The Word of God

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Don Filcek; Matthew 15:1-9 The Word of God

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You're listening to the podcast of Recast Church in Matawan, Michigan. This week, Pastor Don Filsak takes us through his series on the book of Matthew called
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Not Your Average Savior. Let's listen in. Well, good morning,
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Recast Church. I'm Don Filsak, I'm the lead pastor here, and I just wanna say thank you for gathering together to worship
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God with his people this morning. I just wanna remind us that we need time together.
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And part of that gathering together, part of this morning is just recognizing and being reminded that we are not alone in our journey of faith.
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How many of you would recognize that during the week, at times it becomes lonely out there. There are times when it just feels like you're going it alone, maybe at your workplace.
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Not a lot of people have sympathies along with Jesus Christ where you work, and so a lot of times it can become frustrating, or you feel isolated, or you feel alone during the week.
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And so we need this gathering together with each other to be built up and strengthened, that there are others out there who see the world like we see the world.
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There are others out there who believe the word of God is true. There are others out there who love Jesus and have been loved by him, and so we need that reminder.
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And I hope that you recognize that you need others. That's fundamental, I hope that that's in you.
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You recognize you need others. And equally, I hope that you recognize that others need you. Others need you in their lives to be an encouragement and to be strengthening them, and God has brought us all into each other's lives so that we can be sharpened in our relationship with him this morning.
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RECAST CHURCH is an acronym. Many of you know that, some of you don't, and just looking out, I see some new faces here.
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And so just to clarify and explain the name, a lot of people ask me, at the coffee shop, what do you do?
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I'm a pastor, where at? RECAST CHURCH, what does that mean, right? How many of you encounter that from time to time?
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Have to try to explain what the name means. It's an acronym for our core values. It's kind of a double meaning because one time the disciples were out fishing, and they had fished all night and not caught anything, and Jesus told them to recast the nets to the other side.
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They obeyed and they caught fish, and so there's that meaning to it, recasting the nets, but also this acronym, the
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R and the E stand for replicating, the C for community, the A for authenticity, the
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S for simplicity, and the T stands for truth. And truth is the one that really ties all of those other values together.
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We believe that the Bible is an accurate reflection of the truth that God desired to disclose to humanity about himself.
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It tells us who he is, but it's also the source of a lot of different things that are very valuable and very important to our worldview, the way that we look at the world around us.
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It's the source of our understanding of who God is, but it's also ultimately the source of understanding of who we are.
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It's the source of our understanding of what is wrong with the world. How many of you would identify that there were a couple things that went wrong this week?
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Weren't the way that they ought to be, weren't the way that they're supposed to be? Maybe that's in you, maybe that's outside of you, probably a lot of both.
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And so why is it that way? The Bible makes sense of why the world is broken and what's wrong and then clarifies where the world is going.
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Where's all of this heading? And then how can we get to be made right? How can wholeness come to us?
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And all of that is found in the pages of scripture. We have an awesome and glorious word from God about the way, it's kind of like the explanation for the things that you see around you, the way that life really is.
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And in our text this morning, Jesus is gonna point out to the religious leaders of his time the problem that occurs when we turn to other sources for authority in the way that we ought to live.
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Or when, worse, we become an authority to ourselves, an authority to others about the way that we should live.
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In life, we have a lot of competing sources of authority. You have that going on, I take that for granted.
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I'm not gonna ask you to raise your hand. I already know that you have a ton of competing sources of authority. A lot of voices in your week are calling for your allegiance.
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There are even many voices in our culture today that are saying very opposite things that are both claiming to be true.
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You experience that, right? You see that in the news, you see that all around you, different sources saying opposite things and both claiming to be true.
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So how do you know which one to follow? Is there any problem with following the wrong voices?
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Is there any problem with following the wrong one? That certainly depends on what the subject is, right?
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Depends on what you're talking about. Buying the wrong shampoo, that's easily fixed, right? Like, you can remedy that, okay.
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You know, following the wrong advertisement for soap is not a big deal. So don't stress out about those decisions, but getting the right source of authority for your life and how to live your life is a bit more important, right?
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Would you agree with me on that? That one's more significant. So as we read our text this morning, it's gonna need some explanation as we dive into it.
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And we're obviously gonna just introduce it now and then we're gonna sing some songs together and have some connection time and things like that.
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But as we read this here in just a moment and then we get to the explanation later, consider the comparison of the traditions of mankind over and opposed to the commandments of God.
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And the way that there's a little interplay that's going on in this text about those two things, between Jesus and the religious leaders of his time.
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All of us have at our core value, a source of authority. And it really comes down to one of these things
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Jesus is identifying for us. Either we are living a life based on the traditions of humanity, or we are living our lives based on the authority of the word of God.
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And Jesus is urging us through this life to live our lives, through this text to live our lives based solely on the truth found in the
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Bible. So let's open our Bibles if you're not already there to Matthew chapter 15. Matthew 15 verses one through nine is where we're gonna be.
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And if you don't have a Bible on your lap or a means to navigate to a Bible, you can use your phone or whatever device you have there.
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But if you don't have a way to get to the word of God, Mike's got some in his hand back here. And the way that he knows to bring you one is just if you slip your hand up, we're not calling you out.
