The Procrustean-bed gospel

Along with my conviction about my writing yesterday came the reminder that I still don't really "get" the gospel like I should. Maybe no one does, but I remembered how this isn't okay and how I would really like to better understand the message of why Jesus became human, lived, died, and rose again that flashed across the first-century Mediterranean like lightning and changed the world. So I started rereading Romans—considered by many evangelicals to be the clearest and fullest presentation of the crucial message of life known as "the gospel", and the source of what God pointed out in me: "Therefore you have no excuse, O man, every one of you who judges. For in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, practice the very same things." (Rom 2:1)

I'm not out to completely summarize Paul's presentation of the gospel in Romans; I haven't even finished reading and you may as well just read the book itself (Paul is probably less long-winded than I would be). I agree with my fellow believers in saying that much of Romans (certainly chapters 1-8) is an exquisite and detailed presentation of the gospel. After his introduction and greeting, Paul writes 1:16-17 almost as a header to the discourse that will follow: "For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith.”"

Then he totally changes gears in what he says next: "For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth." He proceeds to expound on the nature of and reasons for this wrath for the rest of the chapter. What I realized is that Paul is not just writing in a vacuum. He is doing battle with an imagined Jewish interlocutor learned in the law and trusting in his own righteousness (perhaps even his former self, the Pharisee and persecutor of Christians). This becomes obvious in chapter 2, which goes from talking about "those people" and their nasty sins to directly addressing "you who judge those who practice such things and yet do them yourself" (2:3) Paul pulls no punches in including the Jews in his condemnation.

But if you call yourself a Jew and rely on the law and boast in God and know his will and approve what is excellent, because you are instructed from the law; and if you are sure that you yourself are a guide to the blind, a light to those who are in darkness, an instructor of the foolish, a teacher of children, having in the law the embodiment of knowledge and truth— you then who teach others, do you not teach yourself? While you preach against stealing, do you steal? You who say that one must not commit adultery, do you commit adultery? You who abhor idols, do you rob temples? You who boast in the law dishonor God by breaking the law. For, as it is written, “The name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you.” (2:17-24)

Though Jews are better off in some way than Gentiles (3:1-2), they are by no means free from the universal burden of sin and have no special excuse or "out" with God for it because of their status. In verses 10-18 he puts together a virtual mashup of verses to get across the point that no one is righteous in God's sight on their own merits. No one measures up. Christians who use Romans 3:23 in a morally superior way to convict someone of their sin miss the point completely. Paul is speaking to the breadth of sin, not necessarily its depth.

But that is all an aside to what my reading of Romans so far has gotten me thinking about, and that is the idea of God's righteousness. Paul mentions or appeals to it many times throughout these chapters, first in 1:17, and repeatedly in 3:21-26.

But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it— the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction: for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins. It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.

I started thinking: it makes sense that Paul would talk so much about how the gospel relates to God's righteousness being revealed in Jesus and in us, because he seems to be writing largely to Jewish Christians who would have grown up being instructed in the laws of God and trained to seek His righteousness—through the law. So later he writes about how Christ has released us from the law (7:6) which was roughly coterminous with being enslaved by sin and freed us to live with Christ to God (6:10).

Then I got curious about how much Paul writes about righteousness in other letters and did some research. Where Paul mentions "righteousness" 32 times in his letter to the Romans, he mentions it just once in his first letter to the Corinthians:

But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong;  God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are,  so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption,  so that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.” (1:27-31)

So not only does Paul emphasize the idea of "righteousness" much, much less to the Corinthians, he does so in a rather different way.  Instead of it being something that belongs to God, that He reveals and accounts to us, Christ became righteousness to the Corinthians along with wisdom, sanctification, and redemption. Paul then spends most of the rest of the letter instructing and disciplining the Corinthians.

I think Paul was instructing each church in the way it needed. To those in Rome who boasted in their faithfulness to the law, Paul demonstrates how universal the problem of sin is so that they will realize their need for a savior. But the Corinthian church was apparently composed more of Gentile believers who had more of a problem with incorporating their old pagan worship practices like ritual sex with temple prostitutes (see 6:15-16), getting raging drunk (11:21), and ecstatic spiritual hysteria (see chapter 14) into their new Christian faith, not holier-than-thou boasting or legalism. So his advice to them is much more practical and directed towards rebuking their various abuses of the gospel.

