The passage this morning is from Matthew, the Gospel of Matthew, the first book of the New Testament. And it is verses 1 through 20. Now, if you remember from three weeks ago, now it was, so it's quite a while ago at this point, but a lot of things have happened since then, as you might have gathered. It was part one of this sermon, was on the same passage. But we focused on the traditions of men versus the commandments of God. That was the focus on that sermon. This sermon will focus more on the heart and how out of the heart comes that which defiles. It's not what comes in to a man that defiles him, but rather what comes out from the heart. So that's where our focus will be. So as I read, just make sure you pay attention to that. And also as I read, I remind you that this is the Word of God, and I charge you to listen accordingly. Then the scribes and Pharisees who were from Jerusalem came to Jesus, saying, Why do your disciples transgress the tradition of the elders, for they do not wash their hands when they eat bread? He answered and said to them, Why do you also transgress the commandment of God because of your tradition? For God commanded, saying, Honor your father and your mother, and he who curses father or mother, let him be put to death. But you say, Whoever says to his father or mother, whatever profit you might have received from me is a gift to God, and he did not honor his father or mother. Thus you obey the commandment of God of no effect by your tradition. Hypocrites, well did Isaiah prophesy about you, saying, These people draw near to me with their mouth and honor me with their lips, but their heart is far from me. And in vain they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men. When he had called the multitude to himself, he said to them, Hear and understand. Not what goes into the mouth defiles a man, but what comes out of the mouth, this defiles a man. Then his disciples came and said to him, Do you know that the Pharisees were offended when they heard this saying? But he answered and said, Every plant which my heavenly Father has not planted will be uprooted. Let them alone. They are blind leaders of the blind, and if the blind leads the blind, both will fall into a ditch. And then Peter answered and said to him, Explain this parable to us. And Jesus said, Are you also still without understanding? Do you not yet understand that whatever enters the mouth goes into the stomach and is eliminated? But those things which proceed out of the mouth come from the heart, and they defile a man. For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies, These are the things which defile a man, but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile a man." The reading of God's Word, and we pray that He would bless it to our hearts. Amen. I had a shirt in college that I really liked. It was my favorite shirt. And I wore it a lot. And I didn't like doing laundry. I'm glad my mom and my wife are not here right now. So I wore it over and over again. There, you can scratch this part. I wore it over and over again without washing it. But then I realized that it began to smell not so nice, as shirts do, if you keep wearing them over and over again. So what I decided to do, this ingenious idea, was instead of washing it, I sprayed it with deodorant or with cheap cologne. And that may have worked a little bit, it may have worked maybe a day or two, but eventually I got this awful mixture of body odor and cheap cologne on my shirt, and I realized I have to wash this. That simply will not do. I cannot deal with this problem without getting to the heart of it, and that is the fact that the shirt is dirty. Pharisees, in this passage, deal with sin in a similar way that I dealt with my shirt. They tried to deal with it. They recognized it, to their credit, as a problem. They knew that the reason why they, in the past, and their people in the past, had gotten into trouble was because they were sinners. And so they tried to deal with that problem. We must give them credit for that. But their way of dealing with the problem did not address the heart of the matter. It only addressed that which was a symptom, or that which was external. They focused on the externals, without getting to the heart of the matter. And that's why they had a dirty shirt. They had a dirty heart. They needed a heart change. So what I want you to get this afternoon, if you don't get anything else, get this. Sin begins in the heart. Sin has its roots in the heart. If we are to stop it, we must go to the source. Sin has its roots in the heart. If we are to stop it, we must go to the source, that is, the heart. To get to that point, I'm going to break down the sermon into three parts here this morning, or this afternoon. I'll probably say this morning again. Please forgive me. It's in my mind. Accusation is the first part. Pharisees and scribes accused Jesus of breaking the traditions. Second part is vindication. Jesus defends his charge. And thirdly, we call it explanation. Jesus explains the parable to the disciples. He calls it a parable in quotes. That's what he calls it. First part, accusation. The Pharisees and the scribes. The scribes and the Pharisees accuse the disciples of eating without washing their hands. Verses 1 and 2. And the scribes and Pharisees who were from Jerusalem came to Jesus, saying, Why do your disciples transgress the tradition of the elders? For they do not wash their hands when they eat bread." Now, if you remember from three weeks ago, we talked about the significance of the fact that these scribes and Pharisees are coming from Jerusalem. And Jesus at this point is in Galilee, he's in the north. And they make the trip to go to Jerusalem. And this is not an insignificant trip. And this shows that Jesus and his disciples have made headway and that