Tag Archives: eat

Maddening Interruptions!

July 3, 2015Bible Studyapostles, boat, eat, quiet placeLuella Campbell

MADDENING INTERRUPTIONS!

The apostles gathered around Jesus and reported to Him all they had done and taught. Then, because so many people were coming and going that they did not even have a chance to eat, He said to them, ‘Come with my by yourselves to a quiet place and get some rest.’ So they went away by themselves in a boat to a solitary place (Mark 6: 30-32).

Time out for some “me” time for the disciples. Everybody needs a little “me” time in a very busy world. Even Jesus’ disciples needed time out to catch their breath. Jesus was also a human; He understood His men’s weariness and He called them apart to get away from the crowd and relax before the next round of preaching and healing campaigns began. When there is no time to refuel spiritually as well as physically, that’s often when things begin to go wrong. How important to balance busyness and recreation to keep one’s heart and body functional!

But many who saw them leaving recognised them and ran on foot from all the towns and got there ahead of them. (Mark 6: 33).

Well now, weren’t they a considerate bunch! The people thronged them and clamoured for attention from morning until night. This was something they had never experienced before – help when there was no one else to help them. There was no hospital, doctor or medical science to which to turn for their ailments and their disabilities. Then a man arrived on the scene who miraculously cured everything from blindness to the sniffles. Wouldn’t you run after Him, even if you gave not thought to His needs?

What would Jesus do in a situation like this? His disciples needed rest. They needed to have a leisurely meal without being mobbed. By the time they reached the other shore, the people were already there in their thousands. He could so easily have simply turned around and sailed off somewhere else and left them all waiting there in vain.

When Jesus landed and saw a large crowd, He had compassion on them because they were like sheep without a shepherd. So He began teaching them many things. (Mark 6: 34)

Imagine if Jesus had dodged the crowd and gone somewhere else with His disciples! He was the Father’s representative, remember? Whatever He said and did, He did in the name of the Father. Had He left them and sailed away, He would have given them a message, loud and clear, that the Father wasn’t to be bothered with them. Was that what He was telling them about their God? This could have been one of those irritating and annoying interruptions, but it wasn’t. He didn’t let it be. He took everything in His stride.

An interruption for Jesus was a God-opportunity to reach out to spiritually starving people with the love of God. There would be time enough for Him and His disciples to rest and eat later on, but this was a “now” moment for Jesus. The people needed Him right them. If He sent them away, there might never be another opportunity to tell some of them the truth.

One of the secrets of Jesus’ serenity and confidence was His living in the “now”. Unlike the people whom the soil in His story of the sower and the seed represented, He was not split between “now” and “then”, or “here” and “there”.

That’s how most of us live. Our “now” had less significance for us than what we are waiting for in the future, or regretting in the past. Why do we insist on living in our “tomorrows” or “yesterdays” when Jesus said that tomorrow had enough trouble of its own? He moved from one moment to the next in the calm confidence that His Father loved Him and was in control. Not even a raging storm on the lake could shake His trust in the Father to take care of His well-being. When He had not boat, He simply walked on the water! When it was time to go elsewhere, He went. When the people ran after Him, He taught them. When He needed time with the Father, He went off by Himself and sought solitude so that He could fellowship with God. He knew how to balance work and rest.

What a difference it would make to our lives if we would follow Jesus’ example? Sometimes I have to stand in a queue and wait my turn to be served. How do I handle the waiting? Impatience rises and I want to jump the queue, expect to be given preferential treatment because I am white, English-speaking, educated, affluent or whatever my condition may be, or walk away and come back some other time when there are not so many people.

The Holy Spirit whispers to me, “Live in the moment.” That’s really hard to do when I want to be somewhere else, do something else because the moment for me is irritating, frustrating or just downright intolerable. How hard it is for me to be like my Master, resting quietly in the Father’s love, knowing that He is here. If I allowed Him to orchestrate my life, I could eliminate the word “stress” from my vocabulary! And live longer too.

