An Awkward Dinner Party - Luke 11:29-54

From us today.

I pray, Lord, that you would comfort the hurting and the suffering.

I pray that each of us would hear your voice.

I pray, Lord, that for the seekers and those who don't yet quite know what they believe, God, that they would hear your voice, that they would understand what you're like in your word.

Holy Spirit, we invite you.

We invite you in.

I ask that you would open up the word for us, convict us where we need conviction, comfort us where we need comforting, and give us the clarity that we seek, God.

We love you.

Jesus' name, amen.

Welcome to Skyline Church.

It's gonna be a scorcher today.

I was in my uh attic the other day, and my candles, I had like candles up there, they had melted without being lit.

And I was like, this is bad.

This has got to be bad, right?

So I'm gonna have to figure that out.

Don't worry, you don't need to worry about that.

But hopefully my house doesn't burn down.

So um my name's Adam, I'm one of the pastors here.

If I haven't met you before, it is truly my honor and privilege to be with you guys here today and open the Word of God.

So I want to start out by talking about a guy, a Hungarian guy, named Ignaz Semmelweiss.

Okay?

My guy Ignaz, or Dr.

Semmelweiss, as he was called in the 1800s, was a Hungarian doctor that worked in Vienna.

And he worked in Vienna as um in like the maternity ward.

So he was a doctor that oversaw a bunch of clinicians and different things.

But one of the things that was happening in this hospital in Vienna was there were two birthing wards.

One of them was staffed by doctors and a bunch of medical students, and the other one was staffed by other medical professionals, midwives.

And this thing started to happen where one of the clinics, the clinics with the doctors, it started to get a really high mortality rate for the moms.

The moms would get this fever and then they would die in birth.

And it got all the way up to 18%, which is like kind of a horrifying.

I mean, if you're pregnant and you're like soon to be a mom or just having another child, and you hear that one of these clinics has an 18% death.

That's not far off from like flipping a coin twice.

If it's heads twice, you're dead.

Like that's the chances we're talking about here.

Not far off of that.

And so this clinic had a just a really high mortality rate, and the other clinic didn't.

And so moms are like avoiding at all costs going to this clinic.

Nobody knows why it's that way.

And so Dr.

Sembelweiss is like, what is going on here?

And he's trying to figure it out, and and then one day he he he get, by God's grace, he gets this breakthrough where him and his students are working on like a cadaver, they're doing an autopsy, and one of the students gets nicked with a scalpel, and then he develops the same fever, the same symptoms that the moms were developing.

And Dr.

Semmelweiss was like, there's gotta be, and this is the 1800s, okay, so they don't know about germs yet.

And Dr.

Summelweiss is like, there's gotta be some kind of like particle or something that is being carried by the doctors into, because the doctors would and the students would work on the cadavers, on the autopsies, and then they'd go and help people give birth.

And so Dr.

Semmelweiss was like, okay, we're gonna try this.

We're just gonna like have people, here we go, ready, wash their hands in a just water and chlorine, essentially.

They're gonna wash their hands, we're gonna see if that helps.

And sure enough, the mortality rate dropped from 18 to like 1.6, even better than the other clinic in many respects.

And so you'd think that like, and again, they didn't fully understand why it worked.

They just knew that all of a sudden all these moms were living, whereas previously they were getting fevers and dying.

And you would think that like when you when you get you know proof like this, when you get like uh, you know, data like this, that it would just spread like wildfire all over the place, different hospitals across the rest of the across the rest of Hungary and Europe and all kinds of places, but it didn't at first.

It didn't spread hardly at all.

It actually took a long time.

And there's probably a number of reasons for that, but perhaps one of the most powerful reasons is that in order for it that practice to continue to be adopted, many of the doctors would have had to have basically faced the fact that they were bringing things into these maternity wards that were killing these pregnant women, unintentionally, for sure, but that's just a really hard reality to accept, even if it's very clear that a lot more people are going to live.

They would have had to face a very painful reality, and it slowed the adoption of washing your hands to protect and preserve the births of these moms and their kids.

And so the point of this is like it's very easy for us to see signs that something is true, but if it means being humbled, if it means having to take ownership, if it if it means having to be honest with what the implications of that are, so often we hesitate.

