Point 1Chapter 1 and chapter 2 meet at foolishness
Turn your Bibles this morning with me to Romans chapter 1. Actually, we're going to be doing today an introduction on Romans chapter 2, and I think that it is important, before we begin chapter 2—and we'll look at chapter 2, verse 1 through 3 or 4, tomorrow, or next week, tomorrow— but this week I want to show the connection that exists between chapter 1 and chapter 2. The people that are described in chapter 1 are what we would refer to as the Gentiles. He specifically is speaking to the Gentiles, and then in chapter 2, this is, of course, he's speaking to everyone, and there are people who are in both groups that could, you know, be in either chapter 1 or chapter 2, but he's speaking specifically to the Gentiles in chapter 1, and in chapter 2 he turns his attention to the Jews, to the behavior of the Jewish people. Now, the Jews were God's chosen people.
It's all over the Old Testament. We know that the Jews are God's chosen people, and the Jews also, the Israelites, had the law, and so because they had the law, they walked with a bit of superiority in regards to the way that they live life, and particularly the way they dealt with the Gentiles. So a Jew would look at a Gentile and be like, "Those terrible, no good, very bad people, but we're special." There are a lot of people that come to church every week that feel like they're special because their mom went there, their dad went there, now they go there. How many of you know today that being at church does not make you a believer? That there is a personal choice, that is not something you adopt through heritage. Everybody has to come to a reckoning in their own personal life and decide who Jesus is to them, right? The Jews kind of had the attitude that because they were chosen, and because they were a nation that God loved and chose, that their personal life and what they did and the choices they made and how they lived didn't matter, because "I'm a part of a nation that's chosen." There are people who come to church every week who think, because they come to church and they're a part of a group of believers, that what they do, how they live, how they talk, the way they are does not matter.
But God didn't come to leave us in sin. He came to set us free from sin.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 2:42
He didn't come to just save us one day when we get to heaven, when we stand before the judgment seat. We didn't—he didn't save us there, but he came to save us here.
And there are some of us that wrestle with certain things, certain addictions, certain behaviors, certain things that we have this inclination to just sin, to just do things that please ourself, and we've failed to understand, and we definitely failed to preach, the type of gospel that once you are made a new creation, you're set free from some of that mess. And we either believe that Jesus' blood is powerful enough to save us completely or it's not powerful at all. It doesn't just save us one day, it saves us today. How many of you need a little bit of saving on your Monday? His strength, his grace, his love, his mercy helps us on our Monday, not just one day when we stand before him. And that should be encouraging for us as believers today. Now, I want to read this, and it may be quite an extensive portion of text, ten verses, but I think it kind of sets the foundation of what I'm going to do as an introduction, preparing us for chapter 2. Now, we just saw basically a life that just continues to spiral down into so much sin that people become foolish and they can't even make good choices. There comes a place in your life when you set your face like flint against the things of God that eventually God will release you to yourself, and he will allow all kinds of terrible, evil, horrible things to come in you to the degree that you will never turn to him. So we learned last week, be careful how close to the edge you stand in regards to how much can I sin and still be saved. We said last week we need to step away and understand we don't want to test God because he might turn us over to the thing we hope to do. Most of us in here would look at this list in chapter 1 and go, "Yeah, that's not me," and that's really what the writer is hoping for, Paul is hoping for. But I want to show you a connection, because it goes from chapter 1, then it moves into chapter 2, and the way that it starts out in chapter 2 is a conclusionary statement by the word "therefore." In other words, the writer is basically saying, everything that I described in chapter 1, the people that I describe in chapter 2, both of you are just as doomed. People that are sinful and they don't care, and people who think they're perfect and they don't need help, people that have been in church a long time and they think they're good, and they think they're behaving good, and they think they're righteous and they're moral and they do all the right stuff, those people are just as doomed if they don't have Christ and put their faith in Christ. In other words, you can't be justified by your good works. You're only justified by your belief in Christ. That should get shouts. You're only justified by that. But when you are justified by Christ through faith and belief, you will bear fruit, and you will do good works, because he made you a new creation to do so. Those works don't save you, but they assure you that what you profess about your salvation is true. If you have no fruit in your life and you have no good works in your life and you see no transformation from the time you prayed the prayer, you need to evaluate whether or not you're saved, because all of that is necessary, listen, not to be saved, but to be assured that you are. You with me? Those things come naturally from someone who is saved.
