From Fake to Free

Well you know what, since we had a Hollywood producer with us today, we thought it would be a perfect time to talk about Jesus and show business. So grab the message notes that looked like this, they were in the middle of the bulletins that you got when you came in, and let's continue our series, Jesus Journey. This is all about taking you back into time and space so that you can get to know the world of Jesus Christ. What was it like then? Geographically and politically and socially so that you can understand Jesus a little bit better.

This all ties into a book that we wrote called Jesus Journey, you can get it out in the lobby and that's tied into small group video studies that we actually filmed in Israel. You can sign up for those in the lobby too. But this morning I want to look at what Jesus Christ has to say about toxic religion. Do you agree that religion can be toxic? That religion can poison good things in life? That religion can actually keep people away from God? Well Jesus thought so. And we all need to hear what he had to say about this because we can all fall into this trap, me included.

So let's talk about going from fake to free spiritually and let me give you some cultural background to set this up. Show business, theater, drama was not something that Ralph Winter invented. In Jesus Christ's day, theater and showbiz were everywhere. I'll show you what I mean. One of the places the Bible says Jesus sometimes journeyed to from his home base in Capernaum was a place called the Decapolis, a region on the south and east of the Sea of Galilee.

And the capital of the Decapolis was a place called Sithopolis and this had an impressive theater. 7,000 seats on three levels. It was a building four times the size of this auditorium that we are sitting in right now. Just amazing. Another city of the Decapolis in Jesus' day, Girash, had not one, not two, but three beautiful theaters and the biggest one of them seats 3,000 people. Every major and medium sized and small city in Jesus' day had its own theater.

Why all these theaters everywhere? Well entertainment was a huge part of the Greco-Roman culture in the time of Jesus. In fact, here's a rare behind the scenes glimpse at a play during the time of Jesus Christ. This mosaic was done during the time of Christ in the first century and you see here actors putting on their costumes and they didn't wear makeup, they wore these big masks. And you see the guy playing the instrument. They actually had musical scores in their dramas with brass and woodwind instruments, kind of like a John Williams movie score.

So lots of theater, lots of drama in every little and big city. Now did Jesus ever see any of this part of the culture? I think it's undeniable and I'll tell you why. This is kind of a small group video preview for this week. Remember we talked about him growing up in Nazareth, but right next door to Nazareth was a place called Sephorus and this was a Jewish city that was being rebuilt completely during Jesus' childhood and it's only about three miles away from Nazareth.

It was the capital of Galilee when Jesus was a kid and there is a theater there too. Excuse me, now did Jesus Christ go to this theater to see a play? The Bible doesn't say, but it is positive to me, absolutely conclusive that he saw actors and showbiz because in those days actors would go to busy street corners and put on previews of the play, kind of like movie trailers today.

In fact the trumpeter would play to get the attention of the crowd, people would gather and the actors would perform on the street corners a little bit at the beginning of the play and say if you want to see the rest, you know, come out this afternoon. I'll show you something, this is a very rare statuette, it's about the size of an action figure of an actor doing this acting. He's the master thespian of Christ's world, right? During the time of Jesus, he's posturing, he's holding a mask in front of his face, you can see his eyes if you look carefully through the little eye holes there, great little statue.

And Jesus would have seen actors very much like this on street corners in that city of Sephorus which was in the neighborhood where he grew up. Now keep that in mind when I point this out. You may know that many times, 17 times, Jesus calls religious leaders of his day hypocrites. But you may only think of that word hypocrite as a religious term when actually the word hypocrite is from a Greek word meaning performer or play actor, somebody who puts on airs, puts on a mask, kind of like those actors on the street corner.

Now that you know this and know some of the culture, doesn't it give a little extra color, a little added dimension to the words of Jesus Christ when he criticizes the religious leaders? For example, these words from Matthew 6. Be careful, Jesus says, not to do your acts of righteousness before men to be seen by them. By the way, that phrase to be seen is the Greek word theotenae. Write it out, guess what word we get from that. Theater, absolutely, let's go on.

