Please turn with me in your Bibles to Matthew chapter 23. We're continuing in our series of the last public discourse, the last public speech of our Lord Jesus Christ, warning us, teaching us as his followers. Today, our focus is on Matthew chapter 23, verses 23 and 24. I commence the reading at verse 23. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you tithe mint and dill and cumin and have neglected the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy and faithfulness. These you ought to have done without neglecting the others. You blind guides straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel. This is the word of God. How does one swallow a camel? I've seen some amazing things in television and movies and in YouTube, but never that. Of course, our Lord Jesus Christ is using a particular figure of speech in order to get across a point. And as our Lord Jesus is making this final public speech, he's using very strong methods to make us aware what hypocrisy is, and in so doing, encouraging us and equipping us not to become that. He's increasing our self-awareness. So we do not step into the same way of life. Because what is all too clear is how easy it is that we can become this blind as the religious leaders of Jesus' day are. We're still in this section of the woes that Jesus is pronouncing on the Scribes and Pharisees. The first set of woes was accusing them of keeping people out of the kingdom of heaven. By teaching people a works-based righteousness, the scribes and Pharisees were equipping other people to become twice a child of hell as they were, which is a terrible accusation. The second set of woes shows that their evil influence extended to twisting the truth upside down. by taking oaths and a perspective of the truth and giving excuses so that you didn't have to keep an oath and keeping truth a bit fuzzy and a bit unclear. Not willing to recognize or acknowledge that whatever we say, whether in public or in private, is in the presence of an all sovereign and an all knowing God. Today we look at the third set of woes. which are turning values upside down. If you will turn the truth upside down, you will certainly confuse and avoid justice, mercy and faithfulness. But how, you may ask, are not justice, mercy and faithfulness obvious values that everybody should know? Well, look at the history of the scriptures and your own personal history and that of the history of the world and the church. You should know very well by now that human beings are geniuses at turning values and twisting them upside down. We're very good at perverting justice. And if you can pervert justice, you will certainly know nothing of mercy and how to use mercy in the appropriate situation. And if justice and mercy are not there, Certainly, faithfulness will be nowhere to be seen. But how do we get there? How do you and I become so blind, so perverted and twisted in justice and mercy that we can contribute to a terrible problem? You and I live in a world today where you can go to any major city and you'll find a protest of some kind. A group of people will get together in some sort of public building and say, what do we want? Justice! When do we want it? Now! Right? You see it all the time. And then there's tear gas, and then police, and riot gear, and all those kinds of things. But the next day, when the rubbish is swept clean, the people are gone, all the rage and the emotions are gone, and justice is nowhere near than when we first began. It's nowhere to be seen, and it's nowhere to be seen with the scribes and the Pharisees either. Justice and mercy are now in the hands of the Romans. They kept and maintained their form of justice and mercy for the sake of the Senate and the people of Rome and all in obedience to the emperor. Note for the scribes and the Pharisees, justice and mercy are religious ideas, concepts to be taught to the masses. So their job is to educate people and keep the peace because that's their agreement with the Roman government. Make sure taxes are paid on time and people don't riot and people are quiet. Oh, to be clear, these religious leaders do serve an important priestly role. They have a place. And they know they have a particular social status and a place. And they're so desperate to keep what little that they have, they're willing to remove Jesus from public influence. But genuine injustice and mercy was their responsibility. If you would dare handle the Word of God, then there's no excuse for you. For the Word of God identifies, teaches, and makes clear what justice and mercy are. You might be under the powerful control of another nation or another government, but you can still develop confidence and assurance to know and understand what precious and true values are justice, mercy, and faithfulness. You and I are both responsible to act consistently with that, to speak truth to power when necessary. But that's not the reality for the scribes and the Pharisees. Jesus knows all too well that an injustice has been planned for him. It's on its way. And then soon also for those who follow him. Yet that does not stop him from confronting injustice and demanding that both his followers and the religious leaders of his day think carefully and repent. Pretty ugly position, isn't it? How do you and I get to this point? How do we get to a point where we can swallow a camel? Well, first, you and I, we start to tithe mint, dill, and cumin, little herbs for cooking. All the ladies here would know. Most of the guys say, ah, what's that? The ladies would understand. These are things you would grow in your garden that you would put in the pots to cook your soup. So what do you say? If you're willing to tithe the small matters, doesn't that mean you're serious about the other issues that belong to the Lord, your responsibilities? No. No, we don't do that. True, the law says in the Leviticus chapter 27 verse 30, it says, every tithe of the land, whether of the seed of the land or the fruit of the trees is the Lord's, it is holy to the Lord. Okay, there you have it. Deuteronomy chapter 14 verse 22 also says something similar. It says, you shall tithe all the yield of your seed that comes from the field year by year. Okay, so as typical, the Pharisees have a point, they have a point. But the careful study of the context of those passages in Leviticus and in Deuteronomy show that it was the greater crops, all of it, the greater things of the grain, the wine, and