Bible Verse of The Day – 10-19-20

Mark 7:9 (NKJV) 9 He said to them, “All too well you reject the commandment of God, that you may keep your tradition.

Traditions can be very powerful in many ways.

Many families are steeped in tradition. They carry out certain acts year after year because that’s what they have been shown to do. They may not even know why. They just know that it’s always been that way.

This may not be bad or good. But it shows how prone to tradition human beings are.

The same can be said for the church; the bride of Christ.

She does things in a certain way, time, after time, after time, and most times not even stopping to think about, wonder or question why. She just does it because that’s the way it’s always been done.

Jesus had a few things to say about this.

The scribes and pharisees asked Jesus why His disciples didn’t follow the tradition of washing their hands before eating. This wasn’t viewed as a sanitary issue. They knew very little about germs and bacteria back then.

The scribes and pharisees were more concerned with the fact that the disciples weren’t keeping tradition itself.

When Jesus addressed the scribes and pharisees, He was quick to turn things around and point right back at them, exposing their hearts, and the lack of discipline on their end.

He rebuked them for being the hypocrites that they were, telling them plainly that they rejected (set aside, denied, abandoned) the commandment of God in favor of their man-made traditions.

And let’s be clear; it wasn’t so much the tradition itself that Jesus reprimanded them for. It was the condition of their hearts. They did what they did simply because they had been told to do so, and they had been doing it for centuries without ever questioning it.

And where do we, the bride of Christ, stand today with our traditions? Do we do what we do simply because it’s what we have been shown or told to do, or maybe because we have seen others do it?

Do we say certain things that we have heard others say, without stopping to question the validity of it, or the scriptural accuracy of it?

These are all things that are super important; Things we should all ponder and seek God about.

For if we say or do things simply out of rote or habit, where is the true love of God or the obedience to Him in any of it?

Pastor Curt & Pastor Ellie

Seven Seas Ministries
P.O. Box 272
Bradford, RI 02808

401-315-0902

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