Is This The Way You Love Me?...
Mark 7:5-13 (Amplified Bible)
5And the Pharisees and scribes kept asking [Jesus], Why do Your disciples not order their way of living according to the tradition handed down by the forefathers [to be observed], but eat with hands unwashed and ceremonially not purified? 6But He said to them, Excellently and truly [so that there will be no room for blame] did Isaiah prophesy of you, the pretenders and hypocrites, as it stands written: These people [constantly] honor Me with their lips, but their hearts hold off and are far distant from Me. 7In vain (fruitlessly and without profit) do they worship Me, ordering and teaching [to be obeyed] as doctrines the commandments and precepts of men. 8You disregard and give up and ask to depart from you the commandment of God and cling to the tradition of men [keeping it carefully and faithfully]. 9And He said to them, You have a fine way of rejecting [thus thwarting and nullifying and doing away with] the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition (your own human regulations)! 10For Moses said, Honor (revere with tenderness of feeling and deference) your father and your mother, and, He who curses or reviles or speaks evil of or abuses or treats improperly his father or mother, let him surely die. 11But [as for you] you say, A man is exempt if he tells [his] father or [his] mother, What you would otherwise have gained from me [everything I have that would have been of use to you] is Corban, that is, is a gift [already given as an offering to God], 12Then you no longer are permitting him to do anything for [his] father or mother [but are letting him off from helping them]. 13Thus you are nullifying and making void and of no effect [the authority of] the Word of God through your tradition, which you [in turn] hand on. And many things of this kind you are doing.
It is so ironic to me that people can call you friend and you can be in their corner and then when you need them, they are nowhere to be found. My daughter is going through this with some of the “girlfriends” her “besties” that have called her friend for years. When their lives were in shambles, torn down and they were hurting my daughter has talked with them, prayed for them, baked cakes to cheer them and sowed her time, talents, resources and efforts into them, but now that she needs them to be there, two of the ones that she has sowed the most into are nowhere to be found…Although to hear them tell it just a short while ago she was their best friend and they loved and appreciated her so much. The ironic thing about it is that my daughter recognizes their actions and her feelings have been hurt by their exposition but she would do it all again and would continue to love them unconditionally and stand by them, in spite of their actions and behavior towards her.
We are so like this with God. We give Him all this lip service about how much we love Him and we will do His will and how sold out to Him we are, but then when He needs us to show it we are nowhere to be found. We are happy to receive His blessings, support, assistance and abundance in our lives, but when He has need of us, we don’t show up for duty. Our mouth is all about it but our heart is nowhere near it. We make the rules for how we serve God and maintain our relationship with Him, with no thought for what His word says, or what He may need or desire from us or for us. Many of us are choosing to love God from afar, if we can even call it that. I believe God would really respect us more if we would just stop saying we love Him so much and just let our words line up with our actions; then be a hypocrite trying to save face. I know I feel that way about people that have treated me this way in my life and I am not God. Why do we think for one minute that God doesn’t know where our hearts and mind really are anyway? He knows the beginning from the end, the number of hairs on our heads and our thoughts, remember? But yet as my daughter, God loves us in spite of, He cares for us in spite of, and even He blesses us in spite of. But we are not presenting the truth of who we are and gaining the fullness and benefit of the relationship we could be having with God, instead we are making it up as we go along.
Ask yourself today, have I been there for God like He has been there for me? Have I made myself available to Him as much as He has made Himself available for me? Do my words of love and commitment line up with, my exhibition of love and service? If not we are being hypocrites, and in most cases we are not fooling anyone but ourselves. It is time to get the words of our mouths and the meditations of our heart to be acceptable in His sight and to be something that aligns us with the Father inside and out! Not just in words but in deeds, and matters of the heart as well!
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