Guest preacher

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0:01Alright, well, welcome. As Joel said, my name is Harrison Ford. I hope you're okay that this is the Harrison Ford you get. I'm like the great value Harrison Ford, the one on the low shelf. I'm so excited to be here with you all. I bring greetings from the saints up at City Church up in the city. We have been praying for this church and supporting this church since before it was here in a room with a koala. So it's so exciting for me to be able to come and to see how God is so faithful to the prayers of the saints and to the work that he's doing down here in Chester.

0:48It's very exciting. Today I want to start off with a question. I wonder if you have ever felt like a fake or like a fraud. I know I certainly have. One of those times was when I was a kid. I'm from rural Mississippi, emphasis on rural, and so a lot of my friends were hunters. Now, I don't like to wake up early in the morning, so I don't have a natural predisposition towards hunting, but I really wanted to fit in with this friend group. So what did I do? I went and I bought all the camouflage. I bought the guns. I bought, you know, even the, like the little scents that you put on to mask you. I probably spent so much of like my chore money to trying to appear like a hunter. I think I went twice. Maybe, maybe even once. And I was so, and you know, they would invite me to go hunting with them and be like, oh no, I've got things I've got to do. Because I was so afraid of them finding out the truth that I'm a fraud. I'm not actually cool. I'm not a hunter like the rest of them. And I imagine that you have felt this way at some point in your life, like a fake or like a fraud. It's such a prominent feeling that we even have this term for it, imposter syndrome, which you might have heard.

2:13Back in February, author Leslie Jameson wrote an article in the New Yorker titled, Why Everyone Feels Like They're Faking It. And she chronicles the rise of this term imposter syndrome. And one of the main parts of the article is her just talking about how that has hit this kind of cultural tight spot to us, or a tender spot in us, to where everyone says, imposter syndrome, oh, that names how I feel. I feel like a fake or like a fraud. Now, imposter syndrome usually deals with things like work and relationships. But as a pastor, what I've noticed is that it oftentimes also shows up in our faith. We oftentimes feel like a fake Christian.

3:05You know, maybe we go to church, we do all kind of the right Christian things, but deep down inside, we have this nagging sense that if someone were to really poke in there, they would see that we're a fraud. We're not really much of a Christian at all, are we? So, what I want to do this afternoon is I want to suggest that perhaps the reason that we often feel fake or fraudulent in our faith is because we are pointing ourselves towards a fake or fraudulent view of the gospel. One defined more by culture or tradition or our own internal neuroses and not by scripture itself. We are often trying to live up to an imposter Christianity. So, to consider this, would you please turn with me to Luke 11? We're going to look at verses 37 to 54. I believe this is in your worship guide or you can certainly find it in your Bible. Luke 11, 37 to 54. While Jesus was speaking, a Pharisee asked to dine with him, so he went in and reclined at table. The Pharisee was astonished to see that he did not first wash before dinner. And the Lord said to him, Now you Pharisees cleanse the outside of the cup and the dish, but inside you're full of greed and wickedness.

4:37You fools! Did not he who made the outside make the inside also? But give his alms those things that are within, and behold, everything is clean for you. But woe to you Pharisees, for you tithe mint and rue in every herb and neglect justice in the love of God. These you ought to have done without neglecting the others. Woe to you Pharisees, for you love the best seats in the synagogues and greetings in the marketplace. Woe to you, for you are like unmarked graves and people walk over them without knowing it. One of the lawyers answered him, Teacher, in saying these things, you insult us also. And he said, Woe to you lawyers also, for you load people up with burdens too much to bear, and you yourselves don't touch the burdens with one finger. Woe to you, for you build the tombs of the prophets whom your fathers killed. So your witnesses and you consent to the deeds of your fathers, for they killed them and you build their tombs. Therefore also the wisdom of God said, I will send them prophets and apostles, some of whom they'll kill and persecute, so that the blood of all the prophets shed from the foundation of the world may be charged against this generation, from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah, who perished between the altar and the sanctuary. Yes, I tell you, it will be required of this generation. Woe to you lawyers, for you've taken away the key of knowledge. You do not enter yourselves, and you hindered those who were entering. As he went away from there, the scribes and

