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From early in my childhood, what I learned is that the Christian religion held an important place in American society. I can see this even living in the North. In the South, some say there is a church on every block.
This is why it's called the Bible Belt. But in the North, the Christian religion is seen here as well. The home I grew up in was only 1 .7 miles from our church building. In that short distance, we passed by three churches.
The Christian influence is unmistakable. But we now live in post-Christian America. And this has been this way for quite some time. And it's even more now than ever. What this means is that Christianity no longer has the influence it once had.
But there are still church buildings everywhere. You go to downtown Minneapolis, you see businesses, you see church buildings. Some of the most beautiful buildings, some of the most beautiful architecture are the deadest churches that there are.
There are people who still meet in these buildings, but most of the people who attend these gatherings on Sunday are performing their religious duty. They don't really want to go, but going makes them feel better about themselves.
Or people think, church is what good people do, so I am going to go to church. But these places of religion are not what God intended. God intended for churches to be full of life. He intended for the music and singing to be lively.
He intended for people to give to His work with a joyful heart. He intended the preaching to be full of life. He intended the fellowship to be rich. But in many places of religion all over America, and I would say Europe as well, it is very much like this, this liveliness is absent.
And in its place is deadness. There's no desire for God, but only duty. When this happens, God is not honored. He is displeased. As 1 Corinthians 16 .22 says, if anyone has no love for the Lord, let him be accursed.
No one can fool God. Spiritually dead churches and spiritually dead people will not fool Him. He knows and He demands that our highest delight be in Him. He wants this to be evident in churches and evident in individual lives.
But just as we see this today, Jesus experienced this as well. He ran into dead religion all over the place. And as the God-man, He hated it. And He called it out. This morning as we continue our sermon series through Matthew, we are going to once again see Jesus, have a confrontation with the corrupt Jewish leaders.
These people were engulfed in this deadness. And we will see important truths here through His words. So this time I encourage you to turn in a Bible with me to Matthew 15. We'll be looking at verses 1 -9.
And if you're using a red Bible in the pews, I don't know the exact page, I think it's 970 something. The sermon is titled, Dead Doctrine. What I'm going to do is I'm going to begin by reading the text.
Matthew 15 verses 1 -9. Then Pharisees and scribes came to Jesus from Jerusalem and said, Why do your disciples break the tradition of the elders? For they do not wash their hands when they eat. He answered them.
And why do you break the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition? For God commanded, Honor your father and your mother. And whoever reviles father or mother must surely die. But you say, If anyone tells his father or his mother, what you would have gained from me is given to God.
He need not honor his father. So for the sake of your tradition, you have made void the Word of God. You hypocrites! Well did Isaiah prophesy of you when he said, 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. Here's our big idea. Flee from the darkness of man-made religion. Flee from the darkness of man-made religion. And we'll see three reasons why in our text.
But before we jump in, let me give you a little recap of where we have been. Last week we saw the account where Jesus walked on water. The disciples were crossing the Sea of Galilee to the other side.
And as they were in the middle of the lake, they noticed a figure coming toward them. This figure, of course, was Jesus. He was a man, of course, but they thought it was a ghost. And what happened is that Jesus told them not to be afraid.
And as Peter was in the boat with the disciples, he looks out toward Jesus and he takes a step of faith and asks Jesus if he could walk out to him. Jesus told him to come. Peter stepped out on the water, but once he was out there, he started to doubt and he cried for help and the Lord rescued him.
In this episode, Peter showed some faith. He got out of the boat. But he had much growth to do in the area of trusting Jesus. And this is a good application for us. Jesus is trustworthy. But we have growth to do in trusting him.
He calls us in our lives to extend our faith and to experience the blessing of extending that faith. As we look to him, what we must understand is that the one who walks on water is the answer in our lives.
Now, this once again leads us to our text that we've already read. And our big idea is this, flee from the darkness of man-made religion. And here's our first reason why. Those engulfed in man's tradition rebuke true religion.
Those engulfed in man's tradition rebuke true religion. We'll see this in verses one and two. The last time we saw the Pharisees and scribes was in chapter 12, where Jesus called them an evil and adulterous generation because they sought for a sign.
The questions that they asked Jesus were not innocent questions. Like, I really want to know the answer. You know, our kids ask us those questions. You know, why, why, why? They want to know the answer.
The scribes and Pharisees, they don't want to know the answer. They want to, they're gotcha questions. They're trying to disprove Him. In our passage, they once again come to Him in hostility. As verse one and two tells us.
