Faith Versus Flesh

Transcript

I love you guys. I’m supremely thankful that I get to be here with you. Let’s dive into God’s Word together. Can you please open up to Philippians chapter 3? Philippians chapter 3. If you are like me and you didn’t grow up reading the Bible, you can find all the books of the Bible listed in the very front. The big numbers are the chapter numbers. The small numbers are the verse numbers. If you have trouble finding it, I’d encourage you rather than just not to look at it, to just ask somebody next to you for help. They’d be happy to, yeah, just point you to the verse. Because we really want to put eyes on God’s Word. Because it’s really the only hope we have this morning. We’re going to be in Philippians chapter 3. I’m going to read starting in verse 2. Look out for the dogs.

Look out for the evildoers. Look out for those who mutilate the flesh. We are the circumcision, who worship by the Spirit of God and glory in Christ Jesus and put no confidence in the flesh. Though I myself have reason for confidence in the flesh also. If anyone else thinks he has reason for confidence in the flesh, I have more. Circumcised on the eighth day of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews. As to the law, a Pharisee. As to zeal, a persecutor of the church. As to righteousness under the law, blameless. But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For His sake, I have suffered the loss of all things and I count them all as rubbish

in order that I might gain Christ and be found in Him. Not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ. The righteousness from God that depends on faith. That I might know Him in the power of His resurrection and that I might share in His sufferings, becoming like Him in His death. That by any means possible, I might attain the resurrection from the dead.

— Philippians 3

(ESV)

This is God’s holy, inspired, inerrant, and infallible word. It’s completely sufficient for all things needed for life and godliness. Amen. So there are four main types of irony, or so I’m told by Google. And the idea behind them all is that when we encounter irony, we are impacted when what happens is the opposite of what we expected to happen. So irony can be funny, like when your dog eats his certificate of dog training,

The Irony of False Teaching

dog obedience training, right? Irony can be confusing, like when you find out that a pulmonologist, a lung doctor, smokes two packs of cigarettes a day. Sometimes irony can be tragic. Consider the case of Vital Hassan, the only Jew in all of Europe to be tried and executed after World War II for the crime of being a Jew hunter. Sometimes irony is something that we stumble upon as we just live our lives, like when you can’t use your new scissors because they’re in the plastic packaging that you need scissors to cut open. Other times irony can be a tool that is deliberately employed in order to make a good point, a good dad joke, typically trades in irony. Politicians, at their best, use irony to try to drive home their political points, try to make you think. That’s irony. In this morning’s text, Paul employs a tool known as verbal irony.

And he does it in order to address the issue of false teachers in the church. He actually uses irony three separate times in the very first verse, all of which are directed at these false teachers who are, in essence, saying, you have to become Jewish in order to be saved by God. If you want to be right before God, you have to adopt Jewishness. So let’s look at each of these in turn. First, Paul calls the false teachers dogs. And why is that ironic? One of the things that I’ve noticed about Portland is everybody has a dog. I’m guessing it’s because people don’t like children as much. So instead of children, it’s dogs. In the ancient world, and even in many parts of the world today, when I was a missionary in Peru, people didn’t have dogs in their home. Dogs were like nasty, filthy, mongrel animals.

People threw rocks at dogs when they saw them. In the ancient world, the same thing was true. Particularly in a Jewish context, the word dog was an epithet used for Gentiles. But Paul says, actually, if you’re trying to tell Gentiles that they have to be Jews in order to be right with God, then they’re not the dogs, you are. The false teachers are preaching a gospel that says that you can only be made righteous by observance of the law, basically by doing good deeds. And so the second use of irony that Paul employs is he calls them workers of evil. You’re telling them that they have to do good works in order to be saved, which actually makes you not a worker of good. You’re a worker of evil. Finally, Paul calls these false teachers mutilators of the flesh. Band name - called it! This is ironic because circumcision

was a mark of the flesh that was not supposed to mutilate the flesh, but rather it was supposed to be evidence in the flesh of God’s grace. And Paul says, if you’re trying to tell people that they have to be circumcised to be right with God, then you’re not giving people grace, you’re mutilating them. And then the final dash of irony in this text is not really in anything that Paul says per se, but rather in the fact that Paul is the one saying it. Remember who Paul is. Paul was the Pharisee of Pharisees. He was the advocate extraordinaire of works-based righteousness. When he met Jesus, he had his whole world turned upside down. He had an encounter with grace. So Paul is warning the Philippians to beware of anyone preaching a view of righteousness that he himself used to preach. Irony upon irony. Now the use of irony is always tinged with comedy.