When you give to the needy, don't announce it with trumpets, doo doo doo doo, as the hypocrites or play actors do in the synagogues on the streets to be honored by men like they would do when they were previewing a play, right? When you fast, do not look somber as the hypocrites or play actors do for they disfigure their faces to show men they are fasting. Now that term there, disfigure their faces, the Greek word literally means make unseen or make unattractive like an actor's mask.

In fact, they just recently rediscovered 15 plaster models for actor's masks from the first century. They would put like paper mache over these and make actor's masks out of them. This is one of them. And what drama historians tell us is that in those days, actor's masks had become very distorted, very grotesque, they all look like this. So Jesus, he's not criticizing actors here, he's criticizing religious people for whom their faith is all an act.

He's saying the Pharisees contort their faces so that people will think, look at that guy, he looks so miserable, he must be very religious, right? Jesus Christ goes after these types of people again and again. In fact, Jesus consistently criticizes just one group, religious leaders who teach performance based religion. I mean just think about it. What little you may know of the life of Jesus Christ, who else does Jesus extensively criticize? No one.

He doesn't really criticize the so called sinners at all. He's like, I'm a friend of sinners. He doesn't criticize the pagan Romans, the centurions or anyone else, but he skewers the hypocritical religious leaders. And of course, these types of people remain a target to this day. I mean Dana Carvey made a career out of making fun of these same exact people as the church lady, right? An SNL doing her superior dance, you know?

Now why would Jesus make fun of these same kinds of people? Listen, if what God wants more than anything else is a relationship with you, if that's the whole reason Jesus came to earth to be God with us, then he is going to get most upset at anything that gets in the way of that relationship. And it turns out that insidiously the biggest obstacle to a relationship with God is performance based religion.

Don't miss this. The biggest obstacle, ironically, to a relationship with God is religion when it is performance based. This is, listen, this is such a major target of Jesus Christ's teaching that any series on Jesus has to cover this theme. This is the major conflict dramatically in the Gospels, Jesus versus the hypocritical religious leaders. This is a theme Jesus Christ hits more than any other theme really, and so we have got to cover this.

What I'm going to do this morning is just hit some of the major passages on this in the Gospels to give you a flavor of what Jesus brings up again and again. Here's some characteristics of performance based religion that Jesus talks about. Jot these down. Number one, it invents extra rules. It invents extra rules that aren't in the Bible. Jesus says in Matthew 15:9, "Their teachings are but rules taught by men." Now what's he talking about?

Again, a Discovery Channel moment. Here in Jesus' day there was one group of religious leaders who were very influential, who invented all kinds of rules in addition to what was in the Bible, and they were called the Pharisees. Let me just give you one example. The Bible said to rest on the Sabbath. That was the command. But the Pharisees turned this wonderful opportunity for rest, which was intended for us to develop a relationship with God, and they turned it into rules about all the things that you could not do on the Sabbath.

Like here were some of the rules. You couldn't pick up a bucket on the Sabbath. You couldn't raise a certain weight of fork to your mouth on the Sabbath. Light forks were okay. Heavy forks, no good. That was sin. You couldn't gargle. So like everybody had bad breath on the Sabbath because that was considered work. And you know, maybe this doesn't sound so foreign to you. Maybe you were raised in a church that added all kinds of extra rules onto your faith too.

This happens all the time. In fact, there's a pastor named Mark Driscoll up in Seattle, and recently he posted on Facebook and Twitter, "Give me all the weird religious rules that you have personally experienced." Now the responses are still coming in, but so far he's gotten about 300 responses, and I went on to his account and downloaded some of them. I'll just read you a couple.

Here's one. Ryan says, "My family was in a nationwide school and ministry group, the leader of which believed that the wearing of blue jeans was wrong because it gave the impression of rebellion." That's right. Nothing says rebellion like blue jeans, right? I mean, think about this. Maybe they're onto something. In the '60s, people started wearing jeans. Now we have terrorism. Cause and effect. They're bad.

