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SERMON OUTLINE & SUMMARY |
| Series: Free to Love - How to Leave the Judging to the Judge Part 3: A Careful Look at the Sin of the Pharisees October 4, 2009 | by Ken Wilson SERMON OUTLINE & SUMMARY Reminder: EACH OF THESE SERMONS IS A FIRST WORD, NOT A FINAL WORD REVIEW: Primary choice not between good & evil, righteous & sinners but between competing visions of righteousness. Hence primary conflict: Jesus and the Pharisees. Disciples heavily influenced by Pharisees. One of reasons for Sermon on Mount: reveal contrast between his path and theirs: "For I tell you unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven." Mt. 5: 20 Jesus' sharpest disagreement with Pharisees aimed at their foundation: Mt. 7: 1-5 "The Pharisee is that extremely admirable man who subordinates his entire life to his knowledge of good & evil and is as severe a judge of himself as of his neighbor to honor of God, whom he humbly thanks for his knowledge....The Pharisee is not opinionated; special situations and emergencies receive special considerations; forbearance and generosity are not excluded by the gravity of the knowledge of good & evil....The Pharisee is fully conscious of his own faults and of his duty of humility and thankfulness to God." Ethics, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 30-31 "For the Pharisee every moment of life becomes a situation of conflict in which he has to choose between good and evil." Ethics, p. 30 Not a matter of how strict or lenient, but a more fundamental posture: an understanding of righteous rooted in tree of life or knowledge of good & evil? Move from the Sermon on the Mount to the Sermon on the Lake: Mt. 13: 1-3a Mt. 13: 24-30 Mt. 13: 36 Disciples as about the parable of the weeds, because it hit them in their blind spot, the same blind spot as the Pharisees. Mt. 13: 40-43 Key to the parable: the disciples' offer to pull up the weeds Why pulling up the weeds is a bad idea after all: Move from the Sermon on the Lake to Sermon Back Home 3 more parables, including another version of parable of weeds [parable of net] "Once again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net that was let down into the lake and caught all kinds of fish. When it was full, the fishermen pulled it up on the shore. Then they sat down and collected the good fish in baskets, but threw the bad away. This is how it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come and separate the wicked from the righteous and throw them into the blazing furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. (Mt. 13: 47-50) Background, see John 21: 1-14. Fisherman typically throw out nets, haul in catch, then finally, separate the catch. But when Jesus shifts from fishing to "the way it's gonna be in real time" he "once again" says., "the angels will come and separate" Fishermen think it's their job to separate the fish and normally it is. Pharisee think it's their job. Disciples think it's their job. These parables are saying: IT'S NOT YOUR JOB! Jesus anticipates that this is going to be a struggle for us as much as it was for Pharisees. But if we receive this instruction, he can really make us of us! (Mt. 13: 51-52) Let's distill what we're learning as it applies to loving: 1. The judging that Jesus warns about tends to separate us from others. 2. We tend to separate ourselves from others by judging them. 3. Judging often leads to premature separation For complete sermon notes online, visit our sermons page. |
| PRACTICAL TIPS |
 1. Identify someone you are called to love...but you feel your heart "separating" Ask the Holy Spirit: Am I judging them? 2. Write down your judgments concerning them on a piece of paper and ask God's guidance on how to relate to each one. Would Jesus like you to speak directly to the person to work something out? Would Jesus like to adjust your perspective? Would Jesus like to say, "Thanks for the help, but I'll do the judging when the time comes" 3. When you're ready to release the judgments to God, go outside [be safe!] and burn the piece of paper along with a prayer of surrender. See if this doesn't release your heart to love more freely. |
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION |
 1. Who were the Sadducees? Why did they oppose Jesus? How did they differ from the Pharisees?2. What's the difference between relying on our knowledge of good and evil, and relying on what we see the Father doing? What impact would this have on our lives if we did the latter? 3. In what sense is Jesus "strict"? In what sense is he "lenient"? How does this differ from the Pharisees? In what ways are we to be "strict" or "lenient"? 4. In what ways do you find yourself separating people into "good" and "evil" categories? Is this something we're supposed to do? Why or why not? 5. What are the positive connotations of the word "judge"? And the negative? 6. What's the most challenging thing for you so far in this sermon series? |
Posts
I am loving this sermon series. It is a different paradigm. I find the sequencing of scripture much clearer and more revealing when viewed through the life compared to the knowledge of good and evil mode. It just becomes so clear that Jesus wants us out of the judging business. I taught high school today.... and there it was in the Martha and Mary story. My guess is this is a very hard nut to crack because our lives are spent comparing, evaluating, drawing conclusions etc. On the other hand, dropping the judging from us and leaving it to God should make christians a lot easier to be around. That's good news in and of itself.
