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James 1:27 states “Pure religion and undefiled before our God and Father is this… to visit the widows in their affliction…”
In our High School class we have been talking about this concept and things we can do.
Of course in the Mosaic Law farmers would let widows glean their fields but I hardly think today we could get the widows to go out into the cotton fields during the hottest month of the year to glean after the mechanical cotton strippers have done their job. We live in a different world… I doubt they would glean those fields even if they were air conditioned.
Many years ago I knew a fellow who had a huge antique tool collection and I bought some things from him. That had to be back in the 1990s and he has since passed. I happened to run into his daughter several months ago and she told me her mother would be glad to let me look at those old tools again.
That was months ago. Two days ago I called the 90 year old widow and she showed me that marvelous collection. Of course along the way she talked my ear off… I’ll probably never be able to wear eye glasses.
Anyway… all her stuff was really quite valuable and more than I wanted to pay but I told her I wanted to help her and told her and I knew someone in the auctioneer business who could sell all her stuff for her. She was very excited and thanked me because she had been trying to sell it for a long time and had given up.
So I took a lot of photos and messaged them to my friend and added that I would have liked to purchase some of her things but did not feel comfortable making an offer that might be viewed as taking advantage of a widow. BTW, this same auctioneer had helped another widow I identified for him. Here was my friend’s response…
“… you are one of the few people I know that won’t do that. Most do and it’s usually a relative or a real good friend that has no problem taking advantage of someone”
How sad.
Most of our widows today have plenty to eat but there’s also plenty of other things we can do the help. Look for those opportunities to help and to not take advantage of a widow.
Back when I was a junior or senior in High School we had a Bible class teacher that was truly memorable (for me). He was confident, he was dynamic and he knew his Bible. I still remember one of the lessons he taught us.
First he went to Ephesians 1:22, “… and gave Him (Jesus) to be head over all things to the church which is his body…” Conclusion… the church is Christ’s body.
Then he went to Ephesians 4:4, “There is one body, one Spirit…”
Conclusion… the church is Christ’s body and there’s only one body. Therefore there is only one church… the Church of Christ.
Very powerful logic but there’s only one thing wrong with it… its dead wrong. Those verses don’t teach that. What my teacher failed to recognize is the church exists in a general or universal sense and it exists in a specific local sense.
Paul in his letter to the Ephesians was addressing the church in a general or universal sense. He was trying to illustrate that there couldn’t be one church for the Greek Christians and one church for the Jewish Christians but one broad universal church that was inclusive of all races and all nationalities.
I loved that teacher and still do (even though I have lost track of him) and I guess the learning point here is don’t be so enamored with a teachers personality and teaching style that you fail to judge his message critically because I swallowed that teaching hook, line and sinker and taught it myself. Of course I was only 17 or 18 years old at the time so I forgive myself.
In Matthew 12 Jesus warned his disciples to “be on your guard against the yeast of the Pharisees which is hypocrisy”
This is interesting to me because generally we consider our own sin to have only consequences for ourselves. This passage suggests otherwise.
Yeast affects the whole loaf of bread and the same concept is repeated in 1 Corinthians 5 where Paul admonishes the Corinthians to keep the local congregation free from “yeast” (sin).
The Pharisees hypocrisy affected the whole of God’s Jewish nation because the Pharisees were in a position of leadership. Their hypocrisy could permeate and adversely affect the ones they were teaching and influencing making them hypocrites as well.
How can church leaders today be hypocrites? Here are a few things off the top of my head.
- The teacher who teaches kindness and compassion towards the poor but when given the opportunity to help the poor comes up with some excuse not to.
- The teacher who teaches the need for hospitality and the “oneness” hospitality helps create but is not hospitable at all except perhaps to his friends.
- The teacher who urges the congregation to invite their neighbors to church but never does himself.
I wish we had some kind of spiritual mirror where we could view ourselves as God views us with 20/20 spiritual vision. Of course we can look in God’s word but too often when we look in that mirror our eyes are often blurred with selfish hypocrisy that can harm the entire congregation and render it the Church of the Hypocrites.
We’ve been studying the Parable of the Talents in my High School/young adult class and have learned, correctly, that God assesses our ability and based on that assessment expects some kind of productivity out of us.
I asked my class that if God revealed to us what he thought of our individual abilities... how would that make us feel?
For instance, if God revealed to the whole class that we were all just one talent people what would be our response? Would we just respond by thinking… God knows everything and I am what I am or would we be so indignant at our own correctly assessed ability that we decide… I’m not going to be a one talent man… I’ll prove that I can be better?
What if God told everyone in the class that they were all five talent men what would our reaction bethen? We might be pretty happy and smug and maybe rest on our laurels.
If God told me that I was a five talent man I think that might motivate me to be even better. I might think I’m going to do so well they are going to have to write a new Parable about the 10, 5, 2 and 1 talent men.
