Humble Gratitude

Scripture: Luke 18:9-14

Luke 18:9–14 NIV

9 To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everyone else, Jesus told this parable: 10 “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. 11 The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. 12 I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’ 13 “But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’ 14 “I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”

10.26.2025

Order of Service:

Announcements

Opening Worship

Prayer Requests

Prayer Song

Pastoral Prayer

Kid’s Time

Offering (Doxology and Offering Prayer)

Scripture Reading

Sermon

Closing Song

Benediction

Special Notes:

Standard

Opening Prayer:

O God,

the strength of those who humbly confess their sin

and place their hope in you,

save us from vain displays of righteousness,

and give us grace to keep faith

with the true humility of our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

Humble Gratitude

Our Time

Last Sunday, I talked about God's timing, how we struggle with it, and how our faith grows each day. We don't have control over God's timing. But we do have control over our own time.

Our time might be the ultimate example of God providing for us. More than money, property, or possessions, and even more than our relationships with one another, without time, nothing else matters at all.

The strange thing about time is that we don't know how much we have. Just about everything else in life we can measure. We can figure out how much we need, how we want to use it or trade it. But time? We never truly know how much we have. Even in life's darkest moments, God can restore purpose to our remaining time, reminding us that the amount we have remains a mystery.

This month, we've focused on gratitude, and I hope you've seen that gratitude is not merely a spiritual discipline you add on to everything else. The ways you express gratitude can be spiritual disciplines, but they're as unique as each individual. Gratitude is an attitude. It's part of your character, part of who you are that comes out in what you do, and it touches everything.

Today, our scripture offers insight into how Jesus perceives our use of time, and whether it is marked by true gratitude or just pretending.

The Pharisee and the Tax Collector

The Pharisee

Just like last week, today's parable focuses on two characters. But unlike last week's extreme personalities in a distant setting, these characters were very real. In fact, there were likely multiple Pharisees and tax collectors right there at the dinner party, listening to Jesus tell this story. This could have been something Jesus actually witnessed.

In this parable, Jesus describes what God's people are like, starting with a Pharisee: the model of religious life for everyone. They made sure their track in life was always moving up and to the right. They measured success by money, political power, and social status, all of which translated into respect. Add to that conservative beliefs and good deeds. Their goal was to make and save the most money, give to causes that would earn them respect, and use their influence to strongly encourage everyone to believe almost as righteously as they did.

Pharisees could be genuine examples of a life lived with good intentions, or they could be models of hypocrisy. But either way, they learned to compare themselves to others and to everyone around them. That's why this Pharisee doesn't begin his prayer confessing what he's done wrong. Instead, he comes to God and thanks Him for his success, his righteousness, and the way God made him better than everyone else: all those robbers and adulterers, and even that tax collector standing nearby.

He's recognizing his righteousness and giving God the glory for it, in his words. But he doesn't stop there. He knows there are plenty of other Pharisees who could say the same thing. He has to do more than just avoid sin. So he offers up his good deeds: he fasts twice a week, and he gives a tenth, a tithe, of all that he gets.

Fasting was typically done on special holidays or during times of repentance. But this Pharisee wanted extra credit. He doesn't fast just once a week like other Pharisees, but twice, just to make sure. And his tithing? He doesn't just give 10% of his income. Jesus talked about Pharisees like him who would tithe everything: 10% of their money, crops, livestock, and then raid their pantry to measure out a tenth of their salt, their spices, even their clothes. This guy was running his own blessing box, and he wanted everyone to remember him for it.

All of these things —avoiding sin and doing good deeds —are really good. They're godly things. Things we know we should be doing, and probably doing more of. These are the things he's built his life upon. So he comes and gives thanks to God for getting him started off on the right foot, and tells God all the ways he's been such a great steward of those gifts.

The part about him that really gets to us is when he pauses to pick on that tax collector standing near him. If he hadn't done that, this would be the type of person we would not only want in our church, but also running it. Loyal. Obedient. Generous up to the letter of the law. And willing to give God the credit for making him that way.

The Tax Collector

The next character is the tax collector. This man had money, power, and influence. Everyone in the temple would have known who he was, or at least what he did for a living. But unlike the Pharisee, he had nothing to offer God.

Tax collectors were viewed as traitors by their own people: Jews who collected money from their neighbors to support the occupying Roman army. They got rich off the suffering of others, taking more than required and keeping the difference. They were outcasts from their own community, unwelcome in their own temple.

Here's what made their situation even more desperate: according to the law and the sacrificial system God gave to Moses, there was no forgiveness of sin without repentance. God did not accept sacrifices for sins that people weren't sorry for or intended to continue doing. The tax collector's very profession was considered sinful. Unless he was willing to quit his job and make restitution to everyone he'd overtaxed, an impossible task, there would be no forgiveness for him. The system had no room for him.

So, although this tax collector was wealthy, he stood in the temple with nothing to offer God. And he knew it. He didn't list sins he'd avoided. He didn't mention any good deeds. He couldn't even lift his eyes to heaven. He simply beat his chest and begged, "God, have mercy on me, a sinner."

He knew exactly who he was: a man whose life's work separated him from God and God's people. Yet he came anyway, throwing himself on God's mercy with nothing to bargain with, nothing to trade, nothing to prove his worth.

Jesus said he was the one who went home justified that day. He was the one who walked away in a closer relationship with God than the Pharisee, who had done nothing wrong and had done so much good for God. The man with nothing to offer received everything. The man who had everything to offer went home with nothing.

