Mark 7:1-23 (October 9 2022)

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I mean, if you have your

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Bible, you can turn to Mark chapter 7. Mark chapter 7. We're going to be in verses 1 through 23 this morning.

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If you're new with us, what we've been doing is just going through the book of Mark about a half a chapter at a time.

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And so that brings us to Mark chapter 7 verses 1 through 23 today. We're just picking up this week where we left off last week.

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So, let's read the words of God in Mark chapter 7 beginning in verse 1.

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God's word says this. Now, when the Pharisees gathered to him with some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem, they saw that some of his disciples ate with hands that were defiled, that is, unwashed.

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For the Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they wash their hands properly, holding to the tradition of the elders.

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And when they come from the marketplace, they do not eat unless they wash.

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And there are many other traditions that they observe, such as the washing of cups and pots and copper vessels and dining couches.

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And the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, why do your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?

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And he said to them, well, did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites as it is written?

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This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me. In vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.

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You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men. And he said to them, you have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition.

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For Moses said, honor your father and mother, and whoever reviles father or mother must surely die. But you say, if a man tells his father or mother, whatever you would have gained from me is korban, that is, given to God, then you no longer permit him to do anything for his father or mother, thus making void the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down and many such things you do.

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And he called the people to him again and said, hear me, all of you, and understand, there is nothing outside a person that by going into him can defile him, but the things that come out of a person are what defile him.

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And when he had entered the house and left the people, his disciples asked him about the parable, and they said to him, then are you also without understanding?

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Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile him, since it enters not his heart but his stomach and is expelled?

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Thus he declared all foods clean. And he said, what comes out of a person is what defiles him, for from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness.

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All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.

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These are the words of the living God. I want to begin with a short summary of this passage, just to make sure we took it all in.

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And then we'll ask the question, what is it that makes a person unholy? What is it that makes a person unclean?

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And then, what is it that makes a person holy or clean? But first, let's see what is going on in this passage.

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A crowd of Pharisees had come to Jesus, including, this is for the second time, a crowd of the scribes, who had come from Jerusalem, out to where he was.

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They come and they gathered around him. Now Jesus had just fed the 5 ,000 men, plus the women and children.

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We saw that miracle last week in Mark chapter 6. So he had just fed 5 ,000 plus with miraculous bread.

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And so now they feel that they must discredit him as a host, and so they charge his disciples with eating with defiled hands.

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Now it's important to realize here that Jesus, he's not being flippant about God's law. He's not ignoring a commandment of God.

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For you see, the law of Moses did not require the disciples to perform these ritual washings before they ate.

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In verse 5, we see that the accusation is not that they broke God's law, it's that they broke the traditions of the elders, the traditions of men.

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And so where did this idea come from? Where did this tradition come from? Well there's a couple of commands in Exodus where the priests are required to wash before making food offerings, or for ministering at the altar.

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And about 200 years before Jesus, pious Jews began doing these ritual washings themselves, even though they weren't priests.

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And by the time of Jesus, it became an established tradition that before you would eat, the devout would perform these washings.

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But it's important to know, it wasn't required by God. And so this was one example of many,

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Jesus said there are many such things that they did. This is one example of many where the Pharisees, and presumably others, they fenced the word of God.

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And so you have a commandment of God, they're kind of building a fence around that commandment in order to protect against violating the commandment.

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And his commentary on Mark Kent Hughes lists some of the more ridiculous fences around the law about keeping the

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Sabbath. And so looking in the mirror was prohibited because you might notice a gray hair when you're looking in the mirror, and you might be tempted to pluck it out, which would be working on the

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Sabbath. And so don't look in the mirror, they said. Or you couldn't wear your false teeth, because if they fell out, you would pick them up, and that would be working on the

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Sabbath. And so you couldn't do that. And you could spit on the Sabbath, but you had to be careful where, because if you spit in the dirt and then kind of scuffed it with your sandal, well that would be cultivating the soil, and that would be working on the

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Sabbath, and you couldn't do that. And so you see how they would make all these extra laws on top of God's Word, and the process changed it.

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You see, they were going beyond God's Word. Now the most charitable reading of this situation is that they were well -meaning.

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That they revered the commandments of God, they revered God's holiness, and they wanted to protect against violating it.