As we see these verses again, then the Pharisees and scribes came to Jesus from Jerusalem and said, why do your disciples break the tradition of the elders? For they do not wash their hands when they eat.
It's interesting here that they came from Jerusalem. That's a good observation to make here. Where were the highest up Jewish leaders from at this time? Jerusalem. Where did Jesus spend most of his ministry?
Galilee. Okay, so news is spreading about Jesus. And they're saying, okay, we got to send the cream of the crop of our Jewish leaders to address this guy. So these would have been the prestigious people coming to Jesus.
And what you will notice is that the Pharisees and scribes come to Him once again in hostility. Last week, we saw the narrative where Jesus walked on the water in the Sea of Galilee. And so He is here near the Sea of Galilee as they have this conversation.
And they come to test Him. And the question they ask Him is, why are your disciples breaking the tradition of the elders? And it's very interesting here how they say the tradition of the elders and not Scripture.
That should be a dead giveaway here that there's a problem. What we have learned so far in Matthew is that the Jewish leaders had many man-made laws. Now we know that the Word of God came through Moses and the other prophets of the Old Testament.
But what the Jews of old taught is that Moses passed on an oral tradition. Okay, so by mouth to the leadership of Israel. And this oral tradition was written down into what became known as the Talmud.
As one author wrote, to provide the means for superficially keeping God's commandments, regulation after regulation and ceremony after ceremony were added until God's own word was utterly hidden behind the wall of tradition.
Instead of protecting God's word, the tradition obscured and perverted it. Before long, tradition was more familiar and more revered than God's own word. This move from Scripture to tradition occurred over a period of several hundred years.
And by Jesus' day, the Jewish religion was engulfed in man-made tradition. The scribes and rabbis were to be listened to. These were the authority. These were the ones who knew. These are the ones who were going to lead you down the path of having a relationship with God.
To violate a tradition was more severe than violating a clear command in Scripture. This is how far off the rails they came. Getting this broader context tells us how serious it was that the disciples neglected one of the traditions.
They're not serious in the eyes of God, serious in the eyes of the leadership. What the second of verse two tells us is that they violated the traditions of the elders by not washing their hands before they ate.
Okay, we know that hand washing before meals is a good thing, right? But does it rise to the level of dishonoring God like they're saying here? The Pharisees and scribes observed this about the disciples and called them out.
They were looking, once again, for an opportunity to nail Jesus. See, you're not from God, we are. The purpose of a washing was to remove anything unclean that a common Jew may have come into contact with.
By ingesting food with unclean hands, the body would be unclean. So the tradition made it that the Jews always had to wash their hands before eating. If they didn't have any water, then they couldn't eat.
They had to find water so that they were clean. Now, the Old Testament did say that priests were required to wash their hands and feet before they performed their ceremonial duties. However, the extra biblical tradition said that every Israelite had to wash up before they ate.
No such law exists in the Old Testament. It was a man-made law, and Jesus and His disciples rightly did not keep it. Once again, the goal of the Jewish leadership is to refute Jesus, to discredit His whole ministry.
What they want to show is that He is a phony, and they're not. But it should be no surprise to us that Jesus' disciples disregarded these traditions. Who cares? This doesn't do anything. Why would we keep this?
Now, before they followed Jesus, they probably took part in these traditions as most of the Jewish population did. Remember, this Jewish leadership describes in the Pharisees had the Jewish people in the grip of their hands.
What they said went, and to go against them meant consequences. But once the disciples followed Jesus, they would have known that to follow these traditions was a complete waste of time. But there were strict laws in the Old Testament.
You know, when you read the Old Testament, you see this, right? Read through Leviticus. Lots of strict laws. And you might think, well, maybe the Jewish leaders of this time were right. Because it certainly seems like God cares a lot about these strict laws.
What we see in the New Testament is what God thinks about strict ceremonial laws. The ceremonial laws were meant to point ahead to greater spiritual realities. The ceremonial laws were pictures or types.
For example, the sacrificial system in the temple was intended to point ahead to the once for all sacrifice of Christ as the book of Hebrews makes crystal clear. All of the ceremonial practices commanded by God in the Old Testament were temporary.
But what the Jewish leaders did is expand the ceremonial laws to the point where they were adding things that weren't even in the Old Testament. And they missed the whole point. Jesus would have communicated the truth of these laws to his disciples.