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Just want everybody to have a copy of the word of God on your lap for the morning. And then you can take that home with you if you want a copy of the word of God and you don't have one, take that.
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We want everybody to have a copy of God's word to be able to read it and take it in. But recast,
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I think maybe the most valuable thing that we do in our week is to hear from God's word, whether that's in your own personal time reading it or here in the gathering of God's people.
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I'm gonna explain this text later. But the centerpiece of our time together is hearing
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God speak through his word. This is a glorious privilege, an amazing thing that God would speak to us, and he's going to do so now through his word.
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So follow along, Matthew 15, one through nine. Then Pharisees and scribes came to Jesus from Jerusalem and said, why do your disciples break the tradition of the elders?
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For they do not wash their hands when they eat. He answered them, why do you break the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition?
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For God commanded, honor your father and your mother, and whoever reviles father or mother must surely die.
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But you say, if anyone tells his father or his mother, what you would have gained from me is given to God.
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He need not honor his father. So for the sake of your tradition, you have made void the word of God.
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You hypocrites, well did Isaiah prophesy of you when he said, this people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.
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In vain do they worship me. Teaching is doctrines, the commandments of men.
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Let's pray. Father, I thank you so much that you have given us a bedrock authority.
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You have given us a concrete place to turn, to understand you.
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Now, we have a hard time sometimes discerning it, sometimes understanding it, maybe even in the reading of that text, there's some confusion about some of the history and culture that we're gonna get to later, but Father, there's a beauty in your word.
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There's an amazing reality that you are showing us your nature, how you work with us, who we are.
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And as we come to your text, we have an opportunity to be transformed and to be changed.
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And most importantly, by the glorious central teaching of your word that there is hope for any through the gospel of Jesus Christ, that he came, was a sinless sacrifice for us, died, and rose again three days later.
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That those who trust in him by faith and accept him as their Lord and their King and ask him for forgiveness can be saved.
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And so, Father, I pray that those here who are being redeemed, those here who are justified, those here who are being sanctified and set apart for your work daily and more and more each day,
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Father, that we would worship you now as we get a chance to lift our voices in song before you, that this would be so much more than an exercise of our ability to sing, but it would be an exercise of our very hearts and souls in gratitude and thankfulness for the immense and glorious and beautiful sacrifice that Jesus Christ has given to us in his great love for us.
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From that place of being loved, may we in turn love others and love you because you have first loved us.
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In Jesus' name, amen. Yeah, go ahead and be seated. And I do encourage you at any time if you need to get up and stretch out in the back during the next half an hour or so as we talk through God's word.
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I know the seats you're sitting in are not the most comfortable. If you need to get up and get more coffee, juice, or donuts, even though we just took a break, you may need that.
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So don't be afraid to get up. And then restrooms are out the hallway. Women's are on the main floor.
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Turn right on the main floor. And then men's are upstairs, but down there as well. So use those bathrooms that are on this end of the building, please.
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And then keep your Bibles open to Matthew chapter 15, verses one to nine. We're gonna walk through this text and you're gonna see that the outline and the structure of the message comes straight out of this text that we read earlier.
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And this morning we dig into a text that requires some level of deeper thinking on our part. It's a passage that you could read a bunch of times and not really get down to the meaning of it.
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And I don't know how many of you, like when you first read it, when I read it earlier, you were like, oh yeah, I get what that means. And I think a lot of times we can read through a passage or we read over it and we maybe feel like we get the gist of it, but we're not exactly sure what some of the pieces and the parts mean.
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This text has some historical background that you need to understand in order to really figure out what Jesus is saying.
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A background that we're not very familiar with that requires some study, and that's why I dig into the Word for us each week and spend some time looking at history and looking at different texts and looking at different things and what other scholars say about this stuff so that I can bring that to us and help us to understand it better.
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The text also that we're reading this morning and looking at speaks about some things on the surface that are not the main point, so they feel like a little bit of a diversion and they might just kind of confuse things a little bit.
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For example, you'll see in the text it talks about washing your hands. That really ends up having very little to do with the main point of this text.
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It's not as though we're gonna end up with an application at the end about whether or not you should wash your hands.
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Okay, that's not the point of the text. And so, by the way, I just wanna clarify,
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I recommend it, I think it's a good idea, especially if you wanna be healthy. We've got all kinds of products for that now and that's good, but it doesn't factor much into the text, so it can be like, well, what's this about hand washing and then what's this about how you treat your parents and what is it about dedicating something to God so that I don't have to give something to my parents and things like that.
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But the main reason, hear me carefully, the main reason Matthew recorded this incident and in the life of Jesus and his teaching and his interaction with his religious leaders has a very deep issue at its root.
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It's a very deep thing at the heart of this text. Where does your authority rest?
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Now, at face value, you might not have gotten that from reading it, but that's what's really going on here. On what bedrock do you base your life?
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What is the bedrock of your decision making, of your actions, of your relationships with others, the way you talk to others, the way that you roll during your daily life?
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Everyone in this room has a source or maybe a hodgepodge of sources in our mind for the way that we live our lives.
