Last evening we met here and had an
open house for the Pioneer Girls, the young
girls, under the direction of Claire Moore and
those who labor with her.
And I was greatly cheered to see what
God is doing in the neighborhood.
We've lost so many who've moved to all
parts of the country, but there are others,
and they're coming, and I was glad to
meet some of them last night.
I want you to be friendly.
There have been two schools of thought about
us here.
Some have thought that we were about the
friendliest people imaginable.
I've had people say, I never was treated
so cordially as I was in your church.
And then one or two have said nobody
spoke to me at all.
You know what I've concluded?
I've concluded that this is a friendly church,
but that you have an awful time being
friendly with the back of a man's neck,
you know, when he's on his way out.
And I found a little thing here, an
old Scottish jingle, an ode for visitors, it
says.
So I want to read it here.
My brave Scots is not what it might
be.
You know, it has a Midwest accent.
But I'd like to read to you this
little thing.
I can just see this hanging on a
card, written in old-fashioned script, in many
a Scottish kirk.
Kirk, as you know, means church, and by
the way, means stay a while.
And with that explanation, let me read this
little poem to you.
This is an ode for visitors.
So any of you visiting, listen to this.
If after Kirk ye bide away, there some
may like to speak to ye.
If after Kirk ye arise and flee, we'll
all seem cold and stiff to ye.
The one that's in the seat with ye
is stranger here than you may be.
All here have got their fears and cares.
Add ye your soul to others' prayers, and
be our angel unawares.
Maybe we need you.
I think that's a nice little thing, don't
you?
So don't rise and flee after Kirk.
Because if you do, we'll all seem cold
and stiff to ye.
But if you'll stay around, maybe you can
be our angel unawares.
Just keep that in mind.
Now, I want to read the rest of
chapter 1 of Titus, beginning with verse 14.
Well, better read 13, too, because I don't
want to break into a semicolon.
Paul says this witness is true.
Wherefore, rebuke them that they may be sound
in the faith, not giving heed to Jewish
fables and commandments of men that turn from
the truth.
Because unto the pure all things are pure.
But unto them that are defiled and unbelieving
is nothing pure.
But even their mind and conscience is defiled.
They profess that they know God.
But in works they deny him, being abominable
and disobedient, and unto every good work reprobate.
Now, I am sorry that this isn't going
to be what they call an inspirational sermon.
In preaching the Bible, if you stay close
to the Bible, it's like staying close to
the score of a musical composition.
You can't take too many liberties, or else
you're not playing Bach, you're playing somebody else.
And if I'm giving expository sermons on Paul,
and I take too many liberties with Paul,
then I'm preaching Tozer, not Paul, which isn't
a good thing.
Well, I have to stay by Paul.
I don't apologize for Paul.
He doesn't need my defense.
But it so happens that this Crete crowd
was a bit rambunctious, and they needed some
pretty severe apostolic correction, and they got it.
But this is instructive if it's not inspiring,
and you'll find, after all, that inspiration comes
out of information.
Now, he says in verse 10 above, he
said there were vain talkers and deceivers, and
I talked about those last week.
And then he added this melancholy little phrase,
especially they of the circumcision, poor Jews.
I am not anti-Semitic.
I love the Jews.
I love them for Christ's sake.
The blood that flowed on Calvary from its
human side and standpoint was Jewish blood.
Jesus our Lord was the son of a
Jewish maiden, as well as of God the
Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth.
And my love for the Jews cannot be
challenged.
But the poor sons of Sarah and Abraham
never seemed to keep out of trouble, especially
they of the circumcision, said Paul.
Too bad.
This island of Crete had a very large
Jewish population, as I've explained, and, of course,
they travel a lot.
Jews get around a lot.
And some of them got converted to Christ
while they were elsewhere around over the country,
around over the world, and some of them
were converted there in Crete, no doubt.
And they had become Christians at least by
profession.
But they had made the mistake of bringing
their Judaism over into the church with them,
and they were still strongly influenced by Judaism.
That was so strong in Palestine, of course
it would be strong there, that they had
to have a conference, a council like we
call them now, and decide on whether they
did or did not have to go through
the Jewish ritual before they could be a
Christian, and they decided they did not.
