When Grace Turns Putrid

This morning, we're going to turn to Luke 18, and we're going to look at a parable of Jesus, one that you probably have heard before. Luke 18, and we're going to read from verse nine. The parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector. Luke 18, verse nine, and He, Jesus, also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and treated others with contempt. Jesus said, "Two men went up into the temple to pray."

One a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. 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. I fast twice a week. I give tithes of all that I get."

But the tax collector standing far off would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast saying, "God, be merciful to me, a sinner." I tell you, Jesus said, "This man went down to his house justified rather than the other. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but those who humble himself will be exalted." So far our reading.

I remember a conversation a few years ago with my parents where we were discussing some sort of movie that we had just finished watching. I can't exactly remember what the movie was, but in this story, I remember that there was a character formed in the mould of many characters today in sort of popular movies. The antihero. The antihero. Has anyone ever heard of that title?

That's a type of character who is a mixture of good and bad. On balance, they're probably good, but there's sort of a few little elements here that are maybe not so great. It's the complicated hero. And we know them. As soon as I mentioned these names: Captain Jack Sparrow.

That's an antihero. It's a mixture of good and bad. Han Solo from Star Wars. Even Gru from Despicable Me. All the parents are not along with that.

Now for my mum and dad, and this is where the conversation started, these heroes were too complicated because they grew up in the days of cowboy movies where things were far more predictable. Predictable. The bad guys always wore the black or the grey outfits. The good guys always wore white hats and rode on white horses. Always.

For them, there was something comfortable with the familiarity of these cardboard characters. And before I get too harsh on my mum and dad, you could make the argument that today's heroes of those complicated characters is just forming another comfortable stereotype that in twenty, thirty years' time I'll be saying, "It's far too difficult this next generation." But one problem with stereotypes is that we often miss some pretty important nuances when stories are being told, and that is the case of this parable here. Take the story that we've just read. As soon as we hear about a lineup of characters, our minds are made up.

We hear of one of the men being a Pharisee, and over the many years of Sunday school or sermons, we've been conditioned to think that all Pharisees are evil. He is the man in the black hat. On the other hand, the other man in the story is a tax collector. And while we probably admit that the tax collector is probably not the best of people, we suspect that in the story we're probably dealing with a good guy in disguise. And so mentally, we put the white hat on him.

But if you were in the crowd that ancient afternoon when Jesus told this story, you may not have reached the same conclusion as quickly. Because you see, in the days of good and proper society, this Pharisee was a hero. In people's minds, they would be thinking and nodding along as this man listed all his desirable qualities. Listen to what he says. This is his life and Jesus is not denying it.

Verse 11, he wasn't an extortioner. Meaning he didn't rip people off. He wasn't unjust, he says. Meaning he treated everyone fairly. He was sexually pure.

He didn't cheat on his wife. He didn't fall into sexual sin. He fasted twice a week, meaning he loved God and he sought to honour God. He was generous to the poor and to the church. He gave to the expansion of God's kingdom.

He supported those who were in need. This is who he was. And his spiritual integrity had done him good. The people in the community respected him. They admired him so much that they made him a Pharisee.

They elected him into the school of the Pharisees. So to most listeners of Jesus' day, the Pharisee is the hero. Likewise, this morning, if you think that the tax collector, well, he's just your lovable rascal, your Han Solo, that is really a nice guy underneath it all. Well, you probably don't understand the reality of tax collectors. More often than not, tax collectors were criminals in expensive suits.

Whenever Rome was wanting to tax a region that they had just conquered, they sold the authority to tax people to the highest bidder. And once a person purchased that right from Rome to tax, they were free to take any commission that they wanted on top of the one or two per cent that Rome wanted. Anything that they could personally justify, they could have. As a result, extortion was built into that system. Injustice was part of the trade.

Tax collectors were not nice guys. In fact, Tacitus, the Roman historian, said that once there was a tax collector who was so unusually honest and fair that they built a statue in his honour in that town. That is how unusual it would be to have a nice tax collector. Listening to Jesus' story, the audience would have known, "This is not the good man." And so Jesus sets up this tension and he's wanting to show, at least at the start, that our complicated hearts are a mixture of good and bad.

