SPEAKER_00: As we continue our time of worship, I encourage you to turn to the Gospel of Luke, chapter 20.
SPEAKER_00: I will be reading verses 41 through 47.
SPEAKER_00: And if you happen to have uh forgotten your Bible this morning, there should be one located there in front of you.
SPEAKER_00: And you can find it on page 880 in the Bible there on the shelf right in front of you.
SPEAKER_00: If you happen to not own a Bible, I want to encourage you at the end of the service to take that Bible home with you as our gift.
SPEAKER_00: We have the great privilege of being able to give away dozens and dozens of Bibles, and we would love for you to have that.
SPEAKER_00: And so at the end of the service, if you don't own a Bible or have ready access, please take that home as our gift to you.
SPEAKER_00: Luke chapter 20, beginning in verse 41.
SPEAKER_00: But he said to them, How can they say that the Christ is David's son?
SPEAKER_00: For David himself says in the book of Psalms, The Lord says to my Lord, Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool.
SPEAKER_00: David thus called him Lord, so how is he his son?
SPEAKER_00: And in the hearing of all the people he said to his disciples, Beware of the scribes, who like to walk around in long robes, and love greetings in the marketplaces, and the best seats in the synagogues, and the place of honor at feasts, who devour widows' houses and for a pretense make long prayers.
SPEAKER_00: They will receive the greater condemnation.
SPEAKER_00: This is God's word.
SPEAKER_00: I bought these flexible titanium virtually indestructible glasses, and they broke this week.
SPEAKER_00: And I I wish I had a cool story, but honestly, I was putting them on my face and I pulled them apart and they snapped in half.
SPEAKER_00: And I thought, boy, I have a fat head.
SPEAKER_00: And the problem is, is I can't see very well.
SPEAKER_00: And uh I have my contacts in, but I but I still I can't see up close very well, so if I if I start rambling, it's probably not in my notes.
SPEAKER_00: I but it but everything when I without contacts, everything is blurry.
SPEAKER_00: Uh I can't see at a distance at all.
SPEAKER_00: Uh uh I don't recognize others at a distance.
SPEAKER_00: I they just uh the further out you are, the better you look.
SPEAKER_00: No.
SPEAKER_00: Um I I mean I can't even see myself in a mirror very well without my glasses on.
SPEAKER_00: I'm I'm leaning in forward to try to see.
SPEAKER_00: And uh I went to the ophthalmologist, um, have been going for years now, but just in recent years, uh he told me that eventually I will go blind.
SPEAKER_00: It'll uh he says it's gonna take about 50 years from now uh before it happens.
SPEAKER_00: Um but I'll be completely blind.
SPEAKER_00: I won't be able to read, I won't be able to recognize others, I won't even be able to see myself.
SPEAKER_00: But you see, the same thing is true when we have spiritual blindness.
SPEAKER_00: It's very similar in a lot of ways.
SPEAKER_00: The religious leaders of Jesus' day were spiritually blind, they couldn't see Scripture, they couldn't read and understand Scripture, they couldn't see who Jesus was, they couldn't even see themselves.
SPEAKER_00: And that's the nature of spiritual blindness.
SPEAKER_00: In pride and hardness of heart, they're attacking Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: We've seen this over and over again throughout the gospel.
SPEAKER_00: They want to trap him, they want to discredit him, and ultimately they want to kill him.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus answered them in a parallel account to this in Matthew's gospel, he tells them that they don't know Scripture or the power of God.
SPEAKER_00: They don't know God's word, they don't recognize Jesus, they don't see themselves.
SPEAKER_00: They were blind, but they thought they could see.
SPEAKER_00: In fact, John's gospel records this interchange in John chapter 9.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus says to them, they say, We're not blind, and Jesus says, if you were blind, you would have no guilt, but now that you say we see, your guilt remains.
SPEAKER_00: They were so blind that they couldn't see, that they couldn't see.
SPEAKER_00: They couldn't recognize the reality of their own sin.
SPEAKER_00: They couldn't see their own lostness, they couldn't recognize the problem at the very core of their heart.
SPEAKER_00: They couldn't see Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: They were blind.
SPEAKER_00: Pride underlies spiritual blindness.
SPEAKER_00: Pride causes us to see what we want to see when we come to God's word.
