Dan Werthman: Thank you, Candice and worship team.
Dan Werthman: One correction to Andre's announcement earlier: he may plan on showing up at 6:30, but the meeting starts at six o'clock, so Andre, you be here at six o'clock, too, wherever you're sitting.
Dan Werthman: So if you show up after six o'clock, you will probably miss the announcement of the pastoral search team, and we're also going to announce what the pastoral profile is tonight.
Dan Werthman: In other words, what is the criteria that we're looking for in our next lead teaching pastor?
Dan Werthman: So be here at six tonight for the beginning of the meeting.
Dan Werthman: If you have your Bibles, I invite you to turn to Mark chapter 7, the seventh chapter of the gospel of Mark that we are working our way through.
Dan Werthman: While you are turning there, you'll see coming up on the screen something you may or may not recognize.
Dan Werthman: First couple times I saw this, I had no idea what this was.
Dan Werthman: This is something you might find along the beach as you're walking, and it is a shell.
Dan Werthman: It is the shell of a crab, and a crab, you know, whether you know or are interested in this or not, a crab is an invertebrate, which means that it has no spinal column.
Dan Werthman: And because it has no spinal column, instead, it has a rigid exoskeleton, that hard shell.
Dan Werthman: And as a crab matures, in other words, as its body grows, its body size, of course, increases with growth.
Dan Werthman: But that shell is made up of a substance, a hard substance, that doesn't grow, that doesn't expand.
Dan Werthman: And so, in order for the crab to keep on growing, it must periodically shed its shell in a process called molting.
Dan Werthman: And as it sheds its shell, there's a new shell growing underneath, and the crab has to continually go through that during its lifespan, if it's going to not only live, but grow.
Dan Werthman: Now, what does that have to do with Mark 7?
Dan Werthman: We'll come back to that, maybe, but keep that image in mind, because it is an illustration from the natural world of, really, something that I think Jesus is teaching us about here in this text today.
Dan Werthman: We'll come back to this illustration at the end.
Dan Werthman: Mark chapter 7, reading the first 13 verses, beginning with verse 1:"And the Pharisees and some of the scribes gathered together around Jesus when they had come from Jerusalem." This takes place in Galilee.
Dan Werthman: He's still here.
Dan Werthman: This is still the Galilean part of his ministry.
Dan Werthman: And apparently a delegation of leading representatives of Pharisees and scribes has been sent from Jerusalem, probably at the request of the Pharisees in Galilee, because they are concerned with Jesus and his teaching and his effect upon the people.
Dan Werthman: And these Pharisees and scribes, they had seen that some of Jesus's disciples were eating their bread with impure hands.
Dan Werthman: That is, unwashed.
Dan Werthman: Now at this point, in verse 3, Mark gives a parenthetical explanation.
Dan Werthman: Mark is writing largely for non-Jewish people, and that's most of us, probably.
Dan Werthman: Maybe all of us don't come from a Jewish background.
Dan Werthman: So he adds this explanation for those of us who may not know what that's talking about.
Dan Werthman: The Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they carefully wash their hands, thus observing the tradition of the elders.
Dan Werthman: And when they come from the marketplace, they do not eat unless they cleanse themselves.
Dan Werthman: And there are many other things which they have received in order to observe, such as the washing of cups and pitchers and copper pots.
Dan Werthman: And now in verse 5, he picks up the account again:"And the Pharisees and the scribes asked Jesus,'Why do your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders, but eat their bread with impure hands?'" This is not an innocent question.
Dan Werthman: This is an accusation.
Dan Werthman: This is a challenge.
Dan Werthman: They are meaning to shame and discredit Jesus here.
Dan Werthman: And Jesus responds from quoting the word, the Old Testament, Isaiah 29:13 to be specific:"And he said to them,'Rightly did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites.
Dan Werthman: As it is written,"This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far away from me.
