I invite you to turn in your copy of God's Word to the Gospel of Matthew. We'll be looking at Matthew chapter 6 today. So after taking a break for the holidays and looking at different texts, we're back into our regular series, the Gospel of Matthew, and we find ourselves now in chapter 6. And before we read that, let me just briefly get us back up to speed since we've been away from this now for a few weeks. So, Matthew chapter 6 is right in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount. The Sermon on the Mount is the most famous sermon, the most quoted sermon in history, and we find ourselves now here in chapter 6 right in the middle of it. And let's remember what Jesus has been talking about in the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus is addressing his disciples. He's not talking to the crowds in general. He is speaking to his people, to his followers. And what he's describing is, what is life like in the kingdom of God? If you are a follower of Jesus, you are now in the kingdom of God. And so what is life to be like? What is expected of you? And you might remember in chapter 5, when the Sermon on the Mount began, starts with the Beatitudes, right? Blessed are those who are poor in spirit. Blessed are those who mourn and so on. And in those Beatitudes, he laid out for us what is the essential character of a follower of Jesus. If you are a Christian, this is what you are like. And then in the middle of chapter five, he challenged us and said, if you are a follower, then you're not to be away from the world, but you're to be involved in the world as an influence for good. You are to be salt to help keep the world from descending into further corruption. You are to be light, bringing the message of the good news of Jesus Christ. And then at the end of chapter 5, Jesus turned to looking at the law. How are we as the followers of Jesus to obey the law? And he addressed something that was a problem in his time and isn't a problem in our time. And that is that so often all we do in the law is look at the surface aspect. He talked about things like, well, you know, should you, is it okay if you simply don't kill anyone? On the outside, you can say, well, I've never murdered anyone. And then he got under our skin and got into the heart of the matter and said, what really matters is how you feel about people on the inside. If you hate them, then you're just as bad as a murderer. You may not have let that then work out into an actual physical act, but it still is an issue. And he addressed that with other aspects of the law. And now in chapter six, he's going to continue that. And I want you to see something that won't be so obvious if we just had started chapter six, especially because we've been away for four weeks. And that is this. What Jesus is dealing with is how we live out our righteousness as people who are followers of Jesus. We are called to live righteous lives. And what he did at the very end of chapter 5 is he's dealing with how we live out our righteousness on a horizontal level, on how we deal with others. That's why he talked about how we treat other people, whether it's committing adultery, whether it's murder, you know, hate in our hearts or lust in our hearts. But he was on the horizontal plane. What he's going to do here in chapter six is he's now turning how to how we live lives in a vertical relationship that is in our relationship with God. How can you be righteous in your relationship with God? That's what we're going to be doing here. And the same thing that he did at the end of chapter five, when he looked at the law of God and he said that too often what we do is we only try to keep the surface part of the law and we don't get to the heart of it. He's going to do the same thing with our religious duties, because that's what he's dealing with here. our religious duties and he's going to especially look at the danger of self-righteousness which is when we begin to think that we're righteous because in fact if you take a look at chapter six you're going to see we're going to skip something we're going to read Verses one through six, which talks about our religious duties, one of those being praying, he's gonna give us a model prayer, that's the Lord's Prayer. And then he continues talking about religious duties. And so we're gonna skip the Lord's Prayer for today, because I wanna look at that one in more detail on its own. I just wanna focus on his calling us out on how we live out our religious duties. We're gonna read verses one through six, skip the Lord's Prayer, and just read 16 through 18. And what you're gonna see is that Jesus is saying, we can think that we're righteous because we do obey, because we do pray, because we do give, and so on. And see how Jesus warns us away from that. So with that then, let's turn to Matthew chapter six. Let's start by reading the first six verses. Jesus says beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them for then you will have no reward from your father who is in heaven thus when you give to the needy sound no trumpet before you as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets that they may be praised by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret, and your father who sees in secret will reward you. And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites, for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners that they may be seen by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your father who is in secret and your father who sees in secret will reward you. Now let's jump down to verse 16. And when you fast, do not look gloomy like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces that their fasting may be seen by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face that your