So often we hesitate and don't accept the signs, don't accept the data, don't accept the proof that we that we can see, that we can witness in front of us.

And so in Luke today, the Gospel of Luke today, we're going to see this principle demonstrated.

In fact, we're gonna see Jesus get real direct and real confrontational.

So if you're like an anti-conflict person, I hope you brought your seatbelt, bro, because you know we're in Luke chapter 12, and we've seen Jesus approach things differently, right?

Luke 12 · chapter mention

Like we're only we're just reaching the halfway point of the book, and we we actually saw a few weeks ago Jesus reason with people that disagreed with him.

They called him, they called him basic basically in league with Satan, and he doesn't even like respond in retaliation.

He just like tries to reason with him.

Today we're gonna see Jesus get real confrontational.

And he's gonna do it with three different groups.

He's gonna do it with the crowd, he's gonna do it with the Pharisees, and he's gonna do it with the lawyers, which are like experts in the law.

So, uh, if you have your Bibles, I'm gonna have it up here on the screen, but if you want to grab the blue Bible under about half the chairs, it's gonna be Luke 11, 29 through 54.

On those Bibles under the chairs, it's page 817, if you would like to follow along.

So here it is.

We're gonna be in the ESV version, Luke chapter 11.

Luke 11 · chapter mention

I'm gonna read it in three sequential stages.

This is verses 29 through 36.

This is what it says.

When the crowds were increasing, he began to say, This generation is an evil generation.

It seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of Jonah.

For as Jonah became a sign to the people of Nineveh, so will the Son of Man be to this generation.

The Queen of the South will rise up at the judgment with the men of this generation and condemn them.

For she came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon, and behold, something greater than Solomon is here.

The men of Nineveh will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it.

For they repented at the preaching of Jonah.

And behold, something greater than Jonah is here.

No one after lighting a lamp puts it in a cellar or under a basket, but on a stand, so that those who enter may see the light.

Your eye is the lamp of your body.

When your eye is healthy, your whole body is full of light.

When it is bad, your body is full of darkness.

Therefore be careful lest the light in you be darkness.

If then your whole body is full of light, having no part dark, it will be wholly bright, as when a lamp with its rays gives you light.

Okay.

So the setting here, the first group of people that Jesus is talking to is the crowds.

Now, if you remember from last week, we've seen this thing start to happen in Jesus' ministry.

People have begun to pester him for signs.

When I say signs, I mean like miracles, powerful works of God that demonstrate that something unique is happening.

And here Jesus is rebuking them for seeking a sign.

And, you know, if you've been with us as we've been going through the Gospel of Luke, Jesus has done like countless signs at this point.

Tons of people have been healed, named and unnamed, recorded and unrecorded.

Demons have come out of people.

Jesus has fed 5,000 people by his own power.

There's been so many things that Jesus has done, and yet there's still people who have witnessed these things, but still do not believe.

The problem, what Jesus is pointing out, is not with what they've seen, not the evidence that has been presented before them, but their perspective on what they've seen.

They've seen stuff, but they just aren't convinced.

It doesn't change them.

Jesus is rebuking them for that.

Their objection is no longer evidence-based, but something else going on in their heart.

Something else.

Who's to say what it is?

But the balance that Jesus is bringing here is helpful.

You know, signs in the Bible, miraculous works of God, powerful works of God, demonstrate that the kingdom has come.

The king of the kingdom is here, and the power of God is with them.

Look, pay attention.

You don't see this every day or like ever.

The king has come.

Jesus says later, I think in the Gospel of John, he says, look, if you don't believe my words, then at least believe in the works themselves.

Like let the power of God testify to the fact that something unique is going on here.

You need to pay attention and figure out what that is.

This is what signs are supposed to do in the Bible.

We've seen it do this over and over again.

People come, they see the work of Jesus, they're convinced they follow him as Lord.

I mean, at one point, guys, if you remember, at Jesus' baptism, the sky breaks open and the voice of God the Father booms out of the sky, saying, This is my beloved son.

At another point, he's raised the dead now.

We've seen him raise people from the dead, and still there's people who don't believe.

Now, you might object to this and be like, no, I mean, look, if I, if my friend who I love, or even you, maybe you're out there, you're considering faith, you're not sure what you believe.

