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The ‘Deadly Virtue’ of Religious Devotion
Jim Weaver, Guest Pastor
thanks again this morning to Pedro and to Matthias today. You all do a great job and to the worship team thanks for preparing our hearts for experiencing God's presence today. In these Sundays together we've been talking about what I've called some deadly virtues. These are genuine Christian virtues, qualities, values that are important for us as we follow Jesus. But it's possible for them to become twisted and distorted and confused and misguided and they end up being destructive or deadly to our spiritual life, to our relationship with God. This morning we're going to talk about the deadly virtue of religious devotion. I served with churches for about 40 years before I retired from full-time pastoral ministry. In 4 decades in churches, you will encounter some interesting people and see some curious things. Here are some happenings I remember from different churches. And lest you think I'm indulging in some ministerial exaggeration, you can't make all of this up. There was a Bible study class of older adults who wanted the church to convert a space near their classroom into a restroom. The building and grounds committee investigated the project and They determined that the cost was just too great to justify constructing A restroom with other financial priorities the church had at that time. Not to be denied, this Bible study class, most of the members of it, began to designate their offerings for the construction of the restroom. This went on for several years. I became pastor of this church when the monies that this class had donated, contributed, was getting closer to the amount of money that was actually needed to construct a restroom. Most of the members of the church were long past ready for this issue to just go away. And at this church there was a procedure that was an effort to control the practice of designated giving. If a designated gift was given to the church, it actually had to be accepted by the church in a business meeting before the money could be used for the purpose that it had been given. the Building and Grounds Committee decided to take some money that had been left to the church from the estate of a man who had recently died and add this money to the funds that had been accumulated by the designated gifts of this class. And accept these designated gifts in a business meeting and then the restroom be constructed. At the business meeting where we were approving all of this motion, somebody made the suggestion that a plaque be put on the door of the restroom in order to acknowledge the gift from the man's estate. His name was Ralph. Now the members of the Sunday school class weren't real happy with this suggestion because they had given the bulk of the money and they wanted credit where credit was due. And if there was going to be a plaque on that door, then that plaque needed to have their classes named too. There was some discussion back and forth. And then somebody stood up and said, Ralph was a good guy. I liked Ralph. And I don't want to have to think of Ralph every time I go to the John. The discussion ended, the restroom was built, and there was no plaque anywhere near that door. On another occasion, an anonymous donor gave a small organ to the church to be used in the choir room for choir rehearsals. This organ was to replace an old organ that had just worn out. At the business meeting where we were voting to accept this organ, a woman who was a part of the family that had donated the old organ raised an objection That old organ was a memorial gift and there was a plaque on the organ that identified it as a memorial gift. And she pleaded that she didn't want the memory of her family member to just be discarded. Well, for a moment things were at an impasse. And then a wise retired minister in our congregation made the motion that the memorial status of that old organ be transferred to the new organ. And we accept the gift of the new organ. That woman was satisfied that this would still honor the memory of her family member. And so the new organ was accepted. And the plaque was moved from the old organ to the new organ. and the choir had a new organ to sing by. There was a businessman who was a member of the church, but he had a reputation in the town as being something of a dishonest scoundrel. When he died, he left a large sum of money to the church with instructions in his will that a fund be set up to provide financial resources for educational programs within the church and for scholarships for students who are going to seminary. This had happened long before I or many other members of the church had become connected with that church. But everybody knew about this man because of that fund in his name. And I don't know, but some old timers would tell you that this fund was this man's attempt to ensure his way into heaven. One man every year, once a year, would come and ask what equipment or resource the church especially needed. And then he'd make a big gift so that this item, whatever it was, could be purchased. When that item would show up at the church, it soon would be common knowledge who had actually bought this item. What most people didn't know was this man didn't contribute at all to the church's general budget or provide any kind of financial support for the church throughout the year. This one big gift that got a lot of attention was it for this man. One year it was political primary season and it was the Sunday before election day. In the part of the state that we lived in, there just wasn't any place for you to campaign on a Sunday morning because everybody knew that it was church time. A man who was running to be the nominee for a lieutenant governor came to our worship service that morning. He made his way down to the center of the sanctuary and sat in a place where he'd be the most visible. His county campaign chairman, who was a member of our church, wanted this man introduced and recognized in the service. an introduction and a recognition that he didn't get. The man told his campaign chairman after the service that he had just wasted his time being there that morning. If you're wondering, this man finished way, way down in the pack in the primary. There was a man who started to attend our church along with his family. In a conversation I had with this man and his family about our church, he mentioned the names of a couple of men and wanted to know if they were members of our church, which they were. One was a manager with the electric company and one was a manager with a natural gas company. As it turned out, this man wanted a job with a utility company. And he had started to attend our church in the hopes of getting to know these men. Well, this guy didn't get a job with a utility company. And we no longer saw him or his family at our church. There was a woman who had a song that she always liked to sing at Christmas time as a solo in worship. One year she wasn't asked to sing the song. The Minister of Music selected somebody else to sing the solo. And she quit the choir. But the song was