How Grace Makes Me a Better Facebooker

One of the strange trends at the moment, and I wonder if you've noticed this, and perhaps it's not something that is a surprise and hasn't arisen overnight, but there it is a strange trend nonetheless, is what has been called by one journalist, lae laejing. Laejing. This term coined by a journalist, I forgot where I read this, said that with the rise of social media, a group of people have been given access, a huge group of people have been given access to publish their thoughts, their opinions, at a very low cost through the simple click of a button. With astounding ease and a massive reach has come the opportunity for us to make a lot of noise about causes and purposes, all the while not needing a degree of any personal investment. Laging happens when individuals are outraged about something, yet unequally unwilling to engage either thoughtfully or diligently on the issue.

They are unwilling to invest their lives into fixing the problem. Instead, we click share on social media, we write a few comments, and then we think we've changed the world. So the term lage was coined to explain this phenomenon, which is a combination of the words lazy and outrage. Lazy outrage. Why does this phenomenon exist?

Well, I'm not a sociologist, but in my opinion, it's tied with a huge sense of entitlement that is so prevalent in the twenty first century. An inflated sense of self importance causing me to believe that my voice matters all the time. Because I've been told since birth that I am the most special thing that has ever entered this world, I believe that the world needs to sit up and listen to me all the time. And yet, we find this other funny thing happening that we are averse to bringing ourselves consistently to live in line with those very ideals that we espouse.

With this in mind, I want us to look at a moment described in Luke's gospel account where Jesus deals with a group of people also steeped in a system of self entitlement and self righteousness. Let's have a look at what happens in Luke 14:1-14. Luke 14, verse one. Luke writes, one Sabbath, when He, who is Jesus, went to dine at the house of a ruler of the Pharisees, they were watching Him carefully. And behold, there was a man before Him who had dropsy.

And Jesus responded to the lawyers and Pharisees saying, is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath or not? But they remained silent. Then He took this man and healed him and sent him away. And He said to them, which of you, having a son or an ox that has fallen into a well on a Sabbath day will not immediately pull him out? And they could not reply to these things.

Now He told a parable to those who were invited when He noticed how they chose the places of honour, saying to them, when you are invited by someone to a wedding feast, do not sit down in the place of honour, lest someone more distinguished than you be invited by him. And he who invited you both will come and say to you, give your place to the person, and then you will begin with shame to take the lowest place. But when you are invited, go and sit in the lowest place so that when your host comes, he may say to you, friend, move up higher. Then you will be honoured in the presence of all who sit at the table with you. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.

He said also to the man who had invited Him, when you give a dinner or a banquet, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbours, lest they also invite you in return and you be repaid. But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed because they cannot repay you. For you will be repaid at the resurrection of the just. This is God's word. The passage we read this morning, we're going to divide into three sections.

I think they naturally divide into three sections. And each of these sections have a specific point to be made about, I believe, the issue of self righteousness. All the while, it demonstrates a profound truth that Jesus shows them right up the front, the transformative power of grace. So Jesus deals with self righteousness even as He holds out the opposite of it, which is grace. Let's have a look at this.

Firstly, let's see how love destroys self righteousness in the section of verses one through to six. Jesus begins with his first lesson. God's love conquers our man made systems of virtue. In these verses, Jesus takes a man with what the ESV calls dropsy, which is an old English word referring to oedema, a swelling, a painful swelling of body parts of the body. Jesus takes him and heals him.

Now the man that was there is probably somehow related to someone of one of these Pharisees. It wouldn't have been a poor beggar from the streets, that just didn't happen for the Pharisees. So we are talking about someone's son, someone's brother, someone's cousin that is sitting there at the lunch with them. Jesus heals the man and then makes the point, if someone precious to you was in distress, even on the Sabbath day, would you not do something about it? Now these experts, and remember verse one says they were watching Jesus to see what He was doing, watching Him so that they could ridicule Him or something.

These experts are faced with this tricky situation. They had formulated strict, made up regulations surrounding the Sabbath day, so that they would be here in this moment at a loss to the very common sense question of, would you help your son if he fell into a well on the Sabbath day? Now the common sense response is, of course, I would help my son on the Sabbath day. But these Pharisees are in such a dilemma because they are so politically and socially obliged to stick with a party line that they were almost compelled to say the crazy thing, no, I would rather let my son, let my daughter, let my prized ox die, than break the regulation of the Sabbath. Yet they couldn't do either, the Bible says, Luke says, they couldn't do either, so they remained silent every time he posed them with this dilemma.

