daily java

Daily Java:

Then the disciples came to him and asked, “Do you realize you offended the Pharisees by what you just said?” Jesus replied, “Every plant not planted by my heavenly Father will be uprooted, so ignore them. They are blind guides leading the blind, and if one blind person guides another, they will both fall into a ditch.” (Matthew 15:12-14)

The old catchphrase was WWJD. What would Jesus do? What would he do if someone was offended?

It is very easy to offend someone when you are a preacher. You say something that happens to hit home to someone and they are mad. “You were preaching to me!” they whine.

And you were, of course. You didn’t know it, but the Spirit did. And the Spirit connected with their spirit and they made a connection. But instead of hearing it and recognizing the need to change, they tried to shoot the messenger.

Many a preacher has had his ministry cut short because he said something that offended someone. They got mad, went to the elders, or council, or board or each other and talked about it, built it up. Then, in revenge and retribution at the preacher’s utter gall in preaching about things they needed to hear, they have him fired.

The Pharisees (the conservative Jewish religious leaders of Jesus’ day) got mad because Jesus didn’t do something that they had decided centuries ago was a necessary tradition. It was ceremonial handwashing, a small thing, but as far as they were concerned, on a par with the Ten Commandments. After all,, they had decided to do it and now it was enshrined in the annals of tradition. “We have always done it that way.”

They confronted Jesus with his “sin,” or his lack of obeisance to their traditions. Jesus said, in essence, “So what?”

Then he went so far as to tell them that their traditions didn’t matter and that they were giving God false worship: that of lipservice with no heart behind it.

They got deeply offended. The apostles felt themselves trapped between the man on one side that they knew was from God and their own traditions and authority figures on the other. It scared them and they told Jesus.

His response? Ignore them. They are blind guides leading the blind, and if one blind person guides another, they will both fall into a ditch.

In other words, they do not know what they are talking about and anybody who listens to them will not know what God wants either. As leaders they are worthless, Jesus said.

Strong words. And if Jesus had been the pastor of a church, he would have been fired.

Someone has a complaint that is foolish. You know it is foolish and everyone else does too. But this person is an influential member of the church. They are important. They give a lot, they are charter members, they have a big position in the community that is such that their displeasure will reflect badly on the church.

In other words, they are mad and will hurt the church rather than admit they were wrong.

This is not talking about someone who is confused and earnestly seeking the word and will of God. This is talking about someone who is used to having his or her way and suddenly some preacher tells them they are wrong.

WWJD? He would ignore them. Hard words and a hard thing to do for a preacher, but true nonetheless. He never gave in to people who were just trying to get their way. He came to do the will of the Father who sent him (John 5:30).

I have had an otherwise good work destroyed because an old woman got mad at me for something I said that she disagreed with. I did what Jesus did, but I had to recognize that I also suffered as Jesus did.

When he did this, they killed me. When I did it, they killed my ministry there at that church.

So if we do what Jesus did, we have to be ready to suffer the consequences just as he did.

daily java

Daily Java:

The next day Paul went with us to meet with James, and all the elders of the Jerusalem church were present. After greeting them, Paul gave a detailed account of the things God had accomplished among the Gentiles through his ministry. After hearing this, they praised God. And then they said, “You know, dear brother, how many thousands of Jews have also believed, and they all follow the law of Moses very seriously. But the Jewish believers here in Jerusalem have been told that you are teaching all the Jews who live among the Gentiles to turn their backs on the laws of Moses. They’ve heard that you teach them not to circumcise their children or follow other Jewish customs. What should we do? They will certainly hear that you have come. (Acts 21:18-22)

There is always someone who is willing and ready to minimize what you have done.

There had been a massive paradigm shift in the kingdom of God. No longer was one group of people important and the others second class. Now all were equal in Christ Jesus. No longer would the Jews be the sole people of God. He had turned from them. In fact, he hadn’t even spoken to them for over 400 years.

