What Is the Most Difficult Sin to Overcome?

But what the days of 11, Brad have just finished, and I know we, all of us, have been thinking about that a lot. And with the Passover, as I said, keeping the Passover by myself was a unique experience. I really appreciate being able to keep the Passover with other people. But you have to keep it by yourself. It's profound, because, you know, the bread and the wine is so personal. But not being able to wash somebody's feet, not being able to have your feet washed, you know, just not being able to keep it with other people.

And not being able to go to the first day of 11, Brad. Really, you know, for me, it made this a very difficult days of 11, Brad, but also very special days of 11, Brad, in many ways. And we all spent this time removing sin, you know, and removing the symbols of sin, and taking in the unleavened bread of Christ. So, you know, we went through all these symbols. But before we leave the days of 11, Brad, I want to hit on a very specific subject that has to do with sin. What do you think is probably the most difficult sin to overcome?

Now, I've had people explain to me what they think is the most difficult sin to overcome. I've had people tell me that, well, alcoholism is probably the most difficult sin to overcome. Or homosexuality is the most difficult sin to overcome. I remember a man years ago talking to him. He said, well, he said, homosexuals can't overcome. So they're all going to the lake of fire. They can never repent, and they can never change, which isn't true.

But what is the most difficult sin to deal with, to overcome, to repent of? Is it murder? Well, if he committed murder, I mean, that's about as horrible an act as anybody can commit to take somebody else's life. And yet we do see in the Bible where David committed murder and was forgiven by God. Now, he paid a terrible penalty for it. But what is the most difficult sin for us to deal with? He said, well, it's atheism.

Because if you don't believe in God, how do you even repent? And that's an interesting argument there. But I want to talk about today what is possibly the most common sin. It's so common that it is very difficult to overcome. Because it's a sin that all of us have to one degree or another. So, wait a minute.

All of us have a certain sin that's... No, no, no. I don't have this problem. I don't have that problem. I know somebody who's a habitual liar. I'm not an habitual liar. I don't have to overcome that. So, no, no. That can't be... I can't have a sin that's that hard to overcome. Yet this sin is so common, and it really is the most difficult sin to overcome. And I'll show you why in a minute. To really discuss it, we have to talk about what the Bible means by God's righteousness.

Righteousness simply means the character of being right. If you're righteous, you have the character of being right. So, when we talk about God's righteousness, we're talking about a very big subject. God is righteous in His judgments. In other words, God determines what is good and what is evil. And so, God's decisions are right. He has a true moral standard. And His actions are always consistent with His character. In other words, you could trust that God isn't going today to say, You know what?

I'm so tired of humanity, I'm just going to take a 200-year vacation. You're on your own. He's not going to do that. His judgments are always consistent with what He claims is right and wrong. And fortunately, He holds mercy and is of very high value. It's very high value to God. So, He's showing mercy a lot. But that's still a judgment, isn't it? Mercy is a judgment. He makes a decision. I decide to show mercy, and He does.

So, when we look at righteousness, and we look at God's righteousness, we're looking at this moral character that He uses to determine what is right and what is wrong. What is righteous and what is not righteous. What is just and what is not just. We have a hard time understanding justice. Because usually we want justice when it's for us.

And we want justice against other people. We want mercy when it's us. But God's always going to be righteous in His moral character. God's righteousness also determines that He is faithful. He always fulfills His promises. If you look how many times in the Bible He told ancient Israel, I'm not doing this because of you. I'm doing it because they promised it. I promised this to Abraham. I promised this to David. I promised this to you. And you didn't do your end. But I'm still going to do what I said I would do. So because of this righteousness, this rightness that God has, He is faithful.

So you can count on Him fulfilling His own promises. Then also when we talk about God's righteousness, we're talking about relationships. What He does is always what's best for everybody involved. In other words, God does not cause us to suffer for His benefit. Whatever He does is always what's best for those involved. So we're talking about God's righteousness. We're talking about this huge concept that God always does what's right because He determines what's right and what's wrong. And we can trust that what He does do is based on a consistency. He's consistent in what He does. And He is righteous in what He does.