What the Pharisees wrestle with is what we wrestle with. And that is that we create a set of virtues, not always biblical virtues, that we use to justify ourselves. The Christian cliche might call it works based righteousness, or self righteousness, but it's this concept of us seeking to somehow puff ourselves up with an ideal or a set of virtues. These virtues can be based on God's word, but often they go beyond it, because the nature of self righteousness, the nature of a self righteous heart realises at some point that I cannot keep God's holy and perfect law, but I can create a law of my own. And I can, if I am consistent enough, keep that law and feel pretty darn good about myself.

So we can find all sorts of crazy and contradictory systems happening. People can say, if I am home in time to say goodnight to my kids before bedtime, then I have been a good dad, no matter how little I've invested in their lives otherwise. But if I'm home at 9 p.m. and can kiss them on the forehead, I'm a good dad. If I only go so far physically with my boyfriend, and not further, I am still honouring God, my body and my future husband. So we make up these arbitrary rules, these virtues by which we judge ourselves.

And that's the problem being identified here by Jesus with the Pharisees. The commandment to rest from your work on the Sabbath day had been morphed into this intricate, made up virtue system, so that a ridiculous situation like helping someone in pain with an acutely swollen, painful hand, probably a family member, you won't do that. You won't allow that physical exertion of healing to take place. Why do we create these virtues, these ideals? The answer is so that we can make ourselves good.

This is what I mean by self justification. And the thinking, the logic goes something like this: if I can create a list of virtues or rules that I know I can follow, then by adhering to them, I have made myself good. If I make myself good in my own eyes, then I am entitled to good things as a reward for that goodness. When I am entitled to good rewards, then I can demand all sorts of things, which is where the self entitlement comes from. This is why something like lagging exists.

Think of any sort of outrage that people feel, and it's likely they feel outraged because they think that they're living up to that virtue themselves. Thank you very much. And no one else is, or other people aren't. And we become angry, and we become outraged, and we become very self righteous. And this self righteousness makes us harsh. We are angry and bitter people because of it.

And what I think the Bible is warning us about today is that self righteousness can harden our hearts so much that we might even go to the unthinkable position of saying, it may be justifiable to not help a man suffering with a chronic illness in order to maintain the rage of a made up ideal. The Bible is telling us that that sort of darkness is in every human's heart, because every human, every one of us, has self righteousness in us. So what Jesus begins to say in these initial verses is that in the economy of God, love always trumps the law of dead virtue. The grace of God, which He shows in the healing of this man, God's sheer, free, unconditional goodness always destroys our self righteousness. We may not understand it, but it was love that caused God to give us His law, not simply His holiness or His justice.

God's love gave us His law. By healing this man on the Sabbath, Jesus was showing that something seemingly contradictory to the Pharisees was not contradictory at all to the Sabbath law. Producing life for this man, giving his life back, was the intent of the Sabbath. Through the heart of love expressed by grace, Jesus heals this man and thereby expresses the heart of God's laws given to us. Yet, the contrast between God's love and the Pharisees' self righteousness could not have been any more poignant.

Self righteousness, which comes most often through unbiblical made up virtues, is a constant danger for our hearts. Yet when we understand God's love, the logic of our self righteousness is destroyed. So the undoing power of this love, the power of this love lies within the true virtue which Jesus introduces now in verses 7 through to 11, which we move on to now, which is, He will say, the motivating power of humility. Humility, therefore, destroys self righteousness, verses 7 through to 11. In verse 7, Jesus identifies the social pecking order that was happening in front of Him when people started falling into the house to sit down for lunch.

They are vying for places of honour. In that culture, I think in some other cultures today, the closer you sit to the host or the guest of honour, the more respectable you are. So Jesus, seeing this, starts telling a parable, which means a story with a spiritual meaning. Through the parable, He says that seeking the place of honour for yourself may leave you humiliated when the host of the wedding banquet corrects your self important self identification and asks you to move to the seat you truly deserve. Therefore says Jesus in verse 10, take the lowest place, so that when your host comes to you, He will say, friend, move up to a better place.

Verse 11, for everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted. Jesus hasn't moved on. He is still focusing his critique on self righteousness here, and He does this by saying that the idea of expecting God as the host of this wedding banquet to treat you in a certain way because you think you've earned it is futile. Self righteousness leads to self entitlement, and it makes us expect things from God. It makes us expect things from others that you may not be entitled to.

