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"Then John's disciples came and
asked him, 'How is it that we and the Pharisees fast, but your
disciples do not fast?'
One of my favorite movies is the classic
from 1957 - "The Bridge on the River Kwai." After witnessing how the
war has twisted his superior's ability to reason and has caused him to
unwittingly work for the enemy - and how the frightful toll in human
life only mounts all along, ultimately resulting in his superior's death
and the death of may others - the movie ends with the prison camp
doctor's candid and concise commentary on it all. "Madness. Madness!
Sheer madness!" There simply was no explanation for the unexplainable."Jesus answered, 'How can the guests of the bridegroom mourn while he is with them? The time will come when the bridegroom will be taken from them; then they will fast. "No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment, for the patch will pull away from the garment, making the tear worse. Neither do people pour new wine into old wineskins. If they do, the skins will burst, the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved." (Matthew 9:14-17 TNIV) John's ministry of paving the way for the promised Messiah had done nothing less than turn all Jerusalem, yea, all Judea, upside down. A multitude had heard John preach, confessed their sins and had submitted to baptism by him in the Jordan River (Matthew3:1-6). But not the keepers of the strictest of Jewish tradition, the Pharisees. No, they had remained aloof. In fact, they had been the object of some of the white hot heat of John's preaching (Matthew 3:7-12)! But some months had passed since this mass revival and not much of anything had apparently changed, outwardly speaking, at least. Consequently, some of John's disciples now hung with - the Pharisees! Say what? The brokers of revival now chummed with the keepers of tradition? They evidently persuaded themselves that they had more in common with those their leader had denounced than with John, the one who had given them revival. Madness! Now this must have been slightly maddening for Jesus to be approached this way by some of John's disciples. He would have expected the opposition of the scribes (Matthew 9:3) and Pharisees (Matthew 9:11), but now even some of those who had followed his cousin, John, were questioning his ways. Go figure! But Jesus remained unrattled and patiently reasoned with those who seemed to have lost all sense of reason. His logic was perfect, precise and personal. As an unshrunk patch sewn on an old garment must result in a tear and as surely as the sealing of unfermented wine in an already stretched skin must result in a spill, so also any attempt to harness revival to tradition must result in destruction. It is unreasonable; it is madness. Don't do it! But we see it tried all the time. The business world today is replete with examples of such. One example. A company decides to try and gain market share in a new sector, but in doing so it adopts policies and strategies that only alienate itself from its existing customer base. Then the only ones who are surprised when the company tanks is management. Madness! The spirit is certainly prevalent in churches, too. An example. So as to not risk upsetting the applecart, an overactive governor of tradition is linked to the engine of innovation. The result? The fire of innovation goes out and the governor of tradition no longer has any engine to throttle at all. The innovators grow cold, the tradition bound entrench even more deeply and the church dies a long, slow, agonizing, lingering death. Madness! You see it in people's lives. Do you need an example? Who hasn't watched someone try to break a bad habit, while all the while seeing that they consistently refused to change the environment that enabled and empowered the habit they wanted to extinguish. We see the insanity of it all while they remain oblivious to the idiocy of doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results. Madness! And most maddening of all, you see it in your own life, don't you? You are the example! For you, better than anyone else, know just how many times you've compromised him who alone can truly change your life simply because you wanted the security of knowing what to expect in your future. Even if the potential payoff for change was huge, time and again you opted for the comfort of the tried and true - even when you knew the tried and true wasn't working for you and that you weren't truly working for him. Madness, indeed! We should pray! Father in heaven, forgive us of our foolish ways. Patiently speak sense to us and give us ears to hear your reasoning. Do not give up on us and allow not to give up on ourselves. Preserve us and change us as you would, we pray, in Jesus' name. Amen. -David Smith Baytown, Texas |
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