Dan Werthman: But in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the precepts of men."'" And now in verse 8, Jesus begins to apply that scripture from Isaiah to them, to the Pharisees and what they were doing:"Neglecting the commandment of God, you hold to the tradition of men." He was also saying to them,"You nicely set aside the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition." Now, in verse 10, he gives them a specific example:"For Moses said,'Honor your father and your mother.'" There's the commandment of God.
Dan Werthman: You may recognize that.
Dan Werthman: That's the Fifth Commandment from Exodus 20, verse 12, and he goes on in Exodus 21:"And he who speaks evil of father or mother, let him be put to death." Now he speaks about the tradition of men.
Dan Werthman: Verse 11:"But you say, if a man says to his father or his mother, anything of mine, you might have been held by is Corban(that is to say, given to God), you no longer permit him to do anything for his father or his mother", thus invalidating the word of God by your tradition, which you have handed down.
Dan Werthman: And you do many such things as that.
Dan Werthman: "This is not an isolated example," Jesus is saying.
Dan Werthman: You know, the Pharisees are easy to pick on.
Dan Werthman: We caricature them.
Dan Werthman: You know, we have this way of saying, if we find somebody hypocritical,"Well, he or she's acting like a Pharisee," but I want to start in kind of a counterintuitive way today and talk about my sympathy for the Pharisees.
Dan Werthman: You see, the Pharisees, even though they are easy targets to caricature, they were not the power brokers of Jewish society.
Dan Werthman: That was the Sadducees who were the power brokers.
Dan Werthman: The Pharisees began as a sect.
Dan Werthman: It was a group within Judaism that had very noble goals.
Dan Werthman: The Pharisees began with the goal of simply wanting to honor the law of God, what God had written in what they had, the first five books of the Old Testament.
Dan Werthman: The Pharisees simply wanted to preserve the unique identity of Israel as God's chosen people.
Dan Werthman: They had lofty goals, and so they were motivated, very honestly, by some of the same desires and motivations that I have as a pastor.
Dan Werthman: For example, first of all, they took God's command to pursue holiness seriously.
Dan Werthman: They read and took seriously what I read and take seriously.
Dan Werthman: Leviticus 19:2, God says,"Be holy because I, the Lord your God, am holy." And they heard that, and they took that seriously.
Dan Werthman: God wants us to be holy because we are his people.
Dan Werthman: We should live increasingly holy lives.
Dan Werthman: And that's a desire of myself as a pastor, and of other church leaders.
Dan Werthman: And yes, we understand now, on this side of the cross, that it is the holiness of Jesus that saves us, not our holiness.
Dan Werthman: We understand that what he did on the cross is all-sufficient.
Dan Werthman: I can't, in other words, make myself holy enough to be pleasing to God, but we also understand that, as part of our changed heart, as a response to what Jesus has done on the cross, and with the empowerment of the Holy Spirit, we are called to live increasingly holy lives, that the grace of Jesus Christ does not cancel out God's call to us to be holy.
Dan Werthman: So I can sympathize with them.
Dan Werthman: Secondly, they wanted to preserve the unique identity of Israel as God's people.
Dan Werthman: I mean, consider what they knew that God had said about Israel.
Dan Werthman: Exodus 19:5-6, God says,"Out of all the nations, you, Israel, will be called my treasured possession.
Dan Werthman: You will be for me a holy nation." They took that seriously, and their traditions were intended to put some boundaries around that, to preserve and to protect the unique identity that Israel had from being basically washed away, assimilated, by the pagan nations that surrounded them.
Dan Werthman: And again, I can identify with that as a pastor, as I think most church leaders can: we want the church to be in the world, but we want the church to have a unique identity in the world.
Dan Werthman: We don't want the church to be compromised by the worldliness of our culture around us, so I can sympathize with them.
Dan Werthman: And thirdly, the Pharisees wanted to give people a clear, practical guidance about holy living.
Dan Werthman: You know, they, in striving for holiness, the Pharisees face the very same challenge that we do today, and the challenge is this: how do you apply the specific, but often general in nature, commands of scripture to the unique circumstances of your life?
