our souls to be able to sing praises to the Lord Jesus Christ. We pray that this morning, as we consider your word, your spirit would move among us and in us. We need wisdom, we need enlightenment in our minds. Not a worldly enlightenment, but the enlightenment of your word and of your spirit to reveal to us spiritual truths.
These truths are the deep things of God we pray that we might take them into our souls and be strengthened, strengthened today, and for this week and for our lives. We pray in Jesus' name, amen. A bit of echo. Does it sound normal?
It sounds very little bit better. Okay. We have been thinking about previously the Queen of Sheba and then we thought about the Book of Proverbs, which of course was written by Solomon, whom the Queen of Sheba went to visit. If you were at the 930 meeting this morning, you would have, I would say, received the introduction to this message.
And those who shared from Luke 7 and Luke 5 and the thoughts that were shared this morning were actually a natural introduction to what I'm speaking about this morning, even though the men who shared and so on this morning had no idea what I would be speaking about this morning. So that is a natural work I think of the Spirit of God guiding our hearts together. And we have the idea now of the wisdom of Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ of Nazareth, taken by some such as Nicodemus who addressed him in John chapter 3 is Rabbi. Rabbi.
We know that you are from God. Rabbi is a Jewish word. Luke was a Gentile and wrote the Gospel of Luke as he received information and eyewitness testimony. And he uses the Greek word for teacher.
And the Lord Jesus certainly brought to us and it is in the Bible his wisdom. But I would say that it needs elucidation as to the nature of this wisdom because it was more than wisdom. When we read the book of Proverbs, it seems to me that we get quite a lot of life advice, what it's like to live in this world, things that we perhaps should avoid, meddling in things that we shouldn't meddle in, keeping our mouths closed when we need to close our mouths and being wise in the choices that we make. And as we move into Ecclesiastes, we see even a picture in the wisdom literature of the Old Testament of a man who is for the moment as it were, setting aside, redemptive teaching and looking at life as brass tacks, how the rubber hits the road.
And you know that even though when you look at life like that, for you come to the end of Ecclesiastes chapter 14, you see a light at the end. But as Solomon has moved in his life and in his writings from Proverbs to Ecclesiastes, we see that the meaningfulness of life actually still needs God, that things that are very practical and increasingly practical, that if you view them in the absence of spiritual truth, you run into what the preacher calls vanity or pointlessness, pointlessness and vanity. And so we can take instruction from those things, from that wisdom literature. And then we come to the arrival of the Messiah.
And does the Messiah sometimes give us snippets of wisdom? I will give you an example. Of course we do. But we should be cautious when we speak about the wisdom teaching of Jesus Christ, because it was much more than that.
The disposition of your soul depends on this. This is not just how you are going to cope. Everybody tries to cope. It doesn't hurt to of course read the word of God, the wisdom literature in your efforts to try to cope.
And God will lead you more to much more than that, more than that, more important than that. What about your soul? What about the destination, the disposition of your soul? Oh, this isn't just a matter of let us say, managing and coping and wisdom that helps manage and cope.
It's much more than that. These are eternal things. And so I would be very cautious about simply saying that what the man on the sidewalk might say, if you walk out on the street and you meet somebody on the sidewalk, what do you think of Jesus Christ, of Nazareth? Probably many of them would say, good teacher.
Some good teachings there. Well, wait just a minute. Did Jesus Christ himself claim to be a good teacher? Do you know that Buddha, in his teachings and writings, for example, by contrast, says, you know, in all of his advice, one of his statements is take it or leave it.
Take it or leave it. Now, Thomas said that. Now, Thomas said, how did I take it or leave it? I have something to say.
If it helps you good, if it doesn't help you, well, it's okay. I'm not offended. There is no canon of Buddhist writings. It's a vast amount of sort of increasingly vague literature and extensions there too.
The teachings of the Bible and the teachings of the Lord Jesus Christ are not in that category. These are part of the canon of scripture and they are intended to direct the soul to salvation and to heaven. If they help you in your walk while you are here, so much better. But the questions, as I say, are very big and very serious questions.