I've realized that I'm not necessarily opposed to the gospel being presented as information or a series of propositions; with the nature of language, this is unavoidable to some degree. What I am opposed to is thinking that we can fully capture the "essence" of the gospel in all its richness of meaning and implications with one presentation or style. We read Romans like good Protestants and think that it depicts the pure, unadulterated, raw gospel without realizing that it is already contextualized to people under the law. So instead of contextualizing the gospel to people with other backgrounds and problems, we try to contextualize them to fit our Procrustean-bed gospel by trying to find how they are seeking their own righteousness by a law of some kind for them to be set free from, even when this narrative is a stretch.

Morgan Guyton provides some thoughts of this in his post on evangelism (which, as usual, I highly recommend you read), saying:

In a post-Christendom world, it makes no sense to talk about non-Christians “knowing [anything] to be true” about a “day of giving an account.” The problem is that the formulaic proselytism of Southern Baptists doesn’t have anything to say to someone who, rightly or wrongly, doesn’t give a flip about the concept of Judgment Day (like the cynical European journalist interviewing the pope)"

And later, he clarifies that this kind of justification-on-judgment-day evangelism is really most effective when preaching to Christians, or other similarly moralistic people. When we make it our method of winning nonbelievers, though, it may serve better to push people away from God.

In the old Christendom order, it sort of worked. When everyone was nominally a Christian, you could preach hellfire sermons and get the nominal Christians to come down for the altar call to become “real” Christians (perhaps for the third or fourth time). But in post-Christendom, it doesn’t work anymore to warn strangers about the scary God that the world has stopped believing in. Too many people have seen that scary God create scary Christians who don’t act at all like Jesus. And you can’t blame earthquakes or invasions of foreign imperial armies on God’s wrath anymore.

I worry that in our evangelism, we often address only peoples' minds (or rather, our minds, by trying to formulate a gospel presentation that jumps through all the requisite doctrinal hoops of correctness) while leaving their hearts and imaginations hungry. In our zeal to guard God's (or is it our?) holiness, we depict God in a way that most modern people want nothing to do with—and if they they reject Him, we simply chock it up to "the god of this age" blinding their minds (2 Cor 4:4), without considering that this blinding might be occurring through our misguided proselytizing.

If we make preaching the gospel about using the right method, or hitting on the right talking points, or getting the right results, we may find that it is no longer the true gospel that we're preaching. In his preaching Paul became "all things to all people, that by all means I might save some." (9:22) He truly believed the gospel was a transformative message that applied to everyone: Jew and gentile, weak and strong, slave and free; but his message to each of these groups may have been quite different. "Preaching the gospel", far from being a simple learning and compelling regurgitation (how many times have you heard those two words together) of doctrinal facts pertaining to salvation, may require real humility, creativity, and a willingness to live with and understand diverse people to truly win them over.

But this is all very easy for me to say since I have the opposite problem; that is, taking the above warnings too seriously and getting scared out of preaching the gospel to anyone. And once again I reveal my tendency to write to others and not to myself. I pray for the heart of Paul as he said, "Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel!" (1 Cor 9:16) I pray that I would really get the gospel in a truly transformative way as the early church did, such that I can't keep it from overflowing into my life and relationships. That it would break out of its box of simply being that omnipresent term that evangelicals constantly throw around and come to define me.

I'm going to try to start a discussion yet again:

• How would you describe "the gospel" to yourself?
• What do you think of my conclusion that the law/righteousness narrative of the gospel is not its definition, but an application of it? Do you think we can be too inflexible in how we present it?
• What obstacles do you see put in the way of the gospel that you wish could be removed?

Addendum: I should at least mention the two posts I did for my church's men's group on contextualizing the gospel: One Two

Not the post I intended to write

I've been working for weeks on a massive post. It originally began as two posts—one on "worldview" thinking in the church and overly intellectualized spirituality, and one about "divine restlessness" as a way of maintaining an appropriate level of certainty and epistemological humility in our beliefs—that I decided were similar enough to merge together. Though it covered fairly well-traded ground, it was going to be excellent, brilliant, insightful, and convicting; the usual.

