And if you would like to just get your Bible back again and just have that passage in front of you that we read earlier in our service, Luke 18 verse 9. If you've lost the page, it's page 1,628. And let's just pray and ask God to help us as we come to his word. Father in heaven, we thank you very much indeed for the opportunity now to consider your word together. And we thank you that your word is living and active, and it's able to save us. I do pray, Father, that you would help me to be able to teach your word well. And I do pray also, Father, that you will help each one of us to hear what you have to say to us. And Lord, do pray that you would open up our eyes and to see the truth and draw us to yourself. We pray through Jesus Christ. Amen. Now, this story that we read, in this story, Jesus tells us what we need to do in order to truly know God. And there are basically two things that you have to do. Just pause down to this. Number one, you have to properly understand that you are a sinner who has offended God's laws. And then secondly, You have to depend on God and God alone to make you right with God. And what Jesus teaches in this story is that if you do those two things, if you confess your sin, if you realize you're a sinner and you throw yourself on God for mercy, God will make you right with himself. He will wash away your sins. He will give you eternal life forever. And He will never undo what He has done. And that promise is there for anybody and everybody no matter how bad they have been. Now, as we think about this story, I want to do so under five headings. First of all, I want us to think about why Jesus told the story. Then I want us to think about the two men who went to the temple to pray. Then I want us to think about the prayer of the Pharisee. then the prayer of a tax collector, and then to consider the verdict of Jesus. So first of all, why Jesus told the story? Have a look at verse 9. To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everybody else, Jesus told this parable. So Jesus told this story because of those he knew that there would be some who might be confident of their own righteousness. Now the literal translation is who trusted in themselves that they were righteous. Basically, different people have got two views. Essentially, the view of how you get to God comes down to one of two views. Either you see yourself as somebody who has got to work their own way to heaven through their works, Or you see yourself as somebody who is going to depend on what God has done. Now, I often ask a question of different people. Some of you who are in this room will have heard me ask you this question. And that question is as follows. Can you say for sure that if you were to die tonight, you would go to heaven? I just put that question to you now. I'm not going to ask you to answer out loud, but just think in your own mind. Can you say for absolute definite that if you were to die tonight, you would go to heaven? How would you answer that? Now, a lot of people answer in the following way. A lot of people would say, well, I'd like to hope I'd go to heaven. It's like what Bonnie was saying in her testimony before she came to realize the truth about Christ. I'd like to hope I'd go to heaven, somebody would say. They'd say, well, you know, I live a decent life. I work hard. I look after my children. I don't steal. I believe in God, I go to church fairly frequently, not as often as I wish I should, I know, but fairly frequently. I would like to hope, many would say, I'd like to hope that I'm going to go to heaven. Now, if you would answer in that way, just analyze that for a moment. Who or what are you relying on to take you to heaven? If you would say, well I would hope I'm going to go to heaven because I do this and because I do that and because I do this and because I do that, what are you actually trusting in to get you to heaven if that's how you answer? You're actually trusting in yourself. You're putting your confidence in your own works. Putting your confidence in your own righteousness. Now that is exactly what Jesus is addressing here. The person who puts their confidence in themselves. You might say, well I believe in God. Of course I believe in God and I believe in Jesus. But the question is, what are you actually relying on? to get you to heaven. You might believe in God, but what are you actually depending on to make you good enough for heaven? And if you analyse it, you may well find that actually it's yourself and what you're doing and not Jesus actually. And the other thing Jesus said is about the people that he is addressing to, is that who look down on everybody else. Now that is the flip side of relying on yourself to get to heaven. Because if you rely on yourself to get to heaven, you'll inevitably be a little bit proud, a little bit self-righteous, a little bit holier than thou, when you think of other people who are not as good as you. So you say, well, you know, I live a good life. At least I'm not like these paedophiles or rapists or mass murderers. I'm not like them. And so this attitude of relying on self actually leads you to show contempt for other people. It may be that some of us here are Christians, and we've come to trust in the Lord Jesus as our Saviour, and we know that we're sinners, and we know that we're not going to heaven because of our works. And yet, even as Christians, we can find ourselves slipping back into a form of self-righteousness, a form of religious pride. Maybe, oh, well I'm so right in my views. I'm not like these other Christians who are a bit off in their understanding. Or, oh, God has worked in my life and I don't... I'm not dishonest with my taxes and I don't do this or that thing that