Tradition

Now when the Pharisees gathered to him with some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem, they saw that some of his disciples ate with hands that were defiled, that is unwashed. For the Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they wash their hands properly, holding to the tradition of the elders, and when they come from the marketplace they do not eat unless they wash, and there are many other traditions that they observe, such as the washing of cups and pots and copper vessels and dining couches. And the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, why do your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands? And he said to them, well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written. This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me, in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men. You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men. And he said to them, you have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition. For Moses said, honor your father and your mother, and whoever reviles father or mother must surely die. But you say, if a man tells his father or mother whatever you would have gained from me is Corbin, that is given to God, then you no longer permit him to do anything for his father or mother, thus making void the word of God by your tradition, that you have handed down. And many such things you do. It's the word of the Lord. Did you pray with me? Father in heaven, we do thank you so much that we have you word, and we pray that now you would use it to transform us, that you would use this time to show us the glory of the Lord Jesus Christ. And we just ask that this would be a time when we feel your Holy Spirit working in us, teaching us, building us up, strengthening our faith, helping us to rely on the righteousness we have in Christ. We pray you use this time to equip us to bring the gospel, this good news of Jesus to our neighbors and to the nations where we pray these things in Jesus name. Amen. It's Palm Sunday. Palm Sunday, we have a tradition of bringing the children up front and letting them sing, and now that my oldest is in that group, it's even more special to me. I kind of sit there the whole time like, there he is, there he is. So I love it. I love a lot of the traditions that we have here. Next week we'll be celebrating Easter. That's a tradition as well. And traditions are good things. There's nothing wrong with traditions. There's a lot of good things that we can experience through traditions. Traditions things that we've come up with to celebrate different things. In other cultures, there are some traditions that are pretty interesting. I just found out about a tradition in Solopur, India where parents when their children are about two or three months old, take them to the top of this building. That's about 50 feet high. Don't worry, nobody gets hurt. And they throw the child through the air. Child falls 50 feet down into a sheet that's held by the people waiting at the bottom. Interesting. Not something I think I'm ready to do with my children, but that is yet another tradition. Traditions evolve out of culture. They're part of the way people do things, and therefore they're amoral. They're not either good or bad. They're just things that people do. The reality is what we see in this text is that traditions can become very problematic. They can become treacherous. They can be abused in ways that can cause damage to our relationship with God, to our relationship with others. And so that's what we want to look at this morning. We've been talking for several months now about this cross-shaped life. A life that's shaped by the life, death on the cross, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This morning we want to talk about how the cross-shaped life involves keeping our traditions in perspective and looking to Christ alone for our righteousness. So let's do that by talking about three things. I want to talk about elevated traditions and then evasive traditions and lastly Christ-centered traditions. So let's take a look at elevated traditions and keep your bottles open. We love to just walk right through the passage here, so I'd appreciate if you had your Bible open while we're talking about these things. And looking at verses 1 through 8, let's talk about elevated traditions to see this. Traditions become treacherous when we elevate them to or above the level of God's law. When we put traditions on the level of God's law, we are in big trouble. That's going to prove unfruitful for sure. So let's take a look. Verse 1. Now when the Pharisees gathered to him and some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem saw that some of his disciples ate with hands that were to file that is unwashed. And it says, look at verse 3 now, for the Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they wash their hands properly holding to the tradition of the elders. And when they come from the marketplace, they do not eat unless they wash. And there are many other traditions that they observe, such as the washing of cups and pots and copper vessels and dining couches. Now I know what you're thinking. What is a dining couch and where can I get one? Right? Isn't that sound wonderful? Well, dining couch was part of the culture there as well. You know, you may be familiar with the fact that for a century Judaism, they would eat certain meals reclining and they would either do that on a cushion or on one of these couches. That's not the main issue here. The main issue is that the scribes and Pharisees see that some of Jesus' disciples aren't washing their hands before they eat. And this gets them offended. They're upset by this. They think this is wrong. They want to do something about this because in their tradition, it is right for you to wash your hands before you eat a meal. And it really didn't have much to do with hygiene. It was more of a ceremonial washing that you would participate in to sort of set apart your hands, so to speak, so that they are holy and that so you're trying to do