A tree doesn't have to think about bearing fruit. It just does it because the seed is in it to do it.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 7:00
All right, so listen to this. If you go to one— i'm going to make the connection here. I want to make a connection. I want to say there's some things that are different. From number one, they're immoral people in chapter 1. In chapter 2, they're moralists who think they're good because of all the good stuff they do. Paul is trying to tell us both of them are going to hell if they don't trust in Christ. So that's the connection, but I want to talk about one word that I draw out in verse 22 in chapter 1, and then I want to show the connection that we see in chapter 2. Verse 22 says this: "Claiming"—these are people who are in sin and they don't care and they know what the cost is going to be, and they continue to commit daily suicide by their choices to continue to sin. That's what it says—"Claiming to be wise, they became fools." Everybody say "fools." There is a foolishness that comes from sin. Listen, the foolishness doesn't come from sin—you become foolish when you sin, and the more you live in sin, the more foolish you become. This is where the debased mind comes from. It is a foolish mind. "They exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things." And then you can read down through here, this list gets crazy. "Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen. For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another." And then it goes on in verse 29: "They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, slander, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish"—there is that "foolish" again, that's what I really want to hammer down on—"faithless, heartless, ruthless." So here's my connection here, and then it goes on to chapter 2, and it says, "Therefore you have no excuse." There is a connection between chapter 1 and chapter 2, and it is my position that foolishness is the connection. There is a foolishness when we think that living and giving ourself over to sin, that there will be hope. That's foolish. It's foolish to think and choose the consequences of sin rather than the consequences of believing in Christ. That's foolish. It's foolish. It's foolish to think that you can work your way to heaven. That's foolish.
Only a fool thinks they can be good enough for God. That's foolish.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 10:12
And sinful attitudes create a foolishness in men.
So chapter 2, I want to break down some things that I think are important, so that when we go into it next week we can really have an understanding. In chapter 2—chapter 2 sets about to expose what we call in the church moralists. It's people who want to be moral for the sake of being justified before God. So Paul is trying to expose this group of people, the Jew. The Jew who is saying, "We have not become like the people you're talking about in chapter 1. We're not like those crazy, sinful, horrible, nasty people. We've not sunk to that level." That's what a Jew would say. "We agree with your condemnation. Therefore we're different than they are, we're better than they are, and we stand uncondemned because of our good works."
We get the heart of the apostle Paul in chapter 2. If we basically—we move to Romans 3:19. So turn there real quick, and I want us to read, because we see this discourse in chapter 1, we see a bunch of sinful people, Gentiles, and then in chapter 2 we see Jews who think that they're going to earn their way to
Point 2Every mouth stopped, all the world guilty
Heaven, and then we work our way all the way into chapter 3, verse 19. In chapter 3, verse 19, we see a conclusionary statement that helps us understand what the writer of Romans is trying to say. He says this in 3:19: "Now we know that whatever the law says it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be stopped"—everybody say "every," every mouth may be stopped—"and the whole world, all"—everybody say "all"—"the whole world may be held accountable to God." That's the writer's intention. In other words, he is trying to, in chapter 1, chapter 2, in the beginning of chapter 3, help everyone who is under the sound of that word by the apostle Paul to understand we are all in need of a Savior, those who are far from him and have set their face to continuing sin, and those who think they're good enough. Everything that we do that is good is but filthy rags before God, and we all need a Savior. Isn't that good? Isn't that good? That's real good for the people who sit in church and think they're better than somebody else.
