Whitewashed Tombs And Our Facade

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Do you have a question for us as we kick off and dive in this morning? Do you know what one of the most offensive things Jesus ever said was? Um, yeah, think about it. Uh, you're all going back in your head. He does say something kind of funny later in this sermon. But um, the one that came to mind and the one that applies in today is Jesus looked at some of the most respected religious leaders, these upright elite people of the day that had the perfect spiritual resume and he called them whitewash tombs. Um, and if you think about that imagery, it's not relatable to us today because we go to a graveyard and it's not a tomb, it's totally different. But back then, they actually painted tombs with bright white lime so that they were clean and shiny on the outside, uh, and a passerby could see them and actually avoid touching them because on the inside they were full of dead, rotten bones, dead bodies decaying. Uh, and back then, if you touched it, um, you would actually be considered spiritually contaminated. So Jesus goes up to these religious leaders who are strutting around thinking they're the best of the best. And he says, You're whitewashed tombs. You're walking spiritual contamination. You look nice on the outside, but you're just dead on the inside. And it's just this huge insult because they think that people would come to them to be made holy or follow them to be made holy. And he's saying, You're just this facade. You're just walking dead. And so let's be honest, today, uh, no matter who we are, what we're bringing in this morning, uh, we're not immune to that same facade, that desire to look good, to polish up, um, you know, everybody dressed up. Hopefully, you all showered this morning. Um, you know, put on a colored shirt, um, all that stuff. You know, I've never seen anybody come preach in sweatpants. If someone is due, it'd probably be Tim, actually. Um, but uh, you know, we put on an internal, uh, an external display. We have this temptation to perform, to be looking together. Well, on the inside, we're tired, we're worn out, we're fatigued, there's some rot in us. That battle, that tension lives in us. And so that's the text we're gonna look at today. Uh, we're gonna open up our Bibles to Mark 7 and go through it and look at what Jesus has to say to those religious people, uh, but more importantly, what he has to say to us and what it actually means to be clean before God. And so, some big questions I want us to answer and chew on and strive through this morning is why do our hearts consistently prefer religious, measurable external checklists instead of actually exposing the reality of our hearts? Why do we lean towards those things, those to-do lists? And then what does it actually take to make someone clean all the way to the core? What does it mean to be pure and righteous and in good standing with God? And then how do we sustain that when Tuesday comes and life is chaos and the gritty realities of relationships and work and just surviving in the world constantly pile more on? And the big idea I want to land on, uh, it'll be up on the screen, is that true holiness is not this outside-in barrier that we build, but it's an inside-out cadence of experiencing Jesus' grace and walking with his spirit. The

Mark 7 Opens With Dirty Hands

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pray, and then we'll dive into the text. Yeah, Jesus, thank you. Uh, we get to be your people. Um, we get to come here uh fully loved. You chose us and you have something good for us. And so as we dive into your word, uh, we lean on the promise that it is active and alive, and that your spirit is here in this room. And so we need your help uh to see what you have for us, to convict us, to change hearts, to change our lives. Amen. So if you got your Bible, you can open it up. We're in Mark 7, 1 to 23. There's some Bibles up on the front. Here you can grab phone, app, whatever. It'll also be on the screen. If you have it on your phone and you can't not look at your notifications, just put your phone away. I know I sit behind you and I see what you do. Um we're gonna read, uh, we'll read starting verses one to five. Says the Pharisees and some of the teachers of the law who had come from Jerusalem gathered around Jesus and saw some of his disciples eating food with hands that were defiled, that is, unwashed. It goes into brackets here. Mark is like stepping back and he's gonna explain what's going on. So it says, The Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they give their hands a ceremonial washing, holding to the traditions of the elders. When they come from the marketplace, they do not eat unless they wash, and they observe many other traditions, such as the washing of cups, pitchers, and kettles. End of explanation. Story back on. So the Pharisees and teachers of the law asked Jesus, why don't your disciples walk according to the traditions

