Leviticus 15:1-16:28, Mark 7:1-23, Psalms 40:11-17, Proverbs 10:13-14
Today is the 24th day of February welcome to the Daily Audio Bible I am Brian it is great to be here with you today as we come in and gather around the Global Campfire and leave all of the cares of this life at the door. And we and come into this place knowing that that stuff, that stuff is still gonna be there and we can go right back and pick it up and get about our day. But this is a safe place for us for our souls We’ve come here for such simple reasons, to gather in community so that we know that were not alone during the trials of this faith journey and so that every day we can be refreshed, reoriented and instructed by the Scriptures which makes this a place to exhale. And so often what the Scriptures speak to us gives it gives us a different context or perspective about those things that we left at the door. We can go back to them and see them differently and address them differently maybe without all the anxiety, maybe without all of the nervousness. So, it is great to be here with you today around the Global Campfire to take the next step forward. We’re reading from the Christian Standard Bible this week. We’re working our way in the book of Leviticus are learning about clean and unclean. Leviticus chapter 15 verse 1 through 16 verse 28.
Commentary:
Okay. So, in the book of Leviticus we are learning about what is clean and what is unclean and we were able to do that today with a couple of our favorite things to talk about - semen and menstruation. And, so, every time we go through this in the Bible I’m like why can’t there be more of this in the Bible? This is awesome! But we have to talk about what’s in the Bible and we understand biologically about bio hazards. We can understand because of the other examples that we’ve had during this process that there are really practical reasons for clean and unclean in a camp of a million people that have no antibiotics, have no cough medicine, have no Band-Aids for that matter. But interestingly enough, when we flipped the page into the gospel of Mark what did we hear? So, the Pharisees and the scribes asked him why don’t your disciples live according to the tradition of the elders instead of eating bread with ceremonially unclean hands. And this becomes really really interesting because Jesus was certainly a popular rabbi. People were as we see in the Gospels flocking to him. He’s also being checked out by the religious authorities and they’re asking questions. And so many of their questions about are about why He is breaking the rules and who gave Him authority to do such things. So, let’s go back to Leviticus for second. We’ve been talking about these laws. We’ve been talking about how they have practical human value, especially in a camp like that but that most of these things are still things that we may do them completely differently, but they still can’t be left unclean. They’re going to cause really, really big problems. And we’ve noticed that God has brought His children out of slavery into the wilderness where they have nowhere to run and nowhere to go. They have to learn to depend completely on Him. And this law that is being given, these are the rules. This is what you abide by and this is what you do if you step out of line. This is how you become purified again. But it’s not only external behaviors. All of the external behaviors have correlations, are tied to spiritual truths and realities. What’s being baked in here is a way that this culture is constantly pointed to who they are and where they came from and who God is. Everything about their culture points them in this direction. And, so, everything that they do points them in this direction in one way or another. When we zoom forward a couple of thousand years and we land in the first century at the time of Jesus the rules still exists and people are trying to follow the rules. But over the couple of thousand of years that happened some shifts have taken place. They have begun to think that if they could obey the rules externally, simply just obey the rules they would become righteous. And although that may be true nobody could. But they had sort of lost the plot. The rules existed without the spirit of why they existed. And, so, in the gospel of Mark today Jesus quotes the prophet Isaiah. “This people honors me with their lips”, right? “They say the right things, but their heart is far from me.” And then He goes on to say, “it’s not what you put in your body it is what is coming out of your heart that the files you.” And, so, what begin to see is that things had gotten really backward. A clean heart from within, a profound reverence and awe and love for God from within compels a person to fall in alignment with the expectations of the one that we love. We can understand this in marriage. We make all kinds of mistakes in marriage, but we really go back to the marriage license and try to figure out what we did wrong or what he or she did wrong, many of the rules if we want to call the rules of marriage are bound by love from our heart for the one that we have given ourselves to. And again, we make all kinds of mistakes. There are all kinds of seasons when you’re trying to spend your life together with somebody. But it’s love that would compel us to be loyal. It’s love that would compel us to be faithful. It’s love that would compel us to be self-sacrificing. It’s love that would teach us about compromise. It’s love that binds the whole thing together. The relationship isn’t just about what we do with each other physically, right? Like that’s external. But these things come from what is within us. And, so, the law without the spirit of the law, the reason, the orientation is just page full of rules. Maybe good rules. But when things get twisted to be controlling and not to compel a person from within to love God then things get really backward. They were backward in Jesus time. We can still find that in the world today. What Jesus said to the religious leaders of His time, “abandoning the command of God, you hold on to human tradition. You have a fine way of invalidating God’s command in order to set up your tradition.” And, so, if we’re trying to grit our teeth and all obey God by obeying God’s rules as we understand them then we have to realize that we’re missing the energy or the spark that can allow us to obey at all. And that comes from within, the outpouring of our absolute love for God, our trust in God and our understanding that He is given us some guardrails because He wants us to live free. And when we step outside of those guardrails we are heading toward enslaving ourselves in some way. What God wants is for us to be free and true and who we are and in love with Him as He is in love with us. And so, that gives us some things to think about today as we continue to think about what is clean and what is unclean within us.
Prayer:
Holy Spirit come into that. We can feel a lift in our souls when we speak about freedom, that there is nothing between us and anyone else. Like the offenses that we’ve carried around our whole lives and kept in the basement that’s been cleaned out. We’ve begun to learn to forgive and we’ve begun to learn to release and we’ve become…we’ve begun to look to You for all things, our only hope this changes the way that we do everything. And, so, You have invited us into a dance rather than into a prison cell. Help us to realize that. Help us to realize that when we follow You, even if that means that we have to have the self-discipline to avoid something that will hurt us we are following the path to freedom, to living as we were created to be. So, come Holy Spirit into this. And we pray this in the name of Jesus. Amen.
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And that is it for today. I’m Brian I love you and I’ll be waiting for you here tomorrow.
Community Prayer and Praise:
On vacation this week and will post when I’m over the weekend.