Today’s Podcast
Today’s Bible reading plan:
Read it in a year – Psalms 128-130
see the whole year’s plan [here](http://www.bible-reading.com/bible-plan.pdf)
Today’s Devotional
Luke 11:39-41
Jesus: You Pharisees are a walking contradiction. You are so concerned about external things—like someone who washes the outside of a cup and bowl but never cleans the inside, which is what counts! Beneath your fastidious exterior is a mess of extortion and filth.
You guys don’t get it. Did the potter make the outside but not the inside too? If you were full of goodness within, you could overflow with generosity from within, and if you did that, everything would be clean for you.
What do Jesus’ words mean for us today?
Obsessive compulsive disorder is a terrible problem for those that have a severe case of it. It can be very debilitating causing you to go through repetitive rituals dozens of times before you can move on to the next item of the day. Maybe it’s as simple as tapping the bed or touching a spot on the vanity or seemingly benign things like lining shoes up in a particular way before you can get on with your life. But sometimes these rituals can take on a life of their own. Sometimes they can become bizarre activities that make no sense to anyone, even the person that goes through them over and over, but just can’t stop until the routine is complete for fear that something bad will happen if they don’t.
That’s the sense I get when I read these verse about the Pharisees and their cleansing rituals. I often think about OCD and the terrible plight of the disorder’s victims when I hear about the rituals the Pharisees demanded the Jews follow in their daily routines. When we look back at the book of Leviticus at some of the cleansing ceremonies that God prescribed for the wandering Israelites in the deserts of the middle east, it’s easy to understand many of them.
Having served in army units that spent a lot of time in the field, I know how important some of those personal and community hygiene rules are. It doesn’t take much for disease to spread through a unit if soldiers aren’t following good hygiene rules. In fact, until recent years, disease accounted for the vast majority of casualties every army around the world suffered in times of war. Even today, there are far more soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan due to illness and injury than from battle injuries.
When you have three million people moving across the desert, living in tents, eating from open cook fires, things can get a little dicey. They didn’t have our current medical knowledge. They didn’t use our current medicines. They didn’t have the same kinds of equipment with which to travel. They needed some practical instruction from God to survive.
But by the time Jesus came to visit us, Rome had some pretty good systems in place. Medicine had progressed significantly. Running water appeared in some houses. They understood the importance of hygiene for the most part even though they didn’t understand germs and viruses and the mechanics of disease communication. But the Pharisees took those Levitical laws and turned them into OCD actions. It seemed like somewhere along the line one of the chief priests really had undiagnosed OCD and just multiplied all the rules by ten and no one had any breathing room about anything. It became impossible to keep up with the rituals.
So Jesus intervened. “You guys don’t get it.” It’s what’s on the inside that counts. If you were generous on the inside it would show by your giving. If your were happy on the inside, you’d be smiling and laughing on the outside. If you cared about people, you would try to lift their burdens instead of adding to them. If you loved God, you would love people.
So what would Jesus say to us if He came to visit? Do our services and our institutions look like we have OCD? Do we get so wrapped up in the routine activities that just have to be done in just the right order and just the right way that we forget why we come to church in the first place? Do we forget that what God wants from us is our worship and that when we gather for fellowship it isn’t the ritual that’s important but the relationships we build with people that supersedes everything else? It’s not what we eat or what we drink or how we wash our hands or how we set the table or whether the silverware matches the plates or the napkins match the tablecloth. None of that matters if we love people and care about the relationship we are building.
The Pharisees took their rituals to an extreme to try to assuage their spiritual conscience. It didn’t do any good. They still didn’t meet God’s standard because what God wanted was their devotion and love for each other. They could give neither as long as they were so focused on getting the ritual right. It’s the same with us. Until we get it right and love God and each other, we, like the Pharisees, will try to substitute our rituals, our activities, for the right stuff. Like Jesus says, “Guys, get it right!”
The Voice Bible Copyright © 2012 Thomas Nelson, Inc. The Voice™ translation © 2012 Ecclesia Bible Society All rights reserved. In accordance with the requirements for FTC full disclosure, I may have affiliate relationships with some or all of the producers of the items mentioned in this post who may provide a small commission to me when purchased through this site.