This transcript was generated by whisper.ai.

Hi, this is Pastor Tom and I want to welcome you to Matthew week 17. That means
we're in chapter 15 this week. We're coming out of the parables of chapter 13
and the miracles of chapter 14.

In chapter 15, the focus of chapter 15 is on making sure everyone gets to hear
the good news. Throughout this chapter, in encounters with the Pharisees and
discussions with the disciples and the healing of a woman's daughter and the
feeding of the 4,000, there is this common theme that's going through all of it
and that is that God has invited everyone into a relationship with him. You see,
Jesus, when he first came, he preached, he taught the Jewish people, but
throughout his teaching, he puts in these clues for his disciples and for us
that in the end the teaching isn't going to be just for the Jewish people.

He began there, he needed to begin there with the people of God, but he began
there for a reason so that the message could go out to everyone. And as you walk
through this chapter with me, you're going to see that there are some barriers
that we have to be careful of. There have to be in our lives some things we're
careful of in making sure people hear the good news of Christ.

You see, when it comes to hearing the good news, there are barriers that I can
have in my life to listening to the good news of Christ. And some of those can
be spiritual barriers. I don't want to listen.

I don't want to be close to God. I want to be selfish and live life my own way.
I would never say it that way, but that's what's really going on.

So I get angry anytime somebody wants to tell me the good news. But sometimes
there are barriers not on the spiritual side, but more on the practical side.
They're man-made barriers.

They're things that you and I do as followers of Jesus that keep people from
having the fullest opportunity to hear the good news of Christ. And we're going
to look at some of those barriers this week, barriers like our traditions or our
at least supposed or our look of self-righteousness or barriers like our narrow
vision. Those are things that can keep people from hearing the good news like
Jesus wants us to be telling the good news.

Now in verses 1 to 9, as this chapter starts, Jesus talks very clearly about the
danger of tradition. Listen to what he had to say. Verse 1 says, "Then some
Pharisees and teachers of the law came to Jesus from Jerusalem and asked, 'Why
do your disciples break the tradition of our elders?

They don't wash their hands before they eat. ' Jesus replied, 'Why do you break
the command of God for the sake of your tradition? For God said, "Honor your
father and mother.

" And anyone who curses his father or mother must be put to death. But you say
that if a man says to his father or mother, "Whatever help you might otherwise
have received from me is a gift devoted to God," he is not to honor his father
with it. " Thus you nullify the word of God for the sake of your tradition.

You hypocrites. Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you, "These people
honor me with their lips. These people are far from me, but their hearts are far
from me.

They worship me in vain. Their teachings are but rules taught by men. " Jesus
talks here about a particular situation where instead of honoring their father
and mother, they put a rule in that if they devoted money to God, it wouldn't
have to be given to support your parents.

You could use it for the things you wanted to use it for. And Jesus is saying
you've built a spiritual loophole. Your tradition is keeping you from following
the word of God.

Now, if you look carefully through these verses, Jesus talks about the results
of tradition in these verses. He says, "Because of tradition you break the
command of God. " He says, "Because of tradition you nullify the word of God.

Because of tradition," he says, "your hearts are far from me. And because of
tradition," he says, "you worship in vain. " That tells me.

Look at that list that Jesus gave in these verses. That tells me how extremely
dangerous tradition can be. Now, when we talk about tradition, we're not talking
about God's word.

We're not talking about something that is old like God's word. What we're
talking about is what we've imposed on God's word or our ideas about God's word
or our things that we've added in that have nothing to do with God's word. They
might have sounded good in the beginning, but they don't fit with life today.

Now, the truth is when it comes to tradition, we don't start with tradition.
Things don't begin as a tradition. They become a tradition.

And most often it starts with a good heart. It starts as obedience. We want to
do something right before the Lord.

But then we start to trust in the action alone rather than in the heart behind
the action. And actually, Jesus says when that happens, what was at the
beginning, obedience, becomes disobedience. Things become tradition.

Let me share with you how this happens in three specific ways. Habits can become
tradition. The commands of God can become tradition.

And even history can become tradition. Habits can become tradition. What starts
as a good habit, like a way that I pray, like every Monday I pray for the
missionaries.

Every Tuesday I pray prayers of thanksgiving. That can be a good way to pray.
But that habit can become a tradition that says every Monday I have to pray for
the missionaries.

I'm being disobedient to God if I don't give thanksgiving on Tuesday. And in
fact, not only am I being disobedient to God, you're being disobedient to God if
you don't do it like I do it. So that habit has become a tradition.

And when it becomes a tradition, when habit becomes tradition, it becomes a
ritual. That's what a ritual is. Rituals, most of them, started as good habits.

Just good spiritual habits. But then the heart was taken out of them. Then the
worship was taken out of them.

And all that was left was the action. Supposing somehow that just by doing the
ritual without a heart towards God, sometimes without even being saved, that
somehow that's going to bring me closer to God. It is not.

It is not. Habits can become tradition. They become rituals.

The commands of God can become tradition. And that's what's called legalism.
When I look at the commands of God in the Old Testament, I begin to build my
ideas of how they should be followed through.

My ideas of how they should be lived out. We're going to talk about that quite a
bit this week. This idea of legalism.

