Looking Beneath the Surface

Friday, January 17, 2014            Looking Beneath the Surface

John  7: 19-30

In today’s passage, Jesus exposes two character flaws in our fallen human nature. The first is our tendency to establish rules and boundaries as a means of self-justification. The Jews in today’s passage had established hundreds of rules to govern how to take a Sabbath rest, all of which missed God’s purpose for them. God gave us a Sabbath rest so that we could take time to reflect on how we were living our lives. In the previous six days, did we love the things God loves, did we do the things God does, and did we humbly walk in harmony with God. By the time of Jesus, the people of God had reduced this simple period of self-examination and rest to more than six hundred rules, some as silly as whether one could tie their shoe laces on the Sabbath.

The religious leaders didn’t take well to Jesus pointing out the flaws in their elaborate means of justifying their position. That’s the second flaw Jesus exposed, and as with self-justification, we still struggle with it today. Politicians and bureaucrats spend more time justifying themselves, and using their power to silence their opponents, than they do fulfilling their actual responsibilities.

I wonder what we would have heard, and how we would have responded, if we had been in Jesus’ audience in Jerusalem during the Festival of Shelters. As for me, I am hearing how I desperately need to “stay in the grace of today” (Wm. Paul Young, author of The Shack). I need to live by grace, and by grace alone. Any reliance on rules and regulations will quickly draw me into the devil’s snare of self-justification. I must remember that God saved me by his grace when I believed, and I can’t take credit for this. My salvation is a gift from God; it is not a reward for the good things I have done, so I cannot boast about it. (Ephesians 2:8-9)

When I am not compulsively seeking self-justification, I don’t fear and react with hostility to those who have different opinions, ideas and thoughts from me. I am able to then deal gracefully with them, which I believe is exactly what God has in mind for us: “this is what (God) requires of you: to do what is right, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6:8).

Sē’lah

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(Selah is a word that appears in the Book of Psalms that I often use as the Complimentary Closing in my correspondence. Its meaning, as I use the word, is to pause and think about these things.)

These meditations are written by Alex M. Knight as he seeks the life in Christ as his way of life.  The meditations are published on the BLOG, http://seekingthelifeinchrist.blogspot.com/ and they are also distributed on the Constant Contact email server. You may subscribe to this email service by sending an email to: amkrom812@gmail.com. The BLOG is also available on Amazon Kindle, by subscription.

Publications by Alex M. Knight:

·        Seeking the Life in Christ, Meditations on the New Testament and Psalms has been published and is now available at Amazon.com in paperback and Kindle.

·        The second edition of  First Think – Then Pray is available on Amazon Kindle.

·        Meditations on The Story of My Life as told by Jesus Christ has been released as an e-book on Amazon Kindle.

Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2007. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188.