Sick Hearts Make Up Rules (Mark 7:1-23)

So when I was in um sixth grade, such an insecure time, isn't it?

I remember um New Kid to Town was put in my sixth grade class, and the guys in my class, we were especially less than welcoming to this guy.

And you've seen this, you've been on both ends of this, I'm sure.

And the way that we the ways that we were less than welcome to him is we would continue to sort of put him, but kind of put him in arbitrary tests.

This kid from Florida couldn't answer our Alabama and Auburn football trivia questions.

This kid from Florida didn't, he hadn't grown up in the same sort of world where the things that mattered to us mattered to him, and so we could get him every single time.

And even on things that didn't really matter to us.

Like I have a distinct memory of somebody asking him, Do you even know who Gloria Estefan is?

And he was like, no.

And I laughed so hard thinking, who is Gloria Estefan?

I had no idea.

But to use that opportunity to sort of other him, I jumped on.

Now you've been in this situation, both sides of it, and it can feel empowering when you're sort of reminding somebody else you are not welcome here, and it can feel totally alienating when you're on the other end of it.

I don't think we ever really outgrow this impulse, even if we get better at fighting it.

We have this impulse because here's what's behind the question.

There is a standard that we hold others to.

And we see that in this passage that we're going to read.

There's a standard that we are held to, but just as important is figuring out where that standard comes from.

And there is something that is insidious about using man-made standards, superficial standards, to push others outside.

In our passage, Jesus is challenged by religious leaders who have questions about why Jesus and his disciples don't follow man-made rules.

And their implication, actually, very clearly, they're saying, you are defiled because you don't keep these man-made rules.

And we're going to see how Jesus handles that.

So we're going to see a standard that comes from God, but we're also going to see the grace that we need when we see the true standard.

Let me read this passage from Mark chapter 7.

Mark 7 · chapter mention

Now, when the Pharisees gathered to Jesus 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 properly, holding to the tradition of the elders.

And when they come from the and when they come from the marketplace, they don't 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 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 to them, 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 the person are what defile him.

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.

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

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

The word of the Lord.

Let's pray and ask for God's help.

Gracious God, we thank you for your word.

And we ask, as we often do, that you would dig out for us ears to hear, and that you would give us eyes to see.

Jesus, the one who speaks truth, is truth, but also offers us rest.

And we pray that you would do these things by your Spirit.

Amen.

Okay, so my outline this morning is threefold.

I want to look at the wrong issue and then reaching the issue, and then we're going to look at the real issue.

So the wrong issue, reaching the issue, and then the real issue.

And, you know, from the get-go, what we ought to see in this passage is that there's a certain tension that is bubbling up in the gospel of Mark.

I mean, we would see in the first couple of verses that people are gathering around to Jesus.

They're gathering around to Jesus, and you have emissaries from Jerusalem who have come to confront him.

So word is getting out.

I mean, we've seen that his disciples are going out and spreading.

Herod has heard of him.

Now that now the religious leaders in Jerusalem are hearing about him.

They're going down to Galilee to test him, to say, What are you doing?

We don't trust you.

So the brass has come to sort of hold Jesus' feet to the fire.

And here's the issue: they have noticed that some of his disciples don't do a religious washing of their hands before they eat.

Some commentators say that maybe they notice this at the feeding of the five thousand.

We don't really know how they've come to know in the original language it says when they eat bread.

Maybe it is the five thousand.

We don't know, but they don't wash their hands, and the Pharisees and the scribes will have none of that.

They can't let that slide.

And verses three and four tell us what their concern is.

For the Pharisees and all the Jews don't eat unless they wash their hands, holding to the tradition of the elders.

And when they come from the marketplace, they don't eat unless they wash.

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

Dining couches sound fancy, by the way.

I don't know if you've ever dined on a couch.

I haven't, but uh that sounds pretty fancy.

Don't miss the point.

You know, we tell our kids wash your hands before you eat.

We're worried about bacteria.

We're worried about hygiene.

That's not the concern here.

They don't have antibacterial soap.

That's not what they're doing.

This is a religious washing.

And what they're worried about is that they might become unclean or that they might be approach uncleanness as they might be around Gentiles who are ceremonially unclean when they go to the market.

