Thoughts on Luke - Day 52

                                                    Luke 11:37-42

When Jesus had finished speaking, a Pharisee invited him to eat with him; so he went in and reclined at the table. ³⁸ But the Pharisee was surprised when he noticed that Jesus did not first wash before the meal.
³⁹ Then the Lord said to him, “Now then, you Pharisees clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside you are full of greed and wickedness. ⁴⁰ You foolish people! Did not the one who made the outside make the inside also? ⁴¹ But now as for what is inside you—be generous to the poor, and everything will be clean for you.
⁴² “Woe to you Pharisees, because you give God a tenth of your mint, rue and all other kinds of garden herbs, but you neglect justice and the love of God. You should have practiced the latter without leaving the former undone.


           We sing a song to the grandchildren called, "I Just Wanna Be A Sheep, Baaa", and one of the verses in it goes, "I don't wanna be a Pharisee, I don't wanna be a Pharisee, cuz a Pharisee is fair I see, I just wanna be a sheep, baaaa"  Jesus, in the rest of this chapter blasts the Pharisees and teachers of the law, so much so that they plan to kill Him. I thought about doing the whole passage in one fell swoop but since I have a tendency to err on the Pharisee side myself, I felt like I should look more closely at each of His accusations to see how they relate to me.

         The first one involves doing everything right on the outside, but inside where no one but God can see, is a mess. Inside you have greed, wickedness, contempt for the poor, and very little love for God. We have been studying David lately in Sunday School and trying to figure out what makes him "a man after God's own heart". David doesn't do a lot of things right on the outside - he lies, commits adultery, fornication, bigamy, murders, has bloodlust, is a bad parent, doesn't deal with issues, and on his death bed he is thinking about revenge. So if you look at the outside of his cup, it is pretty dirty. Yet, as we get a glimpse at the insight of his heart in other passages of Samuel, Kings, Chronicles, and especially Psalms, we see a love for God and a relationship with God that is unparalleled. This is what God wants and in our day, when the Holy Spirit has been given to believers to indwell them, this is paramount because it leads to righteous behavior.

          We are often asked, what rules did you have for your kids in the High School years? What was their curfew? How did you control their friends? Did you let them go to parties where there might be alcohol? Were they allowed to miss Sunday School, youth group or church? Did you let them date unbelievers? When you look at those questions, they are all concerning the outside of the cup. The fact of the matter is that these things never came up because the kids were so clean on the inside (only God knows how clean) that these issues didn't come up. They had no desire to drink, party, hang out with non-Christians as close friends, miss church (because that's where all their friends were and dateable guys and girls) or get in trouble, so we really didn't even need to establish rules. Karen was teaching about this in Sunday School this week about watching out who your kids friends are, and I was thinking as she said this that who kids pick as friends is not an external issue, but an internal issue of the heart.

        As a Pharisee, I need to focus on my heart. If my heart is in love with God, my eyes will be pure. I will seek after the things He wants me to seek after, with feet, hands, mind, strength empowered by the Holy Spirit. Also, I will do thing for the poor because I love them, not because it looks good on my resume or because the Bible tells me to do it. We are continually amazed at the lack of true love for the poor and aliens among Christians. Sure, we do things for them, giving food, money, clothing, but we can see by how easily these programs get forgotten, replaced, displaced, unannounced, under funded, that they are more external shows than driven by an inside love of God and His people. We pat ourselves on the backs for our Spanish ministry and it looks great on our resume, yet they are not even a line item on our budget. We give them a place to meet, that is being unused, put our name on the ministry and proclaim how wonderful we are. I say this not to shame us or diss my church (it is an amazingly good church) but to remind us that we are in danger of being the church in Ephesus that was doing all the right things yet was rebuked by God for losing it's first love. If I didn't get paid for taking care of the aliens in our community, would I? Would I hire bilingual people? I don't know...

      Lord, increase my love for you. Help me to love the people You love. Help me to be more focused on the inside of my cup being pure so that by Your Holy Spirit, the external will also be clean. Amen.