Sin Comes from Within

Mark 7 and the Conflict Over Defilement

Mark chapter 7 and the Pharisees and some of the scribes gathered around him when they had come from Jerusalem and had seen that some Of his disciples were eating their bread with defiled hands that is unwashed for the Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they carefully wash their hands thus observing the traditions of the elders.

And When they come from the marketplace, they do not eat unless they wash themselves and there are many other things which they have received in order to observe such as the washing of cups and pitchers and copper pots and The Pharisees and the scribes asked him why do your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders but eat their bread with defiled hands.

And He said to them rightly did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites as it is written This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far away from me. But in vain do they worship me teaching as doctrines the commands of men.

Leaving the commandment of God you hold to the tradition tradition of men. And he was also saying to them you are good at setting aside the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition. For Moses said honor your father and your mother and he who speaks evil of father or mother is to be put to death.

But you say if a man says to his father or his mother Whatever you might benefit from me is Corbin that is to say given to God. You no longer leave him to do anything for his father or his mother thus invalidating the Word of God by your tradition which you have handed down and you do many things such as that.

The Pharisees' Hardness of Heart and Legalism

And After he called the crowd to him again He began saying to them listen to me all of you and understand. There is nothing outside the man which can defile him if it goes into him. But the things which proceed out of the man are what defile the man.

And if anyone has ears to hear let him hear. And when he had left the crowd and entered the house His disciples were asking him about the parable and he said to them. Are you lacking understanding in this way as well?

Do you not understand that whatever goes into the man from outside? Cannot defile him because it does not go into his heart but into his stomach and goes to the sewer. Thus he declared all foods clean and he was saying that which proceeds out of the man.

That is what defiles the man for from within out of the heart of men proceed the evil thoughts sexual immoralities thefts murders adulteries coveting wickedness deceit Sensuality envy slander pride and foolishness all these evil things proceed from within and defile the man.

Let's pray. Or Jesus cutting cutting words or that they cut in our present age as Sharply as they did at the time of this story. Lord, I pray that we would have eyes to see and hearts to discern What is evil inside of us and Lord we will have every tendency to blame what is on the outside.

To blame everything except our wicked hearts in the ways that we stray away from you in the ways that we indeed turn your law upside down. Lord deliver us from that give us repentance. And Lord help us to understand this morning as we delve into this text and look at it.

Help us to see its beauty help us to see its application. Help us to see its practicality and Lord We will give all glory to you knowing that you through your Holy Spirit Illuminate us to see this the teachings of Holy Scripture.

It's in your name. I pray these things. Amen. You may be seated we live in a in a confusing time and I'm about to say some things that I think might make a little bit of Discomfort happen. So we live in an age where we're not sure if the food we're eating is poison or if it's actually food.

There's dyes. There's organic versus factory farming. There's you hear it all the time. The food is chemicals. It's enriched with unnatural stuff. We have vitamins. There's genetically modified organisms.

Do we even need to pasteurize stuff? What do we do? What do we do and then we have endless debates and arguments about feasts should we even celebrate Christmas? Is that pagan did the pagans co-opt Easter?

Oh, what about Halloween? Is it sinful to celebrate Halloween and to go trick-or-treating? Should we be observing what the Jews did with Passover and the many feasts? Do we even need to honor our parents?

Today it's fashionable to hate boomers. The boomers have spent everything. They've left us nothing the Millennials. They actually ruined everything because they're snowflakes who won't work and the zoomers.

They don't even know how to work. What are we doing? Is it okay for us to just forget our parents because really we have Professional facilities so that we don't have to deal with the work of handling our aging parents.

Just send them to a nursing home. That'll be great in modern technology. Wonderful in it amazing and in the middle of all of this all of this confusion Which is all the outside pushing in we have a subtle but pervasive idea and it's twofold one.

They're contradictory. One is that we're more advanced than anyone who's ever lived and so we're not as racist and Everyone who lived before us is antiquated and backwards. But at the same time no one else has ever dealt with the struggles we're dealing with.

We stand alone in human history as we see societies falling and culture shaken. No one has ever dealt with this before no empires ever fallen. No one's ever dealt with wicked tyrants. No one has ever Failed to heed the voice of democracy like we're seeing today and we're rattled and from the book of wisdom Solomon writes all things are wearisome.

