Followership – Clean Hearts is the first in our new FALL sermon series. It’s an election year and leadership is on the minds of the American people, but in our case – in Christianity – we have Jesus, God, as our leader – he’s the perfect leader! That isn’t the problem. Instead of a series on leadership, we’re going to look at followership. Check out the video introducing the series HERE.
If you go back to Exodus and Leviticus you will find plenty of Laws and rules where God told the people what it meant to be clean before him. God commands in the Bible are great. The problem came when the Jewish leaders started to add rules, known as the oral traditions of the elders. In verse 5 of our text it’s just called the traditions of the elders. 200 years after Jesus walked on the earth these oral traditions were written down. They are known as the Mishnah. The problem is that these Jews thought God’s law is so holy and wonderful that we need MORE laws and rules, traditions, so that we won’t go near God’s law and heaven forbid break it.
For example, there is a stop sign in the road. Most people see the sign pull up to it maybe a little past it, slow down, and if there are no cars keep rolling. The traditions of the elders would say if you see the stop sign – stop well before it – come to a complete, sight jerk back and forth stop. Then creep past it lest you be guilty of not stopping. The problem was that the Jew were missing the point of God’s law in the first place. In the example of the stop sign they would stop and then go without bothering to check for oncoming traffic, because after all, they had stopped.
Want to hear more? Watch this week’s message taken from Mark 7, the first our sermon series – Followership – Clean Hearts.
Book(s): Mark
Series: Followership
Tag(s): Work Righteousness
Speaker(s): Fred Guldberg