Signposts | September 22 | The Self-righteous Holy Man
5 Minute Bible Study
Signposts | September 22 | The Self-righteous Holy Man
Ecclesiastes, chapter 7, verse 20. "There is not a righteous man on earth who does what is right and never sins." Well, you could go to Romans 5, I believe, or Romans 3, and say, "All sinned and fallen short of the glory of God." I didn't exactly go there, so what I write is here is a hard truth from Solomon. All men sin, including the best, the brightest, and the most powerful among us. But these very same people often deny this truth and proceed to proclaim their own righteousness to the marvel of all the world. But in the eyes of God, self-proclaimed righteousness is nothing more than self-righteousness, which is the child of pride, a ubiquitous sin. They oftentimes say, "Pride of the seven deadly sins, pride is the chief among us." We have never really, when we are self-righteous, "I'm right all the time, you're wrong all the time," and all kinds of distortions happen because you have lost sight of the righteousness of God and replaced it, substituted for your own righteousness, which is a speck compared to God's real righteousness. What I find common, now that I've been a Christian my whole life and been in ministry for half of it, is how easy it is to forget this very simple thing that's said here, that there's not a righteous man on earth who does what is right and never sins. We want to delineate or categorize. I find this particularly true among my friends who grew up in the Roman Catholic tradition, although all the denominations can be susceptible to this, but they want to say that there's sinners and there's saints, there's good people and there's bad people. It's just not true. If there are two categories, there's only one person and one of them, and that's Christ himself. He's in the category of good and righteous, and all the rest of us are not. I don't know if you've done this, Eric, but Mother Teresa's journals were published some years ago. We think of Mother Teresa, if anyone was a saint, if anyone was wholly good who devoted her entire life to Christ and to serving the poor and all that stuff, it would be her. But if you read through her journals, which I've done just a little bit of, you realize that she really struggled. She had some doubts, she had sinful thoughts, she was not perfect, and sometimes I point people to her and I say, if you think you can achieve perfection in this world, not many people do, but if you did think that, you're wrong. It's only the perfection of Christ that we can lean on in his sanctification journey that he brings us on, makes our relationship with sin different, but we won't escape sinfulness until glory. It's just a reality check for me there. So the pathway to perfection as perceived by some people is probably a fruitless journey because it's an impossibility. But you have come across people that don't claim to be righteous, but I mean, sinless and are therefore righteous. How's somebody in your position? How do you talk them off the ledge because they've got, they're disregarding parts of who they are and substituting in a person they want to be, but aren't yet, but they're focusing on the goal of becoming perfect. I've met people like this. I really, it's not even really necessary to argue with a person like that because you can just, you just kind of have to say, just wait, good luck with that. Your sin will confront you as soon. If it hasn't already, you've deceived your, like it says in the Bible, if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us, but yeah, I mean, I think maybe years ago, I would have tried to intellectually prove to a person that they're not perfect, but I think over time, I just realized, just give them a minute, give them a week, give them a month. Eventually, the persona of self-righteousness, one where the other comes crashing down in someone's life. There's no joy in that. That's true. I mean, it shouldn't be because that's a sin. I mean, they're joying somebody else's suffering. Oh, I thought you meant there's no joy for the person, but there's no joy in us realizing that is what you're saying. Yeah, I was thinking of a damaged church and how they deal with the same question. How do you as a leader in the church deal with this question and we do it through worship and through preaching and we do it through praying and we do it through confession and we do it through proclamation, the apostles creed. So there are lots of reminders that at least come in a weekly basis. My argument is we needed on a daily basis and we needed sometimes almost minute by minute because it's very easy to substitute in the really good person I want to be for the center that I actually am. And if we're not actually intersecting with people that accept, they don't accept it, but they know that they are sinners in the eye of God and they're also forgiven and it becomes, for me in attending church now, it's damage for a long, long time, I think some of the things when I first went there were still there in me, but because of the experience of worshiping and engaging in Bible studies and doing this and so on and so forth, I think that my consciousness, my conscious self, is more aware of an inclination to do something that isn't right in the eyes of God. Interesting. Yeah. It's a huge help. The purpose of this daily Bible study is no greater than to have somebody be in the word because you never know the, it's not the magic, the mystery, the mystery of the, if you go in and look at the Bible as the greatest mystery story ever told, you're going to actually see it at least in some level as absolutely the greatest mystery story ever told because there's this whole thing we call life without God, it's chaos with God, there's a striving to be more like God through the power of the Holy Spirit, Jesus Christ and Jesus Christ. And it's getting people from, you know, kind of living in the world as it is to a place where they want to become more like Christ is one of the marvelous things about the church that has existed for generations after generations, centuries after centuries. [BLANK_AUDIO]