Romans 2:12–16Scripture
Today is going to be a bit interesting. You'll either love this message or you'll hate it, but I think it's important regardless of which side of that you land on. There are some things that I think are important for us to maybe take a look at. You know, I believe that the Bible should shape our worldview. I believe the Word of God not only gives us direction for our future, but it gives us direction for every moment we live in.
We know that the way we think and the way that we act and the way that we process information is really influenced by our company. This is why the Bible speaks so clearly all throughout it that the company matters. If you were to take inventory today of those you keep company with, where would they stand in relation to their walk with the Lord? I think it's important. Even good professing believers in Christ have not all been shaped, and do not have a worldview that is shaped, by the Bible. So it's important for us to understand, if not every person in the life of every protestant church or evangelical church across America, their perspective is not shaped by the Bible, then what are their perspectives being shaped by? Now, particularly when we get into Romans and we're moving into chapter 2, I think there is an undertone that happens there that Paul is really speaking to, that really is an attitude and a mindset that many of us in the church are shaped by today, and I want to kind of pull that out a little bit. There's a couple studies that Barna did regarding this worldview, and I'm picking this one worldview out that I want to talk about today because I believe in chapter 2 many of the Jews were shaped by this type of worldview, in some sense of the word. You know, in some sense. Romans 2:12–16, I want to read that's our text for today, and then I want to get into talking about why it is that Paul is hammering down on sinfulness from chapter 1, the very first verse, all the way through chapter 3, verse 20. And why have we been talking so much about sin, and it just kind of gets heavy after a while? And I want to talk about the importance of
Point 1We sabotage the gospel by rescuing people
What Paul is doing here, particularly in relation to the proclamation of the gospel. We as believers tend to prevent the gospel from completing its work in the hearts of men because we don't like to see men uncomfortable, and I'm afraid that we then sabotage an opportunity for the gospel to complete its work in someone because we want to step in as savior and save them from their heartache.
It is not our responsibility to help save people from the burden and the conviction that is on their life.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 3:13
It is our responsibility to keep our hands off and let the Word, or the gospel, do its work until someone is so stripped down
And so hopeless and so, you know, overwhelmed that they
Pastor Shawn Gray · 3:41
turn to their only source of hope, which is Christ Jesus.
I'm afraid we save people from the heartache too quickly. Now, as a pastor, I will sit in offices with people will come to me with their trouble, and in my earlier years I would try to talk them out of it. I would begin to say things like, "God loves you anyway." That's a truth, that's true.
But God loves people, and he sends a lot of them to hell, because he loves them.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 4:03
That don't make any sense.
So I think today we, in the name of love, have excused ourselves from being a saboteur to people coming to life in Christ, in the name of love. "Well, I love them." We've said here many times that we have a tendency to love people to hell. Paul doesn't have that tendency.
Paul is not concerned, when he writes chapter 1 through 3, that the people in Rome are going to be overwhelmed, saddened, and heavy-hearted. He's not worried about that. He's doing it for that purpose. That's his goal, that's his aim. And so let us read this section understanding that, and then I want to talk about why he's not concerned about the heaviness of this text. Romans 2:12–16. He's really speaking to the Jews and the Gentiles, mainly the Jews who are under the law and the Gentiles who do not have the law, and he begins to talk and really pull the Jews into a conversation that he just had in chapter 1 about the Gentiles. Basically, Paul is saying, "You all got problems, you're all sinners, and you're all doomed, and your only hope is Christ." That's what he's trying to get them to understand. Romans 2:12–16 says this: "For all who have sinned without the law will also perish without the law, and all who have sinned under the law will be judged by the law. For it is not the hearers of the law who are righteous before God, but the doers of the law who will be justified." Listen, I don't want to spend too much time on this right here, which many of you would probably like me to. I would just encourage you, if you have questions about that, go back to last week's sermon and listen, because with Paul, in one moment, or in one breath, he will say you are not saved by self-righteous deeds or by works, you're not saved by that, and then the next couple sentences he will say you were judged and justified by your works. So there is this tension that exists between works and justification. There is a right way you are justified and a wrong way that people try to be justified. There's a right kind of works and a wrong kind of works. We talked about that last week, right? We talked about that last week. Now, Paul is an advocate of this, which is very important: we are saved by faith alone, not by works, that no man should boast.
