How I behave toward others is how the people around me will experience God Ceilon Aspensen, January 15, 2024February 4, 2024 Get the FREE worksheet for this program here. The most important message I picked up from today’s readings overall is how I behave toward others is how the people around me will experience God. My primary take-away from each of the passages was this: Genesis 29-30 – Jacob learned nothing from his own experience of his parents’ “playing favorites.” He played favorites with his wives, which sowed dissension between them and disturbed the peace of his entire household. Matthew 15 – God’s laws take precedence over human traditions. Psalms 15 – Living honestly and uprightly keeps me close to God. Proverbs 15 – Wise living, honest dealing, plain, honest speaking, and walking humbly keep me close to God and out of harm’s way. “I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”–Mohandes Ghandi Telling people about Jesus can be a tricky thing in the modern world because, unless you were born yesterday or are from another planet, you have already heard of him and been exposed to some aspect of Christianity already. Depending on how it was presented to you, you have likely already formed an opinion about it based on the way the message was delivered, or even based on the messenger. I have been a “born-again” Christian for most of my life, having had the “born-again” experience twice–once in junior high school and once again at the age of thirty-three. I have spent the better part of thirty two years “hide[ing] [my] light under a bushel” because I didn’t want my own imperfections and failings to interfere with “the message.” I felt I had made too many mistakes and bad choices, behaved too badly towards too many people, and fallen flat on my face too many times for anyone to think well of God if I were the one delivering any sort of “message” in his behalf. But the Bible is full of people that God used to deliver his message. Jacob is one of them, even though he was clearly a very flawed human being who honored his word very selectively and was a really slow learner, repeating the same mistakes over and over again. In the New Testament stories the pharisees were one group of religious officials of the Hebrew faith. The Sadducees were the other primary group of religious officials of the Hebrew faith. The pharisees were the legalistic branch, holding everyone to every “jot and tittle” of the Law, and wielding the Law like a weapon against their own people. God help you if you broke one of their laws! As I mentioned in the How and why to read the Bible in a year post, most of these laws amounted to six hundred ways to keep people from breaking the Ten Commandments. The Ten Commandments, however, held the entirety of the spirit of the law, which was designed to bring people closer to God. The pharisees didn’t care much for Jesus showing up and pointing people back to the Ten Commandments (which he doesn’t do specifically in this chapter of Matthew, but he does later, and this is part of the groundwork he lays for those lessons). At this point in Hebrew history the pharisees were getting extremely rich off the people–even the poorest of people–by holding them to the minutiae of the law, which required not only making sacrifices but buying the animals the pharisees provided at the temple to be used for sacrifices. If the priests didn’t approve your sacrificial animals as “without blemish” then you couldn’t use them. How convenient that they provided the people who came to the temple to make sacrifices with pre-approved sacrificial animals….for a price. (This is why Jesus turned over the tables of the money changers at the temple later on in the New Testament. More on that in a future post.) In short, the pharisees were the TV evangelists of their day, bilking the masses of their hard-earned coin to enrich themselves, even if it bankrupted the masses, all in the name of church tradition. Jesus became very unpopular when he started talking about the spirit of the law versus the letter of the law, because it threatened to interrupt their cash flow. That’s a very specific example what Jesus was talking about when he said “And why do you break away from the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition?” The commandment of God was to atone for their sins. Declaring perfectly suitable sacrificial animals unclean or blemished simply so they could make money selling them temple-approved animals was essentially stealing from the poor. But there are lots of other examples right here in the present day that qualify as breaking away from the commandments of God for the sake of our traditions. We can discuss those in the comment area below if you want to talk specifics, but for right now I encourage you to think of ways in which you or someone you know holds to the letter of the law for the sake of a church tradition while interfering with the ability of someone else to receive the Grace of God. That is what Jesus is talking about in this verse. Whenever I read today’s passage in Matthew I conduct a little re-examination of my own life and ask myself how my conduct might interfere with the work God has given me to do. If/when I identify something, then I look for ways to get back to the basics, to live and behave according to the spirit of the law instead the letter of the law, so that God can use me to be a messenger of hope, mercy and grace. That’s what I got out of it. What did you get out of the readings today? You can join us in our private Facebook group that I set up specifically for sharing what we take-away from the readings each day. If you haven’t gotten the FREE “Read the Bible in a Year” worksheet yet, you can Get the FREE worksheet for this program here. It is not necessary for you to start on January 1st–you can start from the beginning on whatever date you get the worksheet. Join us! Learn more about why I read the Bible all the way through every year, and feel free to share with anyone you think could benefit. This post is part of the series, “Read the Bible in a Year.” To see other posts in this series, go to the Chronological Index of Read the Bible in a Year Posts. Please follow and like us: Read the Bible in a Year Spiritual Practice behave toward othersbehavior toward otherschristianchristianitygolden ruleread the biblespiritualthe golden rule