The Parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector

Welcome & Opening Prayer

Good morning. Has anybody ever wanted to be an accountant? Odd question, I know. In university I took some accounting classes and they were not my favorite. I didn’t want to be an accountant, but I found myself, after graduating, in Liberia, West Africa, working as a project manager for a non-government organization doing community health education.

The Accountant Story

The country had just come out of a long civil war, and part of what we taught was as basic as: don’t use the same stream for drinking water and for a bathroom. We were building latrines and wells, handing out mosquito nets, that kind of thing, and we had government contracts, Canadian, American, funding it. My job was to prove on paper that we’d actually done what we said we would. Part of that meant dealing with auditors, which is a lot of fun, as you can imagine. When somebody gives you a lot of money to do a job, you can’t just write back a one-line email that says “trust me, we’re good, send more.” They want to come and inspect it. Certify it for themselves. I could not self-certify our own work, much as I would have liked to.

When somebody from outside starts poking around in your business, you don’t know what they’re going to find, or what they’ll think of it. Doesn’t feel great. What if your neighbor audited your heart right now? What if God did? Do you compare yourself to the people around you? Do you see God as a master you’re trying to satisfy? Do you ever feel like no one cares, or that something’s wrong with you that you just can’t fix? I’m not trying to lay that on anyone, but I want to show you how those questions map onto a parable Jesus told two thousand years ago.

Reading the Parable

We’re looking at the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector today, Luke 18:9-14. Then Jesus told this story to some who had great confidence in their own righteousness and scorned everybody else. Two men went to the temple to pray. One was a Pharisee, the other a despised tax collector. The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed, “I thank you, God, that I’m not like other people, cheaters, sinners, adulterers. I’m certainly not like that tax collector. I fast twice a week and I give you a tenth of my income.” But the tax collector stood at a distance and wouldn’t even lift his eyes to heaven. He beat his chest and said, “God, be merciful to me, for I am a sinner.” 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.

So who are the characters here? Jesus is addressing people who had great confidence in their own righteousness and scorned everyone else. The Pharisees were the religious leaders of the day, the shining example of what it looked like to give your life to God. They spent their days learning God’s law and teaching it. The tax collector, on the other hand, was despised. Judah was occupied by Rome at the time, and the Romans hired Jews to collect taxes from their own people. If you were a tax collector, you were basically working for the enemy, a traitor, and on top of that, tax collectors often padded the bill and pocketed the difference. Not an upright guy.

The Pharisee’s Invoice

Picture it like a courtroom. Two men come before a judge who can actually render a verdict, because that’s the whole point of bringing in someone from outside. The Pharisee walks in and gives his account: I’ve fasted, I’ve tithed. But notice, he’s still not settled, so he looks for someone to stand on to feel a little closer to God, and he finds the tax collector. He’s presenting an invoice: this is what I’ve done, so accept me.

Romans 6:23 says the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life. If the Pharisee is working for wages, that’s what he gets paid in. The tax collector doesn’t present an invoice. He knows exactly who he is, and instead of an account, he makes a mercy call: God, I can’t fix this, my books are a mess. And he gets a gift he didn’t earn, because the value of a gift depends on the giver, not the receiver.

When we try to judge ourselves worthy, we’re trying to take the judge’s seat, and we’re trying to be our own savior. But there can only be one. You know that meme with the guy sweating over two red buttons? One button is trusting the blood of Jesus for your sin. The other is having a go at it yourself. The blood of Christ is there and powerful either way. Choosing that second button just means you’re choosing not to reach for it.

Most of us in this room are Christians. We know, in our heads, that we need a savior. But our heads and our hearts believe different things all the time. You can agree it’s not healthy to eat McDonald’s five times a week and then go eat McDonald’s five times a week. Which one do you actually believe? Your actions tell on you. For years I believed I didn’t snore very much. Some of you can tell me that wasn’t true.

So we confess we need a savior, and then we spend the rest of our week comparing ourselves to other people, functioning in shame. The Pharisee was living out of a shame reality, and shame produces comparison, every time. Guilt says I did something wrong. Shame says I am something wrong. One’s outside you, one is you. We weren’t built to carry shame, so the moment we feel it, we go looking for evidence against it, someone to feel better than. That’s comparison. It goes the other way too, feeling like you never measure up. Same shame, different direction. Where you land on the spectrum doesn’t matter. Starting from that position is the problem.

The Garden: Two Trees

I want to zoom all the way out to the garden, because there are two trees there: the tree of life, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. When Adam opened his eyes for the first time, what was the very first thing he saw? The face of God, looking at him with love, having just breathed life into him. That was his foundation. His job was to receive, identity, love, meaning, and reflect it out. Think of it like two magnets in my hand. God is the positive pole, giving. Adam is the negative pole, receiving. Positive and negative snap together. That’s relationship, working the way it was designed.