When we look at the life of the Lord Jesus and we read his teachings and the things that he talked about, he was a man. He walked on the earth. He talked about farm laborers and building barns and weddings and masters and teachers and vineyards. His father was a tectonai, a carpenter.
He knew about debt. He knew about servitude. He grew up in occupied Israel, governed at a higher level by, you might say, by the Romans for the greater crimes and the more serious offenses who then let the Jews manage these smaller issues amongst themselves and tried to keep a lid on things. And in his various books, Alfred Eiderchime, I would recommend the life and times of Jesus the Messiah and the other book about the everyday life of the Jew, how children were taught, how wives were spoken to and so on and inheritance traditions.
All of these things are documented and are well known in the literature. Jesus was there. He was in the middle of that. He knew his audience.
He knew his culture. When he came up through that culture to that audience, he frequently made reference to things that they knew, that they understood, that they experienced, that they observed. Many of these things had stark contrasts as we will see. He himself said this, I had referenced the Queen of Sheba, the Queen of the South shall rise up in the judgment with this generation and shall condemn it, for she came from the uttermost part of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon.
And behold, a greater than Solomon is here. And so I mentioned to you about the idea of Jesus as being a teacher and he's saying, yes, there's wisdom and there's wisdom. There are teachers and there are teachers. To whom was he referring?
Was he referring to somebody else? One of the, didasco lomanoy, amongst the teachers of the law, we have in the English language, the word didactic. As a teacher, you don't want to be too didactic, hammering people with facts, that being didactic, that comes directly from the Greek word for teacher. And when Jesus says a greater teacher is here, who is he referring to?
Lots of scribes and Pharisees and teachers of the law. He's referring to himself. And so we have to come to terms with this. Someone might wonder, I wonder if this Jesus Christ was just on some kind of an ego trip.
He would say things like I and the father are one. He would say things like before Abraham was I am. What? These are things that the man on the sidewalk doesn't really appreciate.
For all the wonderful teachings of the Lord Jesus Christ, historical person, Jesus Christ of Nazareth, for all of those amazing teachings, he was more than a teacher. One of the perhaps nice examples of parallel we had thought a bit about foundations. And we know that in Matthew 7, Jesus spoke about asking this question, what is the foundation of your life? Really?
That's a very, very good question. Everyone who hears these words of mine and does not act on them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. The audience is thinking, maybe Proverbs 24, by wisdom a house is built and by understanding it is established or in the Hebrew word founded from which we get the word foundation. This is a very good question and point, especially if you're bringing up a family.
What are the assumptions, the presuppositions, what are the axioms, what are the underlying things that are foundational to your home? A home is more than a house. A house is made of two by sixes and shingles. A home is much more than that.
And the head of the house is responsible for seeing to it that it becomes a godly home. In order for that to happen, there need to be fundamental foundational concepts and principles. Our value, what is your value? I used to write on the board CHONSP, CHONSP, and then I would write plus trace metals.
Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur, phosphorus. That's about 99.5% of what you are and you're worth about $3.27 of chemicals. And the tiny little bit of selenium which we're still trying to figure out the chemists or churunifed biochemists. What does that do?
Well, if you find a way to take the selenium out of the diet, guess what? All your hair falls out. I don't even know why. But your value, your personhood, you are created in the image of God.
Your children are created in the image of God. They're a gift from God. It's a foundational thing. Your personhood is a derived personhood.
God is the ultimate person. And if you don't understand these things, and that marriage is about a man and a woman coming together, if these foundational things are gone, it's a bit like what Lake Fagade and I were talking about yesterday. We're talking about house renovations. You look at that house.
What do you think of the idea? Let's go to that house there and let's, you know, the wiring, the insulation and the plumbing are all substandard. Let's go into that and fix the wiring, the insulation and the plumbing. Are you mad?
