FBC Daily Devotional – April 7, 2021

Faith Baptist Church

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Well, a good Wednesday to you. Here we are in the middle of the first full week of April already and boy, aren't you grateful for the change of seasons?

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I appreciate as the temperatures get a little warmer and enjoy more sunshine through the course of the day.

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It makes the, I'd like to walk to the church from my home as much as possible and, you know, when it's light and bright and a little warmer, it makes that walk a whole lot friendlier, if you will.

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Well, I want to talk today in our reading in Mark chapters 2 and the beginning of chapter 3 about how sometimes those who are professing believers, and I think genuinely are, can be pretty critical.

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I mean, judgmentally critical. I mean, I'm pharisaical.

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What I'm getting at is what we read in the passage today. Here are these Pharisees who keep coming at Jesus and criticizing him, of all people, to criticize the

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Messiah. Now admittedly, they don't accept him as their Messiah, but nevertheless, is anyone holier than Jesus?

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You know better than that. It's a rhetorical question. But here come these Pharisees and they are so critical of Jesus and his disciples because Jesus and his disciples don't measure up to their standards, quote -unquote, of purity, quote -unquote, and it's still true 2 ,000 years later that there are believers in Christ who can exhibit some of these same characteristics of the

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Pharisee. And what I'm getting at here is what these Pharisees do. So notice their first criticism of Jesus is that he's too chummy with non -Christians.

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Jesus calls Levi or Matthew to his close circle of disciples to follow him, and Matthew throws a dinner.

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And at this dinner there are all kinds of tax collectors and sinners, and Jesus is rubbing shoulders with them.

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He's eating a meal with them. That was taboo. That's a horrible thing to do.

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I mean, you're eating food with people that are sinners and that are tax collectors.

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How can you do such a thing? In our day, I mean, we wouldn't quite put it like this, but in our day,

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I mean, I've seen Christians criticize other Christians because they have friends that are not believers, and they share time together.

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And Jesus asks the question, well, how are the sick going to be made well if the physician stays away from them?

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And that's a good thing for us to ponder, too. How can our unbelieving friends and acquaintances ever come to faith in Christ and have their sins healed, be healed of their sins, if you will, if they're not introduced to the physician?

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And how are they going to be introduced to the great physician if we keep them at arm's length and don't have anything to do with them?

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Again, that's a rhetorical question. So we want to be careful about that. Now, certainly, we do understand there are other passages of Scripture that warn us about evil companions corrupting good morals.

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And so our own heart has to be careful in why we're doing what we're doing.

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Are we trying to just fit in with the crowd and go along with the crowd?

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Well, obviously, that's a different problem, and that's not what we're addressing today. A second criticism that they level against Jesus is that he and his disciples don't practice certain disciplines the way they do or even at all.

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So these disciples of John and the Pharisees, they come to Jesus and say, how come the disciples of John and the

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Pharisees fast, but you don't fast, you and your disciples don't fast? There is an underlying supposition there, isn't there?

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That we, Pharisees and disciples of John, are more spiritual than you guys, because we're fasting and you're not.

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And again, that same spirit can be seen in the church, can be seen among Christian people in the 21st century.

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You know, I practice these spiritual disciplines. I journal, I memorize Scripture, I read through the

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Bible every year, and I spend 30 minutes in prayer every day, every morning before I ever leave the house.

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You know, what do you do? Do you do those things? And the obvious implication is, if you don't, you're not nearly as spiritual as I am, and there's something drastically wrong with you.

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Again, this is not to criticize the disciplines, it's to criticize the Spirit, and that's what

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Jesus is doing. And he goes on to explain, why would the friends of the bridegroom fast when the bridegroom is with them?

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There's a purpose for the disciplines, and if you're just doing the discipline, to do the discipline, and to demonstrate your holiness, you're missing the point, and you're not getting any benefit from that spiritual discipline.

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And of course, it doesn't even matter that these, whom they're criticizing, are actually in more intimate fellowship with the

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Lord. They're the friends of the bridegroom, if you will. And then a third criticism of Jesus and his disciples is, they're practicing what's verboten, what's forbidden.

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I mean, you do something that we say, you know, you can't do, or you're not godly.

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I mean, that's, you're gonna get criticized for that. And specifically, in Jesus and the disciples' case, what they did, they did a couple different things,

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Jesus did, a couple different things. They're walking through a grain field on the Sabbath day, and they pluck some ears of grain, crush it in their hands, and get rid of the chaff, and eat the grain, which was a, normally, a perfectly legitimate thing to do.

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But the Pharisees had developed a more strict tradition that said, you can't do that on the

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Sabbath, because that's work. And here they were doing that on the Sabbath. And was that God's law?

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No, no, it wasn't prohibited on the Sabbath. And, Jesus even elevates the purpose of what they were doing to a higher standard.

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He says, didn't you ever read what David did? How he went to the tabernacle, and he got the show bread that's lawful only for the priest to eat, and yet the priest gave it to him.

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Why? Why did the priest give it to him? Because they were hungry, and they needed something to eat. And Jesus is saying, my followers are hungry, and needed something to eat, and that trumps your interpretation of this

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Sabbath law. And then later on, Jesus heals a person on the

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Sabbath, and again, that is a forbidden thing to do. That's a work that is not to be done.

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You don't do that on the Sabbath. Elevating a practice that can be beneficial, if it's used properly, it can be beneficial, it can be helpful, but elevating it to the level of the command of God that is universal and uniformly demanded of everybody all the time.

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That develops in the heart a critical spirit, a judgmental spirit, that frankly, we need to be careful about.

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We need to be warned against, and not allow it to become a part of our heart, become part of our habit.

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So, our Father, I pray that today you would root that kind of pharisaical spirit out of us, and whatever spiritual disciplines we practice, whatever standards we've developed for our lives to help us grow in grace and knowledge of Christ, I pray that we would not use those things to evaluate and judge other believers who don't who don't use the same measuring sticks and don't use the some of the same practices to the same extent.

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Help us to be tender and sensitive, and to be truly godly and Christ -like in this, we pray in Jesus name.

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Amen. All right. Well, have a good rest of your Wednesday. Hope you get over the hump well of the week and get looking forward to the weekend.