That post will probably never see the light of day.

I still agree with most of the things I said in it, and I may try to work some of them into future posts. But as I was finishing up, it became harder and harder to right. God was convicting me not about what I was writing, but about how and why I was writing it, using the words I was writing. He was pulling a Romans 2:1 on me.

Yesterday I realized that since its renaissance in February through June, I have been taking this blog in the wrong direction, and my output has suffered as a result. A strong theme in my posts this year has been that the Bible is not simply a source of information to make us smarter and should not be read as such, but rather it's supposed to transform us. Once I realized this, I started seeing the misuse of scripture in this way—people simply drawing conclusions they wanted from it to back up their own arguments—everywhere. Everywhere except in my own writing.

The truth is, I've still been mining conclusions I've already drawn out of scripture instead of being informed by it. Too often I've written with my voice instead of seeking to let God speak through my own words. This question of who's really talking is independent of whether I study the Bible with my old logical view or my new Christ-as-Word view. Either can be a high or a low view of scripture. I've changed how I read the Bible, but not how I use it. I still treat it like an object of study to be held up to the light and analyzed for talking points in order to speak to and act on others rather than the Word of God that primarily speaks to and acts on me.

The result of this is that instead of this blog representing a conversation with God and with others, often it has just been the outflow of my train of thought on my solitary quest for truth—a noble delusion! I write about whatever I'm worked up about, annoyed at, or catches my fancy instead of what God is doing in me and saying to me right now. Though my thinking about doubt was this six months ago, He's calling me to move on now, but I keep posting about the same things as a way of staying in my comfort zone and avoiding letting God continue to lead me through my writing. The more I linger, the emptier and more forced my posts feel.

My conclusion (and it's one I still can't hear enough): the Bible is not merely a "text" to be studied, it is the Word of God to be lived. If we do study it, we should do so with the earnestness and immediacy of a man on a sinking ship studying the instructions for a life raft.

The Gift of Loneliness

I recently finished reading a book that I won from my pastor Cor's blog, The Wounded Healer by Henri Nouwen. It's a short but incredibly sweet and practical book about how the wounds we bear can help us minister to others in a confused, lost age. His writing style is both deeply insightful and emotionally engaging, a huge inspiration to me (I think he might also be an INFJ). This passage toward the end stuck out to me (emphasis added):

The Christian way of life does not take away our loneliness; it protects and cherishes it as a precious gift. Sometimes it seems as if we do everything possible to avoid the painful confrontation with our basic human loneliness, and allow ourselves to be trapped by false gods promising immediate satisfaction and quick relief. But perhaps the painful awareness of loneliness is an invitation to transcend our limitations and look beyond the boundaries of our existence. The awareness of loneliness might be a gift we must protect and guard, because our loneliness reveals to us an inner emptiness that can be destructive when misunderstood, but filled with promise for him who can tolerate its sweet pain. When we are impatient, when we want to give up our loneliness and try to overcome the separation and incompleteness we feel, too soon, we easily relate to our human world with devastating expectations. We ignore what we already know with a deep-seated, intuitive knowledge—that no love or friendship, no intimate embrace or tender kiss, no community, commune or collective, no man or woman, will ever be able to satisfy our desire to be released from our lonely condition. This truth is so disconcerting and painful that we are more prone to play games with our fantasies than to face the truth of our existence. Thus we keep hoping that one day we will find the man who really understands our experiences, the woman who will bring peace to our restless life, the job where we can fulfill our potentials, the book which will explain everything, and the place where we can feel at home. Such false hope leads us to make exhausting demands and prepares us for bitterness and dangerous hostility when we start discovering that nobody, and nothing, can live up to our absolutistic expectations.
Many marriages are ruined because neither partner was able to fulfill the often hidden hope that the other would take his or her loneliness away. And many celibates live with the naive dream that in the intimacy of marriage their loneliness will be taken away.
When the minister lives with these false expectations and illusions he prevents himself from claiming his own loneliness as a source of human understanding, and is unable to offer any real service to the many who do not understand their own suffering.

