For instance, Orthodox Judaism, one of the saddest things that I've heard in a while, at least it was sad to me, was I was listening to the radio and listening to a Jewish commentator, Ben Shapiro, who's an Orthodox Jew, and he made the comment regarding his religion that, you know, he has 613 commands that he has to keep. That's the substance of his religion, keeping those 613 commandments. the same ones that the Pharisees had been striving to keep. But, of course, no man can keep even the Ten Commandments, much less all the extra commandments that men have added. And to find our righteousness in that is impossible. Jesus is striving to teach not just obviously His disciples that, but to us, we who have the benefit of reading these things. So let's strive now to, as we hear His Word, to understand it and apply it in our own lives so we don't fall into the same error of attempting to justify ourselves by commandment keeping. Let's go into His presence. God, our Father, Lord, I pray that you would help us this day as we hear Christ's words in this parable and his explanation of it to his disciples, that we would hear how radical sin really is, Lord, how it is at the very root of our being, how we are all affected by it, and how there is only one solution to it to be found in your gospel of grace. Lord, as we consider Christ's words Let's once again, we pray, Lord, be struck and amazed by how amazing Your grace really is, how wonderful salvation is. When we had no hope, You, O Lord, came to save us from our desperate condition. Remind us now, Lord, Open our eyes. Open our ears. Help us to understand. Drive away the devil as he seeks to distract us from Your Word. We pray this in Jesus' holy name. Amen. Amen. When he, that is Jesus, had called all the multitude to himself, he said to them, hear me, everyone, and understand. There is nothing that enters a man from outside which can defile him, but the things which come out of him, those are the things that defile a man. If anyone has ears to hear, let him hear. When he had entered a house away from the crowd, his disciples asked him concerning the parable. So he said to them, Are you thus without understanding also? Do you not perceive that whatever enters a man from outside cannot defile him? Because it does not enter his heart, but his stomach and is eliminated, thus purifying all foods. And he said, What comes out of a man, that defiles a man. For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lewdness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within and defile a man. The grass withers, the flower fades, but the Word of our God will stand forever." Well, I know you all know that we're coming up on the 502nd anniversary of the start of the Reformation. On October 31st, we will remember, of course, the moment in time when Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the cathedral drawer at Wittenberg. And while this is not a holy day that we would celebrate in church, it is an important anniversary to us. And that's why, of course, the kids and their parents are presenting these presentations on leaders of the Reformation. Now, in keeping with the Reformation, we call ourselves Reformed Christians to indicate that our theology, the doctrines that we believe are taught in the Bible, is the theology that came out of the Reformation from Reformers like John Calvin and John Knox. But the reason we follow that theology, the reason we call ourselves Reformed, isn't because we like the men who taught it. We're particular fans of John Calvin, even if we own John Calvin is my homeboy t-shirts or things like that. like that, we are not reformed because of him, but because that theology is based on the idea that our religious beliefs, in order to be true, have to be found in and based on scripture alone. That was the great contribution of the reformers, a contribution of men like Calvin, that we get our theology from the Bible and from the Bible alone and not from the traditions and opinions of men. So when it comes to our theology, We are, I hope, believers in sola scriptura, that is scripture alone. We don't want a theology that's based on the opinions or the feelings of men, the fickle wind and wave of cultural opinion. We also don't want a theology based on the traditions of the church, no matter how ancient or old those traditions are, or no matter how popular they may be. We believe, I hope we believe, that if you cannot find a doctrine taught explicitly or implicitly in Scripture, you shouldn't believe it and you should not practice it, no matter how popular it is or how many people pressure you to do so. Our position in that is the same as that of Martin Luther. Luther, who when he was told by the cardinals and the bishops and the representatives of the Pope and even the Holy Roman Emperor, the highest civil magistrate in the world, when he was told to recant, that is to confess the biblical doctrines that he had been teaching were wrong, he instead, he said, no, I will not do that. He refused to embrace the traditions and the man-made doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church. And so at that place, the Diet of Worms, he stood before the emperor on April 18th, 1521, and he answered the call to recant his beliefs, to go against his beliefs in Scripture. And he said this, unless I'm convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures, or by clear reason, for I do not trust either in the Pope or in councils alone, since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves. I am bound by the Scriptures, I have quoted, and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and I will not recant anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience. I cannot do otherwise. Here I stand. May God help me. Amen." Sometimes I think that when we hear those words, and I mean at this point in time they're probably well known to you guys, I think we forget how radical that stand really is in the eyes of the world. The idea that a man, an individual, could break with the traditions of the church, could go against the religious authorities, could go against hundreds of years of religious practice. and say that everything that people had been doing and saying was misguided or was wrong. I think we forget how shocking that was. For a lot of people, it's just utterly crazy. You by yourself are going to go against the leaders of the church. You by yourself are going to go against the majority of the culture. You're going to confess things that are considered outrageous by the majority of men. And I say that not just to point out how shocking the words of Martin Luther were. I say that to point out how shocking, more importantly, the words of Jesus Christ were when he said these things in the presence of his disciples, in the presence of the people, in the presence of the Pharisees. Even his disciples are shocked by these things. Generally, everybody in Israel who considered themselves to be religious believed what the Pharisees taught. They believed what we looked at last week. They believed, literally, that before you ate, it was necessary to ceremonially wash your hands. And that to eat with unwashed hands was actually sinful, because you would become ceremonially unclean. And only a sinner wouldn't care about becoming ceremonially unclean. But Jesus not only says that that is not what the Word of God teaches, and that it's a commandment of men, he