Legalism is not being obedient to the commands of the Old Testament. Legalism is
me deciding how those commands need to be lived out and then imposing the way I
think they should be lived out on other people and saying to them, "You're not
being faithful to God. If you don't do it like I say, it should be done.

" So in the case of the Pharisees, they had lots of laws, as we've talked about
the last few weeks, about how to make sure you carried out the commands of the
Sabbath day. Just one command in the scripture, but they said it means you can't
do this. You can't walk this far.

You can't do this. You can't go outside the city limits. You can't do this.

You can't do that. And they began to say that their legalistic ideas about the
law were just as important as the law. That's where they got in trouble.

Commands become tradition, and when they do that, they become legalism. And then
history can become tradition. The history of how we've done it before, how we've
done it in the church, how we've done it in our family, how we've done it in our
lives, and that's culture.

You can have good culture, but you can also have a bad culture where you think
everybody has to do it this way. If you don't do it that way, you're not really
close to God. So for instance, in a church that has a prayer meeting on
Wednesday night, you can start to think if you don't come to prayer meeting on
Wednesday night, you're not really a strong Christian.

It doesn't matter if you have to work on Wednesday night. It doesn't matter if
your kids are getting home and have to do homework on Wednesday night. You can't
be a good Christian unless you do what the culture has always done.

History becomes tradition in our culture. Now, just to get practical about this,
someone on our research team asked when it comes to this idea of tradition and
the traditions of the past, they asked this specific question. What about people
who call anyone saying that sexual sin, like adultery or homosexuality, anybody
who's calling those things a sin must be a modern-day Pharisee because they're
just holding on to the traditions.

Well, what you have to sort through, and Jesus teaches us this here, is what's
said in God's word and what we've imposed upon God's word as a tradition, and he
says to the Pharisees, you are nullifying the command of God by your traditions.
So when Jesus talks about traditions here, he's not talking about the Bible.
Jesus upheld the Bible in everything that he said.

Jesus said, "I came not to abolish the law, but to fulfill it. " He's not saying
don't follow God's word from the past. He's saying don't follow the man-made
rules that go along with God's word from the past.

And when you and I allow that to begin to happen in our lives or others to
impose that on us in our lives, what happens is it becomes a barrier to people
coming to know Christ because intuitively they know that's not in God's word.
They can read God's word, they can read the Bible, and so they know we've set up
a list of rules that have nothing to do with what God has said or Jesus has
said. And so because of that, our traditions can keep people from hearing the
good news.

Jesus' goal was to change lives, not impress traditionalists, not impress the
legalists of the day. And if you do that, if you do the same, you're going to be
criticized by the traditionalists. If you say things like, "We don't have to
worship on Sunday," we could have a Tuesday morning worship service.

There will be some people who will come to that worship service who couldn't
come to any other worship service. Many people rejoice. There will be some
people who say, "No, if you don't worship on Sunday," or others who say it has
to be Saturday, "If you don't worship on this day that I say you have to
worship, then you can't truly be worshiping God.

" And they will criticize you. You just have to know that the church down
through the ages, down through the last 2,000 years, has often confused man-made
traditions with biblical orthodoxy, biblical belief. We have a hard time
sometimes letting go of our traditions.

Why? Because they involve change. Just because we've always worshiped at 11
o'clock on Sunday morning doesn't mean we always need to worship at 11 o'clock
on Sunday morning.

Just because we've always prayed in a prayer meeting this way doesn't mean we
always need to pray in a prayer meeting this way. But if you've done it all your
life, you're comfortable with it. It's hard to change.

Change is hard. But we have to remember that old phrase. There is no growth
without change, and there's no change without loss, and there's no loss without
pain.

So it's painful for us to let go of our traditions, our ways of doing things, in
order to open our heart to new ways of inviting people in. Now for you and I,
what does it mean to let go of tradition sometimes in our world today? Well, for
many churches it's meant using a different style of music.

You might love hymns, but you use a different style of music to be able to reach
out to people who, when they hear a hymn, they just think tradition. They miss
the message in the hymn. For others it means being more welcoming to people who
are coming the first time to church.

Others it means using words and the messages that help people to understand or
explaining the words from the Bible that help people who are coming the first
time to understand. For all of us it means accepting people who are not yet
believers. You don't accept people's sin, but you do accept people.

You don't expect people to act like Christians before they're Christians. You
accept them while you're sharing with them the good news. One of the keys to
being able to accept people, helping them to hear the good news, is letting go
of some of those traditions.

Let's take a moment to pray together. I don't know what traditions you might
need to let go of, or to pray would be let go of, but you do. So I'm just going
to ask you right now to say, "Jesus, if there's some traditions in my life, I
don't want to just focus on these Pharisees from the past.

If there's some of these things in my life that are keeping people around me
from hearing the good news, ways that I talk, ways that I express myself, things
that I think this is the way it has to be done, help me to see the difference
between my traditions and your word, between the way I want to do things and the
people that you care about. Lord, I need you to help me to see that. So I pray
that you would.

In Jesus' name, I pray this, amen. " Tomorrow, we're going to talk together
about, "How do you remove the barrier of self-righteousness?