The complicated natures of our hearts—that we are a mixture of good and bad. In a few weeks' time, we're going to be having an election. We've just prayed about that this morning again. Perhaps you've been doing a bit of research into your local members, but I bet my bottom dollar that if you had to choose between the Pharisee and the tax collector, you would have voted for the Pharisee. He was a good man.

In fact, if the tax collector got voted in as your MP, we would be straight on Facebook. We would write something like "Corruption has invaded the government today." And once you understand this, it's not so easy to discover why Jesus decides to go with his verdict that this one, this tax collector, is justified before God. It isn't that clear cut why Jesus says that. It's not simple because it kind of does mess with your preconceptions.

Why does Jesus commend the person we would condemn? Why does Jesus condemn the person we would commend? But he's doing it to make a huge life-altering point to his listeners. And that is that you can receive incredible grace from God, yes, yet miss the whole point. Receive incredible grace from God, yet miss the whole point.

Both men are seen to be doing a good thing. They are in the temple. They are worshipping. They're both believers. They are both praying to God.

Seemingly, they both love God, but both have weaknesses. This Pharisee is a really good person, but he is arrogant. This tax collector is not so good a person, but he is very humble. They are a mixture of good and bad. Yet Jesus concludes the story that the Pharisee is worse off than the tax collector.

One goes home forgiven before God, the other doesn't. And this is what Jesus wants to tell us this morning. That if you're not careful, you could be in the same boat. Why? You can look at this story and be tempted to think that it's a nice little moral lesson about humility and pride.

It is not about humility and pride. Luke introduces the parable in verse nine by saying that Jesus told this story to those who trusted in themselves for their own righteousness. And Jesus paints the picture of a man with all the benefits of God's grace. He had the knowledge of scriptures. He had been brought up in a good environment.

His religious life had contributed positively to his character. But he did what we so often do. He took for granted those things and thought that those good things that were given to him were somehow now contributing to God's acceptance of him. That he had now become a creature deserving of special merit. He even thanks God for the grace that has called him, caused him not to be an extortioner.

He thanks God that I'm not an adulterer. I thank you that I fast twice a week. And then in the same breath he says, "Lord, you've baked a really good cake, but you couldn't have done it without a good egg like me." The man doesn't realise it, but the cake has gone sour. It stinks because it is the smell of grace gone putrid.

The issue here isn't that he's arrogant, although he is. It's that he has not understood the life-altering effect of grace. See, we read that story and we think, "Oh man, this guy is so conceited." And instantly we don't like it. I'm going to be playing a game of volleyball later this afternoon with my volleyball team.

And if we were to go and play and get smashed three-nil in straight sets by the other team, and they, you know, the captain slides under the net and says to me, "KJ, I don't know what game you were playing, but it wasn't volleyball. If you want a little bit of exercise next time, I'll let you walk my dog." It's true that he smashed us, but we don't like it when they say that. You'd rather say, "Oh, it was a good fight, well played, you know, good effort, credit to the lads," whatever. We hate conceit.

And so that's what we read in this story, but that is not the issue. That he was arrogant. You see, the problem is it is possible to receive the most incredible gifts from God including our salvation and yet somehow forget that they were received apart from anything that we offered God. We receive our good salaries and we think, "I've earned it." We have kids that grow up well, who don't act up, and we think it's because we've trained them.

We have skill and strength and we think it's because we've practised and applied ourselves. But who gave you the job? Where were you when your kid was knit together in the womb? Who gave you that strength? Who gave you the mental aptitude?

Who placed you in middle-class Australia? And one part of us identifies these things as gifts. We say, "Wow, these are gifts." We can even thank God for them. And then another part of us forgets and calls them the natural consequences of hard work.

Yet none of these things have been earned. And believing for one second that you've earned anything will leave you conceited, arrogant, and proud. But again, these are just things. What Jesus is getting to and what the kicker in the story is, is that you may think that you've earned a good standing with God because of these things. And so this is what we have to carefully weigh up this morning.

You may think, I may think that my philosophical and my moral positions have given me a good standing with God. Your hard work in having your political ideology, who you will vote for, or your ethical positions on abortion or gay marriage, or your view of social welfare and whether people should receive money on the dole, or your religious positions on how this church practices its stuff, its worship, its outreach, its leadership. There can be an infinite array of issues that you believe will put you in a better position with God than those who have an opposite view. And the idea or the issue with conceit is you're always comparing. And you cut people down so that you can stand on their stumps.

