These readings are from the gospel according to Luke and the epistle of James. And he also told this parable to some people who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and viewed others with contempt. Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood and was praying this to himself. God, I thank you. that I am not like other people, swindlers, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week. I pay tithes of all that I get. But the tax collector, standing some distance away, was even unwilling to lift up his eyes to heaven, but was beating his breast, saying, God, be merciful to me, the sinner. I tell you, this man went to his house justified rather than the other for everyone who exalts himself will be humbled but he who humbles himself will be exalted and they were bringing even their babies to him so that he would touch them but when the disciples saw it they began rebuking them but Jesus called for them saying permit the children to come to me and do not hinder them for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these truly I say to you Whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child will not enter it at all. And from James 4, what is the source of quarrels and conflicts among you? Is not the source your pleasures that wage war in your members? You lust and do not have, so you commit murder. You are envious and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You do not have because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives so that you may spend it on your own pleasures. You adulteresses, do you not know that friendship with the world is hostility toward God? Therefore, whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. Or do you think that the scripture speaks to no purpose? He jealously desires the spirit which he has made to dwell in us. But he gives a greater grace, therefore it says, God is opposed to the proud, but gives grace to the humble. Submit, therefore, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Be miserable, and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned into mourning, and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves in the presence of the Lord, and He will exalt you." The Word of the Lord. Happy New Year. Today we are between series. Normally we preach here at St. Andrews in series, and now we're between series. And this week, and God willing for the next two weeks, we'll have three one-off sermons, standalone sermons, and then we'll pick up another series later. in January. But I thought today, since we rarely meet together on New Year's Day for worship, I thought that I would use this New Year's Day 2017. Man, when I was a kid I thought for sure I would have a rocket car by now. 2017. I thought I'd use the sermon today on this New Year's Day to make a proposal that we have a less stressful year in 2017. Can I get an amen? And it's been a very stressful year for many people. A lot of death in our congregation, the whole national scene, the international scene. And so my proposal is for a less stressful year in 2017. And I would also like to propose a way to get that less stressful year counterintuitive proposal. I want to call for at St. Andrews a kind of moratorium, a kind of prohibition, a kind of regulation against. I want to develop a rule, a moratorium, a suspension against defensiveness. Defensiveness. And this is the idea that I want to cultivate out of this particular two readings of scripture, two passages that I want to use to reinforce this idea and drive home that idea today that defending our reputations and being hypersensitive to criticism and being insecure that we don't measure up to the people around us and therefore trying to prove ourselves to people and prove ourselves to ourselves. I wanna try to propose today that being fiercely protective of our rights, of our merits, of our worthiness, of our importance. I wanna propose today that our yearning for appreciation, for recognition, our yearning for notice from other people, our sense of entitlement, I want to propose that our promoting our own importance, all of these pursuits and mechanisms are tremendous burdens to bear and all of them lead to stress. And the question is, is there any other way to live? I mean, because people just roll that way automatically. We are automatically defensive of ourselves. and it's just how we are. Why is it, I want to ask you, why is it so hard to stop defending ourselves when it comes so naturally? I mean, it's like a reflex. If somebody criticizes you, I've said it many times before, it's like touching a hot stove. You automatically pull your hand back from the stove and when someone criticizes you, you automatically rally to your own defense and are defensive. Why is that? Is there any alternative to this instinctive, automatic hypersensitivity to criticism? How do you even go about it? Not defending yourself, especially if in this particular instance, especially if you happen to be right. And isn't that true of every instance that you're always right? And aren't we getting close now to the problem? How do you even implement? What I'm proposing today is a less stressful approach to life, a non-defensive posture toward life. That's what I want to look at today. Number one, analyzing the universal problem. Number two, accepting a new footing, a new basis for life. And number three, operating from that new platform. Analyzing the universal problem, accepting a new footing, and lastly, operating from that new platform in the new year. The problem, which I'm calling a universal problem, if I was to put it in a word, the problem, the cause of so much stress and friction and quarrels and tension among ourselves and within ourselves, were to put it in a word, the problem is pride or arrogance. And this is really how Christianity looks at the human condition. This is the way Christianity analyzes our situation. This is what's wrong with us. We're arrogant. We're proud. That's the core problem of the human heart. Let me just extract four facts about pride or arrogance from the passages that we read. We could look at many more from these passages, but I'll limit myself to four. Number one, pride or arrogance is fueled by comparisons and by competitions between people. And so the Pharisee, in the first reading, he goes to the temple to pray, which of course is a good thing, but as