the oil need to be tithed. Don't play games by just tithing a little bit here and there. Oh, no, no, no, no, you need to do all of that. Scribes and Pharisees were always overextending, overstretching the law. And isn't that the same thing they did to fasting, hand washing, and Sabbath keeping? What's going on here? Jesus is pointing us to the pattern and thinking of what it means to be a hypocrite. In our modern language today of social media and the fear of cancel culture, we call it virtue signaling. I can project, I can show, I'm righteous, I'm righteous, I'm righteous. That is, if I am self-deceived, as we talked about last week, if I am self-deceived and choose to be clever and dishonest with the truth, I am far more concerned with what public message I'm projecting out there and what your understanding and your perception is of my righteousness rather than the real thing of possessing truth and acting and behaving in a righteous and God-honoring manner. Human beings are geniuses at this. And the sad thing is because we are too self-deceived, we often buy into the same message and lying that we are fed daily. It's easy to poke fingers and say, yeah, that's a hypocrite, that's another Pharisee. Yeah, but why did you believe it? Have you ever thought about that self? Have you ever asked yourself that hard question? Why did you believe it? For example, Let's say I've got four baskets in front of the pulpit, right? Very typical in our churches today, right? One for the general fund, one for the building, one for the pastor's land cruiser, one for the pastor's pork, you know? You know? Some of you pastors, you're smiling, but not get, uh-uh. Right? Okay, so I can come and do a tithe and I could drop, I have my hand closed, you know, and I could very carefully give to the general fund and to that. But what if I want to really show myself righteous? I'll come with an envelope and I'll dance down the aisle with my envelope. with one M, you know, and I'll put it into the land cruiser, the basket for the land cruiser, you know. After the service, you know what's going to happen. I'm going to get a big handshake and the people will think, but Nange, that umzugu, he's a genuine maloko, right? CBT, mm-hmm. And of course, just standing here talking about it, you know, go ahead, Sibu, that's rubbish. But how often do we buy into such things? We create environments where we do it. I'm saying something in a dramatic, obvious way, but we can do this in very small, subtle ways without thinking about it. We repeat this scenario again and again. Why do we do this? Why do we do this? Because ceremonial drama is much easier than the weightier matters of the law that Jesus talks about here. Justice, mercy, and faithfulness. Justice demands strength of character and wisdom and a true study of the law. Mercy demands that the law and its just application are fully understood so that we know and understand when mercy is proper and when it is not. The truth is that when justice is often applied, there's a price to be paid. There's a price to be paid. Wait until your churches or your Christian organizations, you administer discipline. Oh, oh, mortosana, right? People start cusing fingers, politics, people divide and what have you. There's a price to be paid for applying justice. And the same thing is true for mercy. You may analyze the situation. You may sit down with someone you're confronting and you may choose to extend mercy based upon your genuine knowledge of biblical principles and when the Lord Jesus extended mercy and when the apostles and others extended mercy. And of course, someone inevitably will be pointing fingers at you and saying, my friend, you are soft. You're no leader. You should have given that person a serious Chewbacca. That's what you should have done, right? It's because often we don't know where it's, you know. There will be a price, complaints, rage, emotional disagreements, sometimes, and very often, public disapproval. No wonder that Jesus calls these the weightier matters of the law. This is often too much for us to bear, for those of us who are faithless and weak. And even when you are faithful in the Lord and strong in the power of His might, you may feel the same crushing weight that the Apostle Paul did. You may do it right as he did. And what does he tell us in 2 Corinthians chapter 11? All the beatings, the stonings, the public rebukes, the public shame. But the greatest thing that weighed upon him was the concern for the churches. If you read that in that chapter, that's the thing he saves for the last. That's the thing that's on his neck all the time because he properly applies justice and mercy. And he warns the Corinthians, do you want me to come gently or do you want me to come with a rod? Because they know justice and mercy will come. We know this deep in our souls, yet we refuse to recognize it and confront it. In reality, what do you and I often do? We strain a gnat and we swallow a camel. How do we do this? That's the painful thing we need to uncover, this wound. Allow me to answer this question with another question. How does a magician trick you? How does a magician manage to do something amazing, right? He uses one hand to get your attention, Pay attention over here with his other hand, he sneaks, suddenly pop and here's the magic. Something pops out of thin air that you didn't see or expect that it was coming. Hypocrites convinces to focus on something that is useless, jumping up and down about a relatively small thing and neglecting those things that are far more serious. It is far more convenient and it costs us much less to be making sure that we strain out the small fly that might enter into our tea than deal with the obvious and serious sin that must be confronted. We also might allow others to intimidate us, to allow our own fears to control us. We realize that by confronting justice and mercy, a price might be paid. We tell ourselves the lie that it's better to keep quiet, that we will maintain our own righteous perspective in private. But the truth is, if you're swimming in the sewer, if you're swimming in an ocean of corruption, my friend, you're going to become corrupt unless you speak against it. After World War II, many of the Nazis were brought to trial and their excuse was, I was just following orders. I was just doing what I was told by the commander. Guess what? That didn't work with the judges at Nuremberg. Most of those guys