Unmasking Toxic Faith: The Pharisees' Deception

Everybody, yeah, there's a lot of empty seats when the kids leave. I don't know, I'm hesitating.

So, we had a church that grew fast too. I was a pastor in Menomonie, Wisconsin, and one of the solutions we had—and you might not like the solution—but because there were so many open seats once the kids left, we did have the kids. They never did join the worship, so that's another one of those tough decisions you have to make. But there's a lot of seats that could be filled up here, just saying.

It was funny because when I sat back there, I thought, "Wow, the last time I was here, there was hardly anyone in the service last summer." It was kind of the ant tail into COVID and stuff, and it's so nice to see this. The first thing I thought was, "You got to go to two services." I thought I'd say something about that, and I thought, "No, it's kind of a daisy thing to say to a congregation." They might, you know, that might be a sensitive issue. And then you kind of addressed it, so that was kind of funny.

Yeah, so how do I know Rob? I was assigned to Rob as his coach when the church first got started. What was it, 12 years ago? I'm not quite sure how long ago it was. Yeah, so I hung with him for two years until you guys got up and running, and I love the guy. He's just such a special person in my life. There are kind of certain churches that I've adopted that I go, "God, these are—there's four churches that I really have a heart for that I pray for every day," and you're one of them.

So, yeah, I got choked up just saying that.

Yeah, so the last time I was here, you were in the meeting space, you know, sharing space with another church, and then you got this space. Pastor Rob invited me out here last fall to take a look at it when it was kind of in shambles, but you've done such a nice job. It looks beautiful, really good.

So, as the video showed, you're spending time this summer by the lake, at least biblically speaking, and looking at stories in the Bible, particularly in the New Testament, either on or by a lake. So I'm going to take you Lakeside today to hear what Jesus has to say. He's got a number of short stories—what they refer to as parables—and we find them in Matthew chapter 13.

Now, just hearing that Jesus is telling stories by the Lakeside, it just makes you want to bring a picnic basket and bring some, you know, yard games to listen to Jesus. But as you'll soon see, these stories aren't warm and fuzzy feel-good stories because they're actually quite shocking. These are stories about judgment. They're about who is in with God and who is out with God. And I'd imagine the people listening that day, Jesus had their attention.

Okay, and that's kind of what happened when you talk about judgment; people's ears prick up. So it's important that we take a close look and see what Jesus had to say, talking about these stories. Why did he use these stories?

It's interesting because when Pastor Rob first told me what the series was about, I said, "Oh, that's great! I actually did a series on the lake myself like 10, 12 years ago, and I'll just pull that out of the file and I'll preach it." So I pulled it. I had it in the back of my mind; it was in my file. I hadn't read it through, so I pulled it out on Monday and I read it through, and they didn't like it. In fact, I sent it to the worship team, and I don't know what they thought of it, but I just sent—I said, "I haven't even read this through yet. I'm sure I'll change it a little bit," but I didn't like it.

I didn't like it because I didn't think it had the right spirit. If you read the Bible or preach the Bible in the wrong way, just a little bit, it can be very condemning. And I thought, "These are dicey stories about judgment, and if I don't handle these correctly, people could leave here condemned." And I don't—that's not my intent as a preacher, and I know it's not Jesus's intent. He said he didn't come to take down.

So I had to read a little bit deeper, study a little bit more, and I think I uncovered what I was missing.

So to really appreciate what's going on in Matthew 13, you have to read through Matthew 12. I don't have time to dissect all of it today; I hope you do that. It's very fascinating if you connect the two chapters.

So often, we compartmentalize chapters in the Bible, and we stop reading. You know, day one we read chapter 12, and the next day we read chapter 13, and we forget everything that was in chapter 12. Well, these two are really closely connected, and you've got to understand them and read them together. In fact, that's true for these parables too. A lot of times, people preach through these parables one at a time, but I think I'm going to give them all to you today—a really condensed version—because I think that's how you need to hear them.

Okay, so before we dive into these stories, these parables that I've been telling you about, to get the bigger picture, we need to get the context of what Jesus is talking about. And what I mean is if you just read these stories and take them at face value, like I already said, you might feel condemned, and that's not what Jesus intended.