6:12the Pharisees began to press him hard and to provoke him to speak about many things, lying in wait for him to catch him in something he might say. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Would you please pray with me? Heavenly Father, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be found pleasing and acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen. Amen. This is really funny. We, I don't have a pulpit where I preach, and so I don't know what to do with this. I'm sorry if I seem really awkward. I feel like I'm touching it a lot. Maybe it's secretly I want one. So this afternoon, I want, or this, we meet in the afternoon at City Church. This morning, I want us to talk about two things. I want us to talk about imposter Christianity and authentic Christianity. So first, imposter Christianity. In this passage, Jesus confronts two sets of religious insiders, the Pharisees and the lawyers. Now, if you've been around church at all, you know these two sets of people. You know the Pharisees. They're typically the foil, the bad guys. But what's something that we often forget is that within the Jewish society at the time, the Pharisees were actually really well liked. They represented everything that people wanted of a kind of pre-Greco-Roman Israel, an Israel uninfluenced by outsiders. They represented someone who kept all the rules, someone who held to the old paths. They were kind of like the kids in the youth group who have it all together. You know,

7:54the ones that the kids might not like, but the parents really love. That is who these Pharisees were. And I think if we're being completely honest, they're a lot like us. Good church-going people. Now, despite that, Jesus puts them on blast in this passage. Six times, he says, woe to you. And in doing so, he's echoing the prophets of the Old Testament. You see, the prophets who Jesus says in the passage were killed actually by the Pharisees and the lawyers and their forebearers.

8:29The prophets in the Old Testament would frequently pronounce woe upon the Israelites when they rebelled against God, when they strayed from him. And then they would also, you know, we hear something of this in Hosea, where the prophet says on behalf of God, woe to them for they've strayed against me. Destruction is theirs, for they've rebelled against me. But the prophets would also pronounce woes, this kind of malediction, upon the foreign nations that threaten God's people. We see this in the book of Zechariah, or sorry, Zephaniah. Woe to the inhabitants of the seacoast, the nation of the Cherithites. The word of the Lord is against you, O Canaan, land of the Philistines, and I will destroy you. Now, I actually think that we can read both of these emphases into the woes that Jesus is pronouncing here upon the Pharisees and lawyers. You see, at once they're insiders, but they've made themselves outsiders by opposing God's work of redemption in Christ. In some sense, they've made themselves an enemy to the people of God, though you would think that they're insiders. In other words, they're imposters. And what I want to submit to you this morning is that they represent for us the spirit of imposter religion, imposter Christianity. And I think we can even see that today in the church.

10:04You see, Satan, in the ways that he seeks to attack the church, he follows very familiar patterns. So the things that we see him doing here in this passage, he's done throughout the history of the church. He's still doing today. And so I want to give you some examples from the text of what characterizes this imposter Christianity, this imposter religion. First, imposter religion is highly concerned with appearance. You know, my father-in-law is, well, was a very prominent appraiser in New Orleans, Louisiana. And I love to listen to the stories that he would tell me of going into some of these places. He told me some stories of going into restaurants where they had secret rooms that definitely weren't for the mafia. But some of my favorite stories that he would tell me were when he would go and he would appraise these homes in the Garden District. Now, these would have been, if you'd been up in the city, these are kind of like the homes on Monument Avenue. These huge, stately, historic buildings where high society used to gather there. And what he said is, you know, you would walk up to the building and you would walk up and you'd think, this is immaculate. This looks like the platonic ideal of a home. You go inside and you're on the first floor and everything is ornate. Everything is, you know, spick and span. You think, man, this is incredible. He said, then you would go to the second floor or the third floor. And what you'd find is when you go up there, the place hasn't been touched for 50 years or more. And the reason was, often these homes were passed down

11:53through families and inherited. And the person who had it at that point couldn't pay to keep the house up. So where did they allocate their funds? The first floor. The stuff that people could see. The place where high society was going to come. Well, these Pharisees were like those families. Their religious practice was focused on things that people could see. Things that would bolster their appearance in the community. This is what Jesus is talking about in verse 39 when he says, now you Pharisees cleanse the outside of the cup, but inside you're full of greed and wickedness.

