Traditions of Men

Scripture is from Mark at chapter seven verses one through thirteen.

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 properly, 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 void the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down, and many such things you do.

This is the word of the Lord.

Please be seated.

Good morning.

Thanks for joining us this morning.

My name is James Rathman.

I'm the pastor here at Redemption Church Denver.

Uh we're back in Mark this morning, so let's pray, and we'll begin to move through our text for the day.

Holy Father, we thank you for joining us together as a church to come before your word.

Lord, we pray that you would give us eyes to see this morning what you have for us in your scriptures.

We pray that although stories in the Gospels might be familiar, and although we we might have an image of who we think Jesus is, that you might instead peel those away and allow us to see you as you truly are.

Lord, I pray for our church as we begin to move through Mark, that we might truly see Jesus, and that in seeing Jesus, who he is, what he accomplished with his life, what he means for us now, presently ruling, that our hearts might be transformed, Lord, that we might know you in truth, that we might worship you in spirit and in truth.

Lord, you have shown yourself to us, you have made yourself known in your word.

Lord, let us see you in it.

We lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Okay, so we're back in the Gospel of Mark.

Now, what do I mean by back?

Okay, so the way that we typically do things here at RCD is we just pick a book of the Bible and we preach through it.

So we want the central thing that we're hearing as a church to be the Bible, to be the scriptures.

And that's because we believe that the Bible is the word of God.

That's a phrase that you've likely heard.

The Bible is the word of God, scripture is the word of God.

But consider what that means.

It's kind of an outrageous thing to claim that we think these words, these scriptures, are the very words of God.

What else has the word of God done?

Well, we also think it spoke everything into existence, so that it's effective and powerful.

We think that it's perfectly tuned to work in the hearts of his people, so it's as effective as God's word is when he says, let there be light, and there is light, means that God's word does the work.

And we think that the scripture is God's word in that same way, that it will do the work in our hearts.

And so we want the steady diet of our church to be the scriptures, to be the word of God, so that we might see God as he has revealed himself to us in his own words.

Think of this.

You know, it imagine saying this about somebody.

Yeah, I really trust them, but I don't trust their words.

That'd be a weird thing to say about somebody.

We we we never say that.

We we never have that, we don't have that category.

And that's because we think of knowing someone's words as really knowing them.

And that's true.

This is the way that we have to even reveal ourselves to one another is by speaking and sharing our words.

And so by the word of God, it is not as though you can clearly know the word of God and miss God in it.

That's like a, at least when I, you know, like mid-2000s, that was a trendy thing in Christian deconstruction.

There's other trendy things now.

But in the mid-2000s, one of the trendy deconstruction things was you're idolizing the Bible.

There's like a biblical idolatry here.

No, that was not happening.

Trust me.

That was not the problem.

It wasn't we we were thinking too highly of the word of God.

No, how could you possibly think too highly of the very words of God?

This is how God has shown himself to us in a way that can be known.

So, all that's say, that's why we preach through the Bible.

We want you to see God in Scriptures, He's revealed Himself to you.

Now, how do we do that?

Well, that's up to us.

You know, we got a lot of freedom in that.

Make sure you're preaching the Bible, and you can do that in uh, you know, a million different ways.

Here's how we've done it.

Since 2020, we've uh done this pattern of this preaching pattern as a church, where the first part of the year we have been preaching through Genesis.

So starting in January of 2020, we began in Genesis 1, and we preached through Genesis through about May of each year.

So May of 2020 or through January through May of 2020, 2021, 2022.

And at this point, we've made it all the way up to Genesis chapter 33.

Genesis 33 · chapter mention

It's pretty cool.

We're really marching.

And then in the summers, we'll pick an epistle, like a New Testament letter.

And so we've preached through James, uh, we've preached through Ephesians, and just last week we wrapped up Colossians, which was, I really loved that letter.

Uh and then in the fall, we've been moving through a gospel.

We've been moving through uh the gospel according to Mark.

So here we are, our third year in.

We're picking up in the gospel according to Mark.

We've already preached through chapters one through six, and now this, you know, semester, it's basically semesters.

That's the it's not a church calendar word, but you know.

Uh we're preaching through uh this same gospel, Mark, chapters seven through nine, is what we're going to look at.

The purpose of this is that we get Old Testament and New Testament throughout the year, and we learn how to piece this story together as the Bible gives us its own language for how to interpret and understand it.

