Grace Alone (Part 8): Confidence - What do you trust?

So let me ask you a question.

Would you consider yourself self-confident?

I mean, if you just think about your life yourself, would you basically say, yeah, I'm generally self-confident, or would you say, no, I struggle a little bit with confidence?

That isn't necessarily where I live.

And my guess is, however, you answer that question, whether you say, yes, I'm confident or no, I struggle with confidence, that you would probably say that the reason that you struggle with or have self-confidence is built around a couple of factors.

Some of us would say, you know what, I'm confident or I lack confidence because of how I look.

Some of us would say, you know what, I'm confident or I lack confidence based on how much success I've had.

Because I've made money, because I've been able to succeed in the arena in which I work, I feel successful or confident, or maybe I don't.

Or maybe we're confident or we lack confidence based on our relational world, the people that are around us, our friends, our families, and how they relate to us.

And so we'd say, Oh, I have confidence or I don't have confidence.

And what you'll find is that confidence is one of those things that people in general in our society tell you is a really good thing.

In fact, if you Google self-confidence, the benefits of self-confidence, what you'll see is that it will list several, all kinds of articles will list things.

They'll say people who are self-confident will be happier, they'll say that they'll be healthier, they'll be more successful, and they'll have better relationships.

But what I'd like to suggest to you today is that self-confidence is a dangerous virtue.

And I say that in part because of just how it plays in life, but especially how it plays spiritually.

And so before we get into this text, let me just explain a little bit of why this can be dangerous in general, and then I'll apply it to why spiritual self-confidence is a dangerous virtue.

Several years ago, I was coaching one of my sons' travel basketball teams.

I have four sons, and the way that the travel system works is you start your kids at age two if you want them to play on travel teams.

And so you you get them on a team, and then they get on another team, and sooner or later they're on a travel team that travels all around.

And I was coaching the sixth-grade basketball team, and this team was having some success.

They were winning, they were playing other sixth graders, they were beating other sixth graders, and it felt good.

Um, and so we were winning.

Um some of you are like, you're twisted.

Yes, I I get it.

And uh, and so we were winning, and then we entered this tournament, and this was a tournament that that had different categories.

It had kind of the what they called, I think, the elite category, and then the you know, baller category or something like that.

And so we looked at our team and we said, you know, our kids have been playing well, we're really good, we're we're we're doing great compared to the other kids, we're really good.

And so we entered the elite category.

And I knew, as soon as I walked into the gym, that we were in trouble.

And here's how I knew because I asked if the team warming up was a ninth grade team, and I was told they were in fact sixth graders.

And then I saw one of the kids who was probably about 6'5, 6'6 in warm-ups go down and dunk.

And I'm thinking, we're in over our heads.

I had grossly overestimated what our abilities were.

You see, self-confidence can be a dangerous virtue.

And when we compare ourselves with those just around us, we can begin to think that we really are something.

And sometimes the more success we have, the more prone we will be to start to say, you know what, I'm really pretty good.

And what happens in life is that can be a good quality, but sometimes we'll run up against something that is much better than us, or our confidence will be on something temporal, something that can be taken away, and as a result, it can be dangerous just in life in general.

But what I really want to talk about is not how we deal with self-confidence in life, but spiritual self-confidence.

Moral self-confidence.

Because I want to say to you that moral self-confidence, spiritual self-confidence is a dangerous virtue.

And I think this is what we see in this passage in Galatians chapter 4, verses 21 through 31.

Galatians 4:21–31

This is a passage that some commentators have said is the most difficult passage in Galatians to interpret.

And as we've worked our way through Galatians, the argument of Galatians over and over has been that we are not justified by our works, but by grace, that it's what God has done through Jesus Christ that gives us standing.

And if you've been here over the last several weeks, you've heard that.

Because that's what Galatians has been saying.

And if you haven't heard it either, you haven't been listening or I haven't been clear.

But that, if you've been here, you're probably like, enough already, I get it.

But what happens here is Paul comes and he says, Now I'm gonna try to drive it home one more way, and he takes this story that the writers would have, or the readers would have known from the Old Testament about Abraham.