SPEAKER_00: In pride, we put ourselves above God's word as its judge.
SPEAKER_00: And we decide what we want to believe and not believe, what we want to accept and not accept, what we want to put into practice and not put into practice, and pride causes spiritual blindness we can't see Scripture.
SPEAKER_00: Pride blinds us to the reality of Jesus, of seeing who He is.
SPEAKER_00: We're unwilling to admit we need a Savior.
SPEAKER_00: We're unwilling to admit that we're lost and that we need rescuing because pride causes us not to see our own sin, our own shortcomings.
SPEAKER_00: Pride causes us to not acknowledge how messed up and desperate we really are.
SPEAKER_00: Pride underlies spiritual blindness.
SPEAKER_00: We'll see this with the Pharisees, with the Sadducees, with the scribes.
SPEAKER_00: Perhaps we'll see it in ourselves.
SPEAKER_00: The cure for pride is humility, teachability, and surrender.
SPEAKER_00: It's easy to see spiritual pride and blindness in other people, but it's very difficult for us to see it in ourselves.
SPEAKER_00: What we'll learn this morning is that it takes a God-given, humble, teachable heart to see spiritual reality.
SPEAKER_00: The religious leaders have been asking Jesus question after question, trying to trap him, trying to trip him up.
SPEAKER_00: And finally they were silenced.
SPEAKER_00: They couldn't answer, they couldn't think of another question, they couldn't answer what he had said.
SPEAKER_00: And so now Jesus turns the table and he asks them a question.
SPEAKER_00: He asked them a question and it reveals their own spiritual blindness.
SPEAKER_00: There are three realities we see here in spiritual blindness in this passage from 41 to 47.
SPEAKER_00: We're going to examine them this morning.
SPEAKER_00: First of all, spiritual blindness affects our ability to see Scripture.
SPEAKER_00: Secondly, spiritual blindness affects our ability to see Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: And finally, spiritual blindness affects our ability to see ourselves.
SPEAKER_00: Let's look at the text and see what uh what is there that God would open our eyes to see.
SPEAKER_00: First of all, spiritual blindness affects our ability to see Scripture.
SPEAKER_00: These were the religious leaders of Jesus' day that had been coming to attack him.
SPEAKER_00: They were the scribes, they were the Pharisees, they were the Sadducees.
SPEAKER_00: We've talked about these different groups.
SPEAKER_00: The scribes, think about it this way: they were the lawyers, the legalists, and the liberals.
SPEAKER_00: Those were the groups that were coming to Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: The lawyers, the legalists, and the liberals.
SPEAKER_00: The scribes were the lawyers, they were the keepers of the law.
SPEAKER_00: They were the ones that studied the minutiae of God's word to tell you in all the details of all the nuances of what was in there.
SPEAKER_00: The Pharisees were the legalists.
SPEAKER_00: They were the ones that added rule upon rule and precept and put parameters and guides and said you could do this and not this.
SPEAKER_00: They were the legalists of the day.
SPEAKER_00: They were scrupulous to the minutiae of their religious practice.
SPEAKER_00: And then you had the Sadducees, and we saw them last week.
SPEAKER_00: They didn't believe much of anything.
SPEAKER_00: They believed in a God, but God who created and walked away, they didn't believe in miracles or heaven or hell or salvation or life after death or the soul.
SPEAKER_00: They didn't believe much of anything.
SPEAKER_00: Matthew records Jesus warning the people about the Pharisees.
SPEAKER_00: This is what Jesus said.
SPEAKER_00: He says, The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses' seat.
SPEAKER_00: So do and observe what they tell you, but not the works that they do.
SPEAKER_00: For they preach, but they do not practice.
SPEAKER_00: They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on people's shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to move them with their finger.
SPEAKER_00: They do all their deeds to be seen by others.
SPEAKER_00: He said, They taught God's word, and so what they said that comes from Scripture, you need to listen to, but don't follow their practice because they don't practice what they preach.
SPEAKER_00: They're hypocrites.
SPEAKER_00: They say one thing and they tell you one thing, but they do something else.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus throws a softball question here at them.
SPEAKER_00: The question that Jesus asked was a softball question, but they were completely stumped.
SPEAKER_00: They were befuddled in knowing how to answer.
SPEAKER_00: It sounds at first blush like a riddle.