Dan Werthman: Obviously there's lots of God's law in the Old Testament and the New Testament, but there's a lot of gaps, and how do you take the law and apply it to the specific, unique circumstances of your life?
Dan Werthman: They felt this, and they wanted to do something about this.
Dan Werthman: And so through their tradition, they wanted to give people a map, so to speak, that charted the way through: what is permitted and what is forbidden, what is clean and what is unclean, impure.
Dan Werthman: And that's what developed as the oral law.
Dan Werthman: The written law was God's commandments, that, at that time, they had in the first five books of the Old Testament.
Dan Werthman: Now, the written law is what we have in the entire Bible.
Dan Werthman: The oral law is what they developed to apply the written law, to fill in the gaps, to practically apply it.
Dan Werthman: The oral laws are what Jesus calls in our text today"the tradition of the elders".
Dan Werthman: That's the oral law,"the tradition of men", he refers to it as.
Dan Werthman: The tradition, he says, which you have handed down.
Dan Werthman: It's been developed over the generations.
Dan Werthman: Let me make this concrete for you.
Dan Werthman: I'll give you an example.
Dan Werthman: Here's from the written law, Leviticus chapter 15.
Dan Werthman: That whole chapter is on cleanliness and purity.
Dan Werthman: What do you do if you come in contact with something that makes you unclean?
Dan Werthman: Certain bodily fluids make you unclean.
Dan Werthman: What do you do if you become unclean from touching a corpse?
Dan Werthman: Well, God answered that.
Dan Werthman: God answered that in that verse that you see up on the screen.
Dan Werthman: Leviticus 15:11:"Rinse your hands with water, and you will be clean." And if you don't, you will be unclean, is what you see on the verse up on the screen.
Dan Werthman: Well, that's very well and good.
Dan Werthman: God has provided a way, but what does that mean?
Dan Werthman: How do you rinse your hands with water?
Dan Werthman: Is there a technique you're supposed to use?
Dan Werthman: How often are you supposed to do this?
Dan Werthman: In what settings are you supposed to do this?
Dan Werthman: You see all the blanks that scripture, even for them, doesn't fill in.
Dan Werthman: That's what they tried to fill in with their regulations of washing.
Dan Werthman: The oral law, the tradition of the elders, sought to answer those questions: What do you specifically do?
Dan Werthman: And that's what we see in our text today.
Dan Werthman: Mark 7, verse 3:"Carefully wash your hands before eating." That verb"carefully wash", it comes from the root word"fist".
Dan Werthman: So we don't know exactly what their technique was, but you know, it may have been something that involved rubbing one fist in the hand or immersing your hands so all your fist was covered.
Dan Werthman: We're not sure, but they developed a technique so they could answer the people's questions,"How am I supposed to wash?" Verse 4, the first part,"Cleanse yourself when you come from the marketplace." You're in the marketplace, you come in contact with dead things, dead meat.
Dan Werthman: You come in contact with Gentiles, unbelievers.
Dan Werthman: You come back from the marketplace impure.
Dan Werthman: What are you supposed to do?
Dan Werthman: They developed a way of cleansing themselves, a more full washing.
Dan Werthman: Again, we don't know the details, but it went beyond washing their hands.
Dan Werthman: The second part of verse 4: washing cups and pitchers and copper pots.
Dan Werthman: What do you do when the things that you use to make your meal and serve your meal become exposed to something that renders them unclean?
Dan Werthman: Well, they had rituals and explanations, traditions, traditions of the elders, for how to address that.
Dan Werthman: And you may sit here and you may hear all that today, and you may think,"That is ridiculous." And let me remind you, kindly, let me remind you: you have your traditions, you have your ways of filling in the blanks.
Dan Werthman: Let me give you a couple of examples.
Dan Werthman: Consider the New Testament command.
Dan Werthman: This speaks to us now.
Dan Werthman: Hebrews 12:28:"Let us offer to God acceptable worship with reverence and awe." There's the command.