Entitlement causes me to be proud, to believe that my life should be good in the way that I identify what good is. But when tragedy or trial or opposition comes, I am left shocked and deeply angry that God would allow this to happen. Why? Because I have the expectation that I deserve better things. Now, again, the irony is, this is not true just for Christians.

This is not true for simply Christians to be wrestling with. Whether you are a Christian or not, this worldview exists deeply in our hearts. So whether you consider yourself spiritual or not, this understanding is actually deeply spiritual, and whether you are an atheist or some sort of new age spiritual person, you hold to this. If you listen carefully to people as they describe the frustrations of their lives, they will say something like this: do good things, and somehow the universe brings good things back to you. Those people who may not consider themselves religious at all to speak of a universe out there may say something like this.

In fact, agnostic Jordan Peterson will say something like this. He said, work hard, live by these 12 rules, and you'll reap success. But they don't realise that all of this is spiritual, hope filled statements. Because in a world in which, if it was truly what they align it to be, profess it to be, if you aligned it with that worldview, it would be a world where chaos and randomness has caused you to come into existence. And so the question is, why hope for anything that has a cause and effect nature?

If I do good in a chaotic world, why do I expect good? I may receive terrible things just because of randomness. Yet, it's this same thinking expressed here by the Pharisees. If I am virtuous, if I am good and respected, I should get a pretty good seat closest to the host. But in the economy of God, Jesus says, humility conquers this self destructive cycle of self righteousness.

Why? Because there is no disappointment quite as bitter as an unrealised expectation. Why is self righteousness self destructive? It's because when I expect a good thing to happen to me because I've done something good, at least what I've defined as good, and if it doesn't come true, I am devastated. It's the thing that I whinge about the most in my life.

Yet, when we come to understand the gospel, we understand just how undeserving I am of anything good. And once that happens, we cannot help but have our expectations of life recalibrated. In the gospel, centred on God's grace, we discover that it is only the humble that can ever be exalted. Why? Because it takes true humility to accept that God had to rescue me.

I've never done anything good that should warrant my salvation. I've never warranted His forgiveness. It takes humility to realise that I have zero control over my life, the things that come my way, and more profoundly than that, that one day because of my sinfulness, I would have been deserving of the worst things in existence, an eternity away from God. Humility leads us to understand that we cannot save ourselves, that we are in desperate need of rescuing. Meanwhile, hell will be filled with proud self righteous people.

That is what Jesus is saying. Having come to understand and believe in God's grace changes our day to day living. It means that we, as Christians, don't vie for positions in the pecking order anymore. Naturally, we become less angry, less bitter, less sensitive because we don't have a proud image to uphold anymore. We know who we are.

Say what you want about me. I'm sure I am just as flawed as you say I am. But guess what? God has taken me from the lowest chair and He has placed me next to Him. I you're right.

I deserve to be on that end of the table. But God in His grace has moved me. In cowering shame and fear, I came in, I skulked in into that wedding banquet and I sat at that last seat, realising who I am. And by His grace, He saw me and He placed me next to His own seat. I know who I am.

I'm someone that deserves nothing. And yet, by God's grace, I have received an eternal weight of glory. Self righteousness leading to self entitlement, self entitlement which causes us to compete for positions of respect and admiration. That is all conquered by a heart that has come to understand how undeserving we are to receive any place of honour. I am not special.

I am only special because Christ has made me so. And He's done that through no help of my own. And that leads us to the third and the final point. How our lives look now. Well, grace leads us to humble service, and that is where Jesus sort of rounds off His teaching in verses 12 to 14.

Now Jesus looks at the Pharisees, particularly this one Pharisee hosting Him, and says to him, don't invite your friends or your relatives next time. Don't invite the rich neighbour next door because they will simply return the favour. They'll invite you to their place and you'll have your feed there. Instead, invite the poor. Bring in the crippled, the lame, the blind, those who are worse off because they will not be able to return the favour.

Why? Jesus concludes in verse 14, although they cannot repay you, you will be repaid at the resurrection of the just. The NIV says the resurrection of the righteous. Self righteousness makes us believe self righteousness makes us selfish because it leads to self entitlement. Self entitlement makes us think that we deserve reward.