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Now, I would even say that if you have a hodgepodge, you're still, we're gonna see in the text, it's gonna come down to two main sources of authority for each one of us, but some of us have inherited values from your parents, right?
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Have you inherited some values? Good or bad, for good or for bad, you've inherited some things from your parents.
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Some of you have been deeply influenced by churches that you've attended down through the years, maybe a pastor, maybe a religious leader, maybe even a radio broadcast or a sermon online or something like that.
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Many of us have been impacted by books, by teachers that we've accumulated along the way.
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Some of us have been influenced in reality by TV and movies, sometimes in ways that we don't even recognize or don't even understand, but those things have gotten in here to some degree.
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But let me be clear that Jesus is not addressing the fact that we can be influenced by many things, like you already knew that.
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There's a lot of different influences on our lives. But he's saying that when we dig into our hearts deep enough, when we really get down to bedrock core issues, we find a place that we go to routinely for guidance and direction in our lives, and the question that he's calling to these religious leaders is where is that?
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What is that thing that you're turning to? Where do you go for the bottom line? And he will deal with this in a way that identifies two different options.
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Now he simplifies it, and I just mentioned there's a hodgepodge of things that we turn to, but he simplifies it for us, and I think he does,
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I mean, he's Jesus, he gets the right to say there's two types of people, right? Most of the time that we're saying there's two types of people, we're wrong.
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He's saying there's two types of people, and he's right. Either we lean on the way of mankind, we lean on human tradition, we lean on the human way of looking at things, be that a person's advice at work, or something online, or a book we bought at Amazon written by a person, or advice from a counselor, or a therapist, or a psychologist, or we have at our core a recognition of the authority of God's word over us.
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Now I use the word core source of authority because we should go to godly people for counsel, right?
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You should be asking people, you need others. I said that at the start of the message, you need each other, so is it wrong for you to go to others for advice?
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Is it wrong for you to take things on from others? Is it wrong for you to read a book that's not the Bible? Absolutely not, of course not.
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But only in as much as what others that are counseling us say, only in as much as those books that we read line up with God's truth is there really a benefit in our lives and the way we live our lives according to them.
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Does that make sense? So only in as much as we get godly counsel, only in as much as we get biblical counsel, only in as much as we're reading good things that are lining up with God's word is that having a beneficial and good impact on us.
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You see, what we really need is we need his commands, we need his word, we need his gospel, we need this text that we take in every
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Sunday and we need that throughout the week and we need it to be saturating us. We need to be reminded of his right to rule and reign and tell us what we should and shouldn't do.
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The reality is we're living increasingly in a culture that says that no one can tell you what you should and shouldn't do.
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Even the categories of should and shouldn't are kind of starting to turn more and more gray, more and more gray every day in our culture.
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But the outline for our text this morning centers on human traditions and clarifying how we need to be careful to follow
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God's word but not get so caught up in the human traditions that it's often the religious thing to do.
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Where we make rules for others and we make even a huge set of rules for ourselves just like the
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Pharisees did here and we're gonna see that. The Scribes and the Pharisees were masters of rule making and so we make rules for others and then we expect them to jump through our hoops and that's not healthy either.
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So the outline centers on those human traditions. The Pharisees and the Scribes came to Jesus in verse one and they have a bone to pick with him regarding their own traditions.
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The things that they held dear, the things that they had made up and tried to use to protect others and protect themselves and we're gonna see him turning the tables on them and refusing to really even address their traditions and instead in our text he points them to the word of God.
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He says this is a good place to start and this is a good place to end. Your quest for God should begin here and you will find him here.
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If you're truly searching with your heart I believe that firmly and I think Jesus believed that firmly as well and that's part of what he's saying here.
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So here's the structure of our text. This is the outline. If you're into outlines, I went ahead and just for kicks alliterated it for you just for fun.
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I do this once in a while because I just wanna show you that I can. The skepticism of tradition is verses one and two.
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The second is the slippery slope of tradition. That's verses three through six and then the scandal of tradition where it all culminates in scandal is in verses seven through nine.
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And let me be clear before we dive in because I'm gonna use the word tradition a lot in this text and so because of that I wanna clarify what
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I mean when I'm saying tradition. What the text means when it says tradition because how many of you have some traditions coming up around Christmas time?
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Better not, right? The text is, I mean Jesus is saying no traditions, right? We have traditions and those can be good things.
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It's not about the simple things of routines. Traditions are often just routines, right?
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They're the things that we do. I mean you could accuse people, everybody who brushed their teeth this morning is oh you kept a tradition this morning, you're in trouble.
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Hopefully you do keep that tradition. But when we're talking about tradition here in this text and I'll use it a lot but this is what
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I mean by it. I mean religious beliefs and practices that are not found in scripture.
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Religious beliefs and practices that are not found fundamentally in scripture.
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They are man -made wisdom that comes from our own preferences. They are sometimes well -meaning.
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They are sometimes misleading. And in our darkest times they are downright malicious.
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In our darkest times we would hold people to things that we don't hold ourselves to. That's malicious, isn't it?
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That's hypocritical, that's malicious. That would be like saying well you can't do this. I do on the side, I just don't tell anybody, right?
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That's evil. And some of these things, I just give this, I throw this out as an illustration in case you need an illustration.