A War for Righteousness

Friends, make no mistake about it, this morning’s text is not a joke. I want you to know that God has gathered you here in this place, in this room, this morning, so He can warn you. Beware. Brothers and sisters in Christ, members of Trinity, beware. Beware of the dogs. Beware of the mutilators of the flesh. These false teachers are trying to lead you away from Christ and lead you down into the bowels of hell by convincing you that in order to be right with God, you have to trust in your flesh rather than in Christ’s finished work on the cross. They’re trying to tell you that you can be right with God through obedience to the law rather than obedience by faith. They’re trying to get you to trust in your own righteousness rather than the righteousness of Christ. And if you do that, you will be lost.

So beware. You may not know that you’re in a war, but you are. This war of righteousness is a war that we’ve been fighting ever since Genesis 3, ever since the fall of man in the garden. You remember when Adam found himself naked and ashamed in the presence of the Lord after he fell in sin? Genesis 3 describes it like this. And then the eyes of both were opened and they knew that they were naked. So God’s holiness had sort of laid their souls bare. And that was manifested in their nakedness. And it says, and they sewed fig leaves together for themselves and made loincloths. So what we see here is that Adam placed confidence in himself, in his ability to fix his own sin problem, his own shame problem. And what I want you to see this morning is that this anti-gospel impulse lives on in the heart of every son of Adam

and every daughter of Eve. Even in you, even in me, even though we are part of churches that preach and understand and know the one true gospel of grace and grace alone, that fundamental simple impulse still lives in us wherein we say, you know, I bet I can fix my relationship with God in my own strength, by my own power, with my own righteousness, by trusting in the works of my flesh. What that means is that when a false teacher comes along and just barely twists the gospel to just, they’re not going to come out and say, you don’t need the righteousness of Christ, you’ve got this. They’re not going to come out and say that. They’re just going to, they’re going to begin to twist the gospel such that just by a few degrees, you go, you know, actually I think I can trust in my flesh

just a little bit. So be on the lookout. When you look at these ten verses all at once, they can be a little overwhelming. They certainly were for me in my sermon prep. It covers a lot of themes, false teachers, circumcision, worship, Pharisees, righteousness, rubbish, resurrection, suffering. Oh my, you know, there’s a lot going on here. But here’s what I want you to see. All of the themes in this morning’s text are like streams and tributaries leading back to the main river running through the text, which is this. In what shall we trust for our righteousness? Or you might say, in whom will we trust for our righteousness? You can see this contrast pretty clearly in verse 9. Just go ahead and look there with me. Paul says that he wants to gain Christ so that he can be found in him, not having a righteousness of his own

that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ and the righteousness from God that depends on faith. But well before you get to verse 9, you see this in verses 3 and 4 where Paul uses the phrase confidence in the flesh three times. Look back at verses 3 and 4.

I don’t know if you guys are the type that likes to mark up your Bibles, but whenever you see a phrase or a word repeated several times, it’s probably good to highlight underline, put a star next to that. It’s the point of emphasis so that when you come back and you see it as you’re reading through your scriptures in your maybe yearly Bible reading plan, you’ll kind of have your bearings there. So that leads us to ask, what does it mean to place confidence in the flesh? This is important. If you’ve been sort of tuning out, if you’ve been kind of losing attention, if the Twitter is like, like your phone’s vibrating, people are responding to your tweet, you want to kind of like, you’re tempted to pull out your phone and like pay attention to that. This is where I want to like corral you back to me

because this is the difference between true and false worship. This is the difference between being truly circumcised at the heart level or being merely circumcised in the flesh. It’s the difference between knowing Christ and being with Him forever or being an enemy of Christ and an enemy of the cross and being lost forever without Him. This is huge. False teachers are teaching people to place confidence in the flesh. So what does that mean? Confidence in the flesh. At this point, I don’t think we can do better than John Calvin’s explanation. Calvin says that confidence in the flesh is what we have whenever we trust in or rely on anything other than Christ and Christ alone for our righteousness. For Paul, confidence in the flesh had a very Jewish flavor. That’s what verses 5 and 6 are all about, right? Paul lists out his Jewish bona fides.

