Evangelical Pharisees

We had the privilege of having Dr. Steve Brown speak at our church last weekend. I always love to hear him preach. Not only because his voice is mesmerizing but because he brilliantly teaches on God's grace. He says that he gets a lot of hate mail and I'm not really surprised. He usually says some shocking things and I'm sure that some people are offended. My dad said he heard or read somewhere one time that if a pastor isn't shocking his congregation, he probably is not preaching pure grace.

One of the things Dr. Brown said really convicted me and I have been thinking about it all week. He said that Evangelicals (meaning all of us Protestant church-going people, including myself) are the modern day Pharisees. Whoa. How many times have I read Jesus' parables and rebukes to the Pharisees (the religious people of that time) and thought to myself, "How could they be so self-righteous? What was wrong with them?" Well, guess what? I'm just like them. For years I have known that there is nothing that I can do to enter the kingdom of heaven on my own merit. Only through Christ's sacrifice on the cross is this possible. "For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God." Rom 3:23 I've know this truth for years, but there's still a part of me that tries to please God on my own apart from Christ. Sometimes, I'll see someone whose sin looks uglier than my own (in my eyes at least) and I'll think, "Whew...at least I'm not that bad." But the truth is that even our good deeds are like filthy rags.

When Jesus preached, the sinners, the prostitutes, the tax collectors, all the people who were looked down on in society flocked to him and loved to listen to him. These are the people he hung out with. This was shocking to the Pharisees. I wonder what would happen if those kinds of people today were to come into our churches? Would we look down our noses at them like the Pharisees did? Would we compare our sins to theirs and think that we are better than them in God's eyes? I'm sure this is one reason why Evangelicals do not have a good reputation among unbelievers. It's because we're just like the Pharisees. If we were like Jesus, those people would be flocking into our churches. But they're not.