It is a gift of God leading to eternal life. That is important. That is Paul's message. So when he talks about deeds and works and justification, you have to hold that high, that faith saves us, but a true faith. First John says there are so-called believers and there are believers. There are those who look like they have faith and those who truly have faith. And what he's saying is you'll be justified by your deeds. In other words, I will know by your works whether your faith was true or whether it was fake.
That makes sense. That's the best summary I can give. I don't want to really focus on that. Let's go to verse 14: "For when Gentiles who do not have the law by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law.
They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts." Now, I would say this: that the Jews had the law, the Gentiles did not have the law, but listen, God does not play favorites in regards to that. He does not show partiality. That's what Paul says. Even if you don't have the law, he has written it in your hearts, or in your conscience, that you know what to do. You know what is right and what is wrong, and everyone will be held accountable to the law, whether you've been given it, listen, like the Jews have been given it, or whether you've been given it because it's written on your heart. Each one will be held accountable. "They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them on that day when, according to my gospel, God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus." Now notice there's something that I think is important as he closes out this section: it's the secret motivations of the heart that God's looking for.
So we've got to be careful, because I don't think that the apostle Paul wants us to turn to the law to be justified by the law, which we can risk doing as we listen through this. What God is concerned about, because there are non-believers, there are atheists, who have in their conscience to do what is right, and they do what is right, but their heart is not right. Are you with me today? So in other words, there are people, if you look on the outside, there are people
Who can obey the law, they can do good things, they can do good
Pastor Shawn Gray · 9:45
things, but they don't have the right motivation.
So God says good things won't save you. The motivation of your heart and why you do those things is what matters. Now, Paul closes that out, and I think that's extremely important for us today, because some of us turn to doing good things to be saved. We just do. We see other people do good things and we want to do good things too. Like, sometimes it is difficult for people in the life of the church to understand that faith saves you, and saving faith changes you, and changing faith empowers you to do good things through the Holy Spirit. I want to talk, here's the title of my sermon today, and I want to talk about this is kind of my main point: I want to maybe take inventory of why we have such a hard time looking at ourselves as sinners and why we have such a hard time thinking and considering the idea that God will judge us by our works. There is this phrase: moralistic therapeutic deism.
I'm going to talk about that this morning. The title of my sermon is "Moralistic Therapeutic Sabotage," because this idea has so infiltrated the evangelical movement today in America, and I looked at some studies, 2021, I'm going to bring before you today, and this ideology has so shaped how we read the Bible, how we live life, and how we walk as believers of Christ in our daily life, Monday through Saturday. I'm going to attempt to talk about this, but first of all I want to maybe visit a
Point 2Paul lingers on sin for good reason
Little bit about why Paul is dwelling so much on sinfulness. Why I believe there's some profound reasons for him lingering over the sinfulness of the Gentiles and Jews. I think specifically there are two reasons. You can write them down. Here's two reasons why I believe Paul is talking about sin so much and for so long. One is that the gospel of justification by grace alone through faith alone simply does not land on people here in America as overwhelmingly good news until we have some deeper sense of our sinfulness, of our hopelessness before a righteous God.
And I would propose to you that a lot of people in the church today think they're good. They may not say that because they know theologically that's dangerous, but as they think of themselves, a lot of people feel like, "Hey, I'm a pretty good person," and then the next phrase is "compared to so-and-so."
So Paul spends a large portion of time to make sure that every single person under the sound of his voice understands that they have a problem, everyone. The jews and the Gentiles, those who have the law, those who didn't have the law, everyone, he places them in regarding sinfulness in the same category. The other reason Paul might draw out his demonstration of our sinfulness is that we are so resistant to seeing it and feeling the weight of it. It takes a long time for us to get the fact that we've got problems. I believe that we can sense this behind the text I read today, that there is this tension that exists, that the Jews, because they had the law, felt like they were better than the Gentiles. Today we have people measuring themselves by themselves rather than measuring themselves by a holy God, and that's a problem, and Paul is trying to deal with this problem. There's this article I read this week about the careless intermingling of what is referred to as a therapeutic worldview. This right here I would like you to do some studying on this week. Therapeutic worldview is what shapes much of our Facebook posts, much of our conversations around the dinner table, but a therapeutic worldview is not a biblical worldview.
