Recently I preached in a t-shirt full of holes and blue jeans full of stains and dirt. I walked out of the back and onto the stage with a message called Inside Out. I wanted to prove that the message would sound the same and have the same impact as if I was dressed in a shirt and tie. How many of us judge those whether in church or out of church due to the way they dress. How many feel that going to church in anything but your Sunday Best is tantamount to heresy. I want to challenge you to examine your long-held traditional beliefs about church and about Christianity. You see we have traditions that we live by that may be signs to the lost world that say “Stop don’t come in because you’re not welcome”. How many times do we judge a person because of their appearance and miss out of an opportunity to meet a person with a beautiful heart. We need to get off the bottle and stop looking at people and judging them because of external issues when all God cares about is the heart. Jesus said in Matthew 23:25 “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you cleanse the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of extortion and self-indulgence. 26 Blind Pharisee, first cleanse the inside of the cup and dish, that the outside of them may be clean also. 27 “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs which indeed appear beautiful outwardly, but inside are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness. 28 Even so you also outwardly appear righteous to men, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness. NKJV Jesus was pretty blunt in His speech condemning the Pharisees for giving great pretense but inwardly being a mess. The Pharisees were great for heaping up tons of regulations and traditions but inwardly were hypocrites.
Now how does this all apply to me. What traditions are regulations do you hold is such esteem yet you leave the matters of the heart undone. Are you like a balloon that has not been stretched. You know you go to blow it up and basically pass out trying to inflate it. God cannot fill you because you are so rigid and hard to stretch. You take that same balloon and stretch it out in every direction and you find the balloon easy to blow up. Are you allowing God to stretch you? Are you looking beyond the superficial aspects of what you wear or some other man-made tradition. I told a story of the choir singer and hippie. Two men join the church on this specific day and one was a well dressed choir member who spoke well and looked the part. The other was a man with a pony tail and many tattoos. He was rugged looking and had the scars of life to prove it. They both joined the church and it came time to welcome them into the fellowship, but only the well dressed man with the beautiful voice and pleasing image was truly welcomed that day, The hippie was sort of welcomed but only at arm’s length. As time went on and the hippie became one of th most beloved members of that church and a force in the Kingdom of God, while the choir member had an affair with a married woman in the church and caused incredible harm. Looks can be so deceiving. Unfortunately throughout many churches the same scenario plays out day after day and year after year. Most would not welcome Jesus because he was not dressed up enough for some churches. We have this fallacy that if we dress up and come to church on Sunday, then we are good to go, but nothing could be further from the truth.
God is looking at our hearts and He could not care less what you look like. He could not care less for our traditions. All God wants is for us to have His love in our hearts. He wants us to care for each other and to share the Gospel of Light to a fallen world. Most lost people don’t know the church protocols. They don’t know how to act in church and we have made it so uncomfortable for them to even make an attempt to come and sit through a service. It should not be that way and I believe God is changing our hearts slowly but surely here in America. So we know God looks at our hearts and not our clothes or bank accounts. We know that God is pleased when we fulfill the great commission and not the great dress code. We know that God wants us to be used to lead others to Him and not lead others away. God’s idea of a beautiful Christian is a man or woman who loves the Lord with all his heart and loves his neighbor as himself. I see no where in the Scriptures that says make sure your outside is pretty and prim so that you can please God. That is one of those traditions that somehow infiltrated the church. I do see Jesus telling us to examine our own hearts before we make judgments on others. If we clean out our inside then we will be better able to help work in the outside.
There is Hope in the Cross
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Thanks Pastor Chet! See you this weekend
By: andrew bilbrey on October 25, 2011
at 6:41 pm