Traditions That Promise Control

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of the elders, instead of eating food with their defiled hands? So we took a little break from Mark last week, but we're back in, and we're just in this tent, this constant progression of Mark. That's why it's called and and this happened, and that happened. So, and now we're back in, and there's Pharisees, the religious leaders are coming at Jesus. This text starts with a meal, but it's really zooming past to looking at this crowd that's come all the way from Jerusalem. Um, these religious leaders, they're like a hit squad. Um, they're not just walking next door, they're going from town to town, and they've come to watch Jesus and his disciples and what they're doing. And they've come with their checklist. What are they doing? Where can we accuse them of being wrong? They're threatened by Jesus. We've seen these interactions, this tension all throughout the book of Mark, and it continues to escalate. And so their question, their accusation at the heart of this text is why don't your disciples walk according to the traditions of the elders? Why don't they do what we think they need to do? Um, he stops the action, as I said, and he explains to us as Gentile readers what's going on here. And so there was this oral law, a religious tradition that the Pharisees, the religious leaders had put around that your hands need to be clean before you eat. All of us are like, that's great. I try and get my kids to do that all the time. I love the Bible. Why can't we all be like the Pharisees? Just kidding. That is not the lesson of the story. Um, but it's this ritualistic scrubbing from fist to wrist, and literally they like watch for the line to get over the wrist to know that they're just clean if they're over that. If they don't hit that, then it's not considered clean. Uh and the idea was back in the Old Testament, the priests, before they would go into the tabernacle, the house of God, to God's presence, they would clean themselves like this. And so the Pharisees took that and just started applying it to everybody, saying, Well, if it's good for the priests, it's good for you. Everybody needs to put on this performative holiness to make sure they don't even get close to breaking God's commands. Like if there's a hole there and it's bad to fall in the hole, they would put a fence back here saying, Well, we can't even really look at the hole. Um, we got to stay, if we're gonna stay holy, we gotta be out here. And the Pharisees do this over and over and over again. And so these oral traditions, um, these spoken laws build up, they eventually get written down, and it's all these things that they expect people to follow them. Uh, and their core theological error here is they took that thing that was made exclusively for priests and they demanded that everybody do it. Um, they wanted people to act like a priest without the heart of a priest, without the heart of someone contending for the people, of someone who's actually going in and preparing themselves to be close to God. And let's be fair to them, we still need wisdom. We need structure in our life, we need disciplines uh to navigate this deeply broken, fractured world that we live in. Communal boundaries are wise. Oral traditions are usually steeped in wisdom. Um, but we are deceived that if we think keeping the world out is the exact same thing as keeping our souls clean. We'll see that come over and over again as we dive into this. Um, but they have this actual accusation. They say, uh, why don't your disciples walk? Um, because they think their path is the right path. They've elevated this human tradition to the level of divine law. Uh, and so they've reduced holiness. Holiness is like purity, set apartness. Um, God is holy. He's the only perfectly holy thing. Um, but they've reduced that uh to this closed system of manageable behaviors. They have their checklist. It allows them to maintain, it

