Father, we thank You for Your goodness and love, so visible, in Your Son Jesus. Thank You that You have called us Your own and You have drawn us and You’ve gathered us, Lord, out of all peoples, Lord. You’ve brought us together in Christ, Lord. So we just pray this morning we would, Lord, give You all of our worship and give You all of our praise. And as Chase said, our hearts, God, they would be turned only towards You. Lord, so we pray that You would open our ears, Lord, open our eyes to see and to hear more of Christ in Your Word. And Lord, that Your Spirit would cut deep, Lord. Just grow us up. Grow our love, grow our faith for Christ and Father, for Your kingdom. Lord, we thank You for all that You do, Lord. And the small things to take care of us and the big things, God, You are our providers. So I just pray, Lord, this morning You would take back what we give to You. Through tithe and offering, that You would bless it, that You would anoint it, that it would be multiplied for our church and for Your name’s sake, Lord. We just love You and we pray that in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Thank you all for leading us in worship. It’s always good. I kind of feel like I’m preaching in a Mexican restaurant this morning. You can smell all the taco stuff back there.

So, only two hours. Two hours sermon today and then we’ll be on to it. No, I’m kidding. I’m kidding.

We’re going to be in Matthew chapter 23. Continue on in Matthew. If you turn there with me in your Bible, Matthew chapter 23, verses 1 through 12. I’m going to keep going here.

Matthew 23.

Matthew writes, Then Jesus said to the crowds and to His disciples, The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat, so do and observe whatever they tell you, but not the works that they do. For they preach, but they do not practice. They tie up heavy burdens hard to bear and lay them on people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to move them with their finger. They do all their deeds to be seen by others, for they make their phylacteries broad and their fringes long, and they love the place of honor at feasts and the best seats in the synagogues and greetings in the marketplaces and being called rabbi by others. But you are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all brothers. And call no man your father on earth, for you have one Father who is in heaven. Neither be called instructors, for you have one instructor, the Christ, the greatest of men. And among you shall be your servant, and whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted. Certain words make you think of maybe a place in time. When I hear the word pursuit, I think of the word pursuit. I don’t know if you watch, I don’t think they run it anymore, the show Cops, and that bad boy’s intro would come in, and it would be a cop in pursuit of this guy who thought he could outrun the police officer, if these guys would just watch the show Cops, they would see you never get away. They end up running through a cornfield, and like a dog, he pulls them down, and they always get their guy on Cops. But that’s what a pursuit is. It’s a hot pursuit of a criminal. You’re going to get him. It’s what you’re after. And Jesus, in a very similar vein, is talking with that kind of intentionality and what you’re going after. Remember, He’s at the very, very end of His ministry, and Jesus is saying the things that the people need to hear, He’s certainly saying the things His disciples need to hear. You need to pursue Me, and this is what it looks like to pursue Me. And the problem, though, that Jesus is addressing this morning is that there are these people who seem to say to all of Israel, we’re the ones pursuing God. And Jesus has to say, don’t pursue Me. Don’t pursue. Don’t pursue God the way the Pharisees pursued God, because their pursuit of godliness is no pursuit of godliness at all. And that’s what Jesus draws out, is the pursuit of godliness is a good one, but are we seeing godliness? Do we see Christ as we should to pursue Him? So Jesus says, don’t pursue godliness how they pursue godliness.

