{"id":7103,"date":"2015-11-11T00:05:25","date_gmt":"2015-11-11T08:05:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/?p=7103"},"modified":"2015-11-10T14:37:41","modified_gmt":"2015-11-10T22:37:41","slug":"what-matters-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/2015\/11\/11\/what-matters-2\/","title":{"rendered":"What Matters"},"content":{"rendered":"

As Jesus was speaking, one of the Pharisees invited him home for a meal. So he went in and took his place at the table. His host was amazed to see that he sat down to eat without first performing the hand-washing ceremony required by Jewish custom. Then the Lord said to him, \u201cYou Pharisees are so careful to clean the outside of the cup and the dish, but inside you are filthy\u2014full of greed and wickedness! Fools! Didn\u2019t God make the inside as well as the outside? So clean the inside by giving gifts to the poor, and you will be clean all over.<\/p>\n

\t\u201cWhat sorrow awaits you Pharisees! For you are careful to tithe even the tiniest income from your herb gardens, but you ignore justice and the love of God. You should tithe, yes, but do not neglect the more important things.<\/p>\n

\t\u201cWhat sorrow awaits you Pharisees! For you love to sit in the seats of honor in the synagogues and receive respectful greetings as you walk in the marketplaces. Yes, what sorrow awaits you! For you are like hidden graves in a field. People walk over them without knowing the corruption they are stepping on.\u201d (Luke 11:37-44)<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\tJesus was not against personal hygiene. But he used the issue of ceremonial washing as the opportunity to push a Pharisee outside his comfort zone, in order to help him reassess his relationship with God. If Jesus had simply asked the Pharisee what was most important in the law, he would have received the proper, canned response about loving God and loving people. But those words had little to do with how he conducted his life.<\/p>\n

\tLike so many religious people, this Pharisee mostly concerned himself with boundary issues: the quantifiable things that separated him\u2014the \u201crighteous\u201d person he believed he was\u2014from them, the \u201cunrighteous\u201d people who did what he didn\u2019t. It was easy to quantify and measure boundary issues: making sure that he gave the penny to God from the dime he found on the street. Or\u2014to put it in a modern context\u2014that he said a prayer before he put any food in his mouth. It was good to tithe and to pray. But it was more important to focus on how you cared for the distressed and needy, how you treated your neighbors and coworkers and family\u2014let alone strangers like the clerks in the store or the beggar in the street.<\/p>\n

\tJesus wanted the Pharisee to look at the hard things of righteousness, not the easy boundary issues.<\/p>\n

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As Jesus was speaking, one of the Pharisees invited him home for a meal. So he went in and took his place at the table. His host was amazed to see that he sat down to eat without first performing … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_s2mail":"yes"},"categories":[18,17,16],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7103"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7103"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7103\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7105,"href":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7103\/revisions\/7105"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}