they have caused quite a stir to the point where the scribes and the Pharisees are coming to spy on them from Jerusalem, the capital of religious center, the capital basically of Israel, at that time Judea. And so they come up, because Jesus is causing this stir. And they see Jesus' disciples, and they are very careful to look at them, and see what they're doing, to watch their every move. And as they do this, they notice that they do not wash their hands before they eat. They eat bread, but that's just a way of saying that before they eat any food. And they say, you're breaking the tradition of the elders. Now what's going on here is The fact that the Pharisees are talking to people about washing hands is not because they're interested in keeping people free from germs. This is what we think when we wash hands. We all wash our hands before meals, and it sounds like actually pretty logical to do that, but that's not how they're thinking. They had no idea or concept of this. Their idea was about ritual purity or ritual cleanliness. This is something that we often don't think about, but it's something that the Old Testament has a lot to say about. If certain things happen, then you will become unclean, like in the book of Leviticus. And so that's what they're talking about. They're talking about ritual cleanliness. And they get upset at the disciples for saying, for doing, for not washing their hands. And they accuse them of breaking the tradition of the elders. When I was young, this is another good reason why my My mom and my wife aren't here, but I used this verse only half-jokingly when I was being told to wash my hands. I said, look, it doesn't make me unclean. But that's not the point. The point has to do with ritual purity. And so we need to get out of our minds what we would think and into the mind of the Pharisees here. They're dealing with ritual purity and that type of understanding of things and not just simply cleanliness as we think of it. Now, what are they doing? Well, before we condemn their actions, let's try to understand them a little more. We will condemn them, don't worry, but let's try to understand them before we do that. The Bible, the Old Testament, has a lot to say about rituals, doesn't it? The Book of Leviticus is a whole book basically devoted to the temple rituals. It's devoted to feasts and sacrifices and specific regulations concerning them. And the great disaster it is when that's not followed. Like Nadab and Abihu, remember the sons of Aaron. They died because they didn't follow those ritual specifications. So this is a very important issue in the Old Testament. The need for being ritually clean and pure. And even though this particular act of washing hands before meals is not stipulated in the Old Testament, you can see how that would have force to someone living in the first century. You can see how, in their mind, they would want this to happen. They would want to be as careful as possible with the law, so even when the law doesn't stipulate something, they want to be careful and still do it. Why? Because it was their breaking of the Mosaic Law, their breaking of Moses' Law, which got them into trouble in the first place. And so when the Jews return from exile, many of them don't return, many of them stay over there, many of them go out across the European world, but when the ones who do come back to Judea, they have one thing in their mind, and that is we are not going to be like our forefathers. We are going to obey the law, and if we have to add extra laws to ensure that, so be it. We are going to obey the law. And so they obeyed it to the minutest detail. And when the law didn't say something, they added to the law to make sure that they weren't breaking the law. And that's what this is doing. Perhaps someone may have become unclean on their way over to eat. Maybe it would be good to wash your hands beforehand in that ritual sense so that they might be clean. That is what they're doing. And they see the disciples breaking these traditions that aren't in the Word of God, but are based upon it in their minds. And they ask them, why do you do this? You're breaking these traditions. And of course, it's Jesus' disciples who are breaking them, but that says a lot about Jesus himself, because Jesus is not stopping them, he's condoning it in their minds. And so Jesus himself receives this charge. Why do you break the traditions of the elders? And that leads us to our second point. vindication Jesus defends this charge, and that's in verses 3-11, and it's a two-pronged defense. The first prong has to do with a counter-charge, and that is, well, why do you nullify the Word of God by your traditions? That's what Jesus said in verses 3-9. We focused on that a few weeks ago. We're not going to focus on that now. Instead, what we are going to focus on is verses 10 and 11. And that is Jesus' defense. The first part was a counter-charge, and now here is his defense of his own position and his own actions and his own lack of actions when it came to his disciples not washing their hands. Verses 10 and 11. When he called the multitude to himself, he said to them, Hear and understand. Not what goes into the mouth defiles a man, but what comes out of the mouth. This defiles a man. What's Jesus saying here? His point in saying this is that we are not defiled by the things outside of us, but rather we are defiled by that which is inside of us, our own sinful hearts. His point in saying this isn't to nullify the book of Leviticus. He isn't saying that all those laws were useless then. They were just kind of, you know, primitive people and they needed that kind of thing. That's how some people look at the Old Testament. But that's not what Jesus is saying here. He's saying those laws had no intrinsic value. They had no value in themselves, but