We looked at the scribes and the Pharisees before. We looked at them in chapter 15. We looked at them in chapter 15 intensely. And here they’ve reappeared again to oppose Jesus. And right at the end of 22, before we come to 23, Jesus shuts them off, shuts them up once for all. Jesus gives them an answer, and it says, no one dare ask Him a question again. So Jesus has shown whatever intellectual muscle y’all want to try to flex, whatever spiritual wisdom and insight you have, it’s nothing compared with Me. And they don’t even try to do it again. He silences them. And so Jesus’ final word, as they probably kind of walk away and shuffle back, is an important one for His disciples regarding them. Jesus says, don’t be swallowed up in their error and their godlessness. Which isn’t altogether dreadful irony. It’s a terrible, sad irony. The very people who are supposed to be nearest to God are furthest away. The very people who are supposed to be nearest to God are furthest away. The very people who should be leading God’s people to God are driving the Israelites away from God. Jesus says they sit in Moses’ seat. Now Moses doesn’t need an introduction. You know who Moses is? We’ve talked about Moses. Moses was God’s special messenger. Remember, he took God’s words to God’s people. The Scriptures say that God spoke with Moses face to face. So that was his role. That was ministry. Many prophets’ roles throughout time. We look in Deuteronomy 5, verse 27.

He says, Go near and hear all that the Lord our God will say and speak to us, all that the Lord our God will speak to you, and we will hear and do it. So this is the people coming into the covenant with God for the first time. But on down in 29, God says about this, Oh, that they had such a heart as this always, to fear me and to keep all my commandments, that it might go well with them, and their descendants forever. So God laments to Moses, I wish my people were always this hot for obedience. This hot for love for me. And that’s usually a prophet’s experience with being a messenger for God. Usually, you see in the Old Testament, God’s people entirely apathetic or altogether uncareless for the things of God. But the funny thing, this time the script is flipped. Jesus says, This time, here’s your problem. If the people were in a place of desire to know God, they can’t get there because it’s the leaders who are corrupt. Jesus says, It’s the Pharisees. So yeah, they’re in the seat of Moses, but they’re not doing what they should be doing in that seat.

So the seat of Moses is that place of leadership and authority where God’s people learn to love and to know their God, to help them better. Understand what that looks like and what that means. Whatever the Pharisees set out to be as a holy club centuries before, they were not that thing anymore. They are effectively hypocrites. Don Carson says, Jesus’ advice to do what they say and not what they do, it’s biting irony bordering on sarcasm. Because even what the Pharisees taught, it wasn’t the law of Moses. It wasn’t God’s Word. The Pharisees were obsessed with their majorities, made-up rules. So you’ve got to obey our made-up rules, and if you obey all of our made-up rules, then you can maybe start getting at actually obeying God’s Word. And Jesus says here, it’s all back-breaking. It’s entirely back-breaking, and it’s life-taking. Even following God in its hardest parts should be life-giving, not life-sucking. But that’s what they made it. Did the Pharisees actually have a heart to know and love God and to help? Did they help other people know and love God? No, they did not. Did they have all kinds of loopholes and excuses to get them out of the harder things of obeying God? Yes, they absolutely did. Remember how we saw that they would devote their resources to God so they didn’t have to take care of their parents? That was the kind of loophole they had.

So they’re in the seat of Moses, but not to help God’s people. They’re there to hurt God’s people. And I think you can, ask the question, well, why? And Jesus says quite plainly, why? He says, to be seen. In other words, keeping up the appearance of godliness is far more important than being godly to them, is what Christ says. He says their phylacteries are broad. What is that? It’s like a little leather box they would wear on their foreheads or on their arm, and it was an over-interpretation where God says, you know, bind my word around your neck. You know, it was a way that they were trying ever so religiously to obey the text by making up these rules so they would have these little pieces of scripture inside these little boxes on them. And their fringes, now that is from the Old Testament where God says, put, you know, blue tassels on the corner of your garments. And when you see these blue tassels, what the blue tassels do is they make you think about me. They make you say, oh, blue tassels, God, His commandments. That’s what I exist for. But the Pharisees said, here’s what we should do. We should make giant, huge ones so that everybody thinks we’re talking to God and we love God all the more. So the very thing God said here, take this to know me more, they’ve taken it as a way to make people say, oh, look at them. They must be so godly.