If you're like, if this person could see someone raised from the dead, it'd be over.

But what I want to point out to you is that signs do not necessarily do that.

We're gonna see this continue all the way through.

You could read this really in all four of the Gospels about Jesus.

Incredible, powerful works of God are done.

Some people are convinced, and some people aren't.

And it would be no different today.

Because sometimes what you need is not more proof, but you need your heart needs to change, your perception of that proof, what you think about it, what what it means for your life, the way that you stand towards that needs to change.

There's an apologist that I've watched for years.

Apologist, you know, someone who defends the faith to people who are skeptical or don't believe it.

His name's Frank Turek.

And he uh he goes to campuses and different places and invites people in to have a discussion and debate about like, hey, is Jesus who he said he was?

Is the Bible reliable?

And he has this question that he just that he asks every so often that I love so much.

And he goes, Okay, so like in a lot of times oftentimes in the middle of a debate, and he's like, if I could prove to you that Jesus was who he said he was, and beyond a shadow of your doubt, would you believe in him?

Would you follow him?

Would you become a Christian?

Now, when you hear that question, you're like, well, I mean, it if I if it could be proven to me, then sure, of course, right?

You would think that that's how most people answer.

And some people do answer that.

But another huge portion of people, you can see this live, like online on his videos.

Another huge portion of people, honestly to their credit, when they at when Turek asks them, if I could prove to you that Jesus was God and He is who He says, would you believe Him?

Would you follow Him?

A lot of people say, No.

Which is actually really clarifying.

And it's really, really helpful because it shows that the issue now is not proof.

It's not a matter of, has this guy demonstrated that he is who he says he is?

There's some other objection, there's some other hesitation rooted in something deep in that person's heart, their mind, their soul.

And that question makes that clear for people, which I honestly think is really, really helpful because then you can deal with that.

And, you know, for me, like many of you guys know, like in January, God was really gracious to me.

He healed me of a two-year chronic illness, just debilitating illness that was extremely difficult to work with, function with.

I was looking at doing disability.

God heals me overnight, basically, 90% plus of the symptoms gone in a night.

And it's funny to like have that happen to you, and then to tell, because you're so excited, like you want to tell everyone.

I'm telling like baristas who I just met, I'm telling every service person I meet, hey, can I tell you, hey Adam, do you have any dietary restrictions?

Can I tell you a story about dietary restrictions?

I mean, literally, I'm telling everyone I meet, and people react differently.

And sometimes I would tell people, and they just look at me like, what?

How?

And you could see in their eyes, they either don't believe it, they think I'm nuts, or some other thing.

In fact, I remember talking to one guy at one point, and hey, I was supernaturally healed, I couldn't eat all these things, da-da-da-da-da.

Overnight it changed.

And he looks at me and he goes, So, like, also this diet could help, and it could be this disease or that disease.

And I was like, Did you hear what?

Did you just hear what I said?

I was sick and now I'm healed in one night because Jesus supernaturally touched my body.

I don't have to eat weird anymore.

It's it's over.

In one night.

And he's like, so you know, it could also be, I'm like, dude, what?

Like, listen to the words coming out of my mouth.

I'm losing my mind because it's like, I don't, and it's the same thing here.

And honestly, like, woe to us if we think that we can be that far off when God says something and demonstrates something to us, and we just think that our perception is going to be perfect right away.

And so Jesus is rebuking the crowds.

This guy's so popular now, he's rebuking the crowds for the way that they have responded and perceived his works of power, his miracles, his signs.

And so Jesus says, because of that, you're just gonna get one sign.

And there's gonna be two witnesses of judgment against you.

Who is the one sign?

It's the sign of Jonah.

Who is Jonah, you might ask?

Well, you can read through the table of contents of your Bible, you'll see that there's a book named Jonah.

He's a prophet in the Old Testament.

God sends him to Nineveh, the Assyrian capital city.

Enemies of Israel.

Jonah hates them.

God's like, preach repentance to them, their evil has come up before me.

I'm going to destroy them unless you preach repentance to them.

Jonah's like, I don't want to.

God's like, do it anyway.

So he goes.

He walks into the middle of downtown Nineveh, and he goes, Yet 40 days Nineveh will be overthrown.

