What Defiles Us and What Defines Us

If you have a Bible, let's open to Mark chapter 7.

Mark 7 · chapter mention

Pray with me in your hearts one more time, very briefly.

Father God, as was just sung, we ask that you would speak right now, that your people may be built, that the earth might be filled with your glory as the waters cover the sea.

We pray all this in Christ's name.

Amen.

Mark chapter 7.

Mark 7 · chapter mention

How do you personally measure spiritual maturity?

Whether your own or somebody else's.

You meet somebody, you get to know them.

Maybe you get to know two different people, and if you were trying to answer, well, who's godlier than the other person?

How would you determine that?

And it's no good saying, I don't measure, I don't compare, because I'm pretty sure you do, whether you know it or not, intentionally or unintentionally, consciously or subconsciously, those type thoughts go through all of our minds at some point.

How spiritually mature is that person?

Who is godlier than the other?

How am I doing spiritually in comparison with the people?

The context is this: Jesus has been doing ministry now for roughly about two years publicly, and his fame is spreading very far and wide in Israel.

We've seen that.

It's even, he's up in the north, Galilee, Capernaum.

It's gotten down south to Jerusalem, where the big dogs are, so to speak.

They're hearing about this untrained rabbi who's teaching with such authority.

Tens of thousands are following him.

Healings, exorcisms.

And so they're going to come investigate.

Mark chapter 7, let's start in verse 1.

Mark 7 · chapter mention

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

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

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

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

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

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

You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men.

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

For Moses said, Honor your father and your mother, and whoever reviles father or mother must surely die.

But you say, if a man tells his father or his mother, whatever you would have gained from me is Corbin, that is, given to God, then you no longer permit him to do anything for his father or mother, thus making the word of God by your traditions, excuse me, thus making void the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down, and many such things you do.

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

Verse 17.

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

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

Thus he declared all foods clean.

And he said, What comes out of a person is what defiles him.

For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil faults, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness.

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

So we've mentioned this before, but the Pharisees and the scribes, there's some overlap.

Pharisees in general were laymen, but who were separatists.

They were very serious about reading, studying the Old Testament, and trying to practice it according to every jot and tittle.

The scribes would be more the professionals tasked with studying and interpreting the Old Testament.

Some Pharisees were scribes, some scribes were Pharisees, but they're not all.

And the Old Testament was what they really held to, but they had all these interpretive laws of exactly what the Old Testament meant to them.

Now, the ones in Jerusalem would have been the highest authorities.

This would be a little bit like if there was something strange going on in Birmingham, Alabama with the Catholic Church, and the Pope sent some of his cardinals from Rome to come investigate.

Now, they're passionate about washing their hands, and this is not about hygiene.

They weren't OCD germaphobes.

This was about ceremonial ritual purity and cleanliness.

You did have in the Old Testament some law, Exodus chapter 30, if you want to read more about this, about washing of the hands.

Exodus 30 · chapter mention

But it was only for priests when they went to the temple to serve.

And listen, there were a lot of laws like this in the Old Testament.

You're probably aware of that, even if you've never read the Old Testament.

There were these laws, we've talked about them a little bit before.

Sometimes they had to do with the food that you ate.

That they did the laws didn't actually make you holy.

They were symbolic, they were outward signs of inward realities.

They were trying to teach the Jewish people that all people and everything that we do, whether we eat, whether we drink, we're always sinful.

And God is always perfectly holy.

And we can't just lollygag into his presence.

He is so righteous, he is so just, he is so holy.

We need to be cleansed before we can come before him.

And so part of these ceremonial fool laws, part of these ceremonial washings of the Old Testament were symbolic about what was supposed to be going on in the inside.

But the Pharisees and the scribes had taken it and said, No, that's not just for priests.

It's not just when they go to work at the temple, it's for every good Jew on every single day.

And they had made it into a very showy practice.

We don't know exactly what they did, but it was probably something about taking the fist and rubbing it in your hand a certain way and letting the water drip all the way down past your wrist to your elbows.

It became very showy before every meal.

