Sermon Tone Analysis

The Character of the King - He Reforms to Relate!

Matthew 12:43–45 (NIV84)

“When an evil spirit comes out of a man, it goes through arid places seeking rest and does not find it.

Then it says, ‘I will return to the house I left.’

When it arrives, it finds the house unoccupied, swept clean and put in order.

Then it goes and takes with it seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there.

And the final condition of that man is worse than the first.

That is how it will be with this wicked generation.”

There is a danger that we can engage in a moral self-reformation that makes us look good on the outside but that makes no difference to the inside - This is the Dorrian Gray problem:

You may be aware of the book “The Picture of Dorian Gray” by Oscar WIlde.

The extremely handsome, young Dorian is seduced into thinking that he can sin without suffering evil.

Lord Henry Wotton, Dorian’s charming abd witty benefactor but also his malevolent tempter suggests to him that “The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it”, a famous phrase from the book.

“Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind, and poisons us”, says Lord Henry.

He claims that, “The body sins once, and has done with its sin”....”Nothing remains then but the recollection of a pleasure, or the luxury of a regret”.

He follows the advice to “Live!

Live the wonderful life that is in you!

Let nothing be lost upon you.

Be always searching for new sensations.

Be afraid of nothing.”

He does but he is not entirely happy as revealed when his artist friend, Basil Havilard paints his portraitdepicted.

Basil captures his beauty but Dorian, whilst cpativated by it is also jealous of it!

He explains this to Basil saying, “I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die.

I am jealous of the portrait you have painted of me.

Why should it keep what I must lose?

Every moment that passes takes something from me and gives something to it.

Oh, if it were only the other way!

If the picture could change, and I could be always what I am now!

Why did you paint it?

It will mock me some day—mock me horribly!”

And so Dorian sells his soul to the devil in exchange for “eternal youth.”

, as he remains young on the outside, it is the portrait that grows old and not only so, it reflects the horror of his vile, hedonistic and murderous lifestyle until it has to be locked away and covered up in the attic so that no one will discover Dorian’s monstrous true-self!

But Dorian attempts moral reform without real repentance.

In his final moments, he appears to repent the murder of Basil, the suicides of Sibyl Vane and Alan Campbell, and his countless other sins by refraining from seducing and ruining a naïve village girl.

The discrepancy between the enormity of his crimes and this minor act of contrition is too great.

Furthermore, he realizes that he does not want to confess his sins but rather have them simply go away.

The portrait reflects this hypocrisy and drives him to his final, desperate act.

He decides it is better to destroy the last evidence of his sin—the painting of his soul—than face up to his own depravity.

But the depravity he seeks to destroy is, in essence, himself; therefore, by killing it, he kills himself.

His attempt to live life without moral restraint and reform is too costly and as the book draws to a conclusion, we discover that “The soul is a terrible reality.

It can be bought and sold and bartered away.”

It is hardly surprising that Victorian Britain thought of Wilde’s book as immoral, but Wilde had a point when he observed that, “The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.”

He defended the book to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of Sherlock Holmes, , when he said in 1891: “I cannot understand how they can treat Dorian Gray as immoral”.

He described it in a letter to the St. James Gazette journal, as “a story with a moral.

And the moral is this: All excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its own punishment”.

“All excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its own punishment”.

- Moral failure and moral success in terms of improving oneself and becoming proud of one’s moral progress can be equally dangerous spiritually!

The Danger of Self-Righteousness:

Jesus warned people of this illustrates this in the parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector: (Luke 18:11–14).

“God, I thank you that I am not like other people: swindlers, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax-gatherer.

I fast twice a week; I pay tithes of all that I get”

In his own eyes he is already right with God and needs nothing from God and so he gets nothing from God! - He can’t complain really can he?(cf.

Matt.

19:20).

But, in contrast, God can do a great deal for the person who, like the tax-collector, cries out, “God, be merciful to me, the sinner!”

He is the person who goes “down to his house justified rather than the other; for everyone who exalts himself shall be humbled, but he who humbles himself shall be exalted” (Luke 18:13–14).

The problem is that self-righteousness can be so deceptive of our own true condition before God and judgmental of other peopl’s true condition before God.

By itself, morality leads to self-righteousness and is a very dangerous thing.

Jesus wants us to reform in order to relate to Him.

