Take your Bibles with me and turn to Luke 13. Luke 13.
As you are turning there I want to say just a word about my philosophy of preaching. When I was in Bible college, my pastor, Clarence Sexton, had a few phrases he pounded into our heads.
One of them was:
- Nothing is spiritual if it is not also scriptural. And another was:
- We place our emphasis where the scripture places the emphasis.
Essentially, we let the Bible drive. We let the Bible set the emphasis. We let the Bible set for us what is right and wrong.
And I have kind of taken that to an extreme. I'm trying to preach to you like Paul said "the whole counsel of God" and I don't know of another way of doing that besides just going through the Bible.
Another way of thinking about it is this: I used to be a school teacher. I taught 3rd grade. Thankfully, I didn't show up on day one with no guidance. My school gave me a very detailed curriculum that told me what to teach on what day and what material I had to get through that year for my students to be properly third grade educated.
I believe as preachers God has given us the curriculum. It's this book. All 66 books of it. And it's not my job to try to figure out what God's people need. God has already figured that out. My job is to teach it.
Now, I say all of that because there is one theme in the gospels that just gets repeated over and over again, and that is the danger of religion.
You might be tempted to think "Pastor is obsessed with this." "Pastor likes to talk about this all the time." But I'm just preaching the next text and letting God set the emphasis. I wouldn't choose this emphasis - but it is absolutely an emphasis of the Gospels.
Let me show you what I mean real quick. Back in Luke 6, Jesus and his disciples got in trouble because they were picking corn on the sabbath and Jesus stood up to the Pharisees. Remember that?
Also in Luke 6, Jesus healed a man with a withered hand on the sabbath in the synagogue - and then confronted the Pharisees when they had a problem with it.
Now, in Luke 13, in our passage today, Jesus is going to get in trouble because He heals a woman who was bent over for 18 years, and the religious leaders and he's going to have a confrontation about it.
Look at the next chapter - Luke 14:1-6. Jesus heals a man with the dropsy and confronts the Pharisees about it.
So church, I just want you to see that I'm not making this stuff up. I'm not picking and choosing this. This is an emphasis - not THE emphasis - but an emphasis of the book of Luke, and we are just letting the scripture set the emphasis.
Now, with that in mind, let's read verses 10-21 of chapter 13, and we'll talk this morning about the danger of religion.
[!bible] Luke 13:10-21 - KJV 10. And he was teaching in one of the synagogues on the sabbath. 11. And, behold, there was a woman which had a spirit of infirmity eighteen years, and was bowed together, and could in no wise lift up herself. 12. And when Jesus saw her, he called her to him, and said unto her, Woman, thou art loosed from thine infirmity. 13. And he laid his hands on her: and immediately she was made straight, and glorified God. 14. And the ruler of the synagogue answered with indignation, because that Jesus had healed on the sabbath day, and said unto the people, There are six days in which men ought to work: in them therefore come and be healed, and not on the sabbath day. 15. The Lord then answered him, and said, Thou hypocrite, doth not each one of you on the sabbath loose his ox or his ass from the stall, and lead him away to watering? 16. And ought not this woman, being a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan hath bound, lo, these eighteen years, be loosed from this bond on the sabbath day? 17. And when he had said these things, all his adversaries were ashamed: and all the people rejoiced for all the glorious things that were done by him. 18. Then said he, Unto what is the kingdom of God like? and whereunto shall I resemble it? 19. It is like a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and cast into his garden; and it grew, and waxed a great tree; and the fowls of the air lodged in the branches of it. 20. And again he said, Whereunto shall I liken the kingdom of God? 21. It is like leaven, which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal, till the whole was leavened.
This is the word of God. Let's pray and ask God's blessing on our sermon today.
This whole chapter has been a chapter of warnings. Jesus has been saying telling the people that they need to repent or they are going to perish like the people who died under Pilate or when the tower of Siloam fell. That if their tree doesn't show fruit that they are going to be cut down.
And now we get to this story and these parables, and I believe this is a warning too. It's a warning about the danger of religion.