This is why, you know, around HRM, sometimes you see an old house and we were chatting about the fact that they look at the thing and it's substandard in every way. What's it going to cost to, you know, redo it from the inside and all these red sealed tradespeople with their qualifications and electrician and plumber and carpenter and so on. Better to knock it down and start from scratch. It will end up, you'll end up better positioned financially.
And so these sorts of things sometimes I think the world thinks in terms of, you know, I need to get my life, you know, New Year's Eve and resolutions and things like that. My life is not really in order. I need to do some renovations. You don't know the Lord?
It's not about renovations. It's about repentance. It's about knocking the whole thing down and building on the right foundation from the beginning. That's how you can build a home.
I love the origins of words, things like edamol, it's what's called edamology. I'm interested in edamology. And what we have is in the teachings of the Lord Jesus says, there are snippets of wisdom you might say which have eternal significance. Oh, that's different.
But you also have parables. You have parables. I wonder whether they, for everybody old man on the sidewalk, especially the 22 year olds that I was dealing with for 30 years, progressively, you know, they changed. They really, really, really changed.
When I started teaching in the early 90s up until, you know, 18 months ago, I can really tell that the attitude changed, the values changed, the approach to life changed radically in the 22 year olds that I saw over that 30 years. And when I was a boy, as I've said to you before, a lot of times the other parents, well, you know, there's free Sunday school. Why don't we send the kids to Sunday school? I might not even want to darken the door of the church, but I don't mind sending my kids to Sunday school.
And so you had classmates who actually knew about the parable of the Good Samaritan. And you had classmates who knew about the prodigal son. They might not fully understand the significance of it. But people grew up with a Judeo-Christian heritage coming into society.
And I'm a boomer, born in 1956. So that makes me a boomer. And when you grow up with boomers, you feel that other people have sort of a similar knowledge base. But the modern 22 year old, you say, what can you tell me about the prodigal son?
The who? The what? What can you tell me about the Good Samaritan? What?
The who? You know, the basic Judeo-Christian heritage is gone. And people think it's Canada, a Christian country. I tell them black and white forthrightly, it is not a Christian country anymore in any sense.
And it is systematically trying to discard its own Judeo-Christian heritage. It's quite a sobering time to live in. And it's a time in which we really need to cling to the truth. The Lord, in his various teachings, he used as you know these kinds of parables.
And they require a comparison between what you might call the literal and the figurative. There's this sort of mirror going on where you're mentally comparing how the account compares to truth. And it makes your mind work. That's good.
It's good for you to be thinking, for me to be thinking about the meaning of something what you might say is an allegorical or metaphorical sense. Who is the father in the prodigal son? It's a perfectly valid question. It's not just a guy.
No, the father represents somebody. He represents God. Really? Well, if he represents God, I think I'm starting to understand the rest of the parable.
And so these parables that the Lord would give would be quite memorable. And one of the strange things about the human psyche is that we tend to, when we look at what you might call religion, sort of a dangerous word. I don't like this word. But when you sort of look at that whole realm of spiritual things and religion, it seems that there are many bad pathways to go down.
You can go down a wrong pathway. You can go into darkness and believe in things that are totally false. Believe in them with all your heart. That is scary and it happens.
And sometimes even people who know the Lord can have a tendency to become legalistic. And that itself is dangerous to the body of Christ. If we start saying, you have to wear brown socks or black socks on Sundays. Okay?
And the distance from the hem of the lady's skirt to her ankle shall be thus and so. And then you become a bunch of conformists rather than people who are living in freedom. So it's pretty hard to do that when you think about the love of the father, when you think about the graciousness of the Samaritan. It's pretty hard to get legalistic.
They thought they would catch the Lord Jesus. And again, here, we see in Luke 7, I have something to say to you, Simon the Pharisee. He says, say on. The word has something to say to us and we need to take these principles to heart, the principles.
So parabola, where's Tomason? Maybe he's downstairs. So Tomason can now generate parabolas using two different principles. First two laws of Newton and mathematical expression.