And then all the Ninevehes go, and they repent.

And so the sign of Jonah in this context, with what Jesus is saying here, is a sign of warning and judgment.

Because this is what he comes into Nineveh and says.

Interestingly, in another gospel, a similar passage where Jesus is talking about the sign of Jonah, he talks about it differently.

He says, The sign of Jonah, hey, you know in the story of Jonah, how Jonah goes into the belly of the whale, he gets swallowed, thrown overboard, swallowed, God preserves his life, spits him out.

So too will the Son of Man, Jesus, be in the ground three days and rise again.

You'll see that sign with me, too.

So the sign of Jonah is this deep, you know, multifaceted metaphor, but here it's referring to judgment.

The Son of Man, Jesus, in his preaching and their rejection of it, becomes a sign of judgment.

And there's two witnesses that bear witness to this.

One is the Ninevites, because if you read the story of Jonah, Jonah comes in, says, repent, even though he hates him, and they repent.

It says, from the highest king to like the lowest person, the whole city, sackcloth and ashes, oh my gosh, we're so sorry, Lord, we repent.

And they were people that weren't Jews.

Remember the Old Testament, a big part of it is the story of how God takes the Jewish nation.

He's like, I'm gonna bless the whole world through you.

The Messiah is gonna come through you.

Every family of the earth is gonna be blessed through you.

And then it starts to happen.

You start to see people that aren't Jews, Gentiles, the Bible calls them, turn to God.

So the Ninevehes who repented at the preaching of a prophet will rise up with people who are listening to Jesus and not listening, and they will condemn them, Jesus is saying.

So that's one group, but the other group is the queen of the South.

The Queen of the South is a reference to the Queen of Sheba.

And if you've read about this story in the Old Testament, King Solomon has God-given wisdom beyond anyone on planet earth.

And the Queen of Sheba, which is most likely modern-day Yemen in the Middle East, she comes, she hears about the wisdom of Solomon, she comes, she's like, I don't believe it.

She comes and she sees it for herself, she talks with him, and then when she leaves, she's like, Yo, I heard about you.

And they didn't even say half of what was true about this, half of what was true about what God has done in your life.

She believed.

She was convinced.

She saw what God had done in Solomon and was convinced.

And Jesus is like, the Queen of the South, who heard the wisdom of Solomon that came from God and believed, will rise up and judge you.

Because, again, another person who's outside of Israel, who has seen and heard God's voice and believes.

These are the two witnesses and the sign that Jesus uses to rebuke the crowds.

And then he gets into this thing with the lamp and the eye, which for a long time was a really hard passage for me to understand, but it makes a lot of sense in the way it comes right after Jesus talking about people seeing signs and not believing.

Basically, what he says is he gives this illustration where he's like, yo, your eye, it's like the lamp of your body.

If your eye is good, it lets in light, it perceives spiritual things correctly.

And you know, in the New Testament, Jesus himself and his teaching oftentimes are referred to as light.

So he's like, if your eye is good, your spiritual perception is good, then your body fills with light.

And you're guided, you have clarity, you understand truth.

If your eye is bad, because that's what eyes do, they perceive, right?

If your eye is bad, your spiritual perception is bad, then you're full of darkness.

So you can still see the thing, you can still see the light, but not let the light in because you don't perceive that it is what it is.

This is what this parable is about spiritual perception, having a good eye, a good perception of spiritual things, spiritual truth in front of you.

And so perhaps this is you, in the sense of you're not sure what you believe about Jesus.

You're not sure what you believe about Jesus, and maybe you have seen things that you would categorize as evidence, signs.

Because remember, what does a sign do?

It points to something.

The works of God, signs, are meant to point to the power of God, the presence of God, that He's doing something.

Maybe this is you in the sense that you have seen things that count as evidence in your life.

Maybe you've studied the Bible, but it's not enough.

And what I would submit to you is that perhaps the reason it's not enough has nothing to do with evidence.

What I would submit to you to consider, which is what Jesus is saying, is that maybe there's a different obstacle here.

Maybe there's something in your heart, in your soul, that rejects it, what you see, for a different reason, as someone who can testify alongside Jesus that even if God does supernatural works, it doesn't necessarily convince everyone.