If we want to be godly, we have to be unlike the Pharisees. I want to say to you this morning from this passage, the pursuit of godliness is first unconscious of appearances. The pursuit of godliness is unconscious of appearances. Godliness, in many ways, is the grace of self-forgetfulness. Self-forgetfulness. God sent Jesus to be godly in my place and in your place. place. God sent Jesus to be as no one else has ever been. Jesus is like God. And if that’s true, all of my rule keeping and all of your rule keeping in our doing good and our merits and our praying and our fasting and our scripture study and our final financial generosity, it’ll never merit godliness. Even the very law of Moses was given to the people so they could constantly be reminded, I can’t obey this thing. I’m nothing like God. And it should drive them to God to see how good and godly and only how he could be their salvation. So friends, all the more true when you and I come to Christ and see how godly he is, we don’t say, I’m going to look in a mirror now and I’m going to think about what can I do to make myself more godly? How can I prove to God? How can I at least prove to others or at least seem to others like I truly am? Godly. The gospel is a call to stop looking at yourself. Stop trying to come up with ways. Stop coming up with your own standards. Stop inventing versions, a better version of yourself that’s never going to reach the status of Jesus. It’s an invitation to lose yourself. That’s what the gospel call is. And see Jesus as godly. And when you see Jesus is godly by faith, I’m made godly all the more. Abide in him. You know, as much as the Pharisees were obviously hypocritical in their religion and their just hypocrisy, you and I as church folk can be just as bad. Well, I read my Bible because the pastor keeps browbeating me too. I show up to church because I want people to think things about me. You know, I give superstitiously so God doesn’t drop my bank account. I give superstitiously so God doesn’t drop my bank account. I give superstitiously so God doesn’t drop my bank account. And I’m doing all this stuff because I just think I’m supposed to be keeping up appearances. And that is light years away from doing what you’re doing because you’ve spent so much time with Jesus. It simply is who you are. You have unconsciously even, as you’ve looked at Christ, become like him. That’s true religion. That’s true godliness. So godliness at the first is not a way to be. Godliness at the first is a person to know. Jesus. As I know him, I love him more. And as I love him more, I obey him more. And that’s the spirit producing more and more of Christ in me as I spend more and more time with him. In Acts chapter 4, Peter and John were before the Sanhedrin. It says, now when they saw the boldness of Peter and John and perceived that they were uneducated, they were astonished. And catch this. They recognized they had been with Jesus. Y’all just seem like that guy that we crucified. They had recognized they had been with Jesus. So you can dress yourself up in religious garb and you can do the things you think you’re supposed to do. And you can do good works and you can do and you can do and you can do. But friend, it’s never going to be anything other than hollow fruit. Remember what Paul says in Philippians. He says, look, if you want to go on about records, I can top you. I’m from the tribe of Benjamin. I’m zealous. I’m a Pharisee of Pharisees. I persecuted the church. If you want to go tit for tat on who’s kept the law, I’ll outdo you. And Paul says, I counted it all as loss for the sake of knowing Christ. That’s where Paul’s godliness is. It’s knowing Christ. He says, I’ve been there and I’ve done the whole religious thing and it’s empty and it’s fruitless. The only way to be reckoned righteous is to behold Jesus. Man-made religion, philosophies of self-empowerment, which are many today, tell you what you must do to be a better whole version of yourself, to be acceptable, before God. True religion is gleefully aware there’s not a thing in the world I can do to be godly. Not a thing in the world. All my merits and doing and thinking and being will no more make me godly than flapping my arms are going to make me a capable bird. All the effort, all the self-loathing, all the piety, it is, friends, a chasing after the wind. See, if you’re gonna exert effort and you should exert effort, and following Jesus. Exert effort in letting go of yourself. Have a happy funeral at which you bid farewell to you and all of your godlessness and you take up a new life in following Jesus. So grace won’t make you lazy. Grace will give you a zeal that that self-motivated piety never could have. Paul says it’s the energy that God powerfully works within me. That’s how I am who I am, Paul says. So exert energy. The Spirit gives you. Suffer as Christ calls you to. Obey the commands with joy because Christ has been formed in you. Not because you are with your dead old self trying to obey God. And I think at the end of it, and this is probably a special word for you if you’ve been in church your whole life, who are you trying to fool but yourself, really? For all the attempts to hide the deepest, deepest, deepest, deepest, deepest, deepest, deepest, deepest, deepest, deepest, deepest, deepest, to cover up what you really love and who you really are, who loses the game but you? Love yourself enough to abandon yourself in exchange for Christ. A businessman well known for his ruthlessness once announced to the writer Mark Twain, before I die, I mean to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and I will climb Mount Sinai and read the Ten Commandments aloud at the top. And Mark Twain said, I have a better idea. Why don’t you just stay here in Boston and keep them?

