Matthew 15:1-20

Let's do Matthew, Matthew 15.

If you're new with us, we're going through the Bible.

We're studying through the Bible.

We happen to be in Matthew.

We're not going book by, we're going verse by verse.

I'm really, I'm thinking, we're at the point now where I'm beginning to think about what book we'll do next.

And I'm thinking, not gonna guarantee, but I'm thinking about doing the book of Revelation.

Daniel and Revelation go together.

As a church, a few years ago we did um Revelation 1, 2, and 3, and we looked at the letters to the seven churches.

But then you get in.

This is the last book in your Bible, and it is a wild book.

There's all kinds of it's it's the genre of writing is apocalyptic.

So it's a it's a crazy, um, crazy set of material.

But I think it would be good.

I think it would be fun.

I don't I don't know.

So we can you can begin to think about that.

If you have any special requests for what book we go through next, let me know.

Um everybody set?

So Matthew 15.

Matthew 15 is where we're gonna be at.

Have you ever noticed how much we rely on rules and routines to feel accepted or secure?

Think about that for a second.

Rules and routines.

Like recently I we moved, our our family moved houses, and it took me a good couple of months to get into a routine where it just feels like I'm at peace within myself.

Sometimes we rely on rules and routines to feel secure and accepted.

You think about people who obsess over diets, fitness trends, or their professional habits.

They cling to them because they promise control or a simple sense of accomplishment, and ultimately the hope that they'll that will measure up, whether it's our own standards or someone else's.

This need for control isn't just cultural, it's deeply wired into us.

Psychologists say that when life feels uncertain, humans naturally, listen, they naturally create rules.

We naturally create rules or rituals to give ourselves a sense of security.

We convince ourselves that if we just do everything right, check the right boxes, follow the right steps, we'll avoid failure or rejection.

It's like, you know, if you're a fan of baseball, you know that there's all these different kinds of rituals that baseball players will engage in.

They'll wear the same socks for every game.

They'll make sure not to step on the foul line as they're crossing onto the field.

It's not about logic, it's about a desire to feel a sense of control or to feel accepted or to feel safe.

And we all have these things that we we put into our life artificially, kind of based off of our own psychology, but also be uh based off of kind of that sense of tribe to fit in.

And so this morning in our text, we're gonna see some traditions that the Pharisees had built in to give themselves a sense of righteousness, to give themselves a sense of superiority, moral and like religious superiority, to really, you know, to substantiate this idea that they were the religious elites.

And we're gonna unpack that because embedded in the Pharisees is a principle that you and I can tend towards.

And God wants our hearts, He doesn't want us caught up in some kind of set of rules or artificial set of rules to just try to make ourselves feel more spiritual.

He wants to genuinely have us feel spiritual because we're near him.

Because we're accepted in his presence.

And so, again, as I do every week, I'm gonna ask you to look in your own mirror, to reflect on your own life, on whether or not you are leaning into a sense of acceptance that you feel okay with God, that God's okay with you, because some set of artificial routines or rituals, or is it because you know that the God of the universe sent his son Jesus Christ to die on the cross for your sins, and that he is actually in love with you without your ritual or routine or your law?

Okay, the Pharisees' obsession with traditions wasn't just about religion, it was their psychology.

Their rules gave them a sense of control in a chaotic world.

They thought, if I can control the small things, I will feel clean, worthy, and accepted by God.

Those are key words.

Clean, worthy, and accepted by God.

And this morning, if you're doing anything in your life to try to make yourself feel clean, worthy, and accepted by God, other than your faith in Christ, then you're not understanding your own state.

Now we're gonna talk about obedience and how it fits in.

Jesus talks about that here.

But we're gonna look at this kind of this question that the Pharisees ask and how it reveals just this, their own artificial reaching for a cleanliness or a cleanness or a sense of acceptance in God's presence.

Jesus is gonna confront this in Matthew 15.

Let's look at the first nine verses.

We're gonna walk through this.

Actually, before we, because I'm not gonna read the 20, we're gonna do verses 1 through 20.