their value lay in the fact that they pointed forward to Christ and His fulfillment. And the real cleanliness that is the cleanliness of the heart. These are what these laws pointed forward to. And therefore, to focus on them rather than, what Jesus will later call the weightier matters of the law, the matters of the heart, is to misunderstand the law grossly, badly. And the Pharisees, for all their learning, for all their knowledge of the Mosaic Law, of Moses' Law, for all their knowledge of the whole Bible, We have to say they grossly misunderstood the point of it. And the point of it wasn't that we do as many ritual laws as possible so that we don't break the law. The point of it was, we need a new heart and a new spirit. And we need to love God from within the heart. But don't let me tell you that only. Let's look back to the Old Testament. Let's see what the Old Testament itself teaches us about true cleanliness and true purity and true defilement and from where it comes. This is just going to be a brief survey to look through the Old Testament and see its own teaching on its own terms about this matter of defilement versus true cleanliness. In 1 Samuel 16 verse 7, actually in 1 Samuel 16, the beginning of it, we have a scene where David is being chosen as king. Actually, at this point, we don't know it's David yet. And Samuel goes to the sons of Jesse. And each one comes up, and they're big, strong, good-looking men. And Samuel says, oh, it's got to be this one. Oh, no, it's got to be this one. And after all seven of them came forward, and God tells Samuel, no, none of these. Samuel's like, then who is it? And Jesse says, oh, well, I do have another son. He's out in the field somewhere, but he's a little squirt. We're not really going to deal with him right now. God says to Samuel, very important words. He says, Do not look at his appearance or at the height of his stature, because I have refused him. Speaking of one of the brothers. For the Lord does not see as man sees. For man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart. The heart is the key. The heart is the key to the law. The heart is the key to what God looks at. We just sang from Psalm 40. verses 6-8, talking about how sacrifice and offering God didn't desire. But your law is written within my heart. The author to the Hebrews picks up on this passage and talks about how this foreshadows the New Covenant, where he sets aside the one, the sacrifice and the offering of the Old Covenant, to establish the other, the New Covenant. The law is written on the heart Even the Proverbs talk about this type of understanding. We would think that the Proverbs wouldn't have as much to say, but they do. Chapter 21 through 27, verse 27, the sacrifice of the wicked is an abomination. How much more when he brings it with evil or wicked intent? You see, once again, we see the matter of the heart right there in the forefront. The Book of Isaiah, the great opening chapter, the magnificent opening chapter of the Book of Isaiah begins with an indictment against all the people of Israel. God calls upon heaven and earth to witness their great sin and rebellion. And in the middle of it, the Lord says to his people, to what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices to me? I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed cattle. I do not delight in the blood of bulls or of goats." God desires his obedience. Later, he'll say, wash yourselves, make yourselves clean. Do your sins be like scarlet, they will be as white as snow. The issue in the Old Testament itself was always about the heart. Of course, there's a great prophecy of the new covenant in Jeremiah 31, which we just talked about, of the law written on the heart. And that was the promise. The time is coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Judah, with the house of Jacob. No longer. It won't be like the former covenant, because they disobeyed it. But He's going to write the law on their hearts and on their minds. He's going to do away with sin forever. Ezekiel 36. Another great passage about the new covenant. It talks about how God is going to take away the heart of stone and put within it but the heart of flesh, and cause you to walk in my ways, and sprinkle you clean." And this gives us a great clue as to how the Old Testament views the rituals. The sprinkling, of course, was a part of the rituals. You remember Moses sprinkled the people. This was part of the rituals. And God says here that that is a metaphor for what God will do to His people's own hearts. even of the Old Testament itself. The focus is on the heart. The rituals are important, and I don't want to say that they're not important at all. They're very important, but their purpose is to be symbols of, types of, that which occurs in us. Hosea 6.6, a verse that Jesus likes to quote, I desire mercy and not sacrifice, and knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings. Even in the Pentateuch, Even in the first five books, which contains most of the ritual laws, we read in Deuteronomy 30, verse 6, that God will circumcise the hearts of this people and he will cause them to walk in his ways. Here we see once again that the ritual, circumcision of course is a ritual, pointed to something greater than itself, pointed to the time when God would circumcise the heart. And of course we know from Romans 2 at 28 and 29 that this is fulfilled in the New Covenant. Jew is one not outwardly but inwardly and circumcision is a matter of the heart, Paul says. This is the teaching of the Old Testament and of course it's carried on and with greater force into the New. The focus is on the heart. And so Jesus does well here to speak this way. exactly where the Old Testament was pointing to. And it's correct to bring this counter-charge against the Pharisees, this