So we got to back up, read the context, and so we're going to start in Matthew 12. In Matthew 12, Matthew tells us about how Jesus broke the Sabbath. Okay, and to break the Sabbath means that you break the rules of the Sabbath. The Sabbath was the Jewish Day of worship. In Matthew 12, some religious men—they're called Pharisees—caught Jesus and his disciples picking some grains of wheat on the Sabbath. Imagine that! But it was serious to them. It was serious to these Pharisees.

In fact, Matthew tells us this: he says, "Then the Pharisees called a meeting to plot how to kill Jesus." That's just amazing! You just have to hover over that for a second. They wanted to kill Jesus over a few grains of wheat. You gotta love religious people, right? They get mad over the littlest things, and this is what we call toxic faith.

I wrote a whole book on toxic faith, and so as a result of that, a lot of people write me after reading my book and tell me their story, and it's so painful to read that they go to a church that is making them feel far from God. That's how—I mean, that's the opposite of your name, Restoration. What you're restoring people—you're restoring your relationship with God. That's who you're about. It's all about grace.

But here we have these toxic people who want to kill Jesus over them eating grains of wheat on the Sabbath. So toxic faith is when people stick to rules over treasuring the presence of God. Toxic faith adds rules on top of us who already feel like we don't measure up. It just makes it worse. It is crushing; it drives us away from God.

So you kind of, as you read through this, have to feel the weight that people were feeling of this toxic faith in their life and that we're surrounded by it—all these religious people who are trying to push them away from God because they didn't think that these common people were good enough.

But for the religious leaders of that day, you didn't mess with the Sabbath. They had good biblical reasons; toxic people always do. The Sabbath was sacred because God established it at creation, and so the Jews saw it as foundational. It was set in stone; you didn't mess with the Sabbath. To break the Sabbath was like spitting on God. They took it that seriously, and that's why it warranted, in their mind, the death sentence for Jesus.

But Jesus was unfazed by these threats. Jesus was on a life-giving mission, not a toxic mission. So the next thing Jesus did was he cast a demon out of a man, still on the Sabbath. Matthew tells us this: "But when the Pharisees heard about the miracle, this casting out the demon, they said, 'Oh, no wonder he casts out demons; he gets his power from Satan, the prince of demons.'"

So these men accused Jesus of being a pawn of Satan, and they wanted to kill him. This is a—if you read through the whole story of Matthew, this is a turning point because the religious elite rejected both Jesus and his kingdom, and as a result, Jesus rejected them. It's very serious. It's kind of a—it's a turning point in this whole book. Like, wow, this—they're right on their brink here.

See, they were looking for a messiah to kick the Romans out of Israel, but that's not what Jesus came to do. They didn't have the spiritual eyes to see the kingdom that Jesus was trying to bring. His kingdom wasn't political, and his kingdom wasn't military; it was spiritual, and it was personal.

So Jesus tells them this: "Anyone who isn't with me opposes me, and anyone who isn't working with me is actually working against me. So I tell you, every sin and blasphemy can be forgiven except blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, which will never be forgiven. Anyone who speaks against the Son of Man can be forgiven, but anyone who speaks against the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven, either in this world or in the world to come."

These men had called Jesus of the devil, and Jesus was warning them that they were really close to condemning themselves with their own words. I mean, they were like a drowning man rejecting the lifeguard who came to save them.

And then Jesus told these men what the kingdom of God should look like in a person's life. It wasn't about a messiah overthrowing a ruler; it was about a messiah who could come and change their life for good. And he said, "A tree is identified by its fruit. If a tree is good, its fruit will be good. If a tree is bad, its fruit will be bad. You, who are brood of snakes, how could evil men like you speak what is good and right? For whatever is in your heart determines what you say. A good person produces good things from the treasury of a good heart, and an evil person produces evil things from the treasury of an evil heart. And I tell you this: you must give an account on Judgment Day for every idle word you speak. The words you say will either acquit you or condemn you."

