Costly

"You give a tenth of your spices...But you have neglected the more important matters of the law- justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former."

Matt 23.23

Platt:

Do we pride ourselves on following convenient laws or do we spend ourselves expressing costly love? Jesus mentions the law of the tithe in verse 23, and He talks about the scrupulous, careful ways the scribes and Pharisees had sought to obey that law; however, in the process they ignored "justice, mercy, and faith." This is an allusion to Micah 6:8, where God calls His people "to act justly, to love faithfulness, and to walk humbly with your God." God's people had failed to give justice to the poor and express kindness to the needy. These things are the overflow of walking humbly with God, but they weren't characteristic of Israel's leadership in Jesus' day.

In a world where nearly half of the population lives on less than two dollars a day, and approximately a billion people live in desperate poverty, it doesn't make sense to spend our lives priding ourselves on obeying convenient laws that are easy for us to do or debating minute truths that are easy for us to get hung up on, when there is such great need to show justice and mercy in our own city and across the globe. Again, it's not that those convenient laws (like tithing) are unimportant; Jesus says they are important: "These things should have been done" (v. 23). But even weightier is the need to express the mercy and justice of God to the poor and needy, and that is costly love. The question for us is whether or not we are willing to go out of our comfort zones and to get our hands dirty in practical ministry. Or are we content to spend our lives mining through biblical details and doing that which we find relatively easy? Far too many professing Christians seem to have settled into this latter option.