²⁵ I assure you that there were many widows in Israel in Elijah’s time, when the sky was shut for three and a half years and there was a severe famine throughout the land. ²⁶ Yet Elijah was not sent to any of them, but to a widow in Zarephath in the region of Sidon. ²⁷ And there were many in Israel with leprosy in the time of Elisha the prophet, yet not one of them was cleansed—only Naaman the Syrian.”
                                                                                    -Luke 4:25-27
 
Jesus has just told the hometown crowd that no prophet is accepted in their hometown. And then he proceeds to tell these two Old Testament stories with the same punchline: since the prophets are rejected by their people, God sends the prophets to bless other people.
 
The crowd responds furiously to this rebuke.  They storm Jesus and attempt to throw him off a cliff to kill him (so much for the hometown family-reunion warm fuzzies). Jesus passes right through them.
 
Throughout Jesus’s ministry, he will do battle against self-righteousness. This is one of the most entrenched strongholds of sin in Jesus’s day.  It is also one of the most entrenched strongholds in our own.
 
Self-righteousness is a core human defect. It takes the God-given need we all have to feel a ‘right-ness’ about who we are and instead of getting that need met in God, we try to get it met through some other outlet. 
 
Self-righteousness comes in religious packages and non-religious packages, nationalistic packages, professional or career packages, parenting packages, lawn-maintenance packages, housekeeping packages, achievement packages, cause packages, clothing and cosmetic packages and more.
 
Our need to feel a right-ness about ourselves will grab a hold of whatever’s nearby to prop us up. When we grab a hold of something that’s not God to fill that God-given need for right-ness, it inevitably turns into self-righteousness. And when that prop gets threatened, it can really set us off.
 
Everywhere Jesus goes he is a fork in the road: you either cling to your own self-righteousness or you kill it, die to it, and follow Him.  You cannot have both. They both demand to have you, utterly and completely.
 
In his first sermon, Jesus kicks out the prop of nationalistic self-righteousness in his Jewish crowd.  They attempt to murder him in return.  In about three years another self-righteous crowd will storm Jesus, carry him off, and successfully murder him.  This is the dark power of self-righteousness in the human heart.
 
Take a minute to consider what kinds of props you are tempted to lean on or indeed are leaning on in order to feel a ‘right-ness’ about yourself. Consider surrendering those to Jesus today, maybe for the first time, maybe for the hundred and first time.