So, the the first point, the audiences, the crowds, they have ignored the signs, if you're following along on your sermon sheet.

Now the second group, the Pharisees.

The kitchen is about to get a lot hotter.

The world's most awkward dinner party is about to ensue.

So, I mean, if you struggle, like watching the office, like this is gonna be gnarly.

So, uh, Luke 37 through 44.

This is what happens next.

While Jesus was speaking, a Pharisee asked him to dine with him.

So he went in and reclined at table.

The Pharisee was astonished to see that he did not first wash before dinner.

And the Lord said to him, Now you Pharisees, cleanse the outside of the cup and of the dish, but inside you are full of greed and wickedness.

You fools! Did not he who made the outside make the inside also?

But give his alms those things that are within, and behold, everything is clean for you.

But woe to you, Pharisees, for you tithe mint and rue and every herb, and neglect justice and the love of God.

These you ought to have done without neglecting the others.

Woe to you, Pharisees, for you love the best seat in the synagogues, and greetings in the marketplaces.

Woe to you, for you are like unmarked graves, and people walk over them without knowing it.

So, this dinner party degrades into confrontation right away.

And it begins by a Pharisee asking Jesus, Well, why didn't you wash?

And he's not talking about washing in the way our guy, Dr.

Semmelweiss, does.

He's not talking about washing for hygiene.

He's talking about washing for ritual cleanness.

You can read about this in the Old Testament, except you actually can't because the Old Testament doesn't command that you wash before dinner.

There are things that are commanded.

Commanded to be washed in the Old Testament, symbolic of the purity of God and how God must do something to purify us so that we can enter into his presence.

But there is no command about washing before dinner in a ritual purity sense.

This is something that they added.

It's an added tradition.

And I think you might say, well, why?

Like why are they doing that?

The Mishnah, which is like a later Jewish writing, I think actually describes what's going on here pretty well.

The Mishnah will later say that tradition is like a fence around the law, protecting it.

So, in other words, what the Pharisees were doing is they were putting laws on top of the laws to make extra sure that they never violated those laws from God.

It's like a fence around the law, even more laws to protect any potential or possibility from disobeying.

And Jesus is saying, These things don't matter.

You made them up.

Cleanse, uh, cleanse, cleansing the outside is useless when the inside is so foul.

And he's like, didn't God create the outside and the inside?

Doesn't God care about the inside too?

This is the case that he's making.

And then the crazy thing is in verse 41 he says, Instead, give as alms the things that are within.

And then behold, everything's clean for you.

Give as alms the things that are within.

Alms is like charity, it's like, you know, rendering service to the poor.

But Jesus is saying, give the things that are inside of you.

What's the thing that he just said was inside the Pharisees?

Greed, wickedness?

He's saying, give that to God.

Give what's inside of you to God, and all things become clean, including you.

This is the gospel.

This is the good news that Jesus has brought into the world.

Bring your sin to God, bring your heart to God, and he makes you clean.

It's clear that Jesus has zero attraction to pointless laws and external religion that seeks to build up your own sense of self-righteousness.

He says the complete opposite of how the Pharisees are thinking about it.

The Pharisees, they want to be clean from the outside in.

They not only want to wash their hands and symbolically sort of clean themselves before God, they want to do all these righteous things externally such that God might accept them.

This is the philosophy, this is the religious idea that the Pharisees are taking to God.

And Jesus gives them the exact opposite.

You do not clean up and then approach God.

You approach God in your wickedness, render what is within your heart, your evil, before him, and he makes you clean.

In Christianity, you are cleaned from the inside out.

In Christianity, which no other religion will claim this, you come to God with your sin and your wickedness, and he acts on your behalf.

Yes, your volition and your will and your obedience matter.

Jesus says, if you obey me, if anyone loves me, he will obey my commandments.

Of course this is true.

But the exact opposite of what the Pharisees are saying is also true.

You do not clean up and then come to God.

You bring all your wickedness to him and he does what you cannot.

And it's the exact opposite of how they think about it.

And think, I mean, if it truly is outside in righteousness, like if we have to do external things such that it purifies us internally, it's terrible on like eight fronts, right?

Well, two.

It's terrible on two fronts.

First is, if you think that you're doing that, if you think that you've done external things enough such that you have changed inside, first of all, you're wrong, and so you're self-deceived, but you're also prideful in the sense that you think you've completed it.