Here's an awesome one. Cara says, "We were not allowed to wear black polos at our private Christian school. Any other colors were okay, but not black because if you wear black, you love the devil." All right? So there you go. Here's a good one. Cassie says, "I have a friend whose parents believed it was wrong for Christians to trick-or-treat because the reason they gave was Halloween is Satan's birthday and I'm not finished. And then they had a baby born on Halloween." I can just see God up there going, "Angels, come over here. You got to check this out. This is going to blow their minds. Watch this."

You could see that poor woman trying not to have that baby. "No, I'm going to wait until November 1st." I'll just do one more. Here's a kid, Josh. He says he's a high school kid in a public school. He says there's this very religious kid at my school who says he'll go to hell if he eats shrimp. So when we have it for hot lunch, he gives it away.

Now just think about that for a second. You'll go to hell if you eat shrimp. Here, have mine. What is that? There's lots more here. But maybe you're thinking, "It sounds to me like you're making fun of religious people." Yes, yes I am. Why? Well, first of all, because I am one, all right, and I'm guilty of the same kind of stuff. And second, because they're hilarious, okay? And third, because we love them.

And when we take ourselves too seriously, we take this stuff all the way too seriously, we need to be invited to just laugh at ourselves. And we need to say, "Look, you're posing like an actor. Come on. Let's take a break here." But before we criticize those other religious people that they were talking about on those Facebook posts or the Pharisees 2,000 years ago, what about me? What about you?

Do you and I ever turn our personal preferences into God's rules for everyone? You see, what Jesus is criticizing the Pharisees for is not having personal standards. It's not bad for whoever doesn't want to wear blue jeans to have that as a personal standard. I don't wear blue jeans or I don't wear black polo shirts. What's wrong with that is when you make your personal preferences into God's command for everybody else and then you gauge everybody else's spirituality on your rules.

You say, "I never do this." Okay. How about cigarettes? I'll tell you this. I don't like cigarettes. They're expensive. They give you cancer. They make my wife wheeze. She's allergic. If the neighbor five blocks away is smoking, her throat closes up. She starts sounding like Lauren Bacall. It sent me mixed signals because I've called home before dialing home and she answers the phone, "Hello. Hi honey. No, this is not flirtation. The neighbor's smoking. I'm dying."

This is how bad it is for her. For me, my preference is I don't like cigarettes. Okay? But I have to be careful because I can't, no matter how I'm tempted to do this, I can't lift that up to God's law and say, "Thou shalt not smoke and if thou smokest thou art a bad Christian," because that's not in the Bible.

What I can say is, "I don't like cigarettes. I don't think it's healthy for you. Please don't smoke around my wife," but I can't say it's sin. See? Do you see the difference? Here's another one. Meat. It's Santa Cruz. Some of you are vegans, some are vegetarians and you might say, "My preference is no meat." I'd say, "That's great," but you can't say, "God says thou shalt not eat meat," because the Bible doesn't say that for us today.

You can have a preference, you can have a passionate preference, but you can't raise it up to the level of the Bible and declare war over it and judge other people on it, but people do this sort of thing all the time and that leads right into the second characteristic of a performance-based religion. It produces passionate commitment to the wrong things.

Jesus says, "You Pharisees are really zealously committed to the wrong things. You hypocrites," he says in Matthew 23 starting in verse 23. Again, the word means actors. They're play actors, performers. You give a tenth of your spices, mint, dill, and cumin, but you have neglected the more important matters of the law, justice, mercy, and faithfulness. He's talking here about tithing.

Now, tithe literally means a tenth. The basic tithe for Jews based on the Hebrew Scriptures was 10 percent. The total tithe actually was more like 25 percent and these guys were so serious about the tithe because they thought, "If we can prove to God that we're super holy, then he's going to bring his kingdom back because of our performance," so they were so serious about this that they literally tithed out of their spice rack.