And he nailed it on Wednesday night. Which, oh, play that. Play that. We got it.
You can't even see the difference in the two plots. So that's fun. I don't think windows paint can do one. That doesn't look like a perfectly good mathematical parabola to me.
But it's casting something or to put something in an indirect way. And clearly the parables have that sense of giving you a truth in an indirect way and laying it there beside you. And also, I like the idea of this parabola and trajectory and catapults and throwing the idea of parabola. Because if I were to say to Ben, catch.
Heads up. Catch. Pay attention. You ready to receive that?
You got your hands out? You ready to just receive a truth from the Lord? Get ready for that parabola. Get ready for that parable.
So we are going to look at a couple this morning. And Tomason kindly read from Luke 7 this morning. The passage in Luke 18 is quite brief. And perhaps we'll deal with Matthew 20, a minute working at Vignard on another day.
So John Wells gets up this morning and he says, I hate accounting. And I'm sitting there going, hey, man, brother. This is really dated, right? Who uses adding machines with tape that comes out anymore?
No, it doesn't add up. Do it again. So we see in this parable that was read that the debts of the two men that the Lord Jesus described were different. But what did they have in common?
They had in common what the whole human race has in common before God. We are insolvent. We can't offer a God a dime of holiness, not a dime. We are in and it's worse than that.
When you can't offer a dime in repayment, the debt remains. The debt remains. This parable that we had read to us this morning is an example of a very potent parable that has a context which you might say is everything. Sometimes the case was the Pharisee going or the lawyer going, Luke likes the word lawyer.
It happened six times in the book of Luke, only once elsewhere. He likes the word lawyer. I don't know what you think of lawyers. I think I got him.
The guy says, I think I got him. Who is my neighbor? We've been arguing about this for about 500 years. We got him.
And then he tells the story of the good Samaritan. And at the end he says, which of these men were the neighbor? And the lawyer with his PhD goes, the one who put him up in the hotel, the one who helped him. Is that so hard to figure out?
You didn't need all that education to figure that out. You didn't need to argue for 500 years as to define, okay, this guy I should help. This guy here is a little bit past the border. I don't help those people.
No, no. These are just a little bit beyond my consideration. And so he used the reject Samaritan as the man who helps the guy that has been beaten up. And we read this morning that breaking bread, Luke 5, Levi holding a party, he's a tax collector.
And guess what? The Lord Jesus goes to it. And the Pharisees are going, what? I have a speculation.
I have a speculation that between Luke 5 and Luke 7, the Pharisees are talking about this. He went to Levi. You know Levi, the tax collector. He went to a banquet at his house, at his house, at his house.
Oh, once in Simon says, I'm going to invite him to my house. No, yeah. Now I'm not going to give him any water for his feet. I'm not going to give him any oil for his hair.
I'm not going to kiss him when I greet him. Just going to watch him. I know watch him. And I'll report back to you guys how he behaves.
And so it takes place in Luke 7, we read from 36 to 50. And what happens? A prostitute comes into the room, breaks a bottle of an alabaster container of ointment and weeps and wipes Jesus' feet with her hair. I can hardly imagine a more emotionally loaded scene.
And yet, it seemed that there were two sorts of feelings in the room. One feeling is the repentance of this woman is beautiful. And the other feeling is, this is a filthy person. We know who she is.
She walks the streets. Jesus is letting her touch him. She's so unclean and defies description. What a powerful, powerful message that sends about forgiveness.
And of course, what you read is forgiveness, forgiveness. How can this be? The guys on the Pharisee side, they got one thing right. They weren't dumb theologically.
They got one thing right. Only God can forgive sins. He said, your not your latest sin or your sins, your sins are forgiven. And they're right.
Only God can do that. This person this Jesus Christ of Nazareth is much more than a good teacher. He can take a situation and make you see who he is. He has the authority to forgive sins.