So Jesus was pretty amped up here. I mean, this is intense. I haven't been watching the—um, what's the TV show about Jesus? Joe? I haven't been watching it. Forgive me; I know my Christianity is in question there.

[Applause]

I can't think of anything that's been recommended more than that. Thank you. But I haven't watched it, but I'd imagine there's a scene like this, and I would like to see a scene like this acted out because it was super intense.

And again, you just have to stop until you feel the intensity before you move on. This is so important when you read scripture to do stuff like that. But Jesus was really amped up; he was nose to nose and toe to toe with these Pharisees, and he did not speak well of them. I mean, he was close to condemning them.

And I want you to notice two things here: first, that he called them evil, which is important. You'll see this in chapter 13. And second, notice that he's talking about the Judgment Day, which we're also going to see in chapter 13.

Okay, so that leads us up to chapter 13. That's where my sermon actually starts. Now in chapter 13, verse 1, it starts out like this: "Later that same day, Jesus left the house and sat beside the lake."

So I got you to the lake. We're on the lake now. There you go, Pastor Rob. So we're at the lake. But look what it said: "Later that same day." It's the same day Jesus went from rebuking the Pharisees earlier in the day to teaching people by the lake later on.

So his encounter with these religious men was fresh in his mind and in the minds of the people. And then it says, "A large crowd soon gathered around him." If you read chapter 12, you'll see that a crowd had been around him for the previous part of the day, and I have to assume that many of these people saw him confront the Pharisees in this very toe-to-toe way.

They were probably shocked to see him rebuke these religious men who were held in such high honor in that community. In fact, the people were probably full of conflicting emotions—happy that Jesus was finally, you know, someone was finally confronting this toxic faith—but also confused at what this meant. I mean, who was right? Was Jesus right? Were the Pharisees right?

And they were probably a little scared. I mean, I was thinking it's kind of like when Mom and Dad are fighting, you know? Like, "Oh, what's going to happen?" I mean, you might, as a little kid, see who's wrong, but you still wondered where is this going to go?

And so I think the people in the crowd that surrounded him were full of conflicting emotions. So maybe Jesus felt like he had a little explaining to do after that crazy morning.

So Matthew tells us this: "He got into a boat, and then he sat there and taught as the people stood on the shore." He told many stories in the form of parables, and he said, "A farmer went out to plant his seed."

So this is where Jesus tells a series of short stories that many of us are probably familiar with. And now that you know what happened to Jesus in chapter 12 earlier in the day, these stories, I hope, will make a lot more sense to you. That's why I bothered to go back there.

So I'm going to paraphrase this first story. Most of you have probably heard it, but Jesus said, "A farmer went out to cast seed," and he seemed a little bit reckless because he threw some seed on a hard path, he threw other seed among some rocks, and he threw some seed among some weeds. And of course, those seeds, they started, but then they failed.

Now, in light of chapter 12, in light of what I just told you about in chapter 12, who do you think Jesus is referring to when he referred to the rocks, seed among the rocks, in the hard path, and the weeds? I think it was the Pharisees.

So often when we read through these stories, we take it personally, but I think you need to get yourself in the moment. Don't be too—we want to apply scripture to ourselves; that's good. But sometimes you have to stay in the story and go, "Wait a minute, I don't think Jesus was talking to me on this one. I think he was talking to the Pharisees."

He was trying to make a point with these people that were all concerned about toxic faith, and everything. Jesus was seizing the moment to go, "Okay, you saw what I said to them. I called them evil, and you know that they're on the verge of missing out on the kingdom of God. I need to sit down and talk to you why I was so harsh with them."

Okay, so the Pharisees and others like them who had the word of God but didn't receive it, and they did nothing good came from them. They thought that they were in God's kingdom simply because they were Jews, and they were educated, and they were wealthy, and they were religious. But in spite of all that, they rejected Jesus.

Thankfully, some seed fell on good ground, and that seed sprouted, it took root, it produced fruit, and this represents the people who hear God's word and they understand it. They understand what the kingdom is truly about, and they embrace it. And as a result, they produce fruit for God's kingdom.