Now that is a religious person with OCD and a lot of free time, okay? That's what Jesus is talking about here. "I don't know if I gave the Lord a tenth of all my dill leaves." It's crazy, but these guys are serious and Jesus here is saying, "You know, you tithe out of your spice rack, but you don't help people." He's saying, "It's okay to tithe. Continue to tithe. Feel free." But your priority is supposed to be mercy, justice, and faithfulness.

That's the reason we're doing Serve the Bay, the reason we go to Camp Attitude. Love God, love people. Jesus is saying, "You don't do that and you miss the whole big idea of what the kingdom of God is all about." Now, I got a question for you. Why would people even do this? Why would it even occur to you to be walking past the spice rack in your kitchen and go, "Ah, now did I tithe my dill weed this week?" Why would you think that?

Because in a performance-based mentality, you have to be able to gauge performance. In a performance-based system, it's crucial to be able to measure performance. You have to have metrics. Follow me? You have to have measuring points, and giving a tenth of your dill leaves is measurable. In fact, the more rules you have, the more rules you have, the more measuring points you have. And so the more rules, the better.

But here's the problem. It's ultimately self-defeating because it quickly gets to the point where nobody can ever keep all the rules. And so what do you do? You pretend to keep the rules. And that defines performance-based religion. It becomes a theater, an act. You pretend to be more holy than you really are. See, here's the thing again. Don't miss this. Legalism is measurable. That's why it appeals to people. It is nice. It is tidy. I've got a tenth of my mint, and a tenth of my dill, and a tenth of my parsley sage rosemary in thyme. I'm a good, good person.

But grace is messy. Because how can you ever gauge whether or not you're being gracious? But Jesus is saying, "You don't have to measure it. Stop trying to measure it. In fact, get off the whole performance treadmill and relax in God's grace." Now there's a third sign of toxic religion, and it's this. It focuses on the external, not the internal. The outside, not the inside.

Matthew 23:25, Jesus says, "Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees." There's this word again, "play actors, you hypocrites. You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they're full of greed and self-indulgence." Blind Pharisee first cleaned the inside of the cup and dish, and then the outside all so will be cleaned. You have to start with the inside, not the outside, because the human problem is in here.

Very next verse picks up the theme. "Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites." You see the word again? You play actors. "You are like," and here's another metaphor he uses, "You're like whitewashed tombs. They look beautiful on the outside, but on the inside they're full of dead men's bones and everything unclean." Some of you are freaking out right now because you always thought of gentle Jesus, meek and mild, right? The one who's the friend of sinners, and then you're like, "Wow, he's like really letting these guys have it." Yes, because they are preaching a toxic religious system, and it's keeping people from a relationship with God.

This is another place where understanding the location can really open up a verse. When Jesus says in this sentence, "They're like whitewashed tombs," he's actually in Jerusalem. That is down south of Galilee. Jesus goes down here a few times a year for the religious pilgrimages, and he's here in Jerusalem when he says to the Pharisees, "You are like tombs." Now when you hear that, you probably picture some little American tomb that's either flat to the ground or maybe about two and a half, three feet off the ground.

That is totally not what people would have pictured when they read these words. What if I told you that the tombs he's talking about were the size of four and five story buildings? You see, Jerusalem was full of these massive monumental tombs in the time of Christ. You can still see these tombs that were built actually during the lifetime of Jesus in the Kidron Valley, which is a little ravine just next to the Temple Mount, because a real status symbol in those days, if you were wealthy, was to have a massive ornate tomb like one of these.

Over 800 of these tombs from Christ's time have been discovered from all around Jerusalem, and these are the very tombs he was referring to. These existed in his lifetime, and these are on the road up to the Temple Mount, so these would have been the very structures that he walked past when he was saying, "This is a picture of your religion. It's an elaborate, complicated, finely crafted, beautiful grave." You look all together impressive on the outside. Well, look at that. It's a looming monument, but inside you're full of dead men's bones and everything unclean.