You see, in John 15 we find out that God prunes his most productive people so we can be even more productive… that’s how a low talent man can be a higher talent man… by letting God prune him. And as one of the students pointed out this morning… pruning hurts the plant a little but it’s a pain that is soon forgotten, especially in comparison to the great joy we feel at pleasing God.
Let's be the best children of God that we can be and trust his process.
I think an interesting study would be to compare the beginning and the end of Jesus’ ministry.
Of course it began with Jesus’ baptism and choosing to fast in the wilderness for 40 days and then to be unsuccessfully tempted by Satan.
Jesus’ choice to begin his ministry is interesting. My guess is he did it in this manner to foreshadow how his follower’s personal ministry must also begin by being cleansed by the waters of baptism and to receive the promised “gift of the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2:38).
At the beginning of his ministry Jesus voluntarily deprived himself of a necessity of life… food.
At the end of his ministry he was deprived of another necessity of life… all his friends, followers and family.
Jesus was all alone at the beginning and all alone at the end.
Satan tempted Jesus in the wilderness in an attempt to make Jesus his servant. Satan never tried that again but at the end successfully tempted Judas and Peter and manipulated the Jewish and Roman governments to kill Jesus. If Satan couldn’t make Jesus his servant he would kill him… or so he thought.
When Jesus was baptized a loud voice came from Heaven… this is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.
When Jesus died on the cross God spoke again by tearing the veil in the temple, sending an earthquake and making the dead rise from their graves.
Surely Jesus baptism foreshadowed his death, burial and “rebirth”… buried in the waters of baptism and buried in the ground. Arising from the waters of baptism and arising from the tomb.
All of this was an example for us. Remember… Satan never gives up. Sometimes he changes his tactics but he doesn’t give up and if we don’t give up either then like Jesus we can live for eternity in God’s presence and among the “principalities and powers in Heavenly places”.
In Genesis 30 Jacob was having a disagreement with his father-in-law Laban as to the division of their flocks.
Jacob proposed that he take all the sheep that were spotted and Laban could have the more valuable pure white sheep. Laban readily agreed to that.
The trouble for Laban was that God blessed Jacob and the majority of the lamb crop each year was spotted and Jacob’s flock prospered while Laban’s flock diminished.
Jesus during his three year ministry consistently chose the spotted sheep to minister to… the prostitutes, the tax collectors, the hypocritical Pharisees, the sick and the dying.
Of course the Lord’s church has been compared to a flock of sheep complete with Shepherds (Elders) who care for the sheep. The Lord’s church does its best work with spotted sheep that need shepherding.
Sometimes in a congregation we might want to “pick” our sheep. Oh here’s a nice moral family in a denomination let’s clean up their misunderstandings about the Bible and add them to our number and we can go out and eat and be friends and laugh and have a good time.
But the best work is accomplished when we can find someone filthy with sin and show them a little light at the end of the tunnel and with great patience and great spiritual stamina stick with them through thick and through thin until they become strong enough to stand on their own two feet. That my friends is a great victory over Satan and causes the angels in Heaven to rejoice.
And if there is anything to be learned from the Lesson of the Spotted Sheep it’s that God will make that flock of sheep great and prosperous to the bewilderment of folks like Laban who considered spotted sheep to be inferior.
And we’re not talking about sheep and flocks but rather people and congregations.
1 Kings 3 reveals some things about King Solomon…
“Now Solomon loved the Lord, walking in the statutes of his father David, except that he was sacrificing and burning incense on the high places”
Worshipping in the “High places” was prohibited by God in Deuteronomy 12…
“You shall utterly destroy all the places where the nations whom you are going to dispossess serve their gods, on the high mountains… And you shall tear down their altars and smash their memorial stones to pieces… You shall not act this way toward the Lord your God. But you shall seek the Lord at the place which the Lord your God will choose from all your tribes, to establish His name there for His dwelling, and you shall come there”
1 Kings 3 continues with the story of how God blessed Solomon in a dream and gave him unsurpassed wisdom. And then we come to 3:15…
“Then Solomon awoke, and behold, it was a dream. And he came to Jerusalem and stood before the ark of the covenant of the Lord, and offered burnt offerings and made peace offerings, and held a feast for all his servants”
Did you see that? Solomon was worshipping in the “High Places” but after the dream he was already smarter and wiser and worshipped God where he should have in the first place… before the “Ark of the Covenant”
God no longer speaks to us in dreams but through his Son Jesus Christ and in his revealed Word.
Maybe we better re-examine where and how we worship and if we find out (like Solomon did) that our worship is improper, make the proper correction.
We don’t have to be as smart as Solomon to do that… we can borrow his wisdom and mimic it. After all wasn’t that what God intended when he preserved these words for us?
