Tag Archives: Restriction

Holiness, Heart, & Hearth

December 23, 2025 Tom Vander Well Leave a comment

…then exchange your tithe for silver, and take the silver with you and go to the place the Lord your God will choose. Use the silver to buy whatever you like: cattle, sheep, wine or other fermented drink, or anything you wish. Then you and your household shall eat there in the presence of the Lord your God and rejoice.
Deuteronomy 14:25-26 (NIV)

Year-end approaches. For Wendy and me, the already busy holidays are layered with even more good things. Wendy’s birthday on the 21st and our wedding anniversary on New Year’s Eve means the three biggest gift giving events of the year for my wife all happen in 10 days. Believe me, I’ve learned to think ahead. And there’s more than just the holidays.

Year-end also brings decisions that have to be made in the area of our business and personal finances. Giving, savings, and future planning must all be discussed and decided in meetings with various professionals who assist with those things. The dizzying world of taxes and finance produces endless questions. Navigating our labyrinthine tax code feels less like stewardship and more like trial by minotaur. Ugh! Underneath the Spirit and meaning of Christmas and New Years there remains the grind and realities of how life is managed day-to-day.

Speaking of finances and how life is managed, Wendy and I are looking forward our annual tradition of watching Guy Pearce’s dark and intense portrayal of Scrooge in FX’s version of A Christmas Carol. I highly recommend you put it at the top of your Christmas movie watch list. It cuts like a knife to the heart of the matter. What do matters of daily life, personal finance, and relationship look like when the Message and Spirit of what God did at Christmas fail to penetrate the human heart?

That same question lies at the heart of today’s chapter. God through Moses reminds his children and grandchildren that their identity as God’s treasured people is made visible in how they live, what they do with their appetites, how they manage their finances, their generosity, and how they do community each day, each season, each year.

Today’s chapter also has an interesting connection to Jesus’ Story. Moses tells his people that someday, when there is a permanent Temple established it may be that it will be far away from where they live. Transporting all of their stored up tithes and offerings may not be practical. So, there was a provision to sell those tithes and offerings for silver. They could then bring the silver (easy to carry with you) to the Temple. There the silver could be used to buy what you needed for your prescribed offerings and sacrifices.

By Jesus day, the religious establishment had discovered in Moses’ rather simple financial principle a money making scheme. Poor Hebrew pilgrims making the long journey to the Temple did bring with them silver to buy what was needed for their offerings and sacrifices. The Temple established its own currency which the establishment demanded for the purchase of offerings and sacrificial animals. The local currency the pilgrims brought would need to be exchanged. With that exchange came fees and taxes and an entire industry of moneychangers. Jesus approached the Temple—meant to be a place of community, celebration, generosity, and feasting—only to find it had become a spiritual subsidiary of Scrooge and Marley, Inc.

[Cue: Jesus picks up a whip He sees lying on the ground next to the cattle pen.]

Today’s chapter is easily read as simple prescriptive rules regarding diet and religious offerings. But the directives were intended to point to matters of heart and Spirit. God through Moses is teaching his toddler nation that holiness is anchored in restraint.

Desire without boundaries becomes chaos; desire with limits becomes intimacy.

Clean and unclean are not moral categories but symbolic ones—teaching God’s people to pause, to choose, to remember God even in the most ordinary act: eating. The tithe is especially striking: food given to God is not burned, but eaten—by people—with God present. Holiness tastes like wine, bread, and belonging. God is saying “You don’t drift into holiness. You practice it daily, with fork and cup.“

Tent to Temple to Table.

Which, in the quiet, brings me back to Christmas…and anniversary…and New Year’s…and year-end decisions of business and finance. Today’s chapter whispers to me of God’s heart: generous, selfless, and servant-hearted. From the beginning God’s prescription for Life flowed from His Spirit of intimacy, community, and generosity in the simple acts of gathering, celebrating, and eating.

In the coming days as Wendy and I gather with loved ones, as we watch A Christmas Carol, as we finalize business matters, I pray that it is that Spirit that rules my heart.

I have no need for the ghosts of Past, Present, and Future to awaken me in the wee hours.

God bless us, every one.

If you know anyone who might be encouraged by today’s post, please share.

Promotional graphic for Tom Vander Well's Wayfarer blog and podcast, featuring icons of various podcast platforms with a photo of Tom Vander Well. — These chapter-a-day blog posts are also available via podcast on all major podcast platforms including Apple, Google, and Spotify! Simply go to your podcast platform and search for “Wayfarer Tom Vander Well.” If it’s not on your platform, please let me know!

Chapter-a-Day

Keeping it to Myself; Holding it Together

March 4, 2019 Tom Vander Well 1 Comment

For the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking, but of righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.
Romans 14:17 (NIV)

Yesterday Wendy and I were with our local gathering of Jesus’ followers and I met young ladies who were from Honduras, Nigeria, and Afghanistan. I was told that the first time my young sister from Afghanistan joined us I happened to give the message that day, and she was relatively new to living here in the States. At some point during the message I began to cry (that happens quite frequently, I’m afraid). She, however, was taken aback. Culturally, men in Afghanistan do not cry, especially in public. She laughed about it now, and the moment became an opportunity for her to learn and grow on a number of different levels. Very cool.

Along my journey I have encountered people from all manner of cultural, religious, and denominational backgrounds. People have all sorts of things that are important to them religiously, spiritually, or culturally from things you eat (or don’t), things you wear (or don’t), and certain days that are special (or not). We’re not talking here about matters of civil law or basic morality. This conversation is about preferences, practices, customs and traditions that are not the command of Christ, though they may hold some special spiritual significance to a particular individual or a particular group of individuals.