something that pleases God. So that in their mind, that's how you please God. One of the ways that you please God is by washing your hands before you eat, especially if you've returned from the marketplace. Because if you've been in the marketplace, then you've rubbed shoulders with all sorts of different people, different people from different traditions and cultures and Gentiles who may be considered unclean. And so they have this idea that it's very important that you wash your hands, go through this little ritual washing your hands before you eat. And that comes from what's called the tradition of the elders. If you look there at the end of verse three, that's what this is from. What's called the tradition of the elders. It was an oral tradition that had been handed down sort of developed through the years through the generations and handed down. And the Jews at this time basically understood that God had given the law to Moses. And then the elders over the generations would develop these traditions that they would use in order to obey the law. So and it's been said that they would try, they tried to kind of put a fence around the law. So you got the law and then they came up with all these traditions thinking if you're following these traditions, then you're definitely obeying the law. That makes sense. And so that's where this came from. They've got all these different traditions, all these different things that they do, thinking that if they're doing the traditions, then they are obeying the law. And so in the tradition, it was stated that you wash your hands before you eat as a ceremony. And so this was something when they saw Jesus disciples doing eating without washing their hands, they had to know what was going on. In fact, they thought they'd finally found the flaw in Jesus' teaching. So verse five. And as in the Pharisees, the scribes asked him, why do your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands to walk according to the tradition means to live according to that tradition. So they're saying, why are your disciples, Jesus, not living the right way? Why are they not living according to our traditions? They're actually just attacking Jesus' leadership and his teaching because they think they've found some sort of flaw. Now, what we can't realize from just reading it is, this was really offensive to them. They were really bothered by this. Some of you know that we've been having, we've had an Italian exchange student with us for the last several months, Luigi. And he was, we were having spaghetti the other night. And I did what I always do at the end, take my bread, right? And you mop up the rest of the sauce and you eat it. I mean, that's just what we do, right? He goes, if you did that in Italy in a restaurant, you would get run out of town. And I was like, what? He said, yeah, that's just something that's just very unthinkable to do. And so I'll remember that if I go to Italy. But that's kind of like a cultural thing. But this, this is above that. This was this offense in the minds and hearts of the Pharisees was above just a cultural thing. They thought that Jesus' disciples were dishonoring God by not washing their hands before they ate. But Jesus sets them straight. Look at verse 6. And he said to them, well, did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites? As it is written, this people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me, in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men. Jesus is quoting here from Isaiah 29, which goes to show that the same things that were happening now in Jesus' day had been happening back in Isaiah's time as well. And so Jesus is showing that what Isaiah said about his contemporaries who were abusing traditions was, Jesus said it also applies to these Pharisees and scribes. And he calls them hypocrites. That's a strong word. But when you and I use the word hypocrite, we normally are referring to somebody who we would suggest is saying one thing and doing another. But in this case, what Jesus is using this word to mean is more like their actors. He's not questioning their sincerity. I mean, they are sincerely trying to do the things that they say should be done. The issue is, Jesus is basically using this quote from Isaiah to show them that it's an act. All these ritual washings of cups and pots and couches and their hands. All this stuff, Jesus is saying it's just an act. They're just gestures. He's suggesting he's saying to them that their love is not really for God. It says, their hearts are far from me. They're doing these things for some other reason. Not really to please God, but for some other reason. He says that they're teaching as doctrines, the commandments of men. So there's the big issue there, teaching as doctrines, the commandments of men. doctrines are what scripture actually teaches. So like, for example, if you were to flip over to 2 Timothy 3 16, you would see Paul saying all scripture is God breathed or breathed out by God, profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction and training and righteousness. You might be familiar with that verse. The word when Paul says all scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching. It's the Greek word didoscaleats from the same root word that is used here in this passage in Mark. So that's what doctrine is, doctrines what scripture teaches as opposed to what people come up with on their own. So what Jesus is showing them is what they've done is they have taken their ideas, their own traditions that they came up with and they've elevated to the level of God's law. They've elevated them to the level of God's law and are judging people as if they're not obeying the traditions that they're actually not obeying God or they're dishonoring God. And that's why Jesus says you leave the commandment and verse 8, you leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men. And he says that because they have left what God said around washing in the dust, they've ignored it because they've, and they've come up with all these things of their own. You were to