So that's why we move in this way.

Now, I thought of uh doing a recap of Mark chapters one through six, but then I thought, you guys don't need that, you remember.

You know, you remember December of last year when we did our last Mark sermon.

I'm just kidding.

You almost you likely don't remember.

I don't remember what our last Mark sermon was until I got in this and I was like, what was that last Mark sermon?

And I looked into it.

But here's here's the the good news for you.

I I think rather than doing a recap of, and then he went to this town and cast out this demon, and then he confronted these Pharisees, and then he proclaimed the gospel here, rather than doing a recap like that, I as we move back into Mark, I want us to set our intention.

And I want our intention as a church to line up with Mark's intention for why he wrote this letter.

And then if we can participate with Mark in what he intended for his letter, then we can probably get something pretty wonderful out of it.

So Mark shares his intention for this letter right off the bat, right off the bat.

This is Mark, and this is one one.

He says, he introduces this book like this: the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

Okay, now right there, right off the bat, he's making these incredible claims, but claims which can be like a coin that's been passed around so much its embossment is worn off, and we can't tell what it means anymore.

We've heard these phrases so much that it's like their embossment has worn off, and it's just a piece of metal to us.

We've got to regain the ability to hear these things in just the strangeness and how shocking it is at these claims that Mark is making.

Now, consider this question.

What story of a man's life could you possibly hear that would convince you that that man were the son of God?

What could that story possibly include?

What would it entail?

Where you would hear the story of this man's life, and then you conclude, I think that was the story of the Son of God.

And yet, throughout the Gospels, through these stories of Jesus Christ, there are billions of people around the world today who believe that he is the very son of God.

And Mark sets out, he says, I'm telling you the story, the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

In laying out this story, you will come to see that this man, Jesus, is the Son of God.

And there's more in this.

He says, Jesus Christ.

Now, Christ is this word that carries this sort of dual connotation of King and Messiah.

In it we see that he is our King and our Savior.

And so he's saying that the Son of God, this man Jesus, is both the king of all creation and the savior that was promised that we looked forward to, so that all of the world and that all of mankind might have a hope of a savior that they could come to.

If this story were to be told and this man were to enter the world, then you would need to introduce it in a way that was at as large in scale as you could possibly imagine, as grand in scope as imaginable, as grand in scope as the creation itself, which begins with that phrase in the and so Mark begins his gospel saying, the beginning.

Now, if you've read the Bible before, then you know that when you arrive at the New Testament, you've spent a long time in the beginning already.

If you were three years ago with us at the elementary school next door, preaching through Genesis 1-1, you would think we've already done the beginning.

But Mark is saying here, if you understand Jesus Christ, you will understand that the scale of this story it can only be equated to creation itself.

This is a new beginning when you see this man, Jesus Christ.

So I want that to be the lens and intention.

And the questions that you bring to this, think how is it that in this story Mark is serving his purpose to prove to us that this man Jesus, who is a man like any other, was the Christ, the Son of God, that the news of him is a gospel, it is good news, the good proclamation of a true king.

And it is so big that we could call it the beginning.

Now consider that's this story in that way.

This happens once a week, so we should just get used to it.

Can you imagine?

Maybe one of you do.

If you do, you can come talk to me afterwards.

I always think guys that blast music on their motorcycles, it's just an amount of courage that I just don't have.

I'd pull down Tennyson and I'd be like, I'm gonna turn it down.

I don't know if anybody will.

But he's like, because you're so open and everybody sees, and it's pretty cool.

God bless him.

God bless him.

Yeah, that's right.

That's right.

That's the type that's the type of courage we're gonna see Jesus have today.

All right.

So right before today's story, uh Mark in in the writings of his letters, he uh one of the commentaries I read said he's like uh he's like lays bricks with no cement in between.

That's because he's just like, here's one story, okay, here's another story, and there's no segue at all, um, which is kind of nice.

It's wildly efficient.

So this story's context is not really given to us in in the book.

It's just like, bam, here's another story.

But we know the location.

And the location is a small town called Capernaum, and we know what Jesus had been doing in Capernaum, and that the whole town was gathering to him and he was healing the sick.

In fact, they were gathering and they were saying, if I could only touch the fringe of his garment, and many who touched just the fringe of Jesus' garment were healed.

