MARCH 26 "WEAR THEM ON YOUR FOREHEAD"

I will rarely be the one to say that, "God made a mistake", but I have to say, God made a mistake here when He instructed them to "wear them on their foreheads".  What was He thinking? Did God not think that one day, as hard as it is to believe that they might actually make boxes and put them on their foreheads? Or maybe God knew how religious they would become some day and He wanted them to look like fools, walking around with a box on their foreheads.  Fact is, all religious people look like fools to those outside the church.  They see us with all our dogmas, all our rules and regulations but then they see us, when push comes to shove, act like heathens, hateful, prejudiced, unforgiving, cheap, mean, bitter, and the list goes on.  God promised the day when His laws and precepts would be written upon our hearts. A few thousand years later, Jesus came, died and rose from the dead, with that promise now available to all (his laws written upon our hearts) but many prefer just to walk around with the box on the forehead, rather than have God come inside their hearts and radically change and transform them. Remember, it was the Pharisees, with God's laws literally put on their foreheads, that killed Jesus. Religious people killed Jesus then and Religious people still kill Jesus today. When we try to preach Jesus to a sinner, Jesus has been killed in them because of some religious person, walking around with the box of laws on their foreheads but yet living like the devil. Then when we (those with his laws & precepts in our hearts) approach them, they want nothing to do with Jesus or us. It is hard, almost unbelievable that a group of people would have taken this verse literally and made little boxes to put on their foreheads, but they did! A child could easily see the application here that God was implying, ie: Have God's words and his laws imprinted upon your mind.  Even better, have them in your heart. The problem is, Religious people are blind to who they are or what they look like. You will notice in the New Testament, nobody was Jesus sterner with, than the Pharisees. He told the Pharisees, "you go to great lengths to win a convert over, only to make him twice the son of hell that you are". That's beyond stern, we would even consider that rude in our PC culture and climate we live in today. Jesus had a warning to his disciples and to us, "beware of the leaven of the Pharisees". Jesus told you and I to beware, in other words, we are not exempt of having this religious, self righteous spirit jump on us. Each and every one of us has the potential to become quite religious, especially as the years go by and our original conversion experience is many years behind us. If only when we looked in the mirror, we could see the silly box that is upon our foreheads to see how foolish we look to the world, we would rip it off and pray that God put his word in our Hearts!

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