FBC Daily Devotional – March 11, 2021

Well, a good Thursday to you. Week is nearly over, well past the halfway point now, and looking forward to the weekend. I hope your week has been going well and that your day has started off well today on this 11th day of March.

Jesus’ Warning Against the Pharisees in Matthew 23

So I hope things are going well for you. Well, if you read today's scripture reading in Matthew chapter 23, you realize that the stereotypical picture that a lot of people in the world have of Jesus is just not quite accurate.

You know, they think of him as just being kind and mild-mannered and never had a bad word to say about anybody, you know, was always positive and uplifting and expressing love and all the rest of that.

He was all those things, but not only all those things. And that's very clear here in Matthew chapter 23. It's like in one edition of the Bible I have, it breaks the passages down in paragraphs, so you see the whole paragraph together.

And at the beginning of each of the paragraphs here in chapter 23 in verses 13 through 36, the beginning of each of those paragraphs begin with this statement, Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees.

And then he follows it with some kind of a descriptor, and usually it's this, Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites. Hypocrites. Now, in verse 16, he changes it a little bit. He's going to communicate some of the same idea, though.

He says, Woe to you, blind guides. Woe to you, blind guides. But then in verse 23, again, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites. Verse 25, same thing. Verse 27, same thing. Verse 29, same thing. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites.

Now, that's pretty blunt, and that's pretty harsh. And again, as I mentioned the other day in our devotions, it's helpful to us, I think, to put ourselves in the action in these stories, to put ourselves right there.

You know, there's a crowd. There are people around, and Jesus is communicating this message to these religious zealots. These are the people who are generally looked up to. If you wanted to be religious, if you got convicted about, you know, being flippant about religion, and you wanted to get serious about your faith as a Jew, you would look to the scribes and the Pharisees, and you'd say, Okay, I finally need to be like them.

I need to be like these guys. And yet, here's Jesus. He's speaking to these guys, and he says, You guys are a bunch of blind guides, and you are hypocrites. Hypocrites. Now, you can be sure that didn't sit too well with the hypocrites, and indeed it didn't.

They're the ones who really stirred up the trouble to have him crucified. But it would have created a mixed response in the crowd, wouldn't it? Because, you know, some would think, Well, you know, I thought these were the guys to follow, and yet Jesus says they're the hypocrites.

But most of the people, the common people, who heard this, they would have breathed a nice sigh of relief, because they'd say, Oh, you mean I don't have to be like them? I don't have to live like them?

You know, some of the harshest criticisms that Jesus expresses are for those whose religion is marked by adherence to a bunch of meticulous outward rules that are not God's law, but they're add-ons. They have these, they live by these meticulous outward rules, but within their heart is corrupt.

Again, listen to what he says in verses 23 and following, after he says you're a bunch of hypocrites. He says, You tithe mint and dill and cumin, these little herbs, you tithe on the herbs, and you've neglected the weightier matters of the law, justice, mercy, faithfulness.

These you should have done without neglecting the others. You blind guides, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel. So while they're very meticulous in tithing every leaf of mint and cumin and dill and leaving off the more important things, justice and mercy and faithfulness, they're showing, they're revealing that their heart deep down is corrupt.

How can you consider yourself to be truly godly if you're not fair, if you're not just, if you don't express justice or faithfulness or mercy? Those are things that come out of the heart. Now, you know, honestly, and I alluded to this the day before yesterday, I believe, that, you know, I've known too many Christians whose quote-unquote standards have become tests of fellowship, and they've used those standards to serve as a basis for evaluating another person's spirituality.

And you know what? I've been guilty of that. I recall, okay, so when I went to college, a Christian college, and I appreciate what I got in that college, but it was a college. It had a bunch of rules.

I mean, there was a rule book, and you got it, and you had to sign that you would obey the rules in a rule book. And one of the things, this is back in the mid-'70s, mid-late-'70s, and this was back in the hippie era, you know, and all that kind of stuff.

And one of the rules was that all the male students had to have their hair cut in a particular way. It had to be tapered off the ears, tapered off the collar and the back. Your hair wasn't allowed to be over your collar, wasn't allowed to be over your ears, and so forth.

It had to be cut in a certain way. That was their rule. Okay. Well, that's all well and good. They can have a rule, any rule they want to have. The problem came for me when I, and I embraced the rule.

I mean, there was a time in my life when I really needed some discipline and structure, and I got it. And so I embraced the rule, but I allowed that embracing of the rule to become a means of evaluating other people's spirituality.

So I remember having a chapel speaker one day in our school's chapel, and the speaker had, you know, his hair. He had longer hair. He had it combed back, so it wasn't like hanging down, but it was longer than the stand.

He was an older guy, too. I mean, he was an old guy, probably in his 60s, like where I am right now. And yet that hair, it just went a little bit over the ears. And I remember sitting there thinking critically of this guy.

What a fool. What a fool I was. And I've seen that same spirit over and over again through the years where my standards are elevated to the place of God's law when they're not, and I turn around and develop this judgmentalism where I'm evaluating another Christian's level of commitment to the Lord.

I have a holier-than-thou attitude, and I can become contemptuous and disdainful and even have a condescending attitude toward those who don't measure up to my standards. Jesus has a word for me. Hypocrite, scribe, Pharisee, hypocrite.

Don't go there. Don't be that person. I've had to learn that the hard way myself, and the Lord has had to work me over on that. I have standards, I have guidelines for my life and so forth that are beyond even what the law says, if you will, even what God commands, what demands.

But I must not allow those things to become a basis of evaluating another's spirituality. So, let that be an encouragement to us to beware, lest we be like the scribes and the Pharisees, hypocrites. All right.

Deliverance from a Pharisaical, Hypocritical Spirit

I hope you have a good rest of your Thursday. Father in Heaven, I pray that you would deliver us from this kind of pharisaical, hypocritical spirit, and I pray that you bless the remainder of this day, and we ask it in Jesus' name.

Amen. All right. Have a good day. God bless.