So He's going to be faithful, and He's always going to be doing what's right and best for everyone. That's His law, then. It's an expression of His righteousness. Now, when we talk about human beings, when we talk about human righteousness, it's totally different.

Because human beings are never consistent. We might get something right once in a while. But for every time we get something right, there's a half a dozen things we did wrong. So our determination of good and evil is never very good. It's always a mixture of good and evil, depending on the person. We also, because of our corrupted nature, we cannot be trusted to be faithful.

We cannot be trusted to actually do what we're supposed to do all the time. So we're constantly failing. And when we make our decisions, instead of being what's based on what's best for everyone, we make our decisions based on what's best for me. So we're very selfish. So human righteousness is nothing at all like God's righteousness. Now, the Apostle Paul describes the problem this way. He says in Romans 8-7, The carnal mind is enmity against God, for it is not subject to the law of God, nor indeed can be. In other words, we are naturally the enemy of God's righteousness.

But human beings are designed to want to feel righteous. You have to understand how deep inside the complexity of who we are. We need to feel right. Right? I mean, look, people fight wars over what? I'm right. No, we're right. We're right. We're right. Everybody has a need to feel right and to feel righteous. That I am right and my rightness is good. Give an example. Talk to someone who believes that eating meat is horrible. In other words, there are people who believe that eating meat is like murdering an animal.

And so they're vegetarians who will not eat meat. And they believe if you eat meat, you murder an animal. And when you talk to them, they feel righteous about that. It is an absolute overwhelming sense of righteousness, and the fact that you can't see it makes you evil. This is what's so difficult when we look at issues like homosexuality. For us, understanding God's way, homosexuality is a sin. It is unrighteous. It is evil. Right? So we see homosexuality as evil. People who believe that it's good think that you are evil.

They feel righteous. They absolutely feel it. And they have the same... So we may feel repulsed by this idea of homosexuality. They feel repulsed by us. We are repulsive. We are evil. We're no different than Nazis in their mind. But because they feel good, they feel righteous. This is a measurement of righteousness. Now, this is the most common sin, and it's a sin we have to be very careful because we can also commit.

And it is the most difficult sin to overcome. It's called self-righteousness. The reason it's so hard to overcome is because you know you're right. You feel you're right. I have determined this as right or wrong, and I know what is right or wrong in my heart. And therefore, you are evil and I am right.

Self-righteousness is the most common sin, and it is the most dangerous of all sins. And it's the most dangerous of all sins because you can't recognize it. How do you repent when you're right? How do you repent when you're right? It's very interesting that when we look through the Bible that many of the people who dealt with self-righteousness, you know, some of the worst examples of people who were self-righteous, actually were very obedient to the letter of the law of God.

They appeared very righteous. They did lots of right things. And we're going to look at that some. And there's a great danger as we obey God that we begin to think that this is our righteousness. I'm going to look at some symptoms today of self-righteousness. I have little titles I give in each of these. And there are ways that we can approach life and not even realize it.

This first one I call, I would never have bugs. Have you ever been to somebody's house for dinner and you look and, you know, scurrying across the kitchen on the floor as a big spider or something? You know, get in the car and your wife says, did you see that giant spider? Have you ever been to somebody's house and they have lots of bugs? And you say, oh, I would never have bugs. It's so easy to see everybody else's bugs. So what we do is we judge everybody has bugs, but me, I don't have any bugs.

My wife always hates when I tell this story. We've been married about eight years. We moved to East Texas. Now, you have to understand East Texas is famous for one thing, basically. East Texas is rolling farmland, lots of woods and roaches. I mean, little roaches like this and roaches that look like hummingbirds.

Huge things that fly. And they're all over the place. I mean, it's amazing at night. You can, you know, I've been walking down the street at night and you look in the doorway of a business and everything's just covered with roaches.

