A Baptism - Luke 18

Luke chapter 18 -- God gives grace to the humble but opposes the proud!

BI; God has atoned for sin in the death of his son on a cross, and he graciously gives that forgiveness and cleansing to all who will humbly acknowledge their sin and accept his gift of forgiveness. The humble will be exalted, but the proud will be brought low.

Introduction
Well today is a great day, where we are able to formally introduce Phoenix into the life of our congregation. It is a chance to celebrate the gift of life from God our creator, but it is also a chance to think about the meaning of life as well.

Because that is the big question isn't it, we all know that life is a good thing, a blessing from above, but I'm not so sure we are all that confident we know what it is for?
What is it, that is at the heart of meaning and purpose in this life?
Or more importantly, in our life?

And so now we have a moment, to stop and consider some words about life, from a man who is the most influential man who ever lived, so influential they named the dating system after him, so influential he even gets you three public holidays a year!

And in our Bible reading today we see Jesus address two groups of people, to the first group he told a parable (a story or riddle) about two men, and to the second group he made an illustration from the children that came to him. But more of that in a moment.

So it seems children are the theme today, and Tim and Karen, I have some bad news regarding children for you today, now I know this won't entirely be news to you, both from the experience of already having a child, and also your own experience of being a child tells you this to;
the news is kids do dumb things!

Little kids do astoundingly dumb things, often because they don't know better, but many times they do it, despite the fact they know better.
I have seen things on my daughter's hands, and in her mouth, that I wouldn't let touch the soul of my shoe!
And that is because Kids do dumb things.

And here's the really scary bit, I'm reliably told that teenagers do even dumber things!

But The interesting part in common here is that both little kids and teenagers seem to think they can get away with them though.

Now little kids in a first line of defence mechanism, usually employ the strategy of outright denial
-- "I didn't do it!".
And they will swear blind by this defence, even if they are in fact caught red-handed in the middle of the act.
Teenagers on the other hand, have generally grown out of this kind of futile exercise, and instead attempt, what is often an elaborate and more time-consuming, covert operation to cloak over the dumb things they have done!

Either way, the first response is to try to get away without having to take responsibility, for the dumb things they have done.

Adults it seems to me, have not evolved that much when it comes to dumb things. Everybody does dumb things, and as an adult the stakes are usually much higher. So we generally have given up on the denial approach, although at times of desperation, people will often give it a go, more commonly, however. If we are able, we give the sneaky approach of the teenager ago, in fact we usually become better at it than they are, because the stakes are higher.


But if neither of these approaches seems to be successful, as adults, we just give up trying to hide, and become brazen in our behaviour, we flaunt the dumb things we do, and in the name of relativism we challenge anyone to say that there is a wrong in the first place. "Who are you, to judge my life anyway?".

And that argument has some weight, when you are talking to another human being, because we all make mistakes, and we all have different paths to walk.
So this reasoning about living your own life your own way, holds some weight, that is until you try and use it with God.

God gives life, all life, and he knows what it is for. He sees all the things about your life, both the good things, and the dumb things. So what approach will you use when it comes to explaining to your creator what you have done with your life, When it comes to explaining the dumb things you have done?
Will you try to deny it?
Or Will you try and hide from it? (That's what Adam and Eve did in the Garden of Eden)
Or Will you just live brazenly in it, thumbing your nose at your creator challenging his right to demand anything of you anyway?

At the heart of life, is the challenge of the end of life. If you don't understand how this life ends, how will you live a life of meaning and purpose?
Today we reflect on the beginning of life, and so at the same time we need to reflect on the end of life, when we will meet God our creator face-to-face and have to give an account of the life we have lived.

We all do dumb things in life, dumb things against each other, dumb things against ourselves, but especially dumb things against God. And the Bible calls these dumb things, Sin.
What will you do with yours, when you meet with your God?
This is the heart of what Jesus is talking about today in his stories, because this is at the heart of all meaning and purpose in life, because it is at the heart of our relationship with God our creator. And our relationship with God our creator, is the thing, in fact in the end it is the only thing, that gives our life meaning and purpose!

