Sunday 03 • 17 • 19

Let's turn our attention now to God's Word. I invite Christie to come and read for us. The passages are printed on the wall behind me and in your bulletin.

Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them. If you do you will have no reward from your father in heaven. So when you give to the needy do not announce it with trumpets as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets to be honored by others. Truly I tell you they have received their reward in full but when you give to the needy do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing so that your giving may be in secret. Then your father who sees what is done in secret will reward you. And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you they have their reward in full but when you pray go into your room close the door and pray to your father who is unseen Then your father who sees what is done in secret will reward you and when you pray, do not keep on babbling like the pagans for they think they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them for your father knows what you need before you ask him. — Matthew 6:1-8

Woe to you teachers of the law and Pharisees you hypocrites. You clean the outside of the cup and dish but inside they are full of greed and self indulgence. Blind Pharisees, first clean the inside of the cup and dish and then the outside also will be clean. Woe to you teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites. You're like whitewashed tombs which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean. In the same way on the outside, you appear to people as righteous but on the inside, you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness. — Matthew 23:25-28

Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit rather in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the other. In your relationships with one another have the same mindset as Christ Jesus who being in very nature God did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage. Rather he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant being made in human likeness and being found in appearance as a man he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death even death on a cross. Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father. — Philippians 2:3-11

The word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

Would you join me in prayer? Father, Your word is power, and it can come in and break up the hardest places. And so we pray, Father, for that within our own hearts today. We pray, Father, that You'd give us ears to hear. We pray, Father, You would speak to our hearts. We pray that we would leave this place knowing that we have met with the Lord Jesus Christ. We pray this in Christ's name. Amen.

Vainglory: The Seven Deadly Sins

So we're in a series on the seven deadly sins, and I found that every generation has their take on the seven deadly sins. For baby boomers, that was Gilligan's Island. All the characters in Gilligan's were different vices. You had Skipper who was anger. You had Gilligan, who was sloth. You had Ginger, who was lust. You had Mr. Howell, who was greed. Mrs. Howell, who was gluttony. The professor, who was pride. And Mary Ann, who was envy.

Gen Xers, we had Seven, the movie—kind of a gruesome movie with Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt. Gross and dark, right? And then for millennials, there's no better retelling of The Seven Deadly Sins than that satire on our love of technology called The Black Mirror. Black Mirror is the show that's come out with episodes on the device that is a black mirror for the human heart. I think of all the seven deadly sins, Black Mirror covers the one we're looking at today the very best. The one for today is called vainglory.

Now that may not be a word you use often, but that's a Bible word. In Philippians 2, our passage for today, the King James Version of Philippians 2:3 says:

Let nothing be done through strife or a vainglory. — Philippians 2:3 (KJV)

Let me give you a history on the seven deadly sins. There was a time that the seven deadly sins was actually eight, called the eight deadly thoughts and included both vainglory and pride. Over the centuries though, some said that pride is sort of the root underneath all of the seven deadly sins and removed pride from the list, and vainglory stayed on the list.

But over time, because people don't know what vainglory is anymore, it's sort of been subsumed into pride and combined together. And vainglory is not something we talk about. It's not something we know much about. So let's talk about vainglory and its ugly cousins.

What's the difference between pride and vainglory? Summed up in a few words, the difference is this. Pride says, "I think I'm someone great." Vainglory says, "I want you to think I'm somebody great." It's about concern about what other people think.

Prideful people want more than anything else to be number one. Vainglorious people want everybody else to think that they're number one and to see them as number one. Vainglory will seek whatever it can in whatever venue to get the most public applause, whether it's deserving or not. It is an excessive and disordered desire for recognition and approval from others.

So a couple of examples for this. The prideful student will want to be at the top of the class. The vainglorious student will want the grades posted with the names so you can see who's at the top of the class. The prideful person will want to direct the best play ever directed. The vainglorious person will want the rave reviews in the newspaper. The whole point for the vainglorious is that other people notice. Other people give their approval.

Vainglory causes us to be more concerned about reputation than substance. It's the opposite of the North Carolina state motto. You know what the North Carolina state motto is? Come on, help me out. "To be and not to seem," right? To be and not to seem. Well, vainglory is to seem and doesn't care about what is. It's about seeming, not substance.