They are different. I'm going to talk about the difference between the two of these, and I want us to maybe reflect and think about the church and maybe even ourselves, to consider how much of this worldview has shaped my personal perspective of the world, of God, and my relationships and all those sorts of things. One difference between a biblical worldview and a therapeutic worldview is that one assumes that our problems should be framed mainly in terms of mental health and therapeutic treatment, while the other assumes that our problems should be framed mainly in terms of sin and righteousness and redemption through faith in Christ and his Word.
The name of the article is "Faith and Therapy," and it's written by William Kilpatrick, a professor in the education department of Boston College, and here's what he wrote: "one of the most destructive consequences of carelessly mixing therapy with faith is a diminished sense of sin. The best evidence that this has already happened in the Catholic Church is the tremendous drop-off in the practice of confession over the last thirty years."
And he gives some percentages there, and it's shocking how little people go to confession now in the Catholic Church versus twenty years ago. "When we couple this," he says, "with the nearly hundred percent Communion turnout in most parishes, we have to conclude that most parishioners don't have a strong conscience of sin any longer.
They seem to have been so schooled in the gospel of self-acceptance that they can't think of any sins they need to confess." Does that sound familiar?
"A colleague at Boston College told me," this is still the quote, "a story that reinforces the point. He once asked members of his philosophy class to write an anonymous essay about a personal struggle over what is right and wrong, what is good and what is evil, and most of the students, however, were unable to complete the assignment. They just didn't even do it. He asked them why. Well, they said," and apparently this was said without any irony, this is how they responded, "we haven't done anything wrong."
Ninety percent of his class didn't do the assignment because they felt they did not have, or have not done, anything wrong. Ladies and gentlemen, this is our world. This is the attitude of many people in church: "I'm not justified according to a holy God, I'm justified by the good things I've done in comparison to other people who've done worse." Most of the students said, "Well, i've done nothing wrong."
"We can see a lot of self-esteem here but little self-awareness." I love
Pastor Shawn Gray · 17:41
it, that last week we heard that the apostle Paul says do not be self-righteous. So then he's calling us to what is, I believe, an attitude of self-awareness.
If we're not self-righteous, then what are we? We should be self-aware. "The absence of a sense of sin seems strange when one considers that most of these students have had years of Catholic schooling." Now, don't jump to the conclusion that this is isolated in the Catholic Church, because it's not.
That's just what the article says, that's the study the article did. The article documents the kinds of teaching in both Catholic and Protestant evangelical children's and youth curriculum that leads to this kind of thinking. It's in the curriculum, in the church, in our church. Some of us would say today that New Age ideologies are what are infiltrating the church. I would say therapeutic ideologies are what are damaging the church, and I got facts for that. I actually found that, I'm glad I felt that way, because there are facts for that. There is a Barna study, 2021, that's recent to us, about moralistic therapeutic deism. Now we know what therapy is, we know what being moral is, but you may not know what deism is. You know that we hold the position, in most Protestant churches should hold the position, not all pastors, not all pastors do, trust me, I can send you some sermons, I weekly hear sermons of people who are deist in regard to, and this is the difference between a theist and a deist. Basically a deist says, "God's up there, he's real, but he's uninvolved. He doesn't get into the mess of life with us, he has no role, he does nothing, he's hands-off. There is a God, he's not involved with the affairs of men." I don't know how you can come to that stance in the Bible if you read it at all. But a theist says he's intimately involved. That's the difference. They both believe in God. One believes that God's involved with the affairs of men, the other one does not. So if you're a deist, that then lends itself to trusting in your moral living to be saved. It then causes us to turn to therapeutic methods to be better rather than God.