They no longer needed to keep the ceremonial laws. And they especially did not need to keep the man-made Jewish traditions. They were added later. God cares about the heart. Not external religion. It's not like there's something magical here.
If we do this, he's pleased. Man-made religion is everywhere. We know this. Maybe you grew up in it. What is interesting is that what happened in the Jewish religion has happened in Christianity over the last 2 ,000 years.
There's a reason the Protestant Reformation had to happen 500 years ago. It's because the church at that time, the Roman Catholic Church, was engulfed in man's tradition. The Reformation is just getting back to the Bible.
What, okay, let's go beyond the traditions here. What does this say? And if these traditions contradict what this says, we got a problem. Because this is the word of God. And the word of God does not change.
Reformers like Martin Luther and John Kelvin rediscovered what was actually written in the Bible rather than what took over in the form of man-made tradition. By the way, it also returned the Bible to the common man.
Because you believed whatever they told you, right? Whatever the leadership told you, that's what you believed. Mark and Lori and I were talking about this yesterday. When we preach through the Bible, I hope you do, I hope you follow along with.
There's nothing to hide. What I am saying is what this says. If you have to go through someone and they say, you know what, you can't trust the common people, that's a problem. The Bible is written to everyone.
It's supposed to be read by everyone. And so the Reformation brought the Bible back to the common man. And the leadership can no longer deceive people with their traditions that are not the Word of God.
What I want you to understand about Eureka Baptist is that man-made religion is not welcome here. Only the Word of God. Modern day Pharisees would rebuke us. They would say, you're not doing this. You're not doing that.
But we will say along with Jesus and his disciples, we don't need to follow that man-made tradition. That's what they're telling the Pharisees and scribes in this text. That's what we tell anybody who is on us for not following certain traditions.
Do not let anyone impose on you what is invented by man. This historically has happened many times and it's even happening today. I have explained this before, but it's worth explaining again. Over the 20th century, the dominant Phariseeism in the church came from ultra-conservatives.
And people think that we're conservative. Compared to some people, we're pretty liberal. If you were to see some churches out there, and this was more dominant in the old age. These very conservative people, frankly, in lots of Baptist churches made rules.
You can't go to movies under any circumstance. You can't drink a drop of alcohol under any circumstance. You can't dance under any circumstance. You can't play cards under any circumstance. You also have to look a certain way.
If you are not dressed up when you come to church on Sunday morning, you are sinning. If your hair looks a certain way, you are sinning. For these Pharisee-like people, only certain music is allowed also.
In this case, it's only old hymns, right? And we love hymns. We sing hymns in this church. But you can be Pharisaical about that. Now, some also have said only one version of the Bible, King James only.
People given to this have so much focus on the things I listed that they often forget about what God truly cares about. And by the way, we should use wisdom with all those things. And you can see why they would go to that direction because, right, alcohol can be very dangerous.
Cards can be very dangerous. Dancing, very dangerous. Movies, most of them are bad. But no movies, right? So you can take it to the extreme. And that's what I would call the ultra-conservative Phariseeism was.
This was the old Phariseeism. But this is largely on life support today compared to what else is out there. It is out there still. In fact, I just had a conversation with a guy who's very much engulfed in this, sadly.
But it is in the minority compared to what else is out there. The dominant form today is coming from the opposite end of the spectrum. And that is those evangelicals influenced by the left. Okay, so the pendulum has swung.
Used to be over here. Now it's... Oh, speaking of swinging, now it's over here. This Phariseeism comes from those who never think this would describe them. We're the progressive side of evangelicalism.
We're not the Pharisees. These people, I would describe them as the social justice warriors. A few years back, there was a Christian conference held, remembering Martin Luther King, Jr., 50 years after his death.
This was a Christian conference. The conference was perplexing to begin with. As Americans, we appreciate MLK and what he did to advance equality under the law for blacks. However, MLK was a pastor, and he was a false teacher.
We shouldn't be afraid to say that, he was. He did not believe that Jesus was God. He did not believe in the bodily resurrection of Christ. He was a pluralist who thought that all religions can lead to heaven.
Okay, so as Americans, we celebrate him. As Christians, we don't, because he was a false teacher. But at this conference, there were progressive Christians rebuking white evangelicals for their continued role in racism.
And this not only happened at this conference, but others as well, and also in the pulpits all over America. The social justice movement, as I've explained before, is built on Marxist ideas. You are an oppressor because you are white, and you're among the oppressed because you are black.
