Audio Recording Sermon Manuscript: It will be helpful for us to consider what the two men were like in our Gospel reading this morning. The point of the parable turns on these two being quite different from one another outwardly. So that is how we will begin today before getting into the meaning of the parable itself. The more important character to properly understand to get Jesus’s point is the Pharisee. Pharisees, understandably, do not have a great reputation among us because they were often Jesus’s enemies. But we must understand why they were Jesus’s enemies. In a sense, it was because they were so dedicated to their important task of preserving the church at that time. Something that is not widely understood is that all of God’s people owe a debt of gratitude to the Pharisees. The Pharisees were those especially dedicated people who kept the religion of the Bible going in the couple hundred years before Jesus was born. About 300 B.C. Alexander the Great conquered almost the whole of the known world at that time. This included the Jews. While the Jews lived under Greek rule they were sorely tempted to become like the sophisticated Greeks. The Greeks were thought to be much more advanced than those Jewish simpletons who believed in the revelation contained in the Bible. If Jews got rid of the Jewishness it also opened up doors to them for personal advancement. They were much more likely to get good jobs from their Greek rulers. If this situation would have gone on without anybody crying foul, the religion of the Bible would have passed away within a few generations. The Jewish children would have been brought up the way the Greeks wanted them to be brought up. They would have studied Greek thinkers instead of the much more roughly hewn Scriptures. But God, in his grace, raised up a group of people who eventually became known as Pharisees. The Pharisees were the people who championed the Bible regardless of how it might be made fun of by the Greeks. They encouraged people to be faithful to what the Bible said regardless of the consequences. One of the very important things about them is that they were honest. If one of their fellow Jews abandoned the teachings of the Scriptures it was not just brushed under the rug. They were called out for their unfaithfulness. They were disciplined and eventually shunned as a pagan and a tax collector if they would not repent. Not only did the Pharisees teach the Bible, but they followed up with the consequences. This work of discipline and integrity is vital for the church at all times so that it can continue to be strong and healthy. With any body there has to be a way to get rid of waste. If you don’t get rid of that which is toxic, then the healthy tissues will become infected and be destroyed too. If you think about the efficient way our bodies get rid of waste every day, you realize how important this unpleasant and stinky work actually is. If we couldn’t get rid of the waste in our bodies we wouldn’t live very long. So it is with a church body too. Without the Pharisees championing God’s Word the Jewish people would have simply been taken over by the Greek world around them. In our day our people’s souls, also, are being taken over by the unbelieving culture around us. Unfortunately, we do not have Christians with the strength of character that the Pharisees had to be distinct in our beliefs. As a result all our people’s hearts, souls, and minds are being colonized and taken over without much of anything standing in the way. Thus our people are more or less agnostic about spiritual things because that is precisely the way that they have been trained to think. There are a few things they are sure of: they know that the Bible can’t be right—at least not if it is understood literally. They know that there are multiple genders and sex is for the purpose recreation instead of procreation, so who’s to judge what a person might enjoy doing with their sexual recreation? They know t