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Check out my Blog site – www.learningtobeason.wordpress.com

Indignation!

May 29, 2015Bible Study'sinners', eat, Pharisee, sick, tax collectorsLuella Campbell

INDIGNATION!

When Jesus was having dinner at Levi’s house, many tax collectors and sinners were eating with Him and His disciples, for there were many who followed Him. When the teachers of the law who were Pharisees saw Him eating with the sinners and tax collectors, they asked His disciples, ‘Why does He eat with tax collectors and sinners?’ On hearing this, Jesus said to them, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous but sinners.’ (Mark 2: 15-17).

Oh how wrong these guys were! Their perceptions of God were so warped! And of themselves! They conveniently categorised people into “sinners” and “righteous” and, of course, you know which group they fell into. From their point of view, who were the “righteous”? They believed that they were the model of righteousness because they “kept” the law. And their “God” was pleased with them and oh, so displeased with the sinners and tax collectors.

Then Jesus comes along and turns their religion on its head. First He throws demons out and touches lepers. Then He calls all the wrong people to be His disciples. Then He forgives sin as though He were God. Worse still, now He eats with tax collectors and sinners, and the Pharisees knew what that meant. You just don’t eat with people who come from the wrong side of town. To eat with them meant that they were buddies. They had no issues with each other. How could a man who claimed to be God be buddies with those people?

They didn’t have the guts to tackle Jesus, so they tackled His disciples instead. “Why does He eat with the likes of them? Doesn’t He know how it offends us?’ (implied), as though that were the most important consideration. What did it have to do with them anyway? He was free to eat with anyone He chose and was not answerable to them.

Jesus overheard the question and He was indignant. Before the disciples had a chance to put their foot in their mouths, He answered for Himself. He needed no one to defend Him. He didn’t even need to defend Himself but, to get their thinking straight, He put them in their place. “Who goes to the doctor? The sick or the well? I didn’t come to pat well people on the back. I came to bring healing to sick people. It’s obvious that you guys have got it all wrong. You think there’s nothing wrong with you. These people know they are sick, and I can do something for them, but not for you.”

What kind of a God was He representing? One who condoned the sinful lives of the ‘irreligious” people and condemned the ones who tried so hard to impress Him by their “good” lives? They just did not understand. What people could see about them was far more important than what went on inside. It was okay for them to be full of pride about their own achievements and full of contempt for those who didn’t measure up to their standard.

Jesus smartly put them in their place and, once again they had no answer. Round two: Jesus, one; Pharisees, nil. This was getting embarrassing. They should be learning fast that no one takes Jesus on and wins. If they knew what was good for them, they should have kept their mouths shut and their ears open but, unfortunately for them, the lesson was lost on them . . . again!

Just as much as it was embarrassing for the Pharisees, it was encouraging for the ones they despised. Jesus not only ate with the sinners, a sign that He was very comfortable with them and had nothing against them, but He actually defended what He did. It’s no wonder they flocked after Him. No one else championed them, especially not a prominent rabbi like He was.

Don’t let the lesson be lost on us either. Jesus does not condone sin, but He does not condemn the sinner. Every person, apart from what they do, has value to God because He created us in His image. Jesus came to rescue us from destroying ourselves by following our own way. He came to call sinners away from their old stubborn self-will to follow Him. He is the way to Father and He wants to take us to Him . . . whoever we are.

Available on www.amazon.com or www.kalahari.com in paperback, e-book or kindle format, or order directly from the publisher at www.partridgepublishing.com.

Check out my blogsite at www.learningtobeason.wordpress.com

Christ Is The Reality

January 7, 2015Bible Studydrink, eat, judge, reality. Christ, shadowLuella Campbell

CHRIST IS THE REALITY

Therefore, do not let anyone judge you by what you eat or drink, or with regard to a religious festival, a New Moon celebration or a Sabbath day. These are a shadow of things that were to come; the reality, however, is found in Christ (Col. 2: 16-17).

