Can I pray for you in any way?
Send any prayer requests to Gods4all@aol.com
In Christ, Mark
In Christ, Mark
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
** Follow The Christian Walk on Twitter @ThChristianWalk
** Like posts and send friend requests to the author of The Christian
Walk, Mark Cummings on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/mark.cummings.733?ref=tn_tnmn
** Become a Follower of The Christian Walk at http://the-christian-walk.blogspot.com
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The scriptures. May God bless the reading of His holy word.
Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you devour widows’
houses, and for a pretense make long prayers. Therefore you will receive greater
condemnation.”
Matthew 23:14 (NKJV)
“They devour widows’ houses and for a show make lengthy prayers. These
men will be punished most severely.” Mark 12:40
This ends
today’s reading from God's holy word. Thanks be to God.
Today’s devotion is the second in an eight
part series titled, Woeful Behavior. Each devotion covers one of the sinful
actions practiced by the Jewish religious authorities of Jesus’ time, actions
so beyond what God expected that Jesus felt compelled to call them out.
As mentioned in yesterday’s message, there
are two reasons why we need to look at these woes.
The first was because God gives spiritual
leaders great responsibilities and holds them to the highest standards,
standards that aren’t to be modified, compromised, or, worse yet, completely
ignored. If Jesus is speaking out against woeful behavior, then we should pay
attention so we don’t repeat the mistakes of the past.
The second reason was centered on the fact
that all Christians have been given great responsibility by Jesus to carry on
His work and these responsibilities aren’t optional. To shirk our obligation to
do as Jesus commanded is nothing less than woeful and thus why we need to make
sure we are fulfilling what He called us to do.
With this, you’ll recall the first woe
Jesus talked about regarded the Pharisees and the scribes rejecting Him and in
doing so, surrendering their place in the kingdom of heaven. But the woe went
well beyond this for the Jewish religious leaders were influencing others to
not believe as well. In other words, they were leading people away from salvation
and this was something Jesus was not going to stand for.
So what was the second woe?
Look again at Jesus’ words here from the 23rd
chapter of Matthew:
Woe to you, scribes
and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you devour widows’ houses, and for a pretense
make long prayers. Therefore you will receive greater condemnation.” Matthew
23:14 (NKJV)
Of interest, this verse is not included in Matthew’s
gospel in some translations but since it is mentioned in some (I am using the
New King James Version for this devotion), I want to cover it. Mark’s gospel
also has an abbreviated version.
So what was the problem with the way the
Pharisees and scribes were handling their ministry that had Jesus upset?
It’s
important to know the plight of the widow in first century AD. Women were fully
reliant on their husbands for income and support, and when the husband passed,
the widows were often left without anything, needing to rely on social programs
for even base needs such as food. We can read about the plight of the widows in
Acts, Chapter 6. There we see that an additional seven men were commissioned to
assist the disciples in ensuring there was fair distribution of food to widows.
Then James, the brother of Jesus, would write these words:
Religion
that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after
orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by
the world. James 1:27
In addition, there was Old Testament
scripture that indicated widows should be cared for. Look at these passages:
“Do
not take advantage of the widow or the fatherless. 23 If you do and they cry
out to me, I will certainly hear their cry.” Exodus 22:22-23
“There
will always be poor people in the land. Therefore I command you to be
openhanded toward your fellow Israelites who are poor and needy in your land.”
Deuteronomy 15:11
“When
you are harvesting in your field and you overlook a sheaf, do not go back to
get it. Leave it for the foreigner, the fatherless and the widow, so that the
Lord your God may bless you in all the work of your hands. When you beat the
olives from your trees, do not go over the branches a second time. Leave what
remains for the foreigner, the fatherless and the widow. When you harvest the
grapes in your vineyard, do not go over the vines again. Leave what remains for
the foreigner, the fatherless and the widow.” Deuteronomy 24:19-21
Through His word, it’s obvious that God
expected widows would be cared for and that was what got Jesus so upset. The
Pharisees and scribes were obviously taking from widows and leaving them in a
worse situation. Just as we find churches today expecting people to give, the
synagogues in Jesus’ time demanded it and it was obvious that they would go as
far as taking the homes of widows to fund their ministry. This would be done
despite the religious leaders external display of pious righteousness through
long prayers. On one hand, the Pharisees and scribes appeared to be godly
leaders but it was all a ruse, a pretense to disguise their sinful wickedness.
This is why Jesus speaks these harsh words against them:
“Therefore you will
receive greater condemnation.”
So what does this mean for us today?
Well, it means that as we go forth to carry
out the work of the Lord, we need to make sure we are obedient to the whole
word, not just part of it. We can’t pick and choose what we want to practice
and what we don’t.
We also need to make sure we are
intentionally showing people we are righteous Christians, when we are really
acting sinfully in the way we treat others. We can’t afford to be like the
Pharisees and the scribes were in Jesus’ day.
Finally, within the church, we need to be
wary of the matter of soliciting money from the congregation. This means we understand
that people sitting in the pews come from all kinds of socioeconomic situations
and this should be respected. Now I’m not saying that we should pass on talking
about the matter of giving. That would definitely be unbiblical. But as we see
in the word for today, we should not impoverish people or take all that they
have in the name of religion, and especially Christianity in particular.
For to do so would be woeful behavior, the
kind that Jesus said would lead to “greater condemnation”.
Amen.
In Christ,
Mark
PS: Feel free to leave a comment and please share this with anyone you feel might be blessed by it.
Send any prayer requests to Gods4all@aol.com
No comments:
Post a Comment