15- Inside the Cup: Mark 7:14-23 - Mike Olynyk, Meadows Church

You're invited!  Come on a journey as we see the sights, smell the smells & experience Jesus' story told by Mark in an immersive way.  Engage in the story as one of the crowd, the disciples or even as a religious leader.  For an even more immersive experience, click the link below to follow along with the PDF media with maps, pictures of historical sites and more.

INSIDE THE CUP PDF - CLICK HERE

Meadows Church is a church in the community, for the community, located in Langley, BC.  We want you to know that you're welcome here!

Transcript

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You're listening to audio from Meadows Church in Langley, BC. For more information about Meadows Church, go to Meadowschurch.ca. Friends, we are uh gonna continue to walk through our series Encountering Jesus. And and I don't know about you, and I'm a little biased here, but I really love this Meadows Church community. Those that are here today, we're missing a couple. I miss it when people aren't here because there's such family here. And the dynamic of sharing a meal and then worshiping and digging into the word of God, and then also this idea afterwards, we're gonna get to get around tables and just talk about what we're talking about in scripture. And so I just love that about our church. If you are, if you miss a week with us or you want to get caught up on any of the sessions, you can go to meadowschurch.ca slash messages and all of our discussions and all the slides that are behind me. I'm gonna show you some great slides of different towns that Jesus went through today. That's all online. You can go there and check that out. When we last left our fearless hero, Jesus, he was traveling around from town to town and he was healing and he was teaching. When Jesus spoke, you could hear two things. The first, the crowd was so attentive that you could hear a pin drop. The second thing that you could hear is the whispering grumbles of the Pharisees and the Sadducees. Last Sunday the gloves came off. And after the Pharisees revealed how legalistic and how lacking in love they are, Jesus points out and lays into them about their hypocrisy, their pride, their lack of love. And as we hummed last week, they're not fair, you see this, right? We sang, I just want to be a sheep, very briefly. And so today we're gonna continue the conversation, and so we're gonna dig back in. Can you picture it though? I love this picture of Jesus. Can you see his happiness there? It is more the idea that children were all around Jesus, and it was good. And it makes me think of Meadows, and sometimes I tear up when the kids are all playing basketball and they're playing soccer and they're playing gagaball, and it is the awesomest messy church ever. I love it. It's so good because that's where Jesus was. He was getting pushed around in the crowds, and he was people were just vying to see him. And Mark 6 says that they were crowding around and they were trying to touch his clothing, and the coolest thing about it is everybody who touched his clothing was healed. The power of that. And you know, I gotta say that this wasn't one location. Sometimes we get, oh, and he went to Capernaum and he did this miracle. Mark 6 talks about a conclusion statement that Jesus went from town to town and he taught, and then he healed people with his robes. That's how powerful he was. One of the towns that Jesus would have frequented on his Galilean tour was Magdala, the hometown of Mary Magdalene. And you can see the picture there. I think it's awesome. In 1894, they have a picture of the ruins there. And then you have the synagogue ruins today, and then last you can see an overview drone shot of Magdala today, and you'll notice that that is lush farmland. You see, back in the day, Magdala and the other towns were hamlets that were all about agriculture. And since his home base was Capernaum, and the Bible says that Jesus was traveling from town to town to teach in the synagogues in the various towns, it's safe to say that Jesus visited and passed through Magdala often. You can see by the roads. But I wanted to give you another example. This is an artist's rendering of Nazareth, a hamlet of about 50 homes on an agricultural area. For these towns, these hamlets, the buzz and the hoopala was as if the greatest circus ever was coming to town. When Jesus came into town, slowly word got around and then everything shut down and everybody went to Jesus. Whether you believed in him or not, there was this miraculous healer that is doing amazing things and teaching with authority. And people are flocking to him and coming from other towns. This is a picture, an artist rendering from James Tissa. And in it, uh it shows him walking through a hamlet walkway with sick placed in the pathway and in multiple pathways, and they're just hoping that Jesus walks down this pathway so that they can touch his garment and be healed. Because they've heard about Jesus. They know he heals, and they want it, and they want more. Well, there's another group that is here, and it's the Pharisees. And they've come up from Jerusalem and they are not here to be healed. They are not here to glean knowledge, they are here to discredit him. As his disciples are having some lunch, you know, they probably picked up a McDouble meal from the local Magdala McDonald's. And you know, something like that. Well, the Pharisees were trying so hard to shame him. And the reason is that they weren't ceremonially washing their hands. We talked about this last week, that they made