And what was happening in Galatians is that the people of Galatia were starting to think that in order to be a child of Abraham, in order to be part of the covenant, you had to perform a certain way.

And so he takes a story that they knew, and he says, I'm gonna tell you a story.

And he gives them a historical account, and then he says, But I'm gonna apply this figuratively.

I'm gonna give this new meaning so that you get this.

Now, on a whole, this isn't a great way to interpret scripture, is just say I'm gonna assign meaning to something that I want to assign to it.

But because Paul does it here, we can say that this makes sense in this instance.

And he starts out by saying this he says, Tell me, you who want to be under the law, are you not aware of what the law says?

So he says, Those of you who want to feel good about yourself based on how you perform spiritually, aren't you aware of what the law says?

And then he tells this story.

He says, you know, there was this man.

And he had two sons.

One was born to a free woman, one was born to a woman who he says is a slave, and this creates some problems because some people will look at this and say, Wasn't Hagar the oppressed one and Sarah the oppressor?

And how does this turn it around?

And I don't think that's the point here at all, as much as he's saying, I'm talking about something else.

And here's what he's saying, verse 23, he says, His son by the slave woman was born according to the flesh, but his son by the free woman was born as a result of the divine promise.

And here's what he's saying: he's saying, wherever these systems go, the way that they start matters.

And if you start with the flesh, in other words, your self-confidence and your virtue and everything else that you can do, because what Abraham had done in this instance was he had said, I don't have a child, so I'm going to have a child, and Sarah can't have a child, so I'll go have a child with Hagar.

I'll take it into my own hands, child of the flesh.

And he says, If you start that way, then you won't be free, you'll be part of the wrong Jerusalem, you'll be, you, you'll be enslaved.

And then he says, But but if you start with the divine promise, what God has done, then you'll be part of the heavenly Jerusalem, you'll be free, you'll be somebody who's in a whole different category.

And what he's basically doing is he's saying, I want you to see that self-confidence is a dangerous virtue because self-confidence can cause you to take your own morality, your own sense of well-being, your standing with God into your own hands.

I like how Paul David Tripp put it, he said this: he says, Grace will tell you the worst news that you could ever hear.

Well, it blesses you with the most wonderful hope that you could ever have.

Because what grace does is it shows us that we need grace.

And the more that we're aware of our need for grace, the more we're actually growing spiritually, the less aware we are of our need for grace, it means that we aren't actually progressing spiritually.

What we're doing instead is we're starting to now retake ground through our own effort.

See, the church was never intended to be a self-improvement society or to be about our rehab.

Oh, certainly when we come here and we bring things, whether it's things to addiction support or just a life group or whatever it is that we bring, we'll hopefully grow in those things.

But the reason there's a cross on the building when you drive up is to remind us that we were so sinful that it took the murder of the Son of God for us to be made right.

But sometimes what we do instead is we see church as a feather in somebody's cap of improvement.

I heard about one man who was thinking about uh another man who was gonna date his daughter.

And his question was, does he go to church?

And in a way, I understand what he was asking.

He was saying, I want to know, does he believe the same things?

Are you gonna be tied together in faith?

And is he taking his faith seriously?

That's a good question.

Like I don't mean to belittle that, except for this.

If what you mean is he goes to church, therefore he's a good person, then you've missed the point.

Because self-confidence is a dangerous virtue.

Because the reason that we come to church is not because we're good people, we come to church precisely because we know we're not good people.

Because we need to hear about the grace of God.

In fact, it could be said that the only two institutions in this country that we join on the basis of being bad are the mafia and the church.

Because what does it take to join a church?

It takes at least a biblical church, not saying I've got it down, but I don't have it down.

I'm sinful, I need a savior.

And that's why self-confidence is such a dangerous virtue.

Because we can start to think, I don't really need a savior.

Now, this passage is difficult to totally interpret, except that that kind of gives us a feel of it.

In the book that we've been reading in our life groups, if you've been in a life group, we've been reading uh some different books together.

