiction or caught abusing someone or caught in the middle of a corruption, they, if unrepentant, the reason they can be unrepentant is they can take a little bit of false solace in their own heart and say, well, you know what, at least I'm not a rapist. At least my parents raised me right. At least I'm not like these other men. It's the same. But you claim all that, but your life looks like nothing. People see you. People, they watch you at work, and they're thinking to themselves like, if that's a Christian, then they can have it. I don't want that. If that's abundant life, I'm out. I'll take whatever's left, but not that. There is a push-pull to religious culture, and I wanna just briefly state it.

Push-pulls, so there's this tension. The push, the kind of the strong desire within religious culture is that I must, I, religious person, X, must teach and demonstrate these things as wrong, as morally bankrupt, okay? This comes out, particularly with how we teach our children. And that's a good thing. There's nothing wrong with this, okay? But the push is, I need to demonstrate that this is bad. I need to show that this is wrong. I'm not going to condone this thing over here because it's bad, okay? So that's the push. Here's the pull. The pull is, I engage in those things that are bad and morally bankrupt, okay?

That's a push pull. And you don't get to let go of one hold on to the other. It's a push-pull, it's a both and. It's really difficult to handle. And there's really just, in fact, I would say there's really just two ways to handle this. But the difference is everything. The first way to handle that push-pull, that desire to maintain a standard, but all the while knowing that you break it. Okay.

The way to handle that first is religious moralism. In other words, I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to try really hard. I'm going to white knuckle it. You know, I'm going to just purpose in my heart that I'm not going to do whatever I'm not, you know, so just kind of some strain, what the Bible calls will worship. Okay, this I'm just gonna try really really really hard But what you end up doing it with religious moralism is that you minimize your sin as small and you maximize other people sin as worse Than me Okay, so anytime you go down that road of religious moralism. You're just left with

proving your own value Trying to make sure that people know that you're the standard And when pressed, you really do. You really will say something like, you know what, somebody has to maintain this standard. Who's going to do it if not me? The other way they handle that. And again, the difference is everything. The other way to handle that push-pull in religious culture is Jesus' way in the gospel, which says, hey, we're all bankrupt. I don't owe more than another person. They're not more bankrupt than me. We're all totally bankrupt. Nobody's sin is different. Jesus exposes all of our moral bankruptcy and He forgives us for it and He treats us gently in the midst of it. More than that. And we'll get into this in the next few weeks. He teaches and empowers us to help other people through that process.

The process of Jesus exposing your moral bankruptcy, if you've never been through that process, it's excruciating. It's really terrible, but it's the best thing that will ever happen to you. If you've never, if you've never, I don't care if you're 80, if you've never been in a process whereby your sin, Your moral bankruptcy has been just exposed. And I don't mean publicly in a newspaper. I just mean before the Lord even. If you've never gone through something like that, you're overdue. That is a good thing to go through. And really, it's the only way forward. Without being exposed like that, without your moral bankruptcy being exposed, you're gonna be sentenced to defending your own life, your whole existence. You're going to defend every action because you have to be the standard. Jesus says, no, no, no, no, no. Jesus says, I'm the standard and I'm the standard and I've forgiven you your moral bankruptcy.

I'm the standard and I will treat you gently even after you've betrayed me. I'm the standard and I'm still going to acknowledge things as sinful. Jesus doesn't ever say, oh, it's not really that bad. That's not what Jesus never said that. If he acknowledges it as sinful, but he's full of compassion, and he teaches us to be the same way that when we see other people in their moral bankruptcy, that we have compassion because we're in it too. That we're full of grace because Jesus is still saving us. Last thing, and I just want to go back to verse 17, in the back where we started. You know, if you're a Jew and you rely on the law and you boast in God, right? Relying on the wrong thing is a really big deal. What are you relying on to speak to your own goodness, to speak to your identity? What are you relying on?

For Jews and for religious people, it's the Jews in Romans two, and for religious people today, the reliance is on morality, on good deeds, on being a decent person. But we're all different. And we all rely on these things. If you're not relying on the law, you're relying on something for identity, for comfort, for hope, for justification. You're relying on something. What are you relying on? My encouragement to you, and just as we say, I want to just encourage you, rely on Jesus and the gospel. That he is the only way. Let me pray for us. Jesus, thank you for this morning. I pray that you would help us. I pray that you would give us the ability to see our own proclivities toward hypocrisy,

to see how functionally that we're relying on a lot of other things besides you. I pray that you would begin to work in us to heal us of that. I pray that we would just run to you in our moral bankruptcy that we wouldn't try to put on a good face, that we would know that we will be accepted by you. That's your name that we pray.