So whether you're a deist or a theist shapes everything else about your worldview.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 20:34
Now, here's the study I was A groundbreaking study from the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University, and it shows that adults of this generation still embrace moralistic therapeutic deism. Now, this started back in around 2005. This kind of hit the world, and this attitude and this ideology, and that's how much it's grown and infiltrated the ideologies of men and women in the church. This rogue belief system that characterized Christian teen culture now permeates both American culture and the Christian church, making moralistic therapeutic deism, or what they refer to as MTD, the most popular worldview in the United States. Now let me just pause here for a second and say this: most people who are moralistic therapeutic deists won't even know that's what they are, right? They just are shaped by it. They don't know that's what they are.
So today you may say, "Well, I don't even know what that is, so I'm not that wrong." You still might have been shaped by that ideology. You just may not know what that ideology believes. So the American Worldview Inventory they took in 2021 showed that nearly four out of ten adults, that's 38 percent, embrace elements of MTD.
That's four out of ten. That means there's a remaining six, there's a remaining six out of ten adults who embrace other worldviews.
So let me say it this way, and let me give you the names of these other worldviews. So the remaining six are shaped by biblical theism, secular humanism, postmodernism, nihilism, Marxism. That's growing. That's growing. It's growing because the church has gotten more caught up in social justice issues than they have in preaching the gospel. It's growing. A lot of the organizations that even Christians support nowadays are Marxist organizations that want to destroy the family, and we support them because we don't really know what they stand for. I mean, a good saying goes a long way to making an organization have millions flooding into it, but their whole goal is to tear down the family. And sure, and listen, Christians are the number one supporters of these organizations, because we just don't do the work to know what we're supporting. Marxism and Eastern mysticism or New Age.
So in other words, the MTD, the moralistic therapeutic deists, that takes up four out of ten, and all the other things I named, including New age and everything else, that's six out of ten that remain, is broken up into that. Meaning that moralistic therapeutic deism is the largest category that shapes most of our worldview. Listen, biblical worldview is not what shapes the church's worldview. I think it was somewhere around, like, 12 percent. Like, it's low. It's crazy. So I want to break down what a moralistic therapeutic deist believes. There are five
Point 3Five beliefs of moralistic therapeutic deism
Things. They have a slide here that maybe you can take a shot of. Not that one. Here they are. They believe in a God, that God exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth. Sounds good. Two, God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions. Number three, the central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.
Ladies and gentlemen, that's the biggest one. That's the biggest one. So many things are said. Listen, we are
Laughing, everything. I would say to this is trigger-inducing to people. I would say we'll just love ourselves just as we
Pastor Shawn Gray · 25:24
are.
I don't think the Bible says that. You know, I don't think the goal of the gospel is that you just be content and happy with exactly how you are. I don't think that's the point of the gospel. I think the point of the gospel is to go, you're extremely, you're in extreme trouble just as you are. You're not good just as you are. You're a filthy, rotten sinner just as you are. Now, we come to him just as we are, well, we don't continue just as we are, and some of us have been so affected by this ideology that we're just content staying broken, and we celebrate our broken places instead of changing them. It's a problem.
Number four, God does not need to be particularly involved in anyone's life except when God needs to resolve a problem. And does that sound familiar in your prayer life? "God doesn't need to be involved in my life until I need him to fix something." Now, some of you would be like, "Well, I don't believe that." Great, but you pray like you do. Are you with me? Because this shapes how we live.