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There are many churches and there are some conservative churches who would say thou shalt not drink alcohol.
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That would be a statement from their church. Thou shalt not drink alcohol. But you just don't see that.
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Did you know that that's not in there? Did you know that Jesus drank alcohol? I mean I'm not gonna, okay anyways.
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Everybody's like whoa, all right. It's not in there. Don't get drunk is.
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Don't get drunk is in there. And I just wanna clarify that for everybody. Not to drink to excess.
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For anyone. For anybody who's a follower of Christ, they should not be drinking to excess. But enjoying a nice alcoholic drink is not a sin.
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Obviously if you're under 21 in your room, you need to talk with your parents and that's not right, okay? So that's just because you're breaking the law of the land at that point.
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But that's a little different. So it's this idea of adding rules over and above what scripture dictates for us that seem to often be wise.
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Did you know that the majority of these rules that the Pharisees made seemed wise to them? Did you know that the majority of the people who would say thou shalt not drink alcohol have reasons for it?
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Have good reasons for it in their mind? As a matter of fact, they have good reasons that would be for the protection of people, right?
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That would be their heart. I'm not saying that they're, some of these rules are not malicious, but they're misleading or they're misled or they come from a wrong -minded perspective.
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And that's what Jesus is gonna get to. So let's start with the skepticism of tradition, our first point. In verses one and two, we see something of the nature of human tradition from the way that the text is even set up, from the way that it's organized and the way that this all comes to pass.
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The way that the confrontation between the Pharisees and the scribes happens is informative to us. The Pharisees and scribes came to Jesus from Jerusalem, it says in the text.
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Now, he's up in Galilee on the west shore. The last time we saw him, he was up there and he had just crossed the lake and calmed the storm and did some really cool stuff and he healed a bunch of people in Gennesaret and then we get to this text.
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And they come up from Jerusalem about 50 to 60 miles, which is a really cool way to think of it.
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I should have put it on the map is if you were to transpose Israel over West Michigan, because we have a coast on our west, just like the
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Mediterranean Sea, it's actually a really good fit. So the majority of the things that happened in Israel when you're reading about this is
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Kalamazoo to Grand Rapids. Like that's the area you're talking about here, about 50 miles. So when you talk about going from Jerusalem to Galilee, to the
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Sea of Galilee, you're talking about a road trip from Kalamazoo to Grand Rapids. Now walk it, right?
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Now walk it. And now you're going, oh, okay, I get it. So the Pharisees and the scribes, without cell phones, without email, without the ability to just jump online and schedule an appointment or to see
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Jesus' preaching schedule, where's he gonna be next Sunday so I can go check it or Saturday in the synagogue?
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Where's he gonna be so that I can catch him in the Galilee tour? They hunt him down.
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Now there's something about that in itself, right? Do they have some determination to talk with Jesus? Yeah, you see that right off the bat.
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Whoever these Pharisees and scribes are, they've got an intention to talk with him. Now who are these people?
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Pharisees and scribes, let me clarify that before we get too deep into the point of the skepticism here. To make a modern day equivalent, the
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Pharisees and scribes, we could maybe think of them as like a division within Christianity. Maybe the
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Pharisees would be something like the Catholic priests, we could say that. And I think that that's just a good modern equivalent of what we could think of as the
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Pharisees. And the scribes would be like those priest seminary professors who are in cahoots with that, they're together.
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And so that's why I say Catholic priests and the Catholic seminary professors would be because they're the scholars and then they're the ones in practice.
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And so that would be a good way to think of it. So it's like a group of religiously devout men and scholars who are going out from Jerusalem to find
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Jesus. They didn't, again, have an easy way to locate him and so they're hunting for him.
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I'm sure that they could, you know, word spread about where Jesus was. So I don't mean to belabor how difficult that would be, but still they're taking effort.
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And it shows the dedication, but further, what we're gonna see, I would call it a deep skepticism in the ministry of Jesus because of what they're hunting him down for.
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The religious leaders during the ministry of Jesus had a lot of skepticism about his ministry, in part because he didn't meet the expectations of their traditions.
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Now what did I say traditions were? Traditions are those man -made, outside of Scripture, rules that they thought he should follow and he didn't do it, he refused to.
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He didn't do things their way. And this caused them frustration and concern, as you can imagine, for these religious leaders.
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You see, either they were doing things wrong, in their mind, they were very black and white, and so they were like, either we're doing things wrong or Jesus is doing things wrong.
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And we don't do things wrong, so I guess they probably already had their answer before they ever met with him, right? Because they weren't doing anything wrong.
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They were doing what they had always done. They were doing what the religious leaders before them had taught them to do and the religious leaders before them had taught them to do and so they're in their tradition and they're just rolling through this and going,
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Jesus, get in line. Can you imagine that? Just for a minute, just think about that phrase. Jesus, get in line.
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Come in line with our rules. Come in line with our way of doing things. How many of you think that's a scary position to be in?
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I think we've gotta be careful about judging them because sometimes we can do the same thing. Sometimes we can ask him to adopt our view of things.
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We say, you know, I can understand, Jesus, that you might push against me sometimes, but on this one, I'm gonna go with me.