Dan Werthman: When we come together as a church body, we're to offer worship that is acceptable, worship that is reverent, worship that has awe of God, but what does that mean in terms of how do I dress?
Dan Werthman: Does that mean I'm supposed to wear a tie?
Dan Werthman: Well, they didn't have ties at the time this was written, so that can't be in there.
Dan Werthman: So if I bring my belief that I should wear a tie to make my worship acceptable, that is me filling in the blanks.
Dan Werthman: How about talking?
Dan Werthman: I grew up in a church, from the time I was saved on, where when you came into(we called it) the sanctuary, all right?
Dan Werthman: It wasn't the worship center; it was the sanctuary.
Dan Werthman: When you came in, you were to be quiet.
Dan Werthman: You were to be quiet, because that's what it meant to be reverent.
Dan Werthman: To be reverent is to be quiet.
Dan Werthman: Well, where is that in scripture?
Dan Werthman: That is something we added to fill in the blanks.
Dan Werthman: Now is that a bad thing?
Dan Werthman: No, it is not a bad thing, but is that a prescribed thing?
Dan Werthman: Is that something that is clearly in God's law?
Dan Werthman: No, that is something we have added.
Dan Werthman: That as the traditions of men.
Dan Werthman: Singing.
Dan Werthman: How do you sing?
Dan Werthman: Some of you sing; some of you don't sing.
Dan Werthman: I've noticed in the services, some sing some songs; some don't sing other songs.
Dan Werthman: Even your practices of when you sing and what you sing, they come from your traditions, the expectations that you bring.
Dan Werthman: Raising hands.
Dan Werthman: Can you raise hands in worship?
Dan Werthman: Well, if you came from a tradition where you experienced that, and you were taught that that's actually part of worshiping, you say"yes".
Dan Werthman: If you came from a tradition that"no, that's not reverent, and that's not acceptable", you say"no".
Dan Werthman: However you answer all those questions: what you wear, and whether you speak as you come into the worship service, and how you sing, and whether or not you raise your hands, those are your and my traditions.
Dan Werthman: Those are you and me, from our cultural experiences and backgrounds, taking our expectations and filling in the blanks, the specifics that scripture does not address.
Dan Werthman: Let me give you another example, perhaps even more relevant, relevant to even what's going to happen here tonight: the New Testament directions from Paul to people like Titus about"how do you establish a church congregation?" Let me tell you, there's remarkably little information given in scripture about how you would set up a congregation.
Dan Werthman: Here's just one, and there's not many more.
Dan Werthman: Titus 1:5: Paul tells Titus,"As you are going through Cyprus or Crete, and you are setting up churches, set in order what remains, and appoint elders in every city." Okay, we know elders are to be part of it, but notice how little detail is given.
Dan Werthman: So what is the proper structure of elders.
Dan Werthman: And are we to have membership, and what's membership supposed to look like?
Dan Werthman: And what is the government structure of the church?
Dan Werthman: Do you notice the big gaps that God, in his providence, does not allow to be filled in?
Dan Werthman: And so again, the way that you interpret and apply this, and the few other verses about church organization and church government, that goes beyond the written law.
Dan Werthman: That is bringing in your interpretations from your experiences and what you have learned: the oral law, the traditions of men.
Dan Werthman: So as we read this account, let's not be so quick to dismiss and disdain the Pharisees' traditions of washing, of purity rituals.
Dan Werthman: Instead, let's see how their traditions resemble our traditions, and let's hear Jesus's warnings to them about their traditions as warnings to us, as we consider our own traditions.
Dan Werthman: Here are some key principles that I see coming out of this text, and the first one, I've kind of already made this clear, but I'll state it clearly: We all observe and obey some traditions at one time or another.
Dan Werthman: I mean, Paul, or excuse me, Jesus, makes that point clear to them, that Mark brings out in verse 3:"The Pharisees and all the Jews observed the traditions of the elders." This is widespread.
Dan Werthman: And the traditions that we observe: we may bring different traditions, but we all observe some traditions.
