Keep sharing good news without ads.
Sermon by Josh Rice from Mark 7:1-23.
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.
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?
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.
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.
The devil made me do it. The devil made me do it. But even more today and I see it all the time the government made me do it. The government our government's wicked and they made me do it. How can you even know how do you even know what's true now?
Look it's bad to be ruled by liars. It's a judgment of God, right? God is judging the wickedness of our people. It's why we have the government that we have. That's why the bills that get passed at the state level are getting passed.
And then we move further because the government is kind of an amorphous blob, isn't it? Like what is the government? It's so big like what are we even talking about? You know? Who knows but then we go further.
Big Pharma did it. I Listened to a podcast this week. The the guy on Tucker Carlson said I think Big Pharma is the biggest demon in the world, you know, maybe. Maybe but Big Pharma doesn't make you sin Big Agor.
I did it. They didn't make you sin either. It's the microplastics. That's why I act like a girl the microplastics. Guys, look, I'm not. I'm not sitting here and denying effects of evil when the people worship the golden calf.
God.
God through through his his federal head Moses. Ground up that idol and made them all drink it. We're gonna drink a lot of the cultural rebellion that we have and we have a lot of bad stuff going on. We do.
Okay. But temptation from the outside is not sin. This is a little preach doctrine in our day with the confusion of same-sex attraction and Celibate homosexuality and a bunch of mumbo-jumbo. That our forefathers would have laughed in our face and not know what we were talking about when we said things like that.
They would have said things like homosexual same-sex attraction. Stop stop that that's sin and we go home. Is that sin and we write books? Is it sin? Yeah, it's sin. It's unnatural. Okay. Temptation from the outside is not sin, but temptation from the inside is the inner workings of our sinfulness.
Let me read two texts here that illustrate the point. Hebrews 4 14 through 16. This is some of my favorite texts in the whole scripture. Listen to this therefore. Since we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens Jesus the Son of God.
Let us take hold of our confession. Hold the confession we know what the confession is. Don't we church. Christ is Lord. We have no hope outside of him. For we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses.
But one who has been tempted in all things like we are yet without sin. Therefore let us draw near with confidence to the throne of grace so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in the Time of need.
You do not draw near to the kingdom of God by washing your hands. You do not draw near to the kingdom of God by ceremony of purifying yourself before you go into the temple that system is over. The way you draw near the way you draw near to the throne of grace is that you hold fast to the confession.
Do you see that it's not from the outside in it's from the inside out. James helps us very much. This text is used all the time and it should be it's the anatomy of sin. James 1 13 through 15. Let no one say when he is tempted.
I am being tempted by God. For God cannot be tempted by evil and he himself does not tempt anyone. But each one is tempted when he is carried away and enticed by his own lust. Then when lust has conceived it gives birth to sin and when sin is fully matured it brings forth death.
See the world you see touch and eat does not make you sin. Your heart makes you sin. Your rebellion against God makes you sin and then your rebellion of God just like when I was a kid confronted with my sin I lied and we doubled down right what we do is in our more Sophisticated adult lives.
We don't say thinking like when we have cookie crumbs all over face. We don't say no one in the cookie jar. No, we don't do that. We're much more crafty than that because what we do is see see I didn't sin.
All I did Was gossip by saying pray for him, right? You see what do and I know this hits hard right what what we do is we like to cloak our sin in pious language. It's what we like to do. We like to make our malicious gossip a prayer request.
We like to defend ourselves against attack by saying I'm so grieved for you, brother. I'm so grieved and who's gonna attack us when we do this. I'm gonna tell you who will attack you Jesus Christ. He's not he's not won over by that see.
The world of the past and this is the point of the parable. Let's get here the point of the parable. Pharisees wash your hands you're defiled. No, you break the law because of Corbyn and the disciples going what's this about?
And he says do you not understand? It's what's on the outside doesn't do anything to you. It goes in the sewer where it came from, right? It's all the circle of life, right? You eat the bread the bread goes in the sewer.
Who cares if it's leavened or not. Do you know that I can even feel like should we take leavened bread at communion? Here's the answer in the New Covenant who cares who cares? It all goes back to the same place because we do not enter the temple on the basis of our ritual cleanliness.
