…the Scribes & Pharisees
It's not from the head or
knowledge that I want you to teach, but with love, determination and
conviction of the heart, with power & authority, not as the Scribes.
If I would have stopped for a
minute to care about what people thought of Me, I never would have
driven the money changers out of the temple, and there are many other
things I wouldn't have done. I might have been embarrassed when the
harlot came to wash My feet with her tears, but I couldn't have cared
less about what the Scribes & Pharisees thought of Me, because I
went by standards of the heart & not the clichés and superficial
standards of the people.
The Scribes & Pharisees
constantly accused Me of having broken this & that jot & tittle
of the Law, when they failed to see the overall & most important
aspect of it completely. The pricks they felt on their conscience
by all the things I told them were finally too much for them. They
rejected the truth I told them about themselves, justified themselves
in their own minds & thus allowed the Devil to completely persuade
them that I was indeed the culprit, not they, and that there was only
one way they were going to stop the pain & nuisance that My Words
were being to their hearts, and that was to kill Me.
One of the things the Scribes
& Pharisees hated Me most for and would not forgive Me for was the
type of people I considered My friends: Romans, tax collectors for the
Romans, harlots, adulteresses and humble fishermen, instead of them,
the "noble elite" of the "righteous". See, the problem is often the
distorted way in which some people see themselves, their false
self-image.
The humble sinners are often
closer to the Kingdom than the self-righteous Scribes & Pharisees,
those who were ultimately responsible for My death.
After I found out where the
learned & elders were at, the Scribes & Pharisees, & those
who should have known better, I went out to seek a few unlearned men to
educate them in the Father's ways from scratch.
Find those in whom there isn't
that much System brainwashing you have to undo first until you can fill
in anything new. Find those who don't have an attitude of, "I'm not
searching anymore; I've already got it!"
The Scribes & the Pharisees
even saw the Devil in Me! They accused Me of being a devil, and so the
modern Scribes & Pharisees of the churches accuse those with
greater freedom than they have, of the same.
What's important, is - as I
told My disciples - that your righteousness exceeds that of the Scribes
& Pharisees, that your sample is a better one than that of the
phonies & hypocrites, that your faith is something more real &
living than their false & dead religion!
The leaven of the Scribes and
the Pharisees, who made My law of love of no effect with their
traditions. The leaven of doing it the "proper" way, the way that's
accepted by the System, that won't have you stand apart as those who
are despised and looked down on. They want to be accepted and looked up
to in this world. But that will have been their reward. Those who will
be rewarded in heaven will be those who will have suffered persecution
for Me, who will have been despised for Me, and "hated by all nations
for My name's sake."
I was living and practicing all
they had known and been studying about in theory for all those years,
having come to the conclusion that it probably couldn't be done at all,
and here I came along and proved them wrong by simply doing it.
I need you to be aware of the
"leaven of the Scribes and Pharisees," and of all the differences
between the gospel of bondage they're preaching, and yours, of true
liberty.
The leaven of the Scribes and
Pharisees looks very yummy and inviting. So much bigger, sweeter and
more tasty than what you've got, that relatively lean and flat loaf of
bread baked without any of the leaven of inflated egos and "better than
thou" self-righteousness.
You should first ask yourself,
"Do I really want this? Do I really want any of that taste of the
leaven of the Scribes and Pharisees?"
Are you going to risk having
your pure, unadulterated truth infected by the leaven and virus of
self-righteousness? And even if they're going to fail to infect you,
are they going to manage to make you feel bad and inferior and as if
you had less than what they've got?
Since when are My followers, My
disciples, My prophets, supposed to be concerned about their
popularity? They're only supposed to be concerned about doing their job
for Me, of reaching the lost of the world with My message, that's all.
Of course those who are not doing that job are going to resent you,
just like the Scribes and Pharisees resented Me, and you know there are
lots of Pharisees nowadays.
The Pharisees never would have
suspected the motley fishers, tax collectors & other followers of
Mine from lower strata of society than themselves to become the
ascending world religion, while theirs was about to be wiped out! It
was wiped out because it was worthy of death.
