August 20 -- Blind -- Lomé

Good Morning !  The birds are singing and excited.  It is Saturday morning in Togo.  This morning I have accumulated all that I need to make coffee for myself.  Thus, I am sipping the second cup and thinking of you.  When all my plans for travel around West Africa were suddenly wiped out by Holy Spirit, I knew that we would only be in Togo and Benin.  So, I "thought" I had communicated to the two brothers in those two nations the idea that I would spend about half the time in each country.  Alas, I failed to communicate as clearly as I should have.  So, the 2 brothers working separately developed overlapping plans.  But God ...

God is using my blunder to force the two brothers to communicate with each other and forging a deeper bond of relationship between them.  Even our mistakes can become blessings if we let Father work.

As my Beloved Brother and good friend Christophe and I were discussing some of the plans for our first few days, we encountered a recurring difficulty.  We repeatedly found Christophe saying, "No, we cannot change that the brothers there have made a plan." I found myself pondering this morning whether Jesus ran into this same difficulty.

I realized after a while that Jesus was very comfortable operating without an advance plan.  Remember when He was walking into Jericho ?  (See Scriptures below.). He was so totally without a plan that when Holy Spirit pointed out a man in a tree, Jesus turned to him and made an appointment to eat dinner with him that day.  Jesus walked and lived completely free of other people's plans, paradigms, traditions, customs, and culture.  It was not that He was unloving and thoughtless about His impact on their lives.  He was simply never bound by their ideas of how things are supposed to be done.

From Jesus's point of view, the cultural traditions of His day and time were barriers that kept men from following God.  This was especially and pointedly true about the religious cultural traditions.  He did not spend His time trying to flaunt these traditions.  He did not spend much effort to fight these traditions except when He saw people being hurt by them.  But, never did He allow the traditions to ensnare or imprison Him.  He simply walked right through and continued to do what Father set before Him to do.

Some of the religious leaders of Jesus's day wanted to follow Him.  Sadly, the social pressure of their peers kept them bound by their cultural traditions and Jesus walked on leaving them behind.  More people today are kept from following Jesus by religious traditions than by any other barrier.  Perhaps most tragic, because religion becomes for men a counterfeit for real relationship with Jesus, religion is the MOST difficult barrier to overcome.  How can a man consent to be set free from the thing he has been taught all his life is what makes God accept him ?  Jesus spoke of disasterous consequences for the ones who lead God's little children astray.  

But Jesus also spoke the redemptive truth to the religious leaders.  If you were blind I could heal you.  And He balanced that with the warning: Because you say you can see, your sin remains with you (See John 9).  Moreover, He pointed out that those of us who choose to follow men blinded by religious traditions are doomed to fall into the ditch with them.

Please, never let the way things have been done in the past keep you from following Jesus in the present.  Please, stop following religious ideas and doctrines and turn to follow your own personal relationship with Jesus.  It was for freedom that Christ has set us free.  Do not abuse it.  But, NEVER give it up.  Your freedom belongs to you.

His, thus Yours,

  Stuart

Matthew 15:  1 - 14  (NASB). 

Then some Pharisees and scribes came to Jesus from Jerusalem and said, “Why do Your disciples break the tradition of the elders? For they do not wash their hands when they eat bread.” And He answered and said to them, “Why do you yourselves transgress the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition? For God said, ‘Honor your father and mother,’ and, ‘HE who speaks evil of father or mother is to be put to death.’ But you say, ‘Whoever says to his father or mother, “Whatever I have that would help you has been given to God,” he is not to honor his father or his mother.’ And by this you invalidated the word of God for the sake of your tradition. You hypocrites, rightly did Isaiah prophesy of you:

‘This people honors ME with their lips,

But their heart is far away from ME.

‘But in vain do they worship ME,

Teaching as doctrines the precepts of men.’”

After Jesus called the crowd to Him, He said to them, “Hear and understand. It is not what enters into the mouth that defiles the man, but what proceeds out of the mouth, this defiles the man.”

Then the disciples came and said to Him, “Do You know that the Pharisees were offended when they heard this statement?” But He answered and said, “Every plant which My heavenly Father did not plant shall be uprooted. Let them alone; they are blind guides of the blind. And if a blind man guides a blind man, both will fall into a pit.”

Luke  19:  1 - 10  (NASB). 

He entered Jericho and was passing through. And there was a man called by the name of Zaccheus; he was a chief tax collector and he was rich. Zaccheus was trying to see who Jesus was, and was unable because of the crowd, for he was small in stature. So he ran on ahead and climbed up into a sycamore tree in order to see Him, for He was about to pass through that way. When Jesus came to the place, He looked up and said to him, “Zaccheus, hurry and come down, for today I must stay at your house.” And he hurried and came down and received Him gladly. When they saw it, they all began to grumble, saying, “He has gone to be the guest of a man who is a sinner.” Zaccheus stopped and said to the Lord, “Behold, Lord, half of my possessions I will give to the poor, and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will give back four times as much.” And Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, because he, too, is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost.”