Uh Tim Keller suggests that there are four different types of people that this text kind of points to.

And although they don't, it doesn't really point to it in terms of articulating them, the theory does.

And what he says is that there are people who are law reliant.

In other words, they look at the law of God and say, I know that that I need to keep this.

And then there are people who are not law reliant.

And then he says that there are people who are obedient, they obey the law, and those who disobey.

Now, I've added this chart, this was not part of his thinking.

He just talked about these people, but it's easier for me to think about it a little bit this way.

So somebody who relies on the law and obeys the law, we could say, is somebody who will, in many ways, become self-righteous.

Or this is what the Bible calls a Pharisee.

And what a Pharisee is, is somebody who basically says, I do things the right way.

Now nobody likes to think of themselves as being self-righteous.

But anytime that we start to say, I know the rules, I keep the rules, I'm really good at it, what we do is we come to a point where what we're in essence doing is we're saying, my way of living is superior to others.

St.

Augustine put it this way.

He said that when we get good at being good, that our very goodness can become a glittering vice.

And what he was referring to is that we take something, and as we become good, we start to become proud, we start to become judgmental, we start to make comparisons with others, we start to look down on others, we start to become convinced that the way that we do things, the way we see things is superior to how everybody else sees and does things.

And not only that, we begin to kind of kind of take the nectar of self-righteousness and look at others as if somehow they don't get it.

And we can do this in so many ways.

We can do this with our theology by saying my theology is right, and those people have wrong theology.

We can do it with our politics, saying my politics are right, and people who don't get politics the way that I think of politics, they're just idiots.

We can do it with our with our purity, with our sexuality by saying my sexual ethics are the right sexual ethics, and the way that I practice them, that's the right thing.

Everybody else has the wrong thing.

And we can do it with any area of our lives, and I'm not saying that those things aren't important, that having right doctrine, having good politics, thinking about sexuality in a way that's biblical isn't important.

What I'm saying is this.

And that is, it can become a glittering vice.

Because it can be the kind of thing that you start to say, I have done this, and now I start and I look at others and I say, they're not like me.

And therefore, self-confidence can become a dangerous virtue in our lives.

Because we start to believe very soon after that that we don't really need Jesus and that our way of living is superior to other people.

I've seen a sign sometimes at some churches, and the sign is often either on the door on the way out or kind of at the base of the parking lot when you drive out, and it'll often say, You are now entering your mission field.

I don't know if you've ever seen this kind of a sign.

And I, again, I understand the meaning of the sign, and that is, people are saying, in essence, you know what, we come here to be trained, and then you have a mission field that's not all the way across the world, it's right here.

You're now entering your mission field.

But there's something that's always bugged me about that sign.

Do you know what it is?

I just put this together the other day, and that is the mission field's in here.

What happens when when we understand the gospel isn't that we come and say, I have it right and I'm gonna go fix everyone who has it wrong, but we keep coming and saying, I know that I, other than by the grace of God, am no better than anybody else.

And that's why self-confidence can be such a dangerous virtue.

You see, what we love to do is we love to find other people who are doing it wrong and then pile on and feel virtuous about it ourselves.

You see this in social media and in the media all the time.

I mean, who hasn't seen the stories about the Hollywood producer in recent weeks who has taken advantage of his position to coerce women into things.

And it is true that that is despicable action and that people should call that out.

But do you know how small a line it is from calling it out to becoming socially superior and saying, oh, that guy, he's the real problem with the world.

See, self-confidence can be a dangerous virtue.

Again, I'm not saying that that there's not a place to say what he did is wrong, but what I'm saying is as soon as we drink the nectar of saying, but I'm not anything like that, what we're doing is we are beginning to believe that the way that we live in and of itself is acceptable, rather than coming to understand that it is because of God's grace.

I've heard it said that if you aren't the biggest sinner that you know, that you don't know yourself very well.

I think there's truth to that.

Because self-confidence is a dangerous virtue.

But but it isn't just here that it's a dangerous virtue.

It can also be a dangerous virtue over here.