up this rule that you had to ceremonially wash your hands before they eat, and now they were calling them out on it. Well, Jesus calls out their legalism, he calls out the crazy amount of man-made laws. Uh, if you missed last week, go and check it out because I talk about the Pharisees. I talk about how they grew up and just kind of what they were up to. And one of the things they were doing was putting a fence around the law, many other laws, so that you wouldn't come close to sinning, and in the process, pushing every way away from Judaism. Jesus was disgusted by it. And it will show today as we continue our passage. Let's check it out in verse 14. Again, Jesus called the crowd to him and said, Listen to me, everyone, and understand this. Nothing outside a person can defile them by going into them. He's talking about the food from the unclean hands, right? Rather, it is what comes out of a person that defiles them. And now we know if you've been tracking with us, Mark is a to-the-point gospel writer. Mark is the shortest gospel, and he wants to get to the point, and that's great. But sometimes I just want a little more to be able to flesh out who Jesus is and what was happening in the story. And so we can lean on Matthew's gospel and Luke's gospel, and they don't hold back in what Jesus said to the Pharisees. Let's check it out in Luke 11, verse 39. Then Jesus said to him, one of the Pharisees, Now then, you Pharisees clean the outside of the cup and the dish, but inside you're full of greed and wickedness. You foolish people. Did not the one who made the outside make the inside also. Matthew's account goes a little farther. Jesus lays out a laundry list of Pharisaic hypocrisy. And here's two of them for you in Matthew 23. These are part of the woes. Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You claim the outside of your cup and dish, and inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. Blind Pharisees. First claim the outside of or the inside of your cup and dish, and then the outside also will be clean. Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees. You hypocrites, you are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside, but on the inside are full of bones of the dead and everything unclean. In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous, but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness. This is what they're talking about. This is a picture of a gravesite in and around Judea, and you see this building has not been whitewashed. What whitewashed was, what is it was calcium carbonate mixed with water, also lime, is the way, and they would mix it together, and on Passover in particular, they would make all of the tombstones and all of the crypts white. No matter how white you make the inside, there's still a dead body in it. And that, friends, is what Jesus was telling that that is what the religious leaders of God's temple were. That is crazy to me. That he would do that. Why? Have you ever felt that someone's misrepresented you? I I think about, you know, either described you as someone uh you're not, or, you know, giving people a false view of who you are. I think most of us have been in that situation. Meadows Church has actually been in that situation. There was a church that was uh being very disrespectful to the neighbors uh in the park. This is about two summers ago, and it was there's like questionable advertisement and bait and switch and and loud preaching of what we probably would consider it as an off-gospel, but that's not the part that the the problem was was they were uh so loud at preaching and the the music, it was such a bad representation of God. I was getting nasty emails from people. There was a person who lived in the townhouse right there on the field, and he said, even with my my windows closed, even with my doors latched, I can hear every word coming out of that man's mouth. And he thought it was our church. Guys, that that hit me. Because I got multiple emails from uh neighbors that were like, you guys just need to shut up. Just like close your doors and do your thing in the gym, and that's it. And it hurt me because at Meadows Church, it's not what we do. We are a church in the community for the community. Because we want to be Jesus' love to these people. We want people to look at us, and whether they come to faith or not, we want them to be loved by Jesus because he loved them first. That's who we are as a church. And to get this email from people, it broke my heart. Well, think of Jesus. Just a small window into why Jesus was so angry at the Pharisees. Here are the religious leaders of God's temple, God's synagogues, Jesus' temple and synagogues. And they were misrepresenting him on a regular basis. Can you feel the frustration building up in Jesus? They had missed the point entirely. They were leading Jews down the road of outward piety, legalism, and the have-tos for God. But what a crappy view of God. Like put on a righteous show for God, and then maybe, maybe he will smile on you and you can have a relationship with him. That's what they were saying. That's what the Pharisees were saying. They put all these extra rules and said, if you don't do it all, then you're unclean and unworthy to be in God's presence. Jesus went to the well and hung out with the Samaritan woman. He met her. You see, we have a God who actually reverses that. Such a stark difference in theology. And he is rightly furious at the religious leaders. And his ministry on earth would do something. Besides dying on the cross and rising from the dead and healing people, he