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What? That's what these religious leaders are literally doing here is they're going to address him and make sure, and really, to call him to line up with them.
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Come and line up and then we can kind of talk about the way that our ministries can go forward together.
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Their skepticism centers on a very insignificant question. Did you notice that in the text? They're hunting for Jesus, travel all throughout the countryside looking for him to ask him why his disciples don't wash their hands before they eat.
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Now, I don't know about you, but if I get a chance to ask Jesus a question, you know, it's not gonna be a wash on your hands.
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That's not the question that's on my mind, okay? But does that say something about these guys?
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Does that say something about the religion of our hearts? Does that say something about how picky and persnickety and how we can just get down to the minutia of details and loopholes and rules and rules and rules and adding rules on top and how about this?
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Self -justification, making sure that I'm right, search the countryside to make sure that I'm right and make sure that Jesus agrees with me.
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This shows the nature of those who are driven by human tradition. We can get so caught up in arguing semantics.
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We can get so caught up in those details and those loopholes and adding rules on top of rules. We don't even,
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I think these guys are blind to how petty and silly these religious questions are. I think they're literally blinded to it.
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They don't even realize how silly this looks. And in this skepticism, they ask
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Jesus, why is disciples break the tradition of the elders by not washing their hands for ritual purity? This is not just about cleanliness, by the way.
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They didn't even understand germs at this time. They didn't even get it. This was not about like health. This was about believing that they might somehow be unclean in offering thanks to God and so they would wash their hands before they offered thanks so that they were ritually pure to enter into the presence of God, even offer that thanks to him.
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But the phrase tradition of the elders that you see here in the text is a common phrase in Jewish literature. For a large body of rules that eventually became known as the
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Mishnah, you don't even need to remember that. I didn't even need to say it. But it's an actual written document that's ancient that comes down from this era that is rules upon rules, hundreds and hundreds, actually a couple thousand rules that are spelled out in detail that was contingent on the
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Jewish people during this time that are above and beyond, all rules above and beyond law.
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All rules above and beyond what the Bible says. Why? To help you keep the law.
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Why? To keep you far away. And they thought of it, the words that were used often was a fence or a wall around the law.
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So you never even got to the law. Don't worry about breaking the law of God because we've got rules that keep you from even getting close to rules that break the law.
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Do you get what I'm saying? And so we're just gonna really protect our people carefully.
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And I mean, to be honest, they don't even need to know the Bible at that point. They don't need to study this. All they need to know is our rules.
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If they follow our rules, then they don't need to worry about God's rules. See how that could happen?
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And the religious leader is now the authority and the Bible isn't even turned to anymore.
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This is such a common problem for those who find themselves in a position of spiritual authority, by the way. And I think we need to be mindful of our own hearts, not just these
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Pharisees, not just these scribes. But I mean, in our heart, we can start with really good intentions. We want to protect people.
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How many of you want to protect people? There's people in your life that you want to protect. Those of you that are raising kids, I assume that there's some rules that you've placed in your household to try to protect them.
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That's a reasonable thing. This is not at all about, it is not addressing the household, but it is addressing the church at large in our hearts.
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And so the motivation begins, I think, often in these making rules for others with the best of intentions. Man -made rules and adding laws above the law of God may sound good at first, but it almost always leads to a skeptical attitude toward the good things that God is doing with those who do not abide by your traditions.
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You ever been skeptical of somebody who didn't hold your tradition? Yeah, just simply because they didn't hold your tradition?
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Not because of something they said, not because they were wrong, not because they were disagreeing with the word, but just because they weren't from your stripe. They weren't your brand.
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We should take a careful assessment of our own traditions and be sure that we're not leaning on tradition, but instead are leaning on the word of God to guide our lives.
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And the reason we need to be careful is found in the next two points. The second point is in verses three through six, and that's
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Jesus points to the slippery slope of man -made religious traditions. That when we make rules for others, we are on a slippery slope already.
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Jesus didn't even, by the way, dignify their concerns about hand -washing with a direct answer. He didn't even address it.
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He never tells them why his disciples don't wash their hands before they eat. Now, maybe you wanna ask
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Jesus that when you get to heaven. Why? Well, why didn't they? I mean, what's the scoop? Maybe they were just uncouth fishermen, right?
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Like, maybe that's what it came down to. We don't know because he doesn't answer. Maybe it was so that this confrontation would happen.
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Like, he was like, don't wash your hands so that we could see what the Pharisees are gonna do. I don't know. Maybe he was just trying to push their buttons.
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Instead, though, instead of answering that, he turns the tables and asks them a scathing question.
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And by the way, this isn't the, well, why don't you do that then? You know, like, have you ever gotten in that argument with your spouse or with somebody that you love who you're just kinda like, they say, well, why do you do this?
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And you're like, well, why do you do that? You know? Are you laughing because it was funny?
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Are you laughing because you do it? Like, I mean, I think that maybe there's a little bit of nervous laughter in there, right? Like, yeah, I've been there.
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I've done that, you know? And that's not what Jesus is doing here. Jesus is changing the subject. He's actually diverting their attention from what matters least to that which matters most.
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What matters least? Their opinions and thoughts. What matters most? What God says. He's like, let's not even talk about what you think about it.