Friends, for all that you could do outwardly, it’s a question of your heart. It’s a question of your affections. It’s a question of who you love. Richard Sibbes says, his love to us moves him to frame us to be like himself. And our love to him stirs us up to be such as he may take delight in us. Neither do we have faith or hope or anything further than we have that we are concerned to be purged and look like him. When you only have as much as you desire to be like and look like Jesus. And I hope that’s something that I can bring up to us 10,000 more times over the course of decades, because you and I constantly need to be reminded, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, just give me Jesus. I don’t want you to just get on with life. Just going to work. I’m taking care of my family. I’m doing this. I’m doing that. Your kids don’t need a dad or a mom in cruise control. We took you to church. We prayed at dinner. We’re doing the bare minimum here. Your children, your co-workers, your brothers and sisters in Christ, they need you to be a God. The Pharisees weren’t in holiness and zeal and passion for knowing Christ. They need you to be a God. The Pharisees weren’t in holiness and zeal and passion for knowing Christ. That’s what the people in your life need. Are you seeking to be that? Are you seeking to be a disciple maker? Because you cannot produce. You cannot give away what you don’t have. You know, and it always, you know, I grew up going to a small Christian school. I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before, but you know, you have these parents who have zero interest in God in the home. They drop their kids off at Christian school and that’ll make them a good, you know, Christian. And they’re always the first ones who get thrown out for drug abuse or something else. You just, you can’t fake Christianity. You can’t, you can’t fake passion. You can’t just put something in someone else you don’t have. The call is to know God and in knowing him, it flows out as we make him known. Back at verse six with me in chapter 23.

It says, and they love the place of honor at feasts and the best seats in the synagogues and greetings in the marketplaces and being called rabbi by others. But you’re not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher and you’re all brothers. And call no man your father on earth, for you have one father who is in heaven. Neither be called instructors, for you have one instructor, the Christ. So Jesus is not saying something that they don’t know. Jesus is saying something that they don’t know. Jesus is revealing their heart and what they’ve been doing. If there’s a feast, we want the best seat. We want the best place at the table where everybody can see, oh, it’s the, it’s the Pharisees. It’s the religious people. If I’m in the marketplace, man, that you know that they, oh, they want a special greeting. Oh, such and such. How are you? Could you pray? Oh, they just love people being drawn to them. They want to be seen as special. They want to be seen as unique. And Jesus says, most of all, they want to be called rabbi. And rabbi, it does mean teacher, but really it means, in the Hebrew, it means my great one. My great one. What do they want to be called? The master and the great ones of others. Jesus says, don’t call them rabbi. He says, you got, you got, you got one teacher and you’re all brothers. You’re all equal. And he says, don’t call any man father. You got one father in heaven. And he says, don’t call any man father. You got one father in heaven. And he says, don’t call any man instructor. Jesus says, I’m, I’m your instructor. It’s Christ. If you look at Ephesians chapter four, verse 11, Paul says, and he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers. And if you look at first Corinthians chapter four, verse 15, Paul says, for though you have countless gods in Christ, you do not have many fathers for I became your father in Christ Jesus. So what are we supposed to do? Are we supposed to pit Jesus against Paul? Because Jesus said, don’t call anyone teacher and father. And Paul says, God gives the church teachers and I’m your spiritual father. No, you know, what’s the three most important things in Bible study context, context, context. Jesus is making a point. And his point is this in the body of Christ. No one is superior to anyone else. We’re as equal as siblings are equal. There’s no hierarchy, which does a massive wrench, doesn’t it? In the Pharisees whole scheme. That was their thing. They keep being considered high and worthy and better of normal people’s accolades.