In other words, all whites in America are guilty because of their skin color. And this is not biblical, and yet these misguided pastors embracing man-made tradition called white Christians all over America to repent.
They call something sinful that isn't sinful. They call them to repent of something where those listening did not need to repent of. In this system, whites are always the oppressors, and blacks are always the oppressed.
So what this means is a continual repentance that needs to take place for white Christians. In this man-made system, there really is no growth since you are always guilty. You always need to repent of your whiteness.
And what these teachers did and are still doing, sadly, after being confronted, what they're doing is laying a burden on Christians that God does not put on them. Remember what Jesus said in Matthew 11, verse 30?
My yoke is easy and my burden is light. But this burden put on Christians by these misguided preachers is a heavy burden. This is the new Phariseeism, and just like the Pharisees, they do their works to be applauded by the world.
What they are doing is rebuking those who are rejecting their man-made tradition, just like the scribes and Pharisees rebuked Jesus' disciples. They are rebuking those who are trying to follow Jesus while keeping this false teaching out.
It's interesting, there's a church in Washington, D .C. right now that is really doing very poorly. Years before this pastor came, who's really taken it down this direction, like I'm just mentioning here, it was a very diverse church.
Blacks, Hispanic, whites, and they rejected Marxist ideas. And yet this church had all different colors of skin at this church. And yet this new pastor, pretty much if you don't embrace this man-made tradition, you're not for other skin colors, you're racist.
And the great irony of this is that before he was even there, this was a super diverse church. And they understood what the Bible says about we're all created in the image of God. We're all one, really one skin color, right?
We're just different shades of brown. We're all one race, the human race. And they understood this. And yet he's taken them down this really tragic direction. And the irony of this whole thing is that there needs to be a repentance.
And that repentance needs to come from those preachers adding burdens on Christians, just like the Jewish leaders did in the first century. Okay, so whether it's from the ultra conservative side, right, where these extra rules that the Bible doesn't have in there, or on the left side, these extra rules that the Bible doesn't have in there, we need to flee from that.
So flee from the darkness of man-made religion. And the first reason why is that those engulfed in man's tradition rebuke true religion. And here's our second point. That is that Jesus rebukes the misplaced values of the outwardly religious.
And we'll see this in verses three through six. In the previous point, we saw a rebuke. The rebuke came from those engulfed in man's tradition. Now the true rebuke comes as it comes out of the mouth of the God-man in verses three through six, where Jesus answers them.
And why do you break the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition? For God commanded, honor your father and your mother. And whoever reviles father or mother must surely die. But you say, if anyone tells his father or his mother, what would you have gained from me as given to God?
He need not honor his father. So for the sake of your tradition, you have made void the word of God. You'll notice that Jesus does not answer the question by defending the disciples' actions. He responds by asking a counter-question that exposes their hypocrisy.
What they accuse the disciples of doing doesn't matter. But what Jesus points out about the corrupt Jewish leaders does matter. What Jesus tells them is that they are guilty of a real sin. Not a fake sin, a real sin.
He had a long list of sins he could have pointed out that they were committing, but Jesus points out the fifth commandment to them. The fifth commandment says that one must honor your father and mother.
You'll notice in verse four who this law came from. Who did it come from? God. Not man. God. Jesus also told them the serious penalty for breaking this commandment. Exodus 21, 17 says that anybody who reviles their parents shall be put to death.
That's a very serious crime. In Old Testament Israel, it was capital punishment to curse your parents. This law required that one honored father and mother through respecting and taking care of them. But once again, the Pharisees obscure what the word of God clearly says.
They muddied the clear waters. That's what false teachers do. In verse five, Jesus quotes their tradition. If anyone tells his father or his mother what you would have gained for me is given to God. What this tradition has in mind is a gift offered to God.
There was a tradition that said that one could set aside all of their possessions and say that these possessions belonged to God as a gift. And once someone did this, they could not go back because a vow was offered to the Lord.
In Numbers 30, verse two, it says that once you make a vow, you have to keep that vow. This meant that the person could not help his parents with financial assistance. You might say this is a life of sacrifice since everything is dedicated to God.
But on further inspection, this is not the case, not at all. The person would give what the law required him to give to God, but the rest would be left to him. As one author said, the tradition was not designed to serve either God or the family, but the selfish interests of the person making the hypocritical vow.
In order to keep the tradition, the fifth commandment was broken. As Jesus says in verse six, for the sake of your tradition, you have made void the word of God. This is a very strong rebuke from Jesus.