So it's a lengthy section.

There's four scenes.

What I think we should do is we should pray because I'm gonna just, I'm not gonna read all 20 verses, I'm gonna just read them to you and then we're gonna explain it, okay?

So let's let's bow our heads together.

Let's ask God to speak to us.

God, we thank you for your word.

Um, you caused Matthew, the former tax collector, one of your apostles, to write down this biography about your life and what you taught.

And we're gonna look into this record of your teaching, this encounter with the Pharisees and the crowds, the disciples, and with Peter.

We're gonna look at it.

We want to hear how you want to use this in our life.

And so right now we agree together that we're gonna listen for your voice as we're going through this text.

That you're gonna speak how, like illuminate, like open up our eyes to see what we need to see from this text.

Thank you for loving us.

That in your love you want us to connect with this passage.

And we pray this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Amen.

So, verse one in Matthew 15, it says this.

Then Jesus was approached by the Pharisees and the scribes from Jerusalem, who asked, Why do your disciples break the tradition of the elders, for they don't wash their hands when they eat.

So you'll notice here that the Pharisees come from Jerusalem.

They come up to this.

The last thing we saw was that Jesus was over in the region of Genezaret.

So imagine the nation of Israel.

You have these two significant bodies of water.

The northern body of water is the Sea of Galilee, and it's got a bunch of small towns around it.

This is where Jesus grew up.

And now he's teaching in this region.

Down south you have the capital city of Jerusalem, and this is where the Pharisees hung out.

It was the locus of power, the center of power, religious power, and that's where the Pharisees were, that was their kind of their headquarters.

And they go up to Jesus, they approached Jesus, and they ask him this question about their washing of their hands.

But they say, your disciples are breaking a tradition of the elders.

Now, the tradition of the elders, it was a set of oral laws.

You see, at this time, Judaism and what we call Torah, Moses' books, it's been around for 1,500 years.

And so there's been a number of different oral traditions that have risen up to help the Jewish people understand what Moses' laws mean, the Ten Commandments, and the 600 plus other commands that were there.

What did those things, how did it work itself out?

And so one of the traditions that had developed was this tradition around washing their hands.

These traditions were meant to help the people follow God's law.

They were often became burdensome and overshadowed the actual command.

So imagine you have at this layer here, you have God's command.

You can open up your Bible and you can find the command.

But then you have another Jewish teacher that comes along and explains it, and they add a layer of teaching.

And then there's another layer that's added by another teacher and another layer.

So finally you get like this whole robust set of traditions that are burdensome, difficult to follow, weird stuff.

Even to this day, Jewish people followed.

Have you seen the little the fishing line that goes around New York City?

Have you heard about that?

There recently was a cyclist that got clotheslined riding his bicycle across Manhattan, and it was because one of these Orthodox Jewish communities sticks up this little fishing line all around New York City because one of the rules is on the Sabbath, you're only allowed to go so far, you're only allowed to walk so far on the Sabbath day.

But if you can put this fishing line up around New York City, it technically extends your property because the fishing line originates from your property, from your community, and it extends your community further.

So as long as you're within walking distance of the fishing line, you're still observing the Sabbath until the guy gets clotheslined riding his bike along there and breaks your fishing line.

But those are the types of traditions that we're talking about.

That's what Judaism looked like at the time of Jesus.

And there's this ceremonial hand washing.

Now, ceremonial hand washing, this isn't like our hygiene stuff, right?

It was a ritual that would signify spiritual cleanliness, an outward act that they believed made someone acceptable to God.

There was a specific way to wash your hands.

The water would run off your hands in a particular way, they would drip off your hands, and it was this just this tradition to symbolize that you are ceremonially clean.

And evidently the disciples were not doing it in the way that they were supposed to do it.

And the Pharisees kind of put this question to Jesus.

Now notice, they're focused on an external behavior, and it is a man-made rule.

There's nothing in the Bible about washing your hands before you eat.

Now, your mom may say there is, but you need to tell her, there is no rule in there.

It might be good hygiene, but it does not make you closer to God.

