“God, be Merciful to Me a Sinner!”

Luke 18:11-13 - "The Pharisee stood and was praying this to himself: 'God, I thank You that I am not like other people: swindlers, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. 'I fast twice a week; I pay tithes of all that I get.' But the tax collector, standing some distance away, was even unwilling to lift up his eyes to heaven, but was beating his breast, saying, 'God, be merciful to me, the sinner!'”

Jesus, in telling this parable, tells us that the Pharisee stood praying “to himself”. Obviously, Jesus chose His words very carefully and with great purpose. Jesus gives us the meaning to this parable up front. The Pharisee was in the Temple of God and praying to himself, not God. It is his self-centeredness and spiritual deadness that causes him to offer up prayers to himself rather than to God. How sad this is, yet, how incredibly common it is as well. This Pharisee, and the vast majority of souls who have lived on this planet, created a god in their minds that is satisfying to them, but utterly useless to their eternal status. These self-edifying gods of their own creation are like heavy anchors tied around their necks as they stand at the end of the pier called ‘life’. The key word in this whole story about the self-righteous is “himself”; and his prayer illustrates this damning truth. Whereas the key word in the testimony of the tax collector is “sinner”; for he understood his unworthiness, his utter wickedness, and his desperate need of forgiveness. He understood, unlike the Pharisee, that the true God is holy, and that he was unholy – just as Isaiah did in the Temple. “I am a man of unclean lips”, is the same cry as, “be merciful to me, the sinner!” Notice he says, “the sinner”, and not “a sinner”? The Holy Spirit had so opened his eyes to his unworthiness that his focus was not on comparing his plight with anyone else, as the Pharisee had done, but he was singularly focused on his own grave situation before a holy God. And thus, “he who is humbled will be exulted.”

The Holy Spirit’s crushing ‘gift of awareness of sin’ is like a physician who re-breaks a bone in order for it to heal properly. If you are a child of God, thank the Holy Spirit every day for replacing spiritual death with spiritual life, and for opening your eyes to cry out, “God, be merciful to me, the sinner!”