he prays, he immediately begins to look around and compares himself favorably to others. I am not like other people, swindlers, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax gatherer. And these comparisons, which feed our pride, are so stressful to maintain that we always have to maintain the upper hand as we look down on the common people around us. This amazing article I learned about this week, which I want to commend to you. I hope you'll read it. It's a short article. You can read it in five minutes. It's an article from the Washington Post from December 20th. If you want to look it up, I quoted it in the bulletin today. Don't look at it now. But later, look at it and read the article, if you like, from Jenna McGregor. And she discusses the changing status symbols in our society. And according to a recent joint study by Harvard, Columbia, and Georgetown, thank you, by those three universities, a joint study revealed that busyness is the new status symbol. Busyness is replacing luxury items as the chief indicator of a person's worth. The new way of comparing ourselves, a new way of feeling good about ourselves, a new way of getting status in our own eyes and in the eyes of other people. Because good people, valuable, important, and worthy people are people who work many, many hours. They send tweets in the middle of the night, for instance. Did you see what I did there? They humble brag, and I love that word. The Germans must have come up with that word. It's just a great word. The Germans have that gift of stringing words together, and they humble brag, and I love that. I thought, man, there's a word for that? I thought I'd been so slick over the years where I'm trying to show how bad I have it, but really I'm trying to brag to people, and there's actually a word for it. I'm exposed. They humble brag. humble brags how he hasn't had a vacation in years and he thinks he's making you feel sorry for him but people see right through him and realize uh-huh he's just trying to convince me how important and indispensable he is and it can really be a a way of feeling better about ourselves and superior to other people for me to think I am busier than you are. People depend on me. Compare your paltry number of work hours to my great number of work hours and you'll see how really worthy a person I am. And it is so much work to maintain that facade, that important persona facade. Number two, arrogance or pride is a root sin. That is, it leads to other more visible sins. C.S. Lewis, in a great chapter, which again I commend to you from Mere Christianity called The Great Sin, writes these words, quote, pride leads to every other vice. It is the complete anti-God state of mind, end quote. In other words, it's the root that drives all kinds of other selfish behavior, all kinds of violence, of immorality, of unfaithfulness. It leads to the disintegration of the self and arrogance is the root. And not only Is arrogance the source of all kinds of other sins and destructive behavior? But arrogance is also a kind of contaminant that can turn good deeds bitter and poisonous and destructive. For instance, in both these passages, prayer, which I think everyone here would say prayer is a good thing to do, but in both these passages, prayer is held up as an example of something which under the influence of pride, it's a good deed, that can turn poisonous and toxic. Under the influence of his own arrogant heart, the Pharisee goes to the temple to pray, and his prayer becomes an expression of scorn for others and boasting about himself. I know people can say, man, you can never go wrong praying. But the truth is, you can. Prayer can best be an expression of your own arrogant, sinful heart. And James puts it the same way. He says, prideful prayers are only expressions of our own selfishness. And in the grip of arrogance, you pray as an expression of your lusts. All prayers are not good. Pride turns charity into paternalism. You give something to a person in need, and inside your own mind, you're patting the person on the head. and destroying that person's self-concept. Pride turns honesty into a weapon. Hey, just trying to tell the truth here as we destroy another person. Pride can turn any good deed into a reason for looking down on others who are not doing those same kind of deeds. Third, just to remind you, pride is fueled by comparisons and competition. Number two, Pride is a root to all kinds of bad stuff and has the capacity of turning all kinds of good stuff into bad. And thirdly, pride itself is an expression of self-trust. You know, in our latest series, and some of you may be thinking about this, TJ, I thought in the latest series on numbers, the whole book of numbers is screaming to us that the root of all sin is not pride, but is unbelief. Remember the seven fold rebellion at the beginning, at the center of that book is all about unbelief. How is it that now you're saying pride, not unbelief is the root of all sins. And the truth is pride is an expression of unbelief because arrogance says, I don't need God. I don't need you. I don't need anyone. I don't depend on God. And faith, which is the opposite of unbelief, faith says, uh-uh. I am not the source of goodness and fullness in my life. I depend on God and His promises. I believe Him. I receive from Him. He's the source, not I. People who are prideful are afraid of looking needy. So they don't ask, says James. You don't have because you don't ask. They'd rather take matters into their own hands. They're often prayerless because they can do it themselves. They trust in themselves. Everyone trusts in something. Really, you've never met a completely unbelieving person. Everyone is trusting something, but the prideful person is trusting himself. It's a kind of auto-worship, a kind of self-worship. He worships himself and depends on himself. Luke puts it this way, he was speaking this parable to people who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and viewed others with contempt. Prideful people, it's not that they're not trusting God or not trusting anything, they're simply trusting themselves. It's a form of unbelief. I thank you, says the Pharisee, that I am not like other people. He, in his snobbery, he confuses self-assertion with holiness. And he prays, if you'll notice, not to God, he prayed thus to himself. He is praying to himself. He