As I was preparing this message, the Lord kept bringing to my mind Brother Shaul in Israel. Brother Shaul is the one who leads the Messianic believers — Jewish people who accept Jesus as the Messiah — in the city of Tiberias, on the western shore of the Lake of Galilee. As he was taking us to visit a Christian-owned factory that produces sophisticated radio antennas, we came up to a crossroad and a car went by. Brother Shaul said: that's the car.
He shared his testimony with us. One day he was walking along the road when suddenly the voice of the Lord said to him, "Shaul, jump to the side." In that moment he jumped in immediate obedience, and a mustard-coloured Volvo missed him by just a few inches. It was no accident. The people in that car were members of what is called in Israel Yad Achim — "the arm of the brother" — the militant arm of the Orthodox Jewish faith, whose task is quite literally to destroy Christians. Their goal that day was to kill Shaul by running him down and making it look like an accident. If he had not been tuned in to the voice of the Lord, he would have been dead and his seven children fatherless.
Now I want to draw your attention to a remarkable fact: the people who wanted to kill Shaul are very religious people. They are the most religious wing of the most Orthodox group of Jews in Israel. In the name of religion they are willing to commit murder. Religion can be an exceedingly dangerous thing. When we arrived at the Christian factory, virtually every single pane of glass in that compound had been smashed. Not one piece intact. Such is the bitterness and hostility — and it comes not from people who have no religion, but from the most religious people in Israel.
The centre of my message today is this: the most dangerous thing is to be religious without being spiritual. I want to do a sweeping survey of Matthew chapters 23 to 25, which have a very organic connection. Sometimes in my preaching I take one verse and analyze it in depth — that is exposition. But sometimes we must stand back and use a wide-angle lens to see the whole panorama, so that we do not miss the wood for the trees.
Matthew 23 deals with the very problem we are talking about. Verses 1 to 3: "The scribes and Pharisees sit on Moses' seat. So practice and observe whatever they tell you, but not what they do. For they preach, but they do not practice." The Pharisees are the predecessors, the forerunners, of the Orthodox Jews in Israel today. Most people are not aware that the Orthodox Jews hold to exactly the same teaching as the Pharisees did — they are their spiritual descendants in virtually an unbroken line. When the temple was destroyed in AD 70 and the final Jewish revolt was crushed in AD 135, the Sadducees and Essenes were wiped out, and only the Pharisees survived. All the great rabbis of the Talmud and rabbinic tradition were Pharisees. So when you speak of Judaism today, the very people who tried to kill Brother Shaul are in the spiritual line of descent from the Pharisees. Read Matthew 23 and you will see the exact same pattern: killing the prophets, stoning those who are sent to them (verse 37), silencing those who remain faithful to God.
Every paragraph in this chapter begins with the same words: "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites." I want to give you a very simple definition of hypocrisy as Jesus uses it here: it is false spirituality. There is a vital difference between true spirituality and false spirituality, and I want the Spirit of the Lord to check your heart today — whether your spirituality is true or false. Because if your spirituality is false, one of these days you might commit murder in God's name, just as the Lord Jesus told his disciples: "They will kill you and think they are doing God's service." That is how dangerous false spirituality is.
You may not yet be going around committing murder. But the false spirituality will manifest in a critical attitude towards your brothers and sisters, and that critical attitude grows and grows until, one day, the thought of eliminating someone becomes thinkable. Right now it may seem unthinkable. But if you continue in false spirituality, it will become thinkable. And as we move towards the end of this age — and the times of the Gentiles are coming to an end, as I shared from Luke 21:24 — false spirituality will become more and more dominant in the church, with the most dangerous and most harmful results. Brother will go against brother. Father will hand over his child to death. Read it all in chapter 24 and the parallel accounts in Mark 13 and Luke 21. It all starts with doctrinal controversy, with insistence on your particular brand of doctrine to such a degree that there is no more love for someone who does not agree with you.
I saw a very sad situation before we went to Tiberias, among the believers in Nahariya — a city on the Mediterranean coast near the Lebanese border, so close that PLO Katusha rockets sometimes land there. A fellowship there had split and would not even speak to one another. Over what issue? A doctrine from the extreme wing of Pentecostalism: that if you are a true Christian, God will certainly heal you of any sickness whatsoever, and that if you walk with God you will always prosper materially. The argument goes that sin is connected to illness and poverty; Christ removed sin; therefore Christ removed illness and poverty; therefore if you are sick or poor you simply lack faith. With that logic they excommunicate each other, they refuse to speak, they label one another unfaithful. That doctrine literally destroyed the Nahariya fellowship.