You can try and deny it, you can try and hide it, you can try and argue with the Almighty that you really know what's going on, and he who made you has no clue!
You can go down that path until the cows come home, until eternity the Bible says, but you won't be doing it in the place where God is! so it seems to me we need a better option don't we, we need something to be done about this problem. And that is what we will learn about today, that our God, the creator God, the sovereign and holy God, is a gracious God, whose hearts desire is to offer forgiveness, to help the hurting, to care for the broken, and to restore the humble.

The message today in a nutshell is this;
God gives Grace to the humble, but God opposes the proud.

And this is what we see in our passage today in the two stories that Jesus tells.

1. The proud Pharisee versus the humble tax collector

18:9 To some who were confident of their own righteousness
and looked down on everybody else,
Jesus told this parable:
10 "Two men went up to the temple to pray,
one a Pharisee
and the other a tax collector.
11 The Pharisee stood up
and prayed
about[a] himself:
'God,
I thank you
that I am not like other men—
robbers,
evildoers,
adulterers—
or even like this tax collector.
12 I fast twice a week
and give a tenth of all I get.'
13 "But the tax collector stood at a distance.
He would not even look up to heaven,
but beat his breast and said,
'God, have mercy on me, a sinner.'

It seems that the relativism that runs rampant in our secular Western culture today, is not new. Who would have thought it? It seems Jesus himself around 2000 years ago, knew this kind of people. In fact that is why Jesus tells both these stories, but particularly this first parable of the Pharisee versus the tax collector.

In this scene, Jesus is talking to people, who are confident in their own righteousness (confident of their standing before God), & they are confident because they look down on everyone else. I'm sure you know this kind of people too, in fact you may be one of these people (I suspect all of us when no one else is looking). The kind person who says, well I might not be a saint, but I am not Adolf Hitler, I'm not Ivan Milat, I'm not even Shane Warne, or an NRL footballer for that matter, so things must be pretty sweet for me with God, well at least compared to them!


Relativism is a great idea to try and make yourself feel good about who you are, because you are not as bad as some. The problem with relativism is, that people don't understand how it works, the Bible tells us we are not compared relative to the worst person, we are in fact compared relative to the best person, and it changes everything. God holds all humanity up to comparison with perfect humanity, his son Jesus Christ. We aren't compared to the worst of humanity like Adolf Hitler, we are compared to the best of humanity, the perfectly obedient son of God, Jesus Christ.
It changes everything doesn't it?
I mean who likes to be on the losing side of comparison?
And just because someone loses worse than you, is no real consolation at all is it.

You don't have to be Einstein to work out, that when we are compared with Jesus, we all have a problem don't we?
The self-righteous, compare themselves to the weakest, and that is what the Pharisee does in this story.
A Pharisee, is the pinnacle of the religious man of his day. He is like a cardinal in the Pope's Court, dressed in his fine robes, entering into the Vatican in the sight of all the people to pray, on some important ceremonial religious occasion. He is a zealously religious man, all the people know it, he makes sure they know it! The problem for him is, that God does not judge by external appearances, but knows the hearts of men.

The funny thing about people is, sooner or later, whatever we try and cover over and hide on the inside, bursts out through the external facade sooner or later and people see us for who we are. And that is what happens to the Pharisee when he prays.

This Pharisee stands in front of the people, in plain sight, and prays one of those terrible horizontal prayers (you know the ones, where people pray to the other people listening, rather than praying like they should, a vertical prayer, one addressed to their heavenly father, God their creator).

And his prayer, even when he gives thanks, he doesn't thank God for the things he has received from God's hand, but instead thanks himself in God's sight, that he is better than the weakest and the worst. He praises himself for his acts of external religiosity, of praying in the temple, of observing the sabbath day, and of carving off his required amounts of money to the temple.