Okay?

Now, uh, Jesus' disciples, almost certainly, especially his blue-collar fishermen, they didn't mess around with that.

And the scribes and the Pharisees, they come and they observe and they see this, and they want to ask Jesus a question about it.

No, they ask an external question.

I mean, at surface level, not a bad question.

Hey, we're just asking, why don't they wash their hands like most good Jews do?

Be careful when you ask Jesus a question.

They're kind of asking a surface level question.

He goes straight for the juggler.

He pulls out the Old Testament, he goes straight after their heart.

He's like when Isaiah wrote, he was prophesying about men like you.

You draw an ear to God with your mouth, you say a lot of the right things, but your heart, the command and control center of who you really are, you're far from God.

I mean, you have an outward show of worship, but it's empty, it's vain, it's meaningless, it's worthless.

And even worse, you get so passionate about your man-made traditions, your man-made applications.

You exalt that so much, you spend so much time studying that, talking about that, boasting in that, that you set aside God's word.

You just cast it aside, you just neglect it, you just act like it's not a big deal, you just ignore it.

And you're pretty sophisticated.

It's almost like he says, I'll give you that.

You have sophisticated ways of doing it.

He said, Let me give you a clear example.

Because he probably could see in their face, they're probably like, What are you talking about?

That's not us.

He said, Let me give you an example.

One of the top ten commandments in the Old Testament.

Probably all of us know this one, even the little kids, because your parents have probably made you memorize this one.

Honor your father and mother.

We all know that one, but just think about that for a second.

That's internal.

How you honor somebody is internal.

But practically speaking, that means you're supposed to help your parents when they need help.

But the Pharisees and the scribes, this is something you'll find later in the gospels about them, they loved money.

They were greedy.

Religion was working for them.

They were making money off of it.

And so they had developed a very sophisticated way to set aside one of the Ten Commandments.

They had come up with this practice called Corbin, that you could say, you know what, all my wealth that I have, when I die, it's going to the church, going to the temple, going to the synagogue, going to church.

It's going to be used for God.

So, mom and dad, sorry, I've already pledged it to God.

I mean, I have to keep living off of it for now.

I mean, I gotta live.

But I can't give any to you because I'm saving as much as I can for Yahweh.

But it was just a sophisticated way to keep more money for themselves and not have to love and serve and honor their mom and dad.

We don't know exactly what happened to the Pharisees and scribes right after this, but probably they tucked their tail between their legs and they went back to Jerusalem.

Like that didn't go the way we thought it was gonna go.

We thought we were gonna teach Jesus a thing or two, and he like verbally body slammed us.

So Jesus calls the crowds to himself because what he realizes is the average Jewish person in that day and age, they had terrible teachers that have been teaching falsehood and setting aside God's word.

So he says, guys, let me come here, let me explain something to you that's really basic.

It's like 101.

He says, Listen, there is nothing outside of you, if you eat it, that has enough germs or cooties or whatever you want to call it that's gonna really defile you spiritually.

It just doesn't happen.

Pretty simple, straightforward.

I think most of us get that.

But the disciples, again, were so awash in this perverted Old Testament religion that when they get in the house with Jesus, they're like, uh, boss, can you explain that one again?

And he's kind of like, Are you serious?

You don't get this?

Guys, it doesn't matter what you eat.

I mean, literally what he says is like, whatever you eat, it goes into your stomach and then it goes out into the toilet.

It doesn't go into your heart.

It can't really defile you.

That's not what defiles you, but he says, guess what?

You all are already defiled.

And it has nothing to do with what's outside of you.

It has everything to do with us inside of you.

And then he just gives this laundry list of sins: sinful thoughts, any kind of sex outside of marriage, stealing, sex with somebody other than your spouse, lusting after anything that's not yours, anything evil, lying, perversion, jealousy, talking bad about somebody to hurt them, arrogance, godlessness.

Nobody comes out through that list unscathed, right?

We've all done some of that.

My guess is we've all done some of that last week.

And he says, all of these things are sin, they all come from within, and they all make us sinful and spiritually dirty.

