Well, hello, Bible scholars.

It's day 10 on our 40-day tour through the Gospel of John.

Let's open our Bibles to John 5.

We're going to cover the first 15 verses of John 5 today on this episode of the Pastor Mike Drop podcast.

There's a great Broadway musical called Fiddler on the Roof, and one of the most memorable songs from that musical is called Tradition.

You can Google it later and play it, and you'll get a sense for it.

It doesn't take long to get a sense for it because it repeats the same lyric over and over and over again,

tradition, tradition, tradition.

And it glorifies it as something that brings order to chaos

and provides a foundation, a religious foundation,

upon which to order our lives in our community.

Religious tradition can be like that.

It can be a great blessing. It can be a great gift. It's certainly been a blessing and a gift in my

life. But the Bible reminds us, traditions can also get in the way of our relationship with Jesus Christ.

Here at Hope, we have a core value. We have five core values. One of those is we worship God, not tradition.

And we say where tradition helps foster our relationship with Jesus Christ, we embrace it.

But where tradition serves as a barrier between people and God, then we seek to set that aside.

Because that relationship is more important than the religious heritage than

our tradition. Traditions are important and traditions are a big part of our Bible reading for today,

but they're not more important than that relationship we have with Jesus Christ. Here in the

beginning of John chapter 5, there's a man who's sick and he hasn't been able to walk.

He's been sick for 38 years, it says in verse 5.

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