The Pharisee and the Loan Shark

The Pharisee and the Loan Shark

by Francis MacNutt

Transcribed from the original recording; may contain errors.

Alright, tonight I want to talk to you about something that’s just really been hitting me the last few years. And it’s like so many things. I guess I always knew this, but in a way I didn’t really know it. Or fully see the implications of what I’m going to tell you.

And I think it’s pretty obvious that even Christians don’t really fully know what Christianity is all about. Sometimes we know the right words, can say it all, but somehow we don’t really believe it fully. One way we believe it in the mind, but we don’t sense the fullness of what Jesus came to give us.

And I think like the really great heresy in the churches… And there’s not any false doctrine, it’s like something is missing in a way. But it’s that Jesus came as a great teacher. That there are certain things that He came to instruct us in. And if we really learn these Christian truths, that this is what Christianity is all about. Now, that’s true, isn’t it? Jesus did come to teach us about His Father.

About His new commandment, His new agreement. And there are a number of things He did come to teach us. But the most basic thing of all isn’t just a teaching. And I want to really hit home with this through the gospel. And I’d like you to listen to this. This is from the first chapter of St. Mark. As you probably know, Mark was probably the earliest of the gospels to be written. From what we’re able to surmise, it was written around the year 50. For a time, the scholars are putting that back to 90 or 100 or somewhere in there. Then they found a fragment. And it was charcoal dated. And it went back to these very, very early days. So this is the first chapter of Mark.

The 21st verse and following. Now listen to this and see if something doesn’t strike you as really unusual. This is right after He calls His first four disciples. And shortly after He begins to preach. After He begins to preach the good news. They went as far as Capernaum. And as soon as the Sabbath came, He went to the synagogue and He began to teach. And His teaching made a deep impression on them. Because unlike the scribes, He taught them with authority.

In their synagogue just then, there was a man possessed by an unclean spirit. And it shouted, “What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.” But Jesus said sharply, “Be quiet. Come out of him.” And the unclean spirit threw the man into convulsions. And with a loud cry went out. And the people were so astonished. And if you’re looking at this, I ask you to stop looking at it for a moment. I’ll tell you why later. The people were so astonished that they started asking each other what it all meant. “Here is teaching that’s new,” they said. “With authority behind it.”

Now you just heard that. What’s the new teaching? So far in Mark’s gospel, it just says that Jesus preached that good news is at hand. And that the people should repent and believe in the good news. And then this happens. And the people are amazed. And they start asking each other, “What’s this all about? What’s it mean?” And they said, “Here is teaching that’s new. With authority.”

And then it completes the sentence. “He gives orders even to unclean spirits and they obey Him.” And so the new teaching in the New Testament, at least in part, is not just a logical kind of a teaching. But the new teaching is He gives orders even to unclean spirits and they obey Him. And as the New Testament, as well as the old, present it, we, now humankind, are oppressed by a great force of evil.

We are created by God. We’re basically good because created by God. But something got in there through Satan. And since that time, the whole world is radically wounded. St. Paul says, “All creation is groaning, waiting for the revelation of the sons of God.” And we, in particular, we human beings, are really wounded. And the whole history of God’s chosen people in the Old Testament shows that even though God made these fantastic promises, the people were never able to live up to what they knew they should live up to. And Paul says, you know, they have the law. But the law doesn’t help you inside. All it does is show you where you’re wrong and you can’t live up to it. And it just brings greater condemnation on you.

And so all of us are really trapped. And Paul talks about wanting to do something and he can’t do it. And the very things he wants to do and knows he should do, he can’t do them. And we’re all in this situation.

And what I see us trying to do, and there’s something of this in every one of us, is to try to work this out on our own power. To try to get someplace on our own power or by teaching, even if it’s the gospel teaching. And even people wandering around with this book in their hand, but just taking the teachings out of it, that’s not enough to do it.

If you just take the teachings without the power of the gospel, we end up as literalists and people very much like Old Testament type people. And I see many Christians around are kind of hardened. They got a law. And they keep beating other people over the head with the law. I remember one priest who went to a prayer group and he came back and reported. And he said, “All those people had their Bibles there and they were shooting them at each other.”

I see you know the feeling. And it is fantastic what people do by creating laws. And we usually create laws that we can keep, see. And nobody else keeps them. And then we think we’re better than other people. There’s a marvelous book by Vinson Synan, who’s an Assemblies of God pastor, called The History of the Pentecostal Holiness Movement in the United States. And you look at all these, the results of these fantastic revivals they had, you know, 100 years ago. Amazing revivals where people came to Christ. And then you look at what they did with those revivals. There’s one group that decided that Coca-Cola was evil. And anybody who drank Coke was committing sin. Did you know that?

