The Tradition Conspiracy

Tradition plays a powerful role in human thinking and reasoning. Tradition is more than merely an annual practice or established ritual. It actually affects the very heart of mankind. I have come to believe that tradition is man's way of creating his own god. I have found that the one thing that stands in the way of man receiving truth is what I call the Tradition Conspiracy. While most Christians would heartily agree that tradition stunts our spiritual understanding, the majority of them have lost sight of the lines of separation between truth and tradition. Tradition has a way of bleeding over the lines that separate it from truth and over time, if allowed, will invade and overtake truth itself. It can be like an infectious skin disease that slowly eats its way through every inch of healthy skin and does not stop until there is nothing left to consume.

Tradition is the family who had only moments to react when their house caught fire. Leaving behind trivial things such as money, expensive furniture and jewelry, they sprang into action and went for the precious momentous that could not be replaced. The father loaded his arms with home videos of birthdays, Christmases and special occasions while the mother clutched as many family picture albums as she could get her arms around. When they met each other on the front lawn holding their prized possessions, they suddenly realized they had forgotten the children. Tradition clings to the memories and forgets the very heart of those memories.

It happens subtly and over time. Tradition usually starts out on the side of truth. Many times it is even in conjunction with truth, but as time goes by, it gradually begins to latch onto truth and suck the very life out of it. Sometimes it can disguise itself as the very truth it is choking to death and to the casual onlooker, it's next to impossible to tell where tradition begins and truth ends. After generations of this evolution, hearts become more connected to tradition than truth because the lines have been grayed. Tradition ultimately gives people an excuse to throw out their responsibility to think things through to the end. It's no longer about truth anymore. Tradition causes us to set a belief in stone before we find out one way or another. The necessity and responsibility to "find out" is laid aside and never recovered.

Arguing against tradition is useless. Tradition does not need Bible verses to back it up. It doesn't need logical thinking or a scrap of evidence in order for it to stand tall and mighty. It doesn't even require common sense. Tradition lives entirely on its own and many times has no rhyme or reason. The answer as to why certain traditions are the way they are is almost always, "BECAUSE." This is all tradition needs to tell you. Tradition is lifted and placed on a throne as high as God Himself in the minds of most Christians. To even question it, is outright blasphemy. In fact, for millions of people, tradition IS God. Their entire religious experience is based on tradition alone.

We decorate the Thanksgiving turkey with green leaf lettuce. Don't you dare try to pass off parsley sprigs in the place of green leaf! Turkeys get green leaf, period. If you use anything else, it's not Thanksgiving. If you ask why we can't use parsley, the only answer you'll get is, "Because that's the way it is." Is parsley prettier? NO-not with turkey! Would it change the taste of the turkey? We'll never know because we're not going to use parsley instead of green leaf. You just don't do that! You decorate it with green leaf - set it on the far end of the table - then dad carves it as mom passes him the plates. Why can't mom carve it? BECAUSE! Why can't we carve it in the kitchen and bring it out already carved? Because that's not the way it's done.

Tradition is what takes a wonderful holiday like Thanksgiving and gives it an entirely different name to thousands of Americans. It is no longer referred to with the name that describes its purpose (thankfulness), but it's given a new name, defined by tradition, "Turkey Day." Slowly but surely, tradition methodically swallows everything in its path.

This is exactly what has happened with Christianity. A story of how God desires intimacy with people so much that He was willing to die in order to make it happen, has been grossly reduced to one simple title that shows clearly what WE really care about; "Getting Saved." Tradition has become the python that has strangled all truth in exchange for a "get-out-of-hell-free card." Our religion now resembles a 50-foot-long snake with countless lumps and humps in its belly. Those lumps get smaller and smaller over time and eventually we're left with nothing but the snake of tradition.

I think if most Christians were shown a true picture of how much of their religion is truth and how much is tradition, they would astonished. Most people reading this probably think they have a pretty clear idea of the difference, but in my experience, I've found that we usually know about 30%. If I were to list the number of MAIN Christian beliefs that were purely tradition, you would most likely think I was off my rocker. Very little of what we practice today in Christianity is based on truth. In fact, almost every single thing that is said and done in modern-day Church services is wholly tradition.