They value their tradition. That's their idol. But they neglected what God has commanded and what God truly cares about. In Matthew 23, Matthew 23 is the chapter where he just lets off on them. In verse 23 of that chapter, Jesus said, woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you tithe mint and dill and cumin and have neglected the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy and faithfulness.
These you ought to have done without neglecting the others. The corrupt Jewish leaders didn't care about loving their neighbor. They didn't care about helping the poor. They didn't care about taking care of their parents as the law commanded.
What they cared about was their tradition. And somehow they thought that that pleased God. If we just do these rituals, if we just play the game, somehow God is pleased. Their priorities were misplaced and Jesus rebukes them for it.
And what we must understand is that this can happen to churchgoers, whether true Christians or not. We can value things in our church that actually become idolatrous. And we are a church that has lots of history.
And it is a history that we are right to appreciate and we should celebrate. And we have. We just had the 140th anniversary this past summer. But what if we care more about our church history than following Jesus closely?
What if we care more about our traditions? We can care more about our history, more about our annual activities, more about the kind of songs we sing, more about our unique facilities and the decorations in these places.
We can idolize things that are staples in our church without worshiping God. If you think about some of these beautiful buildings that are around, and I think our building is a beautiful building. It's a nice, old, historic church building.
You can worship that, right? You can think, man, I love going to this place because it's just a neat place to be, right? There's a nostalgia to it. But that's not what God wants. God wants our hearts.
When we idolize things that are not essentials, that are history, traditions, things like that, we put ourselves in a dangerous place. When this happens, misplaced priorities happen. Our passion should be for Jesus and what He is doing.
Our greatest desire should be that we love God more and then help others as well as we love Him. And the way that we show our love for God is by doing what He has commanded. So may we make this our aim always as a church.
So we are to flee from the darkness of man-made religion. And the second reason why is that Jesus rebukes the misplaced values of the outwardly religious. The third reason why we are to flee from the darkness of man-made religion is that Jesus calls their so-called worship meaningless.
In verses seven through nine, man-made worship or man-made religion misses the whole goal. Verses seven through nine where Jesus says, you hypocrites, well, that Isaiah prophesied of you when he said, 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. Now, how ugly is it when people wag their finger at you when it's the doctrines of men? It's ugly when that happens. When people impose on you what God does not impose.
I mentioned that I had a conversation with a guy recently. It made me angry. Like, what's this guy doing? And it's alarming when that happens. And what Jesus does here is he quotes a passage from the Old Testament, Isaiah 29 and 13.
This prophecy was written 700 years before Christ. And this prophecy was about the people more immediate to Isaiah, but it's also true about the Jewish leaders who stand right before Jesus. The Jewish leaders at this time were much like their forefathers, and this was not a compliment.
They say the right things. They would never say murdering was okay or coveting was okay or stealing was okay. These were people who didn't say curse words. These were people who did not hang out with drunkards and prostitutes.
Externally, they were clean, but inwardly, they had dark hearts. Jesus did not mince words when he described who they were inwardly in Matthew 23, 27. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you are like whitewashed tombs which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people's bones and all uncleanness.
Now, you go to a graveyard, you know, tombstone, beautiful. You don't want to see what's inside there, right? That's what he compares these people to. Oh, you look beautiful on the outside, but you're dark, you're ugly on the inside.
God does not care about external acts that are not connected to the heart. God hates dead religion. This type of religious practice does not benefit the person practicing this type of religion, because it does not honor God.
It is not true worship. And this is why Jesus says in verse nine, in vain do they worship me. This religion does nothing. It's a waste of time. You might as well go do something else on Sunday morning if you're gonna do that.
All the ceremonies, all the rituals, all the going through the motions does absolutely nothing. Yet dead religion was common in Jesus' day and it is common in the world today. And when we think of the more ritualistic move into Christianity, we think about Roman Catholicism, we think about Lutheran churches in our neck of the woods.
Now, not all Lutheran churches in our area are in biblical. Some do hold to the Bible. We have disagreements, of course, but it's not heretical. But we often hear in conversations, people say, I'm Lutheran, right?
You go up to them and you might invite them to church and they say, I'm Lutheran. And when I hear these words, it is likely that this person is trying to just get you off their back and say, I belong to a church.
And then you ask them, well, what was the sermon last Sunday? I haven't been to church in six months, or last time I went was Christmas and Easter. But this happens in Baptist churches too. To go to a church can be to go through the motions.