Vainglory, Vanity, and Ambition

Vainglory is not just vanity. Now it can be—vanity is definitely part of vainglory—but vanity is maybe in some ways the JV version of vainglory. It's the easiest to spot. It's somebody who cares to show off their body. It's somebody who cares to have their body looked at and seen and admired by people. And we look at that and we're like, "Oh yeah, vanity, vanity, you know, that's sinful." But that's probably the simplest and easiest form of vainglory.

Vainglory is also not simply ambition. Ambition seeks the honor and respect for good work, but from a particular person—an authority, a teacher, the coach, the boss. See, ambition wants accolades and approval from that person who's the expert. But vainglory is not so discerning. It's anyone and everyone. Anyone and everyone. As long as everyone sees it—it's about the manifestation of excellencies. We want to be seen, known, and admired.

That's why it has these two words that are part of it: vain and glory. We're hungry for glory, but the word vain—like in older words—it's empty. It's like dust. It's empty glory.

You remember Alice in Wonderland? One of the problems with Alice over and over in that story is that she's either too big or she's too small. And vainglory does that to us. We're either thinking about our own glory and visions of greatness for self, or we're mired in trivialities that have to do with our image. We're not the right size. We're out of proportion.

Is Recognition Always Bad?

Now think about this. Is a desire for recognition always bad? I mean, no. There's an innate desire within us as children to seek the approval of others and the respect of others. And that could be a good thing. One writer, Shaden Ramey, refers to recognition as the cornerstone of self-esteem. She says we all need to be recognized. It's not a matter of pride or selfishness or immaturity. Human beings, from the earliest moments of their lives, absolutely need respect and affection from those around them.

So we could see that all the time. A child who wants to please the teacher, wants to please the parent, an employee who wants to please the boss—those are good things.

Take, for example, a stay-at-home mom. Most of her work is not seen by other people. Sometimes it's not even valued or counted as work. Have you ever heard people say, "Do you work or just stay at home with the kids?" As one who has six kids, I know there's no just staying at home with the kids. Talk about work. She knows in her heart that her investment is worthwhile. But she struggles because not everybody recognizes that. There's nothing wrong with that kind of desire for recognition.

But here's the thing. A desire for recognition can easily become a disordered desire. A desire for recognition can become a need for recognition, a need for applause, a need for approval—so much that we will take whatever recognition, whether it's deserved or not, whether it's for real or even perceived goods in us.

Vainglory will do so on a wide variety of fields. It doesn't matter—nondiscerning. We can do it in any context. It is a disordered desire. And what's worse is it's also disordered love. We looked at this passage here. I said the older English King James Version of this passage in verse three talks about vainglory.

Selfish ambition, vain conceit, strife and vainglory. And one of the things about this passage is it shows us what a life looks like that's free from vainglory. Not looking to self, but looking to the interests of others. Caring more for the honor and esteem and care of others, right? That's what's pictured here. And vainglory takes those things and not only flips it on its head, but turns it inside out. Because vainglory is not just like, hey, I'm supposed to look to other people's interests, and I don't. It's that I want you to not only am I not looking to your interests, I want your main interest to be me. See, it's much more evil. It's a desire, not only it's a lack of love for others, it's a desire at all costs for your love to be for me. Like me. Love me. Like my picture online of my new tan, or last meal, or new car, or awesome vacation. Like me. Love me. This is why this is the black mirror sin. Because it's all about being seen, appearing. It's the anti-Philippians two. Be concerned about me.

The writer W. H. Auden would point us out of vainglory to an old mythological story. You remember the story of Narcissus? Narcissus is walking along one day and he sees a pool of water, and he catches his reflection, and it catches him. And he's drawn to it. And instead of moving on with anything else in his life, he's drawn to staring at his reflection in the pool of water, to the end of time. W. H. Auden says this: "Narcissus does not fall in love with his reflection because it's beautiful, but because it's his. If it was just about beauty that enthralled him, after a few years as his beauty faded, he would have been able to move on."

We find that we're all also caught up in that narcissistic pull. There's been a study that's been done on American marketing. They found for storefront stores, like in Downtown Raleigh, walkable stores, they found that you can drive up sales if you put mirrors on the outside of your building. Because we might walk by the goods, but we won't walk by ourselves. Just to look. And maybe that store has something for me since they like me too.

How Selfish Ambition and Vain Conceit Manifest in Us

How does selfish ambition and vain conceit manifest itself in us? I'm sure you could come up with a list, but I've got ten for you. You knew this was coming. See if you can identify with these.

