August 9, 2024 Devo

August 9th, 2024

“It’s All About Jesus!”
Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7)
“But I warn you—unless your righteousness is better than the righteousness of the teachers of religious law and the Pharisees, you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven!” – Matthew 5:20 (NLT)
“The Pharisee Within You”

As I walk and pray each day, I usually start my prayer time the same way. I pray about ME. But not about my wants or my needs or my desires. I pray for God to help me to be the man that I need to be. I pray for Him to expose any sin or attitudes or selfishness that I’m hiding from myself. I confess to Him how dependent I am upon Him. I admit to Him that He is the Vine, and I am the Branch. Apart from Him, I am and can do NOTHING.
I start my prayer time this way for a couple of reasons. One is to keep my heart humble and aware of my own fallible, human condition and to stay locked into His Presence and His Power in my life. The second is the awareness I am always in need of changing, growing, repenting, and becoming. If I’m not busy being “born,” I am busy dying. But the third reason is that I’ve found that it is way too easy for me to want to spend my time asking God to fix all the idiots that are around me rather than focusing on the idiot that is within me. I don’t know about you, but I can spot the flaws in other people a LOT quicker than I can see them in myself! When I focus on how messed up and hypocritical the people I see are, I feel pretty good about myself and a lot more “saintly.” The problem is, the more arrogant that attitude makes me, the more I am just like or worse than the very people I’m judging. Pride makes Pharisees of us all.
That’s what Jesus points out in our passage today. He never said that the Pharisees or other religious leaders were great models of godliness. He says our walk with God has to be better than that—higher than that. But we don’t become more godly by pointing out the crud in other people’s lives. We become more godly by letting God dig out the crud in our own.
So don’t spend your time with God today complaining about the horrible people you have to deal with. Don’t spend it telling God how He needs to fix your pastor, spouse, kids, or parents. And don’t let yourself believe that because their sins are so obvious, you are somehow more holy. You're not. Being proud that you’re NOT a Pharisee MAKES you a Pharisee. Go to God to deal with the Pharisee within you and you’ll find it easier to trust Him with the ones around you. That’s God’s Word for you today.