Traditions: Sacred Rituals or Mindless Habits?
My husband and I have an ongoing discussion (entering it’s 10th year now!) about family traditions. We had similar childhoods, many common paths. But now that we have our own family, we are constantly doing the dance of figuring out how to mesh our two backgrounds into a tradition that we can pass on to our daughter.
Traditions came to us from God. He set the table in the Old Testament for certain holidays to be observed each year. Passover was a holiday set aside to remind the Israelites of their flight from Egypt. Christ, in observing the first “Lord’s Supper,” told us that whenever we partake of the bread and the wine, we do it to remember him.
But when traditions become habit, with little thought behind them, they lose not only their meaning but their intended impact on our walk with God. Whether you observe the “Lord’s Supper,” “Communion” or the “Eucharist,” if you don’t take the time to reflect on it’s meaning, you deny yourself the closeness with God that comes from partaking, and you deny God the reverence and awe that is due Him.
Traditions can be effective ways to express faith, but only if driven by real faith. In Matthew, Jesus told a crowd that many Jews would fail to reach Heaven. They were entrenched in their religious habits, yet not mindful of God:
I tell you this, that many Gentiles will come from all over the world and sit down with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob at the feast in the Kingdom of Heaven. But many Israelites — those for whom the Kingdom was prepared — will be cast into outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Matthew 8:11-12
We make a habit out of going to church. We sit in the same pews, greet the same people, sing the same hymns week after week. We begin to morph these sacred traditions into unthinking habits. We hit “autoplay,” sit back and then head out for the week.
See you next Sunday, let’s do it all again!
Guard yourselves. When you catch your mind wandering during the service, remember the purpose of the ritual, the meaning behind it, the suffering or victory that led to it being established as a reminder of God and His wisdom and glory.
Break the habit!
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