I want you to understand, if not for Christ, your betterness will get you to the same fiery hell as those in chapter 1, because you are not—I repeat—in a culture that says you're awesome, you are not awesome. You need help. Now, if you've been alive any amount of time, you understand we all need some help. My wife knows I need some help. We all need help, and where's our help come from? The Lord.
So the whole basis of the Christian gospel is only understood insofar—don't miss this whole thing, this is the gospel, the whole thing, not just the New Testament, the whole thing—the whole basis of the Christian gospel is only understood insofar as people understand that they are guilty before God.
You will never be grateful for God's grace if you think you're good enough without it.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 14:15
So the mission of the church on Sunday is not to make you feel like you're awesome and you have a purpose and you're special. The mission of the church is to funnel the glory to God, and the way that God gets the glory is when we realize we're not good, and it is in acknowledging the fact that we have lack and we have trouble and we have sin that allows the glory to go to God and God alone, and not our own strength, not our own devices, not our own skill, not our own knowledge, and none of that. So we've got to understand that, and that's hard in a world that really just wants to be told that they're awesome. "Just encourage me. I get beat down enough. Shawn, just encourage me on Sunday."
If I encourage you will trust in you and not in Christ.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 15:14
Here's how I can encourage you: you're not good enough, but Jesus died for you anyway, so that you could become good enough through the Holy Spirit's leading and through Jesus' blood. That's it.
Whether people are immoral in chapter 1 or the moral manner of chapter 2, whether they are Gentile of chapter 1 or a Jew of chapter 2, we all need Jesus. In chapter 2, Paul has what is referred to as moralistic heathens in mind. They're heathens, they're not moralistic believers.
They're not believers who've been empowered to bear good fruit. They're people who are trying to be justified by all the good stuff they do. It's really important.
In chapter 2, Paul is talking about these moralistic heathens, and more specifically about moralistic Jews. Now, let me give you some information that I read this week that I think is interesting. The Jew would have really quickly agreed with Paul's condemnation of the Gentile world in chapter 1, and the Jew would have then—this is why Paul's such a punk, because he gets the Jews in the grandstands, while he's talking, to be shouting down, "Yeah, they need to be condemned," and then he comes after the people who moved into agreement with them. It's just a real punk move to do when you're speaking. You get people in to agree with you, and then you'd be like, "Oh yeah, that's you." It's just Paul is just—I'm no wonder he was—they tried to kill him over and over again, right?
Because this is not—this is just not popular preaching. I read this—this is a tangent, but I read this, you guys will like this, maybe, I don't know, I liked it. There's a pastor by the name of Steve Lawson, and he said this: "The problem with preachers today is that nobody wants to kill them."
That was encouraging to me. I mean, right? I mean, that's the problem with preachers. And so in other words, what he's saying is we have preachers that are preaching a gospel to people that people love, and they buy the books, and they love to be told how awesome they are. The problem with preachers is that we're not preaching the gospel, because the gospel divides, and the gospel makes people mad, and the gospel, when you preach it, causes people to come after you to kill you.
Now, should we preach the gospel in such a way to offend? No. The gospel does it by itself. It just does it by itself. It just does it by itself. So he moves these people, the Jews, into agreeing, "All of those people are terrible, but I'm good." How many of you have ever been there? This is a comparison thing. Some of us want to be justified by how much better we are than somebody else. How many of you have ever been caught doing something and either subconsciously or maybe even verbally— definitely when we were younger we did this. When you get older you realize you shouldn't say this out loud, but you think it in your head. You don't say it out loud because you've learned that's not so good, but young people will say, "But so-and-so did this and that's much worse," or "At least I do this, but so-and-so did this." You have a brother and sister relationship in the house, you're getting in trouble, "Yeah, but so-and-so." I hope to be justified by my bad choices and not get punished for my bad choices because someone else is worse. And the church has become this to some degree, in some fashion, and you've got to be careful. If that's you, if you make a practice of that, you've got to be careful about that, because it might be that chapter 2 is for you. It might be—it might be that you hope to be justified by being better than someone else. That's not how you're justified.