SPEAKER_00: He says to them, How can they say that the Christ, the Messiah, the word Christ is Greek for the Hebrew Messiah, and both of them mean the anointed one?
SPEAKER_00: How can they say that the Christ is David's son?
SPEAKER_00: For David himself says in the book of Psalms, the Lord said to my Lord, Sit at my right hand until I make you and make your enemies your footstool.
SPEAKER_00: David thus calls him Lord.
SPEAKER_00: How can he be his son?
SPEAKER_00: The scribes were the experts of the law.
SPEAKER_00: They were the ones that spent their days in leisure studying the minutiae of Scripture.
SPEAKER_00: They were the ones that gave detailed explanations of what were there.
SPEAKER_00: Why were they so blind?
SPEAKER_00: Why were they so incapable of understanding Scripture?
SPEAKER_00: They were self-reliant and spiritually dead.
SPEAKER_00: In order to understand God's word, the Holy Spirit needs to give you life.
SPEAKER_00: The technical term for this is a term that's worth knowing.
SPEAKER_00: It's called regeneration.
SPEAKER_00: Regeneration means being made spiritually alive, being born again.
SPEAKER_00: Before you came to Christ, the Bible says that you were spiritually dead, you were insensitive to the things of God.
SPEAKER_00: Paul says, and you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of the world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience.
SPEAKER_00: He says that in Ephesians chapter 2, verses 1 and 2.
SPEAKER_00: He says that the natural man, apart from a relationship with Christ, we are spiritually insensitive to the things of God.
SPEAKER_00: We are spiritually dead.
SPEAKER_00: And so, unless a person has come into a living and vital relationship with God through the person of Jesus Christ, he is separated from God.
SPEAKER_00: He is spiritually insensitive.
SPEAKER_00: He is still in his own sins, and he cannot properly understand, interpret, and apply God's word.
SPEAKER_00: And we have scores of churches today that are led by pastors who don't know Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: They've never been converted, they've never been regenerated.
SPEAKER_00: They don't have the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit with them.
SPEAKER_00: People ask me pretty often, Pastor, I don't understand how a pastor can deny the Bible, can believe in abortion and be pro-gay marriage and believe that all roads lead to heaven.
SPEAKER_00: I don't understand how a pastor can be like that.
SPEAKER_00: Well, quite simply, it's because they're devoid of the Spirit of God.
SPEAKER_00: They've never been born again.
SPEAKER_00: They've never been regenerated.
SPEAKER_00: They don't know Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: In addition to being regenerated, made alive by the Spirit of God, in order to understand the Bible, we also need the Holy Spirit's illumination.
SPEAKER_00: The Holy Spirit gives us life, and then the Holy Spirit shines the light so that we can understand what God's Word says and get the true intent of it and the weight of it.
SPEAKER_00: We can understand it through the working of the Holy Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: The Holy Spirit opens our eyes and then shines the light onto God's word.
SPEAKER_00: Illumination means the Holy Spirit shining the light to teach us what the Bible really says and understands its true intent.
SPEAKER_00: There is, I'll call it a weight to Scripture.
SPEAKER_00: Think about it in these terms.
SPEAKER_00: There is a weight to scripture.
SPEAKER_00: Have you ever had somebody where you're talking to them about something and it just seems like they're Teflon coded?
SPEAKER_00: Like nothing sticks?
SPEAKER_00: No matter what you throw at them, nothing sticks.
SPEAKER_00: They seem totally oblivious to what you're talking about.
SPEAKER_00: Maybe you even notice that in your own heart.
SPEAKER_00: You're reading the Bible, but it just feels like, wow, everything's just falling off.
SPEAKER_00: Nothing's really sticking.
SPEAKER_00: What's going on?
SPEAKER_00: Well, what it is, is the Holy Spirit needs to impress that upon our hearts.
SPEAKER_00: The Holy Spirit illuminates, takes, and opens our eyes to see, shines a light on God's word, and impresses the true intent and weight of Scripture on our hearts and minds so that we're convicted of it, so that we're impressed by it, so that we are changed by it and transformed by it.
SPEAKER_00: It is the working of the Holy Spirit in our lives through his regenerating us and through illumination, through his making us alive and shining the light so that it truly transforms us.
SPEAKER_00: And the Bible talks about this.