So if I want to be godly, what does that mean? It means I must not be concerned with accolades as the Pharisees are. Their knowledge base of God and his law was not something they used to do what they ought to have done, assist people to know God. It was a tool, a tool they used to subjugate God’s people and draw from them all the favors and blessings and honors in life that they wanted. They, they were a higher class. And as this higher class, they expected to be recognized. So now certainly, God does give pastors and teachers. He better. I need to get a new job. He does give those things not for special praise. I love to give this as a definition of what, what, like what is a pastor? A pastor is someone who’s been given a license to serve. It’s what it is. It’s servitude. It’s special help to the disciples. And when a pastor or a teacher in the church sees that office is anything other than that, he needs to be deactivated because we have one teacher. We have one teacher and it’s Christ. Who teaches you with the spirit of God, who opens your eyes. Paul says in first Corinthians to see and understand. But we, we teach spiritual truths. What to those who are spiritual. So it’s the work of the spirit in me. May God use teachers to help unlock some of that truth. Yes, but not to command. It is to encourage. It is to admonish. It is to push brothers and sisters on Christ. I love how Peter says it. And first Peter five giving encouragement. He says, shepherd the flock of God that is among you exercising oversight, not under commandment. Not under compulsion, but willingly as God would have you not for shameful gain. There’s our Pharisees, but eagerly not domineering over those in your charge, but being what examples to the flock. That’s what it means.

And Jesus says, don’t forget this dear and precious truth. Friends, you are, you are all brothers because you’re children of God. And we are such through our great teacher, through our elder brother, Jesus. So, no one deserves the praise and adoration that alone belongs to Jesus. Our true teacher. No one is worthy of our affections as our father, our one and only heavenly father. And while it’s true, most people in the church will never be called to be pastors and elders. And that’s great. That’s not just not what God has called most people to. You will always be tempted to seek greatness among men, sometimes, especially among men and women inside the local church. But godliness is nothing like the Pharisees. And it’s nothing like us because we’re so often unlike God. We’ve got to remember God’s kingdom is an upside down kingdom. And what does Jesus say in my kingdom? What’s commended is not being honored. What’s commended is honoring. Paul says, outdo one another and showing honor to one another. The good news is what Jesus has done by himself. Jesus, you get all the accolades because you suffered the cross. You suffered humiliation. You overcame death. You, you, and you, period.

Jesus carried the sin of the world on his shoulders. Yes, but did you notice at Bible study last week how flowery my prayer was? I really used some big words and I just wonder if anybody else noticed. But did anyone see when that person came in and they didn’t have a chair and I gave them my chair and I stood in the back of the room. Anybody happen to see that? It’s funny, but it’s true because we’re that evil. Isn’t it true? Oh, if people knew how much I gave. They would think, wow, wow, I don’t give that much. If they knew how many systematic theology books I’ve read. I wonder if they think a little higher of me. The gospel reminds us Jesus is great. Jesus is my great one. Jesus is my great one. He’s the epitome of truth and love. And I would say to you, even very godly people among us don’t deserve that kind of weight. Because as much as it’s true that we like to get that kind of glory. We’re just as bad as giving it to other people who don’t deserve it. If such and such theologian said it, I believe it. That’s my guy. So if he wrote that down somewhere, I’m believing that. That’s as good as gold, right? If the big name pastor and the big name church, if that’s how they’re running the church, that’s how we got to run our church right there. That’s the answer, period. If it’s being taught in that book and that’s the latest, greatest book and that’s what everybody’s inhaling. I got to inhale it too. I got to adopt the vernacular and the verbiage because that’s what’s going and I’m going to give that person that much weight. And you know what it is. And we, when we do that and we do it so bad because we let celebrity culture bleed into the church. What we’re doing is a great disservice to ourself and to the cross because the power of the cross is this. The spirit, all of him is in you all the time to always teach you. And what we’re doing is saying, oh no, I can’t know God personally. I need to cheat off some other holier person to really let me in on what the deal is. And it’s a terrible loss to the greatness of just knowing I have all of God in me. I need no instructor, but Christ. Am I thankful? For Godly men in the church who use their gifts? Yes. She will be grateful for the Godly among us. Yes. Should you be grateful for pastor and elders that labor over you? Yes. But remember, the gospel has loosened you from the hell of living for your own glory and living for the glory of another person. It will end up hollowing you out as much as you find in the end. It was hollow through and through.

