It's my Lord in a box!

My small group has been reading through Matthew this summer and we got to chapter 23 this week. Chapter 23 is the chapter where Jesus is really laying into the religious leaders for not living up to their calling. They're all very surface level and religious. Sometimes I forget about context when I read the Bible. It's easy to read a chapter like this and imagine Jesus sitting with his apostles telling them these things about the religious leaders, but the religious people were right there in the crowd that Jesus was talking to. He wasn't afraid of a little confrontation. But apparently the religious leaders were, since they killed Jesus because He challenged them to live up to what God called them to be.

But that's not the point of this post. In verse 5 it says, "They made their phylacteries wide and the tassels on their garments long." After I read that I went into uber study mode to find out what phylacteries are. Essentially, the Pharisees took Exodus 13:9 literally and decided to make leather boxes containing scripture and wear them around their foreheads or arms. They wore these things at prayer times originally as a reminder of what God had done for them, but it eventually became social statements about how "holy" they were. They were pretty much the WWJD bracelets of their day. They started out for honest enough purposes but eventually they became a social statement.

The verse in Exodus could easily be interpreted that God wants us to have His Word in all of our thoughts and actions, but I think I know why they were more willing to have elaborate head decorations. It's easy to put a box on your head or to wear a bracelet or t-shirt telling people about Jesus. In the same way, it's easy to go downtown and to wear a sandwich board sign and yell at people that they're going to hell. What's challenging is having a real change in your heart. It's hard to reach out to people that you're uncomfortable around and have an actual relationship with them to show them Christ's love. I know that deep down, if there were just a t-shirt I could wear to fulfill the Great Commission, I'd jump at that. I'd rather take the easy way out, but thankfully, I have the Holy Spirit to convict me and to challenge me to not just put on my Christian clothes and live like Hell.

God has been impressing upon me lately the difference that He can make through the life of one person. This is why I feel that this is so important, because if God can do so much with one person, He can do even more through multiple people. The church is growing so much recently, and it's progressing with a minority of people who claim to know Christ. There are so few people who are taking ownership of their faith, and regardless of this, God is doing great things. If people would just take off their Christian t-shirts and start to have a Christ-like heart, the church could be doing exactly what God has called for it to do.