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I don't even wanna know what you think about it. I don't even wanna know about your traditions. I don't care about your piddly little, go ahead and wash your hands if you want.
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That's good. Do what you want. But let's talk about God's word. Let's talk about his commands. Let's talk about what he wants of us.
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So he kinda goes for the heart because I believe that God's word is very close to Jesus' heart.
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It matters to him. He says, let's talk about what's close to my heart here for just a minute. Let's talk about God's law and the way that you
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Pharisees and scribes are using your traditions to break my law. The way that you use your tradition to break the very laws and commands of God.
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Now, I'm sure that at this point, the Pharisees and scribes had no idea that that was coming and no idea what to do with it.
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Then, break God's laws? Are you crazy, Jesus? What in the world? You don't even get it.
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How preposterous that we would break God's laws. You see, religious people have a hard time seeing their own moral failures.
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Many of us know that because we either are or have been religious people. But the notion of breaking
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God's law in the service of their own traditions, that couldn't possibly be right. There's no way that their tradition would ever lead them to break
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God's law. Their tradition is set up to keep them from breaking God's law. They had set up these religious practices and duties to try to protect people from breaking the law.
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But just like a person who would say, thou shalt not drink alcohol, isn't recognizing that scripture says, do not let anybody judge you by what you eat or drink.
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What? Thou shalt not drink alcohol, on one side. Don't let anybody judge you based on what you eat or drink, on the other side.
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Set up that rule. Do we realize that we're breaking another? We're literally breaking another rule by setting that law, a man -made law up.
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But Jesus goes in for one of the 10 commandments here. He goes in for a central thing. He goes kind of for the jugular here.
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One of the most sacred of all the laws for the Jews, all sacred for sure, but the ones that would have been just bedrock, and he quotes two commands that they would have been all too familiar with, spelling out the same rule.
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Exodus 20, verse 12, he quotes it directly. Honor your father and mother. Heard that one before?
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Yeah? Exodus 21, 17. A little less comfortable expose on that law.
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Whoever reviles father and mother must surely die. Pretty strong commandments.
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Pretty central commandments. Clear and pointed from the old covenant that they were trying to establish their righteousness on the old covenant.
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So Jesus says, let me deal with you, old covenant. You wanna go old covenant? I'll match you on this. Do this.
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By the way, all the Old Testament law reflects something of the heart of God for his people. It all reflects something of him.
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It tells us something about who he is. Respect and honor within the family structure is something that God heavily values.
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Do you see it? You see how much he values it from these two commands? These scribes and Pharisees would have been well aware of that being close to the heart of God.
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And at this point, I'm sure these religious leaders are already mounting their defense. I've never reviled my mother or my father.
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I've only ever taught people to honor their father and mother. But there's one little tradition that they regularly taught to people for their own benefit, and people that broke this commandment, they taught people to follow this one tradition and it caused people to break this commandment of honor your father and mother.
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The care for parents in their old age is a part of the calling to honor your father and mother. It's part of that respect within the family structure is caring for aging and elderly parents.
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The Pharisees taught that if a person wanted to avoid the financial burden of caring for parents in their old age, they could just pledge their money and call it dedicated to God.
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And then it was protected from being used for the parent's benefit. Now, this was a legal loophole.
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It was a practice that's recorded for us in many, many documents historically. It's a process, it's the
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Jewish word, the Hebrew word korban is the word for it. The word korban means dedicated.
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A loose understanding would be dedicating a future offering to God or a future offering dedicated to God.
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Now, the way that a person would benefit from this doesn't seem to be clear unless you do some study. So how do I give everything to God and then personally benefit?
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Because I could've just given it to my parents at that point, right? Like, what I gave to God, I could've given to my parents and what's the personal benefit?
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Well, the point is the word future, the idea that it's a future thing. And the way that a person would benefit from this is extremely heartless.
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It's intentionally heartless. It's purposefully trying to avoid caring for those in need around you.
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And in this context, Jesus is even saying they would use it for their parents to avoid caring for parents. Very heartless way.
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They declare all their possessions to be korban. You could, I mean, if you were a Jew, you could do that now. You could say all of my possessions are korban.
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They are dedicated in a future sense to God. Now, you would still have the benefit of living off of that until you die because everybody needs to be sustained and that would've been understood.
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And then any that's left will go to the temple or the synagogue afterwards. It was like a will.
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Like writing the synagogue into your will. And then anything that's left over at the end goes to the synagogue.
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Gave them, it was a will written in a way that kept them from being generous or the requirements of being generous in this life.
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And of course, as you might be able to surmise in your mind, the religious leaders benefited from this arrangement later down the road too.
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As they had every interest in you issuing a rule of korban over your possessions because then everything at the end of your life goes back to the religious establishment.
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So Jesus points to a specific instance where a human tradition has led to a break in God's law through a loophole.
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And I want to point out at this point that there is a brand of legalism, a brand of human tradition, a brand of human religious tradition that gets so caught up in making rules that they become hard to manage.
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Have any of you ever just kind of had enough rules in your family or enough rules in your household or enough rules in your life to kind of start getting confused by them?