When they have to sort of be around those who aren't ceremonially clean, they want to protect themselves.

And so it's easy to mock somebody else's tradition, right?

It's easy to point your finger and say, how silly.

And if we just do that, then we're taking a play out of the Pharisee playbook.

The whole point of this book isn't to look at others and say, look at those silly traditions.

The whole point of this passage is to say, how do I do this?

How can I examine my own heart?

Because that's where Jesus is going to go.

So they've got this religious impulse, not a sanitary impulse, and you see this even by the usage of the word that they use for wash.

I wish that translators would have kept it.

They use the word baptize.

They baptize their hands when they go to market.

They baptize so that they won't be undefiled, so they won't be defiled.

They baptize cups and copper pots.

They baptize couches.

They're probably sprinkling these couches in some sort of religious symbolism.

And another thing that we need to consider is they're doing this for a reason that makes sense.

I mean, the Old Testament does talk about being clean and unclean.

And if you are unclean, there are things that you can't do, like go into the temple.

And so they're not making up the category of being clean and unclean.

But what they are making up is how to prevent themselves from being unclean.

This washing of hands might be a good idea.

It might, it's not, that's not altogether wrong.

They might have an opinion that this is helpful.

This reminds me about what's really going on.

The issue is not that they care about being clean or unclean.

It's that they've now made this man-made rule the standard to know whether you're clean or unclean.

Do you see that difference?

The issue isn't we care about being clean.

The issue is they have created a rule that sort of made sense in a way to remind them to take their cleanliness seriously, and y'all they've made that rule the standard about whether or not they are clean.

We're going to kind of flesh this out as we go.

Alright.

Think about how we do this, make rules and then judge others by them.

There's silly things.

So maybe you've heard when you can wear white.

This is sort of outdated, right?

But traditionally, you wear white, pants in particular, between Memorial Day and Labor Day.

In the South, it kind of starts in Easter, right?

And this can be a fun sort of thing to do culturally.

But what happens when you actually begin to look down on somebody who breaks this rule in October?

Really?

This person is less than us.

It's such a silly thing.

But we do, we make arbitrary rules and judge people by them.

My father's wife wore a white wedding dress to my own wedding in July.

So that's between Memorial Day and Labor Day, so probably okay, right?

Another sort of, we have rules about white, we have rules about propriety, what you should and shouldn't do, and we make judgment calls about them.

The Bible condemns drunkenness.

And so a lot of people in their freedom have said, if drunkenness is a sin, then I will just not drink anything.

That is fine and it is free as far as that goes.

But what happens if that's your posture and you see somebody get a glass of wine and now you're like, there they go.

I knew it.

We can judge somebody based on a rule that is meant to protect us from breaking the real rule.

In the early 2000s, before smartphones, I wonder if any of you remember this, it became really in vogue to sort of say, I'm above television.

There were circles, secular and church circles, that sort of said, like, we're just not going to have televisions.

It's ruining us, we're going to get rid of them.

And it became kind of common in some circles to even like ask, how long has it been since you've watched television?

And I'll confess, I kind of hopped on that train for a little bit.

If you went to somebody's house in some circles and you saw a television in their living room or in their den, oh, hunting season is in session, right?

You can just blast them.

They just must hate God and family time.

They hate everything that's important because they have a television.

How silly.

We've especially moved away from that because all of us are addicted to our screens now.

See, the Pharisees, they're following a tradition that's supposed to protect them from being unclean.

But now, if you break the thing, now that's what defiles you.

It's not the first half of their question to Jesus that's the problem, it's the second half.

In verse 5, why don't your disciples walk according to the tradition of the elders?

So far, so good.

There's nothing wrong with that.

We do things this way.

Why don't they do it that way?

That's a fair question.

We have different traditions.

Here's how it ends.

But instead they eat with defiled hands.

Very clearly, if they don't have our tradition, they've got the wrong tradition.

They're defiled by not keeping our tradition.

And Jesus is going to say, that tradition is nowhere in Scripture.

And so he's not going to mince words.

Alright, so this is what I mean.

What's the wrong issue?

The wrong issue is judging somebody by a standard that doesn't come from the Bible.