So to the people listening to these stories in the crowd that day, I think this was actually good news. They were—there were stories about judgment, but Jesus was saying, "Look, I'm not judging you; I'm judging them because they don't get it. They don't understand me, my teaching, or what the kingdom is all about. They're about toxic faith; they're evil."

Okay, but you want to be like the seed who falls on good ground. Jesus was telling these people that even common people, even sinners, can enter God's kingdom if they embrace Jesus's teaching and bear good fruit, which means good character and good deeds—not that you're measured by those, but that's the result of accepting Jesus into your life.

So that's the first story. And then Jesus told the crowd another story, also about a farmer sowing seeds. And he said, "Here is what the Kingdom of Heaven is like: a man planted good seed in his field, but while everyone was sleeping, his enemy came. The enemy planted tares among the wheat and then went away."

And tares are like a weed, but they're not really a weed; they're just a plant that looks a lot like wheat. And in the early stages of the plant, they look just like wheat, but they don't produce fruit like wheat, and you can't tell the difference until much later.

So the workers went to the farmer and said, "Well, should we pull out these weeds?" And the farmer said, "No, just let's wait until the harvest, and at the harvest, we'll collect all those weeds and then we'll burn them up, and then we'll gather the wheat."

Now again, given the context and what we know now from chapter 12, who do you think Jesus was referring to as these tares? It was the Pharisees. They are the people who aren't producing the fruit for the kingdom. They're the imposters. They're the people that look like religious people, like godly people, but they're not.

So Jesus was turning the crowd's understanding of God and the kingdom totally upside down, and I think it felt good. I think something about them was saying, "This is what I thought God was all about. This makes sense to me because I've never understood those toxic Pharisees. They always seem like they're working against God, but yet everyone seems to think they're so spiritual."

Common people often felt like they weren't very spiritual. In their mind, spiritual people were the priests and the religious leaders, like the Pharisees. The common people didn't feel like they were worthy of God's kingdom, and Jesus explained his parable like this: "The harvest is Judgment Day."

So we've got another judgment story, and the workers are angels. The weeds are pulled up and burned. "On Judgment Day, the Son of Man will send out his angels. They will weed out of his kingdom everything that causes sin. They will also get rid of all who do evil. They will throw them into the blazing furnace; their people will sob and grind their teeth. Then God's people will shine like the sun in their Father's kingdom. Those who have ears should listen."

Jesus is sending a message out to the audience, okay? He wasn't going to come right out and name the Pharisees; he was going to tell stories around the Pharisees, and those who had ears would understand. They would see, "Okay, Pharisees didn't have ears to understand; they didn't have eyes to see the kingdom."

So he's saying, "I'm talking about these Pharisees who you saw me reject and who you saw reject me. They look like they're part of God's kingdom; they sound like they're part of God's kingdom, but they're not. In fact, they're evil. So don't let them intimidate you; don't be like them. Anyone who produces fruit is acceptable to God. That's what you want to be like."

Now, I think these stories were primarily directed at the Pharisees, as I've been saying, but we can be like Pharisees too, and so that's where we have to be really careful. We may say, "You know, I've been going to church all my life. I've been a member; my whole family's been a member of the First Perfect Church of Apple Valley for generations. I give money to the church every week. I've even volunteered in the nursery," right?

So you might think that you're good with God, right? And I've had many people tell me through the years that they had been going to church for years only to realize that they didn't know God at all. It was just religion; it was just a function that they went through, often out of obligation and peer pressure.

See, it's easy to believe in God and to just go through the motions. I think most of us know that, and we never make a connection with God. But if you are in God's kingdom, I think you should know it. I think you should see it; it should be visible because it impacts you in a personal way, and I think other people see it in you too. Sometimes they see it better than you do, so maybe you might have to ask other people.

And that's because God's kingdom, whenever it comes, it transforms whatever it touches. So if the kingdom of God has touched you, it's going to change you, and others will see it, like I said, probably first, but hopefully you'll see it too.

To help people better understand the transformative nature of his kingdom, Jesus shared two brief parables. And the first one goes like this: "The Kingdom of Heaven is like a mustard seed. It's the smallest of all your seeds, but when it grows, it is the largest of all garden plants. It becomes a tree; birds come and rest in its branches."

