There is a huge danger in that we get so removed from what the Bible says that we start basing our Christianity on TRADITIONS that have been established many times through misinterpretations of the Scriptures. I’m so thankful that you read our posts and I want to encourage you to continue to read them, to subscribe to our blog and to share what has challenged you with your friends and family, but let it not replace reading the Word for yourself. Going through the Motions: Jesus never weighed anyone down with useless traditions, these only create heavier burdens for a soul already burdened down with sin. His objection wasn’t to try and get people to clean up by adding additional rules, but rather He continually brought people to the realization of their sin by using the literal laws and commands of God (Mark 10:19), then told them of the hope that could be found only through Himself. You can cage a pig and keep him from mud, you can wash him up and put bows around his neck, you can train him to sleep in the house but the moment you let him loose he will run for the mud. Keeping someone tied up with regulations and rules will never result in the conversion of their soul. Have you heard that song by Matthew West “I don’t want to go through the motions”? This talks about people that just systematically go through rituals because this is what has always been done. In one of my witnessing encounters I spoke with one young Jewish girl who when asked “Why do you go to ‘yom kippur’”, she said “because that’s what all Jews do”, when I asked her where it came from she couldn’t tell me, so I asked her why they don’t sacrifice animals for sin anymore which is what God actually required, she didn’t have an answer. She was following useless traditions and considered them to be her salvation. Closing thoughts: Think about some of the traditions we have made up along the way. There was a time in my life when I thought that if you didn’t say the “sinners prayer” you weren’t actually saved. First of all you won’t find anywhere in the scriptures to support the idea of a sinners prayer. You will however find that people were commanded to repent, and repentance comes only by way of godly grief according to 2 Corinthians 7:10 and salvation is a result of that repentance accompanied by a new found trust in Christ. Godly grief involves a broken heart caused from your lost approval by God because of your sinfulness. If you have never been grieved over your sin you may still be banking on a traditional style canned prayer to save on the day of the Lord which would be tragic. There are so many other traditions that we perform, we pray before bed, but how about the rest of the day? We take our Bibles to church, but do we open them any other time? We raise our hands in church worship, but how is our worship of obedience? We go to church once a week, but the Bible says we are the church so how does the rest of your week look? Have we become like the Pharisees in making traditions into requirements? I wonder how many of our traditions Jesus would spoil if He walked into our church world today, what would we think of Him if He called us FOOLS as He did to the Pharisees? Of course washing your hands is a very good thing to do but let’s be careful we don’t make requirements of anything that Jesus didn’t make a requirement for Salvation. Grace & Peace.
Posted on: Mon, 29 Sep 2014 01:09:34 +0000
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