We have entered the Christmas season, and we all celebrate family traditions. The Elkins home has family traditions as well. There is nothing wrong with our traditions if they are not linked to our salvation. That linkage is dangerous. Those religious traditions are not part of our salvation. 

Jan and I have ministered in many nations. Once during a worship service, we saw a young woman enter the church we were attending. The woman appeared not to have been religiously schooled on how to act in Church. In this group of churches, it was a requirement for women to wear a head covering. We could see the young woman had been touched by the Lord during the worship service. On the way out the door, an older woman, one of the leaders in the church, was dressed in a very flamboyant hat. She approached the young woman at the door. The older woman did not affirm her encounter with Jesus. She told the young woman, “When you come back, make sure you wear a hat.”

I thought that encounter was a one-time event, but it wasn’t. It was a religious tradition. A few weeks later in another church within that same movement, it happened again. As I was getting ready to preach, a young professional-looking woman dressed in very stylish clothing entered the meeting. She was part of the leadership team. As she stepped into the meeting room, in a moment of what looked like personal terror, she reached up and grabbed the sides of her head realizing she forgot her head covering. Another leader, an older man who had just come in from working in the fields, reached into his back pocket pulled out a sweaty and stained handkerchief, and gave it to the woman. She carefully unfolded his handkerchief like she was conducting a spiritual ritual and placed the soiled handkerchief atop her head. She smiled and the meeting continued. 

The Pharisees and teachers of religious law had placed hundreds of extra demands on the people of Israel beyond the basic requirements of the Law. These demands became their traditions. They were not God’s requirements. They were the equivalent of a dirty handkerchief placed on a woman’s head.

One such Pharisaical law was ceremonial washing. It was this violation by Jesus’ disciples that the Pharisees and teachers of religious laws challenged the Lord, “Why don’t your disciples follow our age-old tradition? They eat without first performing the hand-washing ceremony” (vs. 5). 

Jesus rebuked them, “You hypocrites! Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you, for he wrote, ‘These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.’ Their worship is a farce, for they teach man-made ideas as commands from God. For you ignore God’s law and substitute your own tradition” (vs. 6-8).

The danger of our unexamined religious traditions is revealed when we substitute the freedom of Jesus and His Gospel for adherence to a human tradition. Before each move of God, those traditions must be examined. Those who lay aside those traditions for the sake of the Gospel will see the Lord move in mighty ways among unfamiliar people who are searching for freedom in Christ, not religious bondage to manmade tradition.