Most Christians struggle with self-righteousness.  In our heart of hearts, we want to be justified on our own merits instead of relying on the grace of God.  The former would allow us to believe that we are good; the latter forces us to acknowledge that we are not.

Consequently, even as we deplore the sins of others, part of us wants to savor them.  We compare the sinner to the perfection of God’s law and inevitably find them wanting.  However, rather than doing the same for ourselves, we use the sinner for our new standard of comparison. 

They cheated on their spouse.  I’ve always been faithful to mine.  They got drunk.  I’ve spent my life stone-cold sober.  They dress like a tramp.  My attire wins smiles of approval from the church dragons.  And so forth.

Looks like I’m a pretty good person after all, doesn’t it?

This self-righteous perspective is a deadly spiritual problem.  Jesus spent His ministry skewering the Pharisees for trusting in themselves that they were righteous.  However, perhaps the most devastating exposé of self-righteousness in the entire Bible appears in the first two chapters of the book of Romans.  There, Paul baits a trap for the self-righteous and clobbers them when they walk into it.

The trap works so well in part because the bait itself is powerfully reasoned and true.  It is nothing less than Paul’s description of the degradation of the Gentiles in Romans 1:18-32.  Their moral failure began with a refusal to honor the God so evident in creation.  From there it led to sexual immorality, generalized wickedness, and endorsement of the wickedness of others.

This argument would have been red meat to a pious Jew living in the godless city of Rome.  For that matter, it is still red meat to us.  We see the same symptoms of moral decay in the people around us.  They don’t honor God.  They practice sexual sin and lead reprehensible lives.  They praise the lawlessness they practice.  How frequently do we shake our heads at those who call evil good?

Then, in 2:1, Paul springs the trap.  He already has observed in 1:20 that the ungodly are without excuse.  Now, though, he says the same thing to their judges.  All of us are without excuse too.  When we condemn others because of their sin, we condemn ourselves too--because we do the same things that they do.

Maybe I’m not adulterous, drunk, or immodestly dressed, but on my own merits I’m still a sinner.  All of us are.  Just as I can justly condemn them for violating God’s law, so too can someone justly condemn me for violating different parts of the same law.  Do I really want the lies I’ve told to come up on the day of judgment?  How about my outbursts of anger at my spouse?  How about my love of judging others while overlooking my own sin?

Self-righteousness is alluring, but it’s a luxury that none of us can afford.  Puffing ourselves up when we consider the sins of others turns us into a target for the wrath of God.  Only acknowledging our own failures and entrusting ourselves to the mercy of Jesus will lead us to inherit eternal life.

Though the battle is over these days (at least as far as wider American society is concerned), the past couple of decades saw a great deal of strife over the practice of homosexuality.  In their ultimately successful assault on Biblical morality, gay-rights proponents adopted three main strategies:  rejecting the authority of the Bible altogether, redefining Biblical ethics to make same-sex relations acceptable, and critiquing the Biblical arguments against the same.

In the third category, critics liked to attack Paul’s claim in Romans 1:26-27 that homosexual intimacy was unnatural.  They pointed out, correctly, that various animals, from our supposed cousins the bonobos on down, engage in male/male or female/female sex.  Still other animals are hermaphroditic or able to change their sex.  Because these things exist in nature, they reveal that same-sex sexual behavior is natural and that Paul is just a big dumb ignoramus.

As satisfying as such a conclusion is to opponents of traditional morality, it fails to reckon with Paul’s argument or what he means by “natural”.  Romans 1:26-27 is far from a prooftext.  Instead, it is part of his famous description of the degradation of the Gentiles that takes up the back half of Romans 1.

According to Paul, this decline began with the failure of the Gentiles to honor God.  As per Romans 1:19-20, this failure is their fault, not God’s.  In the physical creation, He gave them all the evidence they needed to see His power and divine nature.  They saw and recognized the truth, but they put it out of their minds because they didn’t want to thank and glorify Him.  They chose the gods they had made over the God who made them.

Similar logic is at work in vs. 26-27.  The women who burn for women and the men who burn for men aren’t operating in the absence of evidence of divine intent.  Instead, just like the idolaters of the preceding verses should be reasoning from the evidence of the creation but have refused to do so, those engaged in unnatural relations should be reasoning from the evidence of natural relations but also have refused.

We are the handiwork of a wise, intentional God who expects us to honor His intent for us.  That intent isn’t evident in bonobos or oysters or any other members of the animal kingdom.  We don’t live like animals live or eat like they eat; why should we take our guidance in sexual matters from them either?

Rather, we learn what is natural for us by reasoning from the evidence of our own bodies.  The body of the man is clearly made to complement the body of the woman, and vice versa.  That is the sexual union for which we have been created.  It is equally clear that women aren’t meant to go with women or men with men.  It is not our natural purpose, and it is not what God wants us to do.  If He had wanted us to behave differently, He would have created us differently.

It is possible to endorse same-sex relations, and it is possible to submit to the will of God as revealed in His creation and His word.  It is not possible to do both.  The world around us has made its choice, sure enough, but before we decide to walk the same path, we ought to remember what God has said about where it leads.

The older I get, the more I appreciate the law of unintended consequences.  It posits that every time you act, there will be a result that you anticipated and a result that you didn’t anticipate.  The members of the human race tend to focus so hard on what they want to accomplish that they don’t see what they will accomplish without intending to.

