Today’s Word Up! What’s Stronger Than God’s Word?

Answer: the Worthless Traditions and Rituals of Men (mankind)…

“You hypocrites! Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you, for he wrote, ‘These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.
Their worship is a farce, for they teach man-made ideas as commands from God.’
For you ignore God’s law and substitute your own tradition…And so you cancel the word of God in order to hand down your own tradition. -Mark 7:6-8, 13

More than two thousand years have passed since Jesus offered this rebuke to the religious leaders of that time. In their zeal to be Holy and righteous they often trampled over the very thing that provided for the righteousness, God’s Word. The same problem still exist within the Christian Community, for some strange reason as time, people, and technology changes…there are still some very rigid, stiff and unyielding people who refuse to change. That by itself is not the problem…the problem is when we take that fear of/refusal to change and then erect religious doctrines and superficial rituals around them and then try to enforce those empty rituals on others and use them as a measurement of a persons righteousness.  There is really only one word to describe it…FOOLISH!

Even as a kid this was evident to me, growing up in a church where the women really thought their holiness had something to do with their long skirts and their refusal to wear make-up..and yet their behavior and attitudes looked nothing like God, their attire and lack of make-up didn’t make them more holy or righteous..it just revealed that they lacked fashion sense and besides a little make-up could of really helped some of them out or at least the people looking upon them.

Even as I type this there are fights and arguments taking place, over what is holy and what isn’t, what is worship and what isn’t. One should stand and be silent vs one should dance and be joyful, and the list of foolish goes on and on. All in an attempt to hold to some sort of tradition and keep things the way the have always been. It’s funny because as we look through the Gospels we see Jesus, constantly shaking things up…why cause He was a trouble maker? No not at all, because he came to save people. He broke away from the vain traditions of prostrating and walking around with an appearance of righteousness and began to go into the very places where the people he wanted to reach were…the streets, the thrown away places…the outcast. Jesus being real with people, eating with them, laughing and crying with them. Embracing them and healing their hurts. How did the religious leaders react…”Oh my God He let that nasty woman touch Him! Oh NO! He didn’t wash His Hands before He ate…Oh the Horror…now He’s Dancing at that party with those Heathens. Jesus tried to explain to the religious leaders that He did not come to seek the healthy…but those that were sick and in need of help.

Hey fam, we really need to be careful that we are not taking our own likes and dis-likes, our own personal preferences and then building and shaping our theology and religion around those likes dis-likes and preferences. In other words if I don’t like country music I really shouldn’t be declaring that it is the evil and from the devil and trying to get others to think the same way, or if I am too rigid to jump up and down or raise my hands when I am worshipping God then I shouldn’t launch a campaign to turn everyone else into a stick in the mud or one of the “frozen chosen”. We need to be sure that we are not adding our own empty rituals to God’s plan for salvation and stick to presenting people with the Truth, not Truth with a slant or even partial Truth…it’s time we dump our worthless traditions (which haven’t produced anything worthwhile to date) and start servin up the Truth the Whole Truth and Nothing but the Truth…so Help Us God!

da professor