{"id":6489,"date":"2015-04-04T00:05:39","date_gmt":"2015-04-04T07:05:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/?p=6489"},"modified":"2015-04-04T00:01:12","modified_gmt":"2015-04-04T07:01:12","slug":"the-establishment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/2015\/04\/04\/the-establishment\/","title":{"rendered":"The Establishment"},"content":{"rendered":"

He then called the crowd together and said, \u201cListen, and take this to heart. It\u2019s not what you swallow that pollutes your life, but what you vomit up.\u201d<\/p>\n

\tLater his disciples came and told him, \u201cDid you know how upset the Pharisees were when they heard what you said?\u201d<\/p>\n

\tJesus shrugged it off. \u201cEvery tree that wasn\u2019t planted by my Father in heaven will be pulled up by its roots. Forget them. They are blind men leading blind men. When a blind man leads a blind man, they both end up in the ditch.\u201d<\/p>\n

\tPeter said, \u201cI don\u2019t get it. Put it in plain language.\u201d<\/p>\n

\tJesus replied, \u201cYou, too? Are you being willfully stupid? Don\u2019t you know that anything that is swallowed works its way through the intestines and is finally defecated? But what comes out of the mouth gets its start in the heart. It\u2019s from the heart that we vomit up evil arguments, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, lies, and cussing. That\u2019s what pollutes. Eating or not eating certain foods, washing or not washing your hands\u2014that\u2019s neither here nor there.\u201d (Matthew 15:10\u201320)<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\tJesus was not concerned with what most of the Pharisees thought of him because they were not from God. Most of the Pharisees were largely concerned with what was on the outside of people. Jesus\u2019 concern was with what was inside of people.<\/p>\n

\tWhile it is certainly the case that external circumstances\u2014what we\u2019re taught, what we read, what we watch, can affect our lives for good or ill, Jesus makes clear that it really isn\u2019t our environment, our circumstances, the things we\u2019ve been exposed to that make us who and what we are. Rather, what we are is something that comes from inside of us: our human nature. The choices we might make to murder, to steal, to be evil in whatever way we might be evil, are our choices alone that grow from what\u2019s in our hearts and minds. We cannot blame our circumstances or argue that we couldn\u2019t help it, or that we were made that way by what happened to us. We have no one to blame but ourselves.<\/p>\n

\tWe may have had it rough in our lives. We may have had to struggle more than our peers. We may have lacked the advantages that our friends or neighbors had. But we can\u2019t blame what we did with our lives on anyone else. If we want to, we can change our lives for the better thanks to Jesus. He can do great things with us, no matter what our circumstances. <\/p>\n

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He then called the crowd together and said, \u201cListen, and take this to heart. It\u2019s not what you swallow that pollutes your life, but what you vomit up.\u201d Later his disciples came and told him, \u201cDid you know how upset … 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":"https:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6489"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6489"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6489\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6492,"href":"https:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6489\/revisions\/6492"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6489"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6489"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6489"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}