Where Is True Defilement? Part I Matthew 15:10-20

In my early to mid-twenties, I was entrenched in the running community. I was a runner myself who sold running shoes and also coached. After being in this community for a while, it occurred to me that there was a value system that was common in this fitness community.

Fit people tended to look down on those who were not workout enthusiasts. Many people in the running community held fitness as a very high value. Essentially, to take care of your body was to be a good person.

This was where the brunt of the attention was paid for this group. But there was something missing, something very big missing, and that is God was missing. People did not realize they were sinners in great need of the only Savior, Jesus Christ.

They did not realize that following Jesus is the only way to true virtue. While I worked in this industry of selling shoes, we had sales meetings twice a year. I got to travel to places like Seattle, Coeur d 'Alene, Idaho, Austin, Texas.

It was kind of neat to see different places, but I always dreaded going to these meetings because I knew that I was going to be confronted with misplaced values. As a Christian, I didn't like this, of course.

They cared a lot about fitness. They cared a lot about promoting an active lifestyle, but they cared nothing about what truly mattered. I have joked, and this is a sobering joke, if a rapture were to have happened, no one would have known it because it was a godless environment.

At these meetings, drinking excess alcohol was accepted. Filthy language was accepted. Crude joking was accepted. Objectifying women was accepted. But as long as you take care of your body and you're not a filthy slob, who cares about morality?

Now, this was not everyone, but the majority lived this way. Now, it is true that taking care of your body is a good thing. The Bible tells us this. 1 Timothy 4 says, While bodily training is of some value, some value, godliness is of value in every way, as it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come.

Scripture strikes the right balance. Take care of your body, yes, but don't make that your main priority. You won't live forever. Your main priority should be trusting in the One and living for the One who gives you eternal life.

It is not appearance that makes one moral. It is not your weight that makes you moral. It is not your fitness level that makes you moral. It is not what you eat that makes you moral. There is some value to these things, yes, but they must be put in their proper place.

We must understand that it is your relationship with God through His Son, Jesus Christ. This is what makes you righteous. Now, Jesus, during His ministry, He ran into this experience. And He hit this head-on with the Jewish leaders who had misplaced priorities.

They equated certain external rituals with morality, while forgetting about where true morality is found. As we continue our sermon series in Matthew this morning, I encourage you to turn in a Bible with me to Matthew 15.

We'll be looking at verses 10 -20. And if you're using one of those red Bibles, it's on pages 975 and 976. This sermon is titled, Where is True Defilement? And here's our big idea. Purify your heart to truly please God.

And I'm going to begin by reading the text. Matthew 15, verses 10 -20. And He called the people to Him and said to them, Hear and understand. It is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but what comes out of the mouth.

This defiles a person. Then the disciples came and said to Him, Do you know that the Pharisees were offended when they heard this saying? He answered, Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be rooted up.

Let them alone. They are blind guides. And if the blind lead the blind, both will fall into a pit. But Peter said to Him, Explain the parable to us. And He said, Are you also still without understanding?

Do you not see that what goes into the mouth passes into the stomach and is expelled? But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a person. For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander.

These are what defile a person. But to eat with unwashed hands does not defile anyone. Okay, here's our big idea once again. Purify your heart to truly please God. And before we dig into this text, let me give you a little recap of where we were one week ago.

We looked at the first nine verses of this chapter, and in that passage, Jesus' disciples were confronted by the Jewish leaders who were troubled that the disciples didn't wash their hands before they ate.

But then Jesus stepped into the conversation and told them that they were hypocrites. They cared about this man-made ritual and also made another law that made them not responsible to take care of their parents, thus violating the fifth commandment of honoring their father and mother.

What this passage taught us is that we are to flee from the darkness of man-made religion, man-made tradition, which was a problem then and it's a problem now. We please Jesus by pursuing true religion, not false religion invented by man.

Now once again, this leads us to our text. And our text today that we've already read is very related to the previous text as Jesus piggybacks on this conversation with the Pharisees to stress an important teaching.

So our big idea is purify your hearts to truly please God. And there are two directions how that we will see. Now the first point is going to be today, and the next point is going to be next Sunday. This is quite a long sermon, so I figured let's break this up into two Sundays.

But here's the first direction how that we are going to look at today. By fleeing from the evil within that leads to sinful patterns. Fleeing from the evil within that leads to sinful patterns. We'll see this in verses 10 -11 and verses 15 -20.

After the previous episode, Jesus used this as an opportunity to expand on the conversation that He just had with the scribes and Pharisees, as verse 10 says,. And He called the people to Him.

