Lake Martin Presbyterian Church June 21, 2026 Podcast

Join Rev. William Skinner for this week’s message from Mark 7:1-23, "Manmade Righteousness". Explore Scripture, hear thoughtful teaching, and be encouraged in your walk with Christ. For more information and resources, visit lakemartinpca.com.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the Lake Martin Presbyterian Church Podcast. We're glad you're listening. Lake Martin Presbyterian Church is a congregation of the Presbyterian Church in America, located near Lake Martin, Alabama. Each week we share the preaching ministry of our church and pray it encourages you in your walk with Christ. Here's this week's message.

SPEAKER_01 0:25

Let's now come before God's Word. Would you please take your Bibles if you have them and turn with me in the Gospel of Mark to chapter 7? Just to jog your memory from where we've been in the Gospel of Mark. For the past few chapters of Mark's Gospel, we've seen Jesus and his disciples, when rejected in Nazareth. Remember, they launched this new phase of Jesus' ministry, which was an increased boldness, an increased urgency. Jesus sent out his disciples in pairs of two, and they had a period of ministry that was increased. And that increased urgency, that devoted mission that they went on, brought about all sorts of reactions that we've been looking at through Mark's gospel. If you'll remember, we looked at Herod Antipas and his reaction to Jesus, and we looked at the crowds. And meanwhile, Jesus and his disciples have simply been trying to rest. They've been trying to get some much-needed rest, to have a retreat, so to speak, to recover. They haven't slept much at all. They haven't even eaten some of them. And now it's been days. For us it's been weeks, but for them it had been days of not having this rest, not having this time by themselves to recover. And now, before we get to that rest, it's not going to happen in this passage, it'll happen next Sunday, Lord willing. But in this passage, Mark is going to include one more set of reactions to the ministry of Jesus. In chapter 7 of Mark's Gospel, we're going to hear about the reactions of the religious leaders, the religious authorities to Jesus. And this is not new, we've seen this before in chapter 2. If you remember, in chapter 2, a delegation of scribes came down from Jerusalem to Capernaum in the region of Galilee and were spreading rumors that Jesus was possessed by a demon. And clearly that campaign against Jesus didn't hold. People weren't believing it. So a new group here in chapter 7 is going to gather around Jesus, consisting of Pharisees and scribes. And they're going to try to trap Jesus in his word, looking for opportunities to discredit him, to discredit his ministry. So the scribes and Pharisees are coming to question Jesus' disciples' adherence to the cleanliness laws in particular. Laws regarding ceremonial washings. Ultimately, they're going to claim that his disciples were defiled because they didn't follow ceremonial washings. And in turn, Jesus is going to take them back to the scriptures, back to the word of God, back to the commands of God, and show them what true defilement really is. It's not about washing your hands, it's not about a little dirt under your fingers or eating the wrong thing at the wrong time or drinking the wrong thing. It's man himself. It's the Pharisees themselves. It's you and me. Man himself is who is defiled by sin. Before we read the text, let me just give a quick illustration of what's happening in this text. Before I went to seminary when I was still living in Auburn, I would drive around at night, just in the normal course of life, and I begin to notice over time that I was having a really hard time driving at night. I was having a hard time seeing the road. And I don't know if this has happened to you, hopefully not. At first I assumed that the Auburn municipality had just really dropped the ball on their streetlights, and they had coded them to come on at the wrong time, and so I was frustrated with the city of Auburn, as great as it is. And then after a while, I figured it must be the headlights in my truck. I probably needed to replace the headlights in my truck. They were getting dim. And then one morning I went duck hunting with my friends, and I couldn't see the ducks in the Dawn. All my friends were shooting their limits, and I just couldn't see a duck. And I was wondering what in the earth was going on was going on. And finally, one of my friends said, You need to go to the eye doctor. And I did, and it turned out the problem was not the lights, it wasn't the dawn, it wasn't the ducks, it was me. It was my eyes, it was my own eyes that were the problem. And I tried to blame all these things around me for being the problem, but the problem was I needed glasses. And after a good pair of glasses, I had no issues driving at night. I could see again. I was safe to drive. I was back to duck hunting and not saying I hit a bunch, but I could at least see them. I was back to normal. And that's how Jesus responds in this text, not with a pair of glasses, but he's saying the problem isn't your hands. It's not the way you eat or the way you wash or what you eat. The problem is you. It's not a man-made ceremony that makes you right with God or defiles you. Man is defiled from within by sin. And that's the main thing I want you to see in this text is that it's the sin within your own heart that defiles you. It's the sin within your own heart. And we're going to look at three headings in this text. First, in the first five verses, defiled hands, defiled hands. Secondly, in verses six through thirteen, defiled traditions. Defiled traditions. And thirdly, in verses 14 through 23, defiled hearts. Defiled hands, defiled traditions, and defiled hearts. Before we read this text and consider those headings, let's ask God's help upon the reading and preaching of his word. Let's pray. Our God and Father, we are coming before your word. We're coming before our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. And we know the power that's before us. And as we're about to hear, we have defiled hearts. We will resist this word. We will resist your grace. Would you please pour out your spirit upon us? Overcome us. Force our ears open. Help us to see Jesus, to receive him by faith. It's in his name that I do pray. Amen. Mark chapter 7, beginning in verse 1. And when the Pharisees gathered to him, that is 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 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 dinner 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. 