Let me tell you how you're justified: by believing in Jesus Christ and making him Lord of your life.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 19:26
That's it. That's it.
You just trust in him and you make him Lord. That's how you're justified. It don't matter whether you're better or worse than somebody. That's it.
And if you look at yourself as somebody who's worse than everybody else, I would say probably you're a believer, because you understand the depravity of man. You understand that you without Christ are hopeless. That's a good way to see yourself. When you see that you need help, you easily are someone who goes to the right source for that help. That's good news. The Jew traditionally believed that God was going to blast the heathen Gentiles out of existence because of their sin. How many of you know the story of Jonah, right? You at least heard it. Jonah was told by God to go to Nineveh, because these people were horrible, and to tell them to turn or burn, literally, that he would wipe out Nineveh off the world, as it were, unless they repented. But he also believed that no Jew would ever experience that kind of condemnation. Jews believed that because they were Jewish, born into the line of Abraham, because they were circumcised, and because they kept the trappings of Jewish religion, that they were exempt from any judgment ever. Paul is speaking to this attitude here. Here's a few sayings that Jews said and say even today. They're popular. Here they are. One of them was, "God loves Israel alone of all the nations." That's said today, and it's been said in the Bible. Another one is, "God will judge the Gentiles with one measure and the Jews with another." Now, that kind of helps us get a perspective, if that's the Jewish mindset, why he's writing chapter 1 about the Gentiles and then throwing in chapter 2 to talk with them about that kind of a statement. He'll judge them one way and us another. In other words, we'll have more grace than the Gentiles, those poor nations, those poor people, they're doomed. They said, Abraham—this is a literal saying—Abraham sits beside the gates of hell and does not permit any wicked israelite to go through. That's crazy. Not like—like Abraham sits at the gates of hell to prevent any Israelite getting through to hell because they're special. Paul then in chapter 2 turns his attention from the Gentile and starts going after this type of mindset.
Now, you can see this from two angles. Number one, they believed in salvation by works, the Jews did. They believed in what they called today legalism, salvation by works. There are a lot of people on social media and not on social media that think I am a moralist, that I believe that people are saved by works.
You know why? Because I use the word "work," and that's trigger-inducing for people. But there's a right way to talk about work and there's a wrong way to talk about work, amen. And justification is the key to it. Just in case you didn't know, the Bible is not works-based, but it talks about works a lot once you're saved. But it never talks about works in regards to being justified by your works. It just says good works proceed after salvation. But the Jews were, true more or less, they believed they would be justified by good works, by being chosen, by being special, by God showing his favor on them, and Paul is coming after them. They thought—because they were in a nation, listen to this—they thought that because they were in a nation and because they kept the traditions, and because of their physical identification and their religious identification together, they were exempt from judgment.
Now, that's interesting, because I think we could—maybe there might be some people in churches today across America that, because they come to church and they're a part of a group of people, or because their parents were Christians, that they're exempt from judgment.
Paul attacks that and says, listen, it doesn't matter where you go to church, and it doesn't matter your attendance. What matters is, that doesn't save you. What saves you is making Jesus your Lord.
Don't be like the Jews who think that just because they come on Sunday they're saved. Don't be like that, because there are people that are a part of churches every week that stand before the Lord, and it says in Matthew, he said, they said, "I said, the homeless—I did mighty signs, I did miracles, I prophesied in your name, I did all these things in your name," and "I don't know who you are." You were a part of a movement and you were a part of people who were my true children, but you were never my child. Like, so it's going to happen. So here's the reality. I know that chapter 2 might not apply to many of you, but it might, and highly likely applies to some. So if I were to say today, "Hey, listen, chapter 2 is for the Jews, it's for people who believe they can be saved by their good works, justified by their good works, and that's none of you," the chances are that's not true.
There might be some of you here today, you think you're getting in because your parents love him and have a relationship with him. You think you're getting in because you come to church and you serve and you do that.