His relativism, made him feel good about himself, because he compares himself to the weak, and the least of all. True relativism compares itself to the perfect, what the Pharisee was called to do.

The Bible is very clear that the righteous must do two things;
- Firstly, love the Lord your God with all your heart with all your soul with all your mind and with all your strength.
- Secondly, love your neighbour as yourself.

Nobody should stand proudly before God, trying to remind God of what a great bloke they are, if they remember the standard they are actually called to, not just the standard that everyone else seems to live by.

[light] Have you ever hired a car, from a hire place, like Avis or budget or the like?
Not only is it generally quite painful experience, discovering the fine print is not what they said, that the $45 a day car, actually cost $90 a day if you don't Wanna have an insurance excess of $10,000!
Not to mention they are going charge you $1.50 per kilometre that you drive.
On top of that, you always have to do that inspection before and after the car is being taken by don't you?
You know where you walk around the sheet of paper, and Mark: all the dings and scrapes and scratches and the rest of the damage on the car.

Before you take the car, you are the most vigilant person ever, with the guys notetaking of the damage already on the car.
But After you return the car, you could not be more lackadaisical with the guys notetaking if you tried.
It seems there is a little bit of teenager left in all of us, we would just like to cover things over if we could.

Like a mate of mine, when he was on his ‘p’ plates, he got to borrow his dad's White LTD, and he drove us to a party. As we got to the party he tried to drive down the driveway between the brick pillars of the fence. Now an LTD is a big car.
And it didn't quite fit between the brick pillars. So my mate managed to pinstripe a grey metallic stripe along one side of his dad's car.

Now it seems to me you’ve got a few options at this point. And my mate decided for one that hadn't occurred to me, and I still think it is stupid.
Do know what he did?
He drove the car back to another mates house, and got the liquid paper out and proceeded to paint over the new paint pinstripe. After all he was still a teenager. Did he honestly think his dad was not going to notice?

That is what we try to do with our relationship with God. We try to paint over the damage, and then profess that least it isn't as bad as the other peoples.

Do you honestly think God is not going to notice what you have done with your life? That is what the self-confident people are placing their bets on. That God will be so busy with the other people's problems, he couldn't possibly notice mine! Like an overworked Avis guy at the airport lounge, too busy to care.

Well here is one side of the moral from the story of Jesus tells, God does notice, he notices everyone, and he will oppose the proud, & he will oppose the self-confident.
And here is the second half of the moral of the story. In contrast the humble, compare themselves to perfection, they compare themselves to God himself, God the son, Jesus Christ. Every one who compares themselves to Jesus, realises that they fall short of Gods standard.

Humble people, realise that they do not compare, they do not match up, humble people acknowledge there is a problem.

Humble people are like the tax collector in Jesus story, they know that they have done wrong, they admit that they have done wrong, and they turn to God knowing that only from his hand can come the mercy that they need.
13 "But the tax collector stood at a distance.
He would not even look up to heaven,
but beat his breast and said,
'God, have mercy on me, a sinner.'



The tax collector, collected tax for the Roman Empire, the occupying force of the day. It is the equivalent today of a Palestinian who decided to collect tax on behalf of the occupying Israeli forces from his own people the Palestinians. A tax collector is a traitor of his own people. He is worse than Rolf in the Sound of music.

And this traitor, did not stand in the sight of all men to pray, but he did pray to the true and living God in his temple. He beat his breast, he was so ashamed of his own sinfulness, so ashamed of the stupid things he had done, and so earnestly desiring for the damage they had caused to his relationship with God to be fixed.

He literally says to God, "not just have mercy on me a sinner", but "atone for me a sinner!". Rather than congratulating himself and trying to pretend that everything is okay, this man humbled himself before the living God, acknowledged his own sinfulness, and called on this God to be God.
To be the gracious God who desires to save the lost, to fix the broken and to heal the sick.