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That's the most charitable reading. They were trying not to break His commands. But sinful hearts have a way of polluting even good motivations.

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Sinful hearts have a way of polluting even good motivations. And by the time of Jesus, the Pharisees were heaping heavy burdens on people that they could not bear, and that they were never meant to bear.

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They were never meant to carry. In verse 6, Jesus answers their accusations about eating with defiled hands.

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And He answers with a quote from the book of Isaiah. Now, it's interesting. This part of Isaiah that Jesus is quoting from is a prophecy of judgment against Jerusalem because their worship was polluted.

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You see, they honored God with their lips, and they even performed the sacrifices, but their hearts were far from God.

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Now which do you think God really wants? Honoring Him with your lips, or honoring

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Him with your heart? The problem with people is always located in our hearts.

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And no amount of external action can change the heart. What goes on in the heart always comes out of the hands.

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That is, it always affects the real world lives of people. In this instance, their sinful hearts manifest themselves in this way, according to verse 8.

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They left the commandment of God to hold to the tradition of men.

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Jesus said, you leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men. Now tradition in and of itself isn't bad.

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Tradition in and of itself isn't necessarily wrong, always.

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But it is, when tradition supersedes the word of God, then it becomes very bad.

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And that's what's going on in this passage. They're leaving God's commandment, breaking

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God's commandment, in order to keep that of men. And so Jesus then gives a specific example.

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He quotes to them the fifth commandment. Honor your mother and father. The fifth commandment requires children to honor their parents.

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There's a lot bound up into this commandment. But part of it requires that adult children care for aging parents.

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And the word honor there carries some financial connotations to it. Now given different economic circumstances, there's some flexibility today in how we obey and apply and carry out this commandment.

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But particularly in that day, in an agrarian economy, adult children were to provide for and care for their aging parents materially.

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This is God's commandment. But the scribes had devised a system to get around it.

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Adult children could take what was due to their parents, to care for them, and they could give it to the synagogue, that is to the scribes, and they could count it as korban, which means given to God.

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And so in this system, the children were relieved of their obligations and the scribes got money.

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And so you can see it's kind of a clever system if you're the scribes. It's a win -win for them and for the children.

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But it might be clever, but it's wicked. And it's also dangerous.

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Notice how Jesus, when he quotes the fifth commandment from Exodus, he stops halfway through.

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He does not give the promise. There's a promise when you go back and read in Exodus 20. Honor your mother and father, that your days may be long.

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He stops, doesn't quote that part, instead quotes from Leviticus, regarding the death penalty for those who disobey that command.

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And so you put these two things together, the quote from Leviticus and the quote from Isaiah, and what you get is a threat of divine judgment against Israel for their disobedience and for their economic oppression of their parents.

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It's dangerous. Well then Jesus, in verses 14 through 16, he calls people to them and he explains that it's not what goes into a person that defiles him.

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So eating with unwashed hands isn't really that big of a deal. It's not what goes into a person.

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It's not what he eats or how he might be polluted by having unwashed hands.

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It's what comes out of a person that defiles him. And then the people go away and they go in, and Jesus explains to the disciples themselves saying, what you eat can't possibly defile you, because you eat it and it doesn't go into the heart, it goes into the digestive system.

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And so there's nothing inherently unclean about the physical properties of, say, bacon.

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Now the law forbid the Jews from eating certain foods, including pork, and it said certain animals were clean and certain animals were unclean, but that whole system had to do with marking out

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God's people as distinct, separate from the Gentile nations. But remember,

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Jesus was establishing a new kingdom that would include all nations, and so the ceremonial distinctions pass away with the coming of Jesus.

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He declared all foods clean in verse 19. Therefore, what defiles a man does not come from the outside, what he eats, but from within, his heart.

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All sorts of wickedness comes from the heart. Evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness, all of that comes from within.

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And that is what defiles a person. That is what makes one unholy and unclean.

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And that is what this passage is about. It's a passage all about holiness. What makes one unholy and what makes one holy?

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So here's what happens when a person sins. They incur guilt. Now, a person may not recognize it as such, but it's just the fact of the world that God made and the world that we live in that when a person sins, whether they believe in God, whether they accept the

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Bible or what, when they transgress a commandment of God, they incur guilt. Guilt, in turn, brings shame, which people try to cover.