And it’s like every group has certain rules that they obey, which nobody else really obeys. And it enables you to really look down. Like, you mentioned Tommy Tyson. And I said to Tommy, “You know, you’re a Methodist, and Methodists don’t believe in drinking.” I said, “Where did you get that out of the… No, where did that come from?” Like, you go to Europe, you go to Palestine, you go all over the world, and everybody drinks. And nobody thinks anything about it. It’s wrong to get drunk, clearly, from the Bible. But where do groups get that it’s wrong to drink, period?

And I thought Tommy would enlighten me on this, because he was a Methodist. “I know, tell me the truth.” And Tommy said, “Well…” He said, “I think it comes from the early frontier days, when the people were spread out on the frontier. And they’d just get together once a year. And when they got together, they’d have a real revival. They’d get a preacher in there, and they would be together three days, like a place like this, only more frontier type.

“And they’d get together, and their tendency, that kind of people being… not being with anybody for a whole year, if they got liquor in there, instead of having a real revival, you’d get an orgy.” No, seriously, that’s true. And he said, “I think that’s what it comes from.” A very real Christian application to a pastoral situation. Where it was better just to forbid anybody to drink and keep it out of the camp.

Now, I don’t know whether that’s the way it came about. But it’s like, we all have these kind of rules, and some of them are good. Maybe that’s a true one. I don’t want to impose my own views on this. I’m just saying, it’s like almost every Christian group has particular rules. In the Roman Catholic Church, up to about ten years ago, as you all know, we didn’t eat meat on Friday.

And because we didn’t eat meat on Friday, there is a tendency, see, to look down on other people. There are those people eating meat, you know. We don’t. We sacrifice for the passion of Jesus on Friday. And there’s something in us that wants to be holier than other people.

And ten years ago, when that was taken off, and people didn’t have to, Catholics didn’t have to abstain from meat on Friday, there were many Catholics who were really disturbed. It was like their identity was being taken away. And they were saying, “Well, if I don’t have to do that on Friday, how am I different from a Protestant?”

It’s like they really wanted to be different from Protestants. Now, if that’s our motive for our difference, because we want to be different, we want to feel superior, then there’s something wrong in that whole motivation. And it’s really good that that one went.

Somebody once said, we had that rule because the first pope we had was a fisherman. He wanted business. But there are many things like that. I think all you have to do is to look at all the different groupings of Christians in our country.

I see it in the charismatic renewal. As soon as we began, some of our Catholic prayer groups began talking about these various gifts of the Spirit, like the gift of tongues. We had people coming in, and I don’t know where they got this, but there’s fair scriptural evidence for this. But they were saying, unless you’ve prayed in tongues, you don’t have the Spirit. And I’d see them over at our prayer meetings. They’d be working over some poor woman here in the corner, getting her to imitate them, because they weren’t satisfied she’d received the Holy Spirit. And this poor woman, if she didn’t do what they told them, she’d really feel guilty. She’d feel terrible about it afterwards, and would begin to wonder if she was a Christian. We were having to pick up these pieces all over.

And finally, we had no option except to say to those people, “You know, you don’t minister in our prayer group, because you’re hurting people, and you’re telling them they don’t know Jesus.” And they do. I know this person. And who are you to come right in off the street, and you talk to one of my people that I know, and you tell her that she’s not a Christian. And you call yourself a Christian. And it’s like in the name of Christianity, we end up, well, you know how it is, been fighting each other for 500 years.

And so what Jesus came to give was a kind of a power, a very real power, to free us from this evil that we’re in. And wherever He saw somebody who was hurting, and who admitted they were hurting, wasn’t like they had to be very holy or anything like that. All they had to do was to admit that they were hurting, and Jesus would touch them and heal them. If they were sinners, He would say, “Your sins are forgiven.” If they were oppressed by evil spirits, He would say, “Leave,” and then, no, “Leave.” And the spirits would leave. If the man was a leper, reach out His hand, heal the leper. No matter where the person was hurting, Jesus would reach out and touch them with the power of God and free them.

Now somehow, there’s something in all of us that wants to get control again. So that’s in our power to free ourselves. And if we get all this teaching together, we can save the world. And I suppose of all the churches in this country, my church has done more for education, which is really good. We’ve really felt that our kids need some kind of Christian education.