these non-Christians do. And we can actually find ourselves even as Christians starting to slip back into self-righteousness. So really, when you analyze it, when it says Jesus told this parable to some who were confident of their own righteousness, if you actually start to think about it, it probably comes out in an awful lot of us. Actually, maybe all of us need to hear what Jesus is saying here in this story. Okay, so that's why Jesus told the story because he was aware that there were some who were trusting in themselves to make them good enough for heaven and were looking down on other people. Now, the next thing is there were two men. Jesus told this story of two men. Now, this may well be a true story. We don't know. It may be that this is something that actually happened. There were these two men that went up to the temple to pray. But there were two men who were complete opposites in terms of their perceived morality. One of them was If we go up to verse, we're talking about verse 10 now. Two men went to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. Now both of those terms would probably have to be explained to us in the 21st century. The Pharisees, we know from the Gospels, We can piece together from what Jesus says in other places and from what Paul says about himself, the Apostle Paul who used to be a Pharisee. The Pharisees were those who took their religion very, very seriously. They memorised large portions of the Bible and they were very, very careful to exactly do everything that the Bible said, the Old Testament of course. They went through all the different laws that there were and they were really, really careful to make sure that they did absolutely everything, at least as they thought, everything that the Bible commanded. So, and they were respected by the people around them as really good noble, upright people. They were treated as it were, if I use the term saint, not in a proper biblical sense, but in terms of popular understanding of the term saint, you know, somebody who's a really good person. That's how they were thought of. That was one of them. The other one was a tax collector. Now, again we know from the rest of the New Testament, the tax collectors were despised and very immoral in the way they went about their business. They were despised because they were working for the occupying Roman government. If you think about maybe somebody living in France during the Second World War, and how in France during the Second World War some of the, quite a lot of the people who were in government became collaborators with the Nazis. And they would help to find, for instance, Jews and get them sent back to Germany to be sent to the gas chambers. And these collaborators were hated by the ordinary population because they were working for the enemy. Now, that's the sort of That's the sort of way that this tax collector would have been treated. Moreover, the tax collectors were given a great deal of power to extort money from people. Basically, the government, the Roman authorities said to them, look, as long as you give us what we want from you, we don't really care how you get the money. So, suppose that the Roman authorities say, okay, we want in today's money, say for example, 500,000 pounds from you. Well, they can then go around all these different people getting money out of them by hook or by crook. And they could get, they could actually take maybe a million pounds. And then they give the 500,000 pounds to the Romans and they keep the rest for themselves. So they were on to a really good deal as far as they were concerned, but many of them had no conscience about, you know, robbing old ladies of their savings, or people who were very poor demanding a lot of money from them. And people had no power to stop them because they had the power of the Roman state behind them. And so, you know, any arguments would be referred to the centurion, the local Roman centurion. So we see then, here are these two men, one who would have been regarded as being a really good and upright man, the sort of person that people would say, oh well they're a good person, they're the sort of person who'd go to heaven, and the other who would be regarded as like a complete rogue. And if you want to know sort of how you'd think of a tax collector would be thought of today, think of, you know, when somebody, you know, from time to time there are these terrible cases of somebody who rapes a child and then murders that child. And the tabloids put up on the, you know, the, you know, beast! May he rot in hell and all these sorts of things. Now that's the sort of attitude that would have been displayed towards the tax collectors. Okay, now let's go on then to the prayer of the Pharisee. Now I say prayer, but really you could say so-called prayer, or prayer in inverted commas. Because if we have a look at this, verse 11, The Pharisee stood up and prayed, it says about himself, but if you look there, there's a little footnote, A, and it could be translated to himself. And quite a few commentators reckon that that is actually the correct translation. He wasn't actually praying about himself, but he was praying to himself. He wasn't actually praying to God at all. The only thing that gives any indication that it was a prayer is because he has the word God at the beginning. But all the rest is about himself. There's no confession of sin. There's no request for help from God. It's really a sort of recital of his achievements. And when you actually start to look at what he said, you realize that actually it was full of falsehood. Self-congratulation, false self-congratulation. It starts, the falsehood starts from the very beginning. He says, God, I thank you that I am not