First application is this don't make your personal application everybody's application.

Here's what I mean.

So much of the Bible is given to us, biblical truth, and principle.

And we can't just leave it in the theoretical and the philosophical.

We have to make it concrete, we have to make it practical, we have to make it personable.

Take this command, honor your father and mother.

It makes sense to say, well, part of what that means is when my parents are aging, I help them as they need it.

But we might have two different families that both have an aging parent, and one family might say, the way that we can best honor and love our aging parent is to bring that aging parent into our home and care for them personally.

We have the time, we have the resources, we have the kind of home that could do that.

We have the personalities and capacity that can handle our aging parent.

And you say, that's a wonderful and lovely thing.

And you may have another family that says, for various reasons, it is not best for our to bring our aging parent into our home.

But we're gonna love them, we're gonna use a lot of our money to help them and pay their bills and do what we can.

The Bible never gets that specific.

At some level, it leaves it up to you to make the personal application, and that's fine.

You have to do that to be serious about your faith.

But here's the danger.

If family A or family B starts to say, no, no, my way is the right way.

And if you're not doing it exactly like me, you're a sinner.

That's a form of legalism.

That's what the Pharisees were doing.

Listen, if uh some of you say, hey, Olin, I heard you're writing like an article or something, I'm like, yeah, it's called Revelation chapter 23.

And uh it's gonna be a new part of the Bible.

You should fire me.

You you might should stone me, okay?

And anytime any Christian decides that their personal application is going to be the 11th commandment, you're in sin.

Have your personal application, but just realize that it's that.

It's not a mandate for all people at all times and all places.

The second thing: we need to be continually aligning our lives, our lips, and our hearts.

Okay, this is very important, and this is something I think is vastly misunderstood in the Western church today.

All Christians are not hypocrites.

Have you ever heard somebody say something like that?

Maybe you've said it yourself.

I've probably said it myself at some point.

Well, you know, we're all hypocrites.

That just defangs the word.

A hypocrite was a liar.

A hypocrite was an actor.

A hypocrite was a person that wore a mask and different masks at different times to play different roles.

So let me try to give you a very practical example.

Imagine you have two professing Christians who struggle with the sin of drunkenness.

But here's the way that one man struggles with it.

He says, Listen, I know it's sin.

I hate drunkenness.

I'm trying to fight it.

I've got accountability.

I don't keep looking at my house, I'm doing everything I know, but I have to be honest.

Sometimes when I get really stressed, I do get drunk.

And I hate it, I confess, I repent.

I'm fighting.

I'm not perfect yet, but I'm fighting it.

That guy's not a hypocrite.

He's an honest struggler, like me and you.

Right?

You may not be struggling with that sin, you're struggling with something.

Here's the hypocrite.

I can't believe anybody ever drank alcohol.

That's just the devil's poisoning.

That's evil.

Never on these lips, but every Friday night he sneaks out and gets drunk.

And he just lies about it.

You understand the difference between an honest struggler and a hypocrite?

Okay.

Reverend Barker at Briarwood used to say, you know what?

I'm not what I ought to be, but I'm sure not what I used to be.

Genuine Christians are works and progress.

And you ought to be able to see, hey, I'm different than what I used to be, but I got a long way to go.

That's my life, and that's what my lips ought to be professing about myself.

Third thing: don't neglect God's words for men's tradition.

I have known multiple people, and I bet a lot of you have as well, who drunkenness was a big part of their sinful lifestyle.

And the only way they could find practically to get free from it was just to say, I will never drink alcohol again.

And it was a big part of their conversion, maybe, their testimony.

And listen, and we look at those men a lot of times and we say, Praise the Lord, that was the right decision for them.

It's a good thing, it was a wise thing.

But I have known godly men that I respect in so many other ways that turn that into, well, you know, I had to give up the bottle to walk with Jesus, and I just can't imagine how.

I mean, if you're a real Christian or if you're a mature Christian, you have to as well.

And again, I can understand how they get there in their heart because it was such a part.