They're just all over the place. Well, you know, if you have roaches, you must have a dirty house, right? So what we do is that person has roaches. They have a dirty house. But when you live in East Texas, that's not true. We lived in an apartment complex. We had never had roaches before. And one day there was just roaches everywhere.

And the big ones scare you to death in the middle of the night. They wake you up. They're flying all over the place. And they came in and said, look, we're going to be spraying for roaches. They came in and sprayed. And we didn't have any roaches. And then they sprayed the next building, the next building, the next building. And when they got around to all the buildings, guess what happened? All the roaches came back because they didn't kill them.

They just drove them from building to building. And so then they just started the process all over again. And you couldn't help it. You just go out and you get in the middle of the night and you turn on the light and roaches would scurry all over the place.

She'd have to wash the dishes all the time because there'd be roaches on them. You say, well, we didn't keep a dirty house. No, we didn't. But it's so easy. Self-righteousness looks at everybody else and makes a harsh judgment. Self-righteousness causes us to automatically judge other people without the facts. So we automatically make these judgments because I'm not like that. One of the most telling examples in the Scripture of this is in Luke 18.

Luke 18. Now what I find interesting about Luke's account here, of course, Luke was not there. So Luke gets this story secondhand. He writes it down. But Luke makes a commentary about what Jesus is doing.

So Luke's commentary on this is just as important, then, in understanding Jesus's parable here. Verse 9, And he spoke this parable to some, who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and despised others. Here is the heart of self-righteousness. I trust in my goodness, and therefore it allows me to despise others who are not as good as I am. I trust in my goodness, and I am good, and other people aren't as good. Now, you and I have been given by God remarkable privileges. You and I have knowledge that many, many people do not have. We have practices which are called righteousness. Keeping the holy days, keeping the Sabbath is righteousness. We have all these things God has given to us. But we have to be careful that we don't start trusting in our own goodness. And that gives us license, then, to despise others. So let's look at the parable. Jesus says, two men went up to the temple to pray. One a Pharisee, the other a tax collector. He selects these two people on purpose. Pharisees were well-respected. If you would have seen a Pharisee, if you would have lived at this time, you would have really looked up to Pharisees. Pharisees kept the law of God better than anybody else. They were extremely strict on how they obeyed the law of God. Tax collectors, on the other hand, well, they actually worked for the Roman government. They were looked on as traitors. They were literally looked on as traitors. They collected taxes for the Romans. So they'd come around, knock at the door. It's time for you to pay your taxes. Here's what you owe. If you didn't pay up, then they could, you know, soldiers could come in and take from you whatever you owed the government. So tax collectors are despised. What's really important here is to understand, both of these men are practicing Jews. Both are in the temple. Both are worshiping God. One is looked on as the most righteous of all people, and the other is looked on as the most unrighteous of all people in their society. At the very least, he stood and prayed thus with himself, God, I thank you that I am not like other men. I thank you, God, because you gave me what you haven't given to other people. I thank you, God, because you enlightened me, where you have enlightened other people. Extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this tax collector. Now, what's important here is there's nothing in the parable that says, oh, but this man was an extortioner. Actually, he was not. He was not an adulterer. He did not commit adultery. This man had kept the Sabbath his entire life. He had never worshiped an idol, ever worshiped an idol. This man had probably never committed adultery. He had never stolen. This man's conduct was righteous.

And then he went over and beyond. He says, I fast twice a week. I give tithes of all that I possess. And he did. He fasted twice a week, which goes way beyond anything the Scripture requires. And the man was very meticulous in his tithing. He made sure that he tithed and gave everything to God that God owed, or that was owed to God. He did these things. And these are all, by the way, righteous acts. These are all righteousness. But remember the problem. He trusts in himself. He trusted his own righteousness. Look, God, I'm such a righteous guy. And thank you that I'm such a righteous guy. And thank you I'm not like this man over here. I'm surprised you even let him come in the temple. Surely you don't listen to his prayers. I mean, this man has no value at all to you. Thank you. Thank you for the value you've given me. And the tax collector, standing afar off, would not so much as raise his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, God, be merciful to me a sinner. And Christ says, I tell you, this man went down to his health justified rather than the other, for everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted. This is all about exalting self. It's all about exalting self. Self-righteousness points out how righteous you are. And you don't have to make it up. Oh, I keep the Sabbath. I keep the Holy Days. Look how righteous I am. Thank you, God. I'm not like my neighbor. Who isn't righteous?

