I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Mark 6-7.

    Mark tells us that when Jesus preached in His home town of Nazareth, the people were initially impressed. However, they almost immediately followed that up by dismissing His teaching because He did not have impressive credentials. Despite the sense of what He said and the miracles He performed to support His teachings, they could not get passed His lack of credentials. He had not been taught by this big name teacher, He had not gone to that elite school. Jesus had just studied Scripture and told people what it clearly meant. How often do we put more credence on someone’s credentials than on the meaning of what they say?

    Righteousness does not come about by performing the correct rituals and ceremonies. It is not the result of eating this and not eating that. Righteouesness, or the lack thereof, is a result of the thoughts we harbor and the actions which are prompted by those thoughts. What we say to and about others, and how we treat them matters more to God than any ceremony or ritual.