Do you understand that?

It does not make you closer to God.

Now, let's look at verses 3 through 6.

Verses 3 through 6.

He answered them, Why do you break God's commandment because of your tradition?

Now, this here, this is Jesus that is responding to the question that has been put to him.

Why do you break God's commandment because of it?

Now, where's he going with this?

This is pretty interesting, right?

Because the question is posed to Jesus.

Jesus turns around and he says, I've got a question for you.

And he starts with this.

Why do you break?

Well, what's he talking about?

What is the commandment that they're breaking?

Check this out.

This is crazy.

Look at this one.

Okay, verse 4.

For God said, Honor your father and mother, and whoever speaks evil of father and mother must be put to death.

What commandment is that?

That's a fifth commandment, right?

Out of the ten, out of the ten.

This is easy.

This is low-hanging fruit.

Every Jewish person knows this is the command of God.

Jesus goes on.

But you, now imagine Jesus, like he says, but you, Pharisees, whoever tells his father or mother, whatever benefit you might have received from me is a gift committed to the temple.

Okay, what's going on here?

You had Pharisees, the most religious people who had aged elderly parents.

And they may have, because of their nice, cushy religious job, maybe they got a little bit of extra savings on the side.

Maybe they had some saved up money.

And instead of taking that money and using that money to take care of their parents, instead what they were doing was they were saying, oh, this money here, it's called Corbin.

The word Corbin means it's dedicated to God.

And so they were saying, you know, yeah, I've got a savings account over here of$5,000, but I can't use it to help you because it's dedicated to God.

Now, I'm still using it, it's still there.

But I can't take from that those funds and help you out because it's dedicated to the temple.

It was a cheeky way to get out of genuinely caring for your parents.

Isn't that bad?

Isn't that horrible?

Yeah.

Whoever tells his father or mother, whatever benefit you might have received from me, oh, sorry, that's a gift.

Dedicated.

Now that sounds super religious, right?

Oh wow, you're dedicating your stuff to the temple.

But this to me looks like tax loopholes.

Like how in America, you know, we kind of avoid our taxes in particular ways.

They just found a loophole, right?

Of like, well, I'm gonna just call it Corbin, therefore I don't have to help my parents out.

You gotta be cold-hearted not to help your parents out, you know?

But and to do something like that.

It's so sad.

The Pharisees' tradition made them feel clean, but in reality, they were using their religion to sidestep the commands of God.

Do you see that?

They were using this tradition to get out of following God, and they somehow were able to do this shady deal, and they it seemed to like function as if and still think like I'm a good religious person, and Jesus is calling them on it.

It wasn't just a mistake, it revealed a deeper problem.

Their hearts were far from God.

Imagine someone in our culture who's like they're they say they're like really passionate about the environment, right?

They're committed to recycling, they meticulously sort their paper and their plastic cans every week and proudly avoid using single-use plastic.

Um, on the surface, they feel like they're doing their part to save the planet.

But that same person regularly, you know, flies around in a gas-guzzling private jet, leaves the lights on all day, takes long, wasteful showers.

They feel good about themselves because of the small visible act of recycling, which is a cultural rule that symbolizes environmental care, but they're ignoring the bigger, more impact of impactful behaviors that contribute to sustainability.

It's that kind of thing, right?

It's that kind of behavior.

Trying to, you know, we call that um virtue signaling, is usually the term that we use.

But if you peel it away, there's hypocrisy there.

Now look at this.

In verse 6, he says, he does not have to honor his father.

In this way, you have nullified the word of God because of your tradition.

This is really important.

You've taken basically and you've deleted the word of God.

You've nullified, you've voided the word of God because of your tradition.

All these layers of traditions have been stacked up.

Stacked up where it's like, where is even God's word under all this?

Can you find can you find it?

Is it in there?

Listen, religious people, us religious people, Christians, we're good at doing this kind of thing.

Of having all of this kind of like these traditions and get wrapped up in traditions.

You know, some churches they get all wrapped up in like, what's the color of the carpet gonna be?