The Performance Trap And Burnout

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allows us to maintain this illusion of control. You can check that box, it puts God in a box for us, and so then we we're good. Um, famous preacher Charles Spurgeon, we quote him fairly often. Um, he had this quote uh where he captured this fruit futility of manual behavior modification. The sermon's called Faith Purifying the Heart. He says this true religion is heartwork. We may wash the outside of the cup and the platter as long as we please, but if the inward parts be filthy, we are filthy altogether in the sight of God, for our hearts are more truly ourselves than our hands are. For our hearts are more truly ourselves than our hands are. So this attitude that we see in the Pharisees is this danger performance trap that we still fall into today when we assume that our spiritual health is completely intact simply because everything looks good on the outside. Did my religious duties, woke up early, read my Bible, said my prayers, served at a gathering, sat the rest of the gathering, all those things. We feel good. We checked off our family duties, we checked off our duties to Jesus. We didn't commit those obvious public sins. Your hands look clean, everybody around you thinks you look good and polished, you're happy, healthy, wealthy. And so you start to mistake, we all start to mistake behavioral compliance for genuine spiritual vitality. Like the Pharisees, we start to desperately scrub the outside of the cup when it's moldy and rotten inside. And the crushing cost, if we find ourselves in this performance trap, is that sheer willpower is not gonna get it done. There's pressure and exhaustion of having to will yourself to be better all the time. If you're white knuckling your way into spiritual or moral fitness, you're gonna end up burnt out to the core. If you wake up every single day with this weight to perform your own holiness, you just can't. It's exhausting when we have to be our own savior. And worse, you're tired, you're also gonna be lonely. Because when your entire identity is built on that clean, polished exterior, you can never afford to let anybody see a struggle. You have to keep the wall up all the time. This big, beautiful wall that you craft, and you're just terrified of being exposed. Lonely, exhausted. We know that our heart looks to these checklists because we want to feel in control of our own purity. We want to have a say in our rightness before God. We want to add something to it. But they just create getting to the end of ourselves. This self-constructed fortress of rules leads to that bone weary, agonizing tiredness. And this exhaustion is actually a warning sign. If you feel that, if that's resonating with you this morning, it's a whisper telling you that your manual override is failing, quietly pointing you towards something better, something completely different. The Spirit is trying to use that exhaustion to whisper to you about this life-giving rhythm of grace that he offers to you. So I'll just tease that now. We're going to get into that more. There's good news coming. Um, but that's not where Jesus goes right away. Because when our habits, our performative measures, our raw willpower fails to make us clean, human nature doesn't just abandon the rules. We rarely turn to Jesus quickly. Uh, we simply double down and start to get clever. And so we create complex, highly sophisticated loopholes trying to justify how we can keep being selfish, can keep being sinful. Uh, so if we can't

Corban Loopholes And Hypocrisy

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keep our hands clean, we will bend the rules to make sure they look clean. And this is what happens. And so Jesus keeps doubling down on this. Uh, we're gonna keep reading Mark 6 to 13 here. So the Pharisees make this accusation. This is Jesus' response. He replied, Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you hypocrites, as it is written, these people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain, their teachings are merely human rules. You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to human traditions. And he said to them, You have a fine way of setting aside the commands of God in order to observe your own traditions. For Moses said, Honor your father and mother, and anyone who curses their father or mother must be put to death. But you say, If anyone declares that what might be and have used to help their father or mother is Corban, that is an offering devoted to God, then you no longer let them do anything for their father or mother. Thus you nullify the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down, and you do many things like that. So Jesus takes the focus from theology and their practice, and he starts bringing it down to this real-world family dynamic that's an active thing in the day, then. And he exposes how the Pharisees, they use their religious vocabulary and their brains and their sparts and their cleverness to actually neglect their parents, abandon their own parents. So he calls them hypocrites. He quotes Isaiah 29, and so we probably might have heard this before. Hypocrites comes from a Greek word that was used for stage actors when they would wear a mask, right? So it's like putting on a false face, putting on a facade. Um, and he's exposing them to the core. You're a hypocrite. Um, you say these great things, but you are rotten at the core, and we can see it in how you abandon your parents and disobey God's commands. Um, he says these strong verbs, you're letting go of the commands of God and holding on to human traditions. You're letting go of things that are weighty and that they matter, and you're holding tightly to these human rules that make you comfortable. They put in something they could control. Again, tradition and structure in and of themselves aren't bad. They can be beautiful gifts that God uses. They're the bones that hold up a body, if you will. Um, we need these systems. We need them to run the church and protect our kids and steward our resources. And the tragedy in Mark 7 isn't that the Pharisees had traditions, but that they used those traditions to bypass actually loving their family. Structure is a wonderful servant, but it's a terrible savior. It won't get us there in the end. And so our response is not just throwing away the bones, but we need to make sure that God's spirit is breathing life into them. And so Jesus continues on, he anchors this debate in the Ten Commandments, giving us a yardstick for our spiritual health. Love your parents, right? Obey your parents, honor them. Um, so he's bringing it back into something that obviously this is the core of the Pharisees' teaching. The Ten Commandments make up the core of the Old Testament law. And so Jesus is using their language to make a point to them, to really drive this thing home, to really expose them to what's going on. And he talks about this idea of the practice of Corbin and says right in the text, it means an offering dedicated to God. So something beautiful. Um, but history shows, if we look back at this time, how it was being used, uh, that people would vow their property as Corbin. So a lot of wealth, just like today, tied up in property. Uh, and that legally prevented them from giving or selling that property to benefit their parents who needed care. Uh, the catch with it was, though, when you dedicated or vowed something as Corbin, you still got to keep it. You still got to take income off the property. So all it was doing was putting up a barrier to share and bless others with it. And so people, the religious leaders would do this. They'd come like, well, I can't. I already dedicated that wealth to God. Sorry, mom and dad, you got to be on the streets. Uh, and so you can see how nefarious this is, how it's like a clever use of a loophole to get out of doing something that they just didn't want to do. They like their wealth, they like their status, they like their lands, they didn't really want to care for their parents. So we can be clear here: like dedicating our resources and our money and our gifts to the service of God is something good, something biblical, something that we see done well throughout scripture. We see it well done in the church all the time. But we're in deep spiritual peril when we use our religious commitments or our ministry performance or our ministry commitments as a tactical shield to avoid loving others and obeying the commands of Jesus. Their legalism, our legalism, is a permission of selfishness, right? When you look at it, they're just trying to be selfish. And so they create rules that permits them to be selfish. You can't use God's name to void God's laws. So Jesus accuses them very directly of nullifying God's word. They're robbing it of authority, they're making it void, they're rendering it powerless, something that they've based their whole life around is God's word, his law. And he's saying to them, You don't care about it at all. You just robbed it of all of its power in the way that you use it.

