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Fairplain SDA church

Kyle Tumberg

The Weightier Matters

My message this morning is entitled, The Way Tier Matters.

How many of you appreciate a high quality dependable vehicle?

You know, I do a lot of traveling, so I highly value my cars, which is why I like Hondas and Toyotas, amen?

In the summer of 2009, my wife and I bought a 2001 Toyota Camry, and it's been a really good car.

We've put close to 70, 000 miles on it with very few problems, and in my opinion, Toyota is a company that produces a high quality product.

However, Toward the end of 2009, in the beginning of 2010, Toyota, as you may recall, had some problems, didn't they?

More than 9 million of their vehicles worldwide were recalled due to various problems.

And this was quite uncharacteristic of such a strong company that had been strong for so many years prior.

And many people began to speculate as to what caused the problem.

Why were there so many vehicles being recalled?

Many people blamed the management, saying that the company got too focused on manufacturing more vehicles to increase their market share, and they sacrificed the quality.

However, according to research done by 2 men, Mr.

Jeffrey Leaker and Tomothy Ogden, they found that the problem that Toyota had was not due simply to management approach, rather it was due to a greater internal problem, lack of well-trained leaders throughout the company.

You see, there was a great demand for Toyota-trained managers back in the early 2000s by other companies.

So they lost a lot of their leaders to competition.

And this meant that Toyota had to do something about this problem.

And so they didn't train their leaders as well as they had done in the past.

You see, they have put their leaders through very extensive training to really understand how the company works and the bottom line and so forth, but because of losing leaders, they weren't able to offer that same kind of training.

And what this meant is that they had more underdeveloped leaders carrying a heavy workload and this affected quality on a larger scale.

Now these 2 gentlemen that did the research, Mr.

Ogden, they go on to compare Toyota's problem to what a Harvard professor, Professor Lant Pritchett, terms isomorphic mimicry.

And What Pritchett says, or he uses this term to describe how government institutions in developing nations adopt best practices and institutional forms that mimic those in countries and institutions that provide aid.

But what he says is that merely copying the forms without adopting and adapting the cultural norms and underpinnings that generated those forms is essentially pointless.

And he says the same is true for companies seeking to establish a platform for effectiveness.

He says that copying the forms of another business without adopting the underlying culture that has provided those forms, doesn't work.

Even at Toyota, where the cultural norms and practices were strongly established, a few years of inattention to their core values created weakness in a system that had worked for over 50 years.

In other words, if Toyota, they're saying, if Toyota would have refused to sacrifice their commitment to developing leaders, 1 of their core values, they probably wouldn't have had the problems that they did.

But because there was incongruence between the company's core values, quality and so forth, and their methods that they used to produce their product, they ran into trouble.

They took their focus off of what was most important, their corporate values, and resorted to faulty methods, and therefore they produced a defective product.

Now, the point that these researchers make is that in the business world, the only way to have a truly effective business is not by merely mimicking the forms and techniques of other successful entities, it is in creating a culture among the business with strong values that will ultimately drive the business methods.

However, most businesses simply want to adopt a management style or a technique that has worked successfully somewhere else and run with it without trying to create a strong value-driven business culture where those techniques can actually thrive.

In other words, what he's saying is that their focus is on the wrong thing.

Whereas the focus should be internal, developing strong values, a strong culture, the focus is off And it's on the external things, the methods, how to achieve the goal, which isn't wrong.

Now, as I've thought about these concepts, I can't help but wonder that if in our spiritual lives, in our attempts to please the Lord and to do the best that we can to honor Him, that at times maybe we are not focused on what's most important.

Maybe we get so preoccupied with the externals, the forms or the standards, so to speak, that we neglect what's really most important, the internal, the heart, amen?

Is there incongruence between what we do outwardly and what we are inwardly?

Now today what I want to do is look at a group of people in the Bible who had this very problem.

And before we begin, I want to say just another short word of prayer.

I'm gonna kneel, but you may remain seated.

Dear Heavenly Father, we want to thank you and praise you for this holy Sabbath day.