And I sure feel good, and I can trust in my righteousness. How do you deal with that? You say, well, of course, I mean, we want to see what we're doing is righteous, right? We want to do these righteous things, so how do I not trust in my own righteousness? David faced this. Let's go to Psalm 19. Psalm 19.

In verse 12, in this Psalm, David says, Who can understand his errors? Cleanse me from secret faults. Keep back your servant also from presumptuous sins. Let them not have dominion over me. You know, when we were told to examine ourselves before the Days of 11 bread, it's always good to also read this to God. God, show me my secret faults, the things that I don't know anything about. And please show me how presumptuous I am. I just presume that I'm righteous all the time. Help me to understand my presumptuous sins, so that what? Let them not have dominion over me. Don't let me be controlled by my secret faults and my presumptuous sins. The Pharisee was controlled by his secret faults and presumptuous sins. All the obvious things he did right, but deep inside, there were secret faults and presumptuous sins. He was just presumptuous about it. And he trusted in himself. You and I cannot trust in ourselves. We have to trust in what God will do in us. What God will do in us. If we trust in ourselves, eventually we'll just hear... and this is what the Pharisees did. They believed at the end of life, God took all of their... a list of all the good things they did, and a list of all the bad things. And if the good things outweighed the bad things, they got to go to heaven. You received eternal life because your list of good things outweighed the list of bad things. What we really understand through the Passover is, one bad thing wipes out all the good things. God has to forgive us. That we can't make a bargain with God that says, if I tithe my whole life, you'll forgive the fact that when I was younger, I used to rob banks. God says, no, tithing doesn't erase the fact that you rob banks. But that's what we think. And that's what the Pharisees did. The good deeds outweighed, and when there was more of them, look how righteous I am. And they trusted in their own righteousness. The second self-righteous sort of syndrome we can have, actually is a twist on the first one. It appears to be the opposite, but it's actually still rooted in self-righteousness. It's called the I'm okay, you're okay syndrome. And what we do with this one is, is that, you know, really, I don't have the right to judge anybody. If that's how you feel, you know, if you feel living together is okay, and you really love each other, who am I to judge? But what we do is, but what we do with that is we're taking God's righteousness and replacing it with ours. Because God says, nope, it's wrong, and we say, oh, who am I to judge? Well, you and I didn't judge that. God did. God judged it as wrong. But what happens is, well, I understand. It's not something I would do. It's obvious there are times where we have personal decisions that we make. You know, sometimes what we allow or not allow on the Sabbath is a personal decision. But the other things are not. I mean, the Bible says that we are not to go do our work on the Sabbath. Period. So we're not to go work at our job on the Sabbath. That's, you know, that's, well, that may be right for you, but for me, no, no, no. That's what it says. I didn't get to make the rules up. God made them up. So it's His righteousness. But what happens when we get this way, it's sort of like, yeah, I understand, but I think we just have to be more tolerant. And it's just another form of self-righteousness. And the perfect example of this is in 1 Corinthians 5. 1 Corinthians 5. The church at Corinth sees themselves as very righteous because of the way they're handling something. Look at what it says in verse 1.

It is actually reported, Paul writes, that there is sexual immorality among you, and such sexual immorality is not even named among the Gentiles. The man has his father's wife, and his stepmother. So here's someone committing adultery with his stepmother. Now, she doesn't seem to be in the church. Because she's not mentioned here. They're not told to do anything with her.

So she must not be in the church. But the man is. He's a member of the church. And he's committing adultery with his stepmother. He says, The whole church knew this was going on, but they felt like, well, you know, we just have to be tolerant. We have to be merciful. And we'll pray about it, and we'll see what God does. And Paul says, no. This is a standard of righteousness established by God. And therefore, as the people of God, we have a requirement to take certain actions.