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And shame brings condemnation, which people try to escape. So you have guilt, shame, and condemnation.

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And it makes for a heavy burden that people cannot bear. And so people have to deal with it somehow.

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This guilt, shame, and condemnation that comes from our sin, we have to deal with it somehow. Now, the right way to deal with it, and in fact the only way to actually deal with it, is to turn to and trust

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Christ. And have your guilt expunged by the death of Christ. Have your shame covered by the righteousness of Christ.

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And have your condemnation lifted by the resurrection of Christ. It's the only way to deal with sin, but not all turn to Christ.

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So what do they do? They still have to deal with that heavy burden that comes from the guilt, shame, and condemnation that comes with sin.

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And so some try to relieve this tension by casting off all rules and restraint.

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They try to live as if there are no rules. There is no law. You might call this living by license.

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Just pure licentious living. It doesn't actually work, though.

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And that is why someone who chooses this route to go down, they often spiral into worse and worse deeds.

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And each new habit, each new drug, each new affair, each new addiction, each new crime, is a desperate attempt to mitigate the effects of the last one.

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It doesn't work living by license. Others will attempt to relieve the tension, not by living as if there are no rules, but they'll try to relieve the tension caused by guilt, shame, and condemnation by adding rules.

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You might call this living by legalism. And all the false religions of the world, with all their rules, regulations, and observances, they fall into this category.

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They're adding rules to what God has said. Man -made traditions, we might say.

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So false religions fall into this category, as do various forms of activism, where people try to alleviate their guilt by doing good, or at least what they presume to be good.

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And like the Korban system that we read about in Mark chapter 7, some people think that they can alleviate their burdens, they can escape their condemnation, they can cover their shame, they can get rid of their guilt by donating money to various good causes, maybe church, maybe something else, as if they could buy their way out of sin.

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And still others revert to a modern form of dietary regulations, assigning a moral value to either what you eat or what you refuse to eat.

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I read a book several years ago that connected the dots between a guilty conscience and all sorts of food fussiness, and I think there's something to that.

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People are always trying to get out of their guilt, shame, and condemnation in some way or another.

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The scribes and the Pharisees here in Mark 7, they were practicing a form of legalism. They had instituted all sorts of traditions, all sorts of fences around the law, that they put not just on par with God's word, but they actually elevated above it.

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They elevated their traditions above God's law. We see that in verse 8 where Jesus says, You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men.

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And in verse 9 where he says, You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition.

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But here's the thing about rejecting God's law. When you do that, you don't get no law.

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You don't get no rules when you reject God's rules, like the living by license people want to do.

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What you get is a thousand petty laws, like you can't wear your false teeth on the

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Sabbath. You don't get no rules, you get a thousand petty ones. And why do we do that?

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Why do humans set these things up? Why do we set up these extra -biblical rules?

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Well, it's because it's easier to deal with man -made traditions for external behavior than it is to deal with the commandments of God.

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It's easier to deal with because rules can be manipulated. They can have exceptions. You can devise clever systems like the

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Pharisees did. Violations can be easily hidden. And weightier matters of the law can be ignored because I checked all these other boxes.

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The commandments of God, however, require wisdom, maturity, and sacrifice. And so our man -made rules function as a hedge to protect us from the commandments of God.

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The commandments of God that require us to live as living sacrifices. And so, in other words, it's safer and easier, at least in the short run, at least we think so, to set up a bunch of man -made rules or traditions because it actually demands less of us.

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Because it doesn't demand that we conform to the image of Jesus and that we actually do something about our sin. It protects us from the wisdom, maturity, and sacrifice that it takes to follow

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God fully. Now sometimes this takes the form of the irreligious running from God by setting up their own alternative rival morality.

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And other times this takes the form of the very religious trying to be holier than God.

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And so I want to give an example of each of these. Now if I were a savvier preacher, or a safer one,

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I would steer clear of both of these examples. But you didn't call me here to be savvy or safe.

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You called me to preach God's Word, the Bible, and apply it to all of life.

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And so, here goes. One example of elevating the traditions of men above the

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Word of God is our culture's current attitudes about race and racism.

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And so to be clear, the Bible speaks of the sin of partiality. And the Bible speaks of the sin of pride.