And let's play the church game because it's Sunday. And let me say a word of thanksgiving to the Lord. When I think of where our church is at right now, this largely does not describe us. He is moving us further and further away from this.
And I see a group of people that wants to be here, that desires to worship the Lord together, that are hungry to grow, but we can still fall prey to this. We can honor God with our lips, but not with our hearts.
An unbeliever is always in this place, but believers can succumb to this too. We need to watch out for this. Dead religion is done in vain. God cares about our heart. He wants our heart to be fully engaged.
And we can fall into the trap of kind of going through the motions. Are we thinking about the words we're singing? Are we thinking about how we can please God? He wants us to have a burning passion for Him.
He wants us to be moved when we sing these songs of praise together. He wants us to obey Him in our lives out of our deep love for Him. And if we say words honoring to God, but our heart is really treasuring something else, then we are acting hypocritically.
A hypocrite is an actor. That's where the word comes from. A number of years ago, there was a pastor on the rise in the Twin Cities. He was writing books, invited to conferences, making a name for himself.
It's interesting. Everything I just stated there, it almost seems like more than not, that's a pitfall. Fame is a very dangerous thing. But not always, but more than not, it seems like whenever that happens, the person crashes and burns.
But anyway, in the bio of this man on the church website, he said that when he was younger, he wanted to be an actor. But then he was called to ministry. And as his fame was at an all-time high, people noticed that he wasn't treating people very well.
He would get easily angered around others. But people wrote this off because he was from the East Coast. And they say, well, he's just from New York. And they don't have Minnesota, Wisconsin nice there, right?
We can write this off. But they should not have written it off. This was a major character flaw that made him disqualified for the ministry. But this was just the tip of the iceberg. It was discovered that he was having multiple affairs.
And of course, he was forced to resign. But let me go back to his bio. Remember what he said in his bio? He wanted to be an actor. And the great irony of it is that he was an actor. He played the role of pastor, but eventually he was found out.
We don't want our words to be hollow. We want the words of praise toward God that come out of our mouth to be the overflow of a heart that truly desires God. I get convicted when I think about that story because who are we?
Do we just play the game? Or are we really treasuring God? We need to ask ourselves that question. I need to ask myself that question, right? Do you become a pastor just to play the religious game? That's what the Pharisees did.
That was their treasure. But like I said earlier, there's no place for that here. That's not who we want to be. Far from it. We want to be pleasing to our Lord. It says in Isaiah 66, here is the one to whom I will look.
He who is humble and contrite and trembles at my word. That's who we want to be. So we are to flee from the darkness of man-made religion. We have seen three reasons why in this text. Those engulfed in man's tradition rebuke true religion.
Jesus rebukes the misplaced values of the outwardly religious. And Jesus calls their so-called worship meaningless. We do not want to have a religion rooted in man's wisdom, teachings, and traditions.
Such a religion is corrupt. Such a religion is lifeless. And such a religion ultimately leads people to hell. That's why we must understand this. There's gonna be a lot of religious people in hell. That's a sobering reality.
It's true. But knowing that you are a sinner and that you need the Savior, Jesus Christ, is the only true religion there is. And this religion is beautiful. This is a religion from the heart. And next week we're gonna look at the heart, dig deeper into what that means.
2 Corinthians 3 .18 says, and we all with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. As the Spirit breathes life in you through your relationship with Christ, He is making you into something glorious.
And this is the opposite of dead man-made religion. And may this describe everybody in this room. May dead man-made religion have no part with us. Now next Sunday, we are gonna look at the deepest part of each of us.
What is it in us that determines the course of our life? We'll look at that, Lord willing, next Sunday. And I say Lord willing, by the way, what if Christ comes back this week, right? What if I get hit by a bus, right?
There's no guarantee that we'll be here next Sunday. But maybe we might, okay? And if we are, we'll look at the next 11 verses of Matthew chapter 15. But this time, let's close in prayer. Father in heaven, what a wonderful God you are.
And Lord, I think all of us, if we're honest, we can fall into the trap, Lord, of having our hearts not engaged, of doing things externally, doing it because we feel like we have to. I certainly know I do that, Lord.
But may that part of us die. And may a Spirit-filled person replace that person more and more. Help us all to become the best version of ourselves as we follow You. To be, I remember one author, that we'd be embarrassed of who we were years ago as we pursue You and are moved from one degree of glory to the next.
In Jesus' name, amen.