would actually attempt to reset in most people's brains a proper view of who God was. And praise God for that because I like Jesus exponentially more than anything the Pharisees could come up with. Jesus changed my life. That's why I stand here. That's why Kim and I planted this church. Because Jesus changes lives, He changes my heart, He changes the inner nature, which is what Jesus is talking about in the passage today. Let's keep going. Verse 17. After he had left the crowd and entered a house, his disciples asked him about his this parable. Are you so dull? He asked them. This is Jesus, and that's a little harsh to say to his friends. But the you could you could interpret that is, after all this time I've spent with you, do you still not comprehend spiritual truth? Don't you see, Jesus says, that nothing that enters a person from the outside can defile them? For it doesn't go into their heart, but into their stomach and then out of the body. In saying this, Jesus declared all foods clean. I need to quickly, I think we all know this, and so I'll just quickly breeze over this. Uh but the defile here does not mean a medical or physiological term. It's not like I if I eat poison, like I'm gonna die. I'm my in a way, my body's defiled. This is not what it's talking about here. Defile means to make spiritually unclean. And Jesus is making a comparison between the Pharisees' outward show to display their righteousness and their piety, and he was comparing that to what's actually important. The part of us that really matters, the heart and the soul. I love that God isn't shouting, dance monkey, dance. And then as we dance, we gain his favor. That's not what's happening. God cares about the posture of our heart, and it becomes clear here. Let's keep going in verse 20. 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 the evil thoughts come. Sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance, folly, all these evils that come from inside and defile a person. Do you see the subtle nuance that Jesus is getting at here? First, clean the inside of the cup, and the outside of the cup will be clean. The posture of our heart is what is paramount to God. And it doesn't mean that we don't act out of love, and it doesn't mean that we don't follow what's in the Bible to help us have right relationships with each other and right relationships with God. That's important. But the key in it and where everything comes from is from our heart. I mean, I like look at this. The things that are on the board. Do we would you really want a legacy with anything that's up there? Not one of these things that are tempting for people, give this happy existence or or are actions and memories that you would have a deep sense of pride about. It actually brings shame. And yet for us, and he just names a couple here, for us, it might not be on the board, but we are tempted in our own selfishness. There's this crazy tension between instant gratification and this long-term consequence of right relationships with each other and with God. Paul actually grieves this. Paul in Romans 7, verse 15, talks about this and he's quite overt with it. Let's check it out. Romans 7, verse 15 says this. I don't really understand myself, Paul says. For I want to do what is right, but I don't do it. Instead, I do what I hate. But if I know that what I am doing is wrong, this shows that I agree that the law is good. Right? We know that what God says out of love, that all of the things that He tells us to do, it's for good. And when we don't do those things, it's for bad. We affect our relationships with other people. Verse 17, so I am not the one doing wrong, it's sin living within me that does it. Let's jump to 21. I have discovered this principle of life. That when I want to do what is right, I inevitably do what is wrong. I love God's law with all my heart, but there is another power within me that is warring with my mind. This power makes me a slave to the sin that is still within me. Can you feel what Paul's going through here? I mean, we have like experience with him. He says this in verse 24 oh, what a miserable person I am. Who will free me from this life that is dominated by sin and death, and I would say, relational discord and shame and disappointment. Yes, the answer. Verse 25, thank God. The answer is in Jesus Christ, our Lord. This scripture is so refreshing for me because it labels the struggle that you and I go through. We don't have it all together. I am a sinner saved by grace. This church is a hospital for the sick, and Jesus is in the process of healing us. That's what church is. We don't have to get ourselves right to come to church. We come as we are, and in the midst of it, God comes and he wants us to reveal our heart to him so that he can make things right. See, Jesus is the answer. He turns the key on our heart. Psychologists will talk about this. That there are underlying issues both in nature and nurture responses that we'll just be triggered and we'll lash out at somebody. We're like, man, why did I do that? God wants to heal us of that. Or we we lie and we deceive people to make ourselves look better, to get ahead. Or we crave sexual sin or or we try to uh take more than we need at the expense of somebody else. The less goes on, friends, and you know. Yet rather than focusing on the shame of the past, Jesus removes all that. He helps us get to the root of the issue through the power of the Holy Spirit. He brings love and joy and peace and all the fruit of the Spirit. So I wanted to do something in our remainder of time. We've got a couple minutes. I want