12:32And so because of this, they were performative. They did all of these over-the-top grand gestures to try and get people's attention, but they neglected the parts of the religious devotion that no one would see. Jesus says in verse 42 that they tithe mint and rue and every herb. You see, they were so meticulous in keeping this kind of outward attention to the law that they would go into their garden and they would tithe a tenth of every one of their plants, every one of their herbs. For me, I'd have to tithe a tenth of every one of my weeds. That's primarily what my garden is right now.

13:17So they would do this and people would look at them and be like, oh my goodness, these are the most pious people. But they would neglect the parts of religion that people couldn't see. Namely, as Jesus says it, love of God and justice and love of their neighbor. Now, we don't know if they literally did this or Jesus is just being hyperbolic to make a point, but the point stands. They religiously devoted themselves to the things that would make them seem like good Jews, but they neglected the things that God paid attention to, the things of the heart. So they were concerned with appearance over everything. Now, second, this is a second characteristic of imposter religion. It thrives on recognition and external validation. Recognition and external validation. You see, the reason that the Pharisees were so performative in their religious devotion was because they wanted to be recognized for it.

14:15They wanted to be seen for it. It's what Jesus is talking about in verse 43 when he says, woe to you Pharisees! You love the best seat in the synagogues and greetings in the marketplace. You see, the way that Jewish synagogues were set up was, you know, not unlike this. You have seats out there, and then let's imagine that on the stage up here there would be a couple of seats, and those are reserved for the most prominent people in the community, and that's where the Pharisees love to sit. They love to sit looking out above everyone, everyone looking up to them. It also says here that this extended outside of the synagogue into the world outside of it, into the public spaces. They would go into the market, and they would kind of hold court, as it were, so that people would come and flock to them and seek their advice or seek to give them praise and respect. And so what this shows us is that their religious observances wasn't motivated by love of God, but primarily love of self.

15:21Not love of God, but love of self. And that's what imposter Christianity is true, is too. It doesn't care much about love of God. It cares about love of self. Third, imposter Christianity perpetuates itself through a system of fear-based rule keeping. Fear-based rule keeping. Look at verse 46. Woe to you lawyers also, for you load people up with burdens hard to bear, and you yourselves don't touch the burdens with one of your fingers. You see, to maintain their status in the community, the Pharisees and the lawyers pushed a doctrine of works-based salvation. The idea that if God is going to look good upon you, you've got to prove it to Him that you're worth it. You've got to do all the right things to be in His good graces. And of course, where do people learn what to do and what not to do? Well, from the Pharisees and the lawyers. Now, the problem here isn't that they're teaching people about God's law. God's law is a good thing. Think about Psalm 1. Blessed is the man who meditates on the law day and night. God's law is a good thing. It's also not a problem that they're telling people that there are things you should do and things you shouldn't do. God's law isn't relativistic.

16:45It lays out a positive path of virtue and a negative path of vice. But you see, the problem here is that they would take God's law and they would put layer and layer and layer of extraneous rules upon it to try and guard people from not breaking the law. Here's an example. So the fourth commandment, keep the Sabbath day holy. Okay, that's straightforward enough. But to clarify what exactly it meant to keep the Sabbath day holy, and that's a fair question. We probably all, what does it mean on today to keep the Sabbath day holy? We could probably all have a bunch of questions about that.

17:26Well, they did then too. So the Pharisees and lawyers, in order to clarify that, they came up with 39 different categories of work that were, that was prohibited on the Sabbath day. And then under those categories, you had all of these kind of subcategories and exclusions and inclusions and caveats to it. So they took the law of God, something that was good, and they built all these extraneous layers on top of it. And what did that do? Well, it kept the lawyers in power, because you needed someone to parse through what is right to do and what was wrong to do. So what we see here, the imposter religion of the Pharisees, it focused on appearance, it thrived on external validation and recognition, and it perpetuates, it perpetuated itself through fear-based rule keeping. Now, I don't think I'd have to do much to convince you that these dynamics are still at work among us today in the church. This isn't just an ancient problem. It's a modern problem as well. A Christianity that cares primarily about what people can see.