Man is not able to speak of it. The eye is not satisfied with seeing nor is the ear filled with hearing. That which has been that which has been is that which will be and that which has been done. Is that which will be done?

So there is nothing new under the Sun. Is there anything of which one might say see this it's new. Already it has been for ages which were before us. There is no remembrance of earlier things and also of the later things which shall still be.

There will be none for them. There will be no remembrance among those who will come later still. Often Ecclesiastes is quite discouraging, but I think it gives us a Bracing dose of reality that there is nothing new under the Sun and when Solomon writes of under the Sun He is talking about the kingdom of the earth that everything that's under the heavens that it all just Recapitulates over and over again.

We do not stand in a unique time. We stand in a time in which there's nothing new under the Sun where we don't remember what came before us and guess what? 150 years from now. They won't remember what we did right now.

It will be forgotten in The Pharisees and us today. I think what we do is when we read a story when we read a Example like Mark 7 what we instantly do is say see look at those horrible Pharisees. How could you be that way and I think the finger gets pointed back at us this morning?

And I want to start by hurting us pretty badly. And then I want to end by binding it us up and encouraging and healing us. So first we have to look at astounding hardness of heart. That's where we start our text in verses 1 through 5.

So I want you to look at that and there's been a theme of hardness going on last week when we left Jesus had talked about in the in the stormy sea when he walked on the water that the disciples Were hardened in their heart because they did not discern what they had just seen with the breaking of the loaves.

They didn't understand what Jesus was teaching through his shepherding. And so now on to the scene to teach the disciples even more comes the shepherds of the day. See Jesus is putting himself in contrast with the shepherds that are the Pharisees from Jerusalem because we're gonna see in this chapter.

Is that the the religious cohort the cabal from Jerusalem is going to come once again? They came before in Mark chapter 3 when they said that Jesus was doing all these miracles because he was a son of Satan and Here they're gonna try a different tact and it's not gonna go very well for them.

It's not gonna go very well at all because what the Pharisees show is an astounding hardness of heart get this. Their observation is they come down and they've heard these stories. They've heard of the casting out of demons they've heard of a multitude, you know this right the Multitude of people fed with a couple of loaves of bread and some fish and people are buzzing right people are talking about the healings and the miracles that are going on and the teaching like they've never heard before and They come in and they're worried about whether the disciples are washing their hands or not.

Even in that time that is petty really petty right really petty. But what's happened is the Pharisees are blind and they don't see what's happening and this story. The text tells us is a parable. We have a parable here and so as with all parables what we have to understand is that there is a meaning hidden inside of the obvious story and I think it came to my attention in preaching the parable of the soils a Couple of weeks ago or a few weeks ago.

That I think oftentimes we don't understand the parables and we look down our nose and we're like, how did you miss this? It's obvious sin obviously comes from inside. That's the parable. No, no. No, that's not what the parable.

There is a hidden meaning in here and the hidden meaning is about the kingdom of God, right? It's about how you access the Holy of Holies. That's what's going on. So what I want to point you to is the covenant that's being Unveiled through the appointed time of the evil of these men who are going to come and they're going to try to hold up their traditions.

While they are put in contrast to the Shepherd of Jesus the Shepherd Jesus Feeds his people the Shepherd Jesus heals his flock the Shepherd Jesus takes care of him. He will not lose a single one out of his hand except that one who was appointed to perdition.

The Shepherd Jesus has a heart for his sheep and he loves them and he's with them. But the Shepherd of Jerusalem.

Remember.

The people are scattered like sheep without a shepherd and we see why as the Pharisees come down and they hear of these healings and they Hear the ministry of Jesus and all they can think about is how he's breaking their father's traditions.

And so Jesus. He does what we would do, right? He sneaks off and he complains to his disciples about the big bad Pharisees, right? No.

No.

That's not what he does because what the Lord is going to show us is he's going to show us how we deal with wolves. And how you deal with false shepherds and how you deal with people in sin, and we don't like this.

In America, we don't we are descended from English. And I think one of our things is that we like to be very nice to each other. We like to be nice and then we like to Construct our win off the scenes and that's not what Jesus does but I don't want you to miss in this that what that is what the Pharisees do here is extremely evil and This will offend our sensibilities as Americans because here's what the Pharisees do.

They're coming in and they say why are you defiling yourself by eating without washing your hands? This is not ceremonial cleansing as prescribed by the law of Moses. This is nowhere. You are not gonna have to wash your hands ritually before you eat a meal.

