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Excerpt:

"I'm not those folks over there." Isn't this the game we play, right? Hey, we may not have the best behaved children. But at least they're pretty good at sports. I may not have time to care for my body and be all fit and all of that. But man, at least my kids speak respectfully to others. I may not be at church very much. But at least I care for the well being of my neighbors. If I'm fighting racism, at least I'm a devout spouse. And the lists comparison just goes on and on. We just are so good. We're so good at comparing ourselves to others. Because we're just doing this all the time looking around. How does the tax collector view others we sort of don't even know. We don't even really know. It doesn't tell us. It does say he doesn't even look up to heaven. And it seems as though he doesn't even know the Presbyterians in the temple with him. He doesn't even acknowledge a Presbyterian minister. Come on, man. And we don't know that what his approach to others is in this story, because it seems as though he's just oblivious to it. It seems as though he honestly just doesn't even seem to care what others are doing. Somehow he's gotten off the rat race. Somehow he's unplugged from all the social media. Somehow he doesn't look at others and want to talk to God about them all the time. And that's because your approach to yourself and your approach to others has everything to do with how you approach God. How you approach yourself and how you approach other people has everything to do with how you approach God.

Now, before we consider that final kind of part, how we approach God, I want you to think about the odd danger of this parable, right? Because Jesus really does actually tell us at the end, this man, verse 14, went down to his house justified rather than the other for everyone who exalts himself will be humbled. Yeah, the one who humbles himself will be exalted. So we're actually told by Jesus, the one in the story that we are to emulate, emulate. Jesus does tell us like, "Hey, you shouldn't really be like this Presbyterian guy, you know, you should be like the tax collector." And because of this, we all sort of instinctively want actually to emulate the tax collector here, which is a good thing. But what happens when you do that? Is you start to play the Presbyterians game, right? Because what you start to do is at least say, "hey, at least I'm not the Presbyterian. At least I'm not some self-righteous-do-gooder." And you fall into the very same trap as the presbyterian. The very trap that Jesus is warning us against. If you're saying you've got it all right now in your heart, then you're probably also saying, "at least I'm not like that person. At least I'm the tax collector here. Man, I hate this self righteous religious folk," then you're probably playing the self righteous religious game. I'm gonna tell you that I think the cure to this is actually in how you approach God.

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