So if if I were wondering what type of story of a man's life, what type of things would I need to see if I were to conclude that he was the Son of God, something like just in his presence, people were being restored to the fullness of who they were meant to be.

That would be an ingredient that I would look for.

And so we see that taking place in this small town of Capernaum, and then the tension arises.

Mark 7, 1 through 2.

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.

Okay, so he's in Capernaum, and Pharisees and scribes gather to him from Jerusalem.

Now, who are the Pharisees and the scribes?

The scribes were those that were trained in the Old Testament law.

And so they literally wrote it down over and over again, and they were trained in the proper interpretation of the Old Testament law.

And the Pharisees were kind of like this uh super-religious elite, almost like a club, that would gather together and they would study the interpretation of the law and then enforce the ways in which the society was meant to adhere to that law.

And what they did is they came up with all sorts of additions that they had made to the scriptures.

So the scriptures would say something like, Don't come into the temple if you are sick or if you uh have not washed beforehand.

And they would say, Okay, let's be extra safe.

Let's be extra cautious with the way that we approach the temple then.

Let's, it just says wash.

Well, let's design the very ways in which we're supposed to wash.

And we'll, by having these traditions of you wash in this particular way, and these particular things, these particular times, if we add all of these extra layers of rules before we get to what the scripture says, then we'll be particularly safe, maybe extra holy or extra protected for when we were to enter the temple for worship.

And these laws among the Pharisees had just grown into really a parallel textual tradition to the scriptures.

There's the Old Testament textual tradition, and then growing right alongside of it is what they called the tradition of the elders, which is what they had uh laid out as means and practices by which they could be thought to be obeying the law of God, but even more than obeying the law of God.

A holiness that went even beyond the scriptures.

That's what they likely thought to themselves.

So these scribes and Pharisees commute from Jerusalem, which is their their city of influence.

This is the city where the temple is, and so where the uh culture of the religious elites would be most felt and most present.

They come out to where Jesus is teaching, which is not in Jerusalem, it's in sort of these surrounding backwater type of towns.

And they come out and they're watching Jesus.

And they're watching for some slip-up where they're able to finally discredit this rogue teacher.

And they spot one.

They saw that some of his disciples ate with hands that were defiled, that is, unwashed.

Now, in verses three through four, Mark offers this sort of parentheses where he says, Okay, look, non-Jewish readers, you're probably wondering, like, yeah, you know, I try and wash my hands before I eat, but it doesn't seem like that big of a deal.

And so Mark is writing to a predominantly Gentile audience of readers, non-Jewish readers.

And so they wouldn't understand what this meant.

So he explains look, they have a lot of traditions like this.

They wash their hands, they wash their clothes in these particular ritualistic ways.

They'll even wash uh a dining couch before they eat.

And definitely, if you just came back from the market, because you might have bumped up against a Gentile and then made yourself unclean, you definitely washed if you came back from the market.

So we're all on board.

We all understand what Mark's talking about, right?

Great.

Then Mark did his job.

Okay, so they spot that some of Jesus' disciples were eating with hands that were unwashed.

They were defiled.

And so this is their opportunity to uncover that Jesus and his disciples are actually this rogue sect that doesn't care about their holiness, that instead is trying to deconstruct these traditions that have upheld their society for generations.

That in fact Jesus is saying something that is new and novel and innovative, which is meant to undo the word of God.

Jesus will unmask this hypocrisy, but he says this in Mark 7:5, or the Pharisees ask this question.

Mark 7:5

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?

This is their inn.

Why is it?

I notice, Jesus, you know, this is interesting.

Congratulations on the healings, by the way.

I notice that some of your disciples are eating with unwashed hands.

They don't hold to the traditions of the elders.

Just a brief aside what is a culture?

What is a society?

What keeps it together?

The things that keep a society and a culture together are our upholding of what we've received from those who've gone before us.

That's what that's what makes a society maintain its identity across time, is that we would uphold what we had previously received from those who'd gone before us.

You know, when we uh when we celebrate Thanksgiving here in another couple of months, then we are maintaining the culture of who we are just by our participation with that.

And so the threat that the Pharisees are smelling out is they're saying, look, look, if you are not upholding the traditions of the elders of the ones who have gone before us, then you are actively seeking to disintegrate all that we are as a people.

This is the claim that's being made.

That you are seeking to deconstruct our very cultural identity.