fasting may not be seen by others, but by your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you." Thus far, the reading of God's word. May he bless it to our hearing, especially as he's preached to us this morning. Well, people of God, if you had been in one of the churches that I had the privilege of serving nearly 30 years ago, and if you had been sitting in the pew next to this man, you would have seen a man who was pleasant, a family man with a lovely family. You would have looked at the way he was dressed, and you would have seen that his clothes were nice. He was a well-dressed man, but not pretentious. If you would have gone to his house, you would have seen that he lived in a comfortably large home, very similar to the ones that we have here in Flower Mound, but by no means a mansion. If you would have looked at his car, yeah, it was a nice car, an upscale sedan, a Mercedes, but not a Bentley, not a Rolls, not a Lamborghini. The thing was about this man is that he easily could have afforded a Lamborghini and a mansion and it wouldn't have cost him barely anything because he was one of the richest men not just in town, not even in the region, but really on the whole East Coast. One of the things he used to do is he would collect original letters from C.S. Lewis and when he would find out that one of them was on the market, he might just jump on the Concord that night and just fly over to the UK to pick it up. He was at that level. But the thing is that virtually no one in the church knew that he was so wealthy. Those of us in the session knew because he had come to us after being at the church for a while and being a member, and he had offered to fully fund a new position that we wanted to open up with an assistant pastor. And he's like, okay, I'll go and just underwrite that whole position. And later on, when Mary Jo and I were first going overseas with MTW, he committed to paying a full 50% of the whole mission's budget. And in fact, over time, I got to know that he was actually supporting and funding dozens, just scores of missionaries. But if you were around this man, you would never know any of these things. He chose to live in a rather modest part of town rather than the equivalent of what here would be like Highland Park. He never name-dropped. In fact, he had a very famous brother. If I said his brother's name, you would all sit there and say, oh. But you would never know being around him. Now contrast this man. with what we see, for example, in Hollywood, right? When a celebrity comes out and they want to slap their name on some charitable event so that everybody knows that they're involved with helping these people. You know, the virtue signaling, we've even got a term for it now, that is so common in our culture. And they want to make sure that their name is attached to something so that you can see just how righteous they are. So, you know, something like the John Canales Foundation for the Terminally Frustrated Tom Selleck Wannabes. You know, that kind of thing. They want to make sure that their name is associated with it. And we, that's not all celebrities, but we do recognize the glory hounds among them, right? But why do people behave this way? Why do we behave this way? And the answer is simple. It's because all of us long for approval. We all long for approval, first from our parents, and then from our peers. We long for validation. We long to be told, you are worth it. You have value. And because of that longing, we then turn to seeking approval of others. And that's what can lead to self-righteous behavior. It's that that Jesus wants to deal with here as he talks about these different religious duties. And so as we look at this passage, we're going to see three things. We're going to see the danger of self-righteousness, the underlying cause of self-righteousness, and the remedy to self-righteousness. What is the danger of self-righteousness? Why is that a problem? Then we want to look at the underlying cause of self-righteousness. Why do we fall into it? And lastly, we want to look at the remedy to self-righteousness. How can we correct it? How can we address it in our lives? Let's start with the first of these points, the danger of self-righteousness. And I just realized my notes here are having a little problem. Let's see if I can fix that. Because if we can't, we're going to have real trouble turning the page. There we go, got that taken care of, all right. So you look at verse one, and Jesus is talking about practicing your righteousness. And when you hear that term righteousness, what does he mean? I've already said that it has to do with our religious duties. And the way the ESV has translated it, practicing your righteousness, is literally correct, but it doesn't bring out what righteousness really means in this particular passage. I think other translations who may not be as faithful to the exact words, do actually bring out the meaning. So, for example, the NRSV, which is a cousin of the ESV, calls this practicing your piety, or the Good News Translation, performing your religious duties. The Revised English Bible calls this parading your religion. So what Jesus is talking about here are these external religious duties, these things that we do, good things in and of themselves that we do in the service of God. And he's illustrating them with three examples. As you saw in verses two through four, he talks about giving to the needy. And then in verses five through six, he talks about praying. And then in verses 16 through 18, he talks about fasting. Those are not the only kind of religious duties that we have, but these are the three that Jesus addresses. And again, I think it's very important that Jesus is affirming that righteousness has two dimensions. It has that horizontal dimension