The the ritual cleansing was about temple worship not eating meals and really what's behind. This is a subtle thing is that the Pharisees believe that you can catch sin like a germ. All right and what they were doing is the reason that you had to wash your hands and the cups and the pots and all of that stuff Is because when you were walking in the marketplace, you might have accidentally touched a Gentile and If you have done that Then you are unclean and so you must wash your hands because you might have caught a sin from the Gentile.

From one of those dogs, right? And so you would wash your hands because you might have inadvertently defiled yourself. Or maybe you laid hands on an unclean food by accident and you can't make yourself defiled by touching that.

And so the religious cartel when they hear of what Jesus is doing. They come to play a well-honored game of gotcha. That's what they're doing. Gotcha. See what you did. They tried it with the Sabbath before it did not work out.

Very well for them and now they're gonna try it with something else and it's gonna work out even worse for them.

Much worse.

Because the Lord really just I mean he just destroys them in this passage. It's it's really a total decimation and a takedown. So sin is something you catch from the outside. It would be unclean and they've forgotten see in their zeal to follow the traditions of men.

They've forgotten what the very promises were To Abraham and of what the king was going to be and make no mistake the Pharisees know that Jesus is the king. They just don't like it. They know they know what Jesus quotes to them.

They understand the prophets. They understand the Psalms. They've spent their whole life studying it, but they're blind and they're hardened and they're not hardened. The way the disciples are we're often hardened as his people where we don't discern the teaching, but we're not in open rebellion.

We just don't get it. The Pharisees are in rebellion. They know it and they're hardened just like Pharaoh because they hate Jesus and they hate his ministry and ultimately they hate the coming Covenant that's gonna take down their power because the sin that's defiling them from the inside is everything that Jesus lists at the end of This reading but it's also their malice and their desire to murder to protect their own power.

They are murderers and they are malicious gossips. They are Destructive they are a corrosive force and they've forgotten something. They've forgotten the very word of me. They've suppressed it psalm 22 27.

Listen to this compare this against the idea of accidentally touching a Gentile and having to ritually pure purify yourself. Here's what psalm 22 27 said all the ends of the earth will remember and turn to Yahweh and all the families of the nation.

Will worship before you. What salvation for the Jews only? Not even according to their own writings. No, the kingdom of God was always about the whole earth. God will not be confined to a small nation in the Middle East.

God wants it all. God has claimed it all and this goes even further back than the Psalms. It goes back to the very beginning this this covenant with Abraham. That is one of the greater pictures that we have of the grace of God.

He said to Abraham. I will bless those who bless you and the one who curses you I will curse and in you all the families of the earth will be blessed. All people of God come from Abraham. We are descendants of him by blood or by faith and by faith is the whole nation of the earth.

Every nation that turns to Yahweh is the people of God and the people of God we do not have to Cleanse ourself from accidentally touching them so the source of the observation, it's not the law it's a tradition and Traditions will be zealously followed and enforced.

It's not good enough. See what happens and we're gonna get into the next section which is about legalism. But what happens it was traditions as traditions become law and in fact, they become more important than law.

So what they do here's the idea. The tradition is there to protect us from breaking the law, right? To break the law would be to enter in the temple and be unclean. But instead of doing that we're just gonna move the fences a little bit further back.

So we don't accidentally break the law here with our uncleanliness. We're gonna wash our hands all the time. That's what the tradition does. It's not good enough to just be ceremonially clean before temple worship.

It has to be before every meal look God see how much more righteous We are. You told us to clean before you come in the temple. We're cleaning all the time. See how holy I am and it's very noteworthy that this is an external thing that everybody can see right?

I'm gonna clean myself. Look how holy I am and then look at what's going on. Remember don't lose the context last week. She scattered without a shepherd this week. What are these Pharisees doing? They are heaping heavy burdens on the people.

Heavy burdens and they're not doing one thing to help. Not one thing Jesus is healing. Jesus is teaching. Jesus is feeding and the Pharisees are accusing.

All right.

They don't care about helping the people they care about stocking up the shepherds hut. Right who cares about the sheep when we live in the the nice shepherds house? It's got all the finest stuff in it.

Keep bringing the tithes and offering sheep and we'll keep he can keep in the legalism on you. So that's their tradition and we see that they come and they have their accusation and It's it's hidden there.