When Service Becomes A Shield

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They've neutered the demands of Scripture. This happens to us, right? We know the right vocabulary, we run with the right crowds, we hold the passwords to like the inner circle of what it means to belong to a church, to be a Christian. We use our spiritual resume to excuse the fact that we've never actually surrendered our hearts to Jesus as King. This is the trap of a resume. Before it was the trap of performance, Jesus is going another level down. This is the trap of missing him when we get stuck and defending and writing and polishing our resumes. Because we still do the same thing today. We use our highly noble commitments as tactical shields to avoid what Jesus is calling for us. The simple command to love your neighbor. So think about you can think of you might fall on these examples, or you might know others that do. If your first thought is, I know someone like that, then you probably need to look at yourself first, actually. But think about that faithful servant who never says no to an opportunity to serve. They're constantly out serving the needs of the church. They're setting up for the gathering, they're serving in the nursery, they're hosting a missional community, they're the first one to sign up for a meal train. They're just there. And they look like this spiritual giant in our midst. But their spouse and their kids are completely exhausted because all they get is the short-tempered leftovers of that servant. They use that holy alibi of, I'm doing this for Jesus. But they're actually using God's work to legalize the relational neglect in their life. We've seen some of that. We've all been tempted to that at times. Or maybe some another example would be a parent out working 70 hours a week. And they come home, they're still buried in their laptop, they're on their phone, even when they're physically in the living room, they're disconnected. Their family comes and connects to play, to wrestle, to catch up. They put on that noble shield of I'm just trying to provide for our family. God calls me to be a provider, so I'm doing it. And so they take that very real biblical duty of provision that we see over in the Bible over and over again, but they turn it into this license to be spiritually and emotionally absent. When we do this, we start to tame the living God. We treat him like a defense mechanism, using his mission, whatever we define it as, to defend ourselves from his scrutiny, from his call to love and serve and obey him. We essentially tell him, I'm too important doing work for you to actually obey you. That's the resume trap. So why do we do this? Because working for God is so much easier than actually being with God. We prefer the high pressure duty of religious resumes over the simple, unearned affection of a father. But Jesus offers something in the gospel that's so much better. He offers this joy that doesn't require our resumes, it doesn't require our self-justification. He offers a path where your family and your friends and your relationships don't just get the crumbs of what's left over after you've put in your time for Jesus. But they get this overflow of a heart saturated by the quiet relational presence of his spirit. There's something more there. We'll get more back to that in a bit. But it's a point one was all about what we do with our hands. That second section was all about how we use those religious rules to make a resume. But it's still external. We've been looking at external things, how