See, the problem with me and the problem with you is not that we don't keep enough rules or that we don't look Christian enough on the outside. The problem is on the inside. The problem is my selfishness. The problem is my self-destructive tendencies. The problem is my anger and impatience and jealousy. It's sin, and so I can't mask that with some paint. I need a supernatural savior to deal with that, and the problem with legalism is legalistic systems always end up masking the real problem.

They end up masking the real problem, the dead men's bones inside, because they focus on the outside. I mean, imagine being in a super performance-oriented, legalistic church and having, say, real marriage problems. You walk in on Sunday morning at church, and you and your wife have been fighting all week long. You cannot walk up to your Sunday school teacher or small group leader or pastor and say, "Man, we're like this close to ending it." You can't reveal it because it wouldn't look good. What would people think? They judge you. They might put you out of the church. And so you pretend.

You stick on your mask, and you strike a pose. And the tragedy is you get no help, because the outside looks so perfect, but the inside is dying. Now, I don't believe that most people who lead double lives set out to do that. In fact, in most cases, they loathe it. They might have been struggling with something since their youth, drinking, drugs, depression, anxiety, but afraid of being judged for what's really inside, they clamp the mask on as tightly as possible to look good.

And they are good people. They love God, and they hate sin, especially their own. But if their only coping mechanism is trying harder, making more resolutions, painting the mask, they're cleaning the outside of the cup. And that's death. And Jesus is saying, "Move from the grave to grace." I mean, this is why he says earlier in Matthew 5, "Blessed are the broken." You know, blessed are the poor in spirit. Blessed are those who say, "I can't. I'm messed up. I need help. I can't save myself. I don't need any more pain on the grave. I need a resurrection because I'm dead inside." Those are the people who find life.

Now, look at the response of the Pharisees and teachers to all this. Did they say, "Wow, Jesus, thank you so much for pointing this out." Well, we actually know that some did become followers of Christ, including their leader, Nicodemus. But this response is actually more typical. One of the experts of the law answered Jesus, "Teacher, when you say these things, you insult us. You know, you hurt our feelings, Jesus. You insulted us. Tom's over there in the corner crying. This is not nice, you know?"

And this is always the response of abusers. They turn the criticism around and make it about their feelings, make it about your criticism. They make themselves the victim. But we've been working so hard, Jesus, fingers to the bone, and this is how you treat us. But Jesus won't let them evade the issue. Jesus replied, "And you experts in the law woe to you because you load people down with burdens they can hardly carry, and you yourselves won't lift one finger to help them."

Again, Jesus is using yet another word picture here. Animals loaded down with burdens would have been a sad common sight in those days. These were like the first century version of a pickup truck, you know? And so you saw these everywhere, and a common practice was to load the animals with so much stuff that the animal itself could hardly be seen. And Jesus is saying, "You religious leaders load people down with so many rules and so much performance-driven guilt that it's actually self-defeating because when you're this loaded down, you can't even get any forward traction."

Look at that. Man, that's a great picture right there. Classic of a legalistic religious system. So many rules that true forward progress is impossible. But maybe you can relate to this picture. Maybe this is a picture of your soul. You have felt so burdened by religion. And you can probably tell this is coming from some passion, you know, in my heart because this is my story. This is something I still struggle with to this day.

I wasn't raised in a legalistic church, but I was personally very legalistic, very performance-driven, especially when it came to my spiritual life. And I had all sorts of gauges because I believed that God would bless me more, love me more if I performed better, so I would literally, as a young man, time how long my morning prayers were. You know, and I figured God would like me if I prayed for 15 minutes, but He'll like me more if I prayed for 20, so I'd set benchmarks.