Listen, none of that stuff saves you. Committing your life to Jesus and becoming a follower of Christ saves you.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 26:23
That's it. So I want to talk about four that I think—foolishness behaviors we see. And here's my title, if you care: sin reduces us to foolishness. And this applies to chapter 1 and it applies to chapter 2, because you're foolish in chapter 1 if you just cycle down into a sinful behavior, and you're just as sinful and foolish in chapter 2 if you think you can earn your way to heaven. Both are sinful attitudes, and both lead to more foolishness. In the world today there are loads of knowledge. There's loads of knowledge that can be found. How many of you know, if you want to know anything, just spend any amount of time on YouTube, you can figure it out. There's loads of information out there. Knowledge is everywhere, but wisdom in our culture today is a rare commodity.
Go to Twitter.
Knowledge without wisdom is just silliness.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 27:34
It's just silliness.
Why? Because wisdom is one of sin's first casualties, we see, all the way in chapter 1. Now, this is important. This is why God says to pray for wisdom. You can't miss this when I go into chapter 2. You have to understand foolishness, and sin leads to foolishness, and sin ultimately causes us to lose wisdom.
That's why it says if you will pray and ask for wisdom, I will give it freely, because wisdom is a casualty of sin. And how many of you know we've all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God? We need some wisdom today. It's hard to admit, but true nonetheless: sin reduces all of us to fools.
I like that. That's tweetable. I'll tweet that later today. I like that, because many of us think we're awesome and we have some great opinions, but sin reduces us to fools.
And the fact is that no one is more victimized by your foolishness than you are.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 28:36
That's good. You see the empirical evidence of the foolishness of sin on almost every page of Scripture. It's there. For example, you see foolishness in full operation in the tragic story of David and bathsheba. Just foolishness. This is why David says in Psalm 51:6, "Surely you desire truth in the inward being; therefore teach me wisdom in the secret heart." You cannot find one place in the Bible where sin reigns and foolishness does not also reign. You read the story of David's sin and you say to yourself, "What was he thinking?"
Okay, now you might not be saying that if you're a guy and you were out on the balcony and you saw a woman taking a bath and you took a double take. You might be like, "I'm kind of guilty of that dumb stuff myself, so I don't say, what were you thinking, because I get what you were thinking." But all of us, even men today, would say, when he brought back Bathsheba's husband, trying to concoct an idea to get him to lay with her and he doesn't do it, and then puts him on the front line so that he is murdered and killed, we're like, "David, what are you thinking?" It's one thing to make a mistake, it's another thing to off someone's husband. So even men here today would be like, "What are you thinking? How did you get here?" Here's another question: did he really believe he was going to get away with this? Things people do, people really believe they're going to get away with it. Sin will find you out. That's a promise in the Bible. That's a promise. The problem is we don't like to claim it, but it's a promise in there nonetheless.
We claim a lot of promises for ourselves. We don't claim that one too often. Did he completely forget who he was? Did he think that God was going to stand idly by and let this ridiculousness happen? But David is not some extreme case of foolishness gone wild in the Bible. You see evidence of this same foolish behavior in each of our lives daily. People could say of us again and again, "What were you thinking?"
"What was she thinking? What was he thinking?" We went to a marriage conference as of recent. We ran into a couple who were working hard to restore trust that had been broken because one party in the marriage had an affair on the other party, and some of the conversations in the marriage conference, as I had with both her and him, I would hear things in the conversation of the person or the party who had an affair would say of him own self, "I don't know what I was thinking."
That's what sin does. Sin first attacks our ability to think with wisdom.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 32:18
Sin attacks our ability to think critically, and if ever we lived in a generation where we cannot think critically, it is this generation. You try to go have a reasonable conversation with somebody about something that they don't agree with. Good luck talking sense to people. Are you with me? Good luck bringing facts, because facts don't matter in an argument where only your feelings matter.
But sin turns off your ability to think critically and ultimately be wise, which only comes from God, and how can you be wise if everything you do opposes him? Notice that wisdom comes from God, and God gives wisdom to those who chase after him.