They might say something like this: Do you understand the type of pressure that we're under?

Look, we're already an exiled people that barely have a name to ourselves.

We are under Roman rule.

And I don't know if you read up on Alexander the Great recently, but we're a more Hellenistic people than we are a Jewish people already at this point.

And so we've lost this identity that God has given to us.

And you're out here with unwashed hands.

It may seem like a petty thing, but do you not realize that you are threatening the very coherence of our identity as a people together and before God?

That is the weight of what's being said and the weight of what it likely was experienced.

As in the Pharisees' minds.

But Jesus understands that underneath that facade of protection was actually a deep hypocrisy that was only self-serving.

Okay, now watch this.

I want you to take an image that you have of Jesus in your mind.

When I say Jesus, okay, what image comes into your mind?

Not too much of an image, don't break the second commandment, but like, you know.

He was a man, so it's fine to picture of a man.

So while you are, while you're picturing Jesus, I want you to I want you to hear him say this phrase.

And he said to them, Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites?

Okay.

I don't know if that's the way you picture Jesus talking.

Can you imagine it?

Think of your life, okay, in conflict like this.

They say, Why do they eat why do some of your disciples eat with unwashed hands?

Can you imagine all the background they might be bringing to this question?

Jesus does not pretend along with his opponents for even one second.

He does not, he does not pretend along with their hypocrisy at all.

He immediately calls it out and lays it plain.

Jesus is extremely confrontational.

You hypocrites.

Listen to that.

You can feel the point.

You hypocrites.

You know, this is not like a, he's not even speaking like some people, when they ask that, could possibly be hypocritical.

Let's explore what your intentions are.

No.

No, you hypocrites.

You know what?

Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you.

He he said this: this people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.

In vain do they worship me, teaching his doctrines the commandments of men.

I notice some of your disciples don't wash their hands.

What's going on with that, you hypocrite?

All your worship is in vain.

Isaiah, when he was speaking woes against people like you, he was exactly right.

I can see it right now.

Everything that you do is just to honor yourself, and it is not to honor God.

Look, there is no space.

There is he cuts this off immediately.

It exposes it precisely for what it is, by name, you hypocrites.

Like, I want you to I want you to see that and hear that.

Because one of the hardest parts of reading scripture is seeing what is there.

And one of the hardest parts of getting to know Jesus is seeing how he really interacts with people.

Because many of us don't have a category for this Jesus.

He does not pretend along with people who are lying to him.

He doesn't sustain it for a second.

You hypocrites, Isaiah was right.

Your worship is in vain.

So Jesus goes on, and he's working to show what exactly this hypocrisy is and why it is so hypocritical.

First of all, we can look at the quotations from Isaiah.

You speak as though you're trying to honor God.

You speak in such a way as though you are honoring God, and yet while you're speaking, it's a self-deception.

In vain do they worship me.

They come in, they fill the pews, they sing the songs, and God says it's as if they're doing nothing.

It accomplishes nothing.

It's dead.

This is a dead worship.

Now, why is it a dead worship?

Because they teach as doctrines the commandments of men.

When we gather together, we are here to hear the very voice of God in the scriptures.

And yet, as the Pharisees were gathering together, as the scribes were colluding, their intention was to teach as doctrines just the commandments and the traditions of man.

It is a dead and useless faith.

And Jesus is here to uncover it.

This quotation that Jesus offers that he cites from Isaiah, it's kind of a mashup of verses.

And the second one is actually from Ezekiel, and it ends by saying this: their heart is set on their gain.

So what their hearts are actually set on in their washing of their hands, look, what does it look like?

It looks like a humility before God.

And what is their heart actually set on while they're washing their hands?

It is their own gain.

That's the intention.

And Jesus knows that.

And so he does not for a second allow it to be compared with what he is accomplishing.

Now, there's another level of this hypocrisy, which is so simple that we might miss it, but it's so self-evident.

What had Jesus been been doing?

He's walking around, and people are just touching the fringe of his garment, and the sick are being healed.

Now, if you were sick, you were impure.

You couldn't go into the temple to worship until you had been healed again and then been checked out by a priest and said, Yeah, come back in.

We understand that impurity is contagious, right?

In this ancient mythological framework, their impurity is like, yeah, if you're sick, if you touch a dead body, you're impure, and you can't come back in until you're pure.

