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Call to worship: Psalm 15

Text: Job 31

Sermon Outline:

1. Job's cataglogue of personal righteousness:
   • Job has honored his wife by sexual fidelity, 31:1-12
   • Job has treated his subordinates with equity, 31:13-15
   • Job has provided, as able, for the needy, 31:16-23
   • Job has fled from idolatry, 31:24-28
   • Job has majored in hospitality, 31:29-32
   • Job has confessed his sins openly, 31:33-34
   • Job has signed off on his integrity, 31:35-40
2. A catalogue of our responsiveness to it:
   • We should affirm we can be righteous
   • We should learn to kill sin at the root
   • We should adopt Job's God-centered worldview
   • We should always return to our rest in Jesus

Prepare

Questions to Consider:

1. Most of all, what I'd like for you to do is read the sermon text together as a family prior to corporate worship. Do that, pray it, soak in it, discuss it as friends, as spouses, as parents. Some questions to help:
2. What aspects of personal righteousness and/or obedience do you see in Job 31? As you stare into the mirror that is Job, what aspect pierces you most?
3. Note how throughout the chapter, Job makes repeated returns to God's reckoning. Why? Is that frightening for the believer? Why or why not? How is such a truth useful for Job's godliness?
4. What again is Job trying to prove? Does he go too far here? Does his defense of his personal righteousness slip a bit into the sin of self-righteousness? Look ahead and see what Elihu (I think a good guy) says in 32:1. How does this point us to Jesus?
5. Is Job innocent so far as his argument goes? But is he then truly able to appear without blemish before God on his own efforts? How should looking into the mirror of Christ both move the Christian to work and to rest?