Today, I am reading and commenting on Matthew 23-24.

A large part of today’s passage is various ways in which Jesus condemns the Pharisees  and teachers of the law in His day.  In many ways pastors and religious leaders today should examine themselves to see to what degree, if any, what He says here applies to them.  In fact, all of us should examine ourselves to see if any of what Jesus says in today’s passage applies to us.  Jesus warns against seeking to appear righteous to others while being filled with wickedness and hypocrisy.  All too often, we focus on doing things for public appearance while ignoring the more important difficult things.  We need to start with getting our hearts right with God and examining how we think about others in our hearts.  As I wrote that I realized that we often speak about that side of what Jesus says here (even those who do spend more time on appearing righteous than being righteous often speak about not doing that), but while doing so we overlook something He says here.  Jesus condemns the Pharisees for carefully giving a tenth of the output of their gardens while neglecting justice, mercy, and faithfulness.  What we miss is that when He tells them they should have practiced those three that they should do so without neglecting the tithe.  In the same way, we should practice true righteousness without allowing ourselves to appear to be wicked and decadent.  While we are doing the acts which God calls us to do in private or secret, we cannot neglect taking care about how we speak (or act in public).

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

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