Rules, Rules, Rules

He said to them, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.” Mark 2:27 ESV1

Read Matthew 12:1-8, Mark 2:23-28 & Luke 6:1-5

During the raising of our children, my husband and I were blessed with some excellent parenting resources. From one of those sources, we gleaned the valuable advice: Rules without relationship equals rebellion. That truth, paired with other wisdom and the help of God Almighty, allowed us to develop a home with high standards bathed in grace and love to which our children responded beautifully. It is too bad the Pharisees of old weren’t able to discover such life-giving truths from the resources available to them, the Law and the Prophets. Instead, they exhausted themselves making up new rules, trying to enforce those requirements, and attempting to punish anyone who broke those man-made laws.

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The Healthy Eye

The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness. Matthew 6:22-23 ESV1

Read Matthew 6:19-24

Have you ever heard the idiom looking at life through rose-colored glasses? It means positively seeing things or having an optimistic outlook. Often, if one is wearing rose-colored glasses, he/she sees things better than they really are.

There doesn’t seem to be an idiom for the opposite of rose-colored glasses, yet that mindset definitely exists. Some people look through another kind of glasses, and those glasses are half empty. Those people have a negative outlook on life and circumstances. To them, things often appear worse than they really are.

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