The fathers met, James, Peter, and the rest
of them, and they decided that for the
sake of not offending the Jews, they were
to do four things.
For God's sake and Christ's sake, they were
not to commit fornication, but also they weren't
to eat things offered to idols.
It was a concession to the standards of
the Jewish people, so they would not offend
them.
But they said, you do not have to
keep the law of Moses.
By faith our hearts are purified, even as
the rest.
But these Jews, these circumcision, they followed the
church around everywhere, causing trouble.
And Paul said they were vain teachers, and
they were teachers, these were Jewish Christians.
Now I'll have to explain how this was,
and then we'll be informed, and we hope
that we'll get some inspiration out of information.
These Jewish Christians taught this.
They said there was a written law, and
that law consisted of two things.
It consisted of the ten words written on
stone by the finger of God, and it
consisted then of the additional which was inspired
by God through Moses.
It was the Pentateuch, the five books, Genesis,
Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, we say now.
But they said also that there was another
law called the law of the lip, and
that was an oral law.
And they believed in that oral law just
as certainly as they believed in the Ten
Commandments.
I don't know if they had been put
up to take their choice, which they would
have chosen, but at any rate they taught
the oral law, the traditions, just as vigorously
as they taught the law of Moses.
But they said this oral law of the
lip was passed on by memory, and it
was passed on by memory.
We know that it was tradition.
That's the difference between tradition and written scripture
or written beliefs.
They pass it on by tradition.
In some countries, I'm told, in certain Arabic
countries and Oriental countries, a great deal of
their literature is passed down by memory.
Education consists of memorizing the great classics, and
China did at least for many years until
the modernization of China.
And if they destroyed all their books overnight,
all the books in China had been destroyed
at certain times.
They could have all been reproduced out of
the memory of the scholars.
And they say the same is true in
Arabia, that the book of the Mohammedan Koran
could have been reproduced out of the memories
of the people.
And so they had here, these Jews, an
oral law many, many times larger than the
Old Testament itself.
And it was passed on by memory, by
tradition, and each family gave it to their
children.
They grew up and gave it to their
children, along with the written law, which we
believe to be the inspired word of God.
Now this grew in volume through the years.
Great rabbis added to it, and it became
part of the canonical law.
And it regulated every act, and every day,
and every relation, almost every thought where God
had left men free to do as they
pleased within the framework of righteousness and truth.
They insisted on following that man and putting
the yoke on every minute of his time.
And these regulations took the character of a
law, and they even superseded the law of
God in some people's minds.
Now those were the vain talkers of which
Paul writes, the Jewish fables and commandments of
men that turned from the truth.
And this later on was reduced to writing,
this oral law was reduced to writing about
the time of Christ or a little bit
later.
And it's known now as the Talmud.
Oh, for 30 years I've been a little
bit acquainted.
I've had nodding acquaintance with the Jewish Talmud.
I've bought their books and read them.
And I know what they have.
There's much good in it, incidentally.
There's much good in the Jewish Talmud, much
good.
But they have a strange way of interpreting
Scripture.
They make jots and tittles mean things.
They take a certain sentence, which is obviously
means just what it means, and they add
a certain strange interpretation to that that makes
it mean something else.
And then that became part of the tradition
and part of the law.
And these brethren were coming to the Christians
and saying to them, now it's nice, I'm
a Christian too, I have a Jewish extraction,
but you must understand that you can't just
come roaring in out of paganism and become
a Christian, believe in Jesus Christ and be
saved just like that.
You have to come by way of the
law of the lip, the Jewish tradition, because
salvation is of the Jews.
Jesus himself said it was.
And you've got to listen to us.
So they began to lay these Talmudic rabbinical
laws upon the Jews.
About the sixth century, it was collected and
written down, so we now have it as
the Talmud.
One man said about it that it consists
of countless ceremonies and the practice of elaborate
ritual, which never was written in the book
of the Bible at all.
And to these Talmudists, righteousness or a holy
life lay in living according to these rabbinical
laws or rules.
And when our Lord Jesus Christ came to
Jewry, he found that the law of Moses,
the Old Testament law, which was inspired of
God, had been pushed into the background and
that this oral law or tradition had taken
over and the Jews were under what Peter
called a yoke of bondage, which neither we
nor our fathers could bear.