This is the progression of false spirituality: divisions, dissensions, a critical spirit, and ultimately even murder in God's name. That is precisely what the Lord Jesus is warning about in Matthew 23 to 25. That is why I say we must very carefully distinguish between being truly spiritual and being falsely spiritual. And the distinction is not as easy as you might think.
In a previous message on this topic, I gave one guideline: the difference between being superficial and being deep. The falsely spiritual are concerned with external things, like the Pharisees who tithed mint and dill and cumin but neglected the weightier matters of the law — justice, mercy, and faith. They strain out a gnat but swallow a camel. That guideline is true, but it is inadequate. You can say to yourself, "Ah, but I am not superficial. I am a very deep person. I am a deep thinker. Therefore I can be assured I am genuinely spiritual." It is not so easy to tell. We need a sensitivity to the Spirit of the Lord that is lacking in most of us — and I say most of us, perhaps almost all of us, including myself.
Let me illustrate. Do you believe that the Bible is the word of God, every jot and tittle? I trust you will say yes. Your faith is very much to be admired. But if you think that proves your spirituality is genuine, you have not yet understood the teaching of the Lord Jesus. The Pharisees believed every little hook and dot in the Hebrew text to be divinely inspired. If you believe the Bible to be the word of God, you are in good company — the Pharisees believed it too, with all their heart. And the Lord Jesus called them hypocrites. Why? Because they believed and did not live by it. "They preach, but they do not practice." You believe the Bible commands you to love your brother. Is there one brother or sister in this church that you do not love — that you walk past without acknowledging? Then by your own confession you are a hypocrite. The Lord did not say "you shall not hate your brother." He said "you shall love him." That is a far higher and more positive command. Do you feel jealousy when someone praises another co-worker and not you? Jealousy breaks the commandment to love. Do you harbour an unforgiving spirit toward someone who wronged you? Jesus is very clear: "Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors." If you have not forgiven, you have not been forgiven. That is how strict and blunt the word of God is. It cuts like a sharp two-edged sword. You cannot water it down and then say you have fulfilled it.
# The Difference Between Spiritual and Religious (Part B) — Evangelism, Prayer, Charity, and the Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins
What is another test of being a good evangelical Christian? One is believing the Bible. Let us find another: zeal to evangelise. Surely that is a good test! I grab this person and open the Bible: "Do you believe? Do you confess your sins? Believe in Jesus today!" I know how many tracts I have distributed, how many doors I have knocked upon, how many missionary societies I support. Surely that proves I am a spiritual person. And you find yourself in good company again — the company of the Pharisees.
Read Matthew 23:15: "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you traverse sea and land to make a single proselyte, and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a child of hell as yourselves." They travelled any distance, spared no expense, to make one single convert. That is dedication. And Jesus says: they are hypocrites. You evangelize and they evangelize — where is the difference? The difference is not in the activity but in the person doing it. Consider the Jehovah's Witnesses: they can outrun almost all of us in evangelistic effort. Does that prove they are spiritual? If not, then why is it so difficult to see that evangelistic zeal is no evidence of spirituality? It is simply the eagerness to pass on a particular brand of teaching and doctrine. The Pharisees were very anxious to pass on Pharisaic teaching. Church activity, Christian activity, so-called spiritual activity — none of it proves anything about your relationship with God. Don't think because you are busy in the church, or in a leadership role, or preaching and evangelising, that proves anything. Being spiritual has to do with openness, yieldedness, submission to Christ as Lord — does the Holy Spirit control your life, or do you run your own life with your own religious programme?