You think you lived righteously enough before God, and so you become arrogant.

On the other side, maybe you try to do the external things and you fail, and you know you fail, and so you despair, because you think that's what you gotta do.

And so what happens is if you believe that you are, you believe that you achieve salvation and achieve reconciliation before God by outside in, by a process whereby outside in, then you either become arrogant or you become despairing.

But Jesus is giving them the exact opposite.

He's saying, Bring your wickedness to God, and he will transform you from the inside out.

He'll change what you think, how you feel, your desires, and you'll want to do different things because he changed what was inside.

You know, there's a I think there's a great example uh in our church of this recently.

Um in our D groups in our church, uh, where there's like a leader and one, two, three, or four people with the leader pursuing Jesus together, trying to grow his disciples, the way we read about it in the scriptures.

There's an exercise that we developed uh called the feedback form.

So it's so self-explanatory, right?

Basically, what happens is the people in the D group they get this form that asks, like, you know, like four or five questions.

Hey, what's two to three strengths of this person?

Nice.

But then there's a question, and others like it, that say, hey, if there's one character trait that should be changed about me, what would you say it is?

Oof.

I mean, you're giving someone open season to comment on your life.

I mean, talk about, I mean, people stepping into this exercise is the perfect illustration of people that want to be clean inside.

This is people walking to others and saying, What do you see about my inner life that reflects in my outer life that is not like God?

I mean, talk about a sense of security to be able to ask someone that.

Talk about a sense of willingness to admit sin, to be able to ask someone that.

But this is security that flows from the fact that they know that if they bring what's inside to God, he accepts them.

You come to God with faith, and he does the hard heavy lifting for you.

And then Jesus goes into three woes on these Pharisees.

Three woes, woes like a word that means careful distress will come upon you.

This is what their outside-in approach leads to.

Number one, tithing.

Maybe you've heard of tithing.

It's a command in the Old Testament where you give a tenth of what you have to God, to the temple.

And what was happening was the Pharisees were tithing and then going even further, spinning up their lazy Susan, taking out their spices, gramming out five grams of basil, gramming out five grams of cumin, and tithing that to God, which is like, great, that's a waste of time.

What are you doing?

This is Jesus' first woe to them.

You tithe mint, dill, and cumin, and you have neglected the weightier matters, which is justice and the love of God.

Your priorities have been messed up.

You've focused on the wrong things.

You're literally weighing out cilantro and neglecting the poor.

You're literally gramming out cumin, and you've forgotten about the love of God.

What a sad picture this is.

And it's Jesus' first woe to them.

This is at dinner, by the way, and he's sitting there like, woe to you! Like, woo! Second woe.

They love the best seats in the synagogues and greetings in the marketplaces.

What's he saying?

You love honor and praise from people more than from God.

This is pride.

This is look at my outside.

Never mind my motives, never mind my heart, my thought life.

The other word that the Bible uses to describe this is idolatry.

I seek my value, my meaning, my worth from created things instead of from the creator.

This is what the Pharisees are doing, Jesus is saying.

They value, this is the second point, they value external vanities and neglect internal evil.

And he's correcting them for it.

This external focus makes you extremely fragile, as we'll see in the Gospel of Luke, as the Pharisees begin to panic, persecute Jesus, and ultimately drag him to the cross to murder him, because if you have built your life on the idea that you must do a certain amount of good to be saved, and then someone proves to you that you haven't done enough, your whole existence is compromised.

And so you become extremely fragile when anyone gives you feedback.

You become extremely fragile when anyone wants to talk about your conduct or what they've seen in you, and you become retaliatory because you must defend your conduct at all costs.

Because if you don't, you've blown in.

Whereas someone anchored in the love of God who comes and brings what's inside and allows God to speak to them and transform their heart from the inside out, they can come from a place of peace and security because they know it ultimately doesn't rest on how well they perform.

It creates two very different types of people.

Woe number three, and this one's the gnarliest.

Woe number one, tithing, you tithe out of your lazy Susan, and you've neglected the weightier matters of the law like justice and the love of God.

You love woe number two, you love greetings in the marketplace, best seats in the synagogue, honor and praise from people.