Now let me give you an example of
it from the 15th chapter of the book
of Matthew.
Here's a perfect example of how Christ met
this head-on.
He didn't fool with it.
He didn't try to find the common ground
and do all that they tell us now
he should do.
He simply butted into it head-on.
Then came to Jesus scribes and Pharisees, and
they, of course, were the rabbinists, the Talmudists,
those who were traditionalists.
Then came to Jesus scribes and Pharisees, which
were of Jerusalem, saying, Why do thy disciples
transgress the tradition of the elders?
There it is, the tradition of the elders,
the law of the lip, the Talmud.
Why do they transgress the tradition of the
elders, for they wash not their hands when
they eat bread?
And he answered them by asking them a
question.
Why do ye transgress the commandments of God
by your traditions?
They said, Why do you transgress the traditions?
And he said, Why do you transgress the
law of God by your traditions?
There we have it.
As long as there are human beings alive
in the world, we'll be at least under
the shadow of traditions.
There's a great deal of tradition in this
church, a great deal of tradition.
We do things because our fathers did and
were too lazy to change it, and after
a while it begins to take on a
certain form.
And because we do it a certain way,
there are churches where if you didn't have
an altar call with people kneeling at the
front of the church, they'd think you'd bachelored.
And yet you go back as far as
the Wesley's and you'll find no altars, no
place for people to kneel.
Finney, when he came along, had to argue
and fight to have an anxious seat.
That was the front row for people to
come and sit if they wanted to be
saved.
That's how tradition takes over.
Now there are people that come to this
church and because I don't give an altar
call every Sunday night and say, Now come
down here and kneel to walk out and
say they're backslidden there.
You don't baptize nine, three or four weeks
ago and eight or nine tonight and not
have God doing something in people's lives, and
yet because we don't follow the tradition, they
don't like it.
Well, he said, Why do you transgress the
commandment of God by your tradition?
Then he said in verse 9, In vain
they do worship me, teaching for doctrines the
commandments of men.
Now they carried that same tradition.
You'd think a crucified Christ, a risen Christ,
and the coming of the Holy Ghost would
have swept that away as a wind sweeps
away the mist, but it didn't.
Those talmudic Christians followed along, believing in the
traditions of the elders and the law of
the lip.
Now in Paul's mind and in the mind
of Jesus our Lord, there's a line sharply
drawn between those who believe that righteousness is
a formal thing and those who believe that
righteousness springs out of the heart.
The Talmudists, the traditionalists, believed it to be
a formal thing.
Now I'm not condemning.
I'm not scolding.
I'm not adding anything.
I am explaining what sound scholarship will confirm
that the Pharisees and scribes of Jesus' day,
the Judaizing brethren of Paul's day, which Paul
writes here, call them circumcision, they believed, as
all religions believe, that there has to be
righteousness, that you've got to be righteous to
please God.
But now the question is, what is righteousness
and what does righteousness consist in?
Well, they believed that righteousness was dietary, seasonal,
ceremonial, and maybe ascetical.
And there were four words here, what, when,
how, and how much.
Dietary, that is, what men eat or do
not eat.
And Paul said, they come and try to
bother you with their eating and not eating.
And he said, rather, I wouldn't say angrily,
but sharply in verse 15, under the pure,
all things are pure.
But under them that are defiled and unbelieving,
nothing is pure, but their minds and consciences
are defiled.
So Paul said, now, I want you to
appoint elders and appoint bishops in Crete in
order that they might, by bringing the sound
word of God to bear, they might clear
the air and deliver these new Christians in
Crete from dietary traditions.
You're good if you eat this, you're not
good if you eat that.
I won't say it because I want to
be kind, but can you think as we
go along about certain great church or two
that are also under bondage to traditions, diets,
and times, and seasons?
Well, here we have the seasons, that was
when.
What men do or do not eat, that's
a dietary.
When they're supposed to eat or not to
eat, that's seasonal.
How they dress and kneel and hold their
hands, and when they wash their hands or
don't wash their hands, that's ceremonial.
And how much they suffer and give, and
how often they pray, and how long, and
how often they fast, and deprive themselves, and
punish themselves, that's ascetical.