Well, that's the same as our current mythological framework, which is the germ theory of disease.

I always joke about not believing in the germ theory of disease.

I'm joking, right?

I'm just kidding.

It's just we always got to question what do we take for granted in our own current mythological frameworks, right?

You gotta be questioning that.

So anyway, I'm not a, you know, call me what you want.

We understand that if I were to go around and shake everybody's hands, things would have only gotten dirtier.

They would not have gotten more clean.

Jesus is walking around, and the more people that he is touching, the more purity spreads.

His purity is contagious.

And the scribes and Pharisees are watching him spread purity.

And then they're saying, I notice some of your disciples aren't washing their hands.

So Jesus must be thinking, what do you think the washing of hands is for?

If it's not for making people pure so that they might come in and enjoy the presence of God, then what is it for?

It's just for you, isn't it?

It's just been for you to look good this whole time, hasn't it been?

You hypocrites.

You didn't care about people coming in to know the Lord.

All these traditions that you've heaped up, you've used to puff yourself up and to put down others, and you've used to draw a greater and greater barrier between me and my people, and here I am spreading not the image of purity, but purity itself.

And you don't see it, and you don't even care about it.

You hypocrites.

It becomes clear why Jesus speaks so directly.

Now, there's a parallel here that I want us to see, and this is this is uh should be particularly accessible to us because we just finished the letter to the Colossians.

And in the letter to the Colossians, Paul spends so much time.

You know, the the whole theme of the letter to the Colossians is hold fast to Christ alone, because that is the only path of Christian maturity.

And what Paul was so nervous about for the Colossians as a church is that they would be deceived by people who were coming in and saying, actually, in order to really receive the blessing of God, you need to be circumcised.

And in order to really receive the blessing of God, you're going to need to adhere to these particular holidays and festivals.

And in order to really receive the blessing of God, you've got to uh embrace these dietary restrictions.

And you can't eat uh meat that's been sacrificed in these secular places.

And you uh you have to follow these fasting rituals, and then God will bless you.

Then you will you can be sure and certain that you are a part of our community and you really fit in with these people of God who will receive the blessing of God.

And Paul is so concerned, and so he comes in and he says, look, those things, that self-made religion might have the appearance of wisdom, but it is of no value in stopping the desires of the flesh, because the only thing which stops the desires of the flesh is when our death is put, is when our flesh is put to death in Christ.

So hold fast to Christ and let all of these other things flow from that.

But if you're considering that the way you put to death the flesh in you is by some little ritual, some additional practice that you're adding to the scriptures, then you are deceived and you've lost the whole gospel.

Do you see how perfectly in step Paul is with the teachings of Christ?

This is almost the same exact moment, just from a different perspective.

Paul is writing to a church that he's never been to.

Jesus is in the midst of the people who are heaping these extra burdens on for their own hypocritical desires.

And so how does Jesus describe that?

In verse 8, he says, you leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men.

What does this tell us about the heights of the word of God?

The word of God is not just a starting point.

The word of God is the whole thing.

It is just as wrong to make additions to what God calls obedience as it is to make subtractions to what God calls obedience.

Because the word of God is definitive.

Jesus is on a roll, and so he doesn't stop.

Oh listen, listen to him in this.

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

Do you hear that?

You can also translate it beautiful.

You've got a beautiful way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition.

He's so sarcastic.

He's so cutting in the way that he talks with the scribes and the Pharisees.

Oh, I've been watching you.

I'm so impressed.

You're a master at disregarding the law of God so that you can establish your own tradition.

Please teach me your ways.

He gives this clear example.

Mark 7, 10 through 11.

He says, look, here's one way you do it.

For Moses said, honor your father and 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.

It goes on in Mark 7, 12 through 13, 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 do you do.

Alright, so here's the pattern of what Jesus is describing.

He says, Look, you're a master at denying the word of God so that you can establish the traditions of men.

Consider this one example of many such examples that I could choose from.

But here's one, Jesus says.

Moses says, Honor your mother and father.

Remember the fifth commandment.

They probably knew the Ten Commandments, they were experts in the law.

It would be a good place to start.

If you're a legal expert, probably still is, you know.

Not to tell you how to do your job, but you say if you take what you would have owed your mother and your father to take care of them in their old age, and you say, This is Corbin, that means this is a gift to God, this is my free will offering to God, then you've gotten yourself off the hook.

