you Well, good morning to you. Today I want to encourage you with a few thoughts from Mark chapter 7. I hope this helps for the journey ahead today. I went to Christian University back in the mid-70s, and if you were alive back then, you can hopefully remember the cultural context a little bit. If you're young enough that you don't know anything about that, let me help you out a little bit. This was the era of the hippies, where guys, long-haired, scraggly, wild clothes, and all this kind of stuff. So I went to Christian University, and there were some pretty clearly laid out rules about how you were to dress. As guys, we had to have our hair cut a certain way. Had to be off the collar in the back, tapered a little bit, couldn't be on over the ears. Guys in the university were not allowed to have facial hair. And there were understandable reasons for that. The culture had become very rebellious, and long-haired guys with their scraggly beards, they were making a statement of rebellion against the culture of their parents, if you will. So the university I went to, they didn't want the young men looking like a bunch of rebels. Okay, I get that. But here's the problem. I found myself, I didn't realize what was going on in my own mind and heart at the time, but I found myself internalizing those rules. I bought into them, but I internalized them, and I started to look at other people, other guys, and evaluating in the church. and evaluating their spirituality based on their hairstyle, whether or not they had a beard, kind of clothes they wore, that kind of thing. You may say, shame on you, what's the matter, what was the matter with you? And we're living in a different world now. But anyway, this is the way I came to think, and it was awful. I mean, I remember having a conversation with, with someone about some guys at another Christian university, and I made a comment, something to the effect that it was a compromising institution because the guys could have mustaches and their hair could be over their ears. I'm ashamed to admit that, but that was the way I thought. And the thing is, I believe there's a very real tendency to that in people who want to do right, and think that they have to do certain things in order to please God. We see this in Mark chapter 7, with the Pharisees. Because it says in verse 1, the Pharisees and the scribes came together to Jesus, having come from Jerusalem. It says, Now, when they saw that some of his disciples eat bread with defiled, that is, with unwashed hands, they found fault. Now here's the explanation of that. For the Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they wash their hands in a special way, holding the tradition of the elders. So what was going on here is this tradition of the elders said, if you want to be undefiled, and you want to be truly holy, then when you come from the marketplace, you need to wash your hands in this particular way. may have been well-motivated, but the problem is it wasn't biblical, this wasn't anything God mandated, but that tradition became so entrenched that the Pharisees ended up finding fault with anybody who didn't practice this tradition the way they practiced it, and it wasn't even something that God established. They were critical and judgmental, and determined that Jesus and his disciples weren't as spiritual as they were, because they didn't wash their hands in a certain way. So I think we have to be careful. We can develop, personally, we can develop certain rules, if you will, for ourselves that we know are beneficial and helpful to us in our Christian life. For example, you may have a rule for yourself that you won't watch more than an hour of television a day. You may have a rule for yourself that doesn't even have a television in your home. or that you may have a rule for yourself that you will absolutely not be on Facebook, or YouTube, or anything like that. Fine. Great. If you establish those things because you realize some weaknesses, and establishing those rules for yourself help you deal with those areas of weakness. Great. Wonderful. Here's the problem. If you're not careful, you can allow that rule for yourself to become a standard by which you judge other people. That's when it becomes a problem. You don't want to go there. You don't want to be that way. You don't want to be that person. Father in heaven, I pray that you deliver us from such attitudes. I pray that we'd be very careful about about the spirit and attitude that we have toward others who maybe just don't do everything exactly the way we do it. Oh, Lord, give us wisdom and give us grace and patience and kindness with others. We pray in Jesus name. Amen. All right, listen, have a good rest of your day. I trust the Lord will bless you in it.