18:40A Christianity that primarily serves as a worship of self and not a worship of God. A Christianity that teaches works, not grace, as the way to get into God's good standing. And now, it would be easy to point out some of the most obvious manifestations of this. You know, there's the prosperity gospel, which is focused on your wealth and comfort. There's the influencer gospel, which is focused on appearances, looking cool, looking relevant. I obviously am not a part of that crowd. There's the fundamentalist gospel, which is constantly drawing ever smaller, tighter circles to decide who's in and who's out, who's a faithful Christian and who's not.

19:29And then there's the progressive gospel, whose constant refrain is, do better. But friends, doing this would be falling into the very same trap that the Pharisees fell into. Comparative righteousness. Deciding that my right standing of God isn't based on my relationship with him, but based how I stack up against other people. It's paying attention to the outside while neglecting the inside. And I think if we're honest, we'd likely find that we struggle with some of these very same things as well. And our imposter syndrome with regards to our faith is evidence of that. I mean, think about this. When we're struggling with imposter syndrome with regards to our faith, what is it that's going on in our lives? Well, we might be worried that our lives are too messy. We might be worried that we don't appear to have it all together. We may be worried, we start to feel like a fake when we're not being validated by others in our walk with God. Oh, do these people actually see me as a good Christian or not? And then finally, we feel like fakes in our walk with God when we struggle with sin. When we struggle to have our Christian disciplines, to do a regular quiet time, to attend church weekly. Friends, our imposter syndrome is evidence, I want to suggest, that we're aimed at an imposter Christianity, one characterized by these three things that we've just talked about. We fear that we're fake Christians because we're judging ourselves according to a fake gospel. And I want to suggest the consequences of this are dire. Jesus says in

21:16verse 44, the Pharisees are like an unmarked grave. This is a huge problem in Jewish society because if you walked over a grave, you were considered ceremonially unclean. So you can imagine how bad of a problem an unmarked grave is. You could think that you're clean and then, lo and behold, without knowing it, you become unclean because you've walked over a grave that didn't have a tombstone. And so this tells us, Jesus saying this about the Pharisees tells us two things. Their imposter religion is toxic because it leads to spiritual deadness. There's no vitality in it. There's no life in it. It only leads to death. And then second, it's such a big deal because it leads to killing other people's faith as well. I'm sure that all of us know someone, or maybe it's been us too, who've been in churches characterized by this kind of imposter Christianity focused on appearance or self-worship or focused on rules and legalism. And it has buried us under a weight that we can never get back under, a weight that was never put on us by Jesus, but by a man-made imposter religion. And what does that do? It drives people out of the church. It drives people away from their faith. So this is a big deal. We need to do something about it. So what do we do? Well, this brings me to my second point, talking about, we've talked about imposter Christianity. Now I want to talk about authentic Christianity. What is that? Well, I think the way that you expose what imposter Christianity is, is that you hold it up against the real deal, the real McCoy, authentic Christianity.

22:56Let me suggest this. You know, to the untrained eye, if you were looking at a forgery of a piece of art, let's say the Mona Lisa, I think we all could have a visual in our minds of what the Mona Lisa is. If you were just looking at a forgery, a really good forgery, I would imagine that most of us couldn't tell it's a forgery. I mean, unless we've got some like art historians in here. But you could, if you placed that forgery by the real deal, like if you had the forgery right here on one table, the real Mona Lisa on the other table, you could go back and forth between them and pick out, well, what are the differences here? What are the tells as to which one is authentic and which one is fake? And I want to suggest that that's the same thing with figuring out what true Christianity is. You see, the way that we figure out authentic Christianity is by we look at the source. We look at Jesus himself.

23:52You see, the church is the bride of Christ and the purpose of our faith is to make us conform to the image of Jesus. So because of this, I think it logically follows that authentic Christianity is that which most closely resembles the character and actions and teachings of Jesus. So what do we see in him? Well, first, Jesus wasn't concerned as much with appearances, but with faithfulness to the mission that his father had given him. And of course, the best example of this is the cross. I mean, think about how insane this is, that Jesus Christ, the Lord of all things, would die upon a cross, an instrument that was meant to not only torture criminals, but to humiliate them, to dehumanize them. That's the whole purpose, right? It was to discourage criminality by looking and saying, well, if you do that, this is where you could end up. And yet, the king of the universe willingly takes himself to that place and does that on our behalf. It's so counterintuitive, in fact, that Paul says that if the Holy Spirit doesn't open someone's ears, the preaching of the cross is absolute, utter foolishness. It makes no sense whatsoever.