SPEAKER_00: Paul talks about it in 1 Corinthians chapter 2.
SPEAKER_00: He says, What no eye has seen nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him.
SPEAKER_00: These things God has revealed to us through his Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: We cannot come to God's word apart from a humble dependence and reliance upon the Holy Spirit to enable us to see.
SPEAKER_00: And so we ought to pray, God, help us to see what you say, help us to understand it, to put the pieces together, but more than just for cognitive information, so that our hearts might be transformed, that we will be more like you, we will live more like you, we will love more like you.
SPEAKER_00: A little later in that same chapter of 1 Corinthians 2, he says, And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom, but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual.
SPEAKER_00: And then his final assessment is this and wraps up everything we find here, what's going on in the hearts of the scribes and the Pharisees and the Sadducees.
SPEAKER_00: In verse 14, he gives this assessment.
SPEAKER_00: He says, the natural person, the person who does not have a relationship with Jesus Christ, does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him.
SPEAKER_00: And he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.
SPEAKER_00: So Jesus asked them what ought to have been a very straightforward question to the ones who had spent their entire lives studying the Bible and they're befuddled by it.
SPEAKER_00: They can't see Scripture because they're spiritually blind.
SPEAKER_00: But the question that Jesus asked reveals not only can they not see Scripture, but secondly, they can't see Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: One inescapably leads to the other.
SPEAKER_00: Spiritual blindness affects our ability to see Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: The whole Bible, from beginning to end, is about Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: Every page of the Bible points to the person and work of Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_00: From the opening pages of Genesis to the last page of Revelation, everything is moving towards Jesus in the Old Testament.
SPEAKER_00: Every symbol, every sign is pointing to the outworking of God's plan in the person of Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: We have the Gospels where Jesus is here, and then everything else points back to Jesus of what God has done and how that's going to work out in human history.
SPEAKER_00: It's all about Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: In fact, you may remember after the resurrection, Jesus is walking, uh, two men are walking on the road to Emmaus, and Jesus meets them, and they're they're uh hindered from recognizing who Jesus is, and they begin to talk and they're grieved because Jesus had died and they don't understand what's going on.
SPEAKER_00: And then Jesus, it says this, and beginning with Moses and all of the prophets throughout all of the Old Testament, he interpreted to them in all of the scripture the things concerning himself.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus confronting the scribes and the Pharisees in John chapter 5, he says, This, you search the scriptures because you think in them you have eternal life.
SPEAKER_00: And it is they that bear witness about me.
SPEAKER_00: Yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life.
SPEAKER_00: These were the men that studied God's word day and night, week in and week out, and they they couldn't recognize the time of Christ's visitation.
SPEAKER_00: Because they were spiritually blind, they were befuddled by Jesus' question.
SPEAKER_00: It really isn't that difficult to think through.
SPEAKER_00: Let's just walk through it.
SPEAKER_00: It really only takes a few seconds to explain.
SPEAKER_00: The Christ or the Messiah, the anointed one, is the son of David.
SPEAKER_00: And all of the Jews of Jesus' day would agree with that.
SPEAKER_00: The Messiah will be the son of David, will come from the line, the lineage of David.
SPEAKER_00: But then Jesus points out that in a patriarchal society, a son is not greater than his father or equal to his father.
SPEAKER_00: The father is greater.
SPEAKER_00: So the son, by definition, would be subordinate.
SPEAKER_00: And yet David calls his son his Lord, his master.
SPEAKER_00: And so Jesus says, How do you reconcile this?
SPEAKER_00: How can David call his son his Lord?
SPEAKER_00: And then he quotes from Psalm 110 The Lord said to my Lord, Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool.
SPEAKER_00: And so what he says is, explain this to me.
SPEAKER_00: David is the greatest king in the history of Israel.
SPEAKER_00: He is going to have a son who will be the Messiah.
SPEAKER_00: This Messiah will be greater than him.
SPEAKER_00: He will be David's Lord.
SPEAKER_00: And David says, he will rule and reign forever.
SPEAKER_00: How can that be?
SPEAKER_00: And what Jesus was pointing out was the reality of who he was.
SPEAKER_00: That he was the son of David, but the son of David was more than a mere man.
SPEAKER_00: He was greater than David because he was over David.
SPEAKER_00: He is actually the Lord God Himself.
