Wednesday, February 03, 2010

Good/Bad

Matthew 6:1-18

Here Jesus is talking about some outward positives. They are in direct contrast to the outward negatives (murder, divorce, etc.) that He was talking about earlier. "Don't be fooled by what you see", is what He's getting at. You can't always tells what's going on inside a person by what you see on the outside.
It's interesting, though, that He would have us hide our good deeds. No, that's not right... He's having us hide our "religious" deeds. He mentions in another place not to hide our "good" deeds. It's easy to fake it, if you're resting on your religious deeds. But if you remove those, how are people supposed to know that you are a good person?
Jesus doesn't just pick on the things we do bad, but also the things we do good. It's not that these religious things don't have merit. He stills tells us to do them. But by doing them in private, we can be sure our motives are right. Again it comes back to what's inside. Is it envy, hate or religious pride? They have completely different outer manifestations, but Jesus lumps them together as coming from the same place. Our actions can be good or bad, that's really irrelevant in the end. It is the inside condition, where those actions come from that matters.

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