Then the serpent shows up and says, you could be like God. What he actually wanted was to sit in God’s seat, and he wanted to plant that same desire in us. Under “you could be like God” is a hidden message: you’re not good enough as you are. That’s shame. And suddenly Eve is wondering if she could be better, even though God already said she was good. He’d already certified her. But they ate the fruit, and they started self-certifying instead. Judging.

The Definition of Sin

Do you know the actual definition of sin? Most people think it means breaking the rules. It’s actually an archery term. It means missing the mark. So what’s the mark? Romans 3:23: all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. The mark was to reflect God’s glory. Anything that falls short of that is sin. The Pharisee is reading straight out of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Look at me, I measure up, I certify myself accepted. And honestly, it’s simpler than it sounds. Any time God says something and we go “yeah, but,” we’ve climbed back into that tree.

Jesus wasn’t writing a description of the whole Christian life here. He was handing a specific antidote to a specific problem, the one named right at the top of the parable: people confident in their own righteousness, scorning everyone else. If your car’s out of gas and I hand you a new tire, that doesn’t get you anywhere. He’s saying, here’s what actually gets you back on the road.

Worm Theology & the Open Door

But don’t camp out at the tax collector either. That’s what I call worm theology: oh God, I’m a dirty, rotten sinner, saved by grace, over and over, every day, forever. The tax collector in the story wouldn’t even lift his eyes. Imagine a son standing at his father’s door saying “have mercy on me, can I come in,” and the father saying “yeah, dinner’s on the table, come in,” and the son just keeps saying “please, have mercy” instead of walking through the door. At some point that’s not humility anymore. It’s a refusal to accept what’s being offered. The parable ends on an open door, not a finished room. Humility gets you to the threshold. Jesus is the door.

Heart Distance

Our team just got back from a training week, and something hit me there. When I judge myself the way the Pharisee did, it creates distance between me and the Father, not physical distance, God is everywhere, but heart distance. You know that feeling of sitting two feet from someone you love and somehow being a thousand miles away? That’s what judgment does to us with God. We were built to receive. Flip that role around and try to earn or judge your way closer, and no matter how hard you try, you can’t close the gap, because you’re playing the wrong part.

Even once you’re in the house, you can still drag that self-justifying posture in with you. It’s easy to slide into performance, treating time with God like a checklist, our family, our job, our city, the state of the world, and it’s not that God doesn’t care about those things. It’s that we can prioritize the checklist over his presence. That was never the design. In the garden, they just walked with God in the cool of the day.

If you actually walk into the house, the Father’s already there, and there’s no checklist waiting for you. No scorecard, no ruler to measure you against. Have you ever seen a servant become like his master? It basically never happens, because servants run on transactions. But you have seen a son become like his father, in character, because sons run on relationship instead. A father’s love for his son isn’t contingent on whether he did the right thing five minutes ago. Look at Jesus. Before he’d done a single thing in his ministry, the Father said, this is my beloved son. And at the end, the same words. Not earned by performance. Received as identity.

Paul says judge yourself, so you won’t be judged, which sounds like a contradiction until you see what he means. It’s not self-justifying like the Pharisee. It’s seeing yourself clearly, the way the tax collector finally did, and crying out for mercy instead of an excuse.

Lucy the Dog

My wife went away this week for training. We have a dog, Lucy, who does not handle it when she leaves. She knew, somehow, that this wasn’t a quick errand. She wouldn’t eat her breakfast, which never happens. She just moped around the house for a couple of hours, whining at nothing. And then she finally came and laid her head on my lap. I scratched her ears. And something in her let go, all at once, and she got up and went straight to her food and ate it.

That’s us! When we feel that heart distance from God, we do strange things trying to fill it. We justify ourselves. We compare ourselves. Anything to patch the hole. This morning, sitting right here, I caught myself doing exactly that. Comparison thoughts, running on a loop. And I actually said it out loud in my head: God, I’m literally preaching on this right now. Why am I still doing it? And he dropped one line into my heart that I haven’t been able to shake since: Jesus is the answer to sin. But the Father’s love is the answer to a broken identity.

Sit with that for a second, because it changes everything downstream of it. Jesus is the door that gets us into the house. But it’s the Father’s love, not the door, that heals what’s actually broken in us. You can walk through that door, claim the right sacrifice, get in the right lane, and still carry a shattered identity in with you. And a shattered identity is like a pocket with a hole in it. Everything God pours in just runs back out. Good for a moment, then gone, and you’re left wondering why it didn’t stick. But when his love starts healing your heart, it heals the pockets too. And then you’re not just receiving anymore. You’re overflowing onto everyone around you.

That’s the actual invitation of the gospel. Not just justified, which I remember as just-if-I’d-never-sinned, though that’s the miracle underneath all of it. Actually walking in that relationship, day after day, once you’re through the door.

Altar Call & Response

So if something in this landed on you today, if you caught yourself thinking “I’ve done that” or “I’ve felt that,” or if the only thing you can honestly say right now is “Father, I want a greater revelation of your love,” then come. Don’t wait for a better moment. There isn’t one coming. Just come, and let’s stand together and ask him for it.