Jesus goes into this synagogue. By the way, this is the last time in Jesus' ministry where he goes into a synagogue.
A synagogue was very similar to what we think of as a local church. They had a pastor - only they called him the president or the ruler of the synagogue. They had weekly Bible reading and weekly sermons. They even had something like Sunday School for teaching the kids. Most faithful jewish people went to the synagogue once a week, on the Sabbath.
So Jesus is in this synagogue and he is the guest preacher. And as Jesus is preaching, He notices a woman there who the scripture says has had an infirmity for eighteen years, she is bowed together and cannot straighten herself.
So this woman is an extreme hunchback. She likely has something like an extreme case of scoliosis or spondylitis deformans where your spine fuses together. She probably had to shuffle along, permanently looking at the ground.
This was likely painful. It was definitely embarrassing. And the text tells us she has dealt with this condition for 18 years.
So as Jesus is preaching, he calls this woman to come forward, and he lays his hands on her and says "woman, thou art loosed from your infirmity." And this woman immediately straightens up, and for the first time in 18 years she can stand tall. For the first time in 18 years, she can look forward. For the first time in 18 years she is free from the pain in her back and she can live a normal life.
And she just starts praising God. You would too. She's been "loosed." She's been released. She's been united from the great burden of her life.
But notice this - not everyone is happy about it. The ruler of the synagogue gets very angry about this. The text says he "answered with indignation" and notice, he speaks to the people. He doesn't speak to Jesus. He is being passive aggressive. He is trying to speak to Jesus through the people because He doesn't have the boldness to just come out and say it.
He says "There are six days in which men ought to work."
Now, stop there. Where does that come from? That comes right out of the ten commandments.
[!bible] Exodus 20:9 - KJV 9. Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work:
This man is quoting the Bible.
He says "There are six days in which men ought to work: in them therefore come and be healed, and not on the sabbath day."
So look, it's not even that he is not talking directly to Jesus. He isn't even critiquing Jesus directly. He is critiquing the people for coming to be healed on the Sabbath day.
Now, let's try to get into this guys head for a minute. Because I think it will be really helpful for us as we try to understand what God would have for us in this text.
This man is a what we would today call a pastor. He has given his life to teaching the Bible. He is morally conservative. He is scrupulous. He is faithful to the traditions. In his mind, he is standing up for the Bible and standing against the sloppiness he sees all around him. In his mind, he's the good guy, standing for the right and for the Bible.
But notice how Jesus responds to him in verse 15:
Thou hypocrite.
Jesus wasn't like this pastor. HE didn't beat around the bush. He wasn't passive aggressive. He was aggressive aggressive and He went right at him. "You are a hypocrite. You are an actor. Your religion is theater."
Then Jesus showed him that he was wrong. He had a wrong interpretation of the Sabbath rules. He asked him a question - do you untie your donkey on the sabbath and get him some water?
And the answer is of course he does. The jews actually had elaborate rules about what they could do and couldn't do with their animals on the sabbath. They couldn't work the animals, but they could take care of them.
So Jesus' argument is if you can untie a donkey on the sabbath day - why can't I untie this poor woman from her bondage on the sabbath day? This woman who is a daughter of Abraham, who is part of God's covenant family? This woman who has been suffering for 18 years??
I love verse 17:
[!bible] Luke 13:17 - KJV 17. And when he had said these things, all his adversaries were ashamed: and all the people rejoiced for all the glorious things that were done by him.
The people who were against Jesus - those frozen chosen who said "how dare he do this on the sabbath?" They were ashamed. They were silenced. And the rest of the people just rejoiced in the glorious things Jesus was doing there.
Now, I believe that this passage, and the parables which we will get to in a second, are a warning against religion. If you think about it, nothing caused more people to miss Christ than religion. Than tradition.
And this wasn't some liberal religion. They weren't denying the Bible. They were embracing it. They were memorizing it. They were trying to live it.
I'm convinced that if you were to time machine the synagogues and the pharisees of Jesus day into our own day and culture - the closest thing you would see are churches like ours. Conservative, traditional churches where people have high moral standards and where the Bible is held in high regard.
