The Bible study that became the linchpin for my changing beliefs.

A few years ago we had left Wildwood Baptist ( leaving there may someday be the source of another blog entry) and joined Creekside Community Church (They would later change the name to Creekside Bible Fellowship, and after I left there they changed it again to Rowlett Bible Fellowship).  At the time they were a Southern Baptist Church that operated more as a Bible Church.  I was teaching 4-6th grade boys and was in their Care Group Leadership Group for present and future Care Group leaders. By all accounts, I should have been happy there.  My family was very happy there, but I was not.

 I felt a longing inside my soul to study the Pharisees in the Bible.  I needed to see them as 3 dimensional beings instead of the 2 dimensional ones that are taught in churches.  What I mean by that is that for most people, they are like the cowboys in the old western movies that wore black hats.  We see the name Pharisee and immediately think that they are the bad guys, so therefore everything they did was wrong.

I started by looking at their name.  Pharisee means separate and is taken from Lev. 15: 31

"Thus you shall keep the sons of Israel separated from their uncleanness, so that they will not die in their uncleanness by their defiling My tabernacle that is among them.".

This is what the Pharisees were all about.  They live in an era where the ruler was named Herod, who really was a Roman governor but was allowed to use the tittle King.  He did a lot of rebuilding in Israel, but he also sought to incorporate the Roman lifestyle into Israel.  The Roman lifestyle is the same lifestyle that Christians oppose here in the USA.   Some of the Israelites who were called Herodians looked to him as the coming Messiah.  There were other religious leaders of that day called Sadducees who denied the existence of angels, and the belief that man had a soul that would continue to live after he died, and denied the resurrection of the dead.  They only believed in the law  and that God would physically bless those who obeyed it and punished those who did not.  The Pharisees saw both groups as wrong and tried to live out the whole council of scriptures that they had up to that point which we call the Old Testament.

They carried this message across the world to bring people to God.  They tithed their crops as commanded in the law and gave to the temple.  They so disciplined themselves that they look like they obeyed every command from God.  There was one command that could not be done by self discipline and that is the command "Do not covet".  Paul would later write that the more he fought against this sin, the more that he committed it.  I believe that this sin is what Jesus was talking about when He said, "You clean the outside of the cup and the dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. Blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup,   so that the outside may become clean too!".

As I looked at this I began to think about the message that was taught by well meaningful leaders, myself included, I began to see that we are no different from the Pharisees of Jesus day.  We seek to spread the message about Jesus and then tell people that they need to follow certain rules to be accepted by Him.  Jesus taught that He would clean the inside of a person and as that person becomes clean on the inside then their actions would reflect that on the outside.  

From this lesson, I now focus on relationships and not on changing people.  When I try to change someone by putting commandments on them and browbeating them, I am really showing that I do not trust God to change them.