I recently came to the realization that, as enjoyable as my relationship with my girlfriend is (so, did I mention I'm seeing someone?), and as thankful for it as I am, it can't completely satisfy me, make me fully completely loved, accepted and valued, end the deep-seated feeling of loneliness, and all that fun stuff Nouwen describes. I "saw the bottom" of what it could provide. And the amazing part of my Christian learning in life is that not only was I not surprised by this realization, I was expecting it. As Nouwen says, this realization comes after marriage or years of cohabitation for some and ruins the relationship because both people were hoping that the other would, essentially, be God to them, which is too great a burden for anyone to bear. My pastor Steve often says that his wife Carol is "a great wife, but a terrible god".

But Nouwen paints a more nuanced picture than simply saying that God can cure the loneliness that no one else can. God doesn't just take our loneliness away; He turns it into a blessing and a gift for ministering to others. By understanding our own inner loneliness we can begin to understand the loneliness of others and love them through it. That is, largely, the theme of Nouwen's book.

The difference between law and grace

The following was written in response to the question, "What is the difference between being 'under law' and 'under grace'?"

The intrabiblical tension between law and grace is one that I've struggled with a lot in the past. The Law (i.e. the old covenant) is presented in totally different ways in the Old and New Testaments. In the OT, the law is given as a blessing, a set of rules to live by. The Israelites are promised that if they obey, they will live by their obedience (Lev 18:5) and it will be their righteousness (Deut 6:25). They are also told that the commandments of the law are not too difficult or too far off, but are "in your mouth and in your heart, so that you can do it." (Deut 30:14) Numerous Psalms, especially 119, treasure the Law as a gift and a blessing to be celebrated. Everything seems peachy, until the New Testament.

In the New Testament we learn that no one is declared righteous before God by observing the Law, only made conscious of sin. (Romans 3:20) Instead of a gift, the Law is now seen as a jailer that imprisoned the Jews under it, or at best a stopgap measure to hold us over until Christ came (Gal 3:23-24). The Law is revealed to have been weak and useless, making nothing perfect (Heb 7:18-19), its rituals incapable of taking away sins (Heb 10:4) as advertised (Lev 16:30). In Romans 10:5 Paul uses Moses' earlier promise that that the person who does the commandments will live by them to contrast with the "proper" kind of righteousness, the kind that is by faith.

This would all be well and good, except that God also gave the Law, which makes the gospel seem like a God-given solution to a God-given problem. It completely undermines the spirit in which the Law was given, making it into a burden rather than a blessing. It makes God's "chosen people" seem singularly unfortunate because they happened to live in a time before salvation by faith was revealed and instead got stuck with God's second-rate blessing, the Law, which doesn't save anyone. What is the point of the Law revealing their sin problem as in Romans 3:20 if they didn't live to see the solution? Commentators are quick to point out that this discrepancy is not because of a deficiency in the Law but because of our sinful inability to keep it, but was God unaware of this when He gave it, or taken by surprise? Placing moral burdens on people without helping them to carry them is what the Pharisees did, for which Jesus condemned them. (Matthew 23:4 What is going on here? How could God give the Israelites such a bad covenant deal and pass it off as a huge blessing—the covenant Christ has to deliver us from?

These are very tough questions and I definitely wouldn't say I have figured out all the answers. But I think one mistaken assumption in the questions is that the New Testament authors are making a "bad vs. good" contrast between Law and grace. I think a more fitting description of the two would be "good vs. much, much better". The key to seeing the Law as good, as I believe Paul and the author of Hebrews really did, is to stop seeing it as codified legalism—that is, as a covenant system designed to produce Pharisees. The Pharisees, including Paul (Phil 3:6), obeyed the Law perfectly—if all there was to the Law was doing what it says, they would have been "good" with God. But clearly they weren't.

The point has never been simply to do the right things, says the right words, and perform the right rituals to get into heaven, and God never told us to do so. This kind of legalism was just as much a perversion of God's Word before Christ as it is today. But there is another problem with legalism which is not synonymous with the Law, as it is just as easy to do with grace. This is treating the attainment of salvation from God as our be-all and end-all goal. Eternal life is not a "spiritual object" that God can wrap up with a bow and hand to us in exchange for good works, faith, or anything. Life is found not from Christ, but in Christ Himself (John 14:6). Eternal life is not something we receive from God, but simply knowing the true God (John 17:3). If we treat faith as something we "do" to receive a salvation that is not coterminous with knowing Christ, we may as well be legalists.