SPEAKER_00: He is God in man in the person of Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_00: It can only be true that he will be a greater high priest, that he will reign forever, that he is over David if he is more than a man.
SPEAKER_00: But they were spiritually blind, they couldn't see it.
SPEAKER_00: It's only a riddle because they couldn't connect the dots, they couldn't see the dots to even make the connections.
SPEAKER_00: Who is Jesus?
SPEAKER_00: That's the question that he's asking them at the end of his ministry, at the end of his life.
SPEAKER_00: I love what C.S.
SPEAKER_00: Lewis said years ago that really challenges us to ask that same question.
SPEAKER_00: And Lewis said this who is Jesus?
SPEAKER_00: He says, I'm trying to prevent here anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about him.
SPEAKER_00: I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept his claim to be God.
SPEAKER_00: Isn't that what we hear so often today?
SPEAKER_00: That is the one thing we must not say.
SPEAKER_00: A man who merely was a man and said the sort of things that Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher.
SPEAKER_00: He would either be a lunatic on the level with a man who says he's a poached egg, or else he would be the devil of hell.
SPEAKER_00: You must make your choice.
SPEAKER_00: Either this man was and is the son of God, or else a madman or something worse.
SPEAKER_00: You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon, or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God.
SPEAKER_00: But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher.
SPEAKER_00: He has not left that open to us.
SPEAKER_00: He did not intend to.
SPEAKER_00: Their blindness was complete.
SPEAKER_00: They could not see Scripture, they could not see Jesus, but they couldn't see themselves either.
SPEAKER_00: And this is where it really hits home.
SPEAKER_00: Spiritual blindness affects our ability to see ourselves.
SPEAKER_00: John Kelvin centuries ago made this observation.
SPEAKER_00: He said, you cannot see yourselves unless you see God for who he really is, and you can't see God for who he really is unless you see yourself.
SPEAKER_00: You have to keep both of those in view.
SPEAKER_00: And he gives an explanation for why.
SPEAKER_00: He says this he says, For such is our innate pride, we always see, we always seem to ourselves just and upright and wise and holy until we're convinced by clear evidence of our injustice, vileness, folly, and impurity.
SPEAKER_00: He says, left to ourselves, we think we're pretty good.
SPEAKER_00: Left to ourselves, we may have a few uh foibles and maybe commit some picadillos and some small errors of judgment or character, but we don't see ourselves for who we really are at the core of our hearts until he says we're convinced by clear evidence.
SPEAKER_00: But then he adds this, he says, convinced, however, we are not, if we look to ourselves only and not to the Lord also.
SPEAKER_00: If we judge ourselves by ourselves, we're going to come out looking pretty good.
SPEAKER_00: If we judge ourselves based on looking at other people, we'll find people a lot worse than us.
SPEAKER_00: And so what he says is, he says, we we can't only look at ourselves, we need to look at the Lord also.
SPEAKER_00: He being the only standard by the application of which this conviction can be produced.
SPEAKER_00: He says, only when we look at God in his holiness and righteousness and purity that he is of pure eyes to look upon sin only when we gaze upon the beauty and splendor of his holiness and then begin to look at our own heart as the true reality of the depths of our sin really sink in.
SPEAKER_00: Well, where were the scribes' self-assessment?
SPEAKER_00: They thought they were holy, righteous, pious, devout, godly, honorable, worthy of emulating.
SPEAKER_00: The spiritual leaders had had several responsibilities, three of which Malachi records, he says they need to know God's word, they need to point people to God, and they need to be an example of humble godliness by serving others.
SPEAKER_00: The scribes and the Pharisees and the Sadducees were completely oblivious, completely unaware of the depths of sin in their own hearts.
SPEAKER_00: Look at what Jesus says to him at the end of this chapter, beginning in verse 45.
SPEAKER_00: He turns to the disciples in front of the crowd, in front of the scribes, in the hearing of all the people, and he warns them.
SPEAKER_00: He says, Beware.
SPEAKER_00: And then he begins to assess the scribes.
SPEAKER_00: He says this, they love to wear long robes.
SPEAKER_00: FF Bruce, the commentator, says this long robes mark the wearer as a gentleman of leisure.
SPEAKER_00: What it showed is they loved the good life.
SPEAKER_00: They wore long, white, glowing robes to show that they never got their hands dirty.