and how we relate to other people. You might want to call that morality, how we deal with others. right how we serve our neighbor but there's also this very important vertical dimension of our righteousness you might call that religious aspect or being pious or piety that has to do with our duties whether they might be public like coming to church or private like taking time to read your bible and do devotions and so on and what's important is that in Jesus addressing both and in correcting both He doesn't cancel either one. He lets us know that we don't have to choose between being pious people who focus only on God or moral people who focus on how we treat one another. In other words, it's not between loving God and loving neighbor. He affirms both. And in both of these spheres, He says the same thing, the same thing that he said about how we deal with one another on the horizontal plane is what he's saying here. That the problem is that you and I get wrapped up in the ways of the world and we only get involved in these things externally, but he expects of his followers for us to be able to do these things with the right heart. That's the ticket, that's the key, the interpretive key to both what we saw in chapter five and what we're seeing here. What Jesus is addressing is, are we approaching these things as matters of the heart? And that's why he warns us right in verse 1, right? He starts by saying, beware of practicing your righteousness. Notice he's not condemning that you are doing certain religious things. There are some Christians who say that there really is no place for these sort of external religious duties like going to church and giving and all that. All that matters is how you treat other people. They want a sort of a religion-less Christianity that is to simply focus on active service to those around us. But Jesus, if you notice carefully, he is affirming the place of all these religious duties. He says in verse 2, when you give to the needy, And then he says in verse five, when you pray. In verse 16, when you fast. In other words, Jesus expects us to be doing these things. So religious duties have an important place in the lives of Christians. We need to get that out of the way and establish that. And what Jesus is dealing with here is the same concern he had when he was talking about how we deal with one another on the horizontal plane. In the vertical plane, it's the same issue. His concern is, are we doing it with the right heart? And that's why he says in verse 1, if you look at it again carefully, That's what matters to Jesus. It's not even that we do that before other people because that's sometimes unavoidable. But the problem is that our motive is to be seen by others. That's what drives us. That's what impels us to do these things so that other people can see it. In verse 2, he says that we give that they may be praised by others. Verse 5, they pray that they may be seen by others. Verse 16, they fast that their fasting may be seen by others. So this is the danger of self-righteousness. It's when our motive in doing these things, which are good things, things that Jesus expects us to be doing, but we do them in order to seek the approval of others, in order to build up our reputation. You might remember that Jesus finished chapter 5 by calling us to be perfect. But now he's warning us. Why is it that you strive to be perfect? Why is it that you strive to do your best? Is it because you're truly seeking to please God and to look for his approval? Or are you seeking the approval of others? Are you doing these things because you want to look out or seek the glory of God? Or are you only concerned about securing your reputation? As the Canadian theologian Don Carson has put it, the goal of pleasing the Father is traded for its pygmy cousin, the goal of pleasing men. How often do we do that? Do we live more for how others see us than for the way that God sees us? And here's the thing, even in verse 1, Jesus lays the smackdown on us and lets us know, if you are behaving in this way with those wrong motives, then that act which you think is a service to God really is not. It does not count as service towards God. When you do it to enhance your reputation, it loses its value. He even says in verse 1 that if you do these things to be seen by others, then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven. And really, why should there be a reward? Because after all, what were you doing when we act in this way? You're seeking to secure your own reputation, not to serve God. And so, you already have your reward because you aimed at increasing your reputation and you got it. And so there's nothing more and we can expect nothing further. Jesus makes that very, very clear. So that's the danger of self-righteousness. And let's briefly look at the three different examples that he gives of three illustrations to see how that applies even to us today. He talks in verses 2-4 about giving to the needy. Obviously he's talking about financial giving, but there's other ways in which we give. We sometimes give with the generosity of our time when we help others and so on. So it's not just limited to that. And Jesus is saying that the folks who do this When he tells us to do this, he says, sound no trumpet, verse two, sound no trumpet before you as the hypocrites do in the synagogue and in the streets that they may be praised by others. So here are these folks who are going to the synagogue and they're gonna put their money in the poor box and they sound the trumpet ostensibly to get the attention of the poor and let the poor know, here's some relief for you. But in reality, the reason they're doing it is so that everybody can see that they're the ones who are putting the money in. And it's interesting that Jesus calls them