And said to them,.

Hear and understand. As we saw, the Pharisees and scribes were troubled that the disciples did not keep the man-made tradition of washing their hands before their meal. They thought that not keeping this tradition defiles a person.

What Jesus does is call the crowd nearby who overheard this conversation that Jesus had with the scribes and Pharisees. And He used this as an opportunity to make a very important point about what true godliness is and what it is not.

What Jesus tells the crowd at the end of verse 11 is to hear and understand. And He of course says this to tell them, Please listen closely to what I am telling you. In verse 11, this is the important truth that Jesus tells them.

He says, It is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but what comes out of the mouth. This defiles a person. What He makes clear is that it is not what goes in, but what comes out that determines one's character and one's righteousness.

Remember last week what we saw? The Pharisees taught that if the disciples did not wash their hands, then the food that they ate was unclean. This defiled them and would have been considered unclean. But once again, as I mentioned a week ago, all of the ceremonial laws in the Old Testament were intended to point ahead to greater realities.

And those realities are Christ and other spiritual truths. They were never meant to be permanent. Apart from Christ and the deeper truths, these ceremonies are meaningless. To this day, Jews practice lots of ceremonies, lots of rituals.

They celebrate certain festivals throughout the year. But what they don't realize in their blindness is that they have missed the whole point. These ceremonies were put in place temporarily to point ahead to Christ.

In our text, Jesus tells us what they pointed ahead to. In the Old Testament, there were certain things that the priests and all the Israelites had to do in order to remain clean. All of the laws in the Old Testament that designated cleanliness and uncleanness pointed ahead to the spiritual reality of true cleanness and true uncleanness.

This is the point that Jesus makes here. In verse 11, He highlights that external rituals do not determine what makes one clean and unclean. It goes so much deeper than that. Now as I mentioned, we are going to look at verses 12 -14 in our next point, which will be next Sunday.

So let's move our eyes down to verse 15. And let's look at what Peter's response was to Jesus in verse 15. He says to Him, Explain the parable to us. So Jesus says what goes into the mouth doesn't defile a person, but what comes out.

And Peter's a little confused by this. Now Peter asked Jesus about this parable. Now a parable, as we have seen in Matthew, is a spiritual truth communicated through a story. But Jesus did not tell a story, so this is not really a parable.

But what Peter is getting at here is interesting. We have to know the background of Peter to understand this. Peter came very slowly to understand what the ceremonial laws were all about. He understands what Jesus said earlier in Matthew 12 verses 34 and 35 that these outward rituals don't really do anything, but it's what comes out that really matters.

What's inside of you that matters. But in particular here, Peter is concerned about the Old Testament dietary laws. There were certain foods that were considered clean and certain foods that were considered unclean.

And at this point, Peter believed that certain foods could truly defile a person. Hence why he is so concerned by Jesus downplaying this right here. Peter's trouble with understanding this went on further than this.

After Jesus was off the scene and ascended to heaven. In the book of Acts, Peter had a vision.

In the vision,.

God tells him,.

Eat.

Kill and eat this unclean food that was forbidden in the Old Testament. God is telling him, it's okay to do that. And the reason this vision happened is because Peter was in that place where he thought these dietary laws had value and that they still had to keep them.

But God told him,.

Move on.

Once again, these were pictures that pointed ahead to spiritual realities in Christ. They pointed ahead to the reality that there is true cleanness and true uncleanness. And what goes into the mouth is not what determines that.

But Peter still thought the pictures themselves were important. So that's why he asked the question, I don't understand this. Why are you downplaying these ceremonies? Don't they matter? Well, here's what Jesus says here.

Very bluntly, in verse 16,. Are you also still without understanding? Right? At this point, Jesus is surprised that Peter doesn't yet fully understand this. Jesus has already explained the importance of the heart.

And by this point, Peter should have understood that this is where the important focus must be. In Matthew 12, verses 34 and 35, Jesus already said, For out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks.

The good person, out of his good treasure, brings forth good. And the evil person, out of his evil treasure, brings forth evil. Only one of these made someone unclean and that is what Peter did not understand at this point.

At the end of the day,.

Ceremonies,.

Whether prescribed by God in the Old Testament.

Or man-made,.

Do not matter. They don't have any intrinsic value.

To them.

Now, in the Old Testament, they had to obey these.

And they sinned.

By not listening to God. God's telling them, you need to do this. So their sin would have been saying, nope, not going to do it. That was sinful. But these laws themselves don't have any intrinsic value to them.