Now, in order to be his people, they had to come to him and accept his grace on an equal footing with the Gentiles.

They could not stand this. Of course, you can understand why. The entire Old Testament revelation was either given to them or given to others with them in a primary position. They had been big.

When Paul came up and told them what good was being done, they agreed. Yeah, yeah, that’s great. But, you know, there are lots of Jews being converted and one thing is for sure. They do not want to change. They will accept Jesus, but they do not want to change their lifestyles.

What is more, they are afraid Paul was teaching other Jews that they didn’t have to keep the law of Moses, something they loved and felt was their right and due.

And he was. His message was that the old order was gone. There was now a new order: a law of love and grace, not of laws and commandments.

By the end of this chapter, they were trying to beat him to death and he had to be carried by a bunch of soldiers on their shoulders to keep him from being killed.

In their defense, the church in Jerusalem was treading a fine line. The Jews were as rabid about keeping their laws and customs as the Muslims are today. The only real difference between the two was that they did not insist on converting the rest of the world at the point of a sword.

They would, however, kill you if you told them that their way of doing things was not valid anymore. And the church was both afraid for their own survival in a hostile situation and themselves basically unwilling to change their lifestyles. They had always been Jews and could not imagine worshiping God any other way.

So they reminded Paul of the letter they had sent with him telling everybody what they had to do. Paul, of course, had disregarded this letter as another attempt of the old guard to force their wishes on the new guard. The things it contained, They should abstain from eating food offered to idols, from consuming blood or the meat of strangled animals, and from sexual immorality (Acts 21:25), were for the most part true.

Their real problem was that God had shown Peter a vision saying what he had created not to consider unclean. In other words, eat everything and shut up about it. So everything in the letter except for immorality was not valid any longer, and Jesus had already talked about immorality anyway. There was no reason for an official letter.

When it came down to it, no one in the church has the right to tell anybody else what they can or cannot do. Our relationship in this new order is based on our relationship with God, not with somebody “in authority.”

The customs you follow in life do not matter. What matters is when you begin to mandate them. Then they become wrong.

And there are those who will not care what good you are doing. They will only care about how you can make them feel better.

That is a shame, but it is true.

But we continue anyway. And may God be praised and we be placed in second place.

daily java

Daily Java:

Afterward Jesus returned to Jerusalem for one of the Jewish holy days. Inside the city, near the Sheep Gate, was the pool of Bethesda, with five covered porches. Crowds of sick people—blind, lame, or paralyzed—lay on the porches. One of the men lying there had been sick for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him and knew he had been ill for a long time, he asked him, “Would you like to get well?” “I can’t, sir,” the sick man said, “for I have no one to put me into the pool when the water bubbles up. Someone else always gets there ahead of me.” Jesus told him, “Stand up, pick up your mat, and walk!” Instantly, the man was healed! He rolled up his sleeping mat and began walking! (John 5:1-9)

People do what they do for a reason. Sometimes the reason may be buried in obscurity, but they have some origin and purpose for what they do.

Sometimes that reason is that they just have always done it. It is a silly reason, but it is also a strong one, because it disguises itself as tradition.

Jesus came to this place that had a tradition of healing. The waters evidently had an underground spring and every once in a while the waters would bubble from an outpouring. When they did, the story was that the first person in would be healed.

The problem with this is that the first person in usually was well of enough to jump up and jump in. The truly sick and lame couldn’t move fast enough. Sometimes family members would stay with the sick person but that got old after a while and they wanted to be somewhere else.

Probably, if a person was well enough to jump up and jump in the pool when the waters bubbled, they weren’t that bad and had a “healing” that healed nothing more than a hypochondriac disease. They really weren’t that sick and were healed easily. Or maybe the faith in the water was so great it made them better.

Whatever the outcome, this man was too sick to move quickly. He was a victim. He was sick and couldn’t do anything about it so he sat wishing all day. He had sat wishing for 38 years.