With all of this in mind, I can finally answer the question, what is the difference between being under law and under grace? It is not that we were stuck in a system of legalism and are now freed to receive our righteousness by grace through faith. This may be true of some Christians' experience, but God never commanded anyone to live this way so He could later get more glory by freeing them. What changes from Law to grace is not whether we know God or not, but how we know God. Through the Law God did provide a means of knowing and communing with Him, albeit a difficult, ritualized, and highly regimented one. The Law was also very communal in its role a the prototypical mediator between God and man; there was one tabernacle/temple for the nation where God was said to live, and where people would go to seek Him, and His commands were given on Mount Sinai for all the people.

But by grace we now know God more clearly in the person of Jesus Christ. So the book of Hebrews begins, "Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets,but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world." Whereas the Law was previously the mediator between God and man, we now have Christ (1 Tim 2:5). Through His death and resurrection we are able to know Him in ways of which the regulations of the Law were merely types and shadows (Heb 10:1). Though those under the Law could and sometimes did have a real relationship with God, by comparison with us they were prisoners. Now we ourselves are temples for God's spirit (1 Cor 3:16) and His word is written on our hearts instead of on tablets of stone (2 Cor 3:3). The precepts of the Law are fulfilled (or completed) through the grace shown to us by Jesus, who is the end of the Law (that is, the fulfillment of all it set out to do) for righteousness to everyone who believes (Rom 10:4).

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Addendum: I can't help but wonder if the term "Law" underwent a semantic shift similar to what has happened to the term "religion" today. Whereas initially it referred to the old system of instructions by which Israel would worship and experience its God, by Paul's time it seemed to have become more synonymous with the onerous legalistic burdens laid by the "teachers of the Law", and it is this usage that Paul adopts in his writing about how grace releases us from the Law. Similar to how, today, people say that "Jesus came to abolish religion" which would have sounded absurd to a first-century Christian.

The Glory of God, or packing a mountain in a suitcase

The glory of God—three simple words, so often used in theology (starting with Paul) to refer to the ultimate purpose of God, our lives, history—virtually everything. But much can be hidden behind them, and I sometimes wonder if by using them so much we've forgotten what they really mean.

It's as if a breathtaking mountain landscape could somehow be packed into a suitcase, carried off, bought and sold, changing hands dozens of times, its presence duly recorded in arrival logs and transaction ledgers, spoken of as one might refer to the next shipment of wood, a drop in the ocean of human endeavours for the day, all while its handlers remained ignorant of its awesome contents. I say unpack the suitcase, and let the grandeur speak and be seen for itself rather than being spoken of.

Transactional Christianity

The following was written as part of my Spiritual Formation class at the University of Northwestern.

"Do not be idolaters as some of them were; as it is written, “The people sat down to eat and drink and rose up to play.”" (1 Corinthians 10:7, ESV)

This verse refers back to Exodus 32:6. The context of this reference that the Lord has just finished giving Moses the tablets of the testimony on Mt. Sinai in chapter 31, and the Israelites, losing patience with Moses and with the Lord, have asked Aaron to make them new gods. Exodus 31:1-6 is worth quoting at length:

When the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, the people gathered themselves together to Aaron and said to him, “Up, make us gods who shall go before us. As for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.” So Aaron said to them, “Take off the rings of gold that are in the ears of your wives, your sons, and your daughters, and bring them to me.” So all the people took off the rings of gold that were in their ears and brought them to Aaron. And he received the gold from their hand and fashioned it with a graving tool and made a golden calf. And they said, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!” When Aaron saw this, he built an altar before it. And Aaron made a proclamation and said, “Tomorrow shall be a feast to the LORD.” And they rose up early the next day and offered burnt offerings and brought peace offerings. And the people sat down to eat and drink and rose up to play.