Circumcised on the eighth day, a son of Abraham from the tribe of Benjamin, a Pharisee, which meant that he was very zealous for the law. So Paul says, listen, no one had more reason for confidence in the flesh than me and I’m telling you that these false teachers are telling you that you have to be Jewish in order to be safe with God, to be righteous before God, but no one was more Jewish than I was and I was totally lost. Then in verse 8, Paul says that all of his Jewish pride, his right ritual, his right ancestry, his right morals, all of it amounted to nothing more than a pile of garbage. Now the word translated as rubbish there in your English Bibles is a very sanitized version of a Greek word that basically means a big, stinking, worthless pile of crap. You might be thinking,

Sean, can you say crap from the pulpit? Parents, this might be a good time to talk to your children about the sometimes biblical necessity of using strong language. I mean, if anything, and I’m not saying the real word, which is, no, don’t say it, come on. Some of you guys were thinking it. Right? If anything is going to be referred to as such filthy language, it is this filthy false gospel. Salvation by works. It’s exactly what it is. It’s crap masquerading as gospel. So if I were to place a big, steaming pile of dung right here in front of the pulpit, right in the middle of the floor, and I were to ask you, brothers and sisters in Christ, will you place your complete confidence in this pile of dung to make you righteous before God, what would you say? Will you bet your eternity

on the ability of this pile of excrement to save you? What would you say? No. If you said yes, I would say, great. Well, me and Pastor Thomas want to talk with you in the office, out of the service, because you’re either insane or you’re just spiritually blind to the extent that we.. But Paul is saying exactly that. He’s saying when we trust in the flesh, when we trust in anything other than the finished work of Christ and His righteousness to be made right with God, we are saying, I am trusting in a massive pile of dung to save me.

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Where Is Your Confidence?

You know, this is seen from the beginning of the Bible all the way to the end, this impulse of fallen human beings to trust in their own flesh for their own salvation. We saw it with Adam in Genesis 3. The prophet Isaiah told Israel, your righteousness is like filthy rags. And if you think the word crap is offensive, wait till you find out what filthy rags refers to. From Adam to Israel, from Philippi to Decatur to Portland, human beings love to trust in themselves and their own works to be made right with God. So, I want us to spend a pretty significant amount of time for the rest of our sermon asking just a very simple question. But simple doesn’t mean easy. Here’s the question. Where have you placed your confidence for salvation? In whom are you trusting? For your righteousness. Now, I doubt that anyone here is trusting

in their Jewish heritage for their righteousness. Am I wrong? Is there anybody here? Shalom. I doubt anyone here is trusting in their old covenant rituals. But that doesn’t mean that at some level you might not be trusting in that which is worthless to save you. So, let’s walk through it. Maybe you’re not trusting in circumcision to save you, but you are trusting in your baptism. Maybe you find your righteousness, your confidence before the Lord in your baptism. I can’t tell you in the Christian South how many times I’ve talked to people and I’ve asked them to tell me their testimony and they say, well, I got baptized at this church on this date. I’ll say, fantastic. When did you come to understand that you are lost and dead in sin in need of a Savior, Christ Jesus? And the conversation usually gets a little awkward

because they don’t really know what I mean. They’ve placed their confidence in a religious ritual rather than the thing that the symbol is supposed to be pointing to. Listen, you can get dunked by a pastor over and over and over again and that will do nothing to make you righteous before God. Maybe you’ve placed your confidence in an altar call. Maybe some of you were like, yeah, I remember that. That’s what we did at church camp. Or I went to a conference and they did that. Or I was part of a church that used to do altar calls every Sunday. I know many Christians who have that same story. They placed all their confidence in the fact that they had a really emotional experience in a religious environment and they walked down the aisle and they said a prayer with someone. They were tearful. And then someone said,

hey, you should write this date in the Bible. This is the date that you got saved. Maybe it’s the date you got saved. You can get saved during an altar call if during the altar call you come to see yourself as a sinner in utter need of salvation that Christ alone can offer you. But the design of an altar call is fundamentally working against that impulse. It’s designed to stir up emotions in you and to manipulate you and to pressure you. The Lord can use crooked sticks to draw straight lines, but I can’t tell you how many people I know who have placed false confidence in their altar call experience. You probably don’t place much confidence in your ethnic heritage like Paul did, like the Jews did. But you might place great confidence in your spiritual heritage. I knew a man once who placed his confidence