Arguing with someone who is defending tradition is next to impossible. The debate literally goes no where. You can bring up Bible verses that directly contradict that tradition and the person won't see or hear a word. What is worse, they will actually hear the words of that verse differently than what they truly are. If tradition says that the sky is green and the Bible says the sky is blue, the person reading it will literally hear the word "green" when "blue" is read. Tradition causes people to hear only what it permits them to hear. In the fact of outright contradiction, the person will comprehend only what they've been taught to believe.

A great example of the mind-bending power of tradition is when I posted the article, "The Conviction of the Holy Spirit." In this particular piece, I said that the Holy Spirit does not convict Christians of their sin. He convicts the world of sin so that they'll know they need a Savior, but He convicts Christians of righteousness. As I'm sure you know; this is in direct contradiction to what most of us have grown up hearing. In the comment section, a man who routinely comes to the site for the sole purpose of proving me wrong, posted a Bible verse that in his mind was in direct contradiction to my statement. Amazingly, the verse he quoted literally said word for word what I had written in the article. In his mind, however, he read the verse and saw the opposite of what it actually said. He was only capable of seeing what he had grown up hearing. I cannot tell you how many times people have furiously fought something I've said by machine-gunning a verse to me that confirmed the very thing I said.

I came from a denomination that required me to sign a piece of paper stating that I would not drink any form of alcohol as long as I was a Pastor with them. They have literally made it impossible for Jesus Christ Himself to become a Pastor in their denomination. Amazing! When I brought up the fact that Jesus drank wine, their response was, "No, He didn't." You just can't argue with that. I wouldn't even know where to start. Tradition now forces many Christians to drink grape juice during communion and not wine because drinking wine is a sin. Try and wrap your mind around that one!

A friend of mine recently told me of how one of her closest friends and supporters just pulled out of her ministry because my friend wasn't attending a local Church and paying tithe. Her friend basically said, "I see the fruit of love in your life and I see that women who encounter you and your ministry are seriously blessed, but I can't get past the fact that you're not doing those two things and so I have to stop supporting you." Amazingly, this woman was able to identify the fruit in my friends' life and regardless of what she saw; she couldn't get past her traditions.

When Jesus confronted the Pharisees with the words, "But for the sake of your tradition," this was precisely the spirit He was talking about. It's a spirit where tradition is given precedence over truth. Tradition is a way to make the head believe it's doing a heart thing. It actually feels warm in the heart when it's followed and respected and for just a moment we actually forget that it's nothing more than a religious habit. The Pharisees had become like many of us today. They had become so steeped in tradition that their heart-compass became useless and ineffective. Everything they did was for the sake of their tradition. It was in an effort to serve, uphold, magnify, respect, revere, and proclaim their tradition.

I think we overlook the power of religious tradition. God understood this power when He first covenanted with the Israelites. The Holy Spirit could not dwell directly inside of these people, so God had to submerge them with another kind of power that would hold them over until man's sins were atoned. That secondary-power was tradition. He basically gave them traditions to follow for every area of their lives. The Old Testament is overflowing with hundreds of different traditions. There is something about the human spirit that becomes strangely enamored with the concept of tradition. It's extremely hard to put down and walk away from. This is why most of American Christianity is still steeped in Old Testament thinking. We just don't want to let go of that euphoric sense of spirituality that following a tradition gives us.

Oddly enough, only the people who were willing to release their death-grip on tradition were able to recognize Christ and ultimately receive salvation. I have found the same to be true today. Knowing truth comes by letting go of tradition for tradition's sake. Tradition is the one thing that I see standing in the way of truth in the lives of millions of Christians. You simply cannot put new wine into old wineskins. If you do, the skins will burn and you will lose both the wine and the wineskins. New wine must be put into new wineskins, and no one after having the old wants the new, for he says, "The old is better."