FreshBread

Good Morning,

Were did this week go?  Unless you are on Spring Break, we are glad that it is Friday! Today I want to encourage you to spend the time you would be spending reading FreshBread just to pray for three things….

1. To ask God to help you see and do what he wants you to do today…for this day is not about you!

2. Pray that you would be open to learn something new today, in God’s way and timing, which may require patience on your part.

3. Pray for the service this weekend……It is going to be an important one as we look at how to handle criticism that we all face!

See you Sunday!

Scott

Dear Friends….Good Morning!

Matthew 23:13 &15 -

13 “What sorrow awaits you teachers of religious law and you Pharisees. Hypocrites! For you shut the door of the Kingdom of Heaven in peoples faces. You won’t go in yourselves, and you don’t let others enter either. 15 “What sorrow awaits you teachers of religious law and you Pharisees. Hypocrites! For you cross land and sea to make one convert, and then you turn that person into twice the child of hell you yourselves are!

Ok, let’s take a look at this last verse……The Pharisees were interested in getting people to follow them.  I truly believe they were people who wanted God’s Kingdom to come, they just felt it would come if people would do what they called for….keep the law, stop sinning and the messiah will come to usher in the Kingdom.  This created an us and them crowd.

Along comes Jesus and he begins to hang out with the “them” crowd. He tells a woman caught in adultery…”neither do I condemn you…go and sin no more.”  Sin was and is a big deal to Jesus but it is not a tool for judgment.  His approach was a KINGDOM one and it was so different then the Pharisees had in mind that they could not see Jesus as the Messiah.

When Jesus spoke of Hell, he used the word Gahanna which was a garbage dump at the outskirts of Jerusalem.  Worthless trash, things that made no difference to you were thrown there and burned.  Dogs would rummage through it for food.  When people heard Jesus say this word, that is what they most likely thought about….not a place you might go after you die. (Please note this is not to discount a place called Hell that the Bible speaks of as a final location for the devil and his angles….there is a hell clearly taught of in the Bible, I am just not sure that this is what first century Jews thought about when they heard the word Gahanna).

The Evangelical Church (which I grew up in) today is very concerned with “converts”; unfortunately, this means anyone who raises their hand at an invitation, or walks forward in a service, or claims to believe a set of doctrines….these things make you part of an “in crowd”.  (Please note I am not belittling these methods of someone’s salvation at all, God can work in any way He sees fit) HOWEVER…..It is life change that makes a person who is caught up in being like Jesus….this is not life change brought on by effort, but life change only brought on by the work of Christ on the cross, and my choosing to live in the “sainthood” that he gave me….this is Kingdom Living

With that in mind, I believe that Jesus is saying to the Pharisees, you may be getting people to join your in crowd, but without life change, that is really a worthless thing.  When we stop and think about all of this and what we have been talking about on the weekends with the Rest Stop vs. Kingdom Living, it is so important for us to find our significance in what Jesus did for us on the cross and resurrection! 

I’d love to get your thoughts on this…write me at

Dear Friends….Good Morning!

We had some great thoughts come in from our verse in Matthew 23:13 &15 -

13 “What sorrow awaits you teachers of religious law and you Pharisees. Hypocrites! For you shut the door of the Kingdom of Heaven in peoples faces. You wont go in yourselves, and you don’t let others enter either. 15 “What sorrow awaits you teachers of religious law and you Pharisees. Hypocrites! For you cross land and sea to make one convert, and then you turn that person into twice the child of hell you yourselves are!

I mentioned that the Pharisees had a one track mind, and one of the comments challenged the stereo-typing of my comment.  Some of these thoughts made me think so I’ll print them this morning for you too.

First, I suggest that we need to be careful in how we describe Pharisees.  To say that Pharisees only saw things one way appears to be not only a stereotype, but also incorrect.  For example, Jesus spoke to a Pharisee named Unicode (John 3:1) who  appears to have taken into consideration Jesus’ words (John 7:50-51; John 19:39).  Paul’s teacher, Gamaliel, was also a Pharisee (Acts 22:3)  who was open minded enough to use his well respected reputation to discourage the persecution of the disciples (Acts 5:33-39).  Also, Paul, according to his own confession, was a Pharisee, even after faith in messiah (Acts 23:6).  Certainly Paul wasn’t closed minded in the things of God.

This made me think…you know people including the Pharisees act in ways that they feel are best for what they stand for.  The Pharisees were against Jesus, not just to hurt him, but they truly felt that Jesus was far from God.  The Pharisees had lost the heart of God and replaced it with the idol of Religion.  Oh, this is so easy to do and so common even today. Jesus came and called himself the Living Torah (the way, the truth and the life). He called people to a new way of living, and some of the Pharisees knew there was something special about this….HOWEVER….their actions were so secretive. Nicodemus, for example, came to Jesus at night…..COULD IT BE THAT THEY WERE HAVING A HARD TIME EMBRACING THIS NEW WAY (Jesus way) OF LIVING?….for they saw it as a leaving of the faith. Boy, do I see that struggle and feel it today in so many people!

So the next question was, what did the children of Hell comment mean? We will talk about that tomorrow. Take a few minutes and look up this passage in your Bible…..figure out what happened to verse 14! Talk to you in the AM!