SPEAKER_00: That they were above the fray, that they were, that they were a cut above, that they were gentlemen of leisure.
SPEAKER_00: They had arrived.
SPEAKER_00: I watched 10 minutes of a TV show I don't recommend you watching.
SPEAKER_00: Um it's called Preachers of LA.
SPEAKER_00: It's been out for a couple seasons now.
SPEAKER_00: I I recorded one of them, and then we never stopped the DVR recordings.
SPEAKER_00: And uh I've only watched uh it a couple times, but it happened to be on when we were trying to uh change the stations, and there was a segment of one of these prosperity gospel preachers in Los Angeles, and they're following them around.
SPEAKER_00: It's a reality show.
SPEAKER_00: And one of the guys is one of the pastors is taking a bunch of kids to buy new clothes so that they can go to church.
SPEAKER_00: And they interview them and ask him, well, why are you spending all of this money buying them expensive clothes?
SPEAKER_00: And this is an exact quote of what he said.
SPEAKER_00: He said, Looking good on the outside makes you look real good on the inside.
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes you have to dress to impress.
SPEAKER_00: They loved to wear long robes, they loved recognition, they loved greetings in the marketplace, they loved to be noticed by others, they relished in privilege, they loved the best seats in the synagogue.
SPEAKER_00: They exalted in honor, they loved a place of honor at feasts.
SPEAKER_00: They were viciously greedy, who devoured widows' houses.
SPEAKER_00: An image was everything.
SPEAKER_00: It says, for pretense they made long prayers.
SPEAKER_00: Now we can read this and sit here and think, boy, I'm glad I'm not like them.
SPEAKER_00: But notice what Jesus warns us.
SPEAKER_00: He warns us to say, be careful to not be like them.
SPEAKER_00: Beware.
SPEAKER_00: Why do we need to beware?
SPEAKER_00: The reality is, is because we can be just like them.
SPEAKER_00: It's very possible for us to fall into the exact same kinds of sins as them.
SPEAKER_00: We're not immune to it if we don't guard our hearts.
SPEAKER_00: There's a temptation, and I'll just talk personally.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I think about times when I'm in a prayer meeting.
SPEAKER_00: And as the pastor, I begin, as I'm sitting there listening to other people pray, my mind begins to formulate a prayer.
SPEAKER_00: And I begin to do this because I think, well, I need to sound good.
SPEAKER_00: I need to make sure I say the right words and have the right phrases and the right cadence, and what are people going to think if I if I stumble?
SPEAKER_00: And so I begin to think, what's going on in my heart though?
SPEAKER_00: I'm beginning to become more concerned about what the people listening to me are thinking about my prayer than my actual prayer in my heart before God.
SPEAKER_00: Or maybe we drop hints and we we say things to uh let people know that we did something, you know.
SPEAKER_00: Well, you know, last week after I was at the mall evangelizing, I did this and so.
SPEAKER_00: And we really want people to know, hey, look at what I just did.
SPEAKER_00: Or we talk about giving money or doing other things.
SPEAKER_00: It's very easy for us to fall into these traps in very subtle ways.
SPEAKER_00: And we don't even recognize that we're doing it.
SPEAKER_00: How easy it is to want the praise of men while acting humble, hoping that you'll load on more praise.
SPEAKER_00: It's very difficult for us to evaluate our own hearts because of how blind we are to the reality of it.
SPEAKER_00: It's much easier for us to evaluate other people's hearts.
SPEAKER_00: It's much easier for us to see the sins in others than to see the sins in ourselves.
SPEAKER_00: Notice that that Jesus here says that uh that do you not know?
SPEAKER_00: He says, You will receive the greater condemnation, that that as leaders they'll be judged with the stricter judgment, Jesus concludes.
SPEAKER_00: But there's a message here for all of us.
SPEAKER_00: The ophthalmologist, um, when I was talking to him, I mentioned it at the beginning, he said, uh he told me that what I have, I have uh cornocronis, my thinning of the eyes, eventually I'm gonna go blind.
SPEAKER_00: And and he and he says to me, this is this is what he actually said.
SPEAKER_00: He said, um, he said, but but you don't have to worry about it because it just started and it's gonna take about 50 years, you'll be dead before then.
SPEAKER_00: He has a great sense of humor.