What about going along with the crowd just so that we will fit in? This isn't just the middle school sin. This is when we laugh at a joke that we wouldn't really think is funny. We say something that we really regret later on. We do something. We're pressured into something. What am I doing here? It's vainglory.

Exaggerating. We do this in our stories. Have you ever noticed a group of friends will come together around dinner and somebody starts with a story and it sort of gets one-upped? We do this one-upmanship thing with stories. And doesn't it help if they're just a little embellished? You just make them a little bit funnier. You just add a couple of things in there. It's vainglory.

Hiding. It's ironic in this era of presenting an outward appearance, one of the things you have to do in order to present an outward appearance is to hide some parts of yourself because there are things we'd rather people not know. And in order for people to see this great facade, you have to hide other things. It's vainglory.

Gossip. We all know gossip is wrong. Somebody has estimated that sixty percent of all adult conversations have to do with somebody who's not present. We love it and we hate it. But it's vainglory.

What about doing good to be noticed? Have you ever done something among your friends, among your family, and no one noticed? And you're just so disappointed. You have this aftertaste. Like, come on. You all were supposed to see that. That was really good. I was really good today. You want to test this? Ask yourself if you're vainglorious. Try doing some anonymous things for others this week. Good things where you intentionally try not to be noticed. And see what happens if you don't get that same aftertaste. No one noticed that.

What about boasting? The only way you can be impressed with what I've done is if I tell you. I need you to know. So I'm not boasting. I'm just telling you. It's just information. It's just information you needed.

What about taking credit for someone else's joke or work or idea? Or maybe not taking credit but not correcting the impression that it's not yours.

Self promotion. We all know that we're in a world about self marketing. Your Pinterest page and your resume, your social media online, your job applications, everything has to be photoshopped. We don't post the pictures of ourselves mid-chew, do we? No one wants those.

What about the inability to receive a compliment? That's a nice shirt. Oh, this old thing? I've had this for five years. In other words, yeah, say more. Or what about this one? It only cost me four dollars.

You know, we do these things because we can't receive a compliment, but we're like, "Oh yeah, look at how frugal I am. Look at how I hold on to things." Finally, just plain old flexing—showing off your skills, your knowledge, your looks. Outrageous tattoos, Bible tattoos. Perfect hair. Job titles. Letters behind our name. The greenest, most well-manicured lawn. The ability to be that person in the group who knows which wine on the list to order. The clothes we wear, the cars we drive. In fact, if we don't own a car, we can use any and all things. We are adept at playing this game on any surface—the vainglory game. We're just scratching the surface.

This is why the Desert Fathers likened vainglory to an onion. You begin to peel off layers and there's more underneath, and soon everyone is crying. But I haven't told you the worst. The worst is this: this is the most Christian sin. If you look in the Bible for examples of the vainglorious, they're always religious people. Always religious people. Church fathers pointed out that the greatest temptation from vainglory comes from when we have virtue, when we've made progress, when there's good in our lives, and when it goes unnoticed and we're disappointed by that.

John Chrysostom said, "While other vices find their abode in the servants of the devil, vainglory finds a place in the servants of Christ." So while it may be awesome that you've made progress this year in your prayer life or progress in doing battle with the flesh, you may have grown in your ability to love Scripture. But here's the problem: there's always a dark side to that growth. There's always a way it turns into a place of showing off goodness or taking pride in it, displaying it for other people to see. And what is it? At the end of the day, it's robbing God. It's stealing from God—taking credit for things that we didn't do in and of ourselves, that His Spirit did in us, or getting praise for what seems to be the case in us.

Jesus confronted vainglory. We read the passages from Matthew 6 and Matthew 23:

Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them. For then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven. Thus when you give to the needy, you sound no trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be praised. Truly, I tell you, they have received their reward. — Matthew 6

Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you cleanse the outside of the cup and the dish, but inside they're full of extortion and self-indulgence. Blind Pharisee, first clean the inside of the cup and dish, that the outside of them may be clean also. — Matthew 23

Imagine you go to a really nice restaurant this week—one of those with tablecloths made of fabric, playing music, a real person playing music. Everything on the table is not made of plastic. You know, a nice restaurant. You sit down to this meal. The waiter is crisp in all aspects of delivering the menu and describing the specials, attentive to your every need. You get through a tremendous meal and you come to dessert. They bring you your coffee. As you're sipping your coffee, you look down in the cup and there's a little hunk of mud and the remnant of a slug inside.