So these four things, they all sprang out
of self-righteousness and a misunderstanding of the
grace of God.
Dietary, what men eat and what they don't
eat.
Seasonal, when they eat it and when they
don't eat.
Ceremonial, how they dress, how they kneel, how
they stand, how they rise, how they get
up.
Ascetical, how much they punish themselves.
All of this was a part of the
law of the lip, the tradition of the
elders.
And Jesus broke it right and left, and
they said, why do ye break our traditions?
He said, why do you break God's law
with your traditions?
Now some examples, a way of illustration from
the Pharisees.
You remember that passage where the disciples walked
through the field on the Sabbath day, and
as they walked, they reached out, the King
James Version says, it was corn, but it
was wheat.
They reached out, and the heavy heads of
wheat were hanging there, I can just see
them from my boyhood days, heavy and yellow,
ready to cut.
And they just reached out, as I've done
a thousand times as a boy, took a
couple of heads, rolled them, blew the chaff
off, and ate the wheat.
That's the way to get it, you know,
with none of the vitamins taken out.
And those disciples did that.
And the Pharisees saw them do it.
Should have been somewhere praying or helping the
sick, but they were out spying on Jesus
and his disciples to see if they could
catch them on the breaking of the traditions.
They said, now wait a minute here.
We have a law that says you shan't
thresh wheat on Sabbath day, and you're threshing
wheat.
And Jesus turned on them and said, the
Sabbath was made for man, not man for
the Sabbath.
And he defended his poor hungry disciples who
had rubbed out some wheat and eaten it.
But there you had it.
They weren't interested in hungry disciples.
They were interested in not breaking that law
of the lip that says you can't rub.
They actually went so far as to say,
some of them did, I don't know whether
it was universal or not, but some did,
go so far as to say that you're
not to walk on the grass on the
Sabbath day because you're likely to trample on
a head of grass and the seed will
be crushed out of the head and that'll
be threshing.
Therefore, stay off the grass and walk on
the concrete on the Sabbath day lest you
thresh.
And if you thresh, you're a sinner.
You're ceremonially unclean, you've broken the tradition of
the elders.
Now that to you and me sounds silly,
but to somebody brought up in that it
isn't as silly as it sounds.
And they followed over to Crete, mind you,
and taught this kind of crazy business.
Then Jesus here, you'll remember, he and his
disciples didn't eat, didn't wash.
I've seen men working in factories.
They only had a half an hour to
eat and they wanted to read a little
or chat a little and they'd sit down,
their hands were all covered with grease.
I've seen fellows eat their lunch with greasy
hands, perfectly harmless.
But to a Jew it was terrible.
They said, why?
According not to the law of Moses, mind
you, but according to the law of tradition,
you're supposed to wash your hands before they
eat.
And Jesus said, I don't recognize your traditions.
I recognize the law of my Father and
you're breaking the law of God all the
time with your traditions.
That's my answer to our friends over on
the other side, Catholics.
I'm not against them.
I love them.
I'd cut their lawn.
I'd lend them my hose.
I'd do anything for them.
But I'm not going to allow them to
put a yoke on my neck.
Now, remember another time Jesus sat down with
some sinners.
Now, who were the sinners?
Were the sinners men who committed adultery, stole,
lied, cheated, widows out of their property, had
bad tempers?
No, those weren't considered sinners by the Pharisees.
The sinners were those who didn't wash their
hands before they ate, who walked on the
grass on Sunday, who rubbed wheat in their
hands and threshed and thus broke the law
of the fathers, who didn't either come in
and drew, as they said they should have,
and who thus broke the law of the
tradition, the law of the lip, the oral
law.
They were sinners.
But the Pharisee who hated with a black
hate that finally crucified Jesus, he was ceremonially
clean, and that's a holy man.
Kept the law of the fathers.
And the evil man who would rather a
poor sick man would lie and suffer and
die a tortured death than to be healed
on the Sabbath day, he was not a
sinner.
He was a good man.
He was a holy man because he kept
the law of the fathers.
And the men who finally crucified Jesus, as
Billy Sunday's old song used to say, passed
off for moral men too.
Righteousness to them were those who were clean
according to the ceremony.
They did the thing they were supposed to
do.