What Defiles Comes From Within

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we do behavior modifications. But he's not, Jesus is not content to let us just sit in the shallow end of behavior management. He wants to walk past those rules, past our traditions, and past the facade that we so desperately want to put up and start doing an autopsy. Start looking deeper. So let's keep reading uh and finding. 14 and 23. We'll finish the last section here. Again, Jesus called to the crowd to him and said, Listen to me, everyone, and understand this. Nothing outside of a person can defile them by going into them. Rather, is what comes out of a person that defiles them. And he left the crowd after he had left the crowd and entered the house, his disciples asked him about this parable. Are you so dull? I love Jesus' lines like that. It's great. Are you so dull? He asked. For it doesn't go into their heart but into their stomach and then out of the body. And saying this, Jesus declared all foods clean. Amen. Pulled pork. He went on. What comes out of a person is what defiles them, for it is from within, out of a person's heart, that evil thoughts come. Sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance, and folly. All of these evils come from inside a person and defiles them. So he walks away from the religious leaders. He just knows that that's not who he's there for at the moment. And he takes the crowds with him, these people that are desperate for something more, have been following Jesus because he's offering something that they're yearning for. He delivers this blunt diagnosis of the human heart. He says, Purity is not this matter of avoiding external contact, like the religious Pharisees are saying. It's not just dirty hands, but true defilement actually comes from within. It doesn't matter if you're clean on the outside because you just keep polluting from the inside. And even the disciples, that's where he's like, are you so dull? They're trapped in that mindset, right? They've grown up in this. They've been taught by these religious leaders. It's just soaked into the fabric of their being that external cleanliness is done by contamination touching things. So Jesus points out to them very specifically, so they can get this. What's in here that matters, not what's out there. And in the old covenant, in the old testament, only God could dictate what was clean. So Jesus is acting with that divine authority to rewrite what cleanliness means or rewrite what purity means. Because it used to be that uh uncleanliness was contagious. That's why they couldn't go near the tombs. If they touched it, they would then become unclean. So they couldn't help leopards and the sick because they would get unclean. And then we see Jesus all throughout Mark and all throughout the Gospels reverse that trends. He goes and he touches the leopard. The leopard doesn't make him unclean, but instead Jesus' cleanliness, his purity becomes infectious and cleans the leopard because he is the one. His holiness is the thing that actually can purify, can actually reverse human defilement. And then Jesus goes in through verses 20 to 22, and he lists these 13 specific vices. Um, we're gonna go through them one by one. Are you guys ready? Just kidding. I'm not gonna go through them one by one. Um, starts though with this evil thoughts, internal calculations, hidden strategies, and those spill out into our actions. We're just saying, like from the inside, from those thoughts, from the core of us, spills out into adultery and murder and lewd speech. All these things overflow out of our heart. They're not learned activities. They're something that lives, at the seed of which lives in each and every one of us, because something is deeply broken within humanity. And then the heart, what Jesus is saying in the Bible, uh, is not just the seed of raw emotion like we treat it today, but it was actually like the volition engine. It's the control center of the intellect, the will, our desires. So our culture tells us that our heart is a pristine compass. You should follow it as your guide, follow your heart, and you'll be happy, right? If we're just true to ourselves, then it'll be great. Life will be rainbows and clouds and unicorns. That's my what my daughter would have. I don't know. Meat and smoking and hanging out with dudes, whatever it is for you. Um, but Jesus comes along and has this challenge for us today, just like he did for them, and says that your heart is actually the source of your defilement. And if you make your heart your functional savior and guide, you'll be spending the rest of your life enslaved to your own shifting desires. Constantly trying to justify yourself and get in line with your true being. And Jesus offers us this beautiful rescue. Doesn't say be true to yourself, invites you to be true to him. Because he's the only one that can make you whole. But naturally, we still want that treatment plan, something that we can manage ourselves, a behavioral modification matrix, a new habit to work on, self-help guide to suppress our bad habits. And Jesus comes back to us and says, Well, you don't need a clinic, you need a heart change. Because without that heart change, you're just gonna keep poisoning yourself in your life. Uh John Calvin famously spoke to this reality in the institutes of the Christian religion. He says, From this we may gather that man's nature, so to speak, is a perpetual factory of idols. Just on to the next. We'll just keep making new things to worship, new things to call God, new things to make our savior. And so, does this mean as you say, man, like, man, this is a deep, depressing sermon. I gotta go outside in the sunshine and think about my life. Are we all as bad as we possibly could be? No. No, we're not, of course not. We're actually made in the image of God. So you're capable of profound selflessness, of sacrifice, of beauty. Uh, you love your children, you donate to charity, you would risk your life to save a stranger. But Jesus' point is not that we don't have the capability to do good, but that our core is compromised. Our core nature is compromised, so that even our finest, most noble achievements are often quietly drafted into the service of our self-justification. We use our goodness to prove that we don't need God. This is our culture today, right? You walk around Victoria, nobody really thinks they're a bad person. They're like, look, I cleaned up the trash, I sorted my recycling properly. Um, I have a garden, I compost, um, I do all the right things. I'm not a bad person. Uh, why would I come to church? Why would I listen about this Jesus stuff? There's nothing wrong with me. Um, and that's what Jesus is arguing for, that there actually is something wrong with us. That there's this poison that we even take the best things that we do

