New Salem Baptist Church

Tradition

May 4, 2025

Last week we considered the damaging doctrine of legalism. When we reviewed one form of this bane, pharisaical legalism, we read in Mark, chapter seven. Today, we will address tradition in the church and the same passage will serve us.

Tradition is a wider subject than legalism. Legalism is always detrimental to walking in the spirit. Veritably, if a person is practicing any form of legaliosm they are living according to the flesh, not the spirit.

Legalism is always bad. Tradition can be bad or it can be good. Let us start by reading Mark 7:1-14. [READ]

The Pharisees ask Jesus, “Why don’t your disciples follow our age-old tradition?” (verse 5; NLT) Jesus responds, ‘You hypocrites!” He then accuses them of following the commandments of men.

[1] One danger of following tradition is transforming tradition into law. This is what the Pharisees did and what Jesus condemned. One doesn’t have to call it a law, nor call it a command. But that is the way tradition functions in many evangelical circles. I gave many examples last week. Evangelicals would be apprehensive in calling their traditions a law or a command because of this passage of Scripture.

But, just because you don’t call something what it is, doesn’t mean that is not what it is. Let me say that again: just because you don’t call something what it is, doesn’t mean that is not what it is.

People who try to impose their traditions (not found in the Bible) upon others will merely call them “practice” or “guidelines” or “.holy living.” But they are rules, because if you violate them you are considered less than holy. Does it sound familiar? This is exactly what the Pharisees did. It is a bane.

Transforming tradition into law is pharisaical legalism. We talked about this last week, so there is no need to say more except that we must guard against it, for it afflicts both evangelicals and Pentecostals to a large degree.

[2] A second danger of tradition is falling into the opposite error: transforming law into tradition. This is a driving force behind theological modernism, that is, what we would call liberalism in Chrisitian churches. It is to trivialize the law of God, removing the authority and penalty therefrom, by thinking or saying that some of the commands in the Bible are merely reflective of tradition at the time they were written and need not be obeyed.

What commands do you think those might be? Any command that a reader, or maybe an entire denomination, doesn’t like. To the so-called liberal Christian (I say so-called because if one does not subject oneself to the commands of God it is likely that person was never regenerated.), there is no definite right and wrong; everything is subject to culture and personal choice. For example, liberalism asserts that many of Paul’s commands merely reflected traditions of the time, such as the role of men and women in the church, even the forbidding of same-sex practice, according to them, was just a cultural taboo and it is not applicable today.

This is even a greater danger than transforming tradition into law because when you do the former you still displease God, but only become guilty of one or two sins, such as judgmentalism. Yet, if you transform God’s laws into tradition, you open the door to all sins! Your life will become a microcosm of the world around you.

But it is not just liberal Christians that are guilty of this. Many otherwise conservative believers do the very same thing. If they don’t like a command found in the Bible they will attribute it to a cultural norm “back then,” if a NT command; or, attribute it only to the ancient nation of Israel, if an OT command.

To avoid this trap, it helps greatly to differentiate between moral commands and ceremonial commands. Briefly, we must still follow all the moral commands in the Bible but we no longer need to follow ceremonial rituals.[1]

If we can see that a directive is moral in nature then resist any temptation to think of it as merely cultural. God’s moral commands very rarely change and, when they do, they are raised to an even higher level under the new covenant.[2]

Here is what we must keep at the forefront of our minds: We do not allow ourselves to be influenced by the trends of moral degradation of the culture around us. We follow God’s commandments and not the dictates of the culture.

[3] A third danger of clinging to tradition is in it causing us to miss the benefits of God coming to us. Something new comes our way. When I say, “something new,” I only mean new to our own experience or new to the Christian group to which we belong. If a blessing is really from God it will be seen in Scripture already. Other fragments of the universal church may have been experiencing it for a long time. When I say new, I mean not in our own set of traditions.

When something new comes our way, we tend to either reject it or avoid it.

• There was a time when even raising one’s hands during worship was considered improper or objectionable. Why? No reason other than it was against the tradition of some or most Baptist churches. 
• There was a time when saying Amen! or Hallelujah! during worship was likewise improper. Why? For the same reason: it was against tradition.
• There was a time when playing cards was considered wrong. Why? Tradition.
•  There was a time when dancing was considered wrong. Why? Tradition.

Thank the Lord that we, as followers of the Lord Jesus, have rejected those traditions and we now raise our hands and say Amen! out loud. And, thank the Lord that we can be entertained, only being careful to not be over-entertained as is our culture. (Use your time wisely.)

Here is the odd thing, though. Some of those formerly questionable practices, like raising our hands and saying Hallelujah! out loud, are abundantly testified in the Bible!

So, this third danger of clinging to tradition, that is, missing the benefit of God because of something new, is still with us.

If we are praying for revitalization, as we have been, we must be prepared to receive what God will do to revitalize us! He may do something new to us. It seems as if he will. We must not allow our tradition to blind us to the work of the Holy Spirit.

It’s possible that, if not enough of us are seeking to be touched by God, that he will not revitalize our church. But even so, if you as an individual or as a family are earnestly seeking to have a revival in your heart and life, then be prepared to drop your traditions and receive something new.

In what way did God do this in the Bible? In what way did God do this when Christ established his church in the book of Acts? In what way did God continue to do this many years later in Corinth?

I will tell you. He did it through the baptism of the Holy Spirit and by the gifts of the Holy Spirit being distributed to every member of the church. This is what we must not allow to pass us by. God can and does still work in this way. There is not even one Bible verse that states that the gifts will pass away except when Jesus returns to the earth. That’s when they will cease.

There is not time in this message to delve into this marvelous work of the Holy Spirit. Maybe next time. Today’s message is only a warning about the dangers of tradition and an encouragement to be open to new things.

[Conclusion] We saw that there are three dangers to following tradition.

• We can transform traditions into laws. We can equate them with God’s commands. We may never think they are, but in practice we behave as if they were.
• We can transform laws into traditions. We must resist every cultural influence and place God’s commands above what society expects and even above our desires.
• We can resist or avoid what God is doing because it is not according to our traditions. We may not have raised our traditions to the level of laws, but we become so comfortable with them that we are fearful of stepping out of our comfort zone. If we are then we will miss the blessing of God.

In almost every sermon I end with practical application. I list some simple things that we can do to fulfill what we learned in the teaching presented. Today, is different. In this message my intent is simply awareness. We must be fully aware that tradition hinders us from going forward in God’s way. By his grace, soon I will talk about what we can do to make ourselves more open to what God would like to accomplish in us.

Until then, let us pray: “Lord, you revealed how strongly you were against the traditions of men. Lord, make us to be open to what you will do for us and in us. Do not allow us to be so enamored to our old ways that we forgo what you will do that is different. Keep us open, dear Lord!”