Monday, November 30, 2009

Lost and Found, Part 64 of 78

TEXT: "Now his older son was in the field. And as he came and drew near to the house, he heard music and dancing. So he called one of the servants and asked what these things meant. And he said to him, 'Your brother has come, and because he has received him safe and sound, your father has killed the fatted calf.' But he was angry and would not go in. Therefore his father came out and pleaded with him. So he answered and said to his father, 'Lo, these many years I have been serving you; I never transgressed your commandment at any time; and yet you never gave me a young goat, that I might make merry with my friends. But as soon as this son of yours came, who has devoured your livelihood with harlots, you killed the fatted calf for him.' And he said to him, 'Son, you are always with me, and all that I have is yours. It was right that we should make merry and be glad, for your brother was dead and is alive again, and was lost and is found'." (Luke 15:25-32)

IDEA: We often recognize the sin of self-righteousness in others but fail to see it in ourselves.

PURPOSE: To help listeners diagnose the sin of self-righteousness.

Aren’t the most dangerous diseases those whose symptoms we can’t easily recognize? We don’t treat them when we don’t know they are there.

High blood pressure
Breast cancer

I. Self-righteousness is a disease of the soul difficult for us to recognize in ourselves. Why?

Jesus gave us a case study of a self-righteous boy to help us overcome our congenital blindness and see the symptoms of self-righteousness. We may see in some moment of truth when this disease is alive in us. The case study is found in Luke 15:25-32:

Now his older son was in the field. And as he came and drew near to the house, he heard music and dancing. So he called one of the servants and asked what these things meant. And he said to him, “Your brother has come, and because he has received him safe and sound, your father has killed the fatted calf.” But he was angry and would not go in. Therefore his father came out and pleaded with him. So he answered and said to his father, “Lo, these many years I have been serving you; I never transgressed your commandment at any time; and yet you never gave me a young goat, that I might make merry with my friends. But as soon as this son of yours came, who has devoured your livelihood with harlots, you killed the fatted calf for him.” And he said to him, “Son, you are always with me, and all that I have is yours. It was right that we should make merry and be glad, for your brother was dead and is alive again, and was lost and is found.”

It’s like the loss of “first love” in a marriage. How do you know it’s gone? When everything in the marriage has become habit and second nature.

II. The third characteristic (and it always starts here) is a sense of being treated unfairly, a sense of being ignored, forgotten or disregarded.

“You never gave me a kid that I could make merry with my friends.”

Wounded pride, a crushed ego reveals the centrality of the self.

It’s “I won’t play - I’m going to take my toys and go home.”

There’s an extreme example of this in the Old Testament. King David had an advisor by the name of Ahithophel. He was an astute and wise man. Ahithophel gave Absalom some excellent advice one day, but Absalom’s other staff advised him to do something else. Absalom chose to follow the counsel of the others and not that of Ahithophel. When Ahithophel heard that Absalom had disregarded his advice, he went home, put his household in order, and hanged himself--one of only five suicides in the Bible.

Righteous” people behave this way in church, and congregations are destroyed by it.

We can feel that God is unfair to us or we are unappreciated. We can explain it and excuse it, but it is a symptom of self-righteousness.