look through the Old Testament. You know what you would find? No commands to do all these ritual washings. Nothing. You would find an Exodus 30 and a couple other places that the priest was supposed to do a ceremonial washing before he entered the tabernacle. You'd find that. That's just for the priest though. You could also find in Leviticus 15 that if you came in contact with the bodily discharge, you would wash. I'm good with that one. Okay. But that's it. That's all you get. Okay. So these ideas, these traditions washing your hands and washing the pots and washing the couches, all this stuff, it's simply from human beings. It's just tradition. It is, they're not commands. So they have left the command of God and they're taking what they've said and they're elevating it to the level of what God has said and then they turn and they judge people for not following the traditions that they have come up with, traditions that have no authority. And Jesus, this pretty strong indictment here verse six says this people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me in vain. Do they worship me? So he is using this quote from Isaiah to tell the scribes and Pharisees, I know this is an act. He's saying that you don't really love God. Your hearts are far from God. You're not really worshiping God. It's really pointing that they love themselves. They're worshiping themselves because they're holding people accountable, holding themselves accountable to the things that they've come up with. It's pretty strong, but the issue is we can fall into this same trap. We can and we do you and I, we can fall into this trap. There are times where we get used to traditions, we love our traditions, we view things in certain ways and a lot of times, we even though there's no explicit or clearly implicit doctrine teaching of scripture, we tend to judge others who don't do things the way we do. There's a lot we could we could talk about, but I'm going to just mention one as an example. How should we dress for church? Now bear with me. I might be poking a bear here, but we got to do that sometimes. Think about I want you to hear me out on this. There is no command regarding what we should wear to a worship service. It's just not in there. It's not in the scriptures. And so sometimes people take the view that you really should dress up for church and they have good reasons for doing that because they want to show I honor you, Lord, and so I want to dress nice when I come before you. That's some people see it that way. Other people see it another way where they feel like God accepts me as I am. I don't really need to wear anything special. He's looking at my heart, not my shirt. Well, the reality is, whatever your view is, you're welcome to have it and you're welcome to operate according to it because there are no explicit or clearly implicit commands on how somebody ought to dress when they come to a worship service. They're just not in there, but oftentimes people will look at someone who takes the other route and look at them in judgment. And it happens on both sides because sometimes people who dress up look at people who don't say don't they want to honor God and sometimes people who don't dress up will look at people who do and say that's just an act. I mean, we do it. We judge each other. And Jesus does not want us to do that. I'll give you an example of one time I had a conversation with a person and I was simply saying that there are no clear commands in scripture around what we should wear. So technically people ought to be able to wear whatever they want. And this person said, yeah, but I'm certain you're supposed to dress up and I said, can you show me a verse? And the person said, I don't need a verse. It's common sense. That's kind of funny, but it's extremely dangerous because what happened in that moment is a tradition was elevated to the level of God's law and judgment went forth. Okay. We can wear whatever we want. I dress like this because Hannah likes when I dress up and if Mama and happy, I know what he happy. So that's where that comes from. Okay. We are welcome to wear what we want to church. Okay. I'll tell you another story. There was a man that goes to our church still does and he worked with our ministry that serves food to homeless people and he used to be a person who would dress very, very nicely. He wore his Sunday best every week and but one time when he was ministering to someone who was in desperate need, he invited that man to come to church with him and the man said, I can't come to church. And our friend, our brother here at UPC said, why not? And he said, this all I got and he pointed to his jeans and t-shirt. So the man from our church says, you come to church on Sunday and you'll see me there sitting in jeans and a t-shirt and he has worn jeans and a t-shirt every Sunday ever since. It's amazing. That's where we need to be. We need to be in a position where when we see that our traditions are not in line with God's word, we need to be able to let go of them or let people operate according to their own traditions that we need to be very careful not to elevate our personal convictions. And our personal preferences on things that do not have explicit clear teaching and scripture, we need to not elevate those to the level of God's law. Here's the good question. I would ask you and I would ask myself, are your convictions, biblical or traditional? And if they're biblical, you stand on that truth and you stand for that truth. But if they're traditional, then we have to give each other grace and give each other freedom to express ourselves as we do see fit. And I do want to say a word to those who maybe have felt judged, maybe you've been at a church, maybe even here and you've felt judged by something, whether it's dress or something else, I just want you to hear me say that I'm sorry and that's not supposed to happen here. It's not what's supposed to happen in a church, nobody should feel judged when they're in a church and 85% of non-Christians think Christians are judgmental. Do you know that? And I think a big