Friends, if Jesus is God and all godliness is found in Jesus. That means Jesus gets to set kingdom culture and whatever he says, the culture is in his kingdom. That’s the culture I need to embrace in my heart. And when I find in myself, I don’t like Jesus, his culture. I need to change me because there’s nothing broken with Jesus, his culture.

Next to dying on a cross. What did Jesus show us? It looked like to love others. It was it was down on knees, washing feet.

Someone has written. Pride is the dandelion of the. The soul, its roots go deep. If only a little bit of it’s left behind, it’ll sprout again and its seeds lodge in the tiniest, encouraging cracks. You know that about yourself, know that about yourself, friends get wrapped up in a smaller glory, getting wrapped up and giving praises to those who don’t deserve it. Wanting so bad to be loved, wanting so bad to be liked.

Friends, we’re going to be a church is we’re going to have to do. We’re going to have to have kingdom culture in here because the world has enough of the world. I don’t think we’ve always, you know, we always get that in the church. The world doesn’t need more of the world. They need the culture of Christ. They need to see that how we love one another. The only more one upmanship, the only more domineering. They need supernatural love, supernatural kindness.

That’s otherworldly, and that brings people to salvation, we must say with John the Baptist, what he must increase, I must decrease.

Live daily to revel in the gospel. You get fuzzy eyes, very fuzzy eyes, very quick. It’s so easy to just that cross, that cross, the cross is my culture and it gets blurry and it gets distant and I go back to me and I go back to the old culture like, no, I need the gospel. I need to be applied to me and you’re reminded of how wonderful Jesus is to leave heaven, to carry my cross, to wash my feet. This is my culture. This is my life. I’ve got to constantly preach. I’ve got to constantly preach. The gospel, Lord, saturate me in the gospel, lest I be a fraud, lest I be a fake.

Verse 11.

Jesus kind of ends that part there by saying, the greatest among you shall be your servant. Whoever exalts himself will be humbled and whoever humbles himself will be exalted. How are we pursuing godliness? You want to appear to know Christ? Are you just going to know him? You want the accolades and praise of being godly or are you just going to be godly because you want to know Christ and by grace his spirit makes us such? You want praises for being great because, you know, those praises are like shadows on a wall and they’re here one moment and they’re gone the next and they’re empty and they’re not real living for the glory of God. Oh, the joy, all the satisfaction when we grip the cross and say, Jesus, only you are great. So that’s the question for disciples. Friends, how are you pursuing godliness in what culture and what kingdom are you living? Let’s pray together.

Lord, we know that we have been created to be satisfied in you and you alone. You’ve not created us for anything else. We have been made to be satisfied in the pursuit of your heart. Lord.

God, we just ask that this word that we’ve heard this morning, that your spirit would take it and would break us. Or that we would repent and we would see all those places in our heart where pride lives, where pride seeks self, where pride lives for others. God, we would just lay ourselves on the table for you and say, no, Jesus, take me. Take me and make me as you are. Oh, Father, that we would be less so that Christ would be exalted and would be more in us.

I pray this wouldn’t be just another Sunday, just a passing sermon. But Lord, by your grace, this time we grip a little harder discipleship.

We love you. We just bless your name. We pray that in Christ’s name. Amen.