Number five, good people go to heaven when they die. Good people go to heaven. The name of this study is AWVI 2021. It's a national study of biblical and competing worldviews. It found that although three out of four people, 74 percent, who embrace MTD consider themselves to be Christian, oh, listen to this, although 74 percent of everyone who would be classified as an MTD, not classify themselves, but through questionnaire would say they're influenced by that, out of all those people that were part of that study, four out of ten, out of all those people, only 16 percent qualify as born again based on their theology. The study also found that the beliefs of the vast majority of this group conflict with much or most basic biblical teaching. So, to not have an MTD worldview, moralistic therapeutic deist worldview, what should be our worldview? Well, the Bible should shape our view. Listen, the key in, when we read things out of the MTD that we see, we're kind of like, the key is not to justify our heart or a heart's motive. The key is to go, "I don't want to be that. I want to have a biblical worldview," is to run, is to repentance, to turn, it's to change, is to go, "Oh my goodness, I don't want that to shape me," not, "Well, but I mean well." It's change your thoughts on that. Here's what a biblical worldview is, definition. They have the definition up here because Brook has told me several times, I've mentioned several times, "You probably ought to give a definition to that." This is the best one that I could find: "A biblical worldview, also called a Christian worldview, is built upon the framework of ideas and beliefs through which a Christian individual or group interprets the world and interacts with the world. Our worldview shapes the physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual dimensions of our life." I would add in our social media as well.
We want it to be shaped by the Word. "The research indicated that everyone has a worldview, but relatively few people have a biblical worldview." Out of the study, and it was a broad study, "even among devoutly religious people, the survey of this study discovered that only nine percent of born-again Christians have such a perspective on life."
Wow, guys, that's staggering. That's just staggering to me. So let me do a comparison study of the MTD versus biblical, what a biblical Christian would, how they would answer or rebut these five points we listed earlier. Here's how a Christian would create a rebuttal for moralistic therapeutic deism. Number one: not just a God exists, but the God of the Bible exists, that's important, who has revealed himself as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. "Whoever does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent him," John 5:23. Meaning that believing in a God is not good enough, you've got to believe in the God of the Bible. Number two: God does not just want people to be nice, but commands that they obey him. He is the one who defines good and nice. He calls sin and promises to judge it in the end, Romans 1:18–32. It's not about your goodness, it's about his goodness.
Number three: the central goal of life is to give glory to God, not to yourself, and a byproduct may be that we feel good about ourselves, but that is never the goal. Look at Romans 11:36. It is never the goal of a Christian to find hope in themselves, to find peace in themselves, to find goodness in themselves, but rather it is in seeing ourselves as we truly are that we turn to God and see him as the only one who is good. They came to Jesus and they said, "Good Master," and he says, "Why do you call me good? Only God is good."
Ladies and gentlemen, I came here to burst your bubble and let you know you are not good. Only God is good.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 31:56
Number four: our primary goal as believers is to be constantly in tune with God, following his leading and in daily fellowship with him. We are to pray without ceasing. Number five: no one is good enough to go to heaven. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. If you broke the law in one part, you broke it in every part. No one is good enough, and that is why we need Jesus, God in the flesh. He lived the perfect life that we could not, and he died to pay for our sins so that we might be made acceptable to God. He himself bore our sins in his body on the cross so that we might die to sin and live for righteousness.
It is by his wounds that we're healed, not by our therapy steps, not by your self-help book that you are healed, but it is by his wounds that we are healed.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 33:00
Moralistic therapeutic deism is not an official religion.
Probably no one would ever identify himself or herself as a moralistic therapeutic deist. The real problem is that moralism is not christianity, and that is what Paul is saying to the Jews: you're not good, and you can't do enough good things to be good. You are a sinner, just like the Gentiles in chapter 1. You're not good.
Moralism is not Christianity, and most people who hold these beliefs are likely to identify themselves as Christians when actually they're not, because they have turned to good deeds rather than Christ. And ladies and gentlemen, I think this is prevalent in our church, and I think I can back that up with the Bible. In Matthew, when it says many people who went to church and did good things and served as teachers, Sunday school teachers, and worked in the children's department and taught from the stage and led worship and prayed for people and they were healed will stand before me, and I will say, "Depart from me, I don't know who you are. Go to hell," because a moralistic lifestyle does not save. Only Christ does. And let me tell you, let me tell you how you get people to turn to Christ: let them see how good they aren't, and let that Word complete its work in people until they see and find no hope in themselves. Couple more things and I'm done.
We are resistant to recognizing our sin. That's why I believe he's staying here so long.