He does not want us to outwardly good, without chaning the way we truly are on the inside!

He must change us on the inside or the we will like the Pharisees be “whitewashed tombs” full of “dead man’s bones and full of uncleaness”

This was applicable to the Pharisees as Jesus makes clear in Matthew 23:2-5

“The teachers of the law and the Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat.

So you must obey them and do everything they tell you.

But do not do what they do, for they do not practice what they preach.

They tie up heavy loads and put them on men’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them.

“Everything they do is done for men to see: They make their phylacteries wide and the tassels on their garments long.”

Looking good on the outside - a moral reform - is not enough if the inside remains changed.

In this sense appearing to be religious and good is as dangerous for society as being openly wicked and immoral.

Jesus said of these very moralistic, outwardly righteous group of people “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites!

You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence.

Blind Pharisee!

First clean the inside of the cup and dish, and then the outside also will be clean.

Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites!

You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of dead men’s bones and everything unclean.

In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness.

(Matt.

23:25–28).



“There has never been a group of men more committed to a demanding religious and moral code than the Pharisees and never a group of men so far from God.”(John MacArthur jr).

Beware of Self-Rigteousness!

Self-righteousness can desensitize a person to sin to the point that he is not aware that his very soul is rotting away under demonic corruption.

(so the Portrait of Dorian Gray).

Self-righteousness is obsessed with cleaning up the life of itself and otehrs not to glorify God but to validae self - “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites,” Jesus said, “because you travel about on sea and land to make one proselyte; and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hell as yourselves” (Matt.

23:15).

This is the great danger the Church faces because to approve of moral actions is good and to call for moral reform is vital but to preach morality, even according to biblical standards of behavior, but not salvation through Christ promotes a religion that drives men further from God than they were before they reformed.

It is much easier to reach someone who is overwhelmed with a true sense of His sin than someone who is overwhelmed with a false sense of his righteousness.

That is why Jesus said, “I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners” (Matt.

9:13).

Christ could not reach them, because they thought they had no need of any spiritual help, least of all salvation from sin.

Peter takes this up and warns the Church about perople who “after they have escaped the defilements of the world by the knowledge of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in them and are overcome, the last state has become worse for them than the first.

For it would be better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than having known it, to turn away from the holy commandment delivered to them.

It has happened to them according to the true proverb, ‘A dog returns to its own vomit,’ and, ‘A sow, after washing, returns to wallowing in the mire’ ” (2 Pet.

2:20–22).

The reformed but unconverted person will eventually revert to sinful ways for the same reason that the dog returns to its vomit and the washed sow returns to the mud wallow—because in each case the original nature has not been changed.

Jesus’ parable applied to Israel as a nation, to this evil generation, as well as to individual Jews.

The principle is this, outer reformation without inner transformation brings susceptibility to even worse evil than that from which one turned away.

2. The Danger of Reform without Relationship:

This passage is, to say the least an unusual account and it forces us to ask the question, “What kind of teaching is this?” in terms of its genre?

Is it a parable, as R.T France suggests, one which is analogous of what will happen to the Pharisees and those Jews who reject Jesus?

Does the removal of the demon and the cleaning and sweeping of the house represent their efforts at getting rid of anything in their lives that they regard as “unclean” or “immoral”?

And is it therefore warning against the limitations of this process?

That moral reformation might rid you of something unclean but if you don;t fill the house with somethign better, you are open toe ven worse, corrupting and unclean ifnfluences as a result.

Or is Jesus likening, Israel to a “house” - the “lost sheep of the house of Israel” who, for all the privilege of having the law of God which permits them to clean the house and make it habitable for use, are now in danger of an even worse condition than before, becasue Jesus has appeared to tehma s their Saviour and King but in their rejection of Him, they are committing the “blasphemy against the Holy Spirit” and opening themselves up to an even worse spiritual condition in not taking advantage of the window of opportunity presented by his coming.

Is it in some sense an illustration of a very real, potential condition where the individual who experience some demonic deliverance, but are left “empty” because they do not replace the influence of evil with the presence of the Holy Spirit and as a result fail to follow through on spiritual opportunity for freedom and become entangled again by even worse demonic possession?

Whatever, and they all have at least some truth about them, “the parable gives a vividly humorous account of the experiences and tactics of the expelled unclean spirit, but its point is in the condition of the house”(R.

T. France)