And and this is when you are now law reliant, but you don't always follow through.

If you're law reliant and you obey, what happens is you're self-righteous.

You're like a Pharisee here, you become somebody who is uh really guilt-ridden, and you are somebody who in this instance is really inconsistent in your life.

And what that means, inconsistent, I'm running out of space.

You get the idea.

What happens here is that you say, you know what, I know that that God wants something, that there are certain standards, and you try to live them and then you blow it.

And after you blow it, you say, you know what, I'm gonna try harder the next time.

Any of you ever go through this cycle?

And then you you decide, okay, I'm I'm gonna do better, and so you work hard at it, you redouble your efforts, and you say, now this time I'm really gonna do it.

I'm really going to get it.

Maybe it's something really simple.

Maybe it's just you get convicted that you have been part of a problem at work and talking about other people in unfavorable ways, and so you decide that you're not going to do it, and then you go into work and you get into a conversation, the next thing you know, you do it again, and then you start to say, Oh, what did I do?

Well, in that moment, what you're doing is you're becoming law reliant, but at the same time disobedient.

And what that does is it makes you feel like you've never done enough or you never live up.

And the reason that this is in some ways the the same side of that that coin of self-righteousness is because you're still being law reliant.

It's just the difference of whether you succeed or fail.

And the way that we see this is any time that we have a reaction when something is shown to us that we haven't done right and and we and we do it poorly, what it is, is we respond to it poorly, that's a moment where we're starting to show that we're actually law reliant.

In fact, if somebody who lives with you has ever said to you, you can never admit when you're wrong, that's not a good thing.

Because what they're saying is, you're too proud to ever acknowledge your own shortcomings.

That in some ways is self-righteousness, but it can also be this self-reliant because we feel too guilty to admit we've ever been wrong, so we try to deny it or hide it or obscure it.

I saw this recently, not in the moral arena, but in a different arena.

My wife and I were going to work out together, and so we popped in one of these exercise videos.

We don't work out a lot together, but but we did this day.

And so the exercise video starts the way a lot of exercise videos start.

They have you stretch and do different things.

And and and as we were there, um the one of the early exercises was arm circles.

So we're doing these arm circles, and my wife starts to laugh at me.

She's like, that's a pretty bad arm circle.

Like, like, like you don't have any fluid motion, you know, it's not it's not big enough, all of this.

Now, I've been married a long time.

And I know that in that moment I need to need to like not say a whole lot.

But I also inside knew that I was having a disproportional reaction to my wife mocking my arm circles.

Like I was ticked.

Like, really?

I was like, come on! They're arm circles.

So I had the maturity to not say anything for a few moments.

But then what happened was we got to the push-ups.

Now I'm way better at push-ups than my wife.

And so we're doing the push-ups, and you know, you're switching arm positions, you're doing all this different stuff, and I'm trying to snap them off to make a point, like I'm real I'm rocking the push-ups, and she's here, and and you know, the push-ups, she wasn't rocking them as much as I was rocking them.

She was rocking them, but not like me.

And so I say something.

Now, why did I have to say something?

Do you know why I had to say something?

Because I didn't like the idea that I wasn't good at the arm circles.

So I was gonna point out that I was better at the push-ups.

Do you see what happens when we're self-confident?

Self-confidence is a dangerous virtue because it leads us to comparisons.

It leads us to a place where we start to say, my way is better, I'm superior to you.

But that's not all.

Self-confidence is a dangerous virtue in this side of the equation, but it can also be a dangerous virtue over here.

And over here, we have what I would call secular or we could say relativistic.

And this is, I don't use secular here in the sense of nobody Christian or anything like that.

What I mean is that this is the person who says, you know what, there is no no standard.

I get tired of living on this side of the equation and always either feeling self-righteous or guilty.

And so as a result, I'm going to come over here where I'm not law reliant and there are no rules.

Any of you ever go there?

Where you just start to say, you know what, I'm going to live my life and I don't need any kind of outside encumbrance because outside encumbrances are negative in my life.