in the fact that both his father and his grandfather were pastors in the church. And how could God not receive into heaven a man like that? I know a man today who pretty much believes that he’s right with God because he’s a deacon in the church. He is not qualified to be a deacon in the church. I’ve met people who would never say this out loud, but as you get to know them it’s obvious that they’re placing all of their confidence in the fact that they’re a member of a particular denomination. Denominations aren’t bad. I love denominations. I think they’re actually really useful so that we can get along even though we don’t always agree. But it is all too common for people to place their confidence in the fact that they’re a Southern Baptist or they’re in the PCA. Or my guess is that in Portland

it’s probably our confidence is in the fact that we’re not Southern Baptists. Oh yeah, those Southern Baptists. And you have this sense of self-righteousness that you’re not like them. Maybe you don’t place much confidence in your ability to keep the law, but you might place spiritual confidence in your theological knowledge and acumen. This is a doctrinal church, right? We take theology seriously. The most important thoughts we think are the thoughts that we think when we think about God. Amen? And yet, perhaps, you’ve come to equate knowing things about God with actually knowing God relationally. You think that your Bible knowledge will save you. You think that reading a bunch of dead Puritans is the same thing as loving Jesus. You think that being able to quote Spurgeon proves the fact that you actually belong to Christ.

You place more confidence in your own efforts in reading complex theological works than resting in the finished work of Christ. Listen to me, friends. Your theology cannot save you. It cannot make you right with God. Have we learned nothing from the Pharisees? Theology is good, but apart from Christ, like everything else, it is rubbish. You cannot have righteousness flowing from your proximity and appreciation of right teachers, reading the right books, going to the right conferences, listening to the right podcasts, although you should listen to Room for Nuance. It won’t make you righteous, but it’ll help you think well. I can’t believe I did that. Being on the right side of certain theological debates, being on the right side of certain social movements, you can get all of that right and still be totally unrighteous in God’s sight. Some of us might be placing our confidence in our church membership,

or our attendance, or our Bible reading, or our prayer, or our giving, or our serving. But all of those things flow out of the fact that we have been justified. They don’t make us justified. We live right lives because we have been given the righteousness of Christ. Those things do not create righteousness within us. Here’s a weird one. Some of us might be placing our confidence, our spiritual confidence, in our diets. How does that work? Well, there’s something about the food and drink that we consume or don’t consume that has a strange spiritual interaction with our worship. I know this might sound strange, but remember the Pharisees, right? There’s this Pharisaical obsession in bad religion which says that I’m okay with God based off of the consumption of certain foods and the abstention of other foods. You know, I’ve been hearing people say, because everything is identity politics

lately, right? Like, food is political. Food is political. You’ve heard that? You’re in Portland. Have you not heard that? Food is political. That’s true. Food is religious. And a lot of us like to channel our false religion into what we consume or don’t consume. Make no mistake, the Pharisaical impulse to find our righteousness through what we consume or don’t consume is alive and well in our modern pseudo-spiritual neo-pagan world. From essential oils to fad diets to supplementation regimes, we try to mediate our relationship with God through our food and drink. But I’m here to tell you, you can eat all the right stuff or not eat all the right stuff, and you can be perfectly healthy in your body and be perfectly lost in your soul. Maybe your confidence in the flesh is mediated through your emotions. That is, you’ve come to believe that you are right with God

because of the way you feel when you read the Bible, when you go to church, when you serve the poor. Friends, you have to know that our emotions are good, but they’re not reliable indicators of our relationship with God. Look at verse 6. Paul says, As to zeal, enthusiasm, excitement, joy, right? As to zeal, I was a persecutor of the church. So Paul, before his conversion, he placed tremendous spiritual confidence in his emotional life. He saw his zealous heart for God as evidence that his heart belonged to God, but he was wrong, and he wasn’t a little bit wrong, he was exactly wrong. It was the exact opposite of what he thought was the case. He was zealous even as he was working at cross-purposes with the gospel. I remember as an early Christian, I got saved, nobody discipled me, I got lost in the prosperity gospel,

and I went out and I was doing street ministry every night. I was getting after it for Jesus. I mean, I’m like, I’m doing it, Lord, I’m doing it. And I’m just out there preaching a false gospel every night. If you would have asked me, Sean, how are you doing with the Lord? I would have said, I’m crushing it. Look how excited I am to go out and share my faith. In Romans 10, Paul talks about this phenomenon. He says some of his fellow Jews, according to the flesh, they have the same problem that he used to have. They have a certain kind of zeal for God, but that zeal is not a zeal that can save, because it’s a zeal that trusts in his own righteousness, or in his own righteousness. Look at Romans 10 with me. Just turn over there with me. Romans 10, verses 2-4.