hypocrites. Because that is a Greek word that's been translated perfectly into English. The word hypocrite is literally the word for actor in the Greek. A person who is acting in a Greek theater. And what is an actor? An actor is a person who lays aside his true identity and assumes a false one. In other words, an actor is a person who pretends to be someone that they're not. And Jesus says that's what we do when we do these things to be seen. We become actors. We put on masks because the Greek actors used to wear masks. And we want to portray ourselves to those around us as something other than we're not. We want to look like we are righteous. That's what we do, right? So we want to put our name on things. We want people to see. I remember some years ago when Gray was involved in a golf clinic for kids with disabilities. And the entire event was taken up with this corporate sponsor who wanted to be in every picture, who wanted to be seen with all the kids, who wanted to be holding the check, you know, taking a big picture and everything. That was the highlight of the event rather than the kids. And you might say, well, thankfully, we're nothing like them. I'm never going to be giving a large reward or a donation to a hospital or something. But even if we're not identical, we do find ourselves very often blowing our own trumpets. Think about those times when you might tell someone how blessed you are to support such and such a missionary. Right, you're talking about, oh, look at the blessing it is to me, but of course you're letting everybody in your conversation know that you are giving to that person. And here Jesus says, don't even let your left hand know what your right hand is doing. But here we are letting everybody know, right? Some years ago, you guys might remember in 2009, the Geneva Bible, the folks who published that came out with a special legacy edition of the 1599 Geneva Bible. You could buy it, it's a nice little thing, but if you bought this particular one and you paid more, you get to have your name in it so that everybody could see. We can put our names on our pews, we can put our names in the front of Bibles, all sorts of ways that you see when churches and ministries are raising their funds and all sorts of ways of playing on people's egos, because that's really what it is. It's an ego boost, right? You get to walk and look at the stained glass windows, and underneath there's a little name there of the person who made that window possible. That's the same as trumpeting, just like these hypocrites did. And the result is the same. In verse two, Jesus says, they have received their reward. That's it. And the word that's translated here as have received is a word from the world of business. It's a word from the world of commerce. It literally means they have been given a receipt indicating it's been paid in full. And that's what it's telling us. When you do this, it might seem kind of harsh, you're saying that I've done this thing where I've given money to the needy and God says I get nothing for it. But you got to remember in the eyes of God, it was not a gift to the poor, it was a purchase. Because you were not really helping the poor, you were simply using the poor to help yourself. And that's the thing we have to realize. When we seek the praise of men and then we receive the praise of men, Jesus says there's nothing more to come. You have been paid in full and you cannot expect a heavenly reward in addition. How about praying? In verse 5, he says, you must not be like the hypocrites. There he comes with that phrase again. Who are the hypocrites? Those who love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners that they may be seen by others. Again, his problem is not whether you love to pray, but it's when you love to do that to be seen by others. And that raises a real danger. There's a danger whenever you pray in public. Whether it might be up front during a worship service, whether it might be in a prayer meeting where we're all gathered, it might be just in your home fellowship group as you gather this week. And what is that danger? That danger is that we pray not to God, but to the audience. You know what I mean? I know I'm not, I'm talking about people out there. You guys would never do this, but right. We begin to pray to the audience. We begin to use terms and You might say acceptable cliches, right? Oh, give traveling mercies, bless their heart. You begin to use all these different things. You begin to use these deep, rich tones, right, and these well-pitched intensity that really shows that you're in tune. We all know the person comes on there, oh, Father God, we come before you now. With that intensity, and you say, oh, what a man of prayer. What a woman of deep devotion, right? That's a real danger. We end up loving to pray in public because we end up praying to the audience. You have to look at your own life and say, what motivates me when I pray in public? One of the things I loved, you've all met Brandon. Brandon was our intern for many years. Pray for Brandon as he goes to Presbytery this week. He'll be doing the oral portion of his licensure exam. But you know, when Brandon became a new believer, and he's not changed, so this is not just something that he's lost, but I remember hearing him pray for the first time. And it was so heartfelt. It was just so I don't mean this in a bad way, but simple, right? It didn't have any guile in it. And he still prays the same way, thankfully. That's what we're called to do, not what Jesus is warning us about here. Look at verse 16. He talks then about fasting, about fasting. We'll talk a little bit more about fasting next week, what we should do. But the thing to say now is when we fast, it's meant to be a matter of self-discipline, where you