were hanged in public and executed. Micah the prophet observed this in his own time in a generation of prophets, priests, and princes who began to swallow camels. The injustices allowed by the very leaders of God's people were amazing and discouraging. Yahweh had a legitimate accusation against them. In Hebrew, the word is Riv. It's a covenantal accusation in court against them. Listen to what Micah says in his own time. Woe to those who devise wickedness and work evil on their beds. When morning dawns, they perform it because it's in the power of their hand. They covet fields and seize them, houses take them away. They oppress a man and his house, a man and his inheritance. Micah, chapter two, verse nine, even the women are not spared. Women of my people, you drive out from their delightful houses, from their young children, you take away their splendor forever. Chapter three, verse one, And I said, Here you heads of Jacob and rulers of the house of Israel, is it not for you to know justice? You who hate the good and love the evil, who tear the skin off my people and the flesh from their bones. So what's then to be done? The Lord Jesus Himself teaches us in verse 23. These you ought to have done without neglecting the others. Tithing and our worship, even in the small ways that we do it, is to be encouraged. It's a good thing. But not at the expense of ignoring the weightier matters of God's truth and His law. At the same time, we must strengthen our faith and our proper sense of what is right and wrong. This must be intentional. For if you do not ask hard questions of yourself and those around you, and those influencing you, you and I are capable of doing great harm. And this is hard. This puts yourself at risk. What are we told to do, though, in Hebrews chapter 5, verses 12 through 14? For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles and the oracles of God. You need milk and not solid food. For everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child. But solid food is for the mature. for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil. One of the hard questions you should be asking yourself is, what am I doing to become mature, to have my powers of discernment proved and my character strengthened to discern good from evil and to stand up just as it says in Ephesians 6, in the day when you're attacked to stand firm. The writer of the Hebrews goes on and gives us some very good instruction in chapter 12. Therefore, lift up your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees. Make straight paths for your feet so that what is lame may not be put out of joint, but rather be healed. Strive for peace with everyone and for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord. See to it that no one fails to obtain the grace of God, that no root of bitterness springs up and causes trouble, and by it many become defiant. What is he saying here? The main point I want to glean in context of Matthew chapter 23 is that a Christian is to be an active participation of their moral and spiritual development. It's not mofuta that just gets poured into you. You are active in your development of discerning what good and evil is. Being able to discern justice and mercy and doing so in a faithful way requires serious study and commitment. Micah summarizes the problem and the solution very well in chapter six, verses six through eight. I conclude with this. With what shall I come before the Lord and bow myself before God on high? Shall I come to Him with burnt offerings? With calves a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with the thousands of rams? With ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give the firstborn for my transgression the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? In other words, aren't I supposed to be tithing? Seriously? Worshipping God, yes, true, but he's using an extreme. His main point, verse eight, he has told you, oh man, what is good and what does the Lord require of you, but to do justice, not to know justice, do justice and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God. Micah recognizes that worship is required and necessary, just as Jesus is doing, which includes offering up of our resources to him, but that worship also requires a full-hearted and whole-souled commitment to come under his training and discipline. And so to be able to stand strong in the evil day against all the schemes of the devil and those that serve him. That is the faithfulness that Jesus requires of the scribes and Pharisees. and also those of us who claim to follow him. My friends, allow me to encourage you to offer your tithes, but also to be serious about what it means to offer yourselves totally to Christ's service. Allow the Lord to train you into the kind of one who faithfully speaks out and supports justice and mercy, but biblically Do so in a God-glorifying way. There are many churches, many institutions that love to shout about social justice. It's a big theme in our day. but to do so neglecting the gospel and the appropriate application of justice and mercy as found in His Word. You and I cannot afford to go into that. Just because we see injustice doesn't mean we run away from the gospel and do nothing but justice. There are times and places for justice and mercy. That's why I emphasize the careful study and application of God's Word. There will come a day, my friends, when you will have to make a moral choice. People you do not expect will put pressure on you to be corrupt and make a compromise. What are you going to do to avoid swallowing a camel? Let's pray. Heavenly Father, We live in an evil world. We want to be protected from it sometimes, but Lord, you train us and you protect our souls so that we could confront the evil that we see. Lord Jesus, do not allow us to be so compromised by the world and its systems. Help us to remain faithful and strong, to do speak truth to power, to do support justice and mercy, but do so that is wholly consistent with the whole counsel of God. Lord Jesus, we need strength in our character. Any of us is capable of falling into evil and to compromising. We do not want to discredit the name of Christ. We do not want to fall prey to the schemes of the evil one. We humbly ask that you would strengthen our hands and our weak knees, that you would help us and equip us to stand firm in the evil day. These things we pray in Jesus' name, amen. May the Lord richly bless you.