When Jesus asked him if he wanted to get well, Jesus saw that he had given up. Would you like to get well? I can’t, I have been here too long, no one will help me get healed, everybody else gets everything before I can get there, I am defeated.

Jesus got tired of hearing the excuses the man had so he said, Stand up, pick up your mat and walk!

He cut to the chase and just healed the guy. Suddenly, the man was fine. He had no more excuses. He was well. He was upright. He had no more reason to hang around the well.

What do you want to bet he came back to the pool after a while. He came back, maybe, to show his friends his good fortune, to visit, to reminisce about old times. After a while, he would stay longer and maybe feel in his mind he would help some of the other ones get in if they needed it.

The Bible doesn’t say, but it is entirely possible that he ended up spending his days at the pool again. He wasn’t sick any longer but it was just hard to leave so familiar a place. This was, and everybody said so, his corner at the pool.

daily java

Daily Java: 

 On another Sabbath he went into the synagogue and was teaching, and a man was there whose right hand was shriveled. The Pharisees and the teachers of the law were looking for a reason to accuse Jesus, so they watched him closely to see if he would heal on the Sabbath. (Luke 6:6-7)

Jesus had done a lot of amazing things. And those around him knew it.

But he had also made some important people mad. He refused to follow their traditions and do what they thought he ought to do.

And they were mad. As far as they were concerned, he was a renegade.

Yes, he healed. He healed a lot of people. Yes, he preached well. The things he mentioned were always straight from the Bible. Yes, people liked him and he did a lot of good things and said a lot of good things.

But, he didn’t do things the way they wanted him to do them.

So in Luke 6, they are watching him to see if he would heal on the Sabbath day. The fact that he was healing at all should have told them something. But they were so engrossed in the way they felt things ought to be that they had lost all reason.

Now the Sabbath was important to the people of God. God had given them the Sabbath back in the Old Testament to make sure that the Israelites didn’t work too long and too hard. He wanted to make sure that employees got some time off.

He also made it the day of worship. They could rest and worship and it would be a good day for them. He told them basic ideas of what they were to do or not to do on this day.

But by the time Jesus came along, 1300 years later, the rules on the Sabbath day were massive. Each generation of religious guys felt compelled to add their own spin to the laws. Before long, the rules were almost too big to be known. Kind of like the IRS code.

There was almost no way to keep from breaking them, they were so big.

One of the things that was prohibited was work. In their minds, healing was work. So when Jesus healed on the Sabbath, he did work.

Jesus knew this and did not care what they thought. He asked the crippled guy to stand up in front of everyone. Then he looked over at the religious guys and said “I ask you, which is lawful on the Sabbath: to do good or to do evil, to save life or to destroy it?”

Well, what are they going to say? They certainly aren’t going to advocate evil.

Jesus healed the man. And it says: But they were furious and began to discuss with one another what they might do to Jesus (Luke 6:11). 

There are people who want their way so badly that they will hurt someone else who doesn’t do things the way they want them to be done. Traditions are so strong, the old ways are so important that they trump all the good you may be doing otherwise.

The preacher is preaching the gospel and people are being edified, but he uses the wrong instrument. The worship leader is worshiping, but he is using the wrong kind of music. Young people are being reached, but the teacher is using the wrong material.

The desire to keep what you think is important is greater than the need to preach the gospel.

What happens? The church is hurt. These men wanted their interpretations of God’s word kept. And they felt that keeping their interpretations was more important than preaching the gospel.

And they were willing to kill Jesus rather than have their interpretations of the God’s word not kept.

As a people of God, they did not live. They were too caught up in their own ideas and God couldn’t break through. Any church that does this does not deserve to live. They are no longer there for God, they are only there to keep their own ideas alive.

Like the people of Israel, they cannot survive for long on this attitude.

After all, Jesus died to set us free, not put us under bondage to others’ opinions.