The people were growing impatient with Moses and with God: "When the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain..." As throughout the whole section of chapters 13-19 that Paul was referring to before, they still don't seem to trust the Lord even after all He has done for them. So they decide to make some new gods that they can follow and trust (the prophets delighted in pointing out the absurdity of trusting in gods you made yourself). I noticed for the first time the incongruity: Aaron makes a single golden calf and then the people say, "These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!" As if they simply weren't comfortable banking entirely on a single god. And then it gets stranger: after making these idols, Aaron says that "Tomorrow shall be a feast to the Lord", and they bring offerings (to the true God or the golden calf, it's not clear). Finally, in the verse Paul refers to, the people just party and do whatever they want.

There is more going on here than merely exchanging worship of the true God for a false one. The Israelites still seem to keep honoring God, at least in lip service. In the polytheistic, paganistic culture from which Judaism arose, the existence of multiple gods was not controversial. Families or tribes would have a favorite god that they paid the most respects to, but they would also recognize and honor other gods, because hey, a little more blessing couldn't hurt. This kind of polytheistic worship—not rejecting the true God outright but demoting Him to merely your favorite god to worship or even a peripheral god that you superficially honored to avoid getting whacked—was a huge problem for Israel through the time of the kings. The most controversial thing about Judaism was that its God demanded exclusive worship and devotion—not to simply be added to your own personal pantheon of deities.

Thinking about it, I see Moses and the Israelites displaying two totally different attitudes both under the guide of "worship". Moses was a servant of God. He did what God told him to do, went where God told him to go—basically laid his entire life in God's hand, like so many other imperfect heroes of the Bible (and Jesus). The Israelites, on the other hand, seem more interested in how God will serve them. They expect to be practically pampered through the exodus, complaining against Him when things aren't up to their expectations, and then God seems to be taking too long, not holding up His end of the deal, they turn to another god who can better cater to their whims (while still hedging their bets with God).

This sounds uncomfortably like me. This kind of exploitative attitude, serving God as a way to get things from Him, used to characterize my faith. And it is a pervasive temptation. When we are merely giving God things like our time, our money, our service, our blog posts, and merely getting from Him things like a better life, a new community, a set of rules to live and judge others by, or even salvation (as a "get-out-of-hell-free card"), our relationship with God looks more like a business partnership. He has His interests, we have ours, and by working together we can satisfy those interests while still remaining essentially our own. But the truth of the gospel is that "You are not your own, for you were bought with a price." (1 Corinthians 6:19-20, ESV). We don't merely give God things and receive things from Him; in love we give Him our selves and receive the greatest prize of all, God Himself.

The Anti-Pharisee

My pastor Cor preached a sermon yesterday about how Jesus gets to be lord over your inner life--your mind and heart, thoughts and passions. He stressed the importance of not "sucking in your spiritual gut", that is, not outwardly pretending to be more righteous than you really are on the inside, and instead letting Jesus transform you from the inside out. This is the difference between authentic Christianity and superficial Christian-esque religion, and it is vital that we take heed of it. One of the texts he preached from was part of Jesus' tirade against the externally-focused Jewish scribes and Pharisees in Matthew 23:25-26:

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and the plate¹, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. You blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and the plate, that the outside may also be clean.

While I thought it was a good sermon, it didn't hit me through the heart like a great sermon does. After some reflection, I realized that this is because I tend to make the opposite error of the Pharisees: I clean the inside and neglect the outside. I'm so focused on seeking internal transformation (often by inspiration) that I don't do the hard work of actually reshaping habits and living differently. The result is that while on the inside I may be coming to resemble Christ, on the outside (which is all anyone else sees) I look little like Him in many ways.

There's a misconception in Christianity that makes this opposite mistake easy to miss, saying that the inside, the heart is all that matters. Jesus transforms you on the inside, and the outside changes to match. But I don't think it's quite that simple. He didn't say, "Clean the inside and the outside will also be clean", but "Clean the inside...that the outside may also be clean." Internal transformation is vital and preeminent for the Christian, but it is no excuse to be lazy about changing the patterns of how we actually live--it is an opportunity to do so.

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¹ Random aside: I had an instructive example for a "wrong message" to take from this woe. If you try to be practical and preach a sermon based on this text asking whether you are a cup or a plate, and enumerating bullet-pointed differences between cups and plates, you are probably, as Jesus had just said, "straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel". The point is the difference between cleaning the inside and the outside, not between Jesus' metaphorical cup and plate.