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Does anybody know what I'm talking about? It can be sometimes hard if you're raising kids to just try to be consistent in your rules, right?
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Just the rules that you have that are pretty set forward. And it's hard for us as humans with finite minds to even see how some rules are gonna impact other rules and try to keep all of that organized and you have a flow chart or how do you do that?
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And we certainly have a hard time seeing how a rule made today is gonna impact a new situation in a scenario we have yet to encounter, right?
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And so that's why we have a legislative branch in our government that's constantly trying to come up with new rules to amend broken rules and fix other things and all of that.
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I've made my share of botched rules in my own family. Some rules that I've issued have lasted about two minutes or less.
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Like when my kids were preschoolers, we're on a road trip and I shout in the backseat, no more talking! Not the best of rules.
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Like I mean, how long is that gonna last? Like what are you gonna do? No more questions! Well, I actually like it that they ask questions now that they're teens.
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But so, you know, kind of an unreasonable rule and I think all of us at some point have issued a unreasonable rule.
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But our human religious traditions are on a slippery slope and Jesus is faithful to show us where we come up short.
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He's showing these religious leaders where they come up short. Even in our attempts to do what we think is in the best interest of others, we are sinful and we break things.
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So human religious tradition and additional rules bring with it skepticism of others and it's always on a slippery slope.
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And lastly, where that slippery slope leads is to scandal in our lives.
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In verse seven, Jesus resorts to a holy name calling here in the text. A holy name calling in that I don't think he's just, you know, slinging slurs at them, calling them hypocrites.
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The exclamation point, by the way, in Greek is warranted and so when we draw that over,
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I mean, it's emphatic what he says here, but he means it. He's not just throwing out words at them.
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They are hypocrites. And they're showing themselves to be hypocrites. They wanna hold others to lesser man -made rules while they are ignoring the true commandments of God.
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And we find that the problem with this runs deeper than we might think. Let's pause for a minute and consider how we really feel about making rules for others.
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How does it run in your heart? Do you feel like there's a standard of music that we should hold to?
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How about TV shows that we can watch? How about what people can eat and what beverages they can enjoy?
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How about what home businesses they're engaged in or how they parent their children or how often they attend church?
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There's a whole host of things. I may not hit your particular hangup, but my guess is that everyone in this room to a person reserves some judgment for others that really at the end only comes down to your preference.
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It only comes down to the things that you like. Even often, we can think that we're issuing a command or a rule or a judgment based on scripture and we're just not.
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We're issuing it on ignorance of the word of God. We're not issuing it on the basis of knowledge and fully grasping it.
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Look at what the deep down scandal is here in verses 8 and 9. Jesus quotes a prophecy from Isaiah 29, 13 and indicts them with it.
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They honor God with their lips, but their hearts are far from him, he says. And stop there and consider that Jesus is connecting the making of rules and legalism that holds others to those rules with a heart that's far from God.
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Some of the people who look the most pious on the outside, some of the people who look the most righteous are actually self -righteous and they're actually far from God in their hearts.
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The fact of the matter is we can fake it well, can't we? We can play a part and watch the outside of the cup really well, while inside the cup is just filled with decay and rot.
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And I would suggest to you that as a person who is more insecure on the inside, that creates rules for others.
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Let me say that again. I suggest to you that it is the person who is more insecure inside that creates rules for others to follow.
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It is the one who doesn't trust the spirit of God to really work in people that tries to create structures to control them into obedience.
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It might even be that you don't trust the spirit with you, and that's a concern.
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And that's primarily because there are many of us that have not recognized our own depravity. Our own need for a savior.
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It's possible that we have not been leaning on the spirit to guide us through the scripture, but instead have been leaning on our own understanding and our own rules and our own structures and our own things and our own plans and building walls of rules around our lives to protect ourselves.
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And it's, at its darkest point, at its darkest point, this making of rules amounts to thinking
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God's way is really insufficient. It amounts to thinking that God's word is not sufficient.
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He forgot to go ahead and finish the statement and say, thou shalt not drink alcohol.
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He forgot that, so I'll fix it for him. I'll take care of that for him.
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So we finish it for him. And we make sure that everybody knows that they should abide by that, because he meant to say that, he just didn't get it finished.
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Or whatever rule you think that he should abide by, he forgot to include. And you finish it, because you really aren't sure that this is enough.
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You're not sure that this is the bedrock. You think it needs a little bit of your help. This passage is somewhat technical.
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Go through it and kind of see what Jesus means with korban and all of these different components and hand washing and why is he bringing them back here and all of that, but it's also very practical.
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I hope you see that. So let me bring this home by first clarifying the flow of the text and then drawing a few applications and we'll wrap up with communion and be on our way and hopefully on our way to honor
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God with our lives through trusting his word. But the pathway of this text is thinking about it in terms of the way that it flows into us and the way that the fault flows with us is that really the human heart begins with good intentions, to make rules to help people live for God.
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We just want people to be holy, so we make them wash their hands before they eat so that they're ritually pure. What's the harm in that,
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Jesus? We're just making some rules for people. It begins with good intentions, but rules in the hands of sinful humanity get beyond our capacity to manage and the human heart tends to seek for loopholes.
