Or, Why the Woke Have No Forgiveness, No Fruit, and No Fun Matthew 7:1-6 January 9, 2022 Lord’s Day Worship Sean Higgins

Introduction

As one of the shepherds I am burdened for the body, jealous for you against the world’s attempts to make you miserable. Within the last ten years—which happen to overlap the years we’ve been busy cultivating a Trinitarian community of worshipping, maturing disciples who acknowledge Jesus Christ as Lord over all the world—the accuser, the devil, the evil one, has been cultivating his offspring into an angry, envious, self-righteous mob. By God’s grace, even in and through our liturgy of worship, we do not see the seeds of “woke” sprouting in our church. But, not only do I desire for you to be ready and protected in heart and mind if/when the woke attack, I honestly am doing everything I can to make each of you, and all of us together, a bigger target. We don’t have the problem on the inside, but I pray that we would provoke those on the outside.

Our pastors considered taking an entire Sunday seminar to talk about wokeness, though again, this is not an error that we see within the flock, so it didn’t seem as pressing. But as we take time at the beginning of each year to refresh our understanding of Lord’s Day worship, I can’t help but think that God is using our liturgy to keep us from going woke. That it isn’t critical is not a coincidence.

Woke is an exhausting worldview that will get worse in our culture without a gospel revival. Maybe you’ve never heard the word “woke,” you certainly are dealing with expressions of it, through companies and colleges and Congress and commercials. I couldn’t dream of providing an exhaustive explanation or exhaustive examples, let alone a prophetic vision of how much suffering we’re in for. But again, I want you to understand how our liturgy of worship is a privilege, with a bunch of sub-privileges necessary attached, and how that privilege is exactly a provocation to many of our cultural neighbors, including, sadly, many professing Christians, pastors, and churches.

I’m going to start with a part of the Sermon on the Mount, the judgy-pants, plank-in-the-eye part, then define what woke means and demonstrate how wokeness is anti-gospel, and then call all of us to embrace our privilege in worship, which includes confessing our sins and rejoicing in our God-given forgiveness and fellowship and fruit.

Planks and Pigs – Matthew 7:1-6

Maybe Matthew 7:1 is the most quoted verse in the Gospels next to John 3:16. It may also be a 7:1 misuse:use ratio, and that’s by both those who profess to be Christians and those who don’t. That’s an important piece: men who don’t believe the Bible, but who are familiar enough with it to borrow its morality, use the parts they want in their own defense.

The men and women listening to Jesus were culturally saturated in categories close-ish to God’s commandments. These Jews conversed in the vocabulary of righteousness, and, following in the path of their teachers, had more problems with self-righteousness than unambiguous unrighteousness. They loved to judge by surface standards, which Jesus confronted as missing the heart of the matter (think: anger, lust, loyalties, 5:21-48). Righteousness must exceed that of the Pharisees and scribes, who were precise and pretentious (5:20). Theirs was for show, so Jesus condemned “practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them” (6:1), whether that was in donating to charity (6:2-4), chanting on the street corners (6:5-14), or in gloomy-faced intermittent fasting (6:17-18). They wanted to be seen, they wanted the reward of a higher social score.

At the same time, they were concerned about quality of life, about worldly status, about money and clothes and food (6:24-34). Their treasures showed where their hearts were (6:21).

After all that Jesus said, “Judge not that you be n[...]