I enjoy reading biographies and am currently working through a long one on the life of Winston Churchill. The other night after a long busy day, I was reading a chapter with a lengthy and complex description of events. It introduced several new characters and unfamiliar locations during World War I. I soon realized that I was too sleepy to concentrate and closed the book. In the space of just a few pages I had completely lost the plot of the story. This week’s text about the Pharisees reminds us that it is easy for the details to cause us to lose the plot of what it means to be the people of God.
It is easy to get so focused on appearing religious, having the correct doctrine, and keeping the rules that we become legalistic. Charles Spurgeon said that “the legalist in us is a great deal older than the Christian. If I were a legalist today, I should be some fifteen or sixteen years older than I am as a Christian; for we are all born legalists.” Our nature makes us want to manage God through a religious system. So many of us treat Christianity as a religious system that we can manage and try to save ourselves through the keeping of religious rules. We have a transactional view of our relationship with God, believing that if we are “religious” then God is somehow obligated to us. However, that is a fundamental misunderstanding of the gospel. When Christianity is viewed as just the keeping of an ever-growing list of rules, we ignore grace and “shut the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces.”
Our relationship with Jesus is not dependent on our own righteousness but on His! We are not children of God because we have kept a list of rules and filled our life with religious activity. We are children of God because he first loved us and saved us through his grace. In response to his grace, we in turn exhibit mercy, justice, and faithfulness. The Pharisees remind us that however sincere our pursuit of God, we can still lose the plot and fail to realize the power of His grace.