And here is the sting in the tail, as Jesus tells us the results of this story.
14 "I tell you that this man,
rather than the other,
went home justified before God.
For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled,
and he who humbles himself will be exalted."

The self-righteous are brought low by God, he owes them nothing. But the humble are justified (made righteous) by God and his grace towards them.

God opposes the proud, (the person who is the selective relativist), but gives his grace to the humble.

And this story is reinforced in the second scene where Jesus interacts with his disciples, which we are going to look at quickly.

2. The proud disciples versus the humble children

18:15 People were also bringing babies to Jesus
to have him touch them.
When the disciples saw this,
they rebuked them.
16 But Jesus called the children to him
and said,
"Let the little children come to me,
and do not hinder them,
for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.
17 I tell you the truth,
anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child
will never enter it."

You see it's not just the religious elite, who suffer from a warped sense of reality, through a cheap relativism, but even Jesus very own disciples suffer from it as well.

The disciples, who until recent times, were fishermen and tax collectors and the like themselves, now feel that they are something special because they know Jesus. They feel like they are deserving to be in his company, but in contrast, Little babies or infants are not.

Somehow they feel, these little ones are beneath Jesus. But Jesus rebukes his disciples in no uncertain terms, these little ones able to come to him just like anyone else. In fact they are a better example of how to come to Jesus than anyone else.

New babies can't do anything for themselves, for most of the time they don't even know what they need, much less have the capacity to provide it. They mostly know that they need someone else to provide for them, which is why they cry out for help.

These children that have come to Jesus, are the great example for us as to how you receive the kingdom of God. They know that they are helpless, they cry out, they are brought to Jesus, and they receive the gift they need.

Jesus is calling us to come to him, to cry out to him, so that we may receive grace from God, to fix the problems that we couldn't fix, to fix our relationships with each other, to fix the things we've broken about ourselves, but most importantly to fix our relationship with God.

Jesus said he came ‘to seek and to save the lost’, and he did it by dying on a cross to pay the debt of our sin that we owed to God. And for all who would turn to him and cry out, he offers a costly forgiveness. And God himself has confirmed that this is good and acceptable in his sight, by raising Jesus from the dead, as we have just celebrated at Easter.

God opposes the proud, the self-confident, the religious, the relativist who says, ‘at least I'm not like them". But God gives grace to the humble, the one who realises that they have done wrong, (that they have done dumb things), they have sinned against God, and that they don't want paint over it with liquid paper anymore!

This is the heart of life, that gives life meaning and purpose. As we consider the beginning of life with a baptism, we need to consider also the end of life, in order that we would understand what the meaning and purpose of life is.

You See here Jesus is leaving you with a question:
which of the two things does your life stand on before God,
- self-confidence or
- Humility

You see there are only two paths you can go down, when it comes to the dumb things you have done in your life before God;
some form of self-confidence -- be it denying the problem, trying to cover over the problem, or even thumbing your nose at God altogether -- you can go down that path of self confidence. And if you do,Jesus says to you today, that God opposes the proud and they will be brought low.

Or you can choose the path of humility. Like a little child.
You can acknowledge that there is a problem, and you did it, and you don't want to cover over it anymore. Like the tax collector, you can cry out to God in prayer, asking him to have mercy on you and the wrong you have done. Asking him to atone for your sin, to let Jesus death on the cross be your death on the cross, and to forgive you for Jesus sake.

That is what Tim and Karen have asked God to do for Phoenix today. That Jesus death would be his death, so he can be forgiven, and be in right relationship with God.

Phoenix might not have done too much wrong yet, but given he is not the immaculate conception, we all know his day is coming! just like yours did, just like mine did. A day where we made some decisions and make a hash of it. This morning we have prayed that God would be merciful upon Phoenix because of Christ in that day. And that is the heart, of meaning and purpose in life.
The question is, is it the heart and meaning and purpose in your life?

There are only two options in this life;
Self-confidence, or humble dependence upon Christ.
What are you trusting upon?
And how will you stand when you meet your creator face-to-face?