There is not one thing we can add to our cleanliness this morning. Not one thing we are either fully cleansed by the blood of Jesus Christ, or we're fully iniquity ground. Transgression dirt buried into us because there is no way that we can dig deep enough to get ceremonially pure.
But do you know what Jesus does when we hold fast to that confession? He completely cleanses us. There's no need you're not going to defile your food by ritually cleansing. You don't have to worry about catching a sin disease from someone else.
It's not who sinned your mother or your father. No in the New Covenant in the kingdom of God. We have a great high priest who understands everything that we go through to a greater extent. Do you understand that then Jesus saw temptation from the outside?
He didn't ever give in to the temptation. So that temptation would build and build and build and get to its highest level possible and yet he did not sin. He understands what it's like men to walk around and see an immodest woman.
He understands. He understands the urges that come and he never sinned. He understands women when you hear negative things that are oh so juicy to the ear that we want to hear and we want to Pass on. He understood that he heard all of it and he never sinned.
He understands the temptation to take the conflict run it underground and blow things up. He never sinned. Look what he did with the Pharisees. He goes right at them for the benefit of his disciples. And then he doesn't get impatient with his disciples.
What we're gonna see in chapter 8 is he's gonna teach the same lesson. Patiently again with another miracle of multiplication of food because Jesus does not tire as the teacher. He's the greatest teacher that ever lived.
And you will get the message if you're in his kingdom. And he will take the hardness off your heart. He promised to do it and he surely will. What an amazing God we serve. Don't miss it. Don't miss it.
The world that the Pharisees were living in and the disciples were so ensnared by is over because the surpassing power of the sacrifice the sacrifice. It wasn't about bulls and goats. The power of the sacrifice changed that world and it turned it upside down.
And the Prestige and the perfection and the lineage of the great high priest. He makes perfect intercession for us. What can we add. The author of Hebrews says we can't. Not only can we not add anything.
You cannot go back. You cannot go back. That's what Jesus is teaching his disciples. You cannot Cling to this idea. I'm not your earthly king of Israel. I'm the king of the world. I'm not saving the Jews.
I'm saving everybody. You're not coming into the presence of the Holy One based on your labor and going through the ceremonial cleansing. You're not coming into holiness with God with your abstinence from pork and Crawling things and all of the things that are made unclean and a little bit cool law.
You're coming into the presence of God based on only Only the sympathy of this great high priest who offered the once-for-all sacrifice and who lives to intercede for his people. Can you get a better intercessor than that?
Can you get a better attorney than the one who is the judge jury? Lawbringer. And the one who made the penalty himself. He did it. See before all of this. You had to be really worried about the outside.
He did if you've read Exodus and Leviticus. Not only the outside of the man not only the priest and his garments which were detailed down to the finest detail. But also the tabernacle itself. If you've read the end of Exodus, it's hard sledding, right?
It's where yearly Bible plan readings go to die because at the end of Exodus what happens is God lays out an excruciating detail what every part of the temple was to look like and its dimensions. And the reason why is because God is holy and It took a sacrifice from the man from the lineage of Melchizedek to make a way.
This man was not like a Levitical priest. He had no lineage. He was eternal. There's no beginning and no end. That's the kind of priest it takes to enter into the Holy of Holies. See only the great high priest after making sacrifice for himself could enter in to intercede for the people.
But Jesus did not have to make a sacrifice for himself. He entered into the high places forever on the basis of his perfect righteous standing. And the book of Hebrews is so important for us in understanding what's happening in Mark this Ceremonial law this covenant it's coming apart and the disciples don't quite get it yet.
But the teaching will continue until they all get it and even in Acts. They still don't quite get it, right? Do we have to be circumcised?
Can we eat pork?
Yes.
You see Mark writes so clearly here. Mark writes so clearly because it was so fuzzy to them. It was because if you were told your whole life you can't eat these things and be right with God Mark has to tell us.
Very clearly he says all food has been declared clean. Look friends. You don't have to eat it, but that even means Lay's potato chips. It's of no spiritual significance.
None.
Choose at your own discretion and for your own reasons, but I do truly I truly see. Sorry Brian, here we go. I see it in in in the reform camp. I see more posting about what we're doing on the outside than I do about the great high priest.