This is quite startling! Paul was a Jew and had been a fanatical stickler for the Law, and yet he made a radical statement which contradicted everything he had believed in and taught as a Pharisee and a rabbi.

Religious festivals, New Moon celebrations and Sabbaths were the backbone of Jewish life. They were the weekly, monthly and annual festivals which brought the family and the nation together regularly to cement their unity and to express their faith in God and their anticipation of their Messiah. Elaborate rituals were developed around each celebration which were full of symbolism and meaning for God’s people.

Yet Paul was saying that all of these celebrations and rituals were no longer necessary in their family and national lives? Was he not treading on thin ice by contradicting God’s commands? What right had he to tell God’s people that all of these were fulfilled and done away with in Christ?

As a disciple of Jesus, and an apostle appointed by God, Paul had authority to interpret and ‘bind’ Jesus’s yoke on His followers. The ritualistic celebration of special days was part of the old yoke of Judaism which Jesus fulfilled and abolished by His life, death and resurrection. As his understanding grew, Paul clearly recognised that these special days were prophetic of Messiah. To continue celebrating them was to say, in effect, that they were still anticipating the coming of their Messiah when He had already come.

In what way did Jesus fulfil these prophetic actions? This demands a much more detailed study of the meaning of the Sabbath and the annual festivals which God commanded them to celebrate in Leviticus 23 than we can do here.

However, reading Hebrews 3 and 4 will clear up the issue of the Sabbath, for a start. The command to rest from their weekly labour was prophetic of their perpetual rest of faith in Jesus which sets them and us free from the ‘labour’ of trying to be righteous by keeping God’s laws.

The seven annual feasts were prophetic of the major events of Jesus’s first coming and symbolise what will happen when He returns. He fulfilled the first four feasts in order: He was God’s Passover lamb, sacrificed to deliver us from bondage to sin; He fulfilled the Feast of Unleavened Bread by removing our sin from us just as the Israelites were commanded to remove all leaven from their homes; He fulfilled the Feast of Firstfruits by becoming the firstfruits of the resurrection; He fulfilled the Feast of Pentecost by sending the Holy Spirit to begin the ingathering of the harvest – the church.

There are three feasts yet to be fulfilled when Jesus comes again; the Feast of Trumpets – the announcement of His return; the Day of Atonement when sin will be judged and removed forever and Feast of Tabernacles when God will take up residence with His people, not in booths in the wilderness but in an eternal new heaven and new earth where all the effects of Adam’s disobedience will be removed forever.

That brings me to another important topic. If Jesus has fulfilled days, months and annual celebrations, and did away with food taboos, why do some streams in the church still make them obligatory and legalistically hold to them, especially the Sabbath and food taboos? Is this not a denial of what Jesus accomplished on the cross?

Paul said categorically, ‘Do not let anyone judge you . . .’ We cannot help it if people judge us but what we can help is being affected by their judgment. If someone judges us, it comes from their scruples, not ours.

Jesus gave us two sacraments to observe, not as prophetic of what He would do, but as a remembrance of what He has done; the Lord’s Supper is a remembrance of His sacrifice to seal the New Covenant; baptism is a celebration of His death, burial and resurrection which He accomplished for us to set us free from our slavery to sin and death.

Even festivals like Christmas and Easter, which have become nothing more than an opportunity for merchants to peddle their wares – their success in the commercial world is reckoned by their profits – and people to overindulge, are not rooted in the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ but in paganism which has been ‘Christianised’ for convenience.

There is no such thing as ‘Put Christ back into Christmas’ which is the hopeless cry of many churches, because Jesus Christ was never in Christmas. How dare we involve Him in the frenzy, overspending, overindulgence, pandering to the demands of children and hypocrisy of the ‘silly season’? There is very little about Christmas or Easter that resembles the Spirit of Jesus. He has been tagged on to paganism to make it acceptable and to hold us in bondage to tradition, and believers the world over have been sucked into this tradition and are enraged by anyone who dares to challenge it.