And so when we operate in that economy, of that way of doing things, you always strive to get a good return on your investment. If I bless a rich friend of mine with a good meal and a nice bottle of wine, I really appreciate it if he returns the favour. And hopefully, he even ups the ante a little bit. But Jesus wasn't simply teaching us here another way of winning friends and influencing people. It's not a it's not a motivational strategy here.

He's driving home a point about the kingdom of God. The reason a Christian invests themselves into the lame and the blind and the poor, people who can't give an equal return on the investment, is because we've been recipients of an eternally unequal investment. In the kingdom of God, selfishness has no more place because we are the ones who could never repay the invitation that God has given to us, to the wedding feast that He is holding. We know many times in scripture that Jesus talks about heaven as this wedding banquet. This is what Jesus is referring to.

He talks about it in the next parable after our passage. So we find these two things. In the economy of self righteousness, you work hard to earn the reward of your hard labour. In God's economy of grace, you have already received your reward. And that reward, He says, is eternal life.

The resurrection of the just. Now, again, we need to just clarify that. Jesus is not talking about a resurrection of the righteous in that they've made themselves righteous. If we understand what Jesus understood about His mission, Jesus is talking about His righteousness placed on those believers at the resurrection day. The resurrection of the righteous is a resurrection of those who have received His right.

But this is the logic: if this guaranteed reward I now have through faith in Christ, then the relationship between service and reward is radically flipped upside down. If I've already received the reward, being resurrected to eternal life, now I serve others. And I serve others, and I work proportionate to the eternity that I have. Can you imagine how generous a life like that would look like if we truly believed that?

How much work should be put in to earn eternal life? I have received eternal life. Jesus is saying that grace will lead to incredibly generous service. And when we make the choice to serve in response to His grace, we show that the influence of self righteousness is losing its power over us. So that when people demand my time and I give it to them, the amazing thing is that when I make this choice, I experience incredible freedom.

When we choose to become available to service, when we choose to become vulnerable to service, we are willing to let go of the fear of being stepped on, the fear of being manipulated, of being taken advantage of. And that, if we're honest, is the true reason we don't give, that we aren't generous to serve because we feel we're going to get taken advantage of. But if I willingly give that up, I lay that resistance aside, I don't have to spend the mental energy trying to avoid being taken advantage of. All that is left is service and the knowledge that my service will be recognised one day when Jesus Christ sees me at the resurrection and says to me, well done, good and faithful servant. All my service is one day going to be recognised and there is incredible freedom in knowing that. So across the span of one afternoon, imagine if you were at that dinner or lunch.

Jesus takes these Pharisees and He tries to open their eyes to these truths. He tells them that self righteousness makes us harsh. It causes us to forsake healing for some made up virtue. He says self entitlement makes us proud, causing us to expect good things, good seats at the table, only to be devastated when we are bumped down to economy. Self righteousness makes us selfish so that we only invest in things we expect a good return on.

Meanwhile, we get lazy and we get fat on our own self righteousness. But in the economy of God, we see how Jesus' love trumps this harshness, and this is ultimately brought to us through a thing called grace. The grace of Jesus destroys self righteousness. The reality is we are the recipients, the beneficiaries of God's disproportionate investment. We have received eternally lopsided returns.

God's investment was the perfect life of His eternal Son, and in return, God gets a sinner called KJ. A king's ransom for a peasant. Why won't I serve Him as my King now? How can I not show grace to those who can't or won't pay me back? His grace leads me to service because I have already received my reward, a resurrection based on Christ's righteousness.

It means Christians won't be people who lage on Facebook. We are people of action, of integrity, and of commitment. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for your word brought to us through your Son, Jesus. Thank you that in profound clarity, but with powerful, incisive insight, you have laid our hearts bare.

Our Lord, we are so prone to fall into these worldly economies, these worldly ways of thinking through inputs and outputs, of believing that if we operate in certain ways, we receive the things that the world is telling us we deserve. And yet, Lord, outside of this, we realise that there is a great delusion. We cannot expect anything good. We see people around us that don't receive good. We see people who deserve evil that get good.

Father, help us to understand the freedom, the safety, the security of what it means to be in the economy of God's kingdom. People who deserve to sit in the back row being taken to the seat next to the host. Father, help us to then live lives of genuine, generous service to others, those who cannot or will not repay the investment of our time, our energy, our finances even. Why? Because we have received so much.

We already have our reward. Help us, Lord, to believe this. Help us to understand this when we are tempted, when we are tried, when we are tired. Thank you, Lord, for this powerful insight into what makes our lives tick. We thank you in Jesus' name. Amen.