We are worried about working out. We are worried about testosterone. We are worried about All the food, right? We're worried about the Chemicals in the water and pesticides and frog hormones that are making us homosexuals and all this kind of stuff.
We see this all over the place and we and what happens is it's gotten boring to us. To talk about the basis by which we are purified. It's not about the outside. It's not about the outside and I told you I would mind you up.
I'm gonna cut you one more time first. All right. Here we go. What flows from an inner dirty cup? When inside of the cup is dirt you guys understand this right? You could have the most polished goblet of all time.
It looks beautiful you're like man, I would love to drink from that beautiful golden goblet. But if an inside of it There's like a little speck of poopoo. You're gonna drink from that. No, no one is no one cares.
How pretty the outside of the cup is when the inside is Feces and and the reason why is this and this is what we do. We can't see the heart. We're walking around and we're not seeing people's hearts. What we see is the outside.
Okay, and sometimes for a certain amount of time the outside can look really good and it can hide for a time. The poop on the inside the nastiness that we would never touch if we actually saw it, but we don't see it.
But here's the thing and here's the here's the deal. I know going through the men when we were going through first Timothy you see a thing that he gives a warning. He's like look their works are evident except sometimes they're not evident.
But time will reveal and time will always reveal if the inside is nasty. It can look good the Pharisees look good, but what's gonna happen? They're gonna murder their Lord, right? The inside is nasty and when the inside is nasty, what are you gonna get?
Let's look and here's the marker for us what you're gonna get is evil thoughts. Sexual immorality has there ever been a cult that's not marked by sexual immorality of the leaders. It's always strict legalism and dress codes for the Sexual bonanza for me That's the way it works right because you can't hide it forever.
The rotten heart is always going to act out.
Theft.
Stealing from the people. That's what Corbyn was. Murders that's coming. Adulteries if you break part of the law, you're gonna break it all covening. Do you see what he's doing with the Ten Commandments there?
He's running through him wickedness deceit sensuality ember in envy slander pride foolishness. When we see these coming out at the church. What that shows is that we have dirty insides of the cup no matter how pretty the outside looks no matter how pious the outside.
Sounds when we see this kind of stuff coming out the hearts rotten. Here's the good news friends what we do. I think we preach too often like the Puritans and we make you all afraid and we think I mean, I'm not even saved.
Right. How do I even know? Well Hebrews tells us you hold fast to the confession. Can anything take you away from the confession for God's people the answer is an emphatic. No, and here's the thing guys.
We love his Calvinist total depravity and I believe in total depravity. No one is seeking God not one and yet when God finds you. Did you know your heart is not totally depraved anymore. Did you know Christian?
Did you know did you know your heart is not deceitfully wicked above all things anymore? It's not it's in a conflict. It's not fully wicked it's been redeemed and it's working itself out the other way.
See when we're born in sin. What's happened is it goes from bad to worse as we sit in our sin and we get better at hiding our sin. We get worse and worse. But in Christ what happens is he gives us a new heart this new heart has new desires and those new desires grow over time.
So what happens with the sanctification of the Christian is they're gonna go from good to better. That doesn't mean sinless perfection but that means by God's grace as 70 years old Lord willing that I will be more holy and sanctified than I am today and That the inside of the cup will be cleaner and cleaner until glory when it's perfectly clean.
God desires the hearts of men. Not the appearance of men the hearts of men. We remember from 1st Samuel, right? Why was David chosen to be the king? He even chides his servant Samuel and he says men look on the outside.
But God looks on the inside. God looks to the heart of man. See you were depraved you did hate God. You did spend your time thinking about malice and wickedness and all of the things in this list, but not today not today.
Such were some of you such were some of you but you have been washed you have been redeemed. And so today Christian what we're marked by is not these fruits of wickedness. We are marked by the fruits of the Spirit and the outside of the cup is going to start reflecting purity not because of fake Piety but because it's really who we are.
That's why we have to look at the outside but you. Individually, you're the only one that can look at the inside and you should look at the inside and be much more concerned with your inside Than you are with your outside.
