Verse: Mark 3:3-6
3 And [Jesus] said to the man with the withered hand, “Come here.” 4 And he said to them, “Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to kill?” But they were silent.5 And he looked around at them with anger, grieved at their hardness of heart, and said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” He stretched it out, and his hand was restored. 6 The Pharisees went out and immediately held counsel with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him.
Devotional Thoughts:
I want you to imagine a scenario. Imagine you were at work, and your boss came to you and said that you didn’t have to work tomorrow. You’d still be paid, but you wouldn’t have to work or use any vacation time. That’d be great right?
But then, imagine he began to make some rules that you’d have to follow on your day off. Imagine you:
-Can’t walk more than 1,999 steps
-Can’t ride in a car anywhere
-Can’t eat out anywhere
-Can’t use any electronics
-Have to read your Bible for at least two hours straight and pray for one hour straight
At some point, you’d probably just rather go in to work. Instead of the gift of having a day off, the gift has became a burden.
And this is basically what the Pharisees had done with the Sabbath day. The Old Testament didn’t go into a whole lot of detail on the specifications, so the Jews had created their own system of rules that you could and couldn’t do on the Sabbath. And, according to their specifications, they didn’t believe Jesus should heal this man on the Sabbath.
So Jesus is upset with the Pharisees – in fact, he’d even told them in Mark 2:27, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.” The Sabbath was meant to be a gift for the people, not a burden. It was for their rest, their restoration, it was for them. A healed hand is what the Sabbath was all about.
Points to Ponder:
The Pharisees approached life following God much in the same way that they approached the Sabbath. If we just follow all of these rules, they supposed, then God will accept us.
This kind of mentality is more common than one would think even today. Have you ever heard someone mention that doing a good deed would “score brownie points with the man upstairs?” Or maybe you’ve heard the line, “I just hope the good things I’ve done outweigh the bad things.”
You can have two people doing the same thing, let’s say – serving in a soup kitchen, but serving for two different reasons. One is serving trying to win God’s approval, and the other is serving because they have been approved and accepted through Jesus, and is therefore serving out of an abundance of love. Do you see that? One is selfish, and the other is selfless. One is a burden, and the other is a gift.
The other day I needed Mrs. Tonya’s help with something. I went into her office and remarked, “I really appreciate all the work you do for this church. You’re a really great secretary.” And, almost immediately, she replied with, “What do you want, Zac?”
Again, one option is selfish. The other is selfless.
Listen, we don’t fundamentally need self-help life advice – we need a rescuer. We need someone to rescue us, to save us. And because Jesus has done that, it changes the way we approach life serving God. As Christians, we don’t serve so that God will hopefully accept us, we serve because he already has accepted us in Jesus. We serve because he served us. We freely give because he freely gave to us. We love because he first loved us.
How are you serving God today?