Come on, church! Let’s get back to the Word of God and to the truth! When you see what goes on at Christmas in the name of Jesus, ask yourself honestly, ‘Is this why Jesus came?’ Does He really identify with Christmas? Even the name of the season, ‘Christmas’ is an insult to Him and trivialises what He did for us. Christ-mass implies the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. How can we wish people a merry sacrifice of Jesus?

If we are true worshippers of the Lord Jesus Christ, let us put Him and His life and death back into perspective. Simplify your life. Live in the wonder of His salvation which we remember in two simple observances, and in the daily reality of the rest He made possible for us by removing our need to satisfy God’s holy requirements.

He is, after all, everything we need!

Clay Feet!

October 14, 2014Bible Studyeat, Gentiles, hypocrisy, Peter, rebukedLuella Campbell

CLAY FEET

“When Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face because he stood condemned, For before certain men came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But when they arrived, he began to draw back and separate himself from the Gentiles because he was afraid of those who belonged to the circumcision group. The other Jews joined him in his hypocrisy, so that by their hypocrisy even Barnabas was led astray.

“When I saw that they were not acting in line with the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas in front of them all, ‘You are a Jew, yet you live like a Gentile and not like a Jew. How is it, then, that you force Gentiles to follow Jewish customs?'” Galatians 2:11-14.

Even Peter! How strong are the traditions that enslave a person’s conscience!

Peter was far from Jerusalem. There were no scrupulously traditional Jewish believers in the vicinity of Antioch, so he freely mixed with Gentiles according to the dream which had led him to enter Cornelius’ the centurion’s house in Caesarea and eat with him (Acts 10). But when a group of Jewish believers came from James, the leader of the church in Jerusalem, he slipped back into his old Jewish attitude of exclusivism.

For Peter it was not a matter of conscience or conviction. He had long dealt with the right or wrong of eating with Gentiles – which was an expression of reconciliation; the Holy Spirit had seen to that. Here it was a matter of the fear of man and Paul was quick to rebuke him, even publicly, for going back on his conviction in order to appear loyal to his Jewish heritage. He wasn’t even honouring the word of God but rather Jewish customs which actually contradicted God’s intention.

In his defines of the gospel of grace he preached, Paul referred to this incident to convince his Galatian readers that he had actually stood up to the great Peter whom he had just described as one of the “esteemed” leaders of the church in Jerusalem.

By Peter’s behaviour he had inadvertently dishonoured the gospel of Christ which was the good news of salvation through Him alone. Peter was insinuating that Jesus had not really destroyed the barrier between Jew and Gentile through His death; that Jews were still superior to Gentiles, and showed it by their refusal to eat with fellow Gentile believers. In the end he was saying that he had to uphold the customs of his forefathers which took precedence over the truth of the gospel.

For Paul this was unthinkable. He had given up too much for the sake of the gospel and suffered too much at the hands of his fellow Jews because of their fanatical loyalty to useless traditions to sanction Peter’s hypocrisy by keeping quiet. To say nothing meant that he was allowing Peter to lead others, even his companion Barnabas, astray. If it meant publicly exposing Peter’s cock-eyed thinking, so be it.

Paul does not record Peter’s response. Did he defend himself? Did he make excuses? Did he graciously acknowledge his error? We do not know. All we know is that Paul clearly understood the message of the cross and he defended it fearlessly even to standing up to Peter himself. It was not his intention to belittle Peter or to show himself better than Peter. It was always and only his motive to hold Jesus up as an all-sufficient Saviour for both Jew and Gentile.

Paul had long since come to understand that, at the cross, everyone stands on level ground. There is no longer a difference between Jew and Gentile. All the differences that existed were artificial and man-made. The Jews, as God’s covenant people were chosen, not to make them exclusive, but to set them apart for a divine purpose – to show the world that their God was the only and true God by the way they lived.

