Jesus told this story: \u2018Two men went to the Temple to pray. One was a Pharisee, and the other was a despised tax collector. The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed this prayer: \u201cI thank you, God, that I am not like other people\u2014cheaters, sinners, adulterers. I\u2019m certainly not like that tax collector! I fast twice a week, and I give you a tenth of my income.\u201d But the tax collector stood at a distance and dared not even lift his eyes to Heaven as he prayed. Instead, he beat his chest in sorrow, saying, \u201cO God, be merciful to me, for I am a sinner.\u201d I tell you, this sinner, not the Pharisee, returned home justified before God. For those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted<\/i>.\u2019 (Luke\u00a018:10\u201314\u00a0NLT) <\/p>\n
The lesson in this story is that God has more tolerance for an honest sinner than a self-righteous Christian. When the Pharisee was congratulating himself for the sins he didn\u2019t commit, he was guilty of the sin of spiritual pride. Ask yourself what good behaviour is a source of pride to you? Do you measure others by your<\/i> performance and mark their scorecard accordingly? The only performance that makes any of us acceptable to God is based on Christ\u2019s performance on the cross. \u2018God made Christ, who never sinned, to be the offering for our sin, so that we could be made right with God through Christ<\/i>.\u2019 (2\u00a0Corinthians\u00a05:21\u00a0NLT) <\/p>\n
The righteousness that saves us is imputed\u2014not earned. So don\u2019t be self-righteous!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Jesus told this story: \u2018Two men went to the Temple to pray. One was a Pharisee, and the other was a despised tax collector. The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed this prayer: \u201cI thank you, God, that I am not like other people\u2014cheaters, sinners, adulterers. I\u2019m certainly not like that tax collector! I fast […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"off","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ucbmedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2140"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ucbmedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ucbmedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ucbmedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ucbmedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2140"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ucbmedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2140\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ucbmedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ucbmedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ucbmedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}