A Rule Is The Tree, Not The Forest
As individuals and as churches, we must be truly moral by supporting God’s intentions and principles – not simply the literal letter of His rules. Rules can change according to circumstances while principles and intentions, which are of higher priority, tend to be stable. The New Testament states a rule that slaves are to obey their masters but that doesn’t mean God intended to support slavery. The pre-civil war Southern churches, though, largely supported the letter of the Bible and said it supported slavery. They used the Bible to support something they should have known was wrong. After all, kidnapping was wrong (1 Timothy 1:10). It was a form of stealing.
We often fail to appropriately prioritize. In how many ways do we favor the letter over the spirit? As parents, are we oriented towards principles or rules? There may be occasions where a child breaks a rule for a good reason. Are we really going to punish them in that situation? Even our giving to the church can be oriented toward the letter rather than toward the spirit. For instance, when we teach or believe that we will be under God’s curse unless our first check of the month is written to the local church for at least 10.0% of our income for the month, is this ‘letter’ kind of giving or ‘spirit’ kind of giving? What if giving 10% to the church means we cannot now help financially support a desperately needy parent?
The Pharisees were very rule-oriented. Jesus rebuked them for not keeping the main thing the main thing. They focused on minutiae instead of what was more important, what was a greater priority (Matthew 23:23). Instead, they focused on trivial details and were inflexible about their rules. Despite seeing a profound miracle of a man who had been born blind being healed by Jesus (John 9), they were so small-souled that they emphasized that Jesus had healed the man on the Sabbath in violation of their rule and, thus, discounted the miracle while condemning Jesus.
May the Lord give us wisdom on how to choose the ‘spirit’ in our various decisions.
Instead of being timid, learn to be appropriately bold.