And they they there's there was churches that got like divided over like mask bandates, you know, back in COVID.

And it's just like, okay, you know, it's like all this stuff, you know, that we that we can get caught up in, but like, where's the the the actual like thing, the heart of God that's revealed in his word?

So Jesus goes, he's not done with the Pharisees yet.

By the way, we're still in scene one.

This is scene one with the Pharisees.

He says, hypocrites, okay.

If you have a painting on your wall of Jesus with that nice little lamb around his shoulders, and he's like meek and mild, this is not the image you get, right?

It's important that when you understand who Jesus is, sometimes he talks like this.

Okay?

Do you understand that?

Okay?

The important thing to understand and see about that is that when Jesus left, he said, I'm sending another like me, the Spirit, the Holy Spirit.

And sometimes the Holy Spirit says to you and I, you're a hypocrite.

And that's okay.

That doesn't mean that God's unloving.

It means that the most helpful thing that we need at that moment is to hear that kind of truth.

So Jesus speaks to these Pharisees and he says, Hypocrites.

Isaiah prophesied correctly about you when he said, What did Isaiah say?

This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me, but that's not it.

They worship me in vain, teaching as doctrines, human commands.

They worship me in vain, teaching as doctrines, humans commands.

I want to look at this for just a second.

This whole idea of um human commands.

Human commands.

Dr.

Phil, Oprah, social media influencers, self-help books, offer advice.

They often sound practical and wise, but this is the danger.

We start treating human teaching as if they're biblical truth, and they creep into how we as disciples care for one another.

This is this is what I mean.

We have a um in our culture, we have mass media where there's chicken soup for the soul, there's Oprah, there's podcasts that are out there.

We we are we are inundated with a lot of Of different messaging about how to do life.

And then you have the Bible.

And then we get into a setting like this, and people start sharing their life.

In a little while, we're going to eat together.

And hopefully there's some vulnerability.

Sharing your, you know, the things that are going on with sickness and your health or your search for a job or the things that you know are difficult in your life.

Maybe some of you will share your stories.

And that's a real gift.

If anybody does that for you today over lunch, would you just say thank you to them?

Because nobody told them they had to share a little bit of their life with you.

And that's a very generous thing to do.

It's called being vulnerable.

You're opening yourself up.

Now I want to encourage you as a church that as that happens, make sure that you're not giving out human commands as doctrine.

Doctrine is God's teaching, right?

Doctrine is God's teaching.

And if you take and give advice, it's important to say, when you're giving advice, you know, this might be an idea.

I don't know if it's in the Bible or not.

The best advice you can give is, hey, I know the Bible says something about that, but maybe you don't know everything about the Bible.

Maybe you're not sure.

Okay?

It's really important when you're around church people and you're giving advice, that you're not taking your advice, Oprah, chicken soup for the soul, you're not taking it and turning it into doctrine.

Do you know why?

Here's why.

When you're in this setting, this is this is for you to come into this place is a step of vulnerability.

You're in a place where we just we prayed a minute ago, Holy Spirit, speak to us.

In order for the Holy Spirit to speak to us, we have to open up our hearts.

That's a step of vulnerability.

Some of us have been hurt deeply, and we're like, the last thing I want to do is open up my heart.

Because the last time I did that, I was wounded.

But here you are, you come into a place where God's at work, and then you're around other Christians, and if the other Christians around you start giving you advice and they start telling you, this is what it means to be a follower of Jesus, but really it's just a little bit of Oprah, it's a little bit of chicken for the soup for the soul.

You're missing, you're giving bad advice.

You're not necessarily, you're pairing, it might not even be bad advice, but there's this spiritual, what we call a spiritual art that's paired with it.

And then start people start feeling like, man, I can't do what that person said.

Well, it was just Oprah's advice, but it wasn't the Holy Spirit's advice, but they start feeling like, well, I heard that at church, and so that must be from God.

That's dangerous.

That's very dangerous because we start messing with each other's relationship with God.

This we we were talking about this a couple weeks ago.

There was in the early church, they had this problem with um getting meat.

