Hidden Treasure | Part 9

The big idea

Beware the temptation of spiritual comparison — the moment we start keeping score with God, we stop gazing at His goodness and start admiring our own devotion.

We're saved by grace alone, not by our performance, yet it's easy to drift from awe and wonder at God into quietly keeping score against other people. Jesus' parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector shows that the truly devoted can walk away unjustified while the desperate sinner who simply cries for mercy goes home right with God. The call is to keep pursuing growth while never graduating from grace, with our eyes fixed on the cross rather than on each other.

Point 1 of 7

Pastor Scott reads Ephesians 2:8-9 and stresses that no one can boast because being accepted by God isn't the result of impressing Him. He notes the sense of awe and wonder this produces when someone first grasps that God loves them fully knowing their whole story.

Point 2 of 7

Using the story of coaching his daughters' six and seven-year-old soccer team, Pastor Scott describes how fun turned competitive the moment someone asked the score. He says the same shift happens spiritually — we move from wonder at God to comparing our spiritual stats with others.

Point 3 of 7

Pastor Scott walks through Luke 18:9-14, explaining the Pharisee's genuine, admirable devotion (fasting, tithing, moral living) and the tax collector's despised status as a Rome-funded traitor. The Pharisee's problem wasn't his practices but that he compared himself to the tax collector, while the tax collector simply cried, 'God, have mercy on me, a sinner.'

Point 4 of 7

Pastor Scott shares his own story from early in his faith, mentally ranking himself as more spiritual than friends who missed church, didn't study the Bible like he did, or didn't pray as visibly. He shows how this comparison replaces gazing at God's goodness with admiring our own devotion.

Point 5 of 7

Pastor Scott reads Isaiah 6:3-5, where Isaiah sees the Lord's glory and cries out that he is ruined and unclean. He applies this to say Isaiah would laugh at our temptation to set ourselves as the standard, since God alone is the bar and we all fall short of Him.

Point 6 of 7

Pastor Scott traces Paul's shift from zealous, murderous Pharisee to a man transformed by an encounter with the risen Christ, reading Galatians 2:19-20 (The Message) and Galatians 6:14. He distills it into the equation that Jesus plus anything equals nothing, and Jesus plus nothing equals everything.

Point 7 of 7

Pastor Scott recounts John F. Kennedy Jr.'s fatal 1999 plane crash, where losing sight of the horizon caused fatal disorientation unless a pilot trusts the instruments instead of feeling. He applies this directly: taking our eyes off Christ and comparing ourselves to others causes the same kind of spiritual spiral, whether we feel superior or defeated.

Take it into your week

Pastor Scott's charge is to beware the temptation of spiritual comparison and keep our eyes on the instrument — the cross — instead of on ourselves or each other.