You you guys can't be of God. You're not even doing what our father said and this is what Jesus does. He exposes the hypocrisy of legalism. Look at what he says. He immediately quotes Isaiah this people Honors me with their lips, but their heart is far away from me in vain.

Do they worship me. Vanity is important here. This is all about vanity. Both vanity for themselves, but also taking the Lord's name in vain. They are breaking at least two or three commandments while they're doing this.

They leave the commandment of God to follow the commandments of men. They teach as doctrine the commands of men. We cannot do that. We cannot make the traditions and preferences into doctrine. Doctrine is given by Scripture.

Opinions of man can be good but they're not doctrine and there are not things for us to bind people's conscience to do to look at the look at the Boldness of the Lord. It's amazing to me. It always amazes me our conception of Jesus and we miss pieces like this.

Look, I think we can fall out of balance talking all the time about Jesus turning over the tables and angry Jesus and all that. Sort of thing. But what we can't miss is that when in the presence of sin what Jesus did was he did the most kind thing possible?

Which was to cut? With a surgical knife and go right to the heart of the issue and the heart of the issue is that these Pharisees are Hypocrites, he applies the scripture of Isaiah to these men. Rightly did Isaiah prophesy of you?

What an amazing thing that is. Does it make them happy. No, no, no, it does not make them happy. It makes them very angry. What we have to understand is that legalism is not the love of God's law. See what the Pharisees were doing was they were Showing everyone on the outside how they are students of God's law how they know God's law better than all the unwashed masses.

And at the same time they were demonstrating with their actions all the time that they had no love of God's law. They didn't think God's law was enough to maintain their position and to show their holiness enough.

They wanted to be a little bit more external than that legalism is not the love of God's law. It's rebellion. It's rebellion. And when we say that legalism is the way that we have to make Christ happy with us, then we have a false gospel.

That's what the book of Galatians is about. But even when we don't mix it with the gospel, it is lawlessness. Legalism is placing burdens on people that they should not have to lift. It's rebellion. It is concerned always with the appearance of piety the appearance of height.

And this is the worst thing about legalism is what it really does is it masks? Unrighteousness, that's what it does. It's a cloak. It's a holy pious skin suit to cover up the death and decaying of the sin that it's hiding underneath.

It leaves the law of God for a more showy form of religion and friends. We are infested with it today. We're infested with it in the church in America. I Fear that it is in our walls. Also is that we're always more concerned with what people see and what people hear than what's really there.

And what's really there has to be a heart that loves God's law. Do you understand this? You cannot be a Christian and not love God's law. It's the very essence of the New Covenant.

Right.

The New Covenant was that God would give us a heart of flesh that was a heart of stone so that we would know him. So that no one would have to teach us. That doesn't mean you don't have to learn from somebody preaching.

What it means is that you don't have to be taught the hard lesson from nature. You're gonna be taught by revelation. God has placed a heart in you that desires to love his law and Natural man does not have that natural man suppresses God's law.

Legalism always is about the external. It's never about the internal. It's about hiding the internal and we have many movements in Christianity that are about that. It's ultimately though. It's about vanity.

Vanity you know what vanity is. When you picture vanity I think of the woman spending five hours a morning putting makeup on for the day.

Why?

It's almost always to appeal to the eyes of those outside and hide the emptiness and the darkness that's underneath. Vanity is always about what's perceived and what's seen and never about the substance of the matter.

If you venture on to social media You would see a constant parade of what we call virtue signaling. Virtue signaling is where we take the right opinion of A of a subject so that we get accolades from people while doing nothing to progress.

That principle or that that view what we do is we just jump on board while not lifting a finger. That's what the Pharisees do. The Pharisees have created a car that looks like holiness. This is the religion that pleases Yahweh doing everything that we did doing everything our father's always passed down.

But inside that car is rottenness. The outside of the car looks impressive and everybody outside that sees the Pharisees drive-bys go. Oh, man, I wish I understood God's Word the way these men do. They could recite it.

They memorized it. They could teach it. They could go into the endless genealogies. They could tell you everything about how this word was passed down. They could go through every language. They could give you the lesson in Aramaic in Hebrew.

They knew it all they could translate it into Greek right and they could wow you with their intellect and All the while their hearts are rotten because all of that Intellectual pursuit and all of that flash on the outside was all they're intended and purposeful to hide their murderous malicious hearts.

