Tradition and Truth

A good friend of mine (Cory) forwarded me a link to this silly skit called “World vs. Christian.” It is a great take-off of the Mac vs. PC commercials. It pokes a bit of fun at all the silly issue of how one should dress for Church. As a guy whose donned everything from a 3-piece to flip-flops on Sunday I had to laugh.

For me it raises a good point about a much bigger issue that we as the church should deal with… that is the issue of our traditions. Two thoughts jump out at me and here they are in order:

We should value our traditions: Tradition is valuable. I see it as the cultural expression of timeless Christian truth that is passed down from generation-to-generation. And although it is culturally influenced it is valuable and even commanded in Scripture (Deut 6:7; 1 Tim 5:2; Titus 2:3-4). Tradition is how we tell the next generation what is important and how we lived it out in our generation. So we should know our history and the traditions they formed and value them.

We should evaluate our traditions: Since tradition does not equal Bible it is open for evaluation. A seminary professor of mine once said, “No generation has ever gotten church right.” That has freed me up to see that each generation has the freedom to express timeless, Biblical truth in a way that is understandable in their day. And for this reason we must evaluate tradition… so that we don’t value it more than God’s Word (Mark 7:8) or turn people away from Christ because of it (Acts 15:19).