And he told another parable: "The Kingdom of Heaven is like yeast. A woman mixed it into a large amount of flour; the yeast worked its way all through the dough."

So God's kingdom is transformational. That's the main point in both examples. There's a dramatic transformation that takes place. Both the seed and the yeast start small, grow quickly, and then impact others for good. The mustard tree serves as a haven for birds, and the bread is able to feed other people. I think these are great pictures of God's kingdom and his people, but it's totally different than what the Pharisees had in mind when they thought about God's kingdom.

Okay, and that's why they didn't accept Jesus's message, and they didn't accept him as Messiah. Now, some of the people in the crowd that day were probably wondering, "Well, how do I get into God's kingdom if it's not, you know, to be like a Pharisee, to be rich, and to be educated and religious? So what do I do? What do I do?"

So again, Jesus shared two more parables to illustrate it, and he said it like this: "Well, the kingdom of heaven is like a treasure that was hidden in a field, and when a man found it, he hid it again. He was very happy, so he went and sold everything he had, and he bought that field."

"Again, the Kingdom of Heaven is like a trader who was looking for fine pearls. He found one that was very valuable, so he went away and sold everything he had, and he bought that pearl."

So what happened in both parables? He says that the man in both parables went away and sold everything that he had. He was all in. Both parables, the response to finding the treasure was full-on commitment or a reckless abandonment to live for Jesus. And that's what he wasn't seeing in the Pharisees, and that's what Jesus calls us to do when we discover him.

He's the pearl of great price; he's the hidden treasure. He's worth giving up everything for. Now, the term "reckless abandonment" always rings in my ears because when I was a new Christian, I read a lot of Oswald Chambers, and he used that phrase a lot.

And so here's one quote from Oswald: "I am convinced that what is needed in spiritual matters is reckless abandonment to the Lord Jesus Christ—reckless and uncalculating abandonment with no reserve anywhere about it." Those words just challenged me so much in my early days as a Christian.

So this means that you die to your personal thoughts and your personal rights and what you think you deserve—not that those things are necessarily bad. It just means that you want to always want what he wants more than what you want, and you're willing to sacrifice what you want for what he wants.

Say, "God, I only want for my life what you want for my life, and I'll let the rest burn." So this approach impacts everything about you, okay? It impacts your career and your relationships and your sexuality, your health—everything. If you believe that God's kingdom is the pearl of great price, then it's worth everything that you got. There's nothing you possess that compares to the surpassing value of living for God and promoting his kingdom.

And this approach to God is what brings transformation. The greater the abandonment to God, the greater the transformation that you'll experience from God.

Now, this might sound radical. We don't often like to preach that strongly; Jesus did, but we don't. But as I said before, in context, if you're one of those people in the crowd that day, this was good news, okay? Because it put everyone on the same level—priests, Pharisees, sinners, farmers, you know, fishermen—they're all on the same level. No one had an edge with God because of their wealth or anything like that.

The greatest sinner had just as much access to God as the wealthy Pharisee or the temple priest.

So we've heard five stories so far. Each one helps us to understand God's kingdom a little bit better and understand where the Pharisees fall in line here. And then Jesus told another story. This one was about fishing, and again, I'm going to summarize it. It's a lot like the story of the wheat and the tares because he says that a net was cast, and when they fall on the net, they have good fish and the bad fish. And then the bad fish, what do they do with them? They throw them back; they're unwanted.

It's another story of judgment, and I think it's also aimed at the Pharisees. And at the end of the story, Jesus asks, "Do you understand all these things?"

Okay, remember, it's like he's sending these—these stories are like coded messages, and he wants to make sure that they understand. "Do you understand who I'm talking about here? Wink, wink," right? And they say, "Yes, we do. We think we do." In other words, "Do you know who I'm talking about?" And they go, "I think we do. Yeah, we do. We're tracking."

The final story paints a picture of what good religious leaders should do. So now he paints a picture in contrast to the Pharisees. He says, "Every teacher of religious law who becomes a disciple in the Kingdom of Heaven is like a homeowner who brings from his storeroom new gems of truth as well as old."