I think this principle has been at work in the non-institutional churches of Christ ever since the brotherhood controversies of the 1950s and ‘60s.  In that time, many preachers argued—correctly, I think—that churches are not authorized to provide for the needs of the world’s poor.  As the saying goes, general benevolence is to be a work of individuals, not a work of the church.

In many churches, this preaching and teaching accomplished its end.  Even now, I am part of a congregation that does not go beyond what has been written in the way it spends the Lord’s money.  However, I believe it also accomplished something its adherents did not intend—a neglect of the individual Christian’s responsibility to care for the poor.

When I was growing up, I heard countless sermons on “the issues”.  These sermons relied on texts ranging from the familiar (“Let not the church be burdened!” in 1 Timothy 5:16) to the obscure (“Hock their horses!” in Joshua 11:6).  I learned that James 1:27 does not authorize the church to act, but I heard much less about what it meant for my actions.  When it came to the poor, “If a man does not work, neither should he eat,” received much more play.  I wonder if, even as brethren were careful to separate the work of the church from the work of the individual, they conflated the work of the individual and political activism.

As I have written before https://hisexcellentword.blogspot.com/2020/02/voting-and-christian.html , it is difficult to know how to apply the law of Christ in the voting booth.  It is simple to know how Christians should care for the poor and vulnerable.  James 1:27 is a good start.  So is Luke 12:33.  So is everything that the Bible says about mercy.

Honestly, this is a struggle for me, as I think it is for many Christians.  I don’t want to get played by a con artist.  I struggle with the extent to which many poor people are responsible for their own problems, and therefore may not deserve help (Note:  if you are giving something to someone who deserves it, that is justice, not mercy).  By God’s grace, though, I think I’m making progress.

I assemble with many Christians who are better at this than I am, but I think we all have room to grow here.  We have to be more concerned with showing compassion and less concerned about looking foolish.  We must learn to see more clearly the value that Christ places on everyone. 

This has nothing to do with politics and everything to do with His call to discipleship.  No, general benevolence is not a work of the church, but it has to be our work as individuals—filling the physical, emotional, and spiritual needs of everyone we encounter.  There are lots of ways for us to do this, but every one of us needs to be doing something.  When God has been so merciful to us, we must show mercy to others.

O Lord, do not rebuke me
Nor in Your anger speak,
But come to me with mercy,
For I am worn and weak.
O Lord, I need Your healing;
My bones are filled with fear;
My soul is greatly troubled;
How long till You appear?

Turn back, O Lord, and rescue;
In lovingkindness, save;
The dead do not remember
Nor thank You from the grave.
My sighs have made me weary;
I drench my bed with woes;
My eyes have swelled with sorrow,
Exhausted by my foes.

O sinners, leave my presence;
O foes, depart from me;
My prayer has been accepted;
The Lord has heard my plea.
He hears the supplication
I offer to His name;
Their scheming will be baffled;
Their plots will end in shame.

In 1 Timothy 6:17, Paul embarks on a familiar New Testament theme.  Don’t trust money; trust God instead.  However, his reasoning is different here than elsewhere.  Unlike Jesus, he doesn’t warn us that we can’t serve both God and Mammon, nor does he repeat his claim in Colossians 3:5 that greed is a form of idolatry.  Instead, he warns rich Christians away from trusting in riches because riches are. . . uncertain.

Uncertain?  That doesn’t sound so bad!  However, once we recognize how large a problem the uncertainty of wealth truly is, we will be far less inclined to entrust ourselves to it.

First, wealth is uncertain in prospect.  I know Christians who always have some new get-rich-quick scheme every time I talk to them.  So far, none of these schemes have resulted in riches. 

Sometimes, people’s hopes for wealth founder because of foolishness.  At others, they founder because of chance.  In 1993, some of the brightest minds in finance, including a Nobel Prize winner, founded a hedge fund called Long-Term Capital Management.  They thought they had discovered a way to get great returns without risk.  However, the wrong combination of financial crises in 1997 and 1998 destroyed LTCM.  It lost billions and was liquidated in 2000.

Similar dangers beset our hopes of holding on to the wealth we already have.  Ecclesiastes 5:13-14 comments on the tragedy of holding on carefully to one’s money, only to lose it through a bad investment.  This often is a modern tragedy too.  Con artists, needy relatives, negligent subordinates, and economic shocks all can part us from what we’ve earned.

Worse still, just as we can’t rely on getting wealthy or on keeping our wealth, we can’t rely on wealth to protect us either.  “Money is the answer for everything,” the Preacher scoffs in Ecclesiastes 10:19, and so it seems to the people of the world.  As long as you’re rich, your riches will keep you safe.

That’s not the case.  Many things can separate us from our wealth, and there also are problems that no amount of wealth can solve.  Money might buy the pretense of love, but it can’t purchase the reality.  God is more impressed when we give away our riches than when we accumulate them.  Some diseases remain stubbornly incurable no matter how much money we throw at them, and in the end, “rich dead man” is as much an oxymoron as “jumbo shrimp”. 

Basically, money is good for the little things in life, but it’s worthless for the big ones.  When we’re dying, none of us will look back in satisfaction on the things that money bought.  The people who build their lives around money, though numerous, are foolish. 

God is a much better investment.  Wealth is known for betraying those who love it, but He is known for being faithful to those who love Him.  He will never leave us, and there is no challenge too great for Him to overcome.  Ultimately, the treasure we lay up in heaven is the only treasure that matters.