And yet it was that very religion, that very tradition, that caused the most people to miss Christ and reject Him.
So the main message I want to give to you today is that religion is dangerous. Religion is dangerous.
Now, I think we can look at this story and the parables that follow and we can see four reasons why religion is dangerous.
Why is religion dangerous? four reasons:
1. Religion is dangerous because it can cause us to miss what Christ is doing.
If you look at this story, think and think about it, its really sad. You had this man, the ruler of this synagogue, who professed to love the Bible. He taught the Bible every week. He memorized vast portions about it. He could argue about various interpretations of it. He tried his best to live by it.
But this man had the person the Bible is about - the very subject of the Bible in his little synagogue and He missed it. He missed Christ and He missed out on what Christ was doing because He was so focused on his tradition and his interpretation and his rules.
And church, I want to tell you about this danger: you can get so into your specific flavor of religion that you totally miss out on what Christ is doing on this earth.
Let me put a finer point on it:
I have a strong preference for traditional worship. I like hymns. I like congregational singing. I like it when people dress up for church. I like reading the King James Bible with it's thees and its thous. But I have one big fear in all of that - I am afraid that we can get so into our particular flavor of Christianity that we miss out on the bigger things that God is doing.
I have met several people in the last several years that God has gloriously saved. They are the real deal. They are on fire for Jesus. They love the Lord and they love the word and they are passionate about serving him - and they were reached in churches that had contemporary worship and used contemporary Bible versions.
Now, if I cannot acknowledge that Jesus is working in some of these churches that do things I don't love - then how am I that different than this grumpy ruler of the synagogue that was passive aggressively taking swipes at Jesus?
Take Charlie Kirk. How can we say that Charlie Kirk was doing the Lord's work, preaching the gospel in all of these campuses and then pretend like the church's that produced Kirk are barely even churches because we don't like their music or how their pastor dresses?
Religion is dangerous because it can cause us to miss what Jesus is doing in the world - seeking and saving that which was lost.
Now, I'm not saying "anything goes as long as people get saved." There are important things we should worry about and even divide over - but what I am saying is that religion can cause us to die on some pretty unimportant hills.
And that leads me to a second danger we can learn from this story about religion...
2. Religion is dangerous because it can cause us to major on minors.
This synagogue ruler in the story was absolutely obsessed with the sabbath. Most of the jews of Jesus' day were. It was a regular sticking point with them.
Do you know why? I think it was because the sabbath was easy to legislate. It was a completely external thing. It's really hard to see if someone is "having no other god's before me." It's really easy to see if they are out hoeing their garden on the Sabbath day.
And so by the time of Christ they had hundreds of very specific sabbath rules they had added to "clarify" what this one command meant - and they were really big on it.
This preacher was all about the sabbath calendar, but he missed out on Christ. He was all about the resting on this special day, but He didn't understand how He was supposed to rest in God's work for His salvation.
Religion is dangerous because it causes us to major on minor things. To emphasize things the Bible might talk about, but that it doesn't emphasize, because those things are easier than the things the Bible does talk about.
Listen, I could preach to you about all kinds of rules. Rules on how you dress. Rules on how often you go to church. Rules about how you give.
But a couple of things would happen if I did that:
- First, you would start to feel really good about yourselves. You would get proud. "We are the good ones, we are the ones who dress right."
- Second, I would be robbing you of what the Bible actually emphasizes.
Think about this: if God wanted you to have a checklist of 100 rules to live by, then He could have given you a checklist of 100 rules to live by.
But it isn't in here. What is in here is a lot about Christ, and a lot about sins of the heart, and a lot about grace. That is what we need.
Religion can cause us to miss what Christ is doing, it causes us to major on minors.
Look at a third danger of religion...
3. Religion is dangerous because it can blind us to the pain of the hurting.
When I read this story as a pastor, this is what really bothers me about it. Here is this woman who has been in pain for 18 years. Think about that. 18 years! She's lived in pain and shame for all those years.
And do you know what? That pain and shame didn't keep her from worship. She was still in the synagogue. She was still there worshiping - probably week in and week out.