Oh, boy, is that so self-righteous. No, it's self-righteous not to do it. It is because what we do is we supersede God's righteousness. Well, you know, God would say that, but you know, we shouldn't be that harsh. Who am I to judge? But we're judging what God says to judge. And that's not only in others. We should be judging ourselves. But remember, one of the problems with self-righteousness is you don't judge yourself. You feel pretty good about yourself. So you don't judge yourself. So you're sure not going to judge others. He says in verse 3, For I indeed, as absent in the body, but present in spirit, have already judged, as though I were present.

Him who has done this deed, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, when you are gathered together, along with my spirit and with the power of our Lord Jesus Christ, deliver such a one to Satan, for the destruction of the flesh, that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord. Your glorying is not good. They felt real good. It felt real good to act this way. It felt real good to say, you know what? It's good for us to show this kind of tolerance, to not be too judgmental, and let this man, you know, yes, he's sitting, but we want him to come to understand that he's sitting.

And everybody knew about it. At that point, they're declaring their righteousness as more real than God's righteousness. They're trusting in themselves, instead of trusting in God. So what we have to do is we have to really be careful to tremble at God's word. Let's say you're 66. How do we deal with this? We tremble at God's word. You know, I've actually gone in and sat down with people that were committing grave sins and said, What are we to do here?

You have to stop this sin. You have to stop living together. You have to stop getting drunk. You have to stop whatever. How do we work that through? How do we get you to repent and change? And I've had people actually say, well, I'm not going to. You know what I've done? I've handed them the Bible. I just handed it to them. I said, now, what is required of you is for you to repent and change.

Then God forgives you. But if you refuse to do so, what does God require of me? And in each case, I've done that. The person has said, oh, you're actually required to tell me I cannot come to church until I do repent. And in each case, I've said, remember, I didn't say that. You know the scripture. It's what God said. Not my judgment here. It's God's judgment here. Later, I've had people actually tell me, thank you. Because that woke me up when I realized, wait a minute, I just judged myself. Yeah, I just followed the rules.

That's all I'm doing. You know, I'm asking you to repent. If you won't, what is it God requires now? And I don't put the person out. The person just says, I can't come back to church. I say, well, that's true. Until you stop, then you come back. They do it to themselves. Converted people do it to themselves.

Because that leads them to repentance. It's an amazing thing to watch happen. Stubborn people just, no, I'm going to do whatever I want. Isaiah 66 verse 1, God says, Heaven is my throne. The earth is my footstool. Where is the house that you will build me? And where is the place of my rest? For all those things my hand has made, and all those things exist, says the Lord. But on this one will I look, on him who is a poor and of a contrite spirit, and who trembles at my word.

To not be self-righteous, we have to tremble at the word of God. We have to go ask God to help us tremble at His word. And we have to ask God to give us a contrite spirit to humble us before Him, so that we don't begin to trust ourselves instead of trusting Him.

The third kind of self-righteousness I call the Rabbi-Rabbi Syndrome. And what this is, is an excessive desire, I mean excessive, to be seen as a spiritual leader or a teacher. It's not wrong to want to be a teacher. It's not wrong to want to be a spiritual leader. But there are people who are obsessed with that. I've met people like that. They must be recognized. They have to be recognized. They have to be held up. I've known people, I knew a man one time that was like that. Anyone who came to church, we were like, oh no. Because the new person would walk in, he would walk up to them and say, you're coming over my house for lunch after services.

And then they would go over his house, he would serve them a big lunch, and spend all afternoon giving them a Bible study explaining why the minister who gave them the sermon is such limited in his knowledge. But so he had to take them and teach them more because the ministry just wasn't that smart. And he had been given this gift from God.

And year after year, he got to the place where he had no friends in the church. Nobody would talk to him. Because every single Sabbath was, I've been studying this week.