We will make excuses before we take ownership of our sin.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 35:16
We see this in the nature of a child, right? We come to the child and they get in trouble and they make excuses. It's kind of like that whole thing with the teacher, "You didn't turn your homework in." "My dog ate my homework." And you're like, they're making excuses. There's some excuse. Literally, I did recently do a wedding, and I set all the marriage license with all the signatures on the table. My dog ate it. And I called up to the city to try to get another one, this for Samantha's wedding, and told them that I need another license because my dog ate the license for the person that I had just married the night before, and they laughed, because they, I mean, they officially had never heard that excuse before. And I was like, "I know this is crazy, but I have pictures to prove it," right? So like, it, then my dog ate it. We make excuses for that, and here's what we do. I mean, well, you know what that phrase comes from? Moralistic therapeutic deism. In other words, we then want to separate our hearts and intentions from our life's actions. That's a problem, because the Bible doesn't allow for that. So here's my little pet peeve now, lately, is I will have people say to me, somebody will do something terrible, and then I will have somebody say to me, around the situation, we'll say, into the situation, not even directly to me, "That person is really good, and they mean well." I thought the Bible said out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks, and we live our lives. So if that's true, if what is coming out is bad, shouldn't we classify it as bad, and the motivation bad? But see, we can't take any personal ownership for anything bad that happens from us, because we're naturally good, of course. And if we're naturally good, then anything bad I do is just an oopsie, because I don't really intend to do anything bad, I'm good, so how could any bad thing come from me? So we separate the intention of our heart from our actions.
Let me tell you, that is a person who will make excuses and arguments to the death and never take ownership for the fact that they're bad. You know why? Because although they may not know the words, they're moralistic therapeutic deists, and quite possibly, according to the percentages, only 16 percent of them are even saved, but all of them think they are, kind of like the Jews. Some of you are like, what is this
Point 4Therapy says look within; Scripture says repent
Therapeutic thing? Can you talk about that? Sure. It's really simple. We live in a world where therapy has begun to shape our worldview. It affects what we vote on, it affects what we believe in the church. Therapeutic ideology, this is the simplest way I can put this, tells us that all the problems of our life are out there. For instance, you begin talking to a therapist about your problems and they'll say, "Tell me about your mother."
Are you with me? It's kind of funny, but kind of not funny. And the therapist will begin to direct you that your problems stem from the fact that your mother's the problem.
You're not really the problem, you're a product of a problem, who is either your mother, your father, or anything that's happened outside of you. So in other words, everything outside of you has potential to being the problem. That's what therapy does. This is why it's important to find a biblical therapist, what we would call a Christian one, because they won't counsel you to think that you're not the problem, everybody else is the problem. Now, if I can believe everybody else is the problem, then I can just blame everybody else and never take ownership for the fact that I'm really the problem. And the answer to our problem is outside ourselves or within ourselves, I said that wrong. So the problem's out there, this is what therapy says, the problem's out there, and if you want to find the answer to your problem, you've got to look within yourself. Why? Because you're naturally good, of course. Are you with me? You following me? This is important. Now, why is this a problem? That sounds good. Some of you might even go, "I don't get it, I don't get, well, that sounds bad." Well, because the Bible tells us that the problem is in here, which is the opposite. The problem's not out there, the problem's in here. The Bible tries to get us to look, not within ourselves for the answer to the problem, but rather to look inside of ourselves to realize we are the problem, because once we see that we are the problem, the Bible teaches us that once we see that we'll look outside of ourselves for the answer to our problem. And the answer to our problem, ladies and gentlemen, if you're a Christian or been in church any amount of time, the answer to your problem is Jesus Christ.
You're the problem, and he's the answer to your problem. And if you never see yourself as a problem, you'll never turn to Jesus Christ.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 40:42
This ideology has become a roadblock, if you will, preventing people from really turning to the only thing that will save them, and it is not themselves, and it is not their family, and it is not what's around them. It is Jesus Christ. By faith alone in Christ alone are we saved, and it is a gift of God, because you have a problem.
That's the problem. You're the problem. So this is why the apostle Paul stays so long on the fact that you're a sinner. Some of us are kind of like, "No duh, we get it, let's move on," but a lot of the church, they don't see themselves as the problem. So that's why I believe we are resistant to recognizing our sin, because we think that inside of us is the answer, the problem's everywhere else. So listen, I have seen so many people constantly live miserable lives because they think that because of everything that happens to them they can never have victory in their life.