And our people have sacrificed for a hundred years to make sure that they got a Christian education. And that’s noble. And it’s very important. But it’s not enough, really, to give the people what they need by way of this power that we all need to be saved.

And what I see, you know, some of my friends do is really kind of downplay, I think, the saving power of Jesus by talking about only a salvation experience. You know, come forward to the altar and be saved and be converted. Now, that’s good. We need a direct encounter with Christ. We need His power. We need to move out of the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of light. And that only comes through the power of Jesus.

But after that, it’s like there’s a constant process where all along during our lives we need a continual inflowing of the saving, the healing power of Jesus. It’s not just one experience. It’s like every moment of my life, I need Jesus. I need His help because I am weak.

And there’s no moment, and I read this the other night, Paul says, you know, our salvation, in a sense, is not in sight. In one way, we are saved. But in another sense, we’re in constant need of the power of Jesus in our lives. Every day, every moment.

And it’s like the people, as I see it, in Christianity, who feel that they’ve got it made, are the very ones who seem to block off the continuation of this flowing of the power of Jesus. And there’s a real danger in all of us that we can become like the Pharisee in the story of the Pharisee and the publican.

And I’d like you just to reflect on that. And this is the 18th chapter of Luke, the ninth verse and following. Jesus spoke the following parable to some people who prided themselves on being virtuous and despised everybody else.

Now, I think that’s a temptation we all have when we become Christians. We think we’ve become virtuous. Two men went up to the temple to pray. One, a Pharisee. And as you know, the Pharisees were people who really studied the Scripture. They were the ones who knew it, who searched the Scripture and memorized it and studied it and went to the rabbinic schools. They were the ones who really knew Scripture. And they were the ones who were very strict. They had all kinds of laws to guard what they felt was God’s law. They were the ones who developed the different things you should not do on the Sabbath in order to honor God and honor the Sabbath. And because most people couldn’t live up to those laws that they felt God had prescribed, they looked down on other people who kept breaking what they felt were God’s laws.

And so this Pharisee, and these are really good people, he stood up and he said this prayer to himself, “I thank You, God, that I’m not grasping, unjust, adulterous like the rest of mankind. And particularly that I’m not like this tax collector here.”

Now I assume he was telling the truth. He probably wasn’t unjust. He probably didn’t commit adultery. Probably wasn’t unkind. He was a really good person. And a tax collector, in those days, by the very nature of the thing, the tax collecting was farmed out to a bunch of shysters. And if you’re a tax collector, you have the power of Rome behind you and you go into this village and you assess these various taxes and probably quadruple them and get all this money and give a certain amount to Rome and keep the rest for yourself.

These are really shady characters like loan sharks. I guess that would be the closest. And if you didn’t pay your loan, you got the mafia after you. That’s the kind of people these tax collectors were. And so you could see where a good Pharisee could say, “Well, thank God, I’m not like this loan shark here.”

He said, “I fast twice a week. I pay tithes on all I get.” Now, he was a really good man. What did he do wrong? Apparently nothing. Except he thought he was better than somebody else. And the tax collector stood some distance away, not daring even to raise his eyes to heaven. But he beat his breast and said, he had nothing to offer, this guy, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.”

“This man, I tell you, went home at rights with God. The other did not. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the man who humbles himself will be exalted.” Now, to me, this is the most freeing thing. It’s fantastic. It means that if we just recognize humanly where we really are, that we don’t have it. There’s a whole lot in us that’s weak and crummy, not too good, and that we really need a Savior.

And we need Him every day in those areas of my life where I really am willing to recognize this. All I have to do is say to Jesus, you know, I need help. And the most successful prayers I’ve seen have been along that order. “I need help.” And I’d far rather pray for some drunken bum who comes in off the street and stumbles in and says, “I need help” and really means it than some virtuous person who says, “Well, I’m not too sure what I need. I think you ought to pray for my husband or my wife. They really need it more than I do.”

And not much usually happens when you pray for them. And I get that kind of prayer all the time. And it’s good. I’m not saying that something doesn’t happen. But it’s like the more we recognize our need and our poverty of spirit, blessed are the poor of spirit, the more emptiness there is for God to come in and help us.

Now, that’s just a beautiful thing. And every one of us, I think, has been left in certain areas of our lives that we can’t completely manage on our own. You can do an awful lot on your own. I’ve been behind the Iron Curtain. It’s fantastic. You can walk the streets late at night, all over town. Nobody mugs you.