If you're trying to control the inside with your outside, you are a hypocrite and your worship is in vain this morning. Do you understand when you sing songs to Christ with a heart that's far from him, that's vanity.
That's vanity. We can't do that. It's crucial for us to understand that we cannot add or subtract from the law when we do so division is coming. Division is coming. We have to look into the word and not their traditions of men.
Every church has their traditions. We have to go by what Scripture says and we have the guardrails of confession. But we look at what Scripture says and we break against it. At the end of the day, this is what I want to leave us with.
We have to unite in truth and we have to quiet down about externals quiet down. We have to show patience and understanding through our various preferences and tendencies. Every family has different cultures.
Every family right as many families are in here. We have different cultures and you might come into our you know The rice Christmas thing and you might think well, what are they doing? They're eating Mexican food.
That's crazy. Sorry, Angel. It's Tex-Mex even the horror, right? I Don't know why we do that. We've had the real thing, you know but people come in and what happens is when we elevate our preferences and traditions and we try to bring our stuff from the house into this place and it Forces on other people that is not a mark of strength.
That's a mark of weakness and when we can give way to others preferences and traditions. Learn from them and love each other and keep the main thing the main thing reform people. This is what we must do keep the main thing the main thing that is not not a mark of weakness or opening the door To everyone that's a mark of maturity.
Did you know a huge mark of maturity is being able to disagree with someone continue to disagree with them and not hate them? Not be threatened by them. Oh My feelings that's all the bad things about Millennials that we talked about right.
Snowflakes.
We have to learn how to disagree with each other. Jesus shows us the model right here get to the point get to the point. See we have to be stalwarts and bulldogs on the essentials of the faith. I want us to be bulldogs about that.
I want us to accept nothing less than what Hebrews has told us what the Brit what scripture teaches us. We cannot compromise on that. They are the guardrails of orthodoxy. But we have to be patient and charitable on other doctrines.
We really do and we have to be get this get this and this is my last word. We have to be largely silent about traditions feasts and foods. Those are for individual households. Okay, those are not to bring in and to elevate and to bind others consciences and if we do that Then I pray to God that he would give us grace and compassion with one another and that we would grow.
That we would be the family of God that we reflect that family family squabble. If you ever been to our house, you know Cooper and I are gonna fight. It's fine. We love each other. It's fun sometimes, right?
There's gonna be squabbles here at the end of the day though at the end of the day. We trust in Christ and we hold that confession. And if we do that friends bear with me here if we do that, he is going to clean the inside of the cup.
He's promised to do it. He is changing us from the inside out. He's doing it every day. Sometimes it ends percent. It's imperceptible the five years from now. You'll probably see that work. It's happening.
Trust him. Trust him and trust the process. Let's pray Lord, thank you for your word. Thank you for the simplicity that Mark gives us or that that he cuts through. This difficult thing for the disciples, but it's also difficult for us.
There's nothing new under the Sun Lord. We like to elevate the exterior. Because at our core Lord, we think that salvation is too simple. We think that your grace is an offense. It couldn't be that easy.
Could it that you require nothing from us? But to hold to that confession that you've given us the faith to do in the first place Lord, it is that simple and in our unbelief Lord we stray and I pray that you would help us to come back.
Because you are the great shepherd you are the great high priest you are the master teacher Lord. You are the one that we are to emulate that we are to look at that we are to copy. Or that comes down to how you dealt with conflict to how you dealt with your family your friends the temple Lord may we learn from you?
May we do what you have taught? And Lord from that I pray that there would be growth in your people that there would be peace. But more than that Lord that there would be an aggression to do what you've called us to do Lord that we would not be fake Followers of the law that we would not be virtue signallers hearers only Lord.
But that we would buy your power and by your grace be doers of the law Lord that the inside would match the outside Lord, I pray that you would protect your church from hypocrisy. It is such a bad thing for the witness Lord.
It defiles the gospel when we say it and we're hypocrites Lord I pray that you would deliver us from that that we would repent where we have sinned Lord. Help us to not be hard-hearted Lord give us soft hearts.
Give us understanding and We will praise your name knowing that you will grant all of these requests or we trust you and we love you. And it's in the holy mighty name of Jesus that we pray this morning.
Amen.