Greeting Members and Friends
It time once again for our weekly Sunday School preview so thanks for joining me and welcome back. The Summer Quarter entitled “Justice in the New Testament” focuses on ways God demonstrates His justice and ways His people should follow His example. The July unit is entitled “Jesus Calls for Justice and Mercy,” has five lessons that explore Jesus’ teachings on God’s justice in the books of Matthew and Luke. Included is Jesus’ demand for leaders to practice justice as well as to understand the universality of God’s justice and mercy. This Sunday’s lesson is entitled “Jesus Criticizes Unjust Leaders” or “Hypocrites!”.
In this week’s lesson, Jesus teaches us the importance of being an example of what we teach others and of emphasizing one thing while ignoring others. Jesus teaches this lesson as he points out to His disciples the hypocrisy of the scribes and pharisees teaching and practice. There are people in the church who love and desire the honor and praise of men. Jesus said that there are those who do tell others what to do but do not do them themselves. Not only do they not practice what they teach others to do, but they do what they do to be seen like they are something they are not. This is the definition of a hypocrite which means to mask or conceal one’s true identity.
It addition to that, Jesus said that they emphasize the small matters while ignoring more important matters. He used the proverb to “strain gnats and swallow camels”. Both are unclean yet they are careful to avoid something small as a gnat but swallow something large like a camel. While tithing is important and shouldn’t be ignored, matters of justice and mercy and faith are of greater importance yet they did the first, but not the second. For us today, we must be careful to observe all things and not just the things we want to observe or are easy or convenient to observe. If God said to observe it, then nothing should be ignored or discounted as optional or unimportant. We are not allowed to pick and choose which commands to obey and follow.
Finally, Jesus said to start cleaning from the inside and it will make the outside clean. If we work from our heart to do what is right and please God, the outside of what people see of us will take care of itself. We must always live to please God and never to please men or to be seen of men. Well, that’s all for this week’s preview. Be sure to join us in Sunday School this week for a fuller discussion of this lesson and the general topic of Justice in the New Testament. So, until then
Grace and peace
Pastor Jordan