Because they cared nothing for the people nothing. The people were means to an end for them. But with Jesus the people are the end. Do you understand the reason Jesus came? Was to seek and save what was lost that's the people.

The reason Jesus came was not to make everyone think how good he looked. He wouldn't talk like this if that's what he wanted and good preaching and good proclamation of God's Word hurts us. And it makes us feel uncomfortable and it brushes us back.

But it also should be marked by character. It should be marked by truth. It should not be marked by what's on the outside. It should be marked by what's on the inside and that's why we're given. How do we look at these leaders?

We're to look at what they're doing in the personal life. That's what it's all about. What's in the personal life is what counts because that's the real person. That's what's really going on behind the social media posts.

Behind the clothes behind all of the external trappings is what's going on at home. What does a man think when he's alone? What is his interaction with the Internet when he's alone? How does he speak when he thinks no one hears?

What's he like. And I think we have a good window into what these Pharisees are and then we have an object lesson because Jesus doesn't just call Them names, right? He doesn't just call them names. He actually points out an exact area where they are lawless because the law is always clear.

Is it not does anyone misunderstand the Ten Commandments when you read them? Very clear very clear. Okay, we try to twist them in our unrighteousness, but they're clear. Don't murder people. Don't commit adultery.

Don't have other gods before Yahweh, right? Those things are simple. But when we try to suppress them, we start to call evil good and good evil. And so here we go. Here we go. The vanity of the Pharisees has also taken God's name in vain because what they've done is they've cloaked in Godliness what God never said and that is what it means to take God's name in vain.

It's to ascribe God's power to things that God has not ordained or blessed. A man who says he's a man of God and preaches wickedness is taking God's name in vain. He's also lying. Right, but he's taking God's name in vain.

And so Jesus points the example and this is the Corbin and this should hit pretty close to home for us. He tells them, you know, this law. This is the law honor your father and mother. Do you guys know what it means to honor your father and mother?

Yeah, we know what that means. Don't we don't disobey them when they get older we take care of them. It all flips around right our parents take care of us. When we're dependent and when we're young and they disciple us and they help us and then whenever they're old because end of life.

Because of the curse of sin the end of life gets ugly many times people lose their mind. They lose their body control things get ugly and it's not fun. It's not fun at all and what what happens is. The Pharisees had a way to please the people and the way they please the people was a double whammy.

Hey, guess what you can get out of that ugliness of taking care of your aging parents because that's not fun at all. You can't go do fun stuff. When you got mom at home who might wander out and get killed in the middle of the night because she won't stay in the house.

Right, that's not fun at all. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna say you don't have to do that and guess what you can be super godly while not Doing that because you can give all the money that would have been used to take care of your parents give it to the temple.

It's a one-time offering. Amazing win-win-win-win-win, right the Pharisees get rich. The people don't have to take care of their parents their parents who cares about them. They don't know what's going on.

Anyway, their minds probably slipped and they're sitting destitute out in the street. Right, but you get to feel super deeper holy and what you've done is you have expressly broken God's law. The only person not happy in this scenario is the parents who have been dishonored but who cares about them?

They're old anyway, right but who really is unhappy is God. He's very unhappy and the penalty for dishonoring your father and mother do you realize this we've lost it. The older child who cursed their father and mother they were put to death.

To break God's law is death. We know this and we soften it the wages of sin is death. Sin is not an ethereal concept sin is law-breaking. We know that that it's it's lawlessness. And so the offering here is that Corbyn was a way to wrap religious activity around lawlessness and sin and to say look you can feel holy and feel like you're a friend of the church and Dishonor your father and your mother.

And Jesus lays them on the line with this and then he gives this punching punching send off. You do many things. Such as that when Jesus looked over the crowd. When we read last week and he saw that they were like sheep scattered without a shepherd and his his stomach hurt.

Right. That's what it means. His stomach hurt and he looked on the people and he felt compassion. He felt sympathy. He wanted to help them. The reason he felt that is because this is the type of shepherds that were leading these sheep.

They were telling them to break God's law. And what happens nationally when you break God's law. Your nation is ruined. God is patient. God is long-suffering. He doesn't grind us to dust the second we sin, but at the same time he will by no means.

Clear iniquity and that's why John the Baptist comes on the scene he says the axe is laid to the root of the tree you are a pit of vipers and Then Jesus comes after him and the reason that he comes is to throw off this fake Religion and to fulfill all the promises of God to the nations of the world the way it was going in Israel.