Let us talk about prayer. Surely now we are on safe ground. How much time do I spend in prayer? Out of modesty I will not tell you — but quite a long time. And if you could see me praying, you would be impressed. Brothers and sisters, one of these days I would like you to visit Israel and see the Orthodox Jews at the Wailing Wall. Their whole bodies sway with intense expression; they will stand there for hours. We Christians stand still with eyes closed, expressionless. In terms of length and intensity, they win on every count. And yet Jesus warned about long prayers in Matthew 6:7: "In praying, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think they will be heard for their many words." Many of us do exactly the same — we rush through a prayer list to get through it, hand on a pile of prayer requests, and we call it intercession. Brothers and sisters, we cannot tell from prayer alone whether a person is spiritual. Spirituality is not measured chronologically. It is not a three-hour prayer versus a one-hour prayer. Even there we are at a loss for criteria.
Let us talk about giving money to the needy. Surely this is safe ground. And even there, 1 Corinthians 13: "If I give everything I have, and even my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing." It is not the doing but the motive for doing it. You take the Bible so that you can hit someone over the head with it: "I believe and you don't — I am better than you." That is the wrong motive for believing. You evangelise out of zeal to propagate your particular doctrine. That is the wrong motive for evangelising. You give money so that others will know you give. That is the wrong motive for giving. The motive and the attitude in all of this is what matters — not the external act.
This is exceedingly important to grasp. We need to go deeper, brothers and sisters, or we are going to be trapped in a false spirituality that will destroy the church. And in the day of judgment you might have the terrible shock — the Lord says to you: "You are a goat." How can that be? I am a goat? And notice in Matthew 25 that none of the goats realised they were goats. They thought they were sheep. They said: "Lord, when did we do this?" They genuinely did not understand. And what is the end result for the goats? "Depart from me into everlasting condemnation." We are not talking merely about losing some reward, brothers and sisters. We are talking about eternal salvation. And we are far too confident that we are not goats. The greatest sign of superficial spirituality is confidence that we are all right, even confidence that this assurance comes from the Lord. Paul says: "Work out your salvation with fear and trembling."
So how can we be sure we are not goats? We are left with no easy external criteria. But there is one way, and with this we must close. Matthew 25:1–13, the parable of the wise and foolish virgins. In that parable there are virtually no differences whatever between the two groups — they both are virgins, both believe in and await the bridegroom, both suffer the same infirmities in the long wait, both fall asleep. One group is not more righteous than the other. They have the same lamps, the same oil. The only difference is that one group's oil ran out.
The parable only makes sense on one condition: the only way to enter the wedding feast is with lights burning. It does not matter whether your lights were burning before. What matters is whether they are burning at the moment the bridegroom comes. Why did the lights go out? The oil ran out. And what does oil represent in the Bible? The Holy Spirit. The wise ones lived in the continual fullness of the Spirit. The moment you stop living in the fullness of the Spirit, you sink into false spirituality. You are still religious — your beliefs have not changed — but the oil is running low. As time went on, their spiritual reserve burned lower and lower until there was no more. When Jesus comes, we will still need to be shining, and if your light is not shining at that time, you will not enter in.
And what does light signify in Matthew 5? The spiritual quality of your life manifested in the way you live and the works you do — deeds done by his power and strength. That is the difference between the truly spiritual and the falsely spiritual person. The religious man, the hypocrite with false religion, does not live in the continuing grace and power of God. He does not live as a beggar, poor in spirit, depending moment by moment upon the Lord. Have you ever heard of a genuine beggar who criticises another beggar? They are both beggars — what is there to be proud about? The Lord says "judge not" for exactly this reason: the moment you judge another, you are no longer poor in spirit, no longer living in dependence upon God's grace, no longer living in the fullness of the Spirit. The person who lives in constant humble dependence upon the Lord has a quality of life that is unmistakably distinct. He is humble not because he tries to be humble, but because he knows he depends every moment upon the mercy and grace of God.
Once you no longer depend upon the Holy Spirit, your oil burns out, your light goes out, and you substitute more and more religious activity to cover your spiritual poverty. You become more dogmatic, more critical of others. You may even give more money because you are no longer giving more spiritually. These are the things you must watch out for, step by step, stage by stage.
I think of the Christians in Israel — of Brother Shaul and the others, their windows smashed, the Baptist church in Jerusalem a charred ruin burned by petrol bomb, another church barely escaping the same fate. It is not unbelievers who are the most dangerous enemies of the spiritual people. It is the religious people. And you and I have to make a choice: whether we are going to be religious or spiritual in this much deeper sense, whether our hearts are totally open to doing his will by the grace and power of the Holy Spirit. Let us be quiet in prayer.