Yeah, I love gross stuff to talk about from the pulpit. I don't care how good the rest of the meal was. They get one star on Yelp. You're never going back there again, right? Because while the outside looks great, it's the inside that matters. No, I want nothing to do with that.

Jesus said that was exactly what the Pharisees had done. They went through all the right motions of religion, doing the things that made them look good on the outside. And yet on the inside, there's mud and slug. That's what's really going on.

Who Are the Modern Pharisees?

But before we dismiss those naughty bad Pharisees, I want to think with you: if I were to write a modern paraphrase of the New Testament, who would be the people who would appear as Pharisees? A lot of times we say things like this: "The Pharisees, oh, they were the ones who believe that you earned your way to heaven." That's not true. That's actually a modern New Testament gloss. The Pharisees didn't believe you earned your way to heaven. They loved the Scriptures. They wanted to obey all of God's revelation. They loved God and wanted to be near Him.

If I were to write a modern paraphrase of this, who would be the Pharisees? Christ the King Church, the PCA. We who love the Bible, who want to obey God, who are faithful in worship, who love obeying what's in this book and knowing what's in this book. This is us, y'all. This is us.

Vainglory is insidious.

Vainglory takes genuine spiritual progress, love of God's Word, love of worship, love of the things of God and makes it about us. The Roman generals, they all wanted their names carved in stone so that everybody could see them. Their great exploits. Their great deeds. But we do the same thing. We want our names known. We want people to see us.

The Desert Father John Cassian warns, "Beware of your spiritual successes, especially your victories over sin, lest they become an occasion for showing off and falling into vainglory."

One of the primary reasons Jesus constantly warned the Pharisees was a love of what's on the outside, externals. Outwardly, they showed respect, their dedication and commitment to the law, but it was all about the show. I'm afraid we are, too. Beware when your name is in the bulletin. Beware when you're known in your community group as the person who knows the Bible the best. Beware when other people at your work are like, "Man, he is such a great Christian." Beware when you're a pastor of a growing church.

See, vainglory is deadly. It's a deadly sin. And it's deadly for two reasons. First, because we're stealing glory from God. We're taking credit for things that are only by His Spirit in our lives. The fact that you're making progress, that you love Him, you love His Word—that's from His Spirit, and it's such a gift and you didn't do it. It's also being satisfied with what looks like spiritual progress on the outside, but it's empty on the inside.

What do we do with this? I mean, what do we do? What do you do with your glory-stealing hearts? The problem is not just a love of attention. It's that you love glory. And I do too. And we want it for self. Like me. Love me. It's not easy just to stop it. Our hearts are glory hungry. We love the applause of the crowd. The like on the Instagram. The affirmation of other people.

See, unlike other sins, we're about to go from the spiritual list to the bodily list of the seven deadly sins. We're about to move into gluttony and lust and anger. But these spiritual ones, especially this one, are particularly insidious. This is particularly dangerous. And those who think they're least susceptible to this are like little flies caught in the spider's web of vainglory.

So lest you walk out of here today and you think, "I've got a friend who needs to hear this sermon"—the spider of vainglory is already coming. You're already caught.

Jesus as the Answer to Vainglory

But this is why Philippians 2 is such a gift for vainglorious people like me. Philippians 2 is such a wonder in the New Testament scriptures. If you read it slowly, you realize the first part of it—and we didn't print verses one and two—but the first part of it, those first four verses sound like a study on a life free from vainglory where you look not only to your interests but the interests of others. You care more about honoring and promoting others. And then you get a nice little story about Jesus, how He didn't consider equality with God something to be grasped. He lowered Himself, taking the form of a servant, humbled Himself to death, even death on the cross. Right? Sounds like a great little story, but these are not happenstance. These are super glued together. Because this is good news for the vainglorious.

It's good news. And Paul invites us here, vainglorious as we are, to consider Jesus. That's the first part of this. What do you do with your vainglorious heart? You consider Jesus.

