Breaking with Tradition

The immediate solutions are not always the right ones. They can over time prove to cause more hardship and struggle. This is true when we allow our culture and tradition – the things society finds good and normal to guide and direct us. Emotional affirmations and feeling good about something does not mean it is the right thing to do. When we look beyond the moment and consider the future, should practical considerations of future realities not determine we decide differently – today?

Furthermore, tradition does not provide solutions to the difficulties of life, when tradition serves to hide the tragedies of life. Yes, tradition can bring comfort and security through the familiarity a society provides but it serves no purpose when it hides immorality and sin. When professing Christians advocate cultural tradition to justify the reasons for the counsel they give they are placing their cultural beliefs and traditions above the Word of God.

Either they do not know how to apply the Word of God to life, or they have never been taught the need to do so. Or, that as a Christian they are required to do so. As long as it feels good now, and they don’t have to do something hard and difficult they believe they’re okay. Their Christianity is not informed by the Word of God, it is informed through their emotions and societal constraints.

Rather than look beyond their cultural roots for solutions they conform to traditional law, and traditional leadership. Possibly they are intimidated by their community leaders and believe they are called to submit to leadership even when confronted with a sin issue. Rather than expose the sin and apply Biblical wisdom as a solution to bring their own life and the lives of others into a right trajectory – the sin is hidden. They simply deny it.

When denial leads to the neglect and abuse of a baby and child – it is no longer okay to consider culture and tradition as the governing authority to submit to. It’s time to change who and what you consider your ultimate authority to be. When leadership hides neglect and abuse, it is sin. They are accountable. When you do not address it – you partner with their error, and with their sin.

• The LORD is slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, forgiving iniquity and transgression, but he will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, to the third and the fourth generation (Numbers 14:18).

• All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God's righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins. It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus (Romans 3:23-26).

• Now the law came in to increase the trespass, but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, so that, as sin reigned in death, grace also might reign through righteousness leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord (Romans 5:20-21).

• Speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ (Ephesians 4:15).

• Put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness (Ephesians 4:22-24).

#tradition #sin #truth