part of that is because very often people are judging others according to traditions and not running to them with the truth of Christ. And so if you are a person who's been felt very judged, especially if you felt judged here, I'm honest invitation, I want to talk to you because I want to play one of my favorite games. One of my absolute favorite games, it's called Guess What's Not in the Bible. I love that game and it very often helps people see that they were judged unfairly. So that's one thing. We want to exalt Christ and what he has done in his fulfillment of the law, we do not want to exalt our traditions and our views on things that are debatable in scriptures. So that's the first thing. We don't want to elevate our traditions. Second, let's look at 9-13 to talk about evasive traditions. Traditions become treacherous when we use them to evade God's law to go around it. This is interesting. Look at verse 9. And he said to them, you have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition. For Moses said, honor your father and your mother and whoever reviles father and or mother must surely die. Now he's referring to he's quoting the fifth commandment and an explanation of the fifth commandment. Those are both quotes from once from Exodus 20 and the others from Exodus 21. And this is a serious offense when you were in living in the nation of Israel. Here was a capital offense. And so he quotes the law. That's the doctrine. That's what the law says. And now he goes on to their oral tradition 11. But you say if a man tells his father or mother, whatever you would have gained from me is Corbin. That is given to God. Then you no longer permit him to do anything for his father or mother, thus making void the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down and many such things you do. Corbin, what's that? Corbin was a tradition that came into being and it wasn't necessarily a bad thing. It was it was to declare something given to God. It was you would take your property, your land or something like that. And you would make a vow saying, I give this to God. I declare this Corbin. And what that man is that it belongs to God and that it's kind of like leaving your estate or some of your estate to your church. And that when you die, it's going to go to the church or something like that. And the reality is in the same way that if you do that while you are still alive, you still have access to it. Well, here's what was happening. The reality is, part of this does involve the law. In numbers 30 verse 2, it says if a man makes a vow to the Lord, he shall not break it. So there is that. That is true. That is the law. But this idea of declaring something given to God was a tradition that was made up by human beings. And so here's what was happening. These Pharisees and scribes through the generations as their parents were growing older and in need of financial assistance, the Fifth Commandment would suggest that they should help them. Right. The Fifth Commandment doesn't end once you leave your home, changes a little bit, but it doesn't end. And so honoring your mother and your father would be to help them in their time of need. And so what Pharisees realize is, if I vow all my stuff is given to God, I can still use it, but I can't give it to them. And so that's what they would do. And then when their parents came and said, we're in need, they could say, I'm sorry, whatever you would have gained from me, it's given to God. It's Corbin. And they would be able to retain their property and not help their parents. And they think they thought that they were actually still somehow obeying God in this pretty crafty. The question is, if they were using a tradition to get around one of God's commands, are we capable of that? And the answer is yes. We got to be looking at our traditions to see if some of them happen to be ways that we are using the tradition to sort of get around one of God's law. And I guess this is Polka Bear Week because I'm going to say another one that I think we need to think about. And don't worry, nothing's going to change right now. Right now, but I want you to think about this because I started thinking about this. And are there traditions at UPC that we sort of are maybe using to get around obeying one of God's commands. And I asked the staff. I asked our staff and ministry leaders and they came back with some possibilities. And one of them really hit me in the heart. And I want to just throw this at you. Think about this. Is it possible that some of us as parents are getting around God's clear command to teach our children through our tradition of Sunday school? Think about this. Okay, here's the law. Moses has given the 10 commandments. Again, he's reiterated it in Deuteronomy 5 and then in Deuteronomy 6, he says, you shall teach these laws. You shall teach them diligently to your children and you shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise. And then in Ephesians 6, Paul very clearly says to parents, especially fathers to bring their children up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. So there's the doctrine. Parents should be the ones who are teaching their children about the Lord, about the Bible, about theology, about what it means to be a follower of Jesus. And therefore, if any of us are in the habit of sort of expecting the church to take care of that, we've got to make some changes, don't we? Because it's our responsibility. And I don't want to dwell on this too long because it's not the main point. But I do want to say this just given this opportunity that our church we truly believe that it is the parents responsibility to teach the children. And so why do we have Sunday school? Why do we have that tradition? Why do we have youth ministry? Our Sunday school classes and our youth ministry is to come along side of parents. It's to supplement and add to what we hope and trust that the parents are doing. This is why we just ran this parenting course for the last several weeks. This is why we'll always provide parenting resources. This is why I have an open