Well, if you've ever gone there, what you're doing is you're saying, I don't like where the law takes me.

So what I'm going to do instead is I am going to say there is no law.

We saw this in the way one.

Politician was questioned.

A politician was asked, Do you confess your sins?

Do you remember what the politician responded with?

Said, I don't need to confess my sins.

Now, I don't say that to pick on this politician.

Whether you voted for this politician or against this politician, whether you agree with this politician's policies or don't agree with this politician's policies, here's something I can say with a great deal of certainty.

He sins.

And I don't say that because I watch what he does and say that's somehow worse than me.

I say it because we all sin.

I sin.

I live in the same place.

But what I'm saying is the mindset that says I don't have anything to confess is right here.

It's saying I don't have any rules.

Any rule I don't like, I'll just get rid of.

But the problem with this is, even if this is where you try to live, the truth is you still come back over here all the time because you'll have your own version of political correctness that you'll say, if you don't agree with me in this zone, then I'm gonna come over here and I'm gonna feel all superior to you.

This is all of what our political discourse is today, by the way.

And that leads us to what I think this text is really ultimately pointing to, and that is when we are not law reliant, but instead we rely on grace alone, when we come to say, I'm a child of the promise, not a child of the flesh, it is what God has done through Jesus Christ, not what I do that makes me right with God.

What we experience is gospel freedom.

What we experience, and that's the whole idea of freedom in this text versus slavery.

What happens is we begin to say, I will obey, not so that I get something, but because I've come to see that what God says is the best thing, that He's offering me the best way forward, and that to the degree that I that I surrender my life to God, what I'm actually doing is I'm choosing things that are better for me.

But I'm not reliant on how well I keep the law because that's what Jesus Christ did.

And that is the change, the thing that makes it so that we don't have to live in this place of always fighting with our self-confidence.

You see, self-confidence will either lead us to say, I'm really good, I'm, and we become self-righteous, or I'm really bad because I don't keep it, or to say, I don't want any rules.

And this is why I say that self-confidence, self-righteousness is a dangerous virtue.

But you see, when we live in gospel freedom, what happens is we begin to say, I don't have to keep the law in order to have acceptance, but I keep it because I know that what God has called me to is really the best.

But we see in this passage that people will oppose that.

Here's what we see: verse 28, 29.

It says, Now you brothers and sisters, like Isaac, are children of the promise.

At the same time, the son born according to the flesh, persecuted the son born by the power of the Spirit.

It's the same now.

Now, some people read this and they think that this is applying to the Jewish-Arab divide in our world today, kind of the children of Sarah versus the children of Hagar.

I don't think that's what's going on here at all because Paul has already said, I'm talking about this figuratively.

And what he's doing is he's saying there are people who will be law reliant, there are people who will be all about keeping the law, and they will not like it when somebody relies on grace.

In fact, he says they'll persecute you.

That's what he says.

He says they'll they'll come against you in this way.

Now, what does he mean?

Again, let me just tell you a story.

So I mentioned I have four boys.

One of the things we do is we have our boys do dishes after dinner.

And and this has come over some years, and we try to rotate who does the dishes.

And so one day it's one kid's and the next day it's the next, and so on.

But what happens with great regularity is one kid is gone or something, and and the next thing you know, they're all fighting about who did the dishes last.

And as a as a parent, this is one of those things that you just you you just keep coming back to, and you're like, really?

It would just be easier for me to do the dishes than to listen to you argue about whose turn it is.

And and you hit a point where you say, I almost don't care about teaching you responsibility, I just want to be done with the with the arguing kind of a thing.

So here, I'll do it.

But but my cooler head prevails, and it's like, no, you're gonna do the dishes.

Why do they argue with each other about who did the dishes last?

Do you know why?

They can't stand the thought that one of them would miss a turn.

And why can't they stand it?

Because there's no way I'm gonna spend 10 minutes in the kitchen that you didn't spend.

That would be awful.

Now, why is that so awful?

Because there's something in us that says, there's no way that I want you to get something that I don't get.