If you lived in Rome and you wanted to have a steak, a T-bone steak, you would go to the marketplace.

But the meat that was being sold in the marketplace, before it sold there, it was offered up as a sacrifice to a pagan god.

And so you had this moral dilemma.

As a Christian, can I buy a piece of meat that was offered to an idol?

What do you think?

Some people said no.

And so what you ended up with is by being a follower of Jesus and deciding I can't eat meat offered to an idol, I need to be a vegetarian.

So half the church was vegetarians.

The other half of the church looked at that pagan offering, and they said, you know what?

That um idol isn't anything.

It's just make-believe.

There is no other God but the one true God.

And offering something to that idol really doesn't make any difference.

So Paul writes, and they're judging each other.

They're like, there's like a conflict going on in the church over this issue.

Should you be a vegetarian?

Should you eat meat offered to an idol?

Here's the interesting thing.

Paul says, listen, everybody needs to stand or fall based off faith.

He says, the person who's a vegetarian, they're weak in faith.

They need to be accepted, they need to be loved, but they're not at a place yet where their faith is strong enough to believe that that meat offered to an idol is meaningless.

So Paul would have eaten the meat.

And but he said, I'm not gonna actually eat the meat in front of my brother who's a vegetarian, because I don't want to mess with their relationship with God.

I don't want to hurt, and I don't want to cause them.

Let's use a modern example.

Let's say that we have a Christian who's very sensitive.

Their conscience is really sensitive about meat offered to an idol.

And after church, we say, hey, let's go out for Chinese food.

But we get over there to the Chinese restaurant, and there's the little Buddha, and they're offering, you know, incense and stuff to the Buddha.

And our friend that's come with us, they're like, that's idolatry, that's paganism, I don't want to have anything to do with that.

Now, Paul would have no problem eating at the Chinese food restaurant.

But he wouldn't do it because the last thing he wants to do is be a part of this person who's sensitive, feeling separated from God.

You see, if I go and do the things that I'm at liberty to do, but it then causes my brother in Christ to do that same thing, but then after the fact, let's say they eat there at the Chinese food restaurant and they're like, oh man, I feel farther away from God.

You know, I ate there from this pagan restaurant.

Paul says, Listen, don't eat there.

Don't eat there.

So here's the thing.

When we get, we we do a lot, we're gonna do life together.

We're doing a lot of life together.

We're gonna have a whole meal together.

Our relation, your relationship is so important with God.

It's so important that we're not judging each other.

It's so important that we're not trying to influence, you know, if somebody's sensitive to something, we're not saying, Oh, come on, get over it.

Get over it, you know, just toughen up.

That's not what Paul did.

Paul honored the weakness of their conscience.

He said, It's okay to be a vegetarian.

That's okay.

That's okay.

You're weak in the faith, but that's okay.

I love you, I don't judge you.

You're still loved by God.

Okay.

So Jesus tells these Pharisees, he says, Listen, you guys are hypocrites because you're taking this tradition that came along years and years, a millennium later, and you're saying, this is what it means to be clean and accepted before God.

And you're nullifying the word of God.

You're turning a human command into a doctrine, and that's wrong.

Now, one of the obvious things from this is man, it would be good to know what God says and he doesn't say.

Because we all listen to each other.

We listen to Oprah, we listen to Dr.

Phil, we listen to podcasts, we read books, and you gotta be able to know, hey, is this line up with what the Bible says, or does it disagree with what the Bible says?

Some of the things you might hear is, have you ever heard people say, hey, you need to cut that person out of your life.

They're toxic.

That's a common piece of advice.

It's rooted in a cultural obsession with self-protection.

But it might ignore the ideas of forgiveness, reconciliation, bearing with one another in love.

It's more nuanced than just this kind of like, oh, cut those people out of your life.

No, there's this Holy Spirit-filled, Holy Spirit-led way of relating to other people.

How about this one?

You can't love others until you first love yourself.

And while self-care has its place, Scripture emphasizes loving God and others is the greatest command.

And see, it seems like our problem as humans is that we love ourselves too much.