But look at what a clever way that is of denying the law of God.

It's not it's not say saying, look, I don't care what the law requires of me.

And so whether I owe my parents or not, it doesn't matter.

Instead, it's saying, I'm so holy, I'm so pious, I'm so uh in tune with God and with with his law that I'm going to do even better than the fifth commandment.

I'm not going to honor my mother and father, I'm going to give this directly to the temple, directly to the Lord Himself, because sure, the the Fifth Commandment, wonderful, you know, those guys did great work.

But I can do even better.

And so you see that what might have initially been considered, we can lay out these extra steps, these extra things which will keep us safe from violating the law of God.

That those were always, the whole time, a means of self-salvation.

And this means of self-salvation is always at its heart a way of saying, I don't need God.

I don't need him to save me.

I don't need him to tell me how to live.

I am able to establish my own traditions in such a way where God Himself will be in my debt because he will see how good that I have been and that he must owe me.

It is a way of maintaining this God-like control over their own lives in this way that is beautiful because it looks like honoring God.

This is the difficulty in seeing it.

This is why it takes such, it takes such a shrewdness and such such a plainness to be able to see what it means to hold fast to the word of God alone, to hold fast to Christ alone.

This is not an easy thing to do because the hearts of man are always concocting ways in which we can regain control over our own lives by seeking to put God in our debt by showing him how holy we can be.

But we can't.

We can't be.

And it is a denial of our position before him in the very movement, in the very pattern that we're performing.

Because our position before him is one of a creature who receives our boundaries from him, our creator.

It is he who is in control.

It is he who is God.

It is he that we are meant to honor with our lives.

And that means we receive the word of God as the word of God, not to be added to.

Now, there's something deeply satisfying about seeing Jesus just lay in to these scribes and Pharisees.

Because we can imagine sort of like, you know, these are these are like the archetype of annoying people.

And in our culture, like one of our national pastime is speaking truth to power, which you can do for free on Twitter.

It's just free.

And there's power there, and they'll read it, and you speak truth to them.

And we consider this as like one of the one of the highest forms of morality.

And so we can easily read this and think, oh yeah, that's what Jesus is participating in, and that's why this feels so satisfying.

And we ought to be the same and be doing the same thing.

But this is this is a different pattern than that.

This is a different thing that's happening than that.

And I I think if you get this, you'll be shocked and feel a little personally threatened by what Jesus is here, because Jesus is showing himself to be the perfect opposite of the Pharisees.

We deal in an ordinary amount of hypocrisy.

We expect it and then we expect to receive it in return.

Jesus enters the world as absolutely plain.

He is not just saying true things, he is the truth, the truth itself.

Jesus enters the world not as just another person who is speaking truth to power.

Jesus enters the world as light.

Light reveals, reveals everything that is there.

It shows and exposes the truth of the matter, the reality of the situation.

And that's who Jesus is.

That's why his plainness can be so unsettling and so disconcerting because it's absolutely revelatory.

I want you to consider your own Christian worship and then have the light of Christ shine onto it, how much of it is just for you?

How much of it is just for your own building up?

How many of the patterns that you build into your life for the worship of God are really just so you can check another thing off a list and think maybe I'm not half as bad of a person as I thought I was?

And what if Jesus stands next to you and he is worshiping the Father?

And we see the absolute earnestness, the purity, the sureness, the beauty of that type of worship.

What does that expose about your own heart?

To see Jesus here, we need to not just see somebody who is having fun with people that we don't like anyway.

What we are looking at is what happens when light enters the world.

And Jesus is the light.

This is what's so shocking about him.

And so he reveals this hypocrisy.

He lays it plain before the Lord as the perfect opposite of these religious concoctions.

Because the pattern of Christ's ministry is not one of building himself up by these religious practices.

The pattern of Christ's ministry is one of laying himself down.

Not for those who Deserve it.

Not for those who are unhypocritical, but for the hypocrites, for the liars, for sinners.

Jesus lays his life down.

Jesus' pattern of ministry is not one of duplicitous duplicity where he's talking one way and then doing another way.

He is absolutely, he's, he's the only whole person.

The only whole person.

Think of what that exposes about you.

If that type of light were to come stand next to you, think of what that shows.

I want you to look at Jesus as he is, as he's shown in this scripture here.

Then I want you to consider this.