I'd kneel by my bed because I thought, "God will love me more if I kneel instead of just sit or pray." Weak Christians just sit, spiritual giants kneel. You know, this is the way I thought. Reading my Bible, it wasn't about connecting with God anymore. It was about how long have I done it? 10 minutes yesterday? 15 minutes today? So many burdens, and the joy was leeching out of my spiritual life, and I was applying that same gauge to everybody else around me.

And maybe you relate. The joy you once had is all but gone, replaced by anxiety about whether you are doing enough. And even when you read the Bible or go to church, it's just another burden on your back. It doesn't make you feel free. It makes you feel heavier. And maybe you're like me where it's just your own performance-driven personality, but maybe it comes from religious leaders who loaded you down with all these extra rules.

And now what happens is you're so timid, so afraid, so suspicious of church and even pastors because of how badly you've been burdened and hurt in the past. You'll hear what Jesus says to you. "Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light." Doesn't that sound great? Won't that be such a relief?

His love for you is not performance-based, not even one-tenth of one percent. It's based on his tender grace. Now you hear a lot of us talking about grace here, and let me just explain. Grace does not mean that God just looks the other way when you and I sin. Grace means that he paid the ultimate price by his sacrifice on the cross, so you don't have to perform for him.

Grace means God loves you unconditionally. Grace also does not mean that he'll just leave you in your sinful squalor. In grace he will train you. He will discipline you, but in love, not harshly. I want to show you the best example I've seen of this in a while, and it's from the movie The Horse Whisperer. Show of hands, how many of you have seen the movie The Horse Whisperer? A lot of you.

Well, in this film, there's a horse. Does anybody remember the horse's name? Anybody? It's Pilgrim, which is intriguing to me. And Pilgrim has an accident. And Pilgrim's accident, his injury, makes him traumatized and uncontrollable, and he engages in self-destructive behavior because he's been hurt. And that leads the people who are looking after him in the stable to treat him badly, to try to get him to behave, and in fact, they even suggest that he be put down.

So Pilgrim the Horse has been mistreated and overburdened. But the Horse Whisperer, who is a gentle trainer, teaches a young girl to show Pilgrim that there's such a thing as a light burden and a loving owner. Oh, and guess what that girl's name is? Grace. And so in this scene, so touching, Grace rides Pilgrim for the first time. Watch this.

Grace, now we're going to show Pilgrim here how to help you get on him. Because you see, there's a point where neither of you is going to need me anymore. And we're there. I'm not asking. Put your leg over the saddle here. Did it early. And we're going to rock him up.

Maybe this morning, you are Pilgrim, hurting from some injury and spiritual abuse. And it's made you self-destructive, and you've worn these heavy loads. But do you see that grace is here through Jesus Christ? And he is not the harsh taskmaster with a whip saying, "Try harder, or we're going to have to put you down." Jesus is the one coming to you with love in his heart and tears in his eyes and a gentle touch.

He is grace. And he says to you, "Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for my burden is light. I'm a Lord of love." Here's the bottom line. Jesus calls you from the burden of performance and theater and drama and all that to the freedom of grace. He came to whisper love to you and set you free. And the thing is, once you know him and you know his loving touch, you're going to let him put the saddle and the bridle on you because you are freed-- freed from performance-driven religion.

And you know what? He is making that offer to you right now. Let's talk to him about it. Would you all stand together with me in prayer? Let's talk to God. Let's bow our heads together. As our heads are bowed, let me just say this to you to prepare you for your own talk with God right now.

Some of you, your whole lives, even your religious life, has been about pretending. And you don't even know if you can be real with anybody. Why don't you just start by saying to Jesus, "I hear you." I hear your whisper calling out those trapped in the theater of bad performance-based religion because that's been me. And I felt burdened. And so just say something like this. If this is where your heart is at, Jesus, have mercy on me, a sinner. Help me. Set me free from the inside out by your grace.

I don't understand it all, but I want your light and loving hand to guide me, not the harsh hand of the legalists. Thank you for paying for my sin by your death on the cross. And I want to receive you now as my Lord and as my Savior. In Jesus' name, amen.