sung and the rest of the people celebrated Christmas. You know, all of these stories have something in common besides being true. They raise the issue of why we do the religious things we do and who we do them for. It's the issue of motive and audience. This issue has been around as long as people have been doing religious things. Jesus deals with this issue when He tells us, Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them, for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven. When Jesus talks about practicing our righteousness, He's pointing to all those religious things we do in that ongoing process of being transformed to be who it is that God has called us to be. People who are in a right relationship with God will practice righteousness. It's an expression of our inner life and of our growing faith in God. Today we're just going to use the general term religious devotion. Beware of practicing your religious devotion before other people in order to be seen by them, for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven. Religious devotion is essential to the Christian life. It involves experiences of prayer and silence before God and worship and devotional study of the Bible. Religious devotion is all about our personal spiritual discipline and growth. But religious devotion also involves ministry to other people and serving other people and sharing our faith with other people and touching other people's lives in word and in action with the good news of Jesus. Religious devotion will sink deep into our hearts, but it also reaches out into the world. Religious devotion isn't just about something that we do or say. Religious devotion reflects who we are. Religious devotion involves everything about us as we go about living our lives before God and in response to God. closest model, the clearest model that we have of a life of religious devotion is Jesus Himself. Jesus began His ministry alone in the wilderness in prayer, away from the world. But then Jesus went into the world to minister to people with a heart of divine love. And even in that final night of Jesus' life, He gave hours to prayer, seeking the Father's will. And then the soldiers came to the garden and Jesus stepped forward and he went to do the Father's will on the cross. Jesus' first disciples followed this model. They lived in community and in communion with Jesus. And then they moved out into the world with the gospel to seek the world's transformation. This model of religious devotion is still very valid for us today. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, describes religious devotion in the terms of spiritual respiration or breathing. God breathes into us and we breathe back to God. God's grace breathes in our hearts and our devotion and praise flow back to God. God's love is breathed into us. That's the inhaling. And then our actions of love breathe back into the world. That's the exhaling. In our physical lives, if somebody isn't breathing in and breathing out, That's a kind of respiration that leads to that person's expiration. Breathing in, breathing out, inhaling, exhaling. That's necessary for there to be physical life. And it's the same way with our Christian lives. There is opening up our lives to the presence of God. There's drawing in God's grace into our hearts. There's letting God do His work of transformation in our lives. And then there's going out into the world of people who need God's love to be made whole. There's living. There's serving as followers of Jesus Christ who ourselves are always in that process of being made new. This is religious devotion and it is an essential virtue for the Christian. But this virtue, this quality of the Christian life can can get twisted into a deadly virtue that is destructive, that's harmful to our relationship with God. What can distort this virtue of religious devotion involves that issue of motive and audience. Jesus says, beware of practicing your righteousness, your religious devotion before other people. in order to be seen by them. For then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven. In effect, Jesus reminds us, to borrow the words of another author, all the world's a stage. We're going to live our lives before an audience. And we choose who our audience is going to be. And the audience we choose is based on our motives in life. One audience for our religious devotion is God. And God will be our audience. We will choose God to be our audience when our motive is to live our lives to please God and to grow in a relationship with God. But it's also possible to choose something other than God as the audience for our religious devotion. We choose somebody else as the audience for our religious devotion when our motive is to get noticed and to impress somebody. And the audience that we're living our lives before makes all the difference for us in life. And so Jesus said to those hearers long ago, and he still says to us today, beware, be careful, choose wisely your audience as you live your life. Jesus goes on to give some illustrations to demonstrate how some people in his day chose the wrong audience for their religious devotion. He focuses on three activities that were central to the religious life of the Jewish people. Giving to the poor and prayer and fasting. Jesus says, when you give to the needy, sell no trumpet before you as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and streets, that they may be praised by others. Truly I say to you, they have received their reward. Those who were needy in the community were cared for by the contributions that were collected in the synagogues. And Jesus tells us that some people were sounding a trumpet as they gave their gifts. We don't know exactly what Jesus envisioned here. Maybe he's talking about that practice of sounding a trumpet to call people to worship and to give their offerings. Maybe he's pointing to people who made a loud noise to draw attention to themselves as they would pour a lot of coins into the collection boxes that were shaped like trumpets. Or maybe Jesus is just using a figure of speech. We have the same one in our culture. They were just blowing their own horns. They were playing to a human grandstand. Then Jesus turns to the practice of prayer. And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites, for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by others. Truly I say to you, they have received their reward. It was appropriate for somebody to pray individually at any time of the day, but there were three set times of prayer, in the morning and at noon and in the afternoon. And it didn't matter what you were doing. At the times of prayer, you were to stop what you were doing and pray. And some people always made sure that they were standing on the most crowded St. corners whenever it was time to pray. And in the Jewish manner of praying, they would stretch out their arms with hands reaching out and bow their heads and raise their voices to heaven. Nobody could miss that public spectacle. Then Jesus talks about fasting. And when you fast, do not look gloomy like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces that their fasting may be seen by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. Fasting was a spiritual discipline that was associated with repentance and confession. But some people would broadcast their fasting. They'd put on sackcloth. They'd cover their head with ashes. They wouldn't wash their face. They wouldn't comb their hair. They were making a public display of their confession of sins to God, complete with wailing and with weeping. Jesus calls the people who were practicing their religious devotion like this hypocrites. The word hypocrite is literally an actor on a stage. These people were practicing their religious devotion not just out of some commitment to God, but as a performance, as a show for other people to see. Their audience really wasn't God. Their audience was other people they wanted to impress. And they got what they were after. They got the attention they desired from their chosen audience. But that was all that they would get. Nothing else would come from Jesus. So their religious devotion had become deadly. It had become destructive. And they had fallen into a trap that is still possible for us to fall into. We constantly need to beware, as Jesus warns us, and to examine our lives. Why do we do the religious things that we do? For whom are we doing them? Am I trying to impress a human audience? Is what I am doing really being done as an act of devotion to God? These questions are necessary because we do choose an audience that we are focused on as we live out our lives. Maybe our real audience is other people. We want to impress people with the quality of our religious devotion. This is the motive for the things that we do. Our religious devotion can become a performance for other people to observe. Maybe we come to worship for the points it gets us with somebody when they see that we're here. Maybe we do some act of service because of the recognition that it brings us. Maybe we give because we want people to think we're generous. There are a lot of different ways that we can keep our eyes on other people as we're doing things for God. Sometimes our real audience may actually be ourselves. The audience that I'm performing for is me. I'm doing religious things so I can feel good about myself. I'm doing things so I can pat myself on the back and maybe at the same time I can feel like I'm better than you. We can be our own audience at times. And sometimes it's possible that our audience is God, but we've gotten confused the nature of our acts of religious devotion. We're not doing all of the things that we do in response, grateful response to God because of God's grace and God's transforming work in our lives. Instead, we're doing the things we do in an effort to impress God with what we're doing. We're trying to win God's approval. We're trying to earn God's favor, which we can never do. And we've lost sight of God's grace. In all these ways, when we have the wrong audience, Our religious devotion has become destructive to our life with God because we really don't have our lives fixed on God anymore. Now chances are we don't set out to choose the wrong audience for our religious devotion. Chances are we would never say, I'm going to show off my religious devotion for other people. I'm doing this just to feel good about myself. I'm going to earn some credit on the ledger with God. I don't think all those people I told stories about would say something like this, and chances are we wouldn't either. Chances are we know that God needs to be the only audience for our religious devotion, and we really want to be genuine before God. But chances are we also know that we can be people with mixed motives and we can let another audience come into view that we want to impress for our self-centered reasons. And our religious devotion gets distorted and deadly. So what can we do? We open up our lives to the breath of God's Spirit who wants to keep on remaking us. We stop trying to be noticed by somebody else, and we recognize that the one who matters the most, God, has already noticed us. We live our lives in response to God. who we can never impress because God knows us for who we are. And we let sink in that amazing truth that God has already accepted us in His grace in Jesus. And then we keep on practicing our religious devotion, always asking God to purify our motives. this kind of life, this kind of religious devotion always brings a reward. Three times Jesus says, and your Father who sees in secret will reward you. You know, there are radically different kinds of rewards. There is an extrinsic reward. This is a reward with no natural connection to the action that leads to the reward. Suppose you promise your child you'll give them a reward if they make all A's on their report card. And they make all A's and you give them a $20 bill. You could just as well have given them a concert ticket or a meal at their favorite restaurant. There was no natural connection between the action that they did and the reward. But there is an intrinsic reward. This is a reward that is naturally and essentially connected to the action that brings the reward. When your child makes all As, there's a natural reward that naturally comes. They've gained some knowledge they didn't have before. Maybe they qualify for a scholarship. Maybe they're better equipped to apply for a job. The reward isn't something that is just tacked on at the end of an activity, and it could really be many sorts of rewards tacked on. The reward is something that is a natural outcome of the activity. I tend to think that intrinsic rewards are what Jesus has in mind when he says that our genuine religious devotion will bring a reward. Spending time in prayer is spending time with God and being with God is its own reward. When we focus our attention on God in worship, We can experience the presence of God and the encouragement of God and hear the voice of God. And all of these things, they're their own reward. When we give our gifts to help those who are needy, we're being shaped to be more like God because God is a giving God. and taking on the qualities of God is its own reward. When we serve other people, we're being transformed to be like Jesus because Jesus came to serve. And becoming more like Jesus is its own reward. When we do our religious devotion for God, with God really as our only audience, we get God. God is our reward. A deepening, growing relationship with God is our reward. And there can be no greater reward than this. And so beware of practicing your righteousness, your religious devotion before other people. in order to be seen by them. For then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven. But do practice your religious devotion before God to be seen by God. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you with Himself. Would you pray? Father, as we are gathered here in this place, we know that You are present. And indeed, may You be our only audience. Help us to breathe in Your Spirit that we might become more like Jesus. And then help us to go into the world to share Your love. For we pray in the name of Christ. This morning.