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 and mother must surely die, but you say, if a man tells his father or mother, whatever you would have gained from me is Qurban, that is, given to God, then you no longer permit him to do anything for his father or mother or mother, thus making void the word of God by your own 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 a 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 when he said, What comes out of a person is what defiles him. For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, evil, slander, pride, foolishness, all these evil things come from within. And they defile a person. This is God's word. Look with me first at verses 1 through 5. Defiled hands. The scribes were still on their slander campaign. They were sent from Jerusalem to discredit Jesus. They're on their slander campaign against him, which we can assume was not going well. Because at this point, they're joined by reinforcements from the Pharisees. And they're looking for ways to accuse Jesus and his disciples. Apparently, the accusations that Jesus was demon-possessed didn't stick to a man who was casting out demons everywhere he went. So here in the story, the Pharisees and the scribes finally find some mud that they can sling at Jesus and his disciples. Their great discovery was that some of his disciples didn't wash their hands. Now, this might be hard for us to understand. They weren't concerned about getting sick. They weren't simply scared of what might happen to them if they didn't wash their hands. This was a religious accusation. This was a spiritual accusation from the scribes and the Pharisees. In verses 3 and 4, Mark kind of fills us in on this Jewish ceremonial tradition that after being exposed to sinners in public in the marketplaces, it was customary to wash, ceremonially, symbolically, washing the uncleanness of people off of your skin before you would eat. And Jesus' disciples didn't practice this ceremonial washing. They didn't ceremonially wash off the uncleanness of other people before they would eat. So the Pharisees and the scribes accused Jesus, asking, why don't your disciples wash? Why do they eat with these defiled hands? And in our second and third points, second and third headings, Jesus is gonna deal directly with those accusations, but for now I want us to focus on the Pharisees and the scribes. What is it exactly that they're doing? What are they doing? What is it that causes fully grown men to go around inspecting the hand washing practices of other fully grown men? What were their real motivations behind the actions of the Pharisees and scribes? The sinister motivation of these Pharisees and scribes was self-righteousness. They wanted to point out the weaknesses in others in order to strengthen their own image before men. They wanted to feel better about themselves, and so they wanted to point out the deficiencies in others. The Pharisees and the scribes were the keepers of God's law. That's how they viewed themselves. They were the keepers of God's law. They were the most righteous. They were the shepherds of God's people in their own minds. Recently, you probably have all like me been receiving a few texts each week asking you to complete a survey or telling you something about a political candidate that you didn't previously know, or you got emails, or it's on your social media feed. And all these have one thing in common. They're usually telling you some great transgression that some political candidate has done. And of course, the advertisement is paid for by their opponent, who in turn looks great compared to the thing that the other person has done. The advertisement is not telling you the good thing that the candidate who said the advertisement did, it's trying to make them look good by comparison. If the other person looks worse, they look good. That's the strategy. That's the strategy of self-righteousness. The scribes and Pharisees were out to make everyone else look so bad that they seemed good by comparison that they seemed the best. Their end goal was not that Jesus' disciples would wash their hands. Think about it. What if Jesus' disciples would have gotten up the second they asked about it and gone and washed their hands? These people wouldn't have been satisfied. They would have found something else to critique, something else to jump on. Their goal was to put others down, to be self-righteous. This sinister self-righteousness is not from God. It's not of God, it's from Satan. Satan's desire for mankind is to fall deeper and deeper into the abyss of sin. Satan seeks to kill, to steal, to destroy. He wants to see you fail. He wants to see you fall. That's the same aim as self-righteousness. When you're self-righteousness, it doesn't matter if your neighbors are failing. It doesn't matter if your neighbors look bad. Because that just makes you look good. It makes you look better. But that's not the way of Christ. What does Christ do? He sees sinners with defiled hands and he moves towards them in love. He sees sinners with defiled hands and he takes those defiled hands and he washes them in a fountain of his own blood. He takes defiled hands and he places them upon his own head and he goes to the cross to pay the penalty for their defilement. Jesus teaches sinners to be clean. He teaches them to follow him in true obedience from the heart. He changes our desires. Jesus is not in the business of pointing out the deficiencies in sinners to make himself feel better. Think about it. Jesus was God of God. He dwelt in the highest heavens. By him all things were made. Without him was nothing made that was made. What did he need? Did he need to feel better about himself by putting humans down? Jesus had all the joy. Jesus, who is the very definition of goodness and righteousness, came down to earth and was called a sinner, was condemned as a sinner for sinners. And he's come in joy, bearing your sins upon the cross because he loves you. And he wants the best for you. Jesus' desire is that your hands truly will be clean. But not only your hands, but your mouth and your mind and your heart, your whole being. And in grace he's made a way. He's made a way to actually get you clean. The Pharisees and the scribes are on a mission to use people for their own purposes. They're using people to feel better about themselves. But Christ gave himself to make people better, to make people righteous, to make people stand truly righteous before God. That's the difference in the mindset.