And Jesus wants to point to the Bible so he's reaching the issue.

Okay?

Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites.

If you're going to say they're defiled because they don't keep your man-made rule, what that actually means is it's not them who are on shaky ground.

You're the one on shaky ground.

He flips the script on them.

You've actually left the commandment of God when you start saying you have to keep this man-made commandment.

And this is already harsh language, and Jesus kind of digs in even more.

He says, you have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition.

And then he uses the fifth commandment as an example.

He says, you know, the scriptures say you're supposed to honor your mom and dad.

That if you if you despise your mom and dad, that's a bad thing.

But you've got this new this new tradition called Corbin.

And commentators are confused.

We're not exactly sure what it was.

But there seems to be a consensus that you could say, all of my money I devote to the temple.

And that means you're still able to use your money as a sort of trustee over it, but it's committed to the temple.

And so you can't use it for things beyond your immediate needs, such as taking care of your aging mom and dad.

And the day of social without social security, before Social Security, your children were your social security.

And they're saying, No, you don't have to do that anymore.

You've dedicated it to the temple.

You've got a holier calling.

And there are even some records where kids would be like, ah, I've made a huge mistake.

And the temple would say, Mm-mm, you've already promised.

You can't back out of this deal.

So what Jesus is saying is, you talk a big game about keeping the commandments.

But this is one of the ten commandments, and you've actually added a rule that keeps kids from keeping it, from honoring their mom and dad, or even adult children from honoring their mom and dad.

You're focused on your own rules and not my rules, not God's rules.

You've missed the plot.

And here's why we do this.

Here's where this impulse comes from.

The commandments of God are impossible to keep perfectly.

And we see this explicitly in the Sermon on the Mount.

Jesus says, You think it's about what is murder really about?

It's about being angry in your heart.

What's adultery really about?

It's about lusting in your heart.

And what he's saying is the commandments of God are far more expansive than we think we are.

And we feel this in our hearts.

We know we're not doing a good enough job.

And so we make rules to make us feel better about ourselves.

How much time, you know, how much affection should I show God?

How much, you know, devotion should I show Him?

Ah, I know.

A 30-minute quiet time in the morning should do the trick.

And if I do that, I feel great about myself.

And if somebody is not doing that, well, I can judge them too.

We make rules that are manageable for us so that we feel secure in our own performance.

And Jesus says, when you do that, you're actually punting what God is calling you in your life to see as the standard.

It's a problem.

In 2003, I was a young Christian.

I was very immature, and I was enamored with all sorts of rules, such as not watching television.

And my father one day, who I had a difficult relationship with, if we were to talk about why, I feel pretty certain that a lot of you would be sympathetic to it.

But he shows up to my house.

And another thing you should know about him at this time is he's dying of cancer.

And he comes to my house and he's carrying a television in a box.

This is pre-flat screen, so this is a big bulky thing.

And he's got a VCR DVD combo, pretty fancy, if I do say so myself.

And he opened, I opened the door and I see him.

He goes, Last time I was here, I saw you didn't have a television, so I brought one for you.

And I looked at him and I said, Dad, do you really want me to waste my life in front of a television?

And he said, Well, this thing is pretty heavy.

Can I set it down?

I was utterly dismissive and disrespectful and rude.

There was nothing kind.

And I was convinced that I was doing something really holy in that moment.

Standing for truth.

It's wicked.

You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God.

I remember early on in our marriage, I was in my study and I was reading the Bible.

The Bible, I commend it to you.

And Melissa is like, hey, can you come help me?

And I just barked at her.

I was like, I'm I'm reading the Bible right now.

No, I cannot love my wife.

I'm loving the Lord right now.

You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God.

And the reason legalism is so insidious is because it uses God and it uses the approval that we think that we're mustering from God by doing these things so that we can trample others.

After all, why should I care about your feelings right now when I'm so much better than you are?

I'm standing for truth.

I'm doing the holy thing, and if I'm doing these things, then I shouldn't really pay that much attention to you.

And Jesus says, that's shaky ground, friend.

That is shaky ground.

Of course, Jesus, he's not undercutting the importance of the commands of God.

