Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Ditching to do lists

30 Days with Jesus 

Day 9 - Matthew 12 v 1 - 14 

For the Son of Man is lord of the Sabbath. v 8 

Dotted throughout Jesus life we read of his altercations with the Pharisees, the hyper religious leaders of the day. It would seem that his most challenging words were reserved for the Hypocrites that he saw among them. These leaders had taken God's law and added line upon line to it making it more and more difficult to obey and live up to. So that their spiritual journey was more about living up to rules than finding God.

This Sabbath thing hits a spot for me in that in my younger years Sunday, what has become the Christian Sabbath, seemed to have inherited lots of these same rules.
  • Shopping was forbidden 
  • Taking a bike ride was a no no but taking a walk was OK 
  • Playing golf or any sport was not allowed 
  • Watching TV was off limits (unless you visited your granny like I did) 
  • No hanging your washing on the line 
  • No washing you car • No working (My dad would never leave the house to go fishing to what we called "the back o Sunday" eg. 1 minute past 12 midnight on Sunday) 
  • But plenty of going to Church! 
 It was the Lords Day. So we had to live that Day different. If we did these things then we would please God. These early years set a view of God in my life that even now I am still trying to totally untangle. Even now I can still slip into an easy habit of obeying rules rather than the difficult path of knowing and discovering a deeper relationship with God.

I am discovering more and more each day that God is already pleased with me and what he wants more than anything is not my completed to do list but an opportunity to reveal more of his self to me changing my heart. As he does this we can tear up the to do list because it will have become as irrelevant to us as it already is to Him!

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

I still remember being shocked when you came back and said that you sometimes went for a hamburger and a milkshake on a Sunday night! Strangely enough, I can't remember ever hearing a sermon on the rules in those days, either for or against. They were just there. M

Post a Comment