Dan Werthman: The issue is: do you recognize that what you hold onto, and the expectations you bring, they are traditions?
Dan Werthman: They go beyond what God clearly says in his law.
Dan Werthman: Secondly(this is also kind of implied in what I've already said), but traditions have a powerful effect upon our lives.
Dan Werthman: They have a powerful effect upon our lives together as a congregation.
Dan Werthman: I love what Ray Stedman says:"Tradition is the power of the past reaching into the present to shape our future." And let me just state the obvious example: The constitution.
Dan Werthman: We have a hundred-year-old constitution that is not the word of God, that was the people who wrote it at the original time, over a hundred years ago, their best attempt to apply the word of God to how to govern the church, but it's still tradition.
Dan Werthman: It's the tradition of the past, that now, as we consider it in the present, will shape the future.
Dan Werthman: That's why it's important for you to be here tonight.
Dan Werthman: That's why it's important for you to hear the warnings as Jesus goes further in this text today.
Dan Werthman: Third, traditions can be good or bad.
Dan Werthman: Right?
Dan Werthman: There are traditions that, in some degree, are neutral in and of themselves.
Dan Werthman: They can be good or bad, depending on how we observe them.
Dan Werthman: You know, most traditions begin in the right way and for the right reasons.
Dan Werthman: At least that's my experience.
Dan Werthman: People begin traditions in a way of somehow honoring God.
Dan Werthman: They read something in scripture and they think,"What is the best way for us to try and honor that?" And they develop tradition, or they take the tradition from somebody who has come before them.
Dan Werthman: But the problem is, over time, that original purpose is forgotten, and if it's forgotten, then what happens over time is all that matters is the tradition itself.
Dan Werthman: You know, all that matters is the tradition itself.
Dan Werthman: And that's what Jesus was talking about in verses 6 and 7, in his use of Isaiah 29:"Those people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.
Dan Werthman: They worship me in vain.
Dan Werthman: Their teachings are but the rules taught by men." The prophet Isaiah, he's not specifically thinking about these Pharisees, but Jesus is taking that, and Jesus is teaching both the Pharisees, and he's teaching you in me, that when we keep practicing our traditions, when we keep going through the motions, but we let our hearts become disengaged by why we even have those traditions when we're no longer focused on the underlying purposes of honoring God, we become like the people that Isaiah condemns.
Dan Werthman: Our traditions go bad.
Dan Werthman: How do our traditions go bad?
Dan Werthman: How do our traditions become corrupted?
Dan Werthman: Jesus describes this in verses 8 and 9:"Neglecting the commandment of God, you hold to the tradition of men." Two contrasting verbs there: we cling to our traditions, we hold to our traditions.
Dan Werthman: That becomes what's most important, and in doing so, we let go of the underlying purpose, the commandment of God.
Dan Werthman: And that's how traditions get corrupted and go bad.
Dan Werthman: Traditions, number four, go bad when we lose sight of the underlying law of God.
Dan Werthman: Now, Jesus gives an example here, but it's one of many examples he could give them.
Dan Werthman: Picking it up in verse 10:"Honor your father and your mother." There's the commandment of God.
Dan Werthman: Again, the Fifth Commandment from Exodus chapter 20.
Dan Werthman: What does it mean to honor your father and mother?
Dan Werthman: It means not only to respect them and love them; it means, when they become aged, and especially in that culture, where there was no Social Security net, to care for them, to make sure their needs are met.
Dan Werthman: But what's the tradition that had developed in that time?
Dan Werthman: The tradition that's called Corban, that you see mentioned here, which simply means"consecrated to God".
Dan Werthman: And again, I know this is, you know, this is so far removed from us, but think about designated giving.
Dan Werthman: You may or may not be aware of that.
Dan Werthman: That's something you can do.
Dan Werthman: You can, in your will, you can say,"I'm going to leave my house to some charity, and so I'm going to put it in my will now, while I'm still alive, but I am going to do it as a designated gift.