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And the Bible speaks of tribes and ethnic people groups. And so I believe there is biblical category for tribal or ethnic pride or partiality that is very much sin.

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And that sin can be and has been manifest in some really, really ugly ways throughout history.

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And so wherever those sins are found, they should be abhorred and they should be repented of.

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But in our current discussions of race and racism, the traditions of men have been elevated such that we do not talk in these biblical categories.

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We don't use Bible words and we don't use a Bible framework for how to deal with it.

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For how to deal with those sins. Rather we use man -made ones. We have traditions of men.

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We don't speak of partiality and pride and sin and confession and repentance and forgiveness.

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We speak of white privilege and implicit bias and systemic racism and diversity, equity, inclusion. And then these terms are filled with all sorts of malleable meaning.

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Now the Bible gives us explicit instructions on how to deal with actual sins. The offender is to confess and repent of them.

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The offended is required to forgive them. With both parties acting in the shadow of the cross of Jesus.

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This is God's way. This is God's way of reconciling people. Our culture's tradition of men, however, offers no atonement and no forgiveness.

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Only sensitivity training, self -flagellation, apology tours, financial compensation, and so on.

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And where does it end? That's kind of the genius of the system. It doesn't. So long as our modern scribes are profiting from it.

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There is only one way to deal with sin, including the sin of ethnic or racial pride and partiality.

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And that is the blood of Jesus. And any attempt to handle it otherwise will fail.

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And fail miserably. And so today's critical theories and intersectionality are just modern examples of rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish a tradition of man.

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Now those ideas, while they're making inroads in Christian circles and churches, it's still kind of an out there thing.

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It's an out there idea. It's a secular idea. It's the irreligious running from God by setting up their own alternative rival morality.

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But do we ever do anything like that among believers? Do we ever do anything like that in here?

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Do we ever add our own traditions or rules to God's word? Well for this example

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I want to give you a test case. It's a Friday or Saturday evening.

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You go over to Farmhouse Tacos for dinner and you see a fellow Christian drinking a beer.

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Or maybe it's a glass of wine over at the Peddler. How do you evaluate that situation? Do you rely on the traditions of men or do you rely on the

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Bible for your evaluation? Now this isn't a sermon about the merits or demerits of alcohol consumption.

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Rather it is a point about how we decide the merits or demerits about anything.

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Do we rely on the traditions of men or do we rely on the scriptures? If the

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Bible is the inerrant, inspired, sufficient, authoritative word of God then we must ask, what does the

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Bible say? Not what I've always heard. Not what Uncle Johnny or Aunt Beth said.

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Not what I heard on TV or Facebook or anywhere else. What does the

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Bible say? Back to our test case. Your friend over at Farmhouse Tacos.

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What does the Bible say? The Bible says clearly that drunkenness is a sin and is prohibited.

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Ephesians 5 and 1 Corinthians 6. The Bible clearly warns against the dangers of alcohol.

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Proverbs 20, wine is a mocker, strong drink a brawler. Whoever is led astray by it is not wise.

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Proverbs 23, who has sorrow? The one who tarries long over wine. The Bible is also clear about addictions.

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What we might call alcoholism. Those who can't control their behavior.

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The Bible speaks clearly to this when it talks about self -control and not being controlled by your passions or your desires or your lusts.

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Not having your belly as your God, I should say. But the

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Bible, that same Bible written by the same God also speaks of it as a positive good, alcohol that is.

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Psalm 104 says that God gave wine to gladden the heart of man. Ecclesiastes 9 says to eat your bread with joy and drink your wine with a merry heart for God has already accepted your works.

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Isaiah prophesies that on this mountain the Lord of hosts, the Lord will make a feast for all peoples.

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A feast of rich food, a feast of well -aged wine, of rich food full of marrow, of aged wine well refined.

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And Jesus turned water into wine and gave it to the wedding party and he drank it at Passover and instituted it for the

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Lord's Supper. So when we evaluate the situation of our farmhouse tacos, we've got to take into consideration the entire counsel of God's Word.

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We can't just pick and choose. And that's true no matter where you land on the question of the wisdom of drinking alcohol or not.

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The point is, what does the Bible say? And the

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Bible actually has more to say that's relevant for this discussion and it relates back to our passage as well.

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From the question of food and drink regulations, Paul says in 1 Timothy 4 that everything created by God is good.