Like certain animals are clean, certain animals are unclean. God was just communicating morality. True morality comes from the heart, not from what goes in, not from these rituals, not from these ceremonies.

So if ceremonies don't matter, what is the important thing that needs to be focused on? And Jesus told us this in verse 11. He says it's what comes out of the mouth that matters. In verse 17, Jesus explains how food works and how we need to make an important distinction between what goes into the mouth and what comes out of the mouth.

This is what He says in verse 17. Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth passes into the stomach and is expelled? The food goes into the mouth and the nutrients go where they are supposed to go and the rest is expelled.

And we don't need to say any more on that, right? That's not one of those verses that you really spend a lot of time on. But food does not have inherent ethics to it. You eat this food, you are holy. You eat this food, you are sinful.

Food is food. Now some is healthier for you than others, but eating a cake every once in a while is not sinful. Food is not inherently sinful, but it only becomes sinful when one values food as an idol.

Food is a great gift from God, but just like anything else, it can turn into a god. A false god. But even as I say that, eating certain foods does not defile a person. One's diet does not decide that one is righteous and another unrighteous, even though there may be wisdom to keep an eye on your diet.

There's a balance here. You may live longer the better you eat, but one can eat right all the time and be a rotten person. Pun intended. A rotten person. But Jesus explains in verse 18 where the focus needs to be.

He says, what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a person. And this echoes what Jesus said earlier in Matthew 12 .34, For out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks.

What is the heart? We need to ask this question, right? What is the heart? He's not talking about this organ in the body that pumps blood throughout the body, right? The heart, according to Jesus, and according to the writers of Scripture, is the deepest part of who you are.

We know people from their words and actions, but what is under words and actions is what goes on in the heart. Once again, as Jesus said, out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks. It is from the heart that we speak and act and think.

Another word for the heart is our desires. And we desire what makes us happy. Isn't that interesting? You do what you do because you want what you want. You feel what you feel because you want what you want.

We sin to get what we want, and we sin when we don't get what we want. A kid gets a toy, or they don't get a toy.

What do they do?

They whine. They didn't get what they wanted. They really want a toy, and they might sin to get that toy. One time we were at Walmart, and the lady was just throwing things, toys, on the cart without even asking us.

And we had to take those off. But kids do things all the time like that, and adults do things all the time.

Right?

We sin to get what we want. And by the way,.

What I said there,.

That quote is not from me. It's from someone else. In fact, that's my old pastor that shared that with me. You do what you do because you want what you want. So true. Our life story is told based on our desires.

Right?

The person who hunts and fishes every Sunday morning, we know what their desire is. What makes them happy? Hunting and fishing.

Right?

If we desire to glorify God, that will be shown. If we desire to glorify self, that also will be shown. At the bottom is the desires. Whatever we say, what we do, and what we think follows our desires.

This is the defilement that matters. God goes right down to the bottom. Right down to the depths. He says this is what I care about. Not this external stuff. Not some man-made ritualistic law that the Pharisees and scribes impose on the Jewish population.

God does not care about dead external rituals. He cares about a heart that desires Him above all else. And Jesus wants this crowd to know this, and He wants each of us to know this as well. God is not pleased with external works.

Whenever we do something, to just check it off the list. God is not pleased with this. When we pray, to check it off the list. When we read our Bibles, to check it off the list. When we go to church, to check it off the list.

When we give money to the offering, to check it off the list. When we help someone in need, to check it off the list. Everything that we do, Jesus calls for our hearts to be engaged. Colossians 3 .23 says, whatever you do, work heartily as for the Lord and not for men.

In Matthew 22, verses 36 -40, Jesus said, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. God wants us to love Him with everything that we have.

A heart that is engaged is a person who is full of life. It's a person who pleases God. God uses people who are engaged with their hearts. Earlier we prayed for the missionaries and Brian Stout is one of the missionaries that we prayed for.

I'm amazed by him. Some of you have gotten to know him a little bit. But everywhere he goes, he's a lightning bolt. I remember at my old church, we were going through a tough season, but Brian was going to come home from furlough and we were thinking, he's going to help us.

We need a shot in the arm, right? And he did. He always did when he came home. He's a man full of life because his heart is engaged with God. You can't have a conversation with Brian without eventually talking about Christ a few minutes into the conversation.

We know where his heart is. We know where his desires are. It's obvious. He reads the Word regularly. He prays regularly. He shares the Gospel more than any person I've ever known. If he meets you, you will hear the Gospel.