Now, there's a difference between loving yourself too much, putting yourself first, and your conception of self, your self-identity.

Maybe that needs to be worked on some more.

I think we all need to have the Holy Spirit really give us truth so we understand who we are, but we're all pretty in love with ourselves.

I mean, we we like ourselves a lot.

You know, I can see you guys are all dressed up nice.

You know, you're not slobs, you look great, right?

The Bible says, hey, we need to love others more than ourselves.

Or you watch any Disney movie, you hear this advice, you know, follow your heart, it will guide you.

Well, the Bible warns in Jeremiah, it says that our hearts are deceitful.

And God calls us to follow him and not our hearts, not our own feelings.

So I just want to, oh, I want to keep encouraging you as followers of Jesus, that you're not making, that we're we're not making, that I'm not making the mistake of the Pharisees by just leaning into traditions, whether it's a Christian tradition, a cultural tradition, what we want to lean into is what does the Bible say?

What did Jesus teach?

That's what the new, that's what it means to follow Jesus, is like knowing him, knowing his word, right?

Amen.

Okay, let's go to scene two.

The crowds.

The crowds, verses 10 and 11.

See Jesus calls the crowds together and he calls them to listen and to understand.

Listen and understand.

He says, it's not what goes into your mouth that defiles a person, but what comes out of the mouth.

Now we're going back to hand washing, okay?

We're going back to hand washing, and you've got the disciples who didn't wash their hands, and they're eating, they're eating the food, all right?

And the problem, the mistake that is going on is that they're thinking because they wash their hands, they are clean.

And Jesus says, look, it's not about what um goes into the mouth that defiles it, what comes out of your mouth that defiles a person.

That's it.

That's what he teaches the crowd.

Okay, now let's go to scene three, verses 12 through 14.

The disciples, so we go from the crowd, so we have Pharisees, we have the crowd, now we have the disciples.

Okay?

The disciples came up and they said, Do you know?

Did you know?

Did you know that the Pharisees took offense when they heard what you said?

They're all ticked off, you know.

I don't know what the motivation was for whether uh the disciples are like, Man, you can't like isolate and get the like religious elites ticked off.

We're gonna have like a PR problem.

But they bring this to Jesus.

And here is Jesus' response.

He says, Every plant that my heavenly father didn't plant will be uprooted.

Reminds you of some of kind of the parables that he's been teaching.

And he's like, look, it's basically saying, Look, my father didn't plant the Pharisees.

They're not my plant.

They're self-man-made religious characters in the story, but they're not from the Father.

Now, there are Pharisees who turn to Jesus and they become plants planted by the Father.

But Jesus is helping his disciples.

I look around the room and go, wait, those aren't those aren't those guys aren't on my team.

Those guys aren't on my father's team.

That's not, that's not like them being upset is not a problem to me, because that's not my crowd.

Does that make sense?

All right, let's keep going.

One more verse.

Leave them alone.

Here's the deal.

They are blind guides, and if a blind guide, and if the blind guide, the blind, both will fall into a pit.

He just is basically saying they're leading, they're leading, but they're blind.

And you gotta love his humor here.

You think of the image of a blind person leading a crowd.

That's not a great strategy, right?

But Jesus is saying this group of Pharisees, they're misguided.

They're blind, leading the blind.

Okay, let's go to the fourth and final scene with Peter.

Peter said, Explain this parable to us.

Help us understand.

What does this mean?

And Jesus says, Do you still lack understanding in this question?

Because again, this is one of those times where it seems like Jesus is being kind of harsh, but you've got to appreciate from Jesus just his expectation.

Do you lack understanding?

He's like, don't you get it?

There is this, as you as we read through Matthew and Luke and through the Gospels, it seems pretty clear that Jesus expects his followers to be mentally engaged.

And I don't know what you do to stay mentally sharp and to be like tracking with what's going on, but Jesus' expectations for his followers were high.

Now, he recruited a bunch of simple fishermen.

He didn't recruit the intellectuals of the day.