That's what's happening in this passage, is that there are some people who will, when you are a person who says, I live by grace, and you know what?

When I don't keep the standards perfectly, when when I don't do everything the way that you do, and you want to feel all superior to me, go ahead because you know what, I'm worse than you think.

And they just get annoyed.

Because for them, they can't stand the thought that God's meal, God's grace, is offered so freely to anybody.

And you know what's true beyond the church?

It's that the world doesn't need to see and doesn't long to see the virtue of people on the inside.

It longs to see the weakness.

I'm not saying that virtue is unimportant, but what I'm saying is people aren't drawn to the church because of the virtues, as much as they're drawn to the church because of the weakness and the honesty of those on the inside.

And here's how I kind of know this.

If we took this room, and I know it's too big to do this, but if we took this room and we took people in Butler, we took people in the strip district, and we said, you know what?

Here's what we want you to do.

We want you to come up front, and one after another, we want you to share your greatest victory in the last year, the greatest thing that happened in your life.

Do you know what happened?

We'd be interested for a little while.

You know, the first few people who came up, you'd be like, oh, that's neat, that's cool, oh thank you, that's great.

And then you'd be like, all right, I gotta get out of here.

But if we instead said, why don't you come up front?

And why don't you share your greatest struggle, your greatest place of brokenness, your biggest failure.

Do you know what happened?

You wouldn't look at your watch.

You you would be drawn to the people who tell those struggles.

And you would say, I want to be a part of a community that heals around those things.

You see, self-confidence is a dangerous virtue precisely because what it does is it creates distance between people.

What it does is it creates an appearance to the world that says we have it together, rather than an appearance that says, we're just broken people coming to the Savior.

Now, I know some of you will say, Well, wait a second, wait a second.

Are you saying that it doesn't matter how we live?

Are you saying, are you saying that our brokenness and our sin is good and that we should sin more?

No, I'm not saying that.

What I'm saying is you're already good at sin.

Just own it.

Don't pretend.

But when it happens, be vulnerable enough to say, I am a person who is not reliant on the law but on what Jesus Christ has done on my behalf.

And when that happens in our midst, when that happens in your soul, what will happen is you'll begin to have a confidence that isn't based on how well you perform, but on how Jesus has performed.

And the way that we battled this dangerous virtue of self-confidence, which leads to all of these things is we keep coming back to what Jesus Christ has done, and we keep affirming and keep remembering and keep celebrating and keep savoring that it is not what I have done, but it is what Jesus Christ has done.

Because without that, what will happen is I'll forget and I'll start to say, well, God likes me and the way I do things better than the way he likes other people.

Because after all, I have my theology right.

After all, I haven't fallen to one of the really big sins in a while.

After all, I care about some of the things God cares about.

But when I come and I understand that half of why I try to get my theology right is because I want to feel superior.

That even though I may not fall to a big sin, that I can hardly drive my car from my house to the church without being sinful in the way that I think.

Or that even when I do good, it's mixed with some motive.

And what I do is I start to come and say, God, you have made me acceptable.

And it isn't what I did.

And that's real confidence.

Father, I pray today that you would help each one of us who's here to see what a dangerous virtue self-confidence can be.

And instead understand and celebrate what grace alone really means.

Not that there are no standards, but that we joyfully reach towards you, for you, and celebrate what you've done.

God, for some, maybe today, as we've gathered, this is such a radical message.

They've never heard it.

They always thought that church was about getting a little better, being a little more acceptable to you.

Lord, I pray that even in this moment there would be conviction and a response that would just simply say, God, I know that I can't earn my way, but I do trust what Jesus Christ has done.

And Lord, I pray that we would be people as a community that doesn't live in self-righteousness or guilt and condemnation or the relativism of no law, but instead we would be people who embrace your message, your gospel and live as part of that new Jerusalem, the heavenly Jerusalem, in freedom.

We pray it in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Would you stand and receive a benediction?

Now may the peace of God be in your heart, and the grace of God be in your words, and the love of God be in your hands, and the joy of God be in your soul.

We say this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Have a great week.