He desires to serve others. And one can see by looking at Brian's life that this is a man who has a pure heart as God is transforming him one degree of glory to the next, as the Scripture says. A life like that is the opposite of one who is focused on rituals, focused on duties, bored with God, and loving something else.

Our life should not be full of obligation, doing something just because we have to. But rather, everything we do, we do because we want to. We love God. We enjoy following Him. So we invest our lives in His work.

And if we feel like, Lord, I'm not enjoying the things I should be enjoying, we should pray, Lord, help me to have that joy that should be there. He will answer that prayer. We just need to go to Him.

We want to be people who we pray because we want to. We read the Bible because we want to. We go to church because we want to. We give to the offering because we want to. We pursue deeper friendships with Christians because we want to.

We help someone in need because we want to. We share the Gospel with our neighbor or a co-worker or someone like that because we want to. We think godly thoughts and turn from wicked thoughts because our thought life is important to us because we want to please God.

That is our desire. This is what makes a person pure. Not external duties. Yet there are churches out there, and I put them in quotations. Churches. This is all they do. It's all about the external. It's all about ritual.

As if there is somehow some spirituality in that. We can fall into that trap as well.

In our own lives.

Doing things out of obligation. But a life worth living is one where the Spirit transforms the heart. As the Spirit transforms our lives, we completely change. My parents are here today and they can tell you that Seth from high school is dead.

He's gone. Obviously, we can have sins. Sin can come back into our lives. We can go back to things that we were once engulfed in.

But God changed me.

And that's your experience too in your life for many of you. He's changed you. What we once loved we don't love anymore and new desires grow. Our life becomes a life where our greatest aim is to please God and we find our greatest joy in doing this.

So from our heart can come pure things as God works. And this is the work that God loves to do. And He does it in the one who yields to Him. He does it in the one who surrenders to Him. He rules your life now.

Not you. The one who rules his life and goes his or her own way will destroy him or herself. That's what the Bible teaches. The wide path that leads to destruction. That's the person who rules his own life.

That's where it's going to end. But when God rules your life, it's the opposite. It's a life of blessing. But it's hard to get to that point because we have to die to ourselves before we can get there.

But anyone who does not belong to Christ, this will not be the case. He doesn't rule your life if you don't belong to Christ.

You do.

And Jesus describes what this life looks like. Verse 19, Out of the heart come evil thoughts,.

Murder,.

Adultery, sexual immorality, which is fornication,.

Theft,.

False witness,.

Slander.

That marks the unregenerate heart. This is what people are apart from Christ. People might say,.

Well, I've never murdered anybody.

Have you ever hated someone? That's heart murder. I've never had sexual relations with someone other than my spouse. Well, have you lusted after someone else? That's heart adultery. Slander certainly is accepted in many places.

Evil thoughts. What they say is that if we really knew what people were thinking, we wouldn't like anyone, right? Isn't that the truth? And yet we get fooled by people, thinking, oh, this person must be just this great person.

If you knew their thoughts, you wouldn't think that. We all need a Savior. We all need Jesus Christ. An unregenerate sinner has only wicked thoughts. And you might say, don't unbelievers do good things?

Well, yeah, they do. They help at soup kitchens. They help the crippled across the road. They do things like that. But anything not done for the glory of God is still sinful. As Romans 8 .8 says, those who are in the flesh, those who are unbelievers, cannot please God.

Apparent good works by the unbeliever are done from selfish motivation. Isaiah 64 .6 says that the righteous works of an unbeliever are as a polluted garment. The King James says, filthy rags. They don't do anything.

God is not pleased. I remember visiting the website of a false teacher and he had a non-profit to help those in need. I'm thinking, well, just go party. Don't waste your time. If you've chosen this path to hell, don't help the poor along the way.

It doesn't make any sense, right? His works are filthy rags. But what Jesus describes in verse 19 are the more serious sins. He describes murder, adultery, sexual immorality. He describes theft, false witness, and slander.

All of this starts in the heart. The desires are way off base. They're not what God created humans to be. God created humans to have desires that please Him. But these sinful desires that lead to sinful lives greatly displease Him.

But people have these desires because what makes them happy is not God,.

But sin.

Nobody sins because a gun is placed to one's head. People sin because they want to. And we know this from our own struggle against sin. We do what we do because we want what we want. Do you wonder why sexual sin abounds in our society?

People desire pleasure. But they don't want to enjoy physical intimacy the way God designed it to be between one man and one woman in marriage. This leads to blessing. Any other way, it leads to pain.

And the consequences are self-evident. What we have in the world is a distorted view of what makes one happy. Your Creator is the only one that can satisfy you, and yet people run from the author of pleasure to find new ways of pleasure that they think are better than what the Creator invented.

