Chapter 19: No Pharisees Need Apply. I have taught quite a bit about the total commitment the kingdom requires. It's no place for the undisciplined, the half-hearted, and lovers of this world. We've seen that the majority of mankind will never enter the kingdom. We've also seen that a large portion of the ones who enter the kingdom eventually will be weeded out.
So it would be quite natural, from a fallen human perspective, for those of us who are citizens of the kingdom to feel superior to non-Christians and to worldly Christians. It would be easy for a kingdom Christian to look down on those outside of the kingdom.
Knowing this tendency of our fallen flesh, Jesus warned us in advance: "Judge not, that you be not judged; for with what judgment you judge, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you." And why do you look at the speck in your brother's eye, but do not consider the plank in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, "Let me remove the speck from your eye"? And look, a plank is in your own eye.
Hypocrites, first remove the plank from your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye. It's true that the faint-hearted and double-minded don't belong in the kingdom. But there's another class of people who don't belong there either: the judgmental and self-righteous. Jesus' commandment not to judge is just as binding and just as revolutionary as his teachings on non-resistance.
Sadly, so many who are willing to obey what Jesus said about non-resistance or Mammon refuse to acknowledge Jesus' words of "Judge not"—they've convinced themselves that somehow Jesus didn't mean what he said. It's so much easier to live the kingdom life if only we can pat ourselves on the back, glory in our obedience and holiness, and contemptuously dismiss all those who haven't reached our level of sanctity. But when we do that, we're not really living the kingdom life. We're living a life of self-delusion.
We're more odious to Jesus than are the people we look down upon. No wonder Jesus counseled us, "Enter by the narrow gate, for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and there are many who go in by it." Because narrow is the gate and difficult is the way which leads to life, and there are few who find it. The road to eternal life is indeed narrow and difficult. There are large chasms on either side. On the one side, there is the chasm of laxity and worldliness.
Most professing Christians fall into this chasm. The kingdom walk is too stringent for them. They want an easier road, and there's no shortage of preachers who will tell them that they don't really have to obey Jesus' teachings. Those same preachers will also tell them they don't really have to be separate from the world. On the other side of the narrow way is the chasm of Phariseeism. This is the abyss of self-righteousness. If we don't fall into the first chasm, we're likely to fall into the other.
The way is not easy. Back in 1981, I worked as the corporate attorney for a small oil company in East Texas. One day, we had a hearing with the Texas Railroad Commission in Austin. It probably sounds strange to a non-Texan, but in Texas, the state agency that regulates oil and gas production is the Railroad Commission. Anyway, we had a hearing about changing the field rules for a particular gas field. Because our company had its own helicopter, we decided to fly down to Austin.
On the way down, we stopped and picked up a petroleum engineer and a geologist from FENA, who also were going to the same hearing. The meeting in Austin went fine. During the trip back, I sat up front with the pilot and was watching him fly the helicopter. I said to myself, "That doesn't look very hard. I can probably do that myself." So I asked the pilot if he could let me man the controls for a while, and he readily agreed. I asked him what I needed to do, and he showed me a little ball on the instrument dial.
"All you have to do is to keep that ball in the center of the dial," he explained to me. Well, that sounded easy enough, so I told him I was ready, and he handed me the controls. However, I soon found out that keeping the ball on the center was anything but easy for a novice. The controls were so sensitive that the slightest move sent the helicopter reeling in one direction and then back the other direction when I tried to correct my error.
So we went zigzagging across the Texas skies as I tried desperately to keep that little ball in the center of the dial. Finally, the engineer from FENA in the back seats, who was feeling nauseous, shouted, "Get that lawyer away from the controls!" The pilot lost no time in taking the controls back over. When we dropped the two FENA men off, they both gave me nasty looks. In fact, it turned out that we had to return to Austin for a second hearing a month later.
So we called up FENA to see if their engineers wanted to ride with us again. They politely declined, saying they would just drive down and meet us there. I think they were afraid that I might be at the controls again. Living the Christian life is a lot like trying to fly a helicopter. We have to keep in the center of the road, and it isn't easy to do that because the road is narrow. The confines of this road don't allow us to go zigzagging along.
We must not zig into the chasm of worldliness or zag into the chasm of self-righteousness. We have to keep straight on course. Jesus told us not to judge others, but he didn't tell us that we can't speak out against sin. Paul, James, Peter, and other New Testament writers spoke out against sin in the church, not self-righteously, but in obedience to Jesus. This book is being written to tell Christians and unbelievers about the kingdom gospel, a gospel that is hardly preached anymore.
And in this book, I point to a lot of shortcomings of today's church and to some of the deviant turns the church has made through the centuries. I talk about the gospel of easy believism. I contrast kingdom Christians with those who are merely professing Christians. But I can assure you that I'm not writing this book in a spirit of self-righteousness, for I well know that David Bercot needs this message as much as any of his readers.
My only prayer is that reading this book will challenge my readers as profoundly as writing this book has challenged me. I honestly do not judge individuals or presume to know their final standing with Christ, yet I am quite concerned about the state of Christianity today, and that's why I'm writing this book.
At the same time, I know some of my readers will feel I shouldn't even use the term "Christian" when I talk about those who love the world, those who hold to serious theological errors, and those who have committed gross evils in the name of Christ. So I again want to make it clear that when I use the term "Christian" throughout this book, I am referring to those who profess to be Christians. The authenticity of their Christianity is certainly open to question, but I will leave that up to Jesus.
I should also explain that I use the term "kingdom Christians" to refer to Christians who are serious about being a citizen of God's kingdom and who abide in Christ through an obedient love relationship. However, by using that term, I do not mean to imply that everyone else is categorically assigned to judgment. Again, that's Jesus' decision to make, not mine. Finally, I should clarify that when I use the term "church" with a capital C, I'm referring to the institutional church.
I'm talking about all of the bodies of professing Christians. Once again, to what extent the institutional church coincides with the body of genuine Christian believers, I'm quite content to leave in Jesus' hands. The four or five laws of the kingdom that we've examined certainly are some of the more challenging teachings of Jesus, but they are only a small portion of the laws our King has given us. The rest of his laws and teachings are contained throughout the New Testament.
The fact that I haven't discussed these other laws doesn't mean that they're not just as important as the ones on which we've focused. The largest single collection of kingdom commandments is found in the Sermon on the Mount. If you're serious about being a kingdom Christian, I urge you to read the Sermon on the Mount afresh, pondering each teaching and evaluating your own life as measured by these teachings.