Stop Blaming Your Environment

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and we bend them back to serve ourselves, to make ourselves look good, and don't give God the glory for them. So we need to shift our minds at times, because so many of us, we think that the environment around us is what creates the toxicity, the sin in us. That's what causes us to fall and stumble. But in reality, the environment around us merely acts as the pressure to squeeze what's already in our heart out of us. Life gets hard, life gets stressful, and the worst of us comes out because it already lives in there. So, verse 23. So all these evils come from inside and defile a person. There's no other culprit. You can't blame the world, you can't blame culture, you can't blame your background. The contamination originates within us. We are that factory of idols. When Jesus lays out this devastating clinical evaluation of the heart, our default escape route, if you don't want to hear that, what are you gonna do? You're gonna deflect. You're gonna blame your bitterness, your anger, your greed, your moral compromise entirely on your environment. We tell ourselves, if my schedule wasn't this chaotic, if my boss wasn't this toxic, my spouse was more supportive, I wouldn't act that way. And Jesus says, we're not just the victims here of what's going on around us. We are the active generators of it. And the danger when we start to blame our circumstances is that whatever or whoever you want to blame your sin on becomes your functional savior. That's what will save you when that thing has changed. So if it's your chaotic schedule, that's why you're short with people, that's why you don't have time to be loving and kind and patient, then a better schedule, that's what'll do it. That's what's going to make me a nice guy, finally. If that difficult, hard, hurt-filled relationship is why you are bitter, then a better relationship. If I can just find the right friend, the right spouse, the right partner, then it'll be good. Then I will be saved. So if you blame your circumstances, if you find yourself constantly falling in that trap, you're gonna spend your life waiting for your environment to change before you face your own heart. But a clean cage doesn't turn a wolf into a lamb. True freedom doesn't come from a pristine environment, it comes from a pristine savior. And that's what's on offer here. Jesus whispers a deeper promise. Stop looking to your environment as a savior. Stop waiting for everything to be perfect before you can experience him. Because right now, you can begin to taste and see and experience the quiet relational peace that Jesus offers you in the midst of whatever mess you're in. You get to be with his spirit right now, and you get to rest

You Need A New Heart

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right now. This leaves us with a bit of a day-to-day crisis, though. Jesus has declared authoritatively that those who believe in him will be given a new heart, that they will be made clean. We get a heart replacement. But how does that translate into Wednesday afternoon? Life is chaos. I don't even remember what Matt preached about last week. I just gotta deal with this thing, and life is challenging. If we have a new engine, a new heart, how do we align the dashboard of our lives to follow that and to walk in step with that? How do we maintain holiness, not white knuckling it, but as a peaceful time with Jesus? We need something each and every day. So Jesus gives us a new way forward, gives us that heart, and he declares this new covenant, this new promised reality to his people, the church, to us. But how does it work? How do those sins that pop up in verses 21 and 22 get accounted for? How do we deal with them? Anger, murder. I don't think we deal with that one as often, but um, Dallas Willard, uh famous theologian, uh diagnosis. He has this book called Renovation of the Heart, all around this stuff. There's a quote in there that says the aim of spiritual formation is not behavior modification, but the transformation of all those aspects of you and me where behavior comes from, the circumcision of the heart, the complete changing of the heart. Spiritual formation isn't just a to-do list of creating new habits. Um, we can be fair here: willpower, counseling, behavioral therapy, hab tracking, those are all legitimate tools that you can use uh as you work on yourself. They can help you manage your temper, they can help you organize your schedule, break bad habits. Um, this is common grace. Jesus allows his wisdom and how he built the world to benefit not just the church, but everybody around us. And yet, while those habit loops, so those that therapeutic process uh can change what you do. It cannot change what you fundamentally love. It can restrain that wolf inside of you, but it can't turn the wolf into a lamb. For that, you don't need a stronger leash. You need a new nature, a new heart. You must make an active, conscious choice to resist temptation and choose righteousness every hour, but those choices are futile. They are driven by the raw willpower of your own flesh

