I have been thinking a lot about the whole Halloween debate. The difficulty with these types of debates is the Bible doesn’t address them so we pick sides and dig in. I know he did a lot of things that angered the “evil” Pharisees. It is easy to point to the Pharisees and say how they represent all the things we disagree with and our position is represented by Christ. But you know what, sometimes I find myself being a Pharisee. I find that I often seek my value in myself by rule keeping alone, actually one of the more scary realities is that it’s generally when I feel I am not a Pharisee that I am most in danger of being one.
A Pharisee to me is someone who has the outward appearance of the values that Jesus came to model with none of the inward convictions he lived out. [Tweet “Pharisees have an outward appearance of values but are unchanged by those values they claim to hold dear.”]
I think we need to take a hard look at what is meant when the Bible calls Jesus a friend of sinners.