And we think that somehow through these things, we have a better view, a better grasp, a better relationship with God, but friend, you would be wrong. That is not how God's grace and forgiveness has worked in your life. Thinking in any way that God has accepted us and has come to love us because of what we have done, what we have somehow scrounged, sorted out, what we have cleaned up is not simply to subtract from grace. It is to absolutely destroy grace. You can't add to grace without destroying it.

You can't take away from grace without destroying it. It is a hundred per cent grace or it is nothing at all. And this is what the problem was with the Pharisee. And this is the danger that we can fall into, that the more we grow in faith, thinking that the more we mature as Christians, the more deserving we are for the work of Jesus Christ on the cross. We think that because I've grown a little, now that I've received enough grace to start fixing myself up a little bit, I've quit the drink.

I've quit the drugs. I'm living a pure life. I'm not swearing as much as my coworkers. Here comes the thief of grace. I think I finally got something to give back to God.

And as my guilt builds because I'm growing in my awareness of who I am and who God is, yet at the same time now, I'm more capable than ever of being a better person because God is sanctifying me. And so now I fall into the danger of forgetting the absolutely free nature of God's grace. And that is where the Pharisee is. Now on the other hand, the tax collector, Jesus said, stood far off beating his chest and he wouldn't even look up to heaven and he says, "Have mercy on me, a sinner." You might say, "Well, alright."

He's humble, but he's got plenty to be humble about. He's a dirty tax collector. But here is the deeper layer to the story. A part of the story that makes you realise the complex nature of the human heart. You see, you can have a tax collector who is a Pharisee as well.

This tax collector could have stood in the presence of God and said, "Oh, God, I thank you that I'm not like this Pharisee who prays long prayers, has religious overtones in what they talk about. Look how arrogant he is. I know that I've sinned and at least I'm willing to admit it. And even if I had done all these things, at least you, God, and I know that I'm not a hypocrite." And we know so many people that are in this place, don't we?

Who think somehow that because they don't trust the church, trust organised religion but have this special relationship with God, they are better off spiritually than those who are just normal Christians. They think that God loves the little guy, the little battler, the one that's at least fair dinkum, who lives completely and consistently to God's will, but at least they're not hypocrites. But here's the irony. The tax collector would have been just as conceited as the Pharisee if he thought this way. And do you see that this is the same problem from either angle?

You can play the destruction of God's grace game from any position on the board. By choosing these two characters in the parable, Jesus is actually highlighting that both the Pharisee and the tax collector are deeply flawed people. And in sense, it doesn't matter what their job titles are. It doesn't matter their social standing. Whether it was the tax collector or the Pharisee that walked away or prayed those prayers, it doesn't matter.

This is the singular difference that Jesus points out. It was the tax collector who didn't look to his left or to his right, and with his eyes on the ground, really held it to the Lord and said, "Oh God, have mercy on me, a sinner." This is the difference. He stood in the presence of God and he whispered that prayer. People think that the benefit of regularly coming into God's presence—you know, the things that we should be doing like coming to church every week, opening our Bibles, spending time in scripture, listening to sermons, praying often, fellowshipping with believers—people think that the benefit of regularly coming into the presence of God in those ways is that it makes your life better.

That is not true. The benefit of coming into God's presence is that you see yourself as you really are. When you really see God, you really see yourself. And when you see yourself, you see your sin. And when you see your sin, you cry out to God for forgiveness and grace.

Think about all the times where you have been self-righteous and proud, and I bet you weren't in prayer at that time. Regularly coming into God's presence is the one who is always more aware of their need of God than their successes in God. The person who comes to God and is in His presence are marked with an awareness of how far they have to go rather than how far they've come. And we see that in the scripture so many times. Peter, Paul, we go back to the prophet Isaiah who was the cream of the crop in his day.

He was a priest in the temple. And at a time where his people were rebelling against God, walking away from Him, he was a righteous good man. He worshipped God. And in the hour of national and personal crisis, God meets him in the temple. Remember chapter six?

And he sees God high and lifted up and God's glory fills the temple. And Isaiah catches this vision of God. And how does he respond? "Woe is me. I am undone.