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Nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving for it is made holy by the Word of God in prayer.

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And in Colossians 2, therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food or drink.

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Do not submit to regulations, do not handle, do not taste, do not touch, referring to things that all perish as they are used, according to human precepts and teachings.

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These indeed have an appearance of wisdom in promoting self -made religion and asceticism in severity to the body, but they are of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh.

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Paul says these regulations of food and drink have the appearance of wisdom but lack the substance. And why?

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Because they don't actually stop the indulgence of the flesh. And why? Because of what

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Jesus said in Mark 7, what goes in a person does not defile him, it is what comes out of his heart that defiles him.

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And that, pardon the pun, is the heart of the matter. In this passage of Mark 7.

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Jesus talks about it in verse 6 and he talks about it in verses 14 through 23. What makes a man unholy?

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His heart. What makes a man holy? A new heart.

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People are not inherently good. This is the Christian doctrine of depravity. That after the fall of Adam, people are inclined and they are bent towards sin.

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Their hearts are corrupted and therefore people need new hearts. And this is why the traditions of men aren't good enough.

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They might influence external behavior. They might even manipulate external behavior.

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But that's not where the evil comes from. The evil comes from within. There's a song we used to sing with our kids.

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Apples don't grow on pear trees. Apples don't grow on pear trees. There's no apples there.

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You'll only find pears. And so if you want the right fruit, you have to have the right root.

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That is, you have to have the right tree. If you want apples, you've got to plant an apple tree. If you want pears, you've got to plant a pear tree. And if you want the fruit of the

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Spirit, well that only grows on one type of tree. And that's a cross. You need to be crucified with Christ and raised up with Him by faith.

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A new heart will produce new, good, godly, wise fruit.

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New, good, godly, wise, as defined by the Bible. Good, godly, and wise.

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External behaviors. But here's the thing. You can't reverse engineer that. You can't start with the behaviors and get to the heart.

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You have to start with the heart to get to the behaviors. You can't focus on external behavior through extra -biblical traditions and commands in hopes of changing the heart.

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You'll fail to change the heart and won't actually change the behaviors very well. At best, you'll hide them. And so the principle is this.

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We work in, excuse me, we work out in our lives what God works in, in our hearts.

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We work out what God works in. And so we reject living by license, as if there were no rules.

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We reject also living by legalism. And instead we live by liberty. For the scriptures say where the spirit of the

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Lord is, there is liberty. And this means you're free from the extra -biblical burdens of legalism that might weigh you down.

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From the traditions of men that seek to supersede the word of God, going far beyond it. You have to neglect

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God's rules in order to keep it. But this means we also are free from the slavery of licentious living.

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For you see, rejecting God's rules doesn't set one free. It just makes a person a slave to his or her own passions or lusts.

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But the liberty that the spirit gives, it sets you free from your sinful nature and enables you to obey

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God. It enables you to see what has God said and then be able to follow that and then be able to obey that.

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And obeying God is not legalism. Obeying God is love. For Jesus connects obedience and love in John chapter 14 when he says, the one who obeys my commandments, he it is who loves me.

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So the life of liberty is fueled by, it's also safeguarded by, love.

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Love for God and love for your neighbor. The whole law and the prophets are summed up in these two commands,

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Jesus says. And so hold fast to the commandments of God. Make sure they're actually the commandments of God.

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Know your Bible. Read your Bible. Determine that you're not going to have any problem passages in the

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Bible. And hold fast to what you find there. Hold fast to the commandments of God.

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And walk in the way of liberty and love. For that is the way of Jesus.

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Let's pray together. Our Father in heaven, we thank you for your word. We thank you that your word guides us, leads us.

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We know, we can know by your word, what you want for our lives and how you want us to act and live in this world that you have made and put us in.

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So we thank you for your word. We pray that you would let it guide us in all things. That you would let us evaluate all things by the standard of your word.

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That we would determine what is good and what is true. What is beautiful. What is glorious.

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By what your word says. For it is authoritative. And it is enough.

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Father, I pray that you would give us wisdom. That you would give us maturity. That we might live our lives as living sacrifices for you.

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That we would offer up our lives for you. Lord, I pray that you would free us by your grace.

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By the work of your spirit in us. Free us from sin. And free us to obey your word. That we might live for your glory.