He's saying, pay attention to what the Bible actually says and don't interpret it in a way that makes it more manageable and judge others by it.

The only rule for our lives are the scriptures.

And one of the things that's really frustrating about that at times is because what do I do in this situation?

How do I navigate?

It requires a lot more wisdom and dependence than we want.

Just give me a checklist.

That way I can know for sure did I do the right thing or not.

And God says, I have not given you that.

I have given you wisdom, I've given you my word, and I've given you my spirit that you need to learn to be dependent upon.

I remember as a young Christian, I was talking to a guy who was leading a small group, and I was fascinated by fasting in the Bible, but just utterly ignorant by it.

And I was like, How do you do this?

What are the rules?

And he said, Well, there's no rule to it.

And I was like, so could it just be like from like 6 a.m.

to 6 p.m.

you don't eat that day?

And he's there's there's no rule to it.

And I was like, well, how do I know if I'm doing it right?

What if I did this?

And looking back, it's hilarious because I just didn't have ears to hear what he was saying.

There's not a like if that's how you're going to go about it, Joe, then you're just sort of wanting to say, I did it.

I did it.

Check.

I followed the template.

One of the things that we want to take seriously is we accountability according.

To the scriptures, like we all need to be accountable together.

That's part of what life together in a church is.

But it takes work to remember and to remind ourselves what does the Bible actually say and what is just my opinion?

Judging others by our opinion is never okay.

It's okay to have opinions.

And it's okay to say, and from my life, this makes sense.

But as soon as you start to say, and you should probably do it too, that's where it gets dangerous.

That's where it gets dicey.

So judging others by man-made rules, that's the wrong issue.

Focusing on God's actual rules in Scripture is reaching the issue.

But now let's talk about the real issue, and that's your heart.

The real issue is all about our heart.

And the word defile is really important in this passage because that's what the Pharisees accuse Jesus and his disciples of having.

They eat with undefiled hands.

They're sinful, they're unclean because they don't keep this rule.

And Jesus uses the same word.

He says, I'm reading in verse 14.

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.

Defilement doesn't come from the outside in, it comes from the core of who you are.

It's in you.

There's no escaping it.

You want to talk about what defiles you?

It's your heart.

Your heart defiles you, not these silly rules that you're trying to sort of say, see, I'm clean.

We're going to have to dip our toe into some potty talk here.

And the reason for that is because Jesus dips his toe in some potty talk.

In verse 18, we read, Don't you see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile him, since it enters not his heart but his stomach and is expelled.

This is actually a toned-down translation.

And if you have a Bible, like you'll see, there's a footnote.

Most of you probably have a footnote that says, Since it enters not his heart and goes out into the latrine.

What is a latrine?

It's an outhouse, it's a porta potty.

I won't use the words, but if you follow the subject of the sentence, it ends up in the latrine.

That's what Jesus is saying.

And what he's really saying by highlighting this, he says, the human heart that hasn't been washed is dirtier than what goes in the latrine.

We don't believe that, and we certainly don't like that.

The human heart that has not been washed is filthier than what goes into the latrine.

Jesus' teaching on the human heart is radical and it's shocking, and we don't like it.

It embarrasses us.

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

For from within, out of the heart of man, and he lists, I mean, all the sins you can think, it's not exhaustive, but he's trying.

Come evil thoughts and sexual immorality and theft and murder and adultery and coveting and wickedness and deceit and sensuality and envy and slander and pride and foolishness.

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

And what he's saying is, everyone is defiled.

Everyone.

Where do these sins come from?

They come from within us.

And another way of saying this is we're not sinful because we sin.

We sin because we're sinful.

That's a really important distinction.

We're not sinful people because we sin.

We sin because we're sinful.

For from the heart comes these things.

Let's flesh this out a little bit.

What this means is you cannot blame anyone ever for your own sin.

That is countercultural.

You cannot blame anyone else for your sin because it comes not from them in the outside, it comes from your own heart.

Every single time.

Now, that doesn't mean that you're the only one at fault when you get angry.

Sometimes there's two people at fault.

But you can never blame somebody else for your anger.

And you can never blame somebody else for your envy.

And you can never blame someone else for your bitterness.