As Paul is writing to the followers of Jesus in Rome, he is aware that among all the fledgling local gatherings of believers there are very diverse cross-sections of humanity. Not just Jews and Gentiles, but people from different nations, tribes, cultural backgrounds, and socio-economic positions. This would especially have been true in Rome which was the cosmopolitan epicenter of the western world at the time. The Jesus Movement was breaking down barriers between people for the first time history and for the first time people were interacting with one another, eating together, worshipping together, and speaking to one another as equals on a regular basis. Of course this is going to create all sorts of minor clashes between people from diverse cultural, religious, social and economic backgrounds.

In today’s chapter Paul gives some very clear teaching on these various and sundry differences.

First, he points out that what a person eats and drinks (or doesn’t) and what days are of special spiritual significance (or not) are really of no concern to God but are merely concerns of personal, individual conscience. This, in and of itself, might be a huge eye-opener if my ego has convinced me that I am the universal spiritual template and standard by which all other followers of Jesus should abide by and be judged. Each individual, Paul instructs, should worry only about herself/himself and her/his own behavior in accordance with her/his own conscience before God.

Second, Paul explains that because many different believers have very different matters of conscience on these matters there is no binary “right” and “wrong” in these matters except within my own heart and mind. These things are a private matter between me and God.

That being said and established, Paul urges me to take off my Junior Holy Spirit badge and stop playing spiritual judge, jury, and executioner applying my personal conscience before God onto others who have very different consciences before the same God. “Worry about yourself,” Paul is saying, “and let God worry about others.”

Finally, Paul exhorts me to follow the example of Christ and put others and their personal consciences above my own right to exercise my very different conscience. If I know that a person holds that Sabbath is sacred, I’m not going to ask her/him to come over and help me move my couch that day. If I know that another person finds alcohol to be evil and prohibitive, I’m not going to make an appointment to meet that person at the local pub and I’m going to abstain from drinking in her/his presence.

And, if a sister finds that a man crying in public is wrong, well…I’ll try to hold it together!

Have a great week, my friend!

Chapter-a-Day

(No Need to) “Wait for It”

January 30, 2019 Tom Vander Well Leave a comment

For [God] says,

“In the time of my favor I heard you,
and in the day of salvation I helped you.”

I tell you, now is the time of God’s favor, now is the day of salvation.
2 Corinthians 6:2 (NIV)

I hate waiting. I especially abhor needless and unnecessary waiting.

I confess. I’m convinced this particular disdain and impatience is rooted in being the youngest of four. Growing up I spent years watching my older siblings get to do things before I did. In most cases I can look back from a place of maturity and understand requisite age and size restrictions. Still, there were times when I rightfully argued that capability should have outweighed arbitrary age limits for certain activities. I’m sure of it. At least, that’s the whine of my inner child.

It never ceases to amaze me just how much our childhoods continue to subconsciously affect us in our adult years. Just this past year Wendy came to a sudden revelation about some inner thoughts she had, and their subsequent emotional reactions they created within. She realized that her thoughts weren’t actually her thoughts, but the voice of her mother playing on an endless loop in her brain. Fascinating.

I digress. Back to waiting.

As our local gathering of Jesus followers has been journeying through the book of Acts this year I have been reminded of two major paradigm shifts that happened when God moved humanity from the religious legalism of the Judaic system to the outpouring of Holy Spirit in the first century.

The first paradigm shift was the decentralization of power. Gone was a rigid system in which a human high priest and other humans, simply on the basis of their heredity, have spiritual power and irrevocable spiritual authority over everyone else. By the middle of the story of Acts we’re reading about common, everyday individuals we’ve never heard of, three or four social circles away from the twelve apostles, who God is using to move the Great Story forward. “Wait a minute. Who is this lady, Tabitha? Who is she and where did she come from?”

The second paradigm shift is the lifting of restrictions to experience salvation through Christ and participate fully in the organism Paul refers to as “the body of Christ.” Any and all who choose to follow Jesus have immediate and full spiritual access to all that God has to offer regardless of background, previous record, heredity, socio-economic status, race, gender, politics, education, or age. Any and all who follow Christ receive the indwelling of Holy Spirit, spiritual gifts, and a calling to use those gifts, in love, for Jesus’ good will and purpose.

This is a radical, transformative spiritual shift (that human organizations and institutions have continually found ways to reverse for two millennia).

In today’s chapter Paul quotes a verse from Isaiah 49. It’s a great messianic prophecy. I get why it would have been one of Paul’s favorite references. All of Paul’s readers who were raised in Judaism would have been raised waiting for the Messiah. It had been 400 years since the last prophet, Malachi, and since then they’d been waiting for what God was going to do. Paul writes to those in Corinth that there is no longer any need to wait for God. All that God has to offer is immediately available to anyone, anywhere, in this very moment.

In the quiet this morning I’m thinking about my level of patience. I’ve gotten better at waiting along my journey. “Patience” is a fruit of the Spirit that gets developed over time, and I can see how it has developed in me along the way. I’ve also come to embrace that while all that God has to offer is immediately available, this is still a journey. There’s still a story being revealed. I still have to wait for some things to be fully revealed and realized in this finite, time-laden existence. I’m reminded, once again, of the words of the wise Teacher of Ecclesiastes:

There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under the heavens:

    a time to be born and a time to die,
    a time to plant and a time to uproot,
    a time to kill and a time to heal,
    a time to tear down and a time to build,
    a time to weep and a time to laugh,
    a time to mourn and a time to dance,
    a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
    a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
    a time to search and a time to give up,
    a time to keep and a time to throw away,
    a time to tear and a time to mend,
    a time to be silent and a time to speak,
    a time to love and a time to hate,
    a time for war and a time for peace.