They got up when they were supposed to
get up, sat when they were supposed to
sat, put their hands up like this when
they were told to, peered when they were
told to, and did everything just as they
were told to.
Said that's the tradition of the fathers.
Well, we have it on our hands today.
It isn't affecting us here much.
But wherever I see it, I like to
leave the main path and go out and
hew it down.
I used to have a weed when I
was a boy.
My father called wild parsnip, but it was
really a wild carrot.
And he hated it so bad that if
he was driving along the road, along the
lane, and he saw one over in the
field, he'd stop the wagon, jump off, jump
over the fence, go out, take an ax,
and cut it out at the roots, throw
it up, and then drive on.
And I feel that way about all these
traditional laws they want to put on God's
people.
And place righteousness where it doesn't belong.
I say there's a sharp line of demarcation
drawn between those who believe that righteousness lies
in formal law-keeping and those who believe
that righteousness springs out of faith, that it's
a moral thing.
That a liar can't be wholly a man
no matter how often he goes to church
or makes his confession or gets confirmed or
how much he avoids meat on Friday or
how he keeps the traditions of the elders.
He's not a good man if he's a
liar.
He's not a good man if he has
hate in his heart.
He's not a good man if he has
a churlish temper.
He's not a good man.
Let him be, let him be baptized any
way he wants to be baptized.
Sprinkle, pour, three times, once, immerse, any way.
And he's not a good man if he's
an evil man.
For faith, righteousness, comes out of faith and
out of love.
And it has its source in the heart.
That was the teaching of our Lord Jesus
Christ.
That's worshiping in spirit and in truth.
And such have only one question.
Those who worship in spirit and in truth
have only one question.
It isn't, what shall I eat?
When shall I do this?
How shall I dress?
How much shall I deprive myself of?
Never ask those questions.
That belongs to the traditions.
He has only one question.
And that is, why?
Why, that's motive, you see.
Why?
Why do I do this?
Why?
What's your motive for it?
If you do it out of love, it's
right.
If you do it out of hate, it's
wrong.
If you do it out of faith, it's
right.
If you do it out of self-righteousness,
it's wrong.
What's the motive for this?
And there's the liberty of the Christian, my
brethren.
You can walk upright on the earth and
look at God's sunshine and sing the spacious
firmament on high and worship God and delight
in his world and everything that his hands
has made.
And you'll be all right before God as
long as you keep your motive right.
Your motive is to do the will of
God, to follow Jesus Christ the best you
know how and to love everybody and to
love God.
Your motive is all right.
The question is not how much shall I
eat, but why?
What shall I eat, but why?
Not shall I go to church so many
times a week, but why do I go
to church?
Motive is everything.
Now, by placing sin and holiness in formal
ceremonies, these people destroyed the true meaning of
both sin and righteousness.
Because just as soon as I believe that
I can cheat in a real estate deal,
lie, abuse my wife, and do other things
that are not right, hate my enemy, and
yet I'm right with God provided I tithe
fast at stated times, appear at church at
certain times, wash my hands before I eat,
and follow the ceremonial laws of the tradition
of my church, I'm all right.
If I don't do that, I'm a sinner.
Who were the sinners in Jesus' day?
They were the men on the street, the
people who neglected the ceremonies of the Talmud.
Jesus said he came to save sinners.
They were the ones that came to him.
The common people heard him gladly and flocked
to him.
But the people who stood by the traditions,
the law of the lip, that overshadowed the
law of God, couldn't reach them.
Now, in a climate such as the Pharisees
had and as these traditionalists tried to take
to Crete, Christianity couldn't grow.
The conscience couldn't live.
It had to die because the conscience tells
you not what you're doing, but why you're
doing it.
Some little lady doesn't show up at church.
Now, I believe we ought to go to
church every Sunday.
I think it's the first day of the
week, and I think nothing short of sickness
should keep us away from the church of
God.
I believe that.
But many a person has been condemned for
not being at church who is obeying the
higher call of love, who stayed by the
bedside of an ailing, aged father or mother,
or who did some other kindly deed for
Christ's sake.
Now, I think the wise thing to do
is to try to do that at other
times and get to church anyhow.