Point 3The foolishness of self-centeredness
What does foolishness look like? Here's four, real quick, four, real quick, most significant aspects. Number one, real quick, the foolishness of self-centeredness.
That's the first foolishness we see in both chapter 1 and chapter 2. It's all about me. Just in case you think that the Gentiles—that I would attribute, Shawn, self-centeredness to chapter 1—the writer of Romans would attribute self-centeredness to chapter 1 and chapter 2, applied differently, but both of it's self-centeredness. It's "I'm better, God's blessed me, I won't be judged, Gentiles are terrible, we're good." It's all about me. It's all about me. It's all about me. We live in a very self-centered generation, ladies and gentlemen. This is one of the sure signs that people have been damaged by sin, and it is one of the sure signs that nations have been damaged by sin out of control, and there are people who will take self-centered ideas, try to implement it into the church, and build religions around it and worship us instead of the Creator. Our phraseology tells on us about who we really worship.
This is key. This is not for the sake of judgment, but it's for the sake of evaluation, because we don't want to trust in ourselves, because if we trust in ourselves we have no hope at all. We want to trust in God, and we can't trust in God if we still worship ourselves. So Philippians 2:3 says, "Do nothing from selfish ambition." Listen, do some things for selfish ambition if it means good, it's good for somebody else. It doesn't say that. "Do nothing." Craziest thing ever, though. I looked that up, the word "nothing" there in the Greek, guess what it means? Nothing. "Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit." God help me.
How many of you can agree with that? "But in humility count others more significant than yourselves."
Sin causes us to live foolishly and definitely not like that. We were created to live for something, something bigger than ourselves. We were designed to live with, for, and through the Lord. God is meant to be the motivation and hope of everything we do. His pleasure, his honor, and his will are the things for which we are meant to live, but the foolishness of sin really does cause us to reduce our lives to the size and shape of our lives, and that's the problem. Now, Brook said something really interesting to me yesterday. We were driving somewhere doing something, I don't even remember, I was kind of captivated by the conversation, and I was telling her that i'm kind of getting a lot of conversations of people wondering if I'm a works-based pastor, and she said, "I don't know, I just feel like this is just—I think it's just ridiculous, because if the issue was, Shawn, you talking about people's purpose, no one would have a problem in the church with you saying, 'You've got to do this to fulfill your purpose, and do this to fulfill your purpose, and do this to fulfill your purpose,' because it's about them. But the moment you say that life is about God, and when we follow God there are works involved with following him, everybody wants to have a problem with that. So really they don't have a problem with works, they have a problem with works for God versus works for them."
That's wise. I like that. Amen. And sometimes we just got to get to a place where we can look at ourselves and say, sin has caused us to be foolish to the greed and unto self-centeredness, and I want to not trust in myself, I want to trust in God, and we repent. Often our living has no greater purpose than self-satisfaction and self-fulfillment. Does this sound harsh? Well, ask yourself, why do I ever get impatient with other people? I'm preaching to myself there. Why do I ever say things like I shouldn't say? Why do I get discouraged with my circumstances? Why do I give way to anger or give into self-pity? The answer is that, like me, you want your way, and when things don't go your way or people are in your way, you lash out in anger and you turn inward
Point 4The foolishness of self-deception
In discouragement. That's why sin also brings about number two, the foolishness of self-deception.
Isaiah 5:20 says, "Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!" Ladies and gentlemen, that prophetic word from Isaiah speaks so clearly into our culture and depicts what we're living in today.
We would rather live in the gray and live in any black and white, but, ladies and gentlemen, the Bible is not gray. There is no shadow of turning in Christ. It is either light or it is dark. Let's stop calling what is dark light and what is light dark. Time is up on that ridiculousness.
Sin causes us to be deceived to the degree that we justify sin and call it good. Oh, ladies and gentlemen, we're in that day.