invitation. Anybody wants to ever come over and see my family do family worship together. This is a big deal. And so the question is, do we need to change some things and ensure that we are really taking it upon ourselves to teach our children because that's what the command says. Okay, so we'll get off that soapbox for a second, go back to the main point. The main point is there's the question, if the Pharisees were capable of using traditions to get around obeying God, then we're capable of it too. And so analyzing, thinking about our traditions is a very important thing, thinking about if we are trying to get around obedience. So, not going to go through a whole bunch of traditions to see which ones are okay and which ones are not. What we're going to do is just kind of give a, I just want to basically finish by thinking about what would be what a Christ-centered tradition be. What would a Christ-centered tradition and my best guess at that would be a Christ-centered tradition is one that helps us understand and apply the gospel. Those are the types of traditions we want to make sure that we're taking advantage of but still never forcing them. Christ-centered traditions, an example would be expository preaching, that's the tradition we have here, we walk right through passages looking at what they say, and the reason we do that is because we believe that this method of preaching walking through the passages, it gives us a picture of the gospel each week, it helps us to see the glory of Jesus each week as we look at these passages. Like for example, think about this passage and it shows us two things about us, two things about us that every one of us needs to realize. Think about this, if we're capable of elevating our traditions to the level of God's law, can only mean that deep down we realize that we are unable to keep God's law perfectly and therefore we tend to try to make up these versions of what we think it is to be righteous and then we cling to those because we're so desperate for righteousness. We can't obey. Number two, think about this, if we are capable of using traditions to avoid obeying God then that kind of is a pretty interesting or pretty clear picture that we don't always want to obey God but we do want to be righteous. We do want to feel that we are righteous so we can't obey and we don't want to obey all the time that puts us in a pretty serious predicament. In the next service, we always have a lot of UCF students and think about this, if you're a student and you went to your professor and said, look, I can't do these assignments, not to be honest, I don't want to do a lot of them. What do you get at the end of the semester? And so if God has commanded us to obey Him, to glorify Him and the reality is that we cannot, we're sinners, we actually cannot do it and we also don't want to. That puts us in incredible, incredible predicament doesn't it, but it also, that's how this passage points us directly to the cross and to the Holy Spirit. It just screams of our need of Christ and the cross and the Holy Spirit. Think about this, here's two things about Jesus. Number one, on the cross, He paid for our sin, He paid for the ways that we have fallen short, He paid for our falling to glorify God with our lives and when we trust in Him we receive for free His perfect record of righteousness and we stand before God as if we had always perfectly obeyed. That is incredible news, that's the gospel. And when we see that we can't obey, it's such good news to hear that Christ obeyed on our behalf. And secondarily, we don't want to obey all the time. Well, the other thing we see in the scriptures is that that only has Christ paid our debt but then He gives us His Holy Spirit, so through faith we receive a new heart and the Holy Spirit empowers us, helps us want to obey. Isn't that amazing? So these two things, these two glaring problems that stick out in this passage are answered in Christ, that we would trust in Him alone for our righteousness, that we would trust in His Holy Spirit to empower us to obey and to want to obey. Verse 6 and 7 again, verses 6 and 7 where it says, He's quoting Isaiah, just this part where it says, but their hearts, their heart is far from Me, in vain do they worship Me. That is not what we want to hear, right? And when we believe the gospel as we believe the gospel, that's what makes our hearts close to Him and our worship true. It's not gestures, it's not rituals. My family and I went and saw Frozen and 3D at the Science Center, so tempted to start singing let it go. We went and we saw it and what's interesting, if you haven't seen it, sorry, spoiler alert. There's such great plot twists in that movie. And one of the big plot twists is as the movie is coming to a close, it appears that what will save the day is a kiss, a true loves kiss, a gesture. But what actually saves the day is a sacrifice, one sister sacrificing her life for another. And that's what makes things right in the kingdom. And the plot twist is like common sense will tell us if God's going to love us, we're going to have to do these gestures, all these different things. But the plot twist is what God really wants, what makes things really right between God and you is a sacrifice. Not yours, but his own. The sacrifice of his own beloved son. That's what warms the heart. That's what moves our heart to God. That's what makes our worship true. Isn't he good? Let's pray. Father, forgive us for the times that we have elevated our traditions to places they do not belong. Forgive us for the times that we have avoided or evaded your law. And would you just give us humble hearts, help us to be repentant and help us to celebrate this amazing truth. That Jesus has paid our debt and the Holy Spirit is the one who will empower us to obey, even give us a desire to obey. Thank you for your goodness and your mercy to us. We pray that you would be blessed as we continue to sing as we come back to the heart of worship. Then it's not about what we do for you. It's about you and what you have done for us. We pray these things in Jesus' name. Amen.