Mine, yours. That isn't merely some lawyer or some teacher or some purveyor of worldly wisdom. Jesus Christ of Nazareth is speaking of eternal things, of eternal things. And so he uses it to talk about the two debtors.
What if you have a dad and you can't pay it in, you look in Leviticus, you can look at Old Testament law, you might be looking at becoming what's called an indentured servant. That's kind of a slave. You can't pay the guy back. You forfeit your freedom.
In one case, you might be forfeiting your freedom for a very long time because you have big debt. In another case, perhaps not as long, but you are looking at slavery. Both of these insolvent men were looking at slavery. And they were both simply forgiven.
It's wonderful that when you you guys should get things like this, parallel New Testament and Greek and English and a copy of W.E. Vine. And I know many of you have a copy of W.E. Vine.
It's wonderful to dive in a little bit deeper. In verse 42, speaking of the parabolic debtors, Jesus uses a Greek word that corresponds to gift. In other words, you owe $10,270.52 and you haven't got one cent. And the idea of the forgiveness of the debt is the, as though I just gave you the $10,270.
I just gave it to you. Effectively, that's true. It's like a gift. It's like a gift.
But then speaking of, in verse 48, the forgiveness that the woman enjoyed, she is released. No slavery. We sang this morning about sin and being free from it. How wonderful for her that she never went back to that life, nor did she want to.
She became a follower of the Lord Jesus Christ. And that is a very wonderful thing. What a powerful scene that was. What a powerful illustration it was that those two things should be connected together for those who were present.
It must have been very, very powerful. I want to move on. I have five or 10 minutes left. We see here, as we had read to us this morning, that her faith saved her and that she could go in peace.
Wonderful. Wonderful. My second and last one to consider this morning is a Pharisee and a tax collector. Again, a Pharisee.
Again, a tax collector. The Lord Jesus used these men because they were traders. Not only did they serve the occupying Romans, the Romans expected them to pay themselves using graft. So your taxes, Bob Harvey, for your house for 2024 or $2,500, but I'm making it $3,000 because I'm getting $500 for the trouble of collecting it.
You can imagine how Bob Harvey would feel toward me if I just pocketed that $500. And you, and you, and you, and you. And I'm loading my pockets up and the Romans are going, good. And the Jews are going, I'd like to kill him.
I'd like to see him in jail one day, one day. These guys, we don't like them. And so let's read this together. Now he also told this parable to some people who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and viewed others with contempt.
That is our context. Two men went up into the temple to pray, one of Pharisee and the other tax collector in the NASB. The Pharisees stood and began praying this in regard to himself, God, I thank you that I am not like other men, other people, swindlers crooked at builders and even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week.
I pay tithes of all that I get. But the tax collector standing some distance away was unwilling to raise his eyes toward heaven. He was beating his chest and saying, God be merciful to me, the sinner. I tell you, this man, this tax collector went to his house justified rather than the other one who exalts himself will be humbled.
And the one who humbles himself will be exalted. I wonder, somebody said to John Wells on the street one time, who follows another religion, said, I don't think my prayers go higher than the ceiling. And in that religion, you have to pray a lot every day. And he had this feeling that this was just a road exercise and that it was not an experience of being in communication with God.
The Greek literally says here in this sentence, it's kind of a, you wonder whether it's very particularly pointed in an odd way. The Pharisee prays to himself. It's translated in various ways, but that's the simplest way. He's praying to himself.
I think that I am not like other men. Who's a V? I think myself that I'm not like other men. It's basically what he's saying.
And he's not justified. He's not repented. He's not humbled. I think the phrase spiritual pride is a real oxymoron, right?
It's a self-contradictory pair of words. If you're in spiritual truth, pride is the death of spiritual truth, spiritual life. Putting those two things together, it's like an oxymoron, but here you have a man who was reveling in it, reveling in his religiosity. I don't think his prayers went higher than here.
