FBC Daily Devotional – February 3, 2021

Faith Baptist Church

Subscribe

Download

Share

00

00:07

Well, a good Wednesday to you. Here we are in the middle of the week, and we've got a couple of days behind us.

00:13

Hopefully, they've been productive days for you, and you're looking forward to what the Lord has in store for you on this day, in the middle of the week, getting over the hump and heading toward the weekend.

00:25

I just want to remind you of the midweek service tonight. If you are able to get out and join us, we have a

00:32

Bible study time at 7 o 'clock, 645. Children and young people gather, and they have their own time together.

00:40

It's a good, encouraging time in the middle of the week, and we always end the evening, last 15 minutes or so, in prayer, praying for needs of different folks.

00:52

Well, if you're reading in our Scripture reading plan for this year, today you are in Matthew chapter 12.

01:02

The passage begins with really challenging us to be careful about how we handle our preferences or even our convictions.

01:13

Be careful about handling them. I'm not saying don't have them. We surely should, and we ought to have convictions about the application of biblical principles and God's commands.

01:26

We need to have those convictions, but we need to be careful about how we handle them, and especially how we apply certain biblical principles.

01:36

Because here's the thing. We can read a passage of Scripture, and we can sense how we need to apply that.

01:46

I mean, the truth is there. It's a timeless truth. But how do I apply that to my own personal life?

01:53

Just as an example, you may struggle with your thought life or with your time usage, and so you've come to the conviction that having a television set in your home is just a terrible time waster, and it fills your mind with a bunch of junk.

02:13

And so you have developed the preference or conviction that you should not have a television set.

02:20

Fine. That's good. The problem comes when you look at other

02:25

Christians who have television sets, and you consider them to be spiritually inferior, and even begin to criticize them for having a television or maybe something they watch.

02:37

They spend too much time on it. You can become very critical. This is the attitude. That is the spirit of the

02:44

Pharisees that Jesus is criticizing here in Matthew chapter 12, and he is doing so for very good reason.

02:53

Because Jesus and his disciples, they're going through these grain fields. They're hungry, and the grain fields are plentiful.

03:02

It's not that they're not stealing. There's actually the allocation for this kind of thing in the

03:09

Old Testament economy that someone's passing through your grain field, and they're hungry.

03:16

They can certainly take a handful of grain and rub the grain together, get rid of the chaff, and have something to eat just to tide them over.

03:24

That's what the disciples do. The problem is for the Pharisees, this was done on the

03:29

Sabbath day. And on the Sabbath day to do, according to the

03:35

Pharisees conviction, to do what they did is work. And you don't do any work on the

03:41

Sabbath day. And so they end up criticizing Jesus and his disciples for what they had done.

03:48

Well, we can develop that same kind of spirit. And Jesus answers them, and he rebukes them for that attitude.

03:56

And we have to be careful not to develop that spirit. Because at the end of the section, at the end of that back and forth, in verse 7,

04:05

Jesus makes clear what it is he's looking for. He says in verse 7, If you had known what this means,

04:14

I desire mercy and not sacrifice, you would not have condemned the guiltless.

04:20

I desire mercy and not sacrifice. The Lord is far more interested in seeing my mercy and my compassion toward others than rigid condemnation of others who don't measure up to my underscore, to my conclusion of what

04:43

God demands of me. So we have to be careful about that. And then Jesus goes on in the following section in verses 9 to 14.

04:51

And in this passage, this section offers a further illustration of the very thing Jesus was talking about.

04:58

Again, it's still the Sabbath. And according to the Pharisees and their judgmentalism based on their rigid convictions,

05:10

Jesus isn't allowed to heal someone because it's a Sabbath violation. Now it is not a

05:16

Sabbath violation according to God's determination or God's command, but according to their conclusion about what they think

05:27

God would have them to do. Now, seriously, we don't have too much of a problem with Sabbath violation in our day.

05:35

We've probably gone too far in the other direction on that one and probably are a little too loose on the

05:43

Lord's day. But what about some other shibboleths that we might have? You know?

05:51

I've come to certain convictions or conclusions about what a command, how a command should be applied, or how a biblical principle should be applied.

06:03

Have I developed a caustic, harsh, critical, judgmental spirit toward others who haven't come to that same conclusion?

06:13

I think Jesus offers here a good corrective to us. Let us be known for mercy and compassion rather than for harsh, critical, judgmental spirit.

06:28

May God give us that grace. And Father, I pray today that we would indeed take this warning, this rebuke from Jesus to be known for our mercy, known for our compassion.

06:44

And may we may we shun a kind of rigid condemnation of others who just simply don't measure up to our application of your word.

06:59

Help us in this Lord to be to be wise and understanding and balanced, we pray.

07:05

And we ask this in Jesus' name and for his sake. Amen. All right.

07:10

Well, I hope you have a good rest of your Wednesday and that you get over the hump without any trouble today.