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Excuse me.

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I hope that what you see here is how much better the grace of God and Jesus Christ is than a pharisaic legalism. It's life-giving. It's constructive. It's freeing. But I hope that we all know, I hope that you all know that each one of us, each one of you, and me included, has a little Pharisee inside of your own heart. There's a little scribe, a little Pharisee, and each one of us. We all live with this temptation to compare ourselves to others, to feel better about ourselves when we see others' weaknesses and failures. You might think, well, they don't give as much as me. Or they don't pray as much as me. They don't keep the Sabbath like I do, or they drink too much, or they eat too much, or they don't share the gospel like me, they don't sing as well as I do. Fill in the blank. I can't see your hearts, I can't see your temptation, only God can. But you must know that there's no joy in that kind of religion. There's no joy in self-righteousness. It's sad. It's a miserable type of religion. And it's not only miserable for you, it's miserable for everyone around you. It's off-putting to others. How can you ever expect to make disciples? How can you ever expect to share your faith if that's your faith? If that's your religion? How can we expect to grow our church, to reach our community with a self-righteous attitude? Nobody wants to hang out with the Pharisees. Nobody wants to be around a bunch of self-righteous people who use other people to feel better about themselves. When you feel that temptation rising up in your heart to look at other people and say, I'm so much better than them, to pat yourself on the back and say, at least I'm not like that. I want you to remember a few things. That first of all, your comparison for holiness is not with your fellow man. Don't look to one another to figure out if you're holy. Don't look to one another. Your comparison is with God. You want to know if you're holy? Look to the scriptures. Look to God, look to Jesus. How do you stack up compared to Him? I can tell you, in the light of His holiness, each one of us is a dark, filthy speck. It's not a very nice thing to say to you people, but it's true. In comparison to God, all of us are filthy. Our best righteousness is what? Filthy rags. And Jesus, the eternal Son of God, came to earth and took on flesh and died on the cross to give you his righteousness. True righteousness. Righteousness that you can stand in the presence of God forever in. And it's all a gift. All of it was a gift. You didn't earn any of it. None of it. So if both of those things are true, that in comparison to God, your dark, filthy speck, and the righteousness that you do have was a gift to you from God, there's no room in your heart for self-righteousness. There's no room in this church for self-righteousness. We are a church of sinners saved by grace. And you must see yourself as a sinner saved by grace. And you must see one another as sinners saved by grace, and we see the world as sinners in need of grace. And we move towards sinners with that grace of Jesus Christ that we have received. That's the mindset of Christ. That's the attitude of Christ. That lifestyle, that mindset of grace is joyful. It's freeing, it's attractive, it's irresistible to sinners, to sinners who want to be free. Remember Herod, how Herod looked at John the Baptist. Herod wanted to be free. Like John the Baptist. That was attractive to him. His own sin was preventing him, but it was attractive to him. That's what we want to be. We want to be grace people. So the Pharisees are concerned with defiled hands. Let's now look at defiled traditions. Look with me at verses 6 through 13. In verses 6 through 13, Jesus responds to the Pharisees' accusations directly. He takes them head on by challenging their accusations according to the Word of God. He takes them straight back to the Scriptures. In verses 6 and 7, he takes them to Isaiah chapter 29, verse 13. And he shows them God's prophet Isaiah, accusing God's people of self-righteousness. 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. You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men. Jesus cut straight to the issue with these Pharisees and scribes. They who are pretending to be the shepherd of God's people, these people who are pretending to be the keepers and teachers of God's word have replaced God's word with man-made traditions. They've exchanged it. And then in verses 9 through 13, Jesus gives them an example in their own cultural context of how they've been doing this very thing. He states first, he starts with the word of God. He starts with the command of God, the fifth commandment. Honor your father and your mother. Maybe that is fitting for Father's Day. Honor your father or mother. Now in the ancient world, that's more than just say yes, sir, and yes, ma'am, no, sir, no ma'am. It means more than that. In the ancient world, this was more than obedience and societal honor. This was your retirement plan. Children were your retirement plan. When you were old, too old to tend to your flocks and your herds, too old to produce grain and vegetables, your children would take care of you. There were no retirement homes, no assisted living homes, no SP indices, no