We're in that day. We're all very good at making ourselves feel good about what God says is bad. We're all very skilled at recasting what we've done so that what was wrong doesn't look so wrong to us. I'll tell myself that I really didn't lash out in anger. No, I was speaking as if I was God's prophet whipping people out of the temple. If Jesus can do it, I can do it. No, you're just a mean, hateful, angry person who needs Jesus to help you, not whip people because you're in a bad mood. We'll tell ourself that the second look wasn't lust, "I'm simply a man and I can't control where my eyes go." Yeah, you can. I'll tell myself that I'm not really craving power, I'm just exercising God- given leadership gifts and to have dominion over everything on earth. Stop using biblical principles for you to be abusive. Sometimes exhibiting dominion means laying your life down and being crucified on a cross so that you can reign for eternity. Sometimes it isn't fighting so that you don't die, sometimes it's looking like you lost, through death, so that he can truly reign in the spiritual realm. Come on now, come on. In a world where we want to wield the Holy Spirit to have power and authority to do what we want, to please ourselves, to justify ourselves, and to entertain ourselves, we've called what is godly what is not godly.
And maybe God wanted us to lay our life down. Maybe God didn't want to fight for you, to fight for your rights.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 41:59
Maybe he wanted you to lay down your right, and maybe that's what's right and just. Before you think you're so special because you've been laying your life down—that seems to be the word of the day lately, every conversation I'm in about how much people are laying their life down, how much I'm laying my life down—in case you think you're so special because you're laying your life down, be careful to not be like people in chapter 2 that think so wonderful of themselves that they begin to compare how much they've sacrificed versus how much someone else has sacrificed, because guess what, none of you sacrificed as much as Christ, and the fact that you want to pop off with the mouth about how much you've laid down for somebody takes the glory away from God in the first place. So let me just back off that a bit.
Point 5Self-sufficiency and self-righteousness: wisdom is Christ
That's good stuff. That's good stuff. That's encouraging to me, right? Self—the foolishness of self-sufficiency, it's the third one.
We all like to think of ourselves as more independently capable than we actually are. All the introverts in here, unite. Raise your hand with me if you're an introvert in here. I'm going to say this again. We specifically all like to think of ourselves as more independently capable than we actually are. God created you to be a communal being. You need others and you need God. You need God and you need God's children. God's children make you tired, but you still need them. You can't do this all by yourself. And let me tell you, introverts in here, and I can speak from experience, because I scored 99.9 as an introvert in college. You think I'm joking? That was the actual percentage of my scoring. You can't do this better by yourself.
You can't. You know how many times in my life I just want to throw my hands up and like, "I am done," but then Brook pops around the corner and goes, "Are you sure?" Or she stands silently and applauds. I believe God's going to do something if we'll just stay faithful. You need people. You need people. Some of us are having a hard week and we need someone to encourage us. Amen?
We need someone to say, "Stay in there, keep fighting the good fight of faith, endure to the end." We need people on the sidelines. Why do you think Hebrews 12:1 is there, that people are cheering us on? We need this support. Can't do it by yourself. We were made to live in a humble, worshipful, and loving dependency upon God and in a loving and humble interdependency with others. Our lives were designed to be community projects. As an introvert, that makes me just kind of cringe. This is where our faith as introverts is tested, because is it our faith or is it his?
Our lives were designed to be community projects, not individual ones, yet the foolishness of sin tells us that we have all that we need within ourself.
Introverts, that's sinful, to think that you do it better by yourself. Sin leads to foolishness that causes you to believe that, and that's not God.
We hold our struggles within, we don't share our problems with others, we stay silent, and we are masochistically holding it in as not to burden other people.
That's not how he created you. Even in our relationship with the Lord, we're yoked. In marriage we're yoked, in community we're yoked. The lie of the garden was that Adam and Eve could be like God and wouldn't need him anymore. They could be independent and self-sufficient, and we still believe this lie today. Number four, the last one, the foolishness of self-righteousness.
That's chapter 2. That's chapter 2 specifically. All of it's chapter 2, all the four foolishnesses, but this one specifically.
Why don't we celebrate grace anymore? Why aren't we more amazed by the wonderful gifts that are ours as children of God?