SPEAKER_00: Um but every six months I go in and I and I have to take all of these tests, the field of vision test.
SPEAKER_00: I I have to take they they do an exam, a CAT scan of my eye, of my retina to evaluate, to see if there's any thinning of what's going on.
SPEAKER_00: And and every six months I have to go in because the blindness can happen so slowly and subtly that on a day-to-day basis I'll never know what happens until it's too late to do anything about it.
SPEAKER_00: And it can be so subtle that eventually I could be blind before I even really recognized the depths of my problem.
SPEAKER_00: Spiritual blindness can slowly creep into our own hearts.
SPEAKER_00: We don't realize our hearts are becoming hardened, we're becoming callous, we're becoming insensitive to God's word, we have no passion for Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: We stop evaluating the depths of our own heart to see and own and confess our own sin.
SPEAKER_00: It can happen so slowly you don't realize it until it's too late and you're in a place that you never thought you would be and you never wanted to go, but there you are.
SPEAKER_00: Pride and hardness of heart and self-sufficiency can blind us to God's word and can blind us to seeing Jesus and can blind us from seeing our own sin.
SPEAKER_00: So, what do we do?
SPEAKER_00: Well, first of all, we we cry out to Jesus with whatever we do see.
SPEAKER_00: Whatever measure of sight that we have, whatever sin that we see, we cry out to Jesus and ask him to give us eyes to see the reality of our own hearts.
SPEAKER_00: We can't change our own hearts, but we can go to the one who can and does.
SPEAKER_00: Ask for humility in a teachable spirit.
SPEAKER_00: Humble yourself before God, yield to him in complete surrender, repent of any known sin that God brings to mind.
SPEAKER_00: Ask others to give an honest assessment to help you see what you can't see and to pray with you and for you.
SPEAKER_00: You know, a lot of times Christians are accused of being hypocrites.
SPEAKER_00: And really it's a false, it's a false accusation.
SPEAKER_00: I've admitted to you I'm a messed up sinner.
SPEAKER_00: You all know that.
SPEAKER_00: If you don't, I'm a messed up sinner.
SPEAKER_00: Um I've shared with you different aspects.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, we could spend all day talking about all of my sins and we'd we'd run out of time and run out of recording.
SPEAKER_00: All of us are sinners.
SPEAKER_00: All of us, if we stop to look at the core of our hearts, would see how much sin we have if we see it in light of God and his word.
SPEAKER_00: And you're not a hypocrite for being a sinner as a Christian.
SPEAKER_00: You're only a hypocrite for being a for being a sinner as a Christian if you're not willing to admit you're a sinner.
SPEAKER_00: And a lot of people are turned off with Christianity, not because we're sinners, because we can't admit we're sinners and everyone else knows we are.
SPEAKER_00: And so we need to come before God in humility.
SPEAKER_00: We need to come before others in humility to see and own and confess, to embrace repentance, to repent and to rejoice in the salvation that we have.
SPEAKER_00: We can't do it ourselves.
SPEAKER_00: But if we come in humility, if we come with the teachable spirit, if we cry out to Jesus, he'll change our heart, he'll change our heart and he'll help us to see what only He can help us to see.
SPEAKER_00: And that's Himself, His Word, and our own hearts.
SPEAKER_00: Let's pray.
SPEAKER_00: Father, we cry out to you now.
SPEAKER_00: Lord, we are a mess.
SPEAKER_00: We are sinners.
SPEAKER_00: When we look at you at you, when we look at your holiness and your purity, we realize how how poor and blind and wretched we are, that we need grace.
SPEAKER_00: We need grace today, we need the gospel today.
SPEAKER_00: And Father, I pray for us that we'll humble ourselves before you under your mighty hand and cry out to you to open our eyes that we might see spiritual reality.
SPEAKER_00: And Father, help us to assess ourselves in our hearts.
SPEAKER_00: It's so easy for blindness to creep in so slowly and subtly, we don't even realize it's happened until we're so far down.
SPEAKER_00: And so, God, we pray now for the convicting work of your Holy Spirit and press the truth of your word on our hearts and our minds so that we went we we might turn away from sin and turn to you.
SPEAKER_00: We cry out to you as sinners saved by grace and grace alone.
SPEAKER_00: We pray in Jesus' name.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.