pension plans, no CDs or annuities. There were children. And your children would take care of you in your old age. So it was great. Have lots of kids. That's your retirement plan. Send out your arrows into the world. Everything that your kids had came from you. When you got too old to work your ground, you would give all of your flocks and herds and land to your kids. And then in turn, your kids provided for you until you were deceased. So it was up to the children to care for their elderly parents. But in this pharisaical self-righteous system, this pretend righteousness, they had neglected the oldest and most vulnerable members of society attempting to find religious exemptions. Their solution was called Corbin. Corbin was just a ban. It's just a word for a ban. It was a vow you could take over a certain portion of assets or future income, and you would be banning it from certain uses, devoting it to other uses. And so what you could do is if you anticipated, I'm going to make this much money off of this farm, and I already have enough assets to take care of my parents, so I'm going to use this money for that. They could make this Corbin vow and dedicate all these assets to take care of the temple in the town. You know, they could pay for a synagogue. They could say this is devoted to the building of the new synagogue. And so this won't be used for caring for my parents. And you could make that vow. But of course, in some situations, you can't predict the future. Maybe these assets over here that you're going to take care of your parents with got wiped away. Maybe your flock got a virus and you lost a herd. Maybe your parents had way more needs. Maybe they had health needs that you didn't know about. And so there are some situations in which people were coming to the scribes. Remember, the scribes were the religious lawyers. They made legal pronouncements based on God's word. And they were coming to the scribes and saying, hey, I made this vow, but now I need this money to use for my parents. My parents have these issues, and I can't pay for them. I need to use this money that I made a vow on. And the scribes were saying, No, you can't do that. You've already pledged the money. You can't care for your parents. And Jesus is saying to them, that's ridiculous. You made up this whole vow thing, this whole Corbin vow, and God commanded you to care for your parents. And so now you're prohibiting people from doing what God's word said because of your tradition. So the scribes and Pharisees, what they were doing was they were elevating man-made traditions and laws and rules to have a higher weight than the word of God, a higher weight than the basic commandment of God. Whether it was a hand washing ceremony or the Corbin vow, Jesus is taking the scribes and the Pharisees back to God's word to show them how they've corrupted it entirely. The point here is that man does not get to dictate what is good and right. Man doesn't get to decide what's honoring to God. God's word tells us who God is and how we are to live before Him. It's here in this lesson that you see the hypocrisy of the Pharisaical system. The very people who claim to be the strictest upholders of the law, the religious conservatives, those protecting the integrity of the faith. They claim to be doing all these things, but in the end, what are they doing? They're making their own rules and they're bending the rules of God. They're elevating their own rules above the word of God. They're enforcing man-made traditions and excusing God-given duties. So the legalist, ironically, doesn't actually keep God's law at all. Because no man is capable of keeping God's law. Remember, in comparison to God, we are all a dark, filthy speck. So the legalists, what they do is they twist and change God's law. They excuse themselves from obedience to God's law to accommodate it to themselves. And so in the end, what you actually have is that the distance between the legalist and the libertine, the antinomian, is not so great. They're both doing the same thing. They're both taking the word of God into their own hands and twisting it. So they're really not that different after all. Both are guilty of a rejection of God's word. And so for us, we must not hold to any practice of our faith. We shouldn't do anything in regards to our faith that you can't find an explicit warrant for in God's word. If it doesn't come from the Scriptures, if you can't find it here in God's Word, then you can't compel yourself or anyone else to practice it. We're fallen in sin. We're sinners, we're corrupted. And when we try to create our own new religious practices, we'll always go astray. Every single time. And the passage that Jesus quoted from in Isaiah chapter 29 says that all such practices are vain worship. It doesn't matter if you made a good faith effort, it's vain. God is not honored by it. It's sin. All worship that doesn't come from God's word is idolatry. It's vain worship, it's defiled traditions. Everything we do in regards to our faith, everything we do here in worship, we do for the glory of God and the honor of Christ, and we do it from his word. We do it as he commands us to. If we don't, it's vain worship and defiled traditions. So we've seen defiled hands, defiled traditions. Now let's hear Jesus get down to the heart of the matter, defiled hearts. Look