It might be reasonable, it might make sense to us why these things happen, but it comes from the inside, not from the outside.

Let's simplify it a little bit.

Let's take their sin out of it.

Imagine a young child is carrying a cup of coffee to you.

Say they're walking down the hall and they're carrying this coffee and they stumble.

They're not being reckless, but they stumble.

The coffee cup goes and it shatters, and coffee goes everywhere, all over the floor and the walls.

And you have an impulse to be angry.

Look at what you did.

Have they sinned?

No.

Not at all.

Have you sinned?

Yes.

And why did you sin?

Because it's in your heart.

Not because a coffee cup was spilled.

Because it's in your heart.

Now, should that child say, I'm sorry that I broke your cup, I'm sorry for the mess?

Sure.

But that apology is very different than the kind of apology that comes with saying, I'm sorry I sinned against you.

It's just categorically different.

Let's think about this from another angle.

We all have a certain type of people that we're naturally attracted to, that we want to hang out with.

Friday night, my people.

That's fine.

Having opinions, having preferences, there's nothing wrong with that.

But when that becomes the standard by which you will treat somebody else as worthy of your time, then you begin to belittle people who have done nothing wrong, who might be very kind and gentle and even caring.

And we look down on them because they don't fit our arbitrary sort of standard of the kind of people we want to be around.

It's not healthy, and you can see how it's like, oh, is that what I that is what I'm doing?

When you start to get frustrated at somebody, ask yourself if sin is actually in play.

Have I actually been sinned against?

Or did someone just human?

Finite, imperfect.

Sometimes they sin against us, and then that requires a conversation.

But even still, if I'm angry at them, that's on me and not on them.

Now I hope that what all of us are feeling right now is a little bit of conviction because all of us do this.

So what's the solution?

It's not a self-remedy.

We can't baptize our hands.

We can't say, I've cleaned myself.

And culturally, we do this all the time.

Culturally, we say, this is what we do.

Someone gets caught on a hot mic and they say something vile and racist, and someone will inevitably say, How ignorant.

Is ignorance their problem?

Would just a little bit more education fix what's going on there?

If they were as enlightened as I have, if they have educated themselves, if they had just done what I have done, then they would be clean like me.

No.

Ignorance is not the problem, and education won't fix it.

If he could just baptize his hands in education as we have, if Jesus is right, our problem comes from the core of who we are.

And if that's true, then there can be no self-remedy.

How can you fix what comes from the core of who you are?

There's a reason that no one can baptize themselves.

I mean, grammatically, I have been baptized.

It happened to me.

Something from outside of me had to be applied to me.

And baptism's not the thing, right?

But it points to the thing, and it points to the reality that while nothing from outside us to us can make us dirty, the only thing that can make us clean has to come from the outside in.

And it can only come from the one who makes the standards.

It can only be the one who wrote the laws.

It can only be the one who came down and fulfilled those laws and died for our sin.

He must wash us by his Holy Spirit.

Listen to how Paul says it, and notice the overlapping language.

For we ourselves were once foolish, disobedient, led astray, slaves to various passions and pleasures, passing our days in malice and envy, hated by others and hating one another.

But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, so that being justified by his grace we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life.

What the gospel does is it frees us to be brutally honest about the core of who we are and what's there.

Because if we have been washed from outside, then we are truly now clean.

And the Christian experience is that now there's a war inside.

And we listen to God's law and we try to follow that law, but no amount of our obedience will ever cleanse us.

We can only approach that law now out of a sense that we've already been cleansed by the only one who could cleanse us.

And the one who washes us from outside and gives us his Holy Spirit now says that Spirit indwells us so that we have impulses that are alien to us.

New impulses and new desires alongside our old impulses and our old desires.

And the only way to grow in that is not to sort of grip it and white-knuckle it and say, I will do better, but in dependence to trust in the one who has washed us and promises to lead us.

This is why we get in the door by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, but we also are sustained by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone.

Let's pray.

Father, we thank you for your word.

And we ask that you would not just point us to the things that are true, we ask that you would do that.

But that you would also wash us of the ways that we fail to live up to it.

Thank you for your grace and your mercy in Christ's name.

Amen.