Dan Werthman: I'm going to retain possession of that house.
Dan Werthman: "I'm going to retain use of that house.
Dan Werthman: It's my house," in other words,"til I die, but when I die, it goes to that charity." Well that's kind of the same principle of Corban.
Dan Werthman: In Corban, a Jewish young man could say, you know,"I know my parents are in need of financial assistance, and I do have some resources, but basically, my parents have, you know-- I don't like my parents"...
Dan Werthman: you know, whatever, whatever.
Dan Werthman: "I'm upset with my parents, and so I'm going to take my resources and I'm going to make a designated gift to the temple.
Dan Werthman: I'm going to say these are consecrated to God.
Dan Werthman: Now, I retain the use of them.
Dan Werthman: I can keep using them.
Dan Werthman: It only goes to the temple when I die.
Dan Werthman: But then when my father and my mother come to me in need, I can say,'Sorry, I can't give you anything.
Dan Werthman: "'Everything that I have is already designated to go to God.'" And Jesus says that is using the principle-- that is using a tradition of man, the tradition of the elders, to cancel out, to neglect and cancel out, the commandment of God.
Dan Werthman: How do some of our traditions go bad?
Dan Werthman: If that one doesn't connect with you, consider how we do this, maybe knowingly or unknowingly.
Dan Werthman: Let me give you, again, a New Testament commandment of God.
Dan Werthman: Ephesians 5:19, he's talking to us when we come together to worship.
Dan Werthman: "Speak to one another with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs.
Dan Werthman: Sing and make music in your heart to the Lord." And I would make the case to you that that is not only a commandment, but that is a command of God that we're to worship God with a variety of musical styles, psalms and hymns and spiritual songs.
Dan Werthman: I'd even make the argument that that means we are to worship him with songs from a variety of cultures, because the Church of Jesus Christ is not just the Church of North America, but what do we do?
Dan Werthman: We come to church bringing our own musical preferences.
Dan Werthman: Some of those preferences are preferences from the kind of music that I heard in the church that I grew up in, and that's some of us, that's why I like hymns, or whatever it was that you heard from your church background.
Dan Werthman: Some of us bring our musical preferences from the kind of music that we listened to in other parts of our life, that moves us emotionally, and that's what we want to hear.
Dan Werthman: And when we begin to say,"Well, we're not really worshiping unless we sing hymns or sing contemporary songs or sing country Western, or whatever it may be," that is your taste or your preference.
Dan Werthman: What have we done?
Dan Werthman: We have begun to raise up our traditions, whether we recognize them as traditions or not, over the commandments of God.
Dan Werthman: Why is it that we hold so tightly, so dearly, to our traditions?
Dan Werthman: How is it that we can get to the point where, like Jesus says, we are even, maybe consciously or unconsciously, setting aside the commandment of God in order to keep our tradition?
Dan Werthman: Very honestly, it's because traditions give us security.
Dan Werthman: Traditions give us comfort.
Dan Werthman: There's order, there's security in traditions, in doing the things the way I grew up with, or doing things the way that I've become accustomed to, or the way my family did it.
Dan Werthman: There's comfort.
Dan Werthman: It comforts us, maybe, to come hear a certain kind of music or observe a certain kind of liturgy in a church or do other kinds of church practices in familiar ways.
Dan Werthman: And you know, there's nothing wrong with finding security and comfort in our traditions, unless we take our comfort and our security of our traditions, and we elevate it to a place where it becomes truly more important than the underlying commandments of God.
Dan Werthman: And in doing so, we've made it an idol.
Dan Werthman: We've made it something that we worship more than Jesus Christ himself.
Dan Werthman: So traditions give us security and comfort, but if those traditions and that security and that comfort become an idol, our traditions become rigid, and they risk quenching the Spirit.
Dan Werthman: Do you know that verse?
Dan Werthman: 1 Thessalonians 5:19?