25:12But the reason that Jesus bore the cross on our behalf, that he was willingly let himself be humiliated on our behalf, is because he was full of what the Pharisees lacked. Love of God, love of people, and a love for justice. So authentic Christianity is more concerned with the state of the heart rather than appearance. Second, we see that with Jesus, he wasn't concerned with vain recognition, but instead, he shared his glory with others. You see, because Jesus is the Son of God, the second person of the Trinity, there is no one more worthy of honor than him. There's no one more worthy of glory than him.

25:57But what we find is that wonder of wonders, Jesus comes not to hoard that to himself, but to give that to all of us, to let us share and participate in his honor and glory. John 1 12, but to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God. We get to share in his sonship, which is the apex of his claim to glory. So authentic Christianity isn't concerned with vain recognition, but it's humble and it's self-sacrificial, both of which we see in Christ. And then third, we see that Jesus didn't come to crush people under the burden of rule keeping, but rather he liberates people by perfectly keeping the law of God on their behalf. So because Jesus is the perfectly holy God who could do what no one else could, he could live the holy life, the perfect life that we can't. But notice again that he doesn't keep that for himself as his glory or as to his recognition. Rather, he gives it to us. He takes our imperfect record. He gives us his perfect record, not because of anything we've done to earn it or to prove that we're worth it, but simply out of his love for us. Ephesians 2 8, this is how Paul puts it, for by grace you've been saved through faith, not of your own doing, it's the works, it's the result or the gift of God, not a result of works so that no one may boast. So authentic Christianity is concerned with God's grace, not fear-based rule keeping. Now, the tendency for us to, after, you know, looking at this, the tendency for us is to think, well, okay, how am I going to become an

27:43authentic Christian, authentic Christian? The tendency for us is to think that, well, okay, I just need to do more now. Like, I need to do more to be like Jesus. But again, friends, that's falling back into the old Pharisee mindset of thinking that we can work our way to God. So, in conclusion, let me ask you this. Is there hope for fakes, for Pharisees like me and maybe like you? Well, if there wasn't, we wouldn't have about half of the New Testament. You see, Paul was a Pharisee. Listen to what he says in Philippians 3. If anyone thinks that he has more reason for confidence in the flesh, I have more circumcised on the eighth day of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews, as to the law, a Pharisee, as to zeal, a persecutor of the church, as to righteousness under the law, blameless. But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes to faith in Christ. So, do you hear what Paul says is the hope for Pharisees, for imposters like him and me and you? It's being found in Christ.

29:13You see, that's union with Christ language. We don't become authentic Christians by doing the right things, by drumming authenticity up within ourselves, but rather we become authentic Christians by Jesus coming and living inside of us through his Holy Spirit. We become authentic Christians by sharing in the very authentic life of Christ himself, through our union to him. And how does Paul say this happens? Well, he says that it happens through faith, faith in Christ. In other words, contrary to what our culture tells us about authenticity, when we feel like a faith, when we feel like a fake, we don't look ever deeper inside of ourselves. We don't go a spiritual navel gazing, but instead we look out and up towards Jesus. We remember his loveliness, his beauty, his perfection, his truthfulness, and we rest in the fact that he has given all of that to us. He, by virtue of our union with him, has made us the real McCoy. So friends, whenever you feel like an imposter, whenever you feel like a fake, a fraud in Christianity, remember that you've been united to Christ. Don't look in at yourself. Look up and look out to him. And remember that he's made you the real deal because he is himself. Would you pray with me? Father, we thank you that you haven't left it up, left it up to us to solve this problem, that you haven't asked us to deal with our problem of fake imposter religion, but instead you've given us Jesus, the real deal, to come and live inside of us through your Holy Spirit and to make us authentic as well. Father, we confess that

31:13we live so much of our lives worrying that we're, uh, worrying that we're fakes, worrying that we're frauds. In those moments, would you help us to look at Jesus and to remember that he, the one true man, the one true God, lives within us through your spirit. We ask this all in Christ's name. Amen.