We thank you, Father, for giving us the opportunity to learn about Jesus and to be transformed by his wonderful grace.

Father, we ask that you would forgive us of where we have fallen short.

Forgive us, Father, for our sins, and I pray that as we begin this sacred hour, Lord, as we look at the Holy Bible, I pray that you would anoint my lips, and Father, I pray that you would hide me behind the cross.

May Jesus be seen and may you attempt the devil's attempts to distract us from this message.

We ask and pray this in Jesus' name, amen.

Now the group of people that I'm talking about, you may have guessed it was the Pharisees.

The Pharisees were a political party that arose around 120 BC in response to Hellenism.

In other words, the adoption of Greek culture by the Jews.

As the Greeks expanded their territories, the Greek culture spread and it infiltrated Israel and many of the Jews began to follow these Greek methods or worldly methods, right?

And the Pharisees opposed the worldliness they saw creeping into the church, amen?

Their name meant separatist and they opposed the union of church and state, which was the common practice of the day.

So they were fighting for religious freedom or liberty, so to speak, so that their priests could be free from political engagements.

Their party was composed primarily of scribes and theologians.

They promoted rigid adherence to the law and the host of the traditional interpretations growing out of it, and they were the popular spiritual guides of the day that presented their beliefs with ardor and conviction, and as a result, they won a number of converts to their party.

The Pharisees also insisted on reliance upon God to lead his people and work for them as he had done in the past.

Now as I've thought about the Pharisees and I've thought about who they were what they stood for I could see a lot of parallels between what they stood for and what our church stands for today, amen?

And as I was thinking about this, I began to think that, You know, if I had been a Jew living around the first century, I probably would have seen the Pharisees as, you know, God's faithful people, the ones who were fighting to hold up the standard, the ones who were fighting to be faithful to his word, the ones who were actively evangelizing, and I probably would have wanted to be a Pharisee.

But if I asked you the question this morning, how many of you would have wanted to be a Pharisee?

Because Jesus spent a lot of time rebuking them, right?

But they stood for a lot of good things, right?

They did the right things outwardly, but yet Jesus didn't have a lot of nice things to say about them or a lot of words of commendation.

So we wouldn't have wanted to have fallen into the camp of the Pharisees.

So what was really wrong with the Pharisees?

We're gonna take a look at at several passages of Scripture to see what Jesus said about the Pharisees.

Turn with me first of all to Matthew chapter 23 and we'll look again at this morning's scripture that was read so nicely.

Matthew 23 and verse 23 And Jesus says, woe unto you scribes and who?

Pharisees, hypocrites, for you pay tithe of mint and anise and cumin and have omitted the what?

The weightier matters of the law, judgment or justice, mercy and faith, these ought ye to have done and not to leave the other undone." So what does Jesus say about the Pharisees?

He says you pay tithe on all of these herbs and spices, but you have omitted the weightier matters of the law or the things that were most important, right?

What we see is that The Pharisees were so focused on the externals, doing the right things, following the principles and the law, that they neglected the weightier matters of the law, right?

Was their problem, Their high standard of piety, was that their problem?

No, because Jesus even commended them on their tithe paying, right?

So the problem of the Pharisees wasn't merely that they tried to lift the standard.

Their problem was that they were ignoring something of vital importance.

You know, there are some people who will accuse a person who is trying to be a conscientious Christian or who has a high religious moral standard.

They will say that these people are being Pharisees, they're being legalistic.

However, we have to understand that Jesus did not condemn high standards, amen?

And anyone who tries to condemn high standards or conscientious attention to little things is ignorant of the fact that even Jesus himself set a higher standard than the Pharisees.

You know, the Pharisees set a high standard, outwardly speaking, but when Jesus came, he raised the bar even more, didn't he?

It said in Isaiah that he would magnify the law and make it honorable.

And if you look at Matthew chapters 5 and 6, we see how he did that.

He said, you've heard of old, if a man murders his brother, he is a murderer.

But I say to you, if you are angry at your brother in your heart, you have committed murder, right?

So Jesus set an even higher standard than the Pharisees.

So the high standards were not the problem.

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The Weightier Matters

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