Dan Werthman: Paul, or God speaking through Paul, to the church body, to us:"Don't quench the Spirit." Don't throw a bucket of water by your preferences and what you want and what you're trying to hold onto on the flame of the Holy Spirit.
Dan Werthman: Think of the early church, in the first few chapters of the book of Acts.
Dan Werthman: What do we see?
Dan Werthman: We see the Church growing exponentially.
Dan Werthman: We see people coming en masse to Jesus, because the Holy Spirit is moving powerfully.
Dan Werthman: He's moving in new ways.
Dan Werthman: There were very few forms in the early church there, and so the Holy Spirit was free, was unrestricted and could move in new ways and bring in groups of people like the Gentiles that the original believers never even foresaw was possible.
Dan Werthman: The Church was growing, because while there were traditions, it wasn't restricted by traditions.
Dan Werthman: Here's Jesus's warning to the Pharisees and to you and to me: when we make the traditions, even the good traditions that give us comfort and security, the main thing, we risk quenching the Spirit.
Dan Werthman: We risk restricting the Spirit's ability of our church to make us grow and move and be used by God in the world.
Dan Werthman: So let me come back to the crab.
Dan Werthman: That brings me back to the crabs.
Dan Werthman: Remember?
Dan Werthman: Shedding their shells?
Dan Werthman: And by the way, this is not my illustration; it came from a commentator named David Garland, but it just connected with me.
Dan Werthman: I hope it connects with you.
Dan Werthman: Think of that crab: to live and to grow, the crab must shed its shell from time to time.
Dan Werthman: Now, it needs a shell.
Dan Werthman: It can't go without a shell.
Dan Werthman: It's weak and vulnerable and unprotected without a shell, but if it tries to hang onto its shell, or if the shell becomes so rigid and hard that it can't somehow shed its shell, what happens?
Dan Werthman: The crab will cease to grow, and the crab will die.
Dan Werthman: That's like our traditions.
Dan Werthman: Whether it's the traditions of music or the traditions of dress or the traditions, even, of constitutional forms.
Dan Werthman: We need traditions.
Dan Werthman: We need the ways that we have learned to worship and do life together as a church congregation.
Dan Werthman: They do protect our identity.
Dan Werthman: They do give us comfort and security.
Dan Werthman: But we can easily, if we're not careful, fall into the error of the Pharisees, elevating our traditions above the principles in God's word.
Dan Werthman: And when we do, if we do, our traditions make us hard-shelled.
Dan Werthman: We become like that crab: the body wants to grow, but the shell is too hard, and it can't be molted.
Dan Werthman: It can't be shed.
Dan Werthman: And so, it kills the crab, and our traditions can keep us from growing and can even kill us, if we become hard-shelled.
Dan Werthman: So again, whatever the Lord is laying on your heart, whether it's your style of music or how you dress or how you do reverence as you come into our worship center or constitutional revision or anything else that is left open in scripture.
Dan Werthman: Let's heed the words of Jesus here, to the Pharisees, to us.
Dan Werthman: Let's heed the warning not to quench the Spirit.
Dan Werthman: Let's be aware and open to how the Spirit wants to move.
Dan Werthman: Let's extend grace to each other, recognizing there's a variety of different traditions.
Dan Werthman: Let's embrace the best of all of those traditions.
Dan Werthman: Let's do this so Jesus would be glorified.
Dan Werthman: Let's pray.
Dan Werthman: Jesus, you speak to these men, these Pharisees and scribes, but you speak to us, and Lord, I ask that your spirit would take your words and convict as needed, in all of our hearts, and I think of even where we are as a congregation, Lord, and how important it is to just be very aware of these distinctions between what is actually in your word and what is the expectations, the preferences, the traditions that we sometimes impose upon your word.
Dan Werthman: Give us great discernment, Lord.
Dan Werthman: We don't want to quench your Spirit.
Dan Werthman: Make us open to what your Spirit wants to do.
Dan Werthman: We pray this, Jesus, that you would be lifted up and glorified.
Dan Werthman: We pray this in your name.
Dan Werthman: Amen.