He recruited fishermen, but the way he interacted with his disciples was this expectation that you're tracking, that you're getting it.

Now, he gives his Holy Spirit, and he talks about this in John, I'm sending my spirit, and he's going to guide you into the truth.

So you may feel like, look, I don't have a strong IQ.

I didn't do well in school.

Hey, I'm one of those guys.

Like I didn't do well in school either.

But here's the crazy thing: the Spirit of God, if you're a follower of Jesus, the Spirit, the Spirit of God, not like some fluffy, you know, Casper the Ghost, but the Spirit of God lives in you and can work in the midst of your brain cells and lead you in how to think.

And so here, can I get an amen for that?

Amen.

Thank you.

Yes.

Because we can be wise, we can be as simple people made wise by God.

And we don't have to have some great pedigree, but the Holy Spirit and Jesus expects that you're learning and that you're getting it and you're tracking.

Now, he says, Don't you understand?

Do you still lack understanding?

Verse 17, do you realize that whatever goes into the mouth passes into the stomach and it's eliminated?

This is the digestive tract.

How would they know that?

Well, they're they've butchered animals, right?

They've maybe seen a dead body.

They've seen kind of like open it up and it's like, wow, there's all these systems in here, and food is eliminated, right?

You go to the bathroom and you're done with it.

That's how food works.

Because he's tapping into this idea that it's not what goes into your mouth that defiles you, it's what comes out of you.

And so he says in verse 18, but what comes out of the mouth comes from the heart, and this defiles a person.

Here's some examples.

For from the heart come evil thoughts, murders, adultery, sexual immoralities, thefts, false testimonies, and slander.

These things that make life horrible, that make people horrible.

I mean, some of you have been hurt by the evil thoughts of others, the murderous intent of others, adultery, sexual immorality, theft.

I mean, have anybody had anything stolen before?

Okay, yeah, yeah.

Testimonies?

Has anybody ever gossiped about you?

Yeah, okay, yep.

Slander, you ever been slandered?

Somebody says spreads a false report about you.

He says, all that stuff, it comes from the heart.

It doesn't come from not washing your hands right before your meal.

Jesus is like, your spiritual elites are blind, leading you blind.

I've come to redeem your heart.

That's what we're after.

We're after what's going on in the core of who we are.

These are the things.

These are the things that defile Baltimore.

These are the things that defile a person.

These are the things that defile a family.

But eating with unwashed hands does not defile a person.

Don't tell the CDC what Jesus said.

No, but he's talking about that idea of closeness.

He's talking about this idea of closeness, being accepted before God.

And you see that he's saying, look, listen, how do you treat your parents?

You know?

How do you treat your parents?

How do you how are you like engaging with your words?

How are you dealing with your community?

Those things flow from the heart.

And look, if the things that's coming out of your mouth are wicked, then you need a heart transplant.

And the amazing thing is that Jesus came to deal with hearts.

You see, God's already been working before Jesus came on the scene.

We got go back to Moses and the commands.

The problem with Moses' commands is they're external.

But the beautiful thing for us as followers of Jesus is, and what we celebrate, when we take that cup, when we drink that cup, we say, this is the cup of the new covenant.

The new covenant is literally a contract between heaven and you.

No longer writing on a tablet of stone that you've got to memorize the Ten Commandments, but literally, God has permission.

God can now go to work inside of you and I to transform us, to take us from being having these evil hearts to having hearts that are tender and soft.

And so Jesus here is pleading with his disciples.

Again, let's go back.

Let's not hang out with the blind.

Let's not hang out with the blind.

Let's be with Jesus.

Let's be with Jesus and let him deal with our hearts.

Amen.

Lord, we thank you for your word this morning.

We're so grateful that you instruct us, that you teach us, that you care not about like the external washing of hands, but the more important stuff of what's going on in our hearts.

And God, we give you permission.

Like, Lord, go to work in us.

Help us, Lord, to obey you.

Help us to obey you.

God, thank you for loving us enough that you work in us.

God, forgive us, cleanse us, and work in us by your spirit, we pray.

In Jesus' name.

Amen.