Great virtue, you know. Because you can do a lot with discipline if you know that there’s going to be a punishment if you step out of line. Apparently, there’s not too much cheating, at least in comparison to what we have here. In the country where I was, I understand there’s hardly any drunkenness. Because if you get drunk, the way they do it in this country, if you’re a businessman, they put kind of clown clothes on you, red clothes, and they make you sweep the street for a day. And after you swept the street for a day in front of all your friends, a clown suit, you think twice about getting drunk the next time.

Very effective. A lot of virtue in that sense behind the Iron Curtain. Because there’s a lot you can do by discipline. Still, Nadia Comaneci in the Olympics. How many of you saw her? Fantastic! Just, you know, I got so happy watching her. You know, doing these incredible things and getting tens, seven tens, and nobody had gotten a ten up to that point in the Olympics. Only 14 years old. And she did all that because of discipline. It shows what you can really do if you stick it out. Tremendous discipline. My gosh, if I prayed like that, that many hours, think what might happen.

And the only one thing wrong, they had to teach her how to smile for the Olympics. Did you know that? She never smiles. And their coaches had to teach her because they would do better in their performance. And she simply said, “I never smile.” And when they went back to their seats, remember, these little girls all sitting together. You go back after making a ten, which has never been done, and you sit next to one and they don’t even talk. They just sit and concentrate. Because the big thing is to get the next ten and not to waste time talking to people. There’s a whole lot we can do by discipline and things that look like Christian life.

And we can really reach great heights of discipline, of not drinking, of not smoking, of not doing this, of not doing that, of doing things too. Praying ten hours a day. You could do that. Be hard. You might need somebody like Nadia Comaneci’s coach, but you could do it. But see, is that Christianity? We need discipline. I’m not denying that. But it’s like the heart of Christianity is to know that we’re wounded, that we don’t have it, that we need a Savior. And that we have a Savior in Jesus Christ who emptied Himself of everything and became a human being just like us in everything except sin in order to free us from the evil that’s upon us. And I’ll just close with this because this has been such a discovery to me. Now, sometimes it’s hard to see Jesus as fully human. Now, the paintings and everything of Him just don’t come out quite human.

And it’s hard to see Him just fulfilling ordinary functions of human life. Like, would it be easy for you? I trust it’s easy for most of you, but maybe for some of us be hard to see Him just going out in a rowboat and rowing out there in the afternoon, fishing, wasting time fishing when He could be preaching.

Could you see Jesus just taking off in a rowboat, fishing, and not looking special? You know, the people in the times of Jesus, they didn’t see anything special in Him. People from His own hometown say, “Well, we know this guy. You know, He grew up with his carpenter’s son. What are they making a big hullabaloo about Him in Jerusalem? You know, we know who He is. Just an ordinary man.” But because He died for us, every part of His humanity died. And I found, say, in praying for heart conditions, somebody has a heart condition, I call upon the sacred heart of Jesus and asked that the power in that risen heart of His, you know, beat through this person’s heart or renew his heart or even give this person a new heart.

I think we all know the very special power in the precious blood of Jesus. The blood that He poured out on the cross and the power that has against the whole host of demons. And last but not least, because this is a very delicate area that a lot of people suffer from and it’s kind of hard to talk about. But many people have difficulties in the area of their sexuality.

And it’s like, it’s hard to control it just by willpower. And one way or another, I suppose half the people that I meet are suffering in this area because there’s something gone wrong there that they like to do one thing, but they can’t.

And finally, they just come to terms with it and figure, well, I can’t do anything about it. And it’s hard for some people to think of Jesus as being human in that sense. That He was fully a human being. But I find that when we call upon the sacred humanity of Jesus, which includes that whole sexual realm, and ask Him to enter into this person who’s suffering in this area and harmonize and balance without taking that away because it’s a gift from God, but harmonizing and balancing it and rechanneling it, redirecting it if that’s needed. He does it. And people have been battling temptations for years suddenly. It’s like there’s no big temptation anymore. It’s like it disappears.

The thirst that Jesus suffered upon the cross. Now, the power in that to free a person who thirsts for alcohol and can’t put it down, can’t stop. And every part of Jesus suffered for our salvation. And He means to free us spiritually, mentally, emotionally, and physically. All of Jesus died for all of you and every part of you. And that’s the good news of the gospel.