Woe number three, and this one's the gnarliest.

You're like unmarked graves that people walk over without knowing it.

You're like, wait, what?

Why is that gnarly?

Here's why it's gnarly.

In the Old Testament, contact with death, graves, bodies, bones, um, made a person ritually unclean.

Again, this points back to the idea that in God is only life, only light, only good, no death.

He didn't bring death into the world.

Human sin brought that into the world.

And so with the Israelites in the Old Testament, he's like, yo, if you come in contact with death, you have to go through this ritual cleansing rite to make yourself clean.

And so what happens is if you have a grave that's unmarked, is people just walk over it because it's unmarked, and in so doing become defiled, become unclean.

And Jesus is saying to the Pharisees, you're like a grave that is unmarked, defiling people without them knowing it.

Like this dinner party just went to the next level, bro.

You are like unmarked graves defiling people without them knowing it.

Jesus is saying, you Pharisees do this.

So the way that they're teaching people, adding laws to God's law, we also have to wash before dinner because that's also good.

No.

You can see the way that Jesus responds to the Pharisees in this text, how much he hates external religion, self-righteousness, that neglects justice, loving your neighbor, that neglects the love of God.

Sometimes we hear as Christians that legalism, an obsession over keeping the rules, or you know, these other things we've seen from the Pharisees, sometimes we hear that Christianity is against that.

It's quite another thing to read Jesus getting real angry at dinner with people who perpetuate this.

As Christians, we believe that the gospel is one of grace.

We believe that we don't clean up before we come to God, but that we come to him and he changes us.

Not the other way around.

And you can see how much it matters to Jesus that people understand this and that he stops people saying the opposite.

Can you see that?

Final rebuke.

The dinner party goes on.

Verses 45 through 54, the third group.

The first was the crowds, they reject the signs, the second was the Pharisees, they love external vanities versus internal realities.

The third, the lawyers, the experts in the law, who were basically partners with the Pharisees.

This is what 45 through 54 says.

One of the lawyers answered him, Teacher, in saying these things, you insult us also.

And he said, Woe to you, lawyers also, for you load people with burdens hard to bear, and you yourselves do not touch the burdens with one of your fingers.

Woe to you, for you build the tombs of the prophets whom your fathers killed, so you are witness, and you consent to the deeds of your fathers, for they killed them, and you build their tombs.

Therefore also the wisdom of God said, I will send them prophets and apostles, some of whom they will kill and persecute, so that the blood of all the prophets shed from the foundation of the world may be charged against this generation.

From the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah, who perished between the altar and the sanctuary.

Yes, I tell you, it will be required of this generation.

Woe to you, lawyers, for you have taken away the key of knowledge.

You did not enter yourselves, and you hindered those who were entering.

As he went away from there, the scribes and the Pharisees began to press him hard, and to provoke him, to speak about many things, lying in wait for him to catch him in something he might say.

So, final group, the lawyers, similar to the Pharisees, but also a little bit different, they get three woes as well.

Their first woe is that they load burdens on people too hard to bear, but won't even touch it themselves.

There's two things going on here.

The legalism we've been talking about, they're adding things to the Bible just for the sake of being able to fulfill it so that they can declare themselves righteous.

But when you add things beyond what God has said, it becomes burdensome.

It becomes impossible to fulfill.

So Jesus is criticizing them for that.

And then he says, and by the way, you wouldn't even do the thing that you made up yourself half the time.

This is his woe to them.

How about that cumin?

This is what we're talking about here.

So they're hypocritical.

This is the second piece to this first woe.

And they have a ruthless focus on the law, which has become burdensome.

But you know what's like worse about this?

When you do this, when you add things to God's word, and you increase the burden on people, you put them in a place of deep shame and failure because you make it even more impossible to live up to the standards that God has given.

It crushes people, and Jesus is furious about it.

Look, Jesus does give us commands to follow, and we should feel conviction when we don't follow them.

But this is different.

God's word is perfect and sufficient.

It has everything that we need, it had everything they need in the Old Testament, it has everything we need now as Christians with the New Testament.

But nothing can be taken away or added to it.

Woe number two.

They build the tombs of the prophets that their fathers killed.

And then they neglect the greatest prophet, Jesus, in his message.