What I want you to see here is the way Paul connects zeal and their own righteousness. Romans 10, starting in verse 2. Paul says,

For I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge. For being ignorant of the righteousness of God and seeking to establish their own righteousness, they did not submit to God’s righteousness.

— Romans 10

(ESV)

Do you see? Jesus, in his parable of the sower, says that some will only appear to receive Christ, but later they will fall away and they will demonstrate the fact that they never really knew him at all. And he says that some of the people will initially receive him with great joy. With great joy. If you were on the outside looking in at these people and you were to say, I wonder if they’re actually Christians, you might be tempted to say, look at the joy.

Look at the joy they have. And Jesus says, it’s not true joy. That expression of emotion is unreliable. Sure enough, the joy fades and you’ve probably seen it. The joy fades and people soon start finding joy elsewhere. And they follow a different God. The point is simple enough. Don’t confuse excitement for Jesus with faith in Jesus. And we should be excited for Jesus. We should be joyful, we should be zealous. Emotions are good and when we are walking with the Lord, they will be channeled in the right direction. But if you’ve ever walked through the Gospel of John, you should see how over and over and over again it’s totally possible for people who are completely lost to be totally emotionally confused about the Gospel. Okay. It’s also possible that you place your confidence in your own righteousness and moral scruples. You might be like the rich young ruler.

Do you remember the story of the rich young ruler? The rich young ruler, he kept, to hear him tell it, the whole law from his youth. I wonder what Jesus, like the look in Jesus’ eyes. Because as a pastor, sometimes I’ll stand there and talk to people and they’ll say like totally crazy things to me. You know? And I’ll be like, oh, interesting. Tell me more. But like inside, I’m like, Jesus, he’s like, I kept the whole law from my youth and Jesus is like, oh, interesting. You might be like that. You might look at the Ten Commandments, especially in this godless, lawless, dark, I mean, I’m just using the language that Thomas used in his prayer this morning, a city like Portland. You might be doubly tempted to self-righteousness because of the stark contrast between your obedience and the very obvious disobedience of your neighbors.

You might start looking at those Ten Commandments and you might start feeling yourself, hey, I’m kind of crushing it, you know? I’m not lying. I’m not killing. I’m honoring my mom and dad. You know, Paul said that was his view of himself as well. In verse 6, he says, as to zeal, a persecutor of the church, then he says, as to righteousness under the law, blameless. That was his view of himself. And then he met Jesus and he realized that strict adherence to a list of do’s and don’ts, even if the list comes from Scripture, if it comes from God, cannot save you. It cannot make you righteous. If we could be saved through rule following, God would have saved us not with the gift of faith, but with the gift of willpower. He wouldn’t need to give us grace. He would give us discipline.

The Upside-Down Gospel

He wouldn’t give us the Holy Spirit. He would give us a life coach like Jocko Willink or David Goggins or Jordan Peterson or Oprah Winfrey. He would have sent them, not Jesus, to die on the cross and the Holy Spirit to live in us and to cause us to walk in righteousness. Now, God’s grace does not give us the ability to perfectly obey while we’re still in the flesh, but it does give us the grace to grow in obedience as we’re trusting in Christ completely that His righteousness has become ours by faith alone. Amen. Do you remember the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector? Listen to how that parable begins. He, being Jesus, also told this parable to some who were trusting in themselves that they were righteous. Don’t you love the Bible? I can do a Bible study in my home talking about the glories of the Incarnation

on Christmas Eve, and then my wife decorates my house in such a way that you can see the glory of the Incarnation. In the Bible, Paul is laying out this systematically, he’s like, you know, propositional truth, propositional truth. And then you flip over to Jesus and he’s like, let me tell you a story. And they’re telling us the same thing. The parable goes like this. Two men went up into the temple to pray. One a Pharisee, the other a tax collector. Good guy, bad guy. The Pharisee, standing by himself, prayed, God, I thank you that I’m not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector, which tax collectors just hate. I fast twice a week, I give tithes of all that I get. And this was Paul before his conversion. He would have talked like this, he would have prayed like this.