It was never going to go to the nations of the world. Because the Israelites thought they had to clean their hands if they even touch somebody that was a nation of the world. How is the message of God going to spread in those conditions?

Is God going to allow that?

No.

He is not and so like he did time after time the sins of the people are Judged and they have a dividing line that has come because Jesus come and the dividing line is him. Are you going to follow him or are you going to follow?

These shepherds and the the dividing line of Jesus is the dividing line of grace and The shepherds of their day offer only obedience to the traditions of man that are death. You do many things such as that.

False Shepherds, Legalism, and the Dividing Line of Grace

How do we do that today. We see all kinds of examples today of this kind of lawless Shepherd. Let's call it out, right? We have the so-called supremacy of the Roman Catholic Church the Vicar of Christ the mediator of Sins to the people.

And many are fooled right. Scripture tells us there is one mediator between God and man Jesus Christ. We know that Jesus because of Hebrews it tells us that he is the great high priest who makes intercession.

He's the only one who makes intercession because this covenant is built on better promises. There's no lineage from the Pope to Peter one Antichrist to another. Why are we afraid to say it our? Forefathers weren't but we would throw them out of the church for saying it because again, nobody's ever lived through what we lived through, right?

We have legalism in the fundamentalist Baptist Church. Did you touch alcohol this week? I think I saw you in the liquor store.

You're out.

These are heavy burdens. They are meant to show. You know what? I can show people that I never drink. I can show people that. Right. It's always on the outside. We have the legalism that we've gone through the last seven or eight years about woke churches.

All wokeness is is just legalism. It's elevating things that are not God's law to being God's law and then dividing lines on that. We have the grift of shepherds that place burdens on congregations while not lifting a finger to help them.

There is division that's brought into what should be unified because of Divisions that are based on traditions and preferences that are elevated to law. We cannot elevate our traditions and our preferences to law to do.

So is lawlessness to do so is to discern the body by what we eat drink and celebrate instead of Obedience to Christ and so now we move into the real point of the parable and that's why I've called this sermon the sin from within and The real point of the parable is Jesus explaining this interaction the disciples don't understand.

They don't see what's going on because understand the disciples. The disciples are partially hardened, right? They don't discern. They didn't understand the loaves last week and they don't understand what just happened with the Pharisees this week because they are ensnared in The traditions.

They are Jews and they have been brought up their entire life to think this is how you worship God. This is how we do it. If we don't do this, then we're not the people of God and that's why we have the book of Hebrews.

And that's why we have the book of Romans and the book of Galatians that are teaching us over and over again. There is no way back. You cannot go back. Jesus changed everything. He changed absolutely everything see in this text.

He says listen to me all of you and understand there is nothing outside the man which can defile him if it goes into him. But the things which proceed out of man are what defile the man. Sin is not a communicable disease.

Sure, bad morals enjoys bad company. They do but people don't catch the sin from the people around them. This is a fallacy. You know what? You're not a product of who you follow. You follow who you follow because you're a sinner.

People are not corrupted by the people around them. They seek the people around them to be corrupted. Sin comes from inside. Mark does not leave us any room. I'm so thankful for his pin this week because he makes it so clear and he's so blunt and he's so direct.

The kind of Food you eat does not matter Spiritually, it has no no interact doesn't matter at all. You should not judge people based on the matter of food. Explicitly from Mark. I'm so glad he said it this way and I think I think Paul would later bring it even further and he would go to this.

Dream.

Would you eat? Meat offered to idols. Oh man, it seems like that's pretty rough right and Paul says it's fine. Just don't flaunt it. All right, don't mess with someone's conscience. But sin is not a communicable disease.

We don't catch it. We have plenty of ourself. Jeremiah said the heart is deceitfully wicked. Who can understand it. Who can understand it? Well, I'll tell you who understands it Jesus understands it and the Holy Spirit understands it.

The Holy Spirit indwells us and he understands more than anyone our heart and He abides with us because judicially we are cleaned by the blood of Christ and yet we can grieve the Holy Spirit. By clasping and by clinging on to the sin that ensnared us before we were set free why would the slave want to go back to the chains and yet we want to do it all the time because the heart is Wicked and then what we do from making bad to worse is when we sin we look around and we try to find blame.