defense. They had known the Law, and for all their learning, and for all their knowledge, they still misunderstood it. And this serves as a warning to us, to us who love to read and study the Bible. It's a great thing to do, a great thing to do, and we need to do it. But the Pharisees are the ones who knew the Bible the best. And because of their pride, because of their hypocrisy and their desire to be looked at as pillars in the community there, they misunderstood the law and made it a matter of external regulations. So Jesus defends this with, I would say, the support of the Old Testament that it is in the heart that counts. Now we go to the last part, which I'm calling explanation. Jesus explains the parable to the disciples. Interestingly here, the disciples don't quite get what Jesus is saying. Verse 15, Peter answered and said to him, explain this parable to us. And then Jesus says, are you still without understanding? He just doesn't understand how they couldn't understand. First of all, we notice here that the word, it's called a parable. Where is the parable? Do you see the parable? We have a very technical and precise meaning for the word parable in the New Testament, but the word is used in a much broader sense. The translation here is being very literal, and that's the word, but it doesn't mean parable. It means some sort of extended metaphor or something like that. It's a metaphor, the idea of what we had in verse 11 about not what comes into a man's mouth, but what comes out. And that just means this metaphor. Explain this to us, the disciples said. And what was the disciples' misunderstanding here? How could they have misunderstood what Jesus said? It seems pretty straightforward, doesn't it? Well, I can't even begin to guess how the disciples would have misunderstood this, but if they'd lived in the 21st century, I could begin to guess how they might misunderstand Jesus' words here. So I'm going to go off that basis, realizing that the disciples themselves didn't really think this, but it might be helpful for us, because we might fall into this. The disciples did not understand the parable because, if they lived in the 21st century, they might have thought that Jesus was allowing drug use or alcohol abuse. You think that's funny? One of my friends from college used this passage to condone his own drug use. It sounds pretty clear, right? It's not what goes into the mouth, but what comes out of it. So I can put whatever I want into my mouth, or I can do whatever I want. I can use anything that's outside of me as much as I want. What matters is my heart. Maybe you've come across that, especially young people. this type of understanding where you can do whatever you want outside what matters is the heart. Needless to say, that has absolutely nothing to do with what Jesus is saying. He's talking about the difference between ritual purity and true cleanliness. And as you will see, what you do externally is very important, not because of what it is in itself, but because it reveals the heart. You cannot use a verse like this to say, I can do whatever I want with my hands as long as my heart's okay. That is not what Jesus means. The second misunderstanding might be that they might have thought that Jesus had fallen into some sort of sappy romanticism. Romantic born out of turn. Some people view Jesus' words here like this. To follow your heart, that's all that matters. It doesn't matter what you do. What matters is the following of your heart. If it feels right, then do it. Because the heart is what matters, and a lot of people say this these days, and we are influenced by it even if we try to resist it. That is not what Jesus is saying. The heart is deceptive above all things, the Bible says. Don't follow it. Follow God's Word. In Hebrew, the word heart also, and this is an important point, because Jesus, although he's speaking Greek or Aramaic, we don't know, He's thinking in those terms of Hebraic languages. The heart means so much more than just your feelings. We think of following your heart and following your feelings. But in the ancient way of thinking it was much more holistic we might say. It includes the mind. It includes the will. It includes everything we consider to be the core of one's being. That's what the heart means. And to look at a passage like this and say, follow your heart, that means follow your feelings, is to misunderstand it really badly. The heart is much more than that. It's who we are at the core of our being, and that's what defiles us. Thirdly, the disciples may have misunderstood Jesus, had they lived in the 21st century, to say that he did not care at all about external behavior, that what matters is that my heart is right even if I'm in sin. And one popular version of that today is, as long as you struggle with it, you're okay. As long as something is, you don't need to conquer the sin, as long as you're struggling with it, as long as you have your conscience pricked about it, then you're okay. You can continue to do it and God is still happy with you as long as you're struggling with the sin. struggle with sin. I'm not saying that. But the point of struggling with sin is to win and overcome it. Too often we, as an overreaction to the perfectionism of earlier forms of Christianity, we want to say how bad we are. We want to say that if you're not struggling with something then you're not a Christian. I've heard this at groups in college. I remember one time being at one of those conferences and we were all in a circle and each person went around and said, what they were struggling with and how they were doing it. And I said, well, I can't really think of anything I'm struggling with particularly right now. I'm struggling with sin in general. And they looked at me as if I were a heretic. You're not struggling