But what are they doing?

They're adding to the word of God because the Bible doesn't say that.

Don't do that.

Don't do that.

Never make your personal application equal with the word of God.

Okay?

Now again, most of us won't come out and say it that clearly.

But how might it look in our lives?

Fourth, don't cover your clear inner sin with external ceremony.

And you know, this passage is primarily about washing of the hands.

And probably most of us are like, this is ancient, this is random, this doesn't, you should have skipped this chapter all and gone to something more interesting.

None of us are boasting in hand washing.

COVID was a really interesting time, wasn't it?

For everybody in different times in different ways.

And I just want to say this, okay?

I'm not I had a couple friends that died from COVID.

So I don't want to make light of it at all.

I knew some people that became so passionate about wearing a mask.

And some of these people were ministers.

They would say things if you don't wear a mask, you don't love people.

I mean, I've read the whole Bible and I don't remember that verse.

I knew people on the other side.

If you do wear a mask, you're a sellout.

You're a coward.

You don't have faith.

You don't trust God.

You're a slave to the government.

Again, I don't remember that.

Even the original languages don't say that.

Now listen, wear your mask, don't wear your mask.

I gotta be honest.

When it comes to that, I really don't care.

It doesn't matter what I think.

You may say, well, okay.

Have your opinion.

Be serious about your opinion, be educated about your opinion.

But guys, hold your opinion loosely.

The only thing that we ought to hang really tight to in the is God's word.

Right?

This is what I'm ready to die for.

This is where, by God's grace, I will evaluate myself and I'll evaluate somebody else.

Not some arbitrary random thing that me or the government made up.

You understand what I'm saying?

And again, listen.

I knew a lot of people that wore masks and they were really humble about it.

But I knew other people that wore masks and they became very judgmental about it.

And I knew other people that didn't wear a mask, but they were really humble about it.

But I knew other people that didn't wear their mask, and it became like a boast, and they were very unloving about how they talked about it and rubbed it in other people's faces.

Here's the thing the Bible does have a lot to say about boasting, about love, about not being judgmental, does it not?

And I don't think you find the word mask in the English or the Hebrew or the Greek or the Aramaic.

I just say major on the majors, minor on the minors, guys.

Love.

Be humble, be gracious, be gentle.

Speak the truth to one another in love.

Don't boast in your opinion.

If you're gonna boast in anything, boast in this.

That you know the Lord your God.

Our fifth thing.

Focus on the internal, not the external.

Okay?

The Bible and nature teaches we're all born with sin in our hearts.

That's where our real problem is.

Listen, if you don't believe in all people are born in sin, you either haven't had kids or you didn't pay attention.

Because I had four of them, and we tried our darndest.

But let me tell you what we never did.

And we tried lots of different things.

I never had to sit down, one of my kids say, Hey buddy, I'm gonna teach you how to lie.

It's just a cool thing you never thought of.

Here's the way it's gonna work Dad's gonna say, Don't eat any more cookies.

And then dad's gonna walk out of the room and you eat as many cookies as you want.

And when dad comes back and says, Did you eat the cookies?

You just say, No, sir.

I didn't have to teach any of my kids that.

They figured it out on our own.

Just like I did.

Because sin is in all of our hearts.

Our real spiritual problem is not external, it's internal.

But guys, we love to focus on the external.

I'll give you a practical example.

Let me just let me shift.

Years ago, there was this popular diet called the paleo diet, the caveman diet.

Some of you may be familiar with it, doesn't matter if you are or aren't, okay?

And I was trying to do this diet, and my wife, she's such a great wife.

She was trying to cook for me this way.

And one day we were at the grocery store and we ran into a friend of ours, a woman who that I know is I think is a very godly person.

She was doing the same diet, and she starts talking.

Talking about it.

And as she's talking, it's like her passion and fervor is growing.

I don't eat processed foods, no bread, no cheese.

Everybody should eat this way.

It's like she's about to start having church in the grocery store about the cavemen diet.

And I kind of let her get to the end of her tether and I said, Listen, I don't care about any of that.