Legalism As A Phrasebook

SPEAKER_00 34:40

rather than active, real-time surrender to the Holy Spirit. Uh, imagine with me that you all come to Japan with us next year. You don't speak Japanese at all, and all we give you is a tiny little phrase book. And so you go in, you got to survive life. We're gonna leave you there, abandon you for a year. Sorry, don't tell you that until after we get there. But you got this tiny tourist phrase book. And every time someone comes up to you and they want to have a conversation, the momentum stops because you return to the page. Okay, they said this. Okay, Konichua. Okay, hello, okay, okay, I got this. And then you held, but then you have no conversation. There's no rhythm to it, right? It's exhausting. You have to open the book, translate their words, manually look up the correct response, and then try to pronounce the syllables. Slow, clunky, unnatural. There's no warmth, there's no relationship. It's just this high stress experience. That is legalism. That is the picture of us as we try and live out legalism, try to prove ourselves in our daily walk with Jesus. The Bible becomes the phrase book, and the Holy Spirit becomes this guy with the checklist. Okay, oh yeah, your pronunciation was good there. On to the next. So it becomes exhausting, robotic, and empty. But Jesus is not offering us a phrase book. That's not what this is. He came to teach you the language and what it means to be a native in his kingdom, to make you fluent. When you're keeping in step with him, his love and his joy aren't phrases that you have to frantically look up to perform. They become the natural fluid vocabulary of a heart that is fully aligned to the Savior. In Ezekiel, we have a promise of this in the Old Testament. It says, I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you. I will move from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh, and I will put my spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees. God doesn't just promise us this new heart, He immediately follows it with this mechanism to walk in step with it, his indwelling spirit. What does that look like we see in Galatians? It says, if we live by the Spirit, let us also keep in step with the Spirit. To keep in step with the Spirit does not mean marching in like a grueling, high performance military formation where you're punished for limping. It means letting him set a gentle, sustainable pace. It means letting him carry the weight of your walk to set your stride that is loving and gracious to you. So if your daily spiritual walk with Jesus feels like a heavy weight, you're running on your own steam. You're not using his power at his pacing. So those 13 vices that we see in Mark 7 are the outputs of the flesh. That's what happens when we walk at our own pace and do things on our own power and we sprint ahead. And the only power capable of neutralizing those things is the spirit at work within us, the fruit of the spirit. Um, when the spirit prompts you to pivot away from pride and envy or bitterness, keeping in step with him doesn't mean we're doing this perfectly executed plan that we worked out and something that's robotic and performative. It means just turning to him in desperation. Spirit, I need you to fill me so that when you stumble and you fail to submit, his grace is not taken from you. Helps you continue to walk daily with him in the midst of your life, in the midst of your struggles, in the midst of the mess. And this gentle pacing of the spirit is the ultimate death to legalism in us. Because under that old system of the Pharisees, you had to perform. It was the only way you could maintain your position in God's circle. One slip, one unwashed hand, and you were cast out into the cold, condemned, not part of the family anymore. But under this new covenant that Jesus brings us, Spirit doesn't grade you on a curve. He's not a taskmaster monitoring your compliance from a distance. And we don't walk this path of life in order to get to God. We walk because God has already come down to be with us. So we keep walking because we want to keep being with him. We want to live life beside him. So to be a Christian is not this grueling sprint where we have to prove that we belong to God, prove that we belong to be in his house. It's a restful rhythm of a child who's already fully welcomed home.