I think the wise thing to do is
to appear at church because the Scripture said,
forsake not the assembling of yourself together.
I think God has given us the first
day of the week as a time to
appear, not as we're compelled to do it,
but we do it voluntarily.
But at the same time, there are occasions
where a higher law of love keeps me
from being at my wanted place.
And God recognizes that higher law of love.
I've told it, I suppose, a hundred times.
But old Meister Eckert, somebody asked him, said,
how about praying and how do you manage
to harmonize prayer and service for the poor?
Well, he said, here's the way I harmonize
it.
He said, if I'm in prayer and I'm
even caught away like Paul to the third
heavens and I happen to remember that I'd
forgotten to take a widow some food, I
break off my prayer, go take her the
food.
He said, God will see you don't lose
a thing.
He said, when you come back, you can
start writing where you left off and the
Lord will see you don't lose a thing.
I believe in that.
The law of love, my brother, that dictates
that I do out of love deeds that
may not be written, may not be prescribed,
may not be found at all in the
law of the church, but they're the obvious,
wise, right, good thing to do and I
do them for Christ's sake.
That's the righteous man.
Now, Paul said, I want to read that
and I'm about finished.
He said that these Jewish fables and commandments
of men that turn from the truth said,
under the pure all things are pure.
Pure person, everything's pure.
They came and said, now you can't eat
this kind of meat.
Paul said, don't you believe it.
To the pure everything's pure.
But unto them that are defiled and unbelieving
in their hearts, you see, nothing's pure.
To the Pharisee, he fasted, but his fasting
was impure.
He prayed, but his prayers came back and
slapped his own face.
He deprived himself, but his deprivation was a
sin because his motives were rotten.
They profess they know God, but in words
they deny him, being abominable and disobedient and
unto every good work reprobate.
That's terrible, that's terrible.
And it's spoken about the poor Jews, they
of the circumcision.
Do you often pray for Israel?
Do you often pray for the Jews?
You should.
You should often pray for the Jews.
Remember, they gave us our Bible.
They preserved that Bible and died defending it
down the years.
Remember it.
Remember they carefully preserved it and went over
it and put every jot and every tittle
in place.
The old scribes, we use the word scribe
almost as an epithet of a program.
But those scribes, we owe them a lot,
just as we are translators a lot.
Careful scholars who spend days over sentences, we
owe them a lot.
We thank God for Moses and Isaiah and
Daniel and Jeremiah and Ezekiel and sweet David
with his harp.
We're grateful for the Jews.
We're grateful for those twelve apostles, all Jews
who went out to the four corners of
the earth to preach the truth.
We're grateful for Paul, that great Jew.
We're glad.
We ought to pray for them and pray
for them often and much and pity them
and don't feel superior to them because after
all you're a Gentile grafted into the wild,
to the olive tree.
But Paul would have none of this stuff
in Crete, none of this, none of this
tradition out of which he'd escaped by the
skin of his teeth.
It took a knock down and drag out
conversion on Damascus Road to save him from
it.
Now that God had taken him out of
it, I've been getting letters recently.
Some time ago we published an article how
to win one of our missionaries, how to
win Roman Catholics to Christ.
I suppose I'd get skinned for that.
My poor hides are all spotted with what
I get but I've got nothing but the
most gracious, the most enthusiastic letters from people
saying, some of them saying to this effect,
Oh, you don't know how glad we were
to read this, that your people are interested
in winning Catholics to Christ.
And they have written articles for me about
how to win them, all the kind things
they said and gracious things they said, how
never to offend them but how always to
take the Word of God in your own
testimony and go to them and try to
win them.
But almost all of them said the same
thing.
How we thank God we escaped.
It was almost like a concentration camp.
And when they got out into the liberty
of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, they only
could use one word and that was the
word escape.
They said we escaped.
And how we thank God we escaped.
So I'm glad I've escaped, glad I've escaped
from the laws of the elders.
But we must pray for those who haven't
and we must by love and faith and
grace and careful walk not to offend people,
we must live such lives as shall be
worthy of the liberty we claim to hold
and not use liberty as a license for
the flesh but in meekness of humility follow
our Lord Jesus Christ.
If we do that, God will bless us
and we may be used of him to
deliver some who are now in bondage.