like other men. Well, that's his first big mistake, because If he knew his Bible, he would know that he is just like other men. Because the Bible says, the Old Testament says, which he should have known, there is no one righteous, not even one. There is no one who does good. There is no one who seeks God. These are quotations from the Old Testament, which he's supposed to know. If he knew his Bible, he would know the doctrine of the fall of man, which is there from Genesis chapter 1, about how God placed Adam and Eve in the garden. In Genesis 2 and Genesis 3, God placed Adam and Eve in the garden. He said to them that they were free to eat of all of the trees in the garden except for one, which is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And God said to them, on the day you eat of that tree, you shall surely die. and Adam and Eve did the very thing God told them not to do. They ate of that tree and then what happened was their nature was fundamentally changed. They became hostile towards God and hostile towards one another. And that sinful nature has come down to all mankind. And all of us are sinful in our tendencies. So for the man to say, I thank you that I'm not like other men, is completely wrong. He is exactly, he is like other men. Now, the sins that we commit might be different. They might come out in different ways. Some people's sins come out in very obvious ways, in violence and idolatry and sexual immorality. Other people's sins come out in much more subtle ways, things like pride and envy and ingratitude. But we're all the same in the sense that we all share a common fallen nature. He's like other men. And then notice how he says, he says, I'm not like other men. He says, not robbers, evildoers and adulterers. He says, I'm not a robber. Well again, how self-deceived he was because he was a robber. He didn't love God as he should have loved God. He robbed God of the honour that was due to him. He robbed other people of the love that was due to them. Most notably, this poor tax collector showed contempt for him when he should have been loving him. He was a robber. He didn't steal people's money, but he was robbing other things from God and from men. He said he wasn't unrighteous. The literal translation where it says evildoers is unrighteous. That's what he said about himself. But he was unrighteous, as all of us are unrighteous in our natural self. He was unjust. Could he honestly say he'd never treated anybody unfairly? Had he never done anyone evil? Had he never insulted anyone? Never spread any gossip? Never got angry in a wrong way? Of course he had and we all have. He was unrighteous as we all are ourselves. And then he said he wasn't an adulterer. Well, he may have not committed the sin of actual physical adultery, But Jesus said, if a man looks at a woman with lust in his eyes, he's already committed adultery with her in his heart. Could he really say that he was not an adulterer? Can you, can I say that we're not adulterers, we've never had lust in our hearts and minds? And then he said, or even like this tax collector looking down with scorn and contempt upon this man who he considered to be morally inferior to himself. Showing contempt which is itself sinful. And then he went on to say, I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get. Now he's really doing well, he thinks, because according to the Old Testament law, they only have to fast once a year, the day of atonement. But he says, I, I don't just fast once a year, I fast twice a week. Well, isn't he doing well? So he thinks. As if somehow doing these rituals could somehow earn him a place in heaven. And so many make the same mistake today, don't they? They think, well, I go to church every Sunday. Or I go to mass. I go to confession. I've got my priest. He comes and pours oil on me when I'm about to die. I've been on pilgrimage. I don't eat meat on Fridays. Even I've been baptized. If we depend on any ceremony, to make us right with God, we are gravely mistaken. And then he thought, well, I can buy my way to heaven. He's given his tenth. Now, of course, it's very good and right that we should give generously of the income that we have, both to the Lord's work and to the poor. That is right and that's good. But salvation is not something you can buy. You can't buy a place in heaven. Peter says, you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver and gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your forefathers, but with the precious blood of Christ. It's not with perishable, not with silver and gold that you go to heaven. So we see that this prayer of the Pharisee, it's, you know, when you first read it, you think, oh, that sounds really good. Oh, he's a great guy. But actually, when you break it down and you analyze it, you realize it's a hypocritical sham from beginning to end, making out that he's better than he really is. And it shows really his complete ignorance about himself. Well then what about then the prayer, coming on then fourthly to the prayer of the tax collector. Well the thing to notice about the tax collector is that whereas the Pharisee went into the temple as bold as brass, standing in front of God and you know full of his own righteousness and goodness, the tax collector says Verse 13, he stood at a distance, he would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, God have mercy on me, a sinner. What do you not have here? You don't have a single attempt to justify himself, Not a single plea, oh, but I had, there was this exonerating circumstance or there was that exonerating circumstance. He doesn't say, oh, God, look, you know I'm a cheat because, well, my parents used to cheat on me and, you know, I have to cheat on