are setting aside something with the goal of being able to focus on God. The setting aside of something is not for in and of itself. It's so that you can focus on God. So you might, for example, set aside food or even water for a time so that you're not distracted and you can focus on praying, for example. But there's many other ways in which we fast. We are fasting right now. We've given up all sorts of activities that the world is engaging in right now, sports and outdoor activities, or even sleeping in, and we're setting that aside in order to be focusing on God. So there's all sorts of ways in which we fast. But the key thing in all fasting is that it always has a cost. There's always something that you surrender, that you give up, that costs you in order to be able to focus on God. And what Jesus is warning us about here is not that we do the fasting, but we do it in such a way that we highlight the cost, that we let everybody see what it's costing us. Right? So he has here that they look gloomy. Verse 16, they look gloomy like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces that their fasting may be seen by others. They don't wash their face, they neglect their personal hygiene, everything so they can be seen as the poor people who are fasting, right? And again, we may not do that if we're fasting for food or water, but we tend to do it in other ways. Like, for example, when you do your devotions with your family when houseguests are there. I hope I'm not stepping on too many toes, right? Oh, we gotta do devotions because they're here. They have to be able to see that we do our devotions, right? We just had men's grill night and, you know, the guys here all have a lot of fun. And sometimes we'll joke around and we'll say something like, stop it, you can't be laughing, we're Presbyterian. Okay, I've got a few laughs, I know that. But why do we say that jokingly? Because there's some truth. Maybe in a prior generation more so and less so today, but there still are those around who are such good Presbyterians that they will never smile because after all, there can be no pleasure. We have to refrain from all these things because we're so holy. Those are the sort of ways that we communicate the same sort of thing that Jesus was talking about back then. The purpose of fasting, again, we'll do a little bit more of this next week on the positive thing, positive side of it, but the purpose of fasting is to discipline ourselves. It's not to advertise ourselves. But it's to discipline ourselves, and Jesus says the same thing. If we do do it to advertise ourselves and the admiration of our onlookers, it's all the reward we'll get. So when we look at all three of these, we see that the fundamental problem is the same, and that is that we live for the applause of others. We hunger for their praise. As Jesus says in John 5, 44, you like to receive praise from one another, but you do not try to win praise from the one who alone is God. And later in John 12, 43, he said, you love praise from men more than the praise from God. We become hypocrites. We become actors, actors who wear masks. We hide who we truly are. In fact, so much so that, you know, it's because we're really looking for the applause of others and we don't want them to see who we really are. Margaret Thatcher in the realm of politics once said, being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren't. And it's absolutely true. If you are a lady, you can tell, you don't have to be going around telling it. If you are powerful, people can tell, you don't have to go around trying to prove it. Well, the same thing applies here. If you are righteous and you have to go be telling everybody about it, then you really are not. That's the danger of self-righteousness. If you have to show other people that you're righteous, then you really are not. That's what Jesus is telling us. So people of God, we have to ask ourselves the question, what is it that drives your obedience? What is your motive when you practice your righteousness, when you give, when you pray, when you focus on the things of the Lord and many other things that we can be doing? Is your motive one of being oriented to God so that, yes, you're showing kindness to your neighbor, but you're doing it, for example, in gratitude for all the kindness that he has shown you? Or are you doing it instead with a man orientation? You're seeking the approval of others. That's the true danger of self-righteousness. It's what Jesus is warning us about in these passages. But now let's go to our second point. And what we want to look at here is what is it that impels us then to so seek the approval of others rather than the approval of God? So let's look at the underlying cause behind self-righteousness. Why is it that we wear these masks? Where we can seem like we're wholly focused on God, but in reality we're just focusing on the approval of others. The first thing we want to say about this is that it starts with a failure to understand and to deal with our hearts. The reason we wear masks is in large part because we fail to understand our own hearts. We don't understand our own natures. In Jeremiah 17 verse 9 it tells us the heart is deceitful above all things. We have an incredible capacity for self delusion. So when Paul says in Romans 7-11 that sin deceived me, sin has a way of grabbing a hold of us and we delude ourselves into not realizing just how sinful we really are in our motives, not really realizing what's driving us to do certain things. We can fool ourselves into thinking that we're doing all these things for the good of God and for the good of others. And in reality, it's for our own good. It's what Hebrews 3.13 calls the deceitfulness of sin. So that's the first problem, is that we fail to understand our