says the word God, but really he is praying to himself, his source. And he's all about What he has done, because what he's trusting is his own track record. He trusts himself, he bases his hope on his own achievements. I fast, I pay tithes, I'm not like other people. I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I. James calls prideful people in the church, and let me tell you, in my experience, the church is full of prideful people. and the preacher himself is chief among them. He calls prideful people in the church friends of the world. That is, you slip back into living by that worldly system of merit and comparison where you feel better about yourself by comparing yourself to other people and speaking about God. but trusting yourself, speaking about spiritual things, but living like practical atheists, not trusting in God, only trusting in themselves. Lastly, pride and arrogance is preoccupied with externals and appearances. As the article said about status symbols, we look for symbols. things that we can wear, things that we can look like that show how much status we have. And so the Pharisee stands where he can be seen, makes an appearance in the temple. He prays according to an acceptable formula so that if anyone is listening, they'll know, did his prayer start with thanksgiving? Yes, it did. I thank you, he says, and then immediately under the externals, his heart comes to the surface. I thank you that I am not like other people. He doesn't do what other people do, the sexy, outward, bad, scandalous things that the bad guy does. If you looked at his life externally, you'd think it was okay, but inside the life, the invisible part of the man is mean, and contemptuous, and he can't wait to compare himself to you so that he can get over you. James says the most offensive, awful things about church people, murderers, adulteresses. He's talking to you and me. Double-minded, you friends of the world, you enemies of God, you pray with the wrong motives. He's saying to us, people, please, get past the externals and see your deeper need. See, it's not a matter, and if you leave the sermon right now, you'll get all messed up about this. It's not a matter of me getting up in front of the congregation on this New Year's Day and say, you bad people, stop being so proud and arrogant. It's not a matter of something that we can really change about our own behavior. It's not about just doing something different in the externals. It's not really just about changing your routine or your actions, because you can change your actions. And yet the heart remains spiteful and unkind and proud. And the Pharisee is an example of that. The arrogant person flatters himself by focusing on outward behavior and appearances and he rarely looks to his own heart and motives. As one writer said about the Pharisee, he walked away from the temple that day after praying that self-righteous prayer. He walked away from the temple and he broke into Little song, amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. And all the while his heart was proud. So that's the sickness that afflicts us all. Now let's think about a new footing. If we really do tend in this direction, and we do tend in this direction, it's the way the world functions, it's the law of the jungle, it's the default mode of the human heart. Everybody does it and we bring it right with us into the church. And if this is our instinctive bent and natural response to life, if this is how humans roll, then we need a new footing, we need a new platform, we need a new basis for life. And what the gospel, that is the basic message of Christianity, What the gospel provides for proud people is not a comparative goodness so that if you do certain Christian things, then you can look down on those who don't do those Christian things. The gospel doesn't provide a comparative goodness that we can see and we can measure and we can use to feel better about ourselves as we look scornfully down on other people. The gospel provides something totally different. The gospel provides an imputed righteousness. That is a record that we didn't earn or deserve, a record that is earned by someone else and is accounted to me as a totally different footing. Someone else's status is attributed to me, imputed to me. God, who is totally without arrogance, a lot of things you can say about God, but you can never say that God is arrogant in any way. God, who is not arrogant, does not remove himself, as it were, from sinners, stand aloof from sinners, like the Pharisee did. I'm not like other people. God, instead, identifies with sinners. He steps into our situation. God incarnates. God becomes one of us, soup to nuts, from birth to death. He becomes fully human. And Jesus Christ, the God-man, lived in this beautiful, harmonious obedience to all the Father's will. And he did so with this exquisite sense of blessed self-forgetfulness. It wasn't a kind of self-conscious comparative thing in Jesus. There was no arrogance. He always obeyed out of joy. And he obeyed not just the externals, but always from the heart. His heart harmonized with the heart of his father. And he was the world's only truly righteous person, always doing what the Father wanted him to do, and it was always his delight to live that way. In other words, he lived like none of us have ever lived. He obeyed in a natural, organic, heartfelt way of obeying all the Father's will. And you see, the Christian is a person who sees that Jesus Christ lived in my place, died in my place, rose from the dead for me, representing me, so that just like death could not hold him, death will not hold me because I am in him. He represented me. And the Christian is a person who sees himself sanely, I know, says the Christian, I am a proud comparing person. I may try from time to time to compare myself to other people so that I feel better about myself. But I do understand when I compare myself not to you or to my neighbor, but when I compare myself to the true standard, when I compare myself to God and to his law, I'm toast. I got nothing. I am not a righteous man. I cannot trust myself. My good deeds, my efforts, my righteousness all fall painfully short. I must trust the righteousness I borrow from Jesus Christ. It's grace received by faith. Grace received by faith. And when I'm standing on that, not my record, but his record, perfect spotless