This same Jesus, who is absolutely trustworthy, who is absolutely plain in the way that he reveals himself.

When he says to all who come to me, I will cast out none of them.

You can know he's telling the truth.

When he says, in this world you'll have troubles, take heart.

I've overcome the world.

You can know he's telling the truth.

When he says, I'm the good shepherd, I lay down my life for the sheep, you can know that he's telling the truth.

You can know that he's trustworthy.

When he says, I have not come to save the righteous, but to save sinners, look, listen, listen to that.

I've not come to save the righteous, but to save sinners.

When he says that, you can know that he's telling the truth.

And so that means that you can now come to him as the this sort of little small image of the type of whole person that he truly is.

But when we hold up the wholeness of our hearts towards him and he shines down his light on it, and it reveals all that is, all the discrepancy between how we've presented ourselves to be and the reality of the wickedness that's actually in our heart, and he reveals those things, we know that he does not walk away from us then.

But in fact, he walks towards the cross that he might take on that sin upon himself, remove it from us as far as the east is from the west, so that we might authentically stand before him in righteousness because of what he has done, because he is the one who saves us.

We are not the ones who build ourselves up so that we manipulate him into saving us.

Like we use it to describe like coffee shops and stuff, you know.

But the wholeness of who he is as a person, that when we see that light that we find so threatening, because it would expose so much about us, when we see it paired with his heart towards us to save sinners, we know that we can trust it.

And it gives us a hope of coming to him, not in this dual nature, but in the midst of our sin, so that by him we might be saved.

Look at Jesus.

Look at how different he is.

Look at how he interacts with the hypocrites and the religious powers in the world.

Look at how he calls us towards the real thing, worship of God and spirit and truth.

Be be amazed by your Savior.

All right.

Are there any questions today, Matthew?

In this text, is this text appropriate to use to defend the scriptures against those religions who seek to add to the scriptures, thinking about cults?

Yeah, it's absolutely.

Absolutely.

This would be a great text to go to.

This, Colossians, uh are wonderful places to just lay out, look, you think you're being more holy.

You might tell yourself you're being more holy by adhering beyond the scriptures to the traditions of men.

But it's a hypocrisy.

It's a self-salvation that's showing you aren't willing to depend on Christ alone for your rescue.

And because you won't depend on him, you won't treat him as God.

It's what one of the ways we treat God as God is by depending on him.

And so you are framing it in this beautiful way of upholding the value of the scriptures, but really it is a hypocritical movement.

These can be hard things to spot in our lives because they're so deceptive.

And we need to carve out another category here because it's like, oh man, then I just need to be alone with my Bible in prayer in the woods.

Uh because we're participating in a tradition right now, you know.

But just like most things in the Christian life, it's not this is right, this is wrong.

It's a matter of proportion.

And here we see that this is the proportion that had taken place in the Pharisees' lives, and that often at a heart level takes place in our lives, is that we use the things that we we use things that we would say we're using these to seek a closeness with the Lord.

We're actually using them to displace a need of the Lord.

And we are a type of people who need the Lord.

That's not a bug, it's a feature.

Lean into that need of the Lord.

Now Jesus gives himself to us.

And Paul describes that in 1 Corinthians 11.

He says, For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you.

That the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread.

And when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, This is my body which is for you.

Do this in remembrance of me.

In the same way also he took the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new covenant in my blood.

Do this as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.

For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.

Proclamation of the Lord's death is that he went to the cross, not half-heartedly, not duplicitously, but because of the depth of his love for his people, because of his obedience to the Father, that in that sacrifice we might be saved.

As we are, as we are, we might be saved.

Now that takes standing close to the light, which reveals how we are.

That's a brutal thing.

But our hope in it is that as we are revealed, he stays close.

So close that he would even take the punishment for our own sins, so that we might live with him eternally.

Holy Father, I pray that you would bless this meal, that as we come to you, proclaim your death, as we take up the nourishment of your life, that we might see you as Jesus Christ, Son of God, we might understand your gospel, which is the extension of this grace that you hand to us, Lord, that we might take it up by faith, that as we take up the bread, as we dip it in the wine, that this might be a taking up by faith of this offer of yourself to us.

Lord, that we might in this covenant with you have a trust in your forgiveness, your justification of us, and learn to live freely in this dependence on you.

Father, we praise you that you were the true man.

We lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.