Why don't we live with a deep sense of need coupled with a deep sense of gratitude for how each need has been met by God's grace?
I believe the answer is clear.
You'll never celebrate grace as much as you should when you think you're more righteous than you actually are.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 47:28
Grace is the plea of sinners. Mercy is the hope of the wicked. Acceptance is the prayer of those who know that they could never do anything to earn it. But the foolishness of sin makes me righteous in my own eyes.
When we tell our own stories, and we reflect on our life and we tell people about our life, it is amazing how quickly we become more the hero than we were the other time we told the story. Oh, come on now. "I caught a fish, it was this big." "I caught a fish, it was this big."
"I caught a fish, it was as long as my leg." How many of you told stories about the time you overcame with the help of God, and you end up telling the stories ten times, and the tenth time you say it over dinner with the new friend you formed, you realize that God is no longer the hero of the story, but you are?
You'll never celebrate grace as much as you should when you think you're more righteous than you actually are.
Often it isn't my sin that keeps me from coming to God. Sadly, I don't come to him because I don't think I need the grace that can be found in him, because I'm good enough all by myself. That's good stuff. Here's what all of us must face: sin really does reduce us to fools, but happily the story doesn't end there. The one who is the ultimate source of everything that's good, that's true, that's trustworthy, that's right and wise, is also a God of amazing grace. You don't get freed from your foolishness by education and experience.
You don't get wisdom by research and analysis. You get wisdom by means of a relationship with the one who is ultimately wise.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 50:08
Furthermore—I'll throw this in there because this is trigger-inducing for me—furthermore, to say you are wise is the utmost form of foolishness.
Where do you get that from in the Bible? 1 Corinthians 3:18–20: "Let no one deceive himself. If anyone among you thinks that he is wise in this age, let him become a fool that he may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is folly with God. For it is written, 'He catches the wise in their craftiness,' and again, 'The Lord knows the thoughts of the wise, that they are futile.'" The radical claim of the Bible is that wisdom isn't first a book or a system or a set of commands or a self-help book or principles. No, wisdom is a person, and his name is Jesus Christ.
When you and I are graced into acceptance with him, we're drawn into a personal relationship with wisdom, and wisdom begins a lifelong process of freeing us from the strongholds that the foolishness of sin has on us. We aren't yet completely free, but there will be a day when our every thought, our every desire, our every choice and action and word will be fundamentally wise. And in closing, it makes much sense, then, that a repentant man, David, who we talked about earlier, would reflect on his need for wisdom after his sin, because sin reduces all of us to fools.
Sin is reducing us to fools and calls us to do foolish things even though we think we're wise, and for this we need more than information and education and experience. We need exactly what we find in Christ. We need grace. Listen, I'm going to close with this thought, and I want you to think about it, and I'm not going to explain it, I just want you to think about it.
Wisdom is the product of grace.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 52:42
There is simply nowhere else to find wisdom but through the grace of God for every sinner, because only God's grace makes a fool who was ruled by sin set free from foolishness, that we might step into wisdom. That's the story of the gospel. I want to do this just for a moment. Just pause for a moment.
I just want to give us time to respond. You might be sitting in here today and you might be who we've been talking about in chapter 1. You're just in a downward spiral, and sin leads to more sin, and sin leads to more sin, and you're like, "I'm just—I'm crazy, I'm foolish. I'm foolish, I make more and more foolish choices, and I need help." That's you today. Your only help comes from Jesus Christ. You might be someone here today that's sitting in the room and you think that what's going to justify you is because your parents were believers and you come to church and you're faithful and you serve, and you think that's what saves you, and your good deeds, and you are a moral, moralistic heathen who hasn't put their hope and trust in the Lord, to trust in yourself. That's you. Repent and trust in Jesus. Step out of foolishness and into wisdom that only comes through belief in Christ. I want to take a moment, and it's a moment, 60 seconds, just right where you are. You can close your eyes, you can keep your eyes open, I don't think there's a special connection to God when you close your eyes, but I want you to, in this moment, reflect and consider Jesus.
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