They failed dismally, anyway, and all they did was to show how impossible it was to be like Him by following rules and rituals, most of which they made up, without having their hearts changed. It took the Son of God to show them how to love like the Father, and then to die in the place of sinners to reconcile them to the Father. Where, in all that, were they better than anyone else? They stood on level ground with every other human being in both their sin and their eligibility to receive God’s grace through the death of His Son.

Thanks to Paul’s understanding and clear presentation of the truth, Peter and his companions received correction and we have this letter which presents Jesus to us as the all-sufficient Saviour of sinners plus nothing.

How true it is that anyone, including Peter, can have “clay feet”!

Acknowledgement

Guard Your Own Heart

September 6, 2014Bible Studycontempt, eat, faith, judge, weakLuella Campbell

GUARD YOUR OWN HEART

“Accept one another whose faith is weak without quarrelling over disputable matters. One person’s faith allows him to eat anything but another, whose faith is weak, eats only vegetables. The one who eats everything must not treat with contempt the one who does not, and the one who does not eat everything must not judge the one who does, for God has accepted him. Who are you to judge another man’s servant? To their own master servants stand or fall. And they will stand, for the Lord is able to make them stand.” Romans 14:1-4.

Is this really a problem today? Who cares what another believer eats or wears or even drives or lives in?

In the Apostle Paul’s day, it was an issue for both Jew and Gentile believers – Jews because their conscience was shaped by the dietary laws of their religion and culture, and Gentiles because they bought their meat from the market after it had been offered to idols.

There were two matters of conscience that had to be dealt with: What effect did the food they ate have on their spirits, and did meat offered to idols in a pagan temple have any power to influence them? But, for Paul there was another and more subtle problem – that of judging.

From God’s perspective, judging was more serious than what a person ate. Remember what Jesus said about food? Since it goes into the stomach and passes out of the body, it does not have any power over a person’s heart. It is from the heart, not from what one eats, that wickedness in all its forms originates, and what one eats cannot change the heart, for good or evil. On the other hand, judging another person is a subtle form of idolatry because the one who judges sets himself above the other person.

What about eating meat that had been offered to idols? Does that meat not have the power to influence the eater for evil? Was there not some sort of demonic transfer that took place when the meat was offered to the idol? It all depends on what a person believes.

Never forget that the devil is a liar and that the only language he speaks is the language of lies. His most powerful weapon is deception. He holds people captive to fear only if they believe that he still has power over them. Jesus exposed and utterly defeated him at the cross but he tries to hold people captive by suggesting that he has power over them.

It is up to every believer to decide who his master is? How tragic that many Christians still fear the devil although they say that they trust in Jesus. In the everyday, practical issues of life, we have to ask the question, “Did the cross work?” According to Jesus, when He cried out, “It is finished!” on the cross, He completed everything necessary to reverse what Adam did in the Garden of Eden. He made a public spectacle of the devil, unmasked and defeated him and took away his power to deceive and destroy.

“When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave all our sins, having cancelled the charge of our legal indebtedness, which stood against us and condemned us; He has taken it away, nailing it to the cross. And having disarmed the powers and authorities, He made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.” Colossians 2:13-15.

What kind of food we eat and where we got it from should never be an issue because it has no power to influence our hearts except the power we give it when we act out of fear and not faith. However, when we judge someone who has no problem with what he eats because our faith is weak, we usurp the role of master and set ourselves up as the standard of judgment.

“Let it go,” said Paul. “He has a Master who will take care of him. It’s not your problem.” When we try to control someone else, we subtly expose our own insecurity. When we judge another, we expose our own guilt. Our mouths are the mirror of our hearts. By focussing on someone else’s supposed weakness or guilt, we deflect attention from ourselves in case we are exposed.

What is the solution? Rest in Jesus and take care of your own conscience. Trust God. You are not responsible for your brother’s conscience.