Have you been studying? Well, I have. In fact, I've been studying three hours a day. And I've discovered this, and he would just start preaching to people. Finally, he got to the place he couldn't even come to church. Because he was so much better than everybody else, he couldn't stand it. He couldn't stand to be there because everybody else was so inferior. And then, he went into a Sunday-keeping church, and convinced a bunch of them they should keep the Sabbath, and busted that church up. So he could declare himself the pastor.

Well, they didn't like that, so they kicked him out of that. The last time I talked to my dad years and years ago when he saw this man, he said, hey, I ran into so-and-so at the coffee shop. I said, really? He said, yeah. He said, how's he doing? He says, Gary, he looked like a bum off the street. And he says, I went over and sat down beside him. It took him a while to recognize me. He said, yeah, he said, I just keep trying to teach people God's way, but I have nobody left.

No friends, no church. Even my wife left me. He says, just nobody wants to hear God's way. He was so obsessed. He saw himself as someone ordained by God, chosen by God, and he was so obsessed, he destroyed his own Christianity. He didn't live it. He couldn't live it. He couldn't stand to be with anybody else, because everybody else, thank you, God, that I'm not like these people.

That was his whole viewpoint of life. He had to be rabbi. Look at Matthew 23. We're going to go back to the Pharisees here. They're a little easy to pick on, because many of them tended to be so self-righteous. And, like I said, if you would have been around Pharisees, you would have been... You would have said, wow, these people sure are good at what they do. Let's start in verse... See how much of this I want to cover, because all of Psalm...or Matthew 23 is about the Pharisaical proclivity to be self-righteous.

Let's look at verse 1. Jesus spoke to the baltitudes and said to the disciples, saying, Therefore, whatever they tell you to do, observe, that observe and do, but do not do according to their works, for they say and do not do." In other words, when they said of Moses' seat, they opened the scrolls and they read from the Scripture. He said, when they read to you from the Scripture, do what the Scripture says, but don't listen to their interpretations.

For they bind heavy burdens, hard to bear. They lay them on the men's shoulders, but they themselves will not move them with one of their fingers, but all their works they do to be seen by men. They make their phylacteries broad and enlarge the borders of their garments. Well, God told them to wear phylacteries. They just wore bigger phylacteries than anybody else. I mean, the bigger the phylacteries, the more righteous you must be, right?

They love the best places at feast, the best seats in the synagogues, greetings in the marketplaces, and to be called by men, Rabbi. Rabbi. They need to be called teacher. They need to be called master. Now, once again, is it wrong to want to be a teacher? No. Is it wrong to be some leader in the church?

No. But the emphasis of leaders in the church is always God. The emphasis is always to be Christ who is the head of the church. The emphasis of the Pharisee is always, Rabbi. Me. I'm the teacher here. So the emphasis is always towards them and not towards God. Their righteousness, they trust in themselves. He says, But you do not be called Rabbi, for one is your teacher, the Christ, and your old brethren.

Do not call anyone on earth your father, for one is your father, he who is in heaven. Do not be called teacher, for one is your teacher, the Christ, but he who is greatest among you shall be your servant. And whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted. Now, verse 12 sounds just like what we read a little bit earlier in Luke. Totally different story, different parable, but same point. The more we try to trust and aggrandize ourselves, the more God will humble us.

The more we're humble before God, the more God will exalt us. So do we want to exalt ourselves or be exalted by God? How do we deal with this Rabbi-Rabbi syndrome? Well, we do exactly what Jesus says here. We seek humility before God. We seek humility before God.

When we seek humility before God, we do see that other people have value before God. It is God's desire that all people repent, that all people won't. But we see the value that God gives to all human beings.

And then our last point here. This one is real common in our society. This may be the most common form of self-righteousness. It's not my fault. It's just not my fault. We have the hardest time accepting responsibility and fault. One of my favorite stories that illustrates this is, back in the 1930s, there was a gangster named Tugun Crowley.

He was in New York. And Tugun Crowley was... He was just, I mean, had no conscience at all. This man stole... He was known as Tugun Crowley because he carried two guns in every place he went. And one day he was out necking with his girlfriend in the car. A policeman walked up and he pulled out a gun and he shot the policeman down. They got the policeman's gun and shot him again a couple of times.