others because I, you know, it's all I've ever known, cheating or something like that. No excuses. No, no sort of story to get him off the hook. He just simply confessed to God that he's a sinner. God have mercy on me, a sinner. Full stop. That's what he was, he's a sinner. He's broken God's laws. He's not done what he should have done. He hasn't loved God as he should have loved God. He hasn't loved other people as he should have loved them. He's a sinner. And he says, God have mercy on me, I said. Now, I only really discovered what I was preparing for this week. I've been reading the Bible for so many years, but I only discovered this week that there's a special Greek word that's used there. Probably some of you knew this already, but I didn't realise this. It's the word that is used for the payment or for the turning away of somebody's anger. He says, in other words he's saying, turn away your anger from me. The English word that is used in the older translations in a number of places for this word is to propitiate. That's what he's saying. Please make a propitiation for my sins. Now what that means is he realised that his sins had to be paid for. See, when the translation is a bit weaker and you think, well, God have mercy on me, you might not realise exactly what that's saying. What it's really saying is, God, turn away your anger from my sins and turn your anger on to somebody else. That's what it means. To propitiate means that the anger is turned away from you and it's turned on to somebody else. Somehow he knew, somehow he grasped, that somebody had to pay for his sins. Jesus hadn't yet died on the cross. The gospel hadn't yet been fully made known. But he grasped, somehow, he understood something the Pharisee didn't have a clue about. He not only saw that he was a sinner, but he also saw that somebody needed to make a payment for his sins. So he said, God, please make a payment for my sins. Please turn your anger, your wrath away from me onto somebody else." And how does that happen? Well, we now know from the rest of the New Testament that it happened at the cross. That Jesus was the one who made that payment for sins. Paul says in Romans 5, 28, God displayed Jesus publicly as a propitiation in his blood through faith. Jesus is that propitiation. Jesus is that one who makes a payment for sins. Jesus is the one through whom the sin, the wrath of God, the anger of God is turned away from us. See, just think of it in terms of this way. Here we've sinned. God is a holy God and His anger for our sin is bearing down upon us. It's like a great avalanche and it's coming down towards us and we are absolutely incapable of rescuing ourselves from that. But Jesus comes and that anger of God is diverted away from us and onto Jesus on the cross. And that's how we can be forgiven. And this man saw it, he saw it. He needed to have that payment made and he needed the anger of God to be turned away from him onto someone else and that person was Jesus. Well then, we have finally then the verdict. Jesus said Verse 14, I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. This man, the tax collector, the sinner, the one who is hated by others for his outlandish behavior, he is the one who went home justified before God, right with God. Whereas the Pharisee, who everybody would have said, oh, he's a good person, he went home not right with God. And then Jesus draws a general lesson. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled. and he who humbles himself will be exalted. If you push yourself forward as that Pharisee did, God I'm not, I'm good, I'm not too bad, I live a good decent life. You push yourself up, God will cast you down. If you're not a Christian, that means he'll cast you down into hell. If you're a Christian, you've been saved, well, you won't cast you down into hell, but God will humble you. He'll discipline you if you go back to self-righteousness and pride. But on the other hand, if you humble yourself, you admit your sin, you admit your need, you don't put on airs and graces before God or before other people, then God Now the tax collector went home justified before God. Now I want to ask you a question as we finish. How are you going to go home today? How are you going to go home today? Are you going to go home justified before God? You could go home from this place right with God. If you've never been saved before, you could be saved today. It's as simple as just realising you're a sinner and asking God to save you. It's just as simple as that. You don't have to have performed any good works beforehand. You don't have to have worked yourself up into some sort of emotional state for your guilt and your sin. Some people, you know, are very emotional about their sin and wrongdoing. Others, it's almost like matter of fact. That's not the thing. The question, you just simply have to come to God and admit your sin and ask Him to save you. And if you will do that, you will be saved. And you will be forever counted as right before God. So what are you going to do? Will you do that? Will you humble yourself? Will you admit you're a sinner? Will you ask God to save you? Or will you carry on with the pretense that you're basically a decent person and you've never done anybody any harm and God should be happy to have someone like you in heaven? If you carry on with that way of life, that way of thinking, you'll never go to heaven. If you humble yourself, admit your need, come to God, ask him to save you, you'll be saved. Your sins will be washed away because of what he's done through Jesus Christ. Well, could we just have a few moments of prayer? Just think about what we've heard now. And just invite you just to make your own response to God in your heart.