Wednesday, July
25, 2018
Tax collectors
and other notorious sinners often came to listen to Jesus teach. This made the Pharisees
and teachers of religious law complain that he was associating with such sinful
people—even eating with them! So Jesus told them this story: “If a man has a hundred
sheep and one of them gets lost, what will he do? Won’t he leave the ninety-nine others in the
wilderness and go to search for the one that is lost until he finds it? And when he has found it,
he will joyfully carry it home on his shoulders. When he arrives, he will call together his friends and
neighbors, saying, ‘Rejoice with me because I have found my lost sheep.’ In the same way, there is
more joy in heaven over one lost sinner who repents and returns to God than
over ninety-nine others who are righteous and haven’t strayed away! Luke 15:1-7(NLT)
This parable of Jesus’ sets
up the classic balancing act between actions and attitudes. Both are important, and both usually
criticized in a tug of war between the good children and the bad ones. And, depending on which side of that line you
stand, both are dangerous.
The “Good” Ones
The Pharisees, keepers of
all things religious, are the obedience-driven “good children”. In Jesus’ other parable about this conflict,
the Pharisees, religious leaders and teachers of God’s Law, they would be the
stay-at-home elder brother (as opposed to the bad son who wasted his father’s
estate in the far country). The
religious, obeying, do-gooders were performance-driven conformers; they dotted
all the i’s and crossed all the t’s. Their
resume’s were inscrutable; their attitudes were horrible, condemning everything
that walked…except themselves!
The “Wild-child” Ones
The wild children of the
world have a problem with authority figures, something you see in abundance
with the Pharisees. When Pharisees exercise
control, the predictable reaction is rebellion.
Wild children can detect a Pharisaical fussbudget’s horrible attitude in
a heartbeat…and they want none of it!
The irony of these two types
of people represented in Luke’s Gospel account is that neither is all right,
and, obviously, neither is all wrong.
The Pharisees –a title almost always spoken with a slight bit of spit-out-of-the-mouth
disgust – are seen as wanting to ruin the party, sucking the fun
out of life, while the wild, rebellious ones are duly chastised for their lack
of obedience, but silently admired for their I-gotta-be-me rebellious
ways.
Putting aside which
side you and I may occupy, let’s ask the question this
morning:
If neither the Pharisee, nor the Wild-child is all
right or all wrong…
what do we make of what God expects here?
Well, take your preferences
and prejudices out of the equation and consider; is obedience to God
wrong? Ask again, is a positive attitude
of life
is good, and meant to be enjoyed wrong? The answer is always “yes” AND “no”.
When your obedience is like
a Pharisee, obeying every commandment and, at the same time, despising the fact
that you must obey, because you know all those people who aren’t obeying are out
there having a good time, and it tweaks you so much to be the good child, that
you must condemn everything the wild children are doing…you need an attitude
adjustment.
On the other hand, when
being a wild-child, disobeying just because you despise the good children who
do obey, and then you see how empty the life can be apart from a relationship
with God, and it drives you to step up your game with more and bigger
disobedience, just because you’re gonna show them you were right to reject them…well,
you need a performance review!
And so, the balancing act
becomes surrendering your inner Pharisee AND your outer wild-child ways to God’s
Spirit, so that the growing humility (Christlikeness) God wants to grow in you destroys
your criticizing and allows you to really start living.
The
problem with a Pharisee or a wild-child is the balancing act between obeying
and not obeying is too difficult to be handled by amateurs; sin is just too
strong without the cleansing of blood…and we are unable to be cleansed when we
stand on ONLY our own two feet. This is
what Paul meant when he said it was only when he was weak that he was actually
strong[2].
For You Today
There is nothing wrong with
obedience, and there is nothing good about disobedience. Those are merely indicators of where you
stand on the scale of whether a heart has been surrendered to the love of
Christ, or a heart trying to navigate life all on your own.
Go to VIDEO
[1] Title Image: Courtesy of Pixabay.com
[2] 2 Corinthians 12:10
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