ReplyDeleteAwesome awesome sermon. I have followed Jesus since 1986 and have read the bible a lot. I have never read the parable of the weeds.
ReplyDeleteI have been struggling with this issue for a while and my exposure to this parable's emphasis on allowing God to judge, plus the good descriptions of the Pharisees' mind set as well as Bonhoeffer's spoke volumes to me!
It seems that a lot of us (at least me) come to Christ like the prodigal son, but with time and learning slowly become like the older brother, or like the Pharisees. I very much identified with the Pharisee.
I tend to fear for the integrity of my faith, the future of its practice unless there are 'guardians' constantly on the lookout for the 'weeds'.
I am still processing this, but something 'clicked' for me this morning.
Joao
I was wondering if the word "lenient" was the best one to use to describe Jesus' treatment of the woman caught in adultery. After her accusers leave, when he says to her, "Go and sin no more," I don't get the impression that he's excused her or applied a more relaxed moral standard. I get the impression that he's forgiven her.
ReplyDeleteI'm thinking the word "merciful" works better.
The idea that Jesus would be both more strict and more merciful than we are, and that we would be surprised by how he would treat individual cases, seems entirely scriptural to me--entirely in character.
But Jesus is also entirely consistent with the Law. Like you, I am reticent to judge people in matters of sexual sin, but not because I don't think he gives clear moral standards to hold them up to. The reason I don't want to judge them is because I recognize my capacity to sin and I want to be dealt with mercifully myself.
I think that's a key to understanding the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector. By distancing himself morally from the tax collector, the Pharisee in the parable cannot identify with him as a fellow sinner. Identifying with sinners is precisely what God did in Jesus. That's one way of describing Jesus' whole job, from incarnation to death on the cross. So if we are to "do what the Father is doing," imitating Jesus by identifying with the sinners we encounter in our own real lives would be pretty much fundamental.
The adage "There but for the grace of God go I" has been a pretty good way for me to remind myself a) that every temptation I've been spared is a temptation I cannot possibly judge anyone else's resistance to, and b) every temptation I've suffered or succumbed to gives me a reason to be merciful to others. Perhaps when Jesus invited the one who was without sin to cast the first stone, he wanted something like that to occur to them. He was certainly forcing them to identify with the woman at the level of "sinner."
I love the fact that the only person on the scene qualified by that standard to cast a stone was Jesus himself. He CHOSE not to carry out the sentence.
That is what he did for me, and that is what I owe him for others. It's not lenience — I'm fully aware (like the adulteress) that I owe my rescuer a life of holiness. It's mercy.
I'd like to quote a little from C.S. Lewis's "Mere Christianity," a book that I find edifying. The quote is from Book III, the 4th chapter entitled "Morality and Psychoanalysis." It was quoted to me a couple of weeks ago by a fellow at my son's church, when I was visiting. I felt the usual Holy Spirit shivver along the back of my legs and butt and back and back of my neck. Here is what C.S. Lewis has to say: "Some of us who seem quite nice people may, in fact. have made so little use of a good heredity and good upbringing that we are really worse than those whom we regard as fiends. Can we be quite certain how we should have behaved if we had been saddled with the psychological outfit, and then with the bad upbringing, and then with the power, say, of Himmler? That is why Christians are told not to judge. We see only the results which a man's choices make out of his raw material. But God does not judge him on the raw material at all, but on what he has done with it. Most of the man's psychological make-up is probably due to his body: when his body dies, all that will fall off him, and the real central man, the thing that chose, that made the best or the worst out of this material, will stand naked. All sorts of nice things which we thought our own, but which were really due to a good digestion, will fall off some of us: all sorts of nasty things which were due to complexes or bad health will fall off others. We shall then, for the first time, see every one as he really was There will be surprises."
ReplyDeleteThis is an interesting subject from beginning to end. I find myself beginning to think about people on the basis of rules and regulations, when i am awareof it i tend to stop myself and then think of them as people loved by God, and try to treat them as such.
ReplyDeleteIt is, as much as I have said, not something that comes easily or very natrually. It is something to work at and keep on pressing on at. Loving each other with our heart, as it were, and not with our heads, can be very difficult.
I can't remember if Ken said this, but we do need rose colored glasses for the world. Not to say that we do not need to keep each other accountable, but that is not the same as judging.
Thus a sticky situation, don't use our heads, but we need to use them as well. So where's the cut off? This is where community comes in. I don't want to go down that road just now, but it is a good discussion topic.