record of Jesus Christ, the only truly obedient man. When I stand on that, it takes away the necessity of my having to defend my record, my competencies, my rightness. And I no longer have to prove how busy I am. And don't we do it? Hey man, how you doing? Busy, me too. Good to see you. If you're busy, you must be doing okay. But I no longer have to defend that. I no longer have to prove how important I am, how thin I am, how shapely I am, how cool I am, how informed I am, how religious I am, how pious I am, or any of the other standards that we impose on one another and we impose on ourselves. In fact, the one standard That really matters. Even the law of God is now silenced for me. And it is no longer my judge because the righteousness of Jesus Christ, who obeyed all the law, is now attributed or accounted to me. I'm depending on His righteousness. And there is never, therefore, a reason to look with contempt on anyone else. Truth is, I have no righteousness when it comes to standing before God. Only righteousness I have is the righteousness I'm borrowing from Jesus Christ, who lived the life I failed to live and died the death I deserve to die. Now, tomorrow we launch out into 2017, into the real world. We leave the holy oasis of the sanctuary and we go out into the jungle. So how tomorrow will this new footing translate into a new approach to life, new approach to God, new approach to others, and a new approach to ourselves that really is less stressful? Not stress-free, because we live in a stressful fallen world, but less stressful. How do I wear it, this righteousness of Jesus? And how do I function from this new platform? A couple ideas, really three ideas to think about. Number one, humility is elusive. That is, we would all like to look humble, but we really don't want to be humble. We want to look humble so we can be proud of our humility. and then we can humble brag. Humility is not achieved by a great deal of self-conscious effort. That's not how it comes about. Because when humility becomes self-conscious, it ceases to be humility because humility is not self-conscious. Humility is internal. It is attained like happiness indirectly. And you perhaps have known someone who all his or her life has tried to be happy. Going after happiness is never a good idea. You never find it. Same with humility. Others are often unconscious of humility when they see it. And as C.S. Lewis said in that great article called The Great Sin, when you meet a humble man, you will probably not say, there goes a humble man. You'll simply have a sense that he was interested in you and in what you had to say. It's indirect, as Jesus was interested in the needs of those small, unimportant children and treated them as if they were very important. One way to tell how humble you are, because again, it's elusive, is to ask yourself how you respond to criticism. Responding to criticism tells you whether you're standing on your reputation or standing on someone else's reputation. Humility is not the same as low self-esteem, which is often a form of hyper-self-consciousness. And what I said is true. Humility is not self-conscious. It comes from the heart. I think the meaning of the man who goes into the temple and beats himself on the breast is a way of his saying, I recognize the real source of the problem here. It's not my behavior. my insides, it's my heart, something that only God can change. Realize this as we think about humility being elusive. The conceited person rarely knows that he's conceited. So assume that you are, and that's a self safe assumption. Number two, Spiritual people, moral people, religious people, socially conscious people are at great risk of being proud. Both passages are addressed to these kind of people. And James says some of the harshest words in the New Testament about church people. And I think the reason is we forget, number one, that I am living on borrowed righteousness. I'm standing on the record of another person, the record of Jesus Christ. Number two, Any progress I've made, we forget this, which we often overestimate our progress in the Christian life, but the progress that I have made is due to the patient work and energy of the Holy Spirit and not because I have tried harder than other people. So comparisons have to go. Number three, this is the last thing. The way you get courage to face up to your own pride and smugness and arrogance and self-trust and self-obsession. The way you get courage to do that is to keep on looking at Jesus Christ. You see, where I distance myself from people that I'm superior to, at least I tell myself, and I stay aloof from people like that, I am not like those swindlers, adulterers, unjust, tax gatherers. I'm not like those yucky people. But he, Jesus Christ, keeps moving toward sinners, keeps moving toward those yucky people, people like them and people like you. And he keeps identifying with sinners because he comes to take the sinner's place. He is receiving sinners, taking the blame for sinners like me. And he is the one with greater grace, pursuing this independent, arrogant, smug person. T.J., he's saying, stop running and rest in me. Come, T.J., humble yourself and I will lift you up. You see, when I see him, then I want to pursue all these imperatives at the end of the text. Submit to God, resist the devil, draw near to God, cleanse your hands, purify your heart, looking at him unlocks the door to all those imperatives. When I'm believing, not trusting myself, then I can really face my own egotistical superiority complex and I can weep, be miserable, and I can even laugh at myself. Even have fun with it, like a child. Jesus Christ values the outsiders, the children who don't dare come forward Don't dare lift their eyes to heaven. He comes to us. He came down to us. And that's how he is. Seeing that and believing it. That is the key to a less stressful year. Let's pray together. Lord, as we live this year and even right now as we come to this table, may all of our confidence be away from ourselves, Fixed on Jesus Christ who loved us and gave himself for us Father if there are people in the congregation today who are not Believing on Jesus Christ have not closed The deal with Christ have not put their past present and future into his nail-scarred hands We pray that your Holy Spirit would draw them to yourself even now in Jesus name. We pray amen