Hi friends. I'm Annie F. Downs. Let's read the Gospels. The Gospels are the first four books of the New Testament in the Bible, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. These are the stories of Jesus Christ's life on earth, the friendships, the parables, the sacrifices, the meals, the miracles. So here's how this works. We're going to read all four books in 30 days. We've worked our way through John, Luke, Mark, and we are halfway through Matthew.

So I'm going to read three chapters to you today. You can listen or read along in your own Bible. You can watch on YouTube however you want, and we will pray at the end, and that's it.

So today is day 26, and I'll be reading Matthew chapters 15 through 17 from the new living translation.

And we are on page 169 of the Let's Read the Gospels guided journal.

Matthew 15.

Some Pharisees and teachers of religious law now arrived from Jerusalem to see Jesus.

They asked him, why do your disciples disobey our age-old tradition?

For they ignore our tradition of ceremonial hand-washing before they eat.

Jesus replied, and why do you, by your traditions, violate the direct commandments of God?

For instance, God says,

honor your father and mother, and anyone who speaks disrespectfully of father or mother must be put to

death. But you say it is all right for people to say to their parents, sorry, I can't help you,

for I have vowed to give to God what I would have given to you. In this way, you say, they don't

need to honor their parents. And so you

cancel the word of God for the sake of your own tradition. You hypocrites, Isaiah was right when he

prophesied about you. He wrote, these people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.

Their worship is a farce, for they teach man-made ideas as commands from God. Then Jesus called to the

crowd to come in here, listen, he said,

and try to understand. It's not what goes into your mouth that defiles you. You are defiled by the

words that come out of your mouth. Then the disciples came to him and asked, do you rise you

offended the Pharisees by what you just said? Jesus replied every plant not planted by my heavenly father will be uprooted.

So ignore them. They are blind guides leading the blind, and if one blind person guides another,

...