Church

When people ask me whether I grew up in church, I have a hard time answering. My parents dropped me off at Sunday school, where we learned lessons, made crafts, and memorized Bible verses. But I had no place in the worship service. As a young person, I didn't think God was worth my time. And looking around the room, I was pretty sure there were others who didn't really think God was worth their time either. Some were there to be seen, to continue their life path of moving up and to the right. Others seemed almost too enthusiastic about Jesus and prayer. To my young mind that didn't know better, it all felt disconnected from real life.

Looking back, I can see that I wasn't really part of the church family. I was just there —though not consistently —and I didn't want to be there when I was. I wanted to use my time for myself.

Over the years, people have pointed out that those Sunday school lessons probably helped me get to where I am today. There's truth in that. But I also had classmates who attended more faithfully than I did, only to have their lives ended or destroyed by the choices they made, some of them before graduation. God's grace made the difference, not just church attendance.

I can thank God, like the Pharisee, for the circumstances that drew me closer to Him and kept me from worse trouble. Many of us have a similar story. We get ourselves to church, pull away from things we know are wrong, try to focus on using our time for God, making small sacrifices, and giving what we can. We try to get our lives moving up and to the right, maybe a little more each week. But Jesus says that's not the life of someone who has the right relationship with God.

I left the church before I found my need for Jesus. And then Jesus came and found me before I even found my way back to church. When I came back, I didn't see the other people around me anymore. I just saw Jesus and my need for Him.

The truth is, we can forget what it cost God to love us. We forget that while we continue to sin, we act as though we are His enemies. We celebrate forgiveness every week, come and ask for more, but like the Pharisee, we don't always know what we're being forgiven for.

The recovery community knows something important about this: they take a serious moral inventory of their lives. They confess their sins to receive forgiveness. Without this kind of self-examination, we're not even paying attention to whether we're sinning or not. We expect to keep receiving pardons from God every day, and it doesn’t matter if we know what sins those pardons are for or not. That means we can very easily stop following Jesus altogether without even knowing it.

Sometimes our hearts grow cold, and we don't feel the Spirit. It has nothing to do with the people around us or the activities we're participating in. It's that we've stopped noticing our need for Jesus. But when we're in touch with that need, like that tax collector was, knowing we have nothing to offer, desperate for His mercy because we know the sin in our life, we know there's nothing we can do except beg Him to come and save us again. We can find ourselves in the coldest, deadest place, and it won't matter because Jesus will hear us and He will show up.

Humility, Gratitude, and First Fruits

I think there's a little bit of Pharisee in all of us. It's hard to do that serious moral inventory, to really dig down and find what we need to repent from and ask forgiveness for. That's a humbling task. It brings us back to the realization that we have nothing to offer God. Everything we have is what He first gave us. The good choices we've made were encouraged by His Word, His Spirit, and people He put in our path. Without His grace, there are no depths we wouldn't crawl ourselves into.

Taking that serious, honest look at our lives humbles us. But that humility opens our hearts to gratitude in a way that nothing else does. When we know our sin, know what it means to be forgiven, and know what it cost God to forgive us, that changes everything. Our offerings are no longer a church tax or obligation. They become a sacrifice of thanksgiving for what He has already done. They become firstfruits, not leftovers.

Talking about money and church is often taboo, and we're going to talk about it more because Scripture does. But today I want to go somewhere even deeper. Because there's something God wants even more from you, something harder to give. Your time.

Sometimes we talk about volunteering our time in serving opportunities like it's a grab bag: as long as you've done something, you can pat yourself on the back like the good Pharisee. But I want you to think about what it means to offer God the firstfruits of your time.

When God calls us to bring Him an offering, He doesn't ask for whatever's left over after we've used it. He asks for pure, unblemished offerings. He asks for firstfruits, the best of the harvest, given first in faith that there will be enough for everything else.

So when we offer God our time, are we giving Him whatever we can fit in? Letting the world, our work, our family, everything else have first pick, leaving God the scraps? Or are we coming to God, saying, "Lord, you pick. You choose what time you want. I'll offer it to you in faith that you will give me the time I need for everything else."

Brothers and sisters, are you willing to take time for that honest look at your life? To see your sin for what it is and confess it before God? To know your need and how great the cost was to forgive that sin?

Will you let God humble you, so you can come to a place of true gratitude: not fishing for things to be thankful for, but knowing deep in your heart the gratitude that comes from His grace?

As we celebrate His sacrifice and come in worship, will you offer yourself, your life, your time, the most valuable thing you have, to Him? Will you give Him the firstfruits of all He's given you?

Closing Prayer

Lord, we come to you, blinded by our pride and ingratitude, and the sin that we continue to allow to live in us. We know that, even in our good days, when we want to turn away from that sin and give ourselves entirely to you, without your help, we are powerless to do anything against it. Open our eyes to those weeds that grow in our lives, so that we can see them, confess them to you, and ask for your help in removing them. We are sorry for the times that we have done good deeds to look good in the eyes of others or to feel better about ourselves. Today, Lord, we're grateful that you've given us the ability to give you anything at all.

As you do that good work in us, humbling us, and filling us with true gratitude, as you teach us to worship you by coming and offering our lives before you. Help us be willing to offer the most precious gift we have: our time. And to allow you the first choice, instead of giving you the leftovers. We may not trust you enough, Lord, to really do that. Help us remember how trustworthy you have been to us. Give us the faith to humbly come before you and offer ourselves as your faithful, grateful people. In Jesus' name, amen.