This was probably Adam in the garden. I’m going to fix myself, I’m going to cover my own sin, I have my own righteousness. This was Israel in the temple. These sacrifices, I’m going to make sure I dot all my i’s and cross all my t’s, I’m going to be on it, my sacrifices are going to make me right with God. This could be you, here’s my list of spiritual accomplishments that I’m trusting in to be righteous before God. And here’s how Jesus responds to that impulse. He continues with the parable. But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast saying, be merciful to me. I’m a sinner. He was standing far off, he couldn’t even get close to God. I feel it in my bones. And I don’t say it enough. And when I say it, I don’t mean it enough.

Be merciful to me. I am not righteous. I can never make myself righteous. And Jesus says, I tell you, this man went to his house justified, declared righteous. This is grace. A grown man crying in the pulpit. But this is grace. Do you understand what Jesus is offering you this morning? You are not righteous. You’re the opposite of righteous. You’re a sinner through and through. And I could elaborate, but more words won’t do it. If you get it, you get it. If you don’t get it, you don’t get it. But if you don’t get it, you need to see it today before you leave. God’s law says, don’t steal. You do. God’s law says, don’t lie. You do. God’s law says, don’t murder. And don’t even think about murder in your heart. And you do. You hate your brother. God says, honor your father and mother.

And you haven’t done that. You’re a lying, stealing, cheating, murderous, and we could just keep going, adulterous, blaspheming sinner. You can never fix yourself. Do you see? You can’t fix it. You can try and try and try, but even if you do everything right from this point forward, you will never fix everything wrong that you did before. You can’t fix your own sin problem because you’re still a sinner. You can’t clean the white garment because your hands are covered in blood. And even if today you realize, oh man, I actually do need to be made righteous. I am a sinner. What should I do? If your fundamental impulse is, I’m going to make a loin cloth for myself and fix my own shame and nakedness, it’s not going to work. But praise be to God. He says, not only do you not have to do that,

you can’t do that. I won’t let you do that. You remember what happened in Genesis 3? God sacrificed an animal and he made clothes for Adam and Eve and he said, I’m going to cover you. I’m going to cover you. Stop that. Your fig leaf underwear, not going to work. Let me make something that will actually work. All of our desires to find our righteousness, to justify ourselves, none of it works. And it doesn’t work on purpose. God wants the glory of coming along and saying, yeah, you tried, didn’t you? And you couldn’t, but I can. And I love you and I will. So will you trust in me? The beautiful thing about this offer is you don’t have to do anything to receive it. So you can stop trying so hard. And you can just rest. And you can just trust that the God of the universe

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who sent his Son to save you has made a promise that by faith alone. And if you’re like, well, Sean, what does that word faith mean? I didn’t grow up in the church. It just means to trust. It’s just like I tell my daughters, hey, I’m going to do this for you. And they say, okay, Dad, I trust you. That’s what God is saying to you this morning. If you’ll just trust that I’m going to fix it, then I will. And all you have to do is say, okay, fix it. And he will. If you want to know more about what that looks like, practically, I just encourage you to really find anyone else in the room that is a member of this church or any of the pastors and ask about how to pursue that. The difference between the Pharisee and the tax collector

is that the Pharisee placed all of his confidence in the flesh. The tax collector knew that he had nothing to place his confidence in. Isn’t it strange that the egregious sinner in this story had the spiritual advantage over the devoutly religious character? This is the upside-down logic of the gospel. And I hope you recognize, friends, that your proximity to ritual worship places you at greater risk for trusting in your own flesh. That doesn’t mean ritual worship is bad. Israel should have gone to the temple and offered their sacrifices. You should come to church, read your Bibles, pray, serve the poor, love your neighbor, all of that. But you must also recognize that it places you in a certain kind of danger. You have a certain kind of risk. So I want you to recognize it and just be aware of it. So I want you, brothers and sisters,

to examine your life, your religious life, your moral life, your emotional life, your family life, and ask yourself, am I willing to count everything as rubbish in order that I might gain Christ and be found in Him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith alone. Let’s pray. Lord Jesus, help us not to be like the man who looks in the mirror and beholds his face and then walks away forgetting what he has seen. Lord, Your Word has planted a seed in the hearts of many this morning. We pray that You will help us to remember this message day in and day out. Help us to consistently trust in You and therefore glorify You in all things. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.