B. B. Warfield lived in the 1850s to 1920s. He wrote a sermon that I think is particularly powerful in outlining how this particular vice needs this particular passage. And this is what he said. Reflecting on this, he entitled it "Imitating the Incarnation." He says:

Christ did not cultivate Himself, even His divine self. He took no account of self. He was not led by divine impulse out of the world, driven back into the recesses of his own soul to brood morbidly over his own needs until to gain his own esteemed worth, all sacrificed to him. He was led by his love for others out into the world to forget Himself in the needs of others, to sacrifice self once and for all upon the altar of sympathy.

Now, that's amazing. Here's Jesus who, of all people who've ever lived, can we just say He's probably the most well-balanced person? He probably had the best sense of self. Can we say Jesus probably had decent self-esteem? Would you agree with those things? And yet how did He nurture that? He didn't. He forgot self. He emptied Himself. He set self aside. He set self aside so that He could pursue and love and empty Himself and even go to a cross to bleed for the vainglorious. Jesus sets Himself aside. Consider Jesus.

Second, though, we see this. This is not just an interesting story about Jesus. It's a call for us to follow Him in doing the same. Again, B. B. Warfield says this:

Self-sacrifice will lead us, His followers, not away from, but into the midst of people. Self-sacrifice means not indifference to our times and our fellow people.

It means absorption in them. It means forgetfulness of self and others. It means entering into every person's hopes and fears, longings, and despairs. Following Jesus means becoming more and more other-focused, full of empathy, considering others better than themselves.

To give up vainglory means we relinquish the rights to self, the place of self at the center of attention. We adopt this phrase over our lives: It's not about you. It's not about you.

Johann Sebastian Bach was famous not only for writing good music, but for writing at the bottom of every page, "Soli Deo Gloria"—Glory to God alone. That's what's under the signature of those who are repenting, learning to repent of vainglory.

Warfield says this: As we follow Christ in this way, it will dry up vainglory springs at their source. We cannot be self-consciously self-forgetful. We can't be selfishly unselfish. Only when we humbly walk this path, seeking truly in it not our own things but those of others, we shall find the promise is true:

He who loses his life shall find it.

Only when, like Christ and in loving obedience to His called example, we take no account of self, but freely give ourselves to others, we shall find each in his measure the saying true of Himself also:

Wherefore also God hath highly exalted Him.

The path to self-sacrifice is the path to glory. I love that. It is so true. Following Jesus always means going to His cross and then taking up yours. Whatever preacher stands before you and doesn't hold up taking up your cross is trying to sell you something. Because the way to follow Jesus is following Him to death. There can only be resurrections in your life if there's death. And the only way we deal with vainglory is not by trying to contain it but by trying to kill it. By saying, this is deadly. It's killing me. It's robbing my God, and it must die.

Following Him means laying all of that before Him, taking up your cross and following Him.

The Power of Worship

But one last thing, and this is great news for us today. One thing that you may not notice about Philippians 2 is that it looked like a paragraph, but it's not a paragraph. Bible historians agree. This is a poem. It's actually a song. It's been called the Carmen Christi. It's considered one of the earliest hymns of the church—verses 5 through 11. It's lyrics to a hymn that they sang over and over again in the early church, and that is key for us, the vainglorious. Here's why: vainglory is not a sin that you can think your way out of. It is a sin that you may only worship your way out of.

Over and over, coming face to face every week as we come together and worship together, worshiping and remembering the glorious one, submitting your worshiping heart at the throne of Jesus.

I live in a household of musicians, and music is such an amazing gift. Our singing together is not accidental. It is so purposeful. When you set words and glorious truths about who God is to music, they have this power to sneak past the defenses of anxiety and fear, to get around the high towers you build of rationalism. They have the ability to get past the centuries and past the guards and into your heart. Music has the power to get into our hearts.

This is why one of the things I want to encourage you is never miss a song on a Sunday morning. You should show up early so you get all the songs. One of my joys as a parent over the years was hearing my little children sing the tunes of things they don't even understand the words of. And they're singing truths back to me: "That's true. You're right. He is the glorious one." It raises my head. It reminds me: remember, it's not about you. It's about Him.

This is what music does for us. Songs that grab our hearts and cause us to lift our eyes up off self and onto Him.

So I want to close the sermon today in a way that's different from how we normally do. We normally go to the Apostles' Creed and we stand together and we say, "Yeah, this is really true." Today, we're going to sing it. So let's take the doxology, which usually comes after the Lord's Supper, and let's sing this together. Let's call each other to remember these truths.

I'm going to invite you to stand as we sing these words together, these words of gospel truth.