with me at verses 14 through 23. In these verses, Jesus gathers the scribes and the Pharisees to himself, and he tells them a quick parable. That nothing from outside going inside a person is what defiles them, but what comes out of a person is what defiles them. And then Jesus goes to his disciples privately and explains what this parable meant. That it's not what you eat or drink that defiles you, it's what comes from within your heart. It's what comes from within that defiles you. And Jesus' point in explaining all this is not to give you another list to speculate about what defiles you and who's more defiled. His point is that in each and every one of us, in each and every one of the scribes and Pharisees, each and every one of his own disciples was already defiled from within. The source of the defilement is not out there, it's in here. In the same way that it wasn't the street lights in Auburn or the headlights in my truck or the early dawn that was giving me a hard time seeing, it was my own eyes. So too, it's not improper hand washing or eating the wrong things or whatever it may be that defiles you. You're already defiled. You are the source of defilement. From the moment you were conceived, the moment of conception, that's when a person is a sinner. It's not that you sin, you are a sinner. We are born prone to wonder, prone to leave the God we claim to love. Each one of us has a heart that's filled with wicked desires. And that's what makes us defiled before God. You can't wash your hands enough to get rid of your defilement. You can't point out the defilement of your neighbor Joe and feel better about yourself. You can't make new rules. You can't change the standards to appear less defiled. The defilement is in you. It's not that you sin, it's that you are a sinner. And the good news for us this morning is that Jesus came for sinners. Jesus was the only human being born on this planet that was not a sinner. Jesus is the only person born on this earth who is not a sinner. Jesus never sinned. And he went to the cross and shed his blood, his righteous blood, and endured the eternal wrath of God for sinners. And Jesus calls you to come to him, to come to him and to wash your defiled hands. To come to him and to give up your defiled traditions. To come to him and wash yourself clean with his blood, to get rid of your defiled heart. He didn't come to take advantage of you, to take advantage of your sin, to make you look bad. He came to wash you clean. He came so that you can wash your defilement away and stand perfectly righteous before Almighty God with clean hands and a pure heart. He came to earth and took the defilement of sinners upon himself. And he carried that defilement to the cross and washed it away forever. It's all of grace, it's all of love. Will you trust this Jesus? Do you trust that he can make you clean? Do you trust that he and he alone can deal with your defiled heart? Each one of you has a defiled heart, we all do. We all have the same need. And there's only one person who can satisfy that need, and his name is Jesus. In this passage, we've seen the self-righteous Pharisees and scribes complaining about the defiled hands of Jesus' disciples, using others to make themselves feel more righteous, unloving men, graceless. We've seen Jesus rebuke their defiled traditions, teaching them that whenever men replace the Word of God with the teachings of man, we're missing the point and worshiping in vain. And we've seen that within each one of us lays a defiled heart. Our defilement doesn't come from without, it comes from within. And what I hope you see in this passage is that your problem is inside of you. Our problem is our sin. And no amount of self-righteousness, no amount of washings or man-made traditions can fix it. But there is a faithful Savior who came to save sinners. Not to shame them, but to save them, to take their defilement upon himself, and he went to the cross and paid for it. And he's freely offered to you this morning in this word. In just a moment, we're going to come to the Lord Jesus' table together. And at this table, he's offering himself to remind defiled sinners that he and he alone is the one who makes you clean. It's his flesh and his blood for you. That Christ alone can take away your defilement and make you stand before God. Let's pray and come to his table together. Abba Father, holy God. We're so quick to blame everything around us for the reason that we sin. We're so quick to point out all the deficiencies in others to make ourselves look better. But in truth, our hearts are far darker than we are willing to admit. We're far worse sinners than we would have one another know. And the truth is that Christ is a far better Savior than any of us believe. Would you help us to see him? Would you help us to trust him? Would you help us to take hold of him, to wash our defiled hands and hearts and minds in his blood. It's in his name that we do pray. Amen. Let's stand and sing together. Behold the Lamb printed on page six of your order of worship.

SPEAKER_00 38:06

Thank you for listening to the Lake Martin Presbyterian Church Podcast. If this message encouraged you, please consider sharing it with someone else. To learn more about our church, including worship times and upcoming events, visit lakemartinpca.com. We'd love to have you join us.