hearts. Those masks don't just hide our true selves from other people, but they very often mask our own hearts from ourselves. We need to have a certain level of maturity, a certain level of self-awareness to be able to see those things. John Calvin once wrote, the human heart has so many crannies where vanity hides, So many holes where falsehood lurks is so decked out with deceiving hypocrisy that it often dupes itself. It's absolutely true. So the first problem that we have, the reason that we fall into self-righteousness is that we don't know our true nature and we delude ourselves. But the second one is not only do we fail to understand ourselves, but we fail to understand the true nature of God. Now remember, the Sermon on the Mount is being spoken to Jesus' followers. And it's very telling that 13 times so far, and we're only like, you know, not even halfway through the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus has referred to God as Father 13 times. He wants us to understand the nature of God as our Father. And you see, the problem for the hypocrite, for the one who wears a mask, is that he does not know God as Heavenly Father. And if you don't know the real God, then you can't have a real relationship with him. If you don't know him, how he truly is. then you can't truly relate to him. The problem is then you end up having an insecure relationship with God because you don't really know him. And what does that lead to? It leads to you turning to what you do know, which is seeking the approval of others, caring more about what other people think. Earlier, Scott read from Luke chapter 15, the very familiar parable of the prodigal son, and you can see that there so clearly. The focus always seems to be on the younger son, right? The irreligious one, the one who runs away from God and lives however he wants apart from God's law. But the story ends with a focus on the older son who is the religious one, and he represents those who try to earn the approval of God through obedience. When the younger son, the disobedient, irreligious one, finally came to his senses, he repented of his sin. He returned to his household, and we see how the father receives him, revealing to us the nature of how God the father is. The father runs out to welcome this prodigal son with what? Open arms. There's no recrimination. He forgives him. He loves him. He celebrates his return, but the older son doesn't understand that. And Scott read from verse 28 there in Luke 15, he said, Do you hear that as language? All these men are yours, I have served you. The word they are served is literally slaved. All these years I have slaved for you. That's how he sees his relationship with his father. He doesn't understand that loving nature. The religious person sees God as a slave driver. One to whom we have to, like he said, I never disobeyed your command. That's how we see him. We don't see him as a father. We see him as a slave driver when we are that type of religious person, where we believe that we have to obey God's command in order to earn his approval. So you see, the failure to understand God as a father is very, very significant. When we don't understand who we truly are, as sinful as we are, and we don't understand the loving and forgiving nature of the father, then we begin to look for approval elsewhere. So what's the remedy to all this? Our last point, the remedy to self-righteousness. The bottom line is you and I long for approval. If you deny that about yourself, then you're falling into the very trap that we said earlier, which is we don't even know our own hearts. We long for approval. We long to be valued. We're afraid of being marginalized. We're afraid of being rejected. And that's all right because God created us to be in community. So the way that you and I can escape self-righteousness, that is that strong desire to seek approval from others, is very simple. It's to have the approval of God in its place. Because if you have the approval of God, then you do not need the approval of other people. It's exceedingly simple, right? You either have God's approval or you seek it elsewhere. But if you have the approval of God, you don't need to seek it elsewhere. And the thing is this, is that you will never gain God's approval through your obedience because you will never be able to obey him well enough to do so. Remember the standard was what we saw at the very end of chapter five, that you are to be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect. And none of us can live up to that. But the good news, the gospel, remember every time that Jesus presents us these things in the Sermon on the Mount and it seems impossibly out of reach, we always find that the answer to them is found in him. He is the one who connects us to all these things. And yes, you can be approved by the Father. How? Through the obedience of Jesus. Jesus' obedience is what leads to our approval. He lived a perfect life of obedience that you and I are incapable of ever living. But he did it in our place so that the record of his righteousness is given to us. That's what Paul calls justification. We are given his record of righteousness. And what's more is our record of sin, of disobedience, of rebellion against God, was given to Jesus and He bore it on the cross. He took upon Himself there the punishment that you and I so richly deserve because of that sin. And so it's because of what Jesus has done that we then have approval, approval that comes through Christ. When we accept Him as our Savior through faith, then we not only are saved, but something amazing happens. God adopts us as His Son, God adopts us as His daughter, and we know Him as our Heavenly Father. That's why as Jesus talking to His people in the Sermon on the Mount, those who are His followers