to first a couple of tools to help go to the surgeon, the heart surgeon, to go to Jesus. And I feel like there's so much chaos in the world, all around us, and in even within our own families sometimes. And yet, God wants us to come to Him and to be healed. Jesus says that the root of our actions, good or evil, comes from the heart. And so that's hard. How do we change this like ingrained and deep-rooted lived experience tampered by selfishness? I'm not saying, by the way, that we're bad people. We're not. There are a lot of good people in this room, but we have hurt others. And with it we carry that weight. And Jesus doesn't want us to carry it. And he uses Romans 12, verse 2, that reinforces how the heart can change. Verse 2 says, do not conform to the patterns of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Mind, heart, they're all windows into our inner being. It's the inside of the cup. So what I love about this verse is that it's actually, it's not passive because we need to go to God, but God actually does all the work. By the power of the Holy Spirit, we're transformed day by day and we grow in more love for each other. We gain more healing. I don't know if you've ever had a time where you just can't forgive somebody. It was brutally hard for me to forgive my earthly father for what he did. Yet at the same time, as I went to the cross, as I went to God, I said, God, help me to forgive him. Day after day, that became easier and easier. And I truly believe I've forgiven my father for leaving me. Only through Jesus. Only through the power of Jesus. Psalms 51, 10, David cries out, Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me. See, God is the heart surgeon. And it's allowing and surrendering our lives to God where He can do the heart work, transform and mold and shape us. Jesus does everything, friends. Now maybe we need some counseling to help us. Maybe we we need friends to come alongside us. That's what the beauty of the church is. But God is the one at the center of it. And so three things that you can do, these are just quick, and then we're going to move into a time of reflection. Okay? The first thing, ways that we can surrender and allow God to do the heart work. And this is something that's that's even like scientific in nature, is meditation. Now, this is meditation with God, though. It's coming to God who wants to spend time with you and daily reminding your body and your soul that you are free in Jesus and that God loves you. Do you know that there are statistics in science that talk about the value of gratitude and thanksgiving? To help cardiovascular, to help different things in our body physically by being grateful. And so when we thank God for different things, how amazing is that? Spend time with God. Talk to him. He is your father and he loves you. If you need something to help out, we have a devotional Spotify playlist. And I want to just play a song in the morning and just meditate on that. In the chaos of this world, God wants to have coffee with you. And sometimes he has a shoulder to cry on. Okay, so spending time with God is one. The second is engaging with the Word of God. If you're not just opening up your Bible and reading it, I'd love to help you to give you a resource to be able to do that. We're going through one section of Scripture a day as a church. Love for you to get on that or to start even at the beginning. But Sunday nights are not enough of God's word in our lives. We need to be in the word. It's a form of surrender to go to God and to God's word. And it reminds us of the awesome thing God wants for our life. And in the process, the Holy Spirit comes and fills you up. The days that I am bang on every day reading my Bible, the Holy Spirit changes things in my day. So spending time with God, engaging in the world, these are, please hear me. If you're hearing it as a checklist, that's not what I'm saying. If it's a checklist, try something else for a bit. Because God doesn't want a checklist, He wants quality time with you. The last thing is to be real with God. He knows every awesome spot in that heart. And he also knows every dark crevice in your heart. So you don't need to put on a show for God. Instead, reach out. Say, ah man, I hate that I'm doing this selfish thing. Help me. Forgive me. Take away past weight. I know you do that. And then may I live into the freedom of the future. That's what God wants. It's not a private shaming in this moment. It's actually gaining freedom in that moment. And so I think that we could actually practice this third thing right now about being real with God in this time of just response. I invite you just to where you are. I invite you just to close your eyes and just to hear the worship. Quiet your heart. I want you to hear Jesus is far less worried about your mess ups than you probably are. What he's most concerned about is the state of your heart and the posture of your heart. He wants nothing more than for love, joy, and peace to be exuding from it. And so the question I have for you, friends, is uh, what is the heart work Jesus wants to do in you right now? God, if there is ways that we need healing, would you come and bring that? God, thank you that you love us. That we don't have to put on a show for you, but you stand there with open arms waiting for us to embrace you. God, we want to embrace you right now. Would you do that in this time? We're so glad you chose to join us today. To find out more about Meadows Church and how you can get involved, connect with the pastor or how you can partner with us in ministry. Go to meadowschurch.ca.