with sin? I'm struggling with sin, but there's nothing in particular I can think of right now. And it's almost as if you're not really a Christian unless you've had that struggle. Unless you have a testimony which is a complete turnaround from your life. That's not what Jesus is saying. He's not talking about that. Jesus cared about not only struggling, but overcoming, and about not only inner behavior, but also outward behavior. His point is simply that our external behavior is dictated or governed by our heart. And you can be a hypocrite and have that not be true, but that's not the way it's supposed to be. Out of the outflow of the heart, Jesus says in a different place, the mouth speaks. So, let us not misunderstand Jesus as the thinking that external behavior doesn't matter. Or that we can do whatever we want, we can put anything we want into our mouth, like drugs and excessive alcohol. Or that Jesus was some sort of romantic thinking that the only thing that mattered was one's feelings. But what does he mean? He tells us in verses 17 through 20. Do you not yet understand that whatever enters the mouth goes into the stomach and is eliminated? But those things which proceed out of the mouth come from the heart, and they defile a man. For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witnesses, blasphemies. These are the things which defile a man, but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile a man." Sin begins in the heart. That's his point. And if we are to treat it correctly, we must go there. And now I'm going to, in conclusion, give you some practical advice concerning a few sins that we often fall into. First, we must understand that all sin begins in the heart and therefore treated accordingly. If anger is your temptation, if you find yourself becoming angry at people and blowing up a lot with a temper, don't think that once you've controlled that temper, and have not brought it out all the time, that you're done now, and that you can stop, and that you can move on to the next thing. That's a great first step, and that's a really good thing to do, is to make sure it doesn't come out. But remember, it's in the heart. Don't boil over inside of you. Don't let it stew inside of you. Address the issue where it is, in the heart. You can, because God has written the law on our hearts. Put it on our minds. He's given us the Spirit. We can do this. The same thing with lust. Just because you have not committed adultery doesn't mean that you can't still struggle with the problem or that you should stop fighting. The issue is more than that. It's a great place to begin not to commit adultery. That's a good thing. But don't stop there. Because if you do, you misunderstand yourself. You misunderstand the fact that it can still grow in the heart, and grow and grow, and sooner or later, it's going to come out. That's just the way human beings are. That's how God created us. We must understand that all sin begins in the heart, and therefore treated accordingly. Secondly, application here, we must pray for a clean heart, and a willing spirit. Later we'll sing Psalm 51. After David committed that great sin of murder and adultery, he wrote Psalm 51. And I didn't bring it up in the Old Testament list I did, but I could have easily. Because he says, sacrifices in bold, you did not desire them. But what are the sacrifices of God? A broken spirit and a contrite heart. And the Lord will not despise a broken spirit and a contrite heart. And he says earlier, create in me a clean heart and renew within me a right spirit or a willing spirit. David knew, especially after he had fallen into that sin, he knew the source of his problems. He probably had dealt with it before that. And he probably thought he'd keep it under control, but he couldn't. He knew he needed a clean heart and a right spirit before God. So we pray for that just like David did. And thirdly, advice on this, focus on important matters of the law. Focus on matters of the heart, such as loving God and loving your neighbor. That's how the New Testament summarizes the law. What is the greatest commandment? Love the Lord your God with zero. Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your might, all your strength, all your everything, basically. And the second one's like it. Love your neighbor as yourself. When we focus on these important laws, on these weighty matters of the law, when we focus on this matter of the heart, we will not get bogged down in what the Pharisees did in their externals. We all need details. We all need to be able to apply the law within our lives and within our specific situations. But we don't want to get bogged down in these details and make these details the law rather than the great commandment and the second greatest commandment. That is the center. And we must always remember that. Without despising the external things that we do, we need to do them. We need to always keep our focus on the greatest commandment of the law. to love God and to love our neighbor. In doing this, we will not fall into the trap of the Pharisees spreading cologne on a dirty shirt. Instead, we'll put it in the washing machine where it belongs and create in us a clean heart and a right spirit. Let's pray. Father in Heaven, create in us a clean heart and renew in us a right spirit. Help us to understand where sin begins and where its roots are. Help us to treat it accordingly. Help us to kill it accordingly. And we pray, Father, although we will never be done with our struggle with sin before we die, we pray that you would give us victory and that in Christ Jesus we would be growing in righteousness. We would be growing in conformity to His image, and that Your blessing would be upon us as we seek to live before Your face and walking with You. In this we pray in Jesus' name, Amen.