But unless we should look at that man and say, nothing like me. I don't know, just parable, what do you make of this? I'm not a traitor to my people either. Well, you have something in common and I have something in common with both of these men.
We are sinners. And given the right circumstances, we can do virtually anything bad, virtually anything. I don't know if you're following some of the lectures that you can find from a famous psychologist on YouTube or such things, but I was interested that one of those lectures absolutely reinforced one of my commentaries on Paul. Paul has lists of horrendous sins, sometimes in the epistles.
You can find them. What? This is so starkly in contrast to the rest of the letter. Why is it there?
Because you and I do have the capacity for this kind of evil. We just don't want to admit it. We're just so comfortable. We have nice houses and we have good food and we have a life.
We don't have the circumstances that push us into that kind of awful behavior and desperation, which is good and it's bad. The tax collector is the kind of person that God can use his loneliness to bring him to himself. Loneliness is a hard thing. That prostitute, she's with men, but she's one of the loneliest people on the face of the earth.
The tax collector is lonely. That's a hard thing to bear. They made lifestyle choices, you might say. And for many that just continues on to death.
That lifestyle continues on to death. But out of the grace and mercy of God, if a person will open their mind in their heart and think of God and think of where the soul is going, God can use that pain and that loneliness that we experience sometimes on earth to bring him to himself. That is even the experience of the Christian. The Christian can become comfortable and stop praying.
Well, pretty soon what happens is you realize that things are beginning to go awry and you say, well, there it is. I haven't been praying. My circumstances that have gone awry, my relationships that have gone awry, they point me back to God, that I need to get back to the Lord. I need to return to prayer.
I need to be in relationship to Jesus Christ through the difficulties of life. But on the other side of redemption, it's clear that God can also use the awfulness of what life can be to bring us, to bring a person, to God. What do you think of the statement, I deserve mercy? It seems to me that the definition of the word mercy excludes the joining of it with the word deserve.
What do we deserve? What did Simon the Pharisee deserve? Judgment. Judgment.
We don't deserve anything but judgment. But we can cast ourselves on Christ. Christ died on the cross. And if your soul cries out for redemption, look to the cross.
That's where you need to look to find redemption for your soul. The councils of self can be wrong. The Simon the Pharisee said, this meant not a prophet. The man who was praying to himself was only praying to himself as a kind of counsel to himself in complete darkness.
Does it remind you of Luke 12 where it actually, again, in Luke you have, he said, you know, I'm so wealthy. I'm just enjoying my prosperity so much. In fact, I have more prosperity than I know what to do with. I got it.
It comes to him in the night. I say to my soul, soul, it's funny the way it reads. I say to myself, soul, say to me, me, listen to me, me. What we're going to do is build bigger barns.
Did he know that was his last minute advice to himself? That was his last minute counsel to himself because he never woke up. This night, God requires your soul. That's the last thing you ever thought was how to store your material gain in your soul, counseling your own soul.
And so we must be very cautious and very wary of when our own souls enter into counsel to our own souls. There is a way that seems right unto a man, it says, but the end is death. The end is death. We should accept the counsel of scripture that says, look to the cross.
Look to the cross. Oh, soul, are you weary? Look to the cross. That's where you will find salvation.
That's where you will find redemption. That's where you will find living water. That's where you can feed upon the bread of life. And so this morning, as we part, I trust that you will go back and you can read these parables and maybe also the one in Matthew 20.
And think about those around you who know not the Lord. Think about your own soul. Think about what God would have you to do in relation to your communion with him. And be thankful.
If you know the Lord, you can be as thankful as that woman who wiped Jesus' feet with her hair. Be thankful. Let us pray. Father, this morning, we think of these people that the Lord Jesus spoke about and taught about.
And sometimes we see ourselves in them, help us to be people who are humble in heart and not proud. Help us to be people who look at the cross. If there's anyone here who has not trusted in the work of the cross, may that person come to the cross and trust in the work of Christ and repent. We pray in Jesus' name, amen.
And so we're going to have a closing hymn.