October 20

Matthew 15; Mark 7
It’s interesting that Jesus would choose the command to honor your father and mother as an example of how the Pharisees placed their tradition and religion above the will of God.  It seems that they were using their religion as an excuse to keep from fulfilling this particular command.  Instead of honoring their parents, they were devoting that which would honor them to their traditional views of religion, actually proclaiming that it was the will of God!  Oh, how we fail as Christians when we use our faith as a tool to practice evil.  We fail to fulfill the weightier aspects of God’s will in order to satisfy our own desires.  Throughout my life I have felt a calling to minister to the aged, primarily because I have so often witnessed them being ignored by their own family.  They are lonely, often stuck away in a rest home and forgotten.  I once made a TV service call at an 85 year old man’s place.  When I arrived I discovered nothing wrong with his television.  He told me that it was his understanding that a service call gave him 45 minutes of service, so he wanted to fill those minutes with conversation.  He was willing to pay a total stranger for some company when his own son lived just twenty miles away!  He hadn’t seen or spoken to him in three months.  This sort of thing is repeated time and again.