Rest For The Weary And Burdened

SPEAKER_00 39:40

So this brings us to the end. Um this entire text with all of its cultural tensions and internal autopsies has been driving us towards this single, unavoidable intersection. We're left with a decision that we can't delegate, we can't delay. We've looked at these different traps. We know that we can't fix ourselves, we can't stay stuck in the performance trap, policing outward metrics, letting bitterness grow unchecked in our soul. We can't keep deflecting and saying, well, I'm just a victim of my circumstances. Those change, I'll be better. We can't just keep trying to build our external resume and saying, Jesus, I'm doing this work for you. It's okay if I mess up sometimes or disobey. I'm doing this for you. You will waste your life creating a pristine facade while the inside remains a rotting tomb. I'll call the band up now before I dive into clothes here. So wherever you are, band, come on up. Um the choice that Mark 7 leaves us with. There's a thing that we need to respond to today. Um, the act of obedience in this text is not actually the invitation that some of us will want to hear. Go home, try harder, wash your thoughts. That's just modern hand washing. It's not what Jesus wants for you. It's not what I want for you. The invitation today is to stop striving, stop performing, and simply simply collapse into the finished work of Jesus. If you are exhausted, Savior does not hand you a heavier pack. He says, Come to me, all who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Stop trying to wash a heart you cannot clean. Take a deep breath. Let go of the need to perform your own holiness and let Jesus clean you from the inside out. For those in here today that don't know Jesus, that wouldn't call themselves a Christian, maybe you're dragged along by a friend or your favorite aunt, now your second favorite aunt, um, maybe you've just been curious. You've been standing on the perimeter of the scene, watching what's going on. You don't know where you fit, you don't know what's for you. You've been looking at Jesus, you've been looking at his church, and you've been assuming somewhere inside that I gotta get my act together a little bit more before I can approach Jesus. I need to wash my hands, clean up my language, fix my moral behavior, get my life sorted out before I take that step of saying yes to him. So hear this clearly now. Jesus doesn't ask you to wash your hands before you come to his table. He's not looking for clean hands, he's looking for a surrendered heart. The religious elite in this text had perfectly clean hands all the way up. And they were completely dead on the inside. Jesus invites you to bring your dirty hands, your broken relationship, your secret habits, your weary mind to him exactly as you are right now. Why? Because he is the only one with the power to make you clean. You don't need to perform your way into his presence. So stop standing outside trying to analyze him from a distance. Come pull up a chair, let him do for you what you are completely powerless to perform for yourself. And for those in this room that are followers of Jesus, stop waking up on Monday morning trying to white-knuckle your behavior through raw willpower. Stop treating the Holy Spirit like this invisible police officer watching everything you do. The Bible is not your to-do list. It's not a phrase book so you can figure out how to act. So tomorrow morning, when the inbox overflows, when your kids are screaming, when you're tempted to pull out your noble excuses of overworking and overserving to justify yourself, stop. Take a breath, yield to that quiet prompt of the Holy Spirit inside you. Let go of the high pressure duty of religious resumes and simply step into his sustainable, unearned pace. The Christian life is not a grueling sprint to prove you belong. It's that restful rhythm of the child. Fully loved, fully adopted, fully welcomed home. Turn your gaze inward. Recognize that the spirit is there. Jesus is helping you believe the gospel. Right now, when you leave here tomorrow morning, Wednesday afternoon, through every moment of your week, He is there. Don't default to putting whitewash on a tomb. Step out of your striving and align with his spirit. Come to that inside-out Savior, rely on his spirit, and let Jesus execute the deep, radical cleansing that you are completely powerless to perform on your own. Let him clean you from the inside out. Yeah, Jesus, thank you that the ask of us is to profess belief and surrender our hearts to you. And from there, you give us everything we need to lovingly, peacefully, restfully, joyfully walk through you in the midst of the mess of life. And so, Spirit, please come in this moment, in this space, and whisper that joy, that peace, that rest into all of us that are weary and burdened from trying to prove ourselves, from trying to save ourselves, from worshiping false idols. You have so much more for us, Lord. Help us not forget. Amen.