Dave's Diary

Prayer

Briefly prepare your heart in silence, and ask the Holy Spirit to awaken your sense of anticipation that God is about to speak to you through His Word. Then, before you read, I invite you to pray this prayer based on Psalm 25:8-9

Good and upright are You, Lord.
You instruct sinners in Your ways.
I humble myself before You today and pray –
Guide me in what is right and teach me Your way.
Amen.

Reading

Matthew 23:23-24

Remember, in Matthew 23, Jesus was confronting the religious leaders with the truth about the sins that were keeping them – and, through them, keeping others – from the kingdom of God. They believed that they were in right standing with God, but in reality they were far from Him. That’s why Jesus was so brutally honestly with them. He was striving to wake them up to the spiritual danger they were in. Knowing Jesus, it is clear that His heart was for these religious men to repent, turn away from their path of self-deception, and be saved!

In today’s verses, the issue Jesus highlighted was the way these men hypocritically obeyed the law of tithing to the nth degree. They were so over-the-top in their commitment to tithing that they even set aside a tenth of every little “harvest” from their herb gardens. Now that was not a problem in and of itself. But what made them hypocritical in this was that, while they were this hyper-committed to tithing, at the same time they totally neglected the deeper principles of God’s Law – justice, mercy and faithfulness.

Jesus points out that even while they had the outer trappings of religious performance perfectly in place, they did not care about the poor, the vulnerable, the oppressed and the hopeless. These were the very people God had commanded His People to care for faithfully, but they paid them no attention!

They had not heeded the words of their own prophet Micah:

⁶ With what shall I come before the Lord and bow down before the exalted God?
Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old?
⁷ Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousand rivers of oil?
… ⁸ He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.

God is most pleased when we, His people, focus on the deeper and more important principles of living in step with His heart. But instead of paying the closest possible attention to the most important matters of God’s Law, these men focussed on perfectionism in the things that mattered far less to God. And Jesus rebuked them as hypocrites for living unjustly, mercilessly and faithlessly. Let us not fall into this trap.

Let us become a people who please God’s heart by living in step with His justice and mercy, in all faith and humility.

Contemplation

Please take time to ponder what Jesus has commanded us. Turn one or more of these declarations over and over in your mind. Keep them in mind throughout the day and live in step with Your King, Jesus.

As a disciple of Jesus Christ, and in the power of the Holy Spirit:

• I will not let my “religious observances” blind me to the needs of others.
• I will walk humbly – treating others’ needs as very important.
• I will behave justly and kindly towards others at all times.

Jesus, King of Kindness, let Your mercy, justice, generosity and love flow through me to others today. Amen.