I am a man of unclean lips." Isaiah could have drawn comparisons with his rebellious countrymen and said, "These rascals. I mean, after all, where were they? They should have been in the temple." Yet for all his righteousness and goodness, when Isaiah saw God, he saw himself.

And when he saw himself, he saw his sin. And when he saw his sin, he cried out for cleansing. If you live in the presence of God, if you live in light of His holiness, you will see your sin. But if you live with one eye on yourself and one eye on other people, you will have no eyes for God. You'll excuse your sins either by saying, "Well, mine isn't as bad because this guy's is way worse."

Or you will say, "Mine isn't as bad because everyone is doing it." But the man or the woman who steps into the presence of God often, the one who stands before God fully exposed, is a person that will see their need more clearly and will know their need of grace every time. We never outgrow the need for grace. Even now as we realise we've taken God's grace and we've allowed it to become putrid in our self-righteousness. Friends, hear the words from Jesus Christ, your Saviour, today.

Now that you stand again in His presence. Now that you hear Him speaking to you, realise that the more you live in God's light, the more you will see your own shadow. Yet, we are called to live in this tension. We're called to live in this space being utterly aware of our need and utterly aware of our dependence on a God who is so loving. This is the secret of humility.

Being aware of God's grace will protect this church from disunity and division. Being utterly aware of God's grace protects us from being a useless and irrelevant church. Why? Because useless and irrelevant churches won't reach the lost. Churches who have lost sight of God's grace won't be on mission because deep down in a very dark place, that church will think that they, well, they're better than them.

That the lost really aren't worth the effort because they haven't tried as hard as we have. Because their motives really aren't as good as ours. They haven't pursued the truth as much as we have. How ready are we to accept God's grace? And how easily do we forget that it's the same grace that's needed to save those around us?

We command people to come over to our side of the fence. We realise that we have self-righteousness if we have pride in how we talk. If there is no patience in our words. We wag our fingers at them, but where are our tears? Where is our broken heart?

Do we pray for those people through sleepless nights pleading to God for their souls? Sick Christians, sick churches are the ones who feel special. Thinking that they are the objects of God's grace because they have it together. But if you were to lift those bandages off those Christians and those churches, you would not smell the scent of an English garden. It's the smell of grace gone putrid.

And so in finishing up, the incredible power of the gospel that has empowered every Christian and every great church is found in the humility that cleanses us from all the notions of deserving anything good so that we can finally bask in the reality of sheer amazement at God's love in Jesus Christ. The humility that we find in the presence of God makes you reach out your hand to trust and to receive the truth that Jesus Christ had to die for you. Not that He wanted to die for you because you are so cute. He had to die for you because there is no difference between you and the tax collector. And so that is the secret of humility that changes the church, that changes the Christian, that gives us joy, that makes us truly good people in how we treat others.

Because we don't look inward at our deficiencies and become self-loathing and we just hate ourselves and therefore the whole world is absolutely rubbish. Neither do we look outward to those people around us and compare ourselves with them. Humility comes from looking into the face of God who is the fullness of holy love and the fullness of loving holiness. And while we look into His face, we see ourselves and we see our need of forgiveness and we hold out our hands for the grace to be received that is completely free. And we thank our Saviour Jesus Christ that He has made it possible through His life and His death on our behalf. May the Lord give us a strong sense of smell to realise when grace has gone sour in our lives and give us a sense of His glorious love to shake us out of our self-righteousness.

Let's pray. Father, we come to you this morning in humility. And we realise, God, we realise how transformative it is to come into a space like today, a moment like today to hear Your word that recalibrates our hearts. But Lord, the fear is that we can leave this place and Lord, we can forget that transforming power of grace as we live as Christians. Lord God, help us to so viscerally, so tangibly realise our need of You, our absolute dependence on Your grace, Your forgiveness, Your love, that we will be so consumed by Your love.

That all sense of entitlement, of deserving, of self-induced, self-made righteousness will fall off. Help us, Lord, to stay humble. Help us, Lord, to see those who don't have it yet and to love them first. Help us to be patient. Help us to be kind.

And Lord Jesus, help us to point to You all the time as the one who first loved us. We pray for Your protection of us, of this church, in Jesus' name. Amen.