repeatedly refers to God as Father. Because once we put our trust in Christ, we gain the Father's approval and He becomes our Father. And it's an eternal approval that we will never lose. 2 Corinthians 10.18 says, it is not the one who commends himself who is approved. How do we commend ourselves? By trying so hard to do certain things. It is not the one who commends himself who is approved, but the one whom the Lord commands. It's the Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, who commends us to the Father. And because of that, God says of you the same thing that he said of his son Jesus at his baptism. This is my beloved Son, my beloved daughter, with whom I am well pleased. Do you hear that? If you are a follower of Jesus, The Father in heaven, the one who created all things of nothing, the one who sits in sovereign on the throne of all creation and rules all things, says of you, I am well pleased. Because of your own merit, no, for we have none, but because we have now the merit of Jesus Christ upon us. And because of that, you will never, ever, ever lose that approval. People of God, this is what every person on this planet longs to hear. And you've just heard it. You've just heard it. God says of you, I am well pleased. It's a reminder that the Most High is not against you. He is for you. So who cares what other people think? What matters is what God thinks. And because of Jesus, what does he think? Well, he's gaga about you. He loves you. He's committed to you and he will never reject you as his child. He might discipline you, yes, but never reject you because, and this is an important thing to understand, there is nothing that you will ever be able to do to make God love you more because he already loves you as much as he loves his own son, Jesus. That's to the max. But there's also nothing that you can ever do that will make God love you less. Because the reason he loves you is not because of what you and I have done, but solely because of what Jesus has done. So you see, that's the remedy to self-righteousness. All the clawing, all the scraping, all the attempts to get everybody to say, wow, John's a really great guy, mean nothing. And we don't need them because we have the approval of the Father. That's the most important thing. Is there a place for serving God with religious duties? Yes, Jesus has made that case here. But as Paul says in 1 Thessalonians 2, 4, we have been approved by God not to please man, but to please God. Too often we reverse those. We try to please God in order to be approved, and Paul tells us, no, we've been approved, therefore we act to please God. I'll end by pointing out a story that I know many of you have heard, but some of you have not, and that's the story of Skinny and Sable. And it really does illustrate getting that order out of place and what a difference it makes. Back in 1991 when Mary Jo and I were still only a few years married and we didn't have any kids, we got a little dog straight from the breeder, a beautiful little tiny English Cocker Spaniel. We called her Sable. And right around that time, about a year later in 1992, my mom rescued a dog out of all the mess that was Hurricane Andrew. And that poor little dog was also skinny, so she called him Skinny, which he didn't stay skinny for long because she fed him. But Little Skinny was a dog who apparently either was abused or had had a very difficult life beforehand because he was very obedient, but he obeyed out of fear of being punished. He obeyed because he thought that he might suffer the consequences of his master or mistress in this case. But that was not the case with Sable. Sable, our dog, was a dog who had been taken straight from the breeder, who had never known anything but the love of a new couple that didn't have any children yet. And so we lavished all the love on that little dog. And Sable also was very obedient. But she obeyed out of love. She obeyed out of a desire to please us. You see, that's a significant difference that we see too often in Christians. I ask you, are you a skinny or are you a sable? Do you obey God because you're expecting to get His approval? And if you fail to get it, oh, what's He going to do to me? Or do you already recognize that you are accepted, that you are the father's son, the father's daughter, that he will never reject him. And so out of gratitude, you now seek to please him. I hope we can all be sable. And I'll say this, people of God, if we remove our masks, this church will be unleashed. When we're no longer concerned about what other people think, when we revel in the approval and the love that we already have from the Father in heaven, there's no telling what we can do as a church for his glory. May God help us to do so and to be so. Let us pray. Father in heaven, how thankful we are that in Jesus Christ we have your full approval without any recriminations against things that we have done, without any conditions or qualifications. We have your love, we have your approval. We've not just been brought into your kingdom, but we've been adopted as children of God Most High. What an amazing privilege we have. And we pray, Father, that we would understand that and it would seep deep into our bones, as it were, so that we would stop living for the approval of men and recognize that we already have your approval. Help us, Father, to not be, literally, as Jesus said, hypocrites, people who wear masks so that others would see that which we really are not. Help us to not be deceived. We know that we are a sinful people, a people who can do nothing in our own strength. But it only magnifies so much more your grace that we are a people who are loved and who are approved because of Christ, not because of who we are. Help that to become a reality for each and every one of us.