Happy Lord’s Day, my friends!

Today, be encouraged to pursue relationship with the One who knows you best and loves you most! Ritual will wear you out, but relationship will strengthen you day-by-day!

Dr Seth Postell at ONE FOR ISRAEL explains:

“In the fourth year of King Darius, the word of the LORD came to Zechariah on the fourth day of the ninth month, which is Chislev. Now the town of Bethel had sent Sharezer and Regemmelech and their men to seek the favor of the LORD, speaking to the priests who belong to the house of the LORD of hosts, and to the prophets, saying, ‘Shall I weep in the fifth month and abstain, as I have done these many years?’” (Zech 7:1–3).

The seventh chapter of Zechariah functions for that book much like the Sermon on the Mount does for Matthew. The people of Bethel wanted to discuss ritual, but God wanted to address relationship. With the exile over and the temple being rebuilt, they wondered whether it was still necessary to continue fasting over the destruction of the first temple and the murder of Gedaliah.

We may easily hide behind good works, but God sees past religious appearances and examines the motivation of the heart.

Rather than answering their question directly, God turns to the deeper issue of the heart. He is far more concerned with the motivation behind religious actions than with the actions themselves. “When you fasted and mourned in the fifth and seventh months these seventy years, was it actually for Me that you fasted?” (Zech 7:5).

Herein lies a serious danger for God’s people today. We may easily hide behind good works, but God sees past religious appearances and examines the motivation of the heart. In the Sermon on the Mount, Yeshua identifies doing good deeds for the wrong reason as hypocrisy (see Matt 6:2, 5, 16; 7:5).

When our actions are done for the glory of God, however, even ordinary things like eating, drinking, or giving someone a cold cup of water (Mark 9:41) become acts of worship that please Him (see 1 Cor 13:1–3). And since only God can see the heart, hypocrisy is not something we should hunt for in others. Instead, we should ask God to expose it in our own religiosity, which may impress people but fail to honor Him.

“Whether, then, you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Cor 10:31).

(Find it here.)