I love bread and cheese.

I'd eat it every day.

I'm just trying to lose weight.

I say, look, I Matthew Henry on this text said, Of course there's nothing wrong with washing your hands.

There's something wrong if you put religion in it.

Is there anything external in your life or in my life that we're putting religious freight in?

Does that make sense?

That's where you get in trouble.

And guys, why are we so tempted to do this?

Because if I'm caught up in the comparison game, internal stuff like honoring and loving and being, it's hard to show that off.

But hand washing and my diet and what I wear, I can wear it like a badge of honor, can't I?

And the Pharisees love this kind of stuff, and we're all tempted to it.

Sixth point, when we get so focused on these man-made external rules, it's not just that we miss the word of God, we miss the God of the Word.

Guys, think about it.

Haven't you ever thought, wouldn't it be great to live 2,000 years ago and be in ancient Palestine when the God man was actually walking around in beard and robe and sandals, you can go touch him and talk to him?

These guys had that privilege.

They're living in Jerusalem.

They're hearing about Old Testament prophecies being fulfilled.

They go down to investigate.

They talked to God audibly in the flesh.

And you know what they wanted to talk to him about?

Hand washing.

They totally missed it.

And he said, Let's not talk about washing hands, let's talk about the Bible.

And their response was to go back home and say, we gotta kill this guy.

Now here's another thing interesting about this text that I don't know if you noticed.

Jesus is getting on the Pharisees and he makes a very big deal about don't neglect God's word.

Who do you think you are that you can just set God's word aside?

And then after the Pharisees and scribes leave, or at least they fade to the background, he calls the crowds and he starts talking about the Old Testament food laws.

Did you notice the little parenthetical comment that Mark made?

At the end of verse 19, he just says, Thus he declared all foods clean.

You see what Jesus just did?

He said, No mere man should ever just set aside God's word.

You can't do that.

And then a couple verses later, he's like, I'm setting all that aside.

Because he's not a mere man.

He's not a mere prophet.

He is the God man.

And he realized, you know what?

Listen, Matthew chapter 5, verse 17, Jesus said, Don't think I came to abolish the law and the prophets.

Matthew 5:17

I didn't come to abolish them.

I came to fulfill them.

There were all these Old Testament, sacrificial, ceremonial, outward, external rituals about purity that were supposed to point to an inner reality.

And Jesus said, I am the inner reality.

You don't need all that external stuff anymore.

Your problem is not external.

Hand washing and diet isn't gonna fix your real problem.

Because you have a heart problem.

Water can't cleanse it.

The food that you eat or don't eat can't cleanse it.

What can cleanse the human heart of sin?

Blood.

And not the blood of bulls or goats, but only the blood of the God man, the Lord Jesus Christ Himself.

Think about this.

He was the only pure, righteous, undefiled man to ever live.

But when he went to the cross, he was defiled with my sin.

He was defiled with all the sins of all the people throughout all time in history who would ever trust in him.

He died sinfully dirty on the cross as our substitute so that I might live clean.

I might live righteously.

I might live free.

And I might die in faith.

I'm clean, I'm whole.

Not perfect yet, but I've been washed, I've been cleansed by the blood of the Lamb.

Hallelujah, what a Savior.

Let's pray.

Lord Jesus, you are glorious.

And our words fail.

They're beggared to try to describe your glory, your splendor, your majesty, and yet your love, your compassion, your tenderness.

You are God on high, eternal, far and distant, above us, beyond us, incomprehensible, and yet you have come close, you have come near, you have spoken to us in words that we can understand and apply.

You have loved, you have saved, you redeemed us.

Lord, I pray for myself, I pray for everyone hearing that we would be appropriately humbled by your great grace and mercy.

That the only thing that we would want to boast in is, I know Jesus.

That's the only great thing about me, is I know Jesus.

And Lord, we would not be sinfully judgmental of others, but we would love them graciously and tenderly as you have loved us, and we would speak the truth, even the hard truth, and love to them as you have spoken to us.

We pray all this in the name of Christ.

Amen.