And he's saying when religious teachers understand who I am and understand what the kingdom is really about, they suddenly have new things to teach. They're not stuck to the old ways; they're willing to implement and introduce new things that Jesus has taught—both the Old Testament and Jesus's teaching about the kingdom. A good teacher is going to incorporate Jesus's teaching into the Old Testament teaching. That's what he was looking for; that's what he wanted from the Pharisees, but this is what the Pharisees failed to do.

So what's the moral of these stories? I was—I’ve got a good friend who just coincidentally we found out that we're preaching on the same text today, and he was going to preach kind of like I did 12 years ago. And I just kind of threw it out there, "Hey, you might want to read chapter 12 before you reach after, you know, create your sermon on chapter 13."

And that messed with him because he realized that he had to change everything. And he said, "So what's your point? What's your point in all this?" I thought, "Simple: don't be a Pharisee." I mean, that's the moral of the story. Don't be like a toxic Pharisee. Don't just be religious; make sure your faith is real and that you allow God to change you from the inside out.

It's not complicated. In fact, it's refreshing. This is what we hope religion—this is what we hope God and faith and church is all about. It's just the toxic people have messed it up for so much and given us the church such a bad name.

So Jesus is pleading with the people here: don't be like the Pharisees. Don't let them intimidate you. Don't let their wealth and their education and their power convince you that they're right because they're not. In fact, they're evil people.

The Pharisees are evil. I mean, imagine Jesus saying that about other religious people. I mean, if Jesus showed up today and pointed out some toxic churches and said, "Those pastors, those churches are evil," I think we'd all be shocked. Like, I didn't think you could say that.

Well, maybe we can't, but he can, and he's dead. So God accepts everyone—sinner or saint—but he expects us to allow him to change us, okay? To become like him, to produce good fruit. He wants to do something beautiful in our lives. We don't have to resist it; we don't have to worry.

I remember when my brother—I shared a book with him, and he wasn't a believer, and I don't know where he's at today, but he—when after he read the book, it was so refreshing to him because he said, "Oh, I thought to become a Christian meant I had to vote a certain way, and I had to do these certain things, and I had to believe in a six-day creation." And he kind of listed off all these legalistic things, and I said, "No, no, no, it's not like that. You're entering into a relationship with a personal God who wants to be involved in your life on a daily basis. He wants to do something beautiful."

You don't have to—you can put down your defenses; you can breathe deep. You can say, "Oh, you know that toxic faith? I kind of thought that was wrong. I feel so much better knowing that Jesus thinks that's wrong too."

Jesus wants to use you to be a blessing to other people, to bring good things to other people. He doesn't want to just bring good things into your life; he wants you to bring good things into other people's lives.

So he's laid the pearl of great price at all of our feet, and the question that we all have is, "What are we going to do? What is the pearl of great price? What is the price that we put on that? How much are we willing to sacrifice in order to make that a part of our life and to let it change us?"

Because the more you're willing to sacrifice and commit, the greater the transformation will be in your life.

I'm going to invite the band to come up. I'm going to pray here for us, and I hope you'll join me in prayer here.

So, Father, I want to thank you for these stories. As challenging as they are, thank you. I pray that the Pharisees' rejection of Jesus would be a warning sign to us to not settle for being merely religious. God, might we have hearts of reckless abandonment to you? Might we see the value of this pearl that you've put in front of us, this treasure?

Might we not limit its value? Might we not compromise its value? But might we realize that it's a pearl that's priceless; it's a treasure that you can't put a value on. So it really requires our whole life.

God, help us move in our life changes for good. Make our lives beautiful and use us to make the lives of other people beautiful as well. And we all pray that in Jesus's name. Amen.

Amen. Wow, thank you, Remy. What a powerful, challenging message. And my prayer would be that we would leave here encountering the same—the same world exists outside those doors as when we walked in here, but my prayer would be that you would see it in a new light and you would see your role in this world in a new light after this message today.

Would you stand and just proclaim that Jesus is capable of changing all the things in our lives? We'll just repeat the last song that we did, actually: "Promise still stands; your faithfulness, I'm still in your hands."