FBC Daily Devotional – February 15, 2021

Faith Baptist Church

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Well, a good Monday to you, starting a new week and I hope your week is getting off to a good start.

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Hope you had a good weekend. It's a cold one, wasn't it? I don't know what the final record or low was early, early this morning, but it was just cold.

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I hope you're staying warm, not having any problem with your furnace or freezing pipes or anything like that at all.

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So I hope things are going well for you. Well, in our scriptural reading for today, if you're following along in the daily readings, we're in Matthew chapter 15 and this passage begins with some kind of bold guys who are confronting

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Jesus and they confront him about something that may seem pretty strange to us.

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They come to him and say, how come you and your disciples don't wash your hands before you eat? Now, in this climate of COVID, when we're exhorted to wash our hands 15 times a day at least, or every time we touch something, wash your hands and sing the

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ABC song twice when you do so and all that kind of thing. This may seem like a perfectly reasonable question to ask, like, don't you guys care about your health or anything?

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What's going on? But that's not what this is about. What it's about is the fact that the Pharisees had this notion that anytime that they ate something they had to wash, not to get germs off their hands that might cause them to get sick, some kind of disease or something, but that they might have gotten somehow contaminated by a

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Gentile or somebody who was unclean. And so they confront

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Jesus about this because it seems that they're not very concerned, Jesus and his disciples, they're not very concerned about avoiding the contamination of unclean people.

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And the way Jesus handles this points out several easy areas that you and I can fall into, even though we're not

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Jewish Pharisees, we can be contemporary

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New Testament Christian Pharisees, if I can use that phrase, and fall into Pharisaical ways of thinking.

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So for example, if I elevate my own personal preferences or even convictions to the level of a biblical command, for example, perhaps you have come to the conviction that you should not have a television in your home, okay, that's your personal conviction.

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That is not a biblical command. There is nowhere in the Bible where you can point to a passage of Scripture or a verse of Scripture that says you are not to have this electronic device in your home called a television.

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It's just not there. Now certainly you can take some biblical principles and you can apply those principles in such a way that lead you personally to the conviction that you can't have a television in your home.

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But you come to that conviction, and the problem is you become a Pharisee if you look at other

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Christians who have televisions in their home, and you conclude that they're not as spiritual as you are.

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They're defiled. They're somehow unclean because they have this television in their home.

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And that ends up leading you to the place of judging or criticizing others who don't have the same tradition, and that's what's going on here in this passage.

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The Pharisees are judging and criticizing Jesus and the disciples because they don't have the same traditions as those

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Pharisees. What it can also do is lead you, elevating this standard or this personal conviction, elevating it to a point of biblical command, can actually lead you to violate other commands, the actual commands of God, and you can do so for the sake of your quote -unquote tradition.

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Again, so take the television thing, for example. You may be very meticulous about not having a television in your home, but that judgmental spirit that you have toward other people can actually cause you to violate the biblical command to love your neighbor as yourself, for example.

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Now, in the case before us, in the passage before us, Jesus is confronting the

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Pharisees. What they were doing was they were elevating their own personal preference regarding committing things to dedicating things to the

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Lord, and they would dedicate their property or dedicate their finances to the Lord, to the temple supposedly, and then they would not take care of their family, and particularly their elderly parents, as they were exhorted or commanded to do in the

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Scripture. So, we can violate God's commands for the sake of our traditions, and the big problem here that Jesus leads to is that in the end,

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I can end up being a hypocrite with a heart that's far from the

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Lord, and I'm really quite self -deluded because I think

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I'm so pious because I don't have the television in my home. I'm so pious and godly because of that suprabiblical tradition.

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I rise above my other Christian brothers and sisters who have televisions in their home.

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I'm deluding myself with that kind of thinking. And so, that problem really gets down to a matter of the heart, doesn't it?

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Jesus goes on in this passage to talk about that very issue, and he comes to the point in verses 19 and 20 where he says this, he says,

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What comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a person. You see, the

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Pharisees were so concerned about defiling themselves by eating something that might have been contaminated from outside people, from those who weren't as spiritual as they were, and they thought,

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I'm going to contaminate myself spiritually if I don't wash my hands properly.

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And what Jesus is saying is, no, look, contamination begins in the heart and it comes out, it shows itself outwardly.

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So that's why he says, what proceeds out of the mouth from the heart, this defiles a person.

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For out of the heart, he says, come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander.

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These are what defile a person. But to eat with unwashed hands does not defile anyone.

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It's like having a box in your home on a display, on a table, or even hanging on the wall these days.

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That doesn't defile you. What's in your heart, the control center of your being, your intellect, your emotions and your will, as we're learning in our

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Adult Sunday School series right now. What's in your heart and comes out, that's what defiles you.

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You see, maybe you've learned that the best thing for you to do is not have a television, not because having a television itself is sinful, but because you have a sinful heart.

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And your sinful heart leads you to use that instrument of the television in ways that express sin.

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Waste of time, lust, inordinate affections, misplaced priorities.

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So Jesus really gets to the heart of the matter, actually, in dealing with this whole problem of elevating our own preferences or standards or convictions to the level of biblical command.

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He warns us against that. It's a trap that we can so easily fall into. So as we pray together today, let's pray that God would deliver us from that kind of mentality that takes the convictions that the

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Lord has given us, that help us in our own personal walk with Him, but elevating those things to the level of biblical command, and thereby judging others.

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So Father, deliver us from this pharisaical way of thinking, we pray.

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I pray that we would have personal convictions, but we would learn how to distinguish between personal convictions and preferences that we've come to that help us in our spiritual life, to elevating them to commands that we expect and demand other people to follow.

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Grant us that wisdom, we pray. And we ask this in Jesus' name and for His sake. Amen. All right, well,

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I hope you will have a good rest of your Monday, and that the Lord will bless you in it.