They reject this modern prophet, the greatest of all prophets, God himself, who speaks for God because he is God.

They reject him.

And so in rejecting Jesus, you show that you would have done the same things that your fathers did when the prophets came in the Old Testament.

That's what he's saying.

You're just like them.

They have thought too highly of themselves.

They looked at what happened in the Old Testament, they're like, I'm not going to make that mistake.

And then they make it again anyway.

Not only do they not listen to Jesus, they persecute him.

It's worse.

That's woe number two.

Then woe number three comes from verse 52.

He says, You've taken away the key to knowledge.

You have not entered yourself, you've not understood yourself.

But if that wasn't enough, you've stopped other people from understanding.

You won't even let other people enter.

The burden of the law, Jesus will later say that my yoke is easy and my burden is light.

And they have done the opposite.

They have done the exact opposite.

So, what do we need to make of this passage?

What do we need to make of the crowds rejecting the signs, the world's most awkward dinner party, Jesus getting extremely frustrated and rebuking people left, right, and center over dinner?

Well, I think, like we said before, if you're considering faith, perhaps your hesitancy with faith really doesn't actually have anything to do with evidence.

Maybe it does.

Maybe you need to study further.

You haven't seen enough yet.

But perhaps it doesn't.

Perhaps there's an objection in your heart that's actually revealing something else.

Maybe the idea of lordship, the idea that we don't just know that Jesus is true, but we follow him as our creator, as our Lord.

Maybe that's the thing ultimately that you don't want any part of.

Maybe the idea of bringing your sin into the light before God and before others and your community that walks alongside you as you turn away from it, as you repent from it.

Maybe that is the thing that you don't want any part of.

I think one of the things that Jesus asks us to consider today is maybe your rejection of him has nothing to do with proof.

But if you're a Christian, the application here is endless.

We're going to get a moment here before communion where we list all the things that Jesus says the Pharisees, the lawyers, the crowds are doing.

Because like the reality is, is it's so easy for us to see them doing this and be like, oh, how terrible, without recognizing the fact that it's just as easy for us to do the same things and we have done the same things.

And so we're going to get an opportunity to bring those things to God.

Render inside as alms, and everything becomes clean for you.

We're going to get that opportunity in a second, but I just want you to think for a minute as we wrap here, how important it is to live from the foundation of the love of God for sinners, not from the foundation of obedience to the law.

Think about how much it shapes the culture of a church when people come in for the first time and they experience people, they experience a church where people bring their sin before God.

They experience a church that's less judgmental because they're not trying to clean themselves up from the outside in, but they're bringing to God what's on the inside that their outside might change.

Think about how different it is to come to a church that's the opposite of the Pharisees and the lawyers, where burdens come off of you.

Think about the experience that a person could have by coming to our church where they come in and instead of feeling shame, they feel hope because they see the truth of the gospel, not a fake, man-made tradition or weight that's meant to manipulate the hand of God to do what you want.

How different does it become when people experience our church when we render inside the things, when we render to God the things that are inside.

That's a church that removes burdens.

That's a church that invites people into the presence of God, doesn't hinder it.

That's a church that restores joy and hope to the hopeless and comfort to the suffering, and understanding to the confused.

And the only way that we become a church that is like that is if we first be like that and experience that ourselves.

Heavenly Father.

One of the points you say was for us to see that we could not keep it.

And thus all we can do is render our hearts before you, our wickedness, our greed, our love of external validation, human praise, all the in-between.

All we can do is bring that before you and ask you to help.

Lord Jesus, this is what faith in you is.

I pray, God, that you make us like this.

I pray, God, that you correct our temptation towards external vanity, towards fake religion that has not addressed the heart, that has not addressed what we think and desire, and the reasons, the motives with which we do things.

I pray, Lord Jesus, that you would transform us such that the hopeless and the joyless would come in and feel the burden slide off their back as we lead them to you.

Please, Lord Jesus.

We know that we have been tempted by the same things.

And I ask, God, that you make us a church that delights in the gospel so much that no one could ever come in and come out without hearing of the free gift of grace that comes through faith in you.

The forgiveness of sins that comes through faith in you, the security and peace offered to people who bring their sins into the light and allow you to forgive them.

We love you in Jesus' name.