Two college students sit down in the library. It's quiet. They grab study materials - books, pens, pencils, highlighters - and get to work. The hours clock by. Both lean over their work. One keeps looking at the clock. The other loses himself in his studies. They both leave at the same time. The kid who kept eyeing the clock gets a D, and the other student flies home for Christmas break with an A for the semester.
Remember in high school when all the teachers hung up posters of good study habits? I tried some of them; they didn't work. God has a poster up, too. The poster includes such spiritual disciplines as prayer, fasting, worship, meditating on the scriptures. The high school posters weren't lying - their outlines were of great quality and if you really applied them instead of just copying them, you'd get somewhere. Why is it any different with God? If we simply pray without our hearts, if we fast because we want to lose weight, if we worship just because the song is pretty or out of obligation, if we open our Bibles only because we have to go to a Bible study the next morning, how can we expect to grow spiritually?
Prayer, fasting, worship, meditating on the Bible - all that is great when you do it with your heart turned towards experiencing God, hearing from God, conversing with God, loving on God. But when we just go through the motions, we end up empty-handed, sometimes even more hollow than we went in. The reason why is simple: God isn't interested in our obedience to spiritual disciplines, but our growing closer to him through them. The Pharisees were just going through the motions - and if you read through the rest of chapter 15, you can see how much he didn't appreciate this.
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