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How many of you notice the pull towards the least common denominator in your life? What can I get away with, in other words?
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And the end product of this making rules and this legalism is no more heart in the game, but just obeying man -made rules without much thought about God at all.
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We need to keep God's word as a standard because it is the concrete line of wisdom. Making rules for others is the very nature of religious tradition and Jesus points out the failure that that leads to.
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So the first application from this text that I can see is to run down the lines of skepticism in your own life.
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Where do you find yourself holding others suspect? What are your hand -washing issues, so to speak?
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Where is it that you believe you're right and everybody else is wrong? Another way to ask this question is where do you find yourself judging yourself better than others?
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Think about that. Work through that. And the next step is to consider whether that is genuinely an issue of the word of God or not.
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Sometimes there's a pretty clear issue and what's bothering us is genuinely sin, right?
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And that's okay. Don't confuse the issue of legalism and making man -made rules with God's rules.
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We ought to disdain the breaking of God's rules in us and out of us.
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Legalism isn't taking man -made rules and applying them. Legalism is taking man -made rules and applying them to others.
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But it is not legalism when we call sin, sin. So if the thing that bothers us is clearly, it is not sin, it's not found in scripture, then we need to repent of our arrogance and pride for considering ourselves better than others.
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We should come back to dependence upon the Holy Spirit to speak to us through his word and what he desires of us.
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Lastly, and most importantly, we need to consider where our hearts are at in this tension between religious tradition and the authority of the word of God.
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Do you love God? For you, in all honesty, is it more like falling in love?
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Why is it like a list? Is it a checklist? If I finish the day and show my wife the checklist and say, see dear,
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I love you, here's the checklist. I did this, this, and this. That's a little bit different, isn't it, than actually loving her with my heart.
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Some of you women are like, I like that checklist. That's a different thing altogether. You're just like, give me the checklist. I mean, come on.
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Maybe there's a combination there, a little bit. Depends on how your wife is wired. I think my wife might really like that checklist, for real.
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And you gotta think through that, but it's about the heart, right? Totally missed my illustration there.
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Do you love God, or are you just going through the motions? Are you just jumping through hoops? Are you just doing what he, you know, da -da -da -da -da, and as it wrote?
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Do you wanna walk with him each day? Are you more concerned with the nuances of rules and regulations?
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Are you okay with him working on you and others at a different pace? Sometimes it's about pace.
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Sometimes it is a lack of recognition that he doesn't work with us all like a cookie cutter project. He's not producing cookie cutters.
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And he works in your life different than he works in my life, and the things that he's convicting me of right now are not the things that he might be convicting you of, and you might not be ready to handle the things that he's working on me for, or vice versa.
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Are you trying to control and manage your relationship with God, or are you walking with him through life as a friend, a guide, as a heavenly father?
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You live your life by an invisible standard, and there is no absence of human wisdom that is eager to step in and help you call the shots in your life.
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We live in a time where human emotion is nearly always the answer. Have you noticed that? Do what feels right at the time.
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Do what you need to do for you. You only live once, so make yourself as happy as possible.
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And that is one line of human tradition and authority. There's another line of religious authority that ranges from conservative churches telling you that you cannot be a good
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Christian and drink a beer, to Catholic churches telling you you need to pray to Mary and do a bunch of religious things in order to get to purgatory so that then you can pay off your sins and get to heaven.
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And then you have cults that unashamedly add books to the Scriptures, like the Book of Mormon, that claim equal authority with the
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Bible. So where do you go for the bedrock of authority in your life? Jesus points these misguided religious teachers back to the
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Word, and it is in that Word that we find the good news of Jesus Christ. It is not only in the commandments that point to our shameful condition, but it is that the solution to that problem is found in the pages of Scripture.
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So we come to communion this morning to remember the blood that was shed for us and His body that was broken for us in sacrifice.
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If you're all in with Jesus, then come to one of the tables in the four corners of the room during this next song and reflect on the goodness of God revealed to us through His Word.
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And the Bible tells us that anyone who puts their trust in the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross is justified by the
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Father. And justification means that the law has been fulfilled for you.
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As weak as we are in the flesh, as bad as we are at keeping laws and rules, Jesus came and fulfilled the law for us.
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And that fulfillment looked like paying the sentence for our sins, which was death. So recast, let's go out from this place with a renewed commitment to return, return or turn to His Word as our sole authority for a relationship with Him so that it will not be said of us what this text says.
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In vain, in vain do they worship. Let's pray.
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Father, I thank you so much for your Word. I thank you that we have a bedrock, we have a place that we can turn, we have a source of hope.
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And in that source of hope, we find the cross of Jesus Christ that we celebrate and remember through communion.
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Father, that anyone who is here, who has given their lives to you, can come by faith and has come by faith and can be made whole and right.
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And so Father, I pray that as we come to these tables that we would reflect on the blood that was shed for us on the cross and the body that was broken for us, that Jesus paid that price for us.
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But Father, if there are any here who are not in with you, that they would sit this communion out, but maybe you would give them the boldness to come and talk with me about how they could establish and start a relationship with you this morning.
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I ask that you would go with us throughout this week and help us to honor your Word, to read it, to take it in, to trust it, and to base our lives on it.