"If I can just get away from all the problems." This is why people don't stay in church very long, or why they hop churches so much, because it's easy to stay somewhere for a little bit. You've got a honeymoon period where they don't see that you're a problem, but once you hang out with people for a little bit, everybody's going to realize you've got some problems, and so we just move, because that makes us uncomfortable that people see us as having a problem, so we just leave and go to the next place to live, and people can see us as awesome again. Listen, I believe there are two ways to respond to sin in our lives.
There's two ways Paul talks about both of them. You're either correcting others or you're repenting. That's what you'll do. People that repent have a biblical worldview. People who turn to correcting others instead of repenting have a moralistic therapeutic deist worldview.
If you think yourself is good and everyone else has the problem, then you're going to spend all your time correcting all the problems that you're in relationship with.
So if you find yourself somebody that's judgy, and this is why he says in the beginning, stop judging people, what is he attacking? He's attacking this idea that you think you're good with God when you're really not, and instead of repenting, this is why the apostle Paul tells the Jews, repent. You're not repenting, you think you're good, repent. Ladies and gentlemen, this is the ideology that has infiltrated the church in America and is shaping our worldview, and I'm telling you, it's crazy, because this is what the apostle Paul is talking with the Jews. Now, most of us want to identify with the Gentiles, but a lot of us are acting much like the Jews. We think we're good, we think we're special, we think we can handle it, we think all the problems are out there, and so we go to fixing everybody else instead of owning the fact that we got a problem, because we can't see ourselves as the problem. So we're constantly going around wagging our finger at people about the things they're doing, because we're already good, so I'm going to go fix everybody else and make them good, because they're a problem to me. So in other words, you can see if moralistic therapeutic deism has infiltrated your thought life and the way you see life by whether you're somebody who's constantly talking about everybody else's problems.
You either repent because you see that you're a problem, or you think you're good and everyone else is the problem and you start trying to correct everybody.
That should be convicting to us a little bit, right? If you find yourself doing some of these things, I'm not saying you're a pagan, you're going to hell, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that we have been shaped by some of these ideologies and we need to see it for what it is, and we need to turn towards Christ. And listen, if you think your perspective isn't shaped by these ideologies, New Age or whatever it is, secular humanism, all of these things, if your ideology, the way you see life, isn't shaped by that, we have a bigger problem. Our perspective shapes how we respond to the gospel. Now, we know, and I'm going to close with this, we know here that many of the Jews, many of the Jews that Paul, that are under the sound of Paul's voice as they read this letter, many of them, they do not repent.
They continue. Many Jews today continue to think they're good. Listen, and many believers, in case you just want to get, we're not trying to get on to Jews or get on to Catholics, there are many people in the church that are just like that. You think you're good, you don't need Jesus, you don't need people, "I'm good."
It is hard to look at yourself and realize you're not good.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 46:32
Ladies and gentlemen, at the beginning of this text, at the beginning of this, he is saying, and he talks a lot about the law, "For all who sin without the law will perish without the law, and all who sin under the law will be judged by the law." Then it begins to talk about the law the Jews had and the law that was written on the Gentiles' hearts.
Ladies and gentlemen, the point of the law is to help you realize you're not good.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 46:56
That's the work it's sent to do. The law is given to help you come to grips with the fact that you're not good, but the work it accomplishes is to get you to stop turning to yourself for answers and start turning to God for answers. We're going to learn next week that although the Jews had the law wasn't finishing its work in them. Today in America specifically, most homes, even non-believing homes, have one of these in their house.
So you have the law, but can I say this, the only way the law completes its work in you is if you open it and read it.
You don't get this by osmosis.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 47:56
And you know what it says in the chapter, in the few verses before that, you'll be held accountable to what you had access to.
So it is our responsibility to be opening the Word, or the law, or the gospel, and letting it complete its work, which is helping us see that we're not good without God, that we might turn to him for our source of hope and help and healing.
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