But she had a hard life. And she was healed. Miraculously healed. Obviously healed.
Her 18 years of pain and shame produced worship when Christ touched her. She loved Christ and worshiped Him. Her response was worship. His response was criticism.
But what about this religious ruler? What did His religion do for him?
I'm thinking about some of the people in our congregation who have heavy physical and mental burdens. Imagine if one of them was healed, and rather than me rejoicing in it - I saw it as a problem.
How hard hearted can you be?
Church, we ought to care about the plight of the hurting among us. We ought to have Jesus' compassion for them.
Jesus looked at sinners and didn't say "serves them right, sinners. You made your bed, now lie in it. Do better!"
No!
[!bible] John 3:16 - KJV 16. For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.
[!bible] Romans 5:8 - KJV 8. But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.
God looked at sinners with compassion. And Religion, if we are not careful, can replace that compassion with pride. Instead of us seeing ourselves as sinners in need of a Savior, we see ourselves as righteous people who are dotting our is and crossing our ts, unlike those heathen out there.
Church, religion is dangerous. Many, many people are going to stand before God someday in judgement and say "I went to church every Sunday. I wore the right clothes. I sang the right songs."
And Jesus will say to them "Depart from me, I never knew you."
Religion can cause us to miss what God is doing, to major on the minors, to ignore the pain and hurt of the suffering people Christ cares for.
Now, there is one more section of this I want to cover, and I believe it is about religion too. So let me give you my fourth point and then I'll explain it:
4. Religion is dangerous because it grows alongside the truth unnaturally well.
Jesus finished this section off with two parables that He compared to the kingdom of God.
The first was a mustard seed that grew into a large tree that the birds could nest in. The second was some leaven (or yeast) that got hidden in something like 60 lbs of flour and ended up causes the whole mound of flour to be leavened.
Traditionally, this is how these two parables have been interpreted: God's work is something that starts small, and then grows and grows.
But I am going to go out on a limb and I am going to say I don't believe that is the right interpretation here.
Do you know that a mustard seed doesn't grow into a tree. It's a little bush. At most, it might get to be like ten feet tall, but it will never be strong like a tree.
And in Jesus parables, the birds are always negative. Like the birds in the parable of the seeds that came and snatched up the seed.
And leaven, leaven is always negative in the Bible. It's never referring to a good thing.
So here is what I think Jesus meant by these parables, I think he meant that there is going to be some false religion that grows unnaturally well, like a small amount of yeast that leavens a huge pile of flour or a mustard seed that grows as big as a tree - and that is going to make way for error and dangerous religion to be mixed in with the truth.
Jesus has just exposed dangerous religion in the person of this ruler. The people rejoiced, but Jesus knows this isn't over. This kind of religion—the kind that quotes Scripture while missing Christ, that majors on minors, that ignores the hurting—isn't going away. It's going to grow. It's going to spread. It's going to look impressive (like a tree where there should only be a bush), and it's going to work invisibly through the whole lump (like leaven hidden in dough). Jesus is warning them: what you just saw in this ruler? That's not an isolated case. That's a pattern that will persist and expand.
And bad religion, it hides in with the good religion. Like this woman who hid the leaven in the flour. Bad religion works silently, in the dark, infecting the good, leavening the good. Till you wake up one day and what was once great and spiritual is now thoroughly leavened and corrupted.
And so I think this whole section was a warning. A warning against the dangers of false religion.
Now, as we close this sermon today, I want to ask you a question that I think is appropriate:
Are we this synagogue?
- Are we more known for what we are against than what we are for?
- Are we more known for our rules or for Christ?
- Do visitors here feel our compassion or do they feel our judgment?
I don't want to give my life to religion, I want to be a part of what Christ is doing in this world. I'm praying about this, would you pray about it with me?
Finally, I want to ask this. You know, this woman came to church (or synangogue) and worshiped for 18 years - but none of that mattered until she met Christ.
Being in a place of worship doesn't make you a Christian. What matters is if you have personally believed the gospel and trusted Christ. Maybe you are going through the motions today, clinging to religion - and you need to cling to Christ.
Let's stand for prayer.