Well, what happened was they traced him back to his apartment in New York. And 150 policemen surrounded the apartment. And there was a gun battle that went on for hours. Because he was a cop killer. They had submachine guns and rifles and he was upstairs shooting out the windows. It was like something out of a... The way I've read it and the way it was described, it was something like out of a movie. And here they are, all these policemen. Thousands of people gathered off, you know, a block away to watch all this while they shot up the apartment complex. And so he's wounded. And he thinks, what goes through a man's mind who just shot down a policeman a couple hours ago?

For no reason at all. The guy just walked up, knocked on the window, and the guy rolled the window down and shot him. What goes through his mind? Well, we do know because he actually got out a piece of paper and a pencil and he wrote down his thoughts. And they were blood-stained. He survived. They actually... When he went in, you know, he took it out of his hand and there was this note with blood on it that he had written down. And what he had written down was, To whom it may concern, Under my coat is a weary heart, but a kind one, one that would do nobody any harm.

He saw himself as the good guy. In fact, as they led him to the electric chair, his last words were, This is what I get for defending myself? He saw himself as the good guy. Human beings, we do not like to accept how corrupt our human nature is. Oh, we do a few things wrong. But basically, we're good people. We're basically good. I can trust in my goodness. Think about who said this. I have spent the best years of my life giving people the lighter pleasures, helping them have a good time, and all I get is abuse, the existence of a hunted man.

Anyone know who that is? Al Capone. He was a good guy in his own mind. He was abused by the police. He's a good guy. Not a bad guy. I just grew up in a bad neighborhood. This is one of the ultimate expressions of self-righteousness. I've done a few bad things, but I'm basically a good person. And you see this at the very beginning when Adam says what? God, it's your fault because you gave me this woman. And she says, not my fault, it's Satan's. Satan had nobody to blame. It's just this human proclivity we have not to take responsibility for our own sins. Last scripture we'll turn to is 1 John 1. 1 John 1. 1 John 1.

Even though we've gone through the days of 11 brand, this is something to think about over the next year. These presumptuous sins that we can have and not even recognize. Because, hey, we're not out stealing. We're not lying. We're not cheating. We're not committing adultery. We haven't murdered anybody. We keep the Sabbath. None of us have statues of Mary in our house. Those are all righteous things. And we should do those things. But if we're not careful, we can begin to trust our own righteousness. And the moment we begin to trust our own righteousness, we begin to despise others who aren't quite as righteous as I am. 1 John 1. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar, and His Word is not in us. John says, My little children, these things I write to you, so that you may not sin. And if anyone sins, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ, the righteous. He Himself is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only, but for the whole world. We have forgiveness offered to us. And we are to go, you know, we've been washed in that blood through the Passover. But throughout this whole year, you and I are washed in the blood of Christ every day. Every day, we get to go and say, God, forgive me today of my secret faults and my presumptuous sin. Help me to see them, and forgive me for them, so that I may overcome them. We have to have that humble asking for forgiveness every day. Because there isn't a day that goes by that you and I don't do something that is actually offensive to God. But because He is merciful, He extends this mercy to us all the time. So, we have these issues, these symptoms, these syndromes of self-righteousness. The I would never have bug syndrome. Other people have bugs, not me. It's because other people are dirty housekeepers, not me. The I'm okay, you're okay syndrome. Oh, come on, we just can't judge that. The Rabbi-Rabbi syndrome. Oh, everybody needs to see me as I'm important. I'm a teacher, I'm someone that everybody needs to look up to, because I really know more than anybody else. And it's not my fault syndrome. It's just not my fault. I mean, I'm just not that bad of a person. I'm okay.

We have just gone through this wonderful time. We know we've been forgiven. The sacrifice of Jesus Christ was applied to us as our substitute. But now let's spend the next year with God working in us. Working in us not to produce our righteousness, but literally to produce His righteousness. His righteousness in us.