This is irrational. All that is desirable and beautiful and good comes from the one who is perfect. I love this. There's a quote from C .S. Lewis. C .S. Lewis wrote this book called The Screwtape Letters.

And in the book, there's a chief demon and a lesser demon that he's kind of mentoring about how to torture another human, how to tempt another human. And this is what the chief demon says to the lower demon.

He says, Never forget that when we are dealing with any pleasure in its healthy and normal and satisfying form, we are, in a sense, on the enemy's, the enemy is God, on God's ground. He made the pleasure.

All of our research so far has not enabled us to produce one. All we can do is to encourage the humans to take the pleasures which our enemy has produced at times or in ways or in degrees which God has forbidden.

Isn't that interesting? So, in other words, let's twist the pleasure. Let's come up with new ways to enjoy this pleasure that are outside of God's boundaries. But if you do that, it leads only to pain.

Not true pleasure. God is the author of pleasure. To find these outside of Him is a lost cause. At the end of the day, it will lead to dissatisfaction. Pleasure apart from God is only temporary and ultimately it leads one to hell.

It is of utmost importance that our desires are ordered rightly. Jesus calls this crowd and He calls us to have pure God-honoring desires. Desire righteousness and you will do righteousness. I love Psalm 34.

That verse says, Delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart. I may have gotten that reference, but I don't know. But you know the verse. Delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart.

Think about that.

When you delight yourself in Him, you desire what He desires. As you become a Christian, you see this transition in your life. You go from selfish desires to desiring what God desires. You spent your Saturday afternoon helping with a church garage sale.

Years ago, you might have thought, Why would I waste my Saturday doing that? God has changed you. You desired that. You would rather do that than do something else on that Saturday. Isn't that amazing how He does that?

And sometimes we don't even know we did it. We're like, Oh wow. I'm doing things differently than I used to. You know this. You have come to desire things that you once did not desire and old desires that you had are now gone.

This is the work of God in your life. As you follow Christ, the aim of your life becomes glorifying God, not living for self and having a life full of sinful patterns. We get to the point as we grow, we don't even recognize who we were before.

And that's God's goal in our lives. He has to redeem us. He has to sanctify us. This process of holiness that takes place over a long period of time. And it's a painful process. We want it to go faster.

But if you have that struggle in your life, be encouraged. God is working in your life. The transformed life is one of desiring what God desires and having a life full of godly patterns. So you see these patterns here.

Evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander. Those are ugly things. But you know what the fruit of the Spirit is? Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness.

Self-control is the last one. That is the fruit of the Spirit. That's who He changes you to be. To love God with all your heart. To love your neighbor as yourself. That's the switch that happens. It goes from these selfish, ugly desires to these pure, beautiful desires.

These God-honoring desires. And what a wonderful life it is to live this way. Jesus said in John 10 .10, He said, I have come that they may have life and have it abundantly. And that indeed is the life of following Jesus.

So we are to purify our hearts to truly please God. And the first direction of how is by fleeing from the evil within that leads to sinful patterns. Now next Sunday, we will look at our second point. And in the second point, we're going to look at verses 12 -14 where Jesus talks about blind guides.

And of course, He's talking about the scribes and the Pharisees. But this is a big warning for us. Do not follow after the wrong teachers. At this time, let's bow our heads and pray. Father in Heaven, Your Word is a lamp unto our feet and a light unto our path.

It is like honey. And we need it, Lord. We need the Word. It's a meal that we're eating here. And we need to be encouraged. We need to be challenged, convicted, helped, changed. And I pray that all of that would happen today in each one's heart here.

Lord, our goal is to grow in Christ together. So use this text, this sermon, to accomplish that in each one's heart, I pray. In Jesus' name, Amen. I want to extend a big thank you. A lot of you provided meals over the last 10 days.

And I just want to give you an update, too, that she's doing much better. She should be back here next Sunday. She told me this morning, she says, I'm feeling so much better. So that's great news. And a lot of you borrowed some stuff to us.

All that stuff is on the table down the stairs. So you can grab the different things that you lent to us. But we just want to say thank you. And one thing I've learned is that you are very good cooks.

The food was fantastic. So thank you so much. I look forward to the next potluck. That's going to be good. I think that's just about it. But we will close today. Let's close with a Gospel song. And let me say it before we sing.

Holy God, in love became, perfect man to bear my blame. On the cross, He took my sin. By His death, I live again. Okay, let's sing that together.

Holy God.