Avoiding the Greater Condemnation - part three

Luke 5:31 And Jesus answered them, "Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.   32 I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.

There are a lot of self righteous, conservative religious people who think they have no need of spiritual physician.   It is a common disease in conservative churches.    It can be contagious!  (Look at how the apostle Peter got sucked in, Galatians 2:11-16.)  Please examine your heart to make sure you don’t get caught up in that stuff!  Looking down on people who don’t go to church, or people who drink and smoke and cuss.  Those attitudes and behaviors stink in the nostrils of the Lord!

Or judging people who disagree with your political views!  I am a political conservative – you may like that or hate it.  But it is what I am.  But Jesus wasn’t a Republican.  He wasn’t a Democrat either.  GOP does NOT mean “God’s Own Party”!  Our gospel cannot be restricted to any one political party or political view.  Republicans, Democrats, Independents, Socialists and even Communists need to get saved!

            But self righteousness is not restricted to conservative religious people!  Anyone who thinks they are better than others is self righteous.   Secular folk and liberal folk are often self righteous too.  I hear and read them saying things that make it obvious they look down on us “poor ignorant Christians”!

What makes self righteousness so blame dangerous is the erroneous belief that we are all right and we don’t need anyone to fix us!  If you think you have all the answers and think you have it all together, you sure don’t need a Savior!  If you think you are exempt from the disease of sin, you fail to realize you need Doctor Jesus!  If you think you’ve got your act together, you think have no need to get saved!  - or, no need to grow, no need to become more like Christ!

In fact, in a sense, if you think YOU have all the answers, you’ve gone into the Savior business yourself!   In a way, you’ve gone into the god-business!  Only God has all the answers!  And God doesn’t take lightly to competition!  “Thou shalt have no other gods before me!”  This includes yourself!  Just ask Lucifer how God reacts to little phonies trying to take His place.  God is not insecure.  But He will not allow His glory to be mocked or His beloved people to be misled.   God will not share His glory with another!

If you run into Pharisees or Sadducees who think they have all the answers – YOU CANNOT ARGUE THEM OUT OF IT!   My advice is to speak the truth, then walk off and pray for the Holy Spirit to open their eyes!  Pray for them, and seek to honestly and humbly live the Christian life in front of them.  You can’t force them to change.  If you get angry and mean you only reinforce their prideful self righteousness.

Jesus said, 32 “I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.”Even Jesus could not fix the self righteous while they were entrenched in their self righteousness.

He came for those who know they are sinners, those who know they are a mess.   He came for people who have hit bottom and know they cannot fix themselves.  He came for the straight sinner and the gay sinner.  The church going sinner and the bar hopping sinner.  Rednecks, mentally ill, promiscuous, drug addicts, sex addicts, child abusers, house wives who gossip, Deacons who lust after their neighbor’s wife, financial advisors who steal from their clients.

John Calvin, “He came to quicken the dead, to justify the guilty and condemned, to wash those who were polluted and full of uncleanness, to rescue the lost from hell, to clothe with his glory those who were covered with shame, to renew to a blessed immortality those who were debased by disgusting vices.”

            But don’t miss He came to call us all to repentance!  To repentance! Just this week someone asked me what repentance is.  In NT “repentance” translates a Greek word, “metanoia”, meaning, ; “(1) religiously and morally, as a change of mind leading to change of behavior, repentance, conversion, turning about.” (Bibleworks)  

“a change of mind leading to change of behavior”.   Repentance means accepting God’s verdict on your behavior, your thinking, your values, and choosing to change them all with God’s empowering!  You can’t repent on your own.  You can’t change on your own.  You need the power of the Holy Spirit to change you from the inside out!

            You don’t get saved by just saying a prayer someone tells you to pray.  You get saved by repenting of your sin and believing that Christ is God become a man,  who died on the cross for everyone who will believe in Him and on the third day God raised Him from the dead!

This is the Gospel!  This is the good news!  Do you believe this?  Have you repented?  Have you turned from your sin and cried out for God to forgive you and change you?  If not, you need to do that right now!

            If you have believed, my question is, have you kept your heart open to Him?             Have you avoided self righteousness and pride and hypocrisy?   Is your heart broken by your own sin and failure?  If not, my beloved brother or sister, fall on your knees before Him and cry out for change!  Be ruthless with your sin and with any hint of self righteousness.  

May God grant that we can look at the people around us without self righteousness, without pride and have our hearts broken by the sad condition of our country.  I’m not talking about the economics or politics – they are in sad shape.  But it is the moral collapse and spiritual confusion in America I’m talking about.   I believe they are at the root of the other problems.

This week Billy Graham wrote, "My heart aches for America and its deceived people. The wonderful news is that our Lord is a God of mercy, and He responds to repentance."

            I believe in Christians being involved in the political process.  But my friends, no election is going to fix what is ailing this once great nation.  No politician can fix the twisted hearts and minds of our people.  A mean spirited, self righteous church will not fix this nation. 

            America needs a humble, broken church that is on its face before God for her own sins.  You need to get down before God in repentance for your sins!  And I need to be right beside you in repentance for my sins! 

            Then, and only then we need to cry out for conviction and repentance to sweep through this land with a might move of God.  “The healthy do not need a doctor.”  But my friends, America needs Doctor Jesus!  We have hope because He came to call sinners to repentance, and we are a nation full of sinners.

They do not need a feel good “Gospel” that tells them Jesus loves like they are and will not judge any one. 

And they do not need hypocritical, mean spirited self righteous judgment from a church dead in its own pride and sin. 

They need loving, broken servants of Jesus who plead with them to repent AFTER they have repented themselves and AFTER they have pled with God to turn the hearts of the lost to Himself.

Pray for America – for our children and Grandchildren, for churches and pastors,  For hard hearts to be broken and blind eyes to be opened by the Holy Spirit.

Repent, then, and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped out, that times of refreshing may come from the Lord.
Acts 3:19 NIV