then goes on to say something radical. to change their entire view of the nature of sin. He says sin isn't something that is present in the world, that we eat and drink and take in. It's not something that is outside of us, that infects us like a disease. He says food and drink isn't sinful. It can't make us sinners. In that, he is preparing the way also, and I hope you note this, for the removal of the ceremonial restrictions on what people could eat. I mean, but if you had discussed with a Jew at this point in time, for instance, that a bacon sandwich doesn't make you evil, they would have looked at you with absolute shock. What are you talking about? Of course it doesn't. It makes you ceremonial and clean. But Jesus says, no, it's not the things outside that make us sinful. Sin is something present in the heart. It's something that's inside of us. And we sin when we have evil desires and thoughts, and then we act on them. And we commit things like adultery and fornication and theft and lies and blasphemies. And the Pharisees, obviously, they are appalled by this, but His disciples are appalled as well, because here we had the foremost scholars in all of Israel. They had come down from Jerusalem, and Jesus had confronted them, and He had said, not just, I'm not going to recant my belief that we don't need to ceremonially wash our hands. He said to them, essentially, what you are teaching. root and branch, everything is wrong. It isn't biblical. And not only does it not help anybody to be saved, in fact, it's so far from helping people to get to heaven that it will, if they follow your system of religion, it will only bring them to hell. So later, his disciples, I mean, after he's done speaking publicly, they come and they ask him, they're confused. Can you explain this parable to us? In essence, they come to Jesus and they say, we don't get it. We really do not understand. What are you talking about when you speak about the things that defile us and how they come from within? And then Jesus then teaches patiently, once again, he teaches them that to go to heaven, you don't need clean hands. He says, you need a clean heart. And the problem is, as Jeremiah had taught in Jeremiah 17, nine, the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. Who can know it? so we can wash our hands before eating, but it will not wash away the sin in our hearts. You remember that famous scene from Macbeth where Lady Macbeth is sleepwalking, and she does it every night, and she goes through the motions of washing her hands, and she says, out, damn spot, out, I say. Now, physically, Lady Macbeth's hands are clean. You could look at them, and you could not see what she is seeing in her mind's eye. What was she seeing? She was seeing the blood of Macduff. What she's seeing on her hands is actually the inner guilt of her sins. Now, here's the thing that we don't understand. I think Shakespeare was trying to tell us this, of course. We may not see the guilt of our sins staining our hands like Lady Macbeth did. But brothers and sisters, friends, that's our problem too. Ever since the fall, sin has been something that is native to us, that dwells within us. It's not like the universe fell and we were untouched. Rather, what the Word of God tells us, what Jesus is telling us, is that sin from the point of the fall onwards was something that was inside of us. God Himself declares in Genesis 8, 21, the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth. And there he's speaking about the world after the flood, after he had saved Noah and his family. And bubbling up from that evil heart that we have since we're born into this world come all sorts of sinful desires, and then what happens? We act upon those sinful desires. We are the ones who are defiled and corrupted. It's not that we eat ceremonially and clean foods and become corrupted, rather we, in touching the food, become corrupted. I remember R.C. Sproul pointing out that when the ark was being brought to Jerusalem the wrong way, they were carrying it into Jerusalem initially on an ox cart, and one of David's men had reached out to steady the ark when he saw one of the oxen had taken a misstep and the ark might have fallen in the mud. And this was radical to me the first time I heard it. R.C. Sproul said that when he reached out to touch the ark, what he didn't realize is that his hand was more corrupt, more vile than the dirt that the ark would have fallen in had it hit the ground. There it was sinful man reaching out to touch the symbol of a holy God. We are all, brothers and sisters, defiled and corrupted by our very nature. The Westminster Confession of Faith puts it this way. In fact, if you'll turn in the back of your hymnals with me to page 852, this is a helpful guide to understanding what the Bible teaches about the nature of sin as something not outside of us, not something that affects us externally, but something that comes out of us. with this in Chapter 6 of the Fall of Man, of Sin, and of the Punishment thereof. Our first parents, being seduced by the subtlety and temptation of Satan, sinned in eating the forbidden fruit. This, their sin, God was pleased, according to His wise and holy counsel, to permit, having purpose, to order it to His own glory. By this sin they fell from their original righteousness and communion with God, and so became dead in sin and wholly defiled in all the parts and faculties of soul and body. They being the root of all mankind, that is Adam and Eve, the guilt of this sin was imputed and the same death and sin and corrupted nature conveyed to all their posterity, descending from them by ordinary generation. From this original corruption, whereby we are utterly indisposed, disabled and made opposite to all good and wholly inclined to all evil, do proceed all actual transgressions." Brothers and sisters, one of the things that we need to come to grips with is we don't become sinners when we sin. We sin because we're sinners by our very nature. So we can spend hours washing away the physical evidence of our crimes, but what is it that can wash away the sins of our hearts? What can cleanse us inwardly? What can do that? Well, the good news, brothers and sisters, is that God can. That's the gospel in essence, that all of us are fallen by our very nature. All of us in our first parents, Adam and Eve, had fallen, but the Pharisees, they didn't realize that God was the answer to their problem, not their own attempts at work's righteousness. They felt that they could, by keeping those laws, those 613 rules, that they could somehow establish themselves as righteous with God. But what Jesus was trying to tell them is, no, you have to depend entirely for your salvation on the grace of God. You have to come to Him for that forgiveness, and that in the Old Testament, the Old Testament that the Pharisees poured over so diligently, that is exactly what He had said. So, for instance, if you'll turn with me back into your Old Testaments to Ezekiel, you'll find Ezekiel after Lamentations, you get Jeremiah, Lamentations, and then Ezekiel, and he goes to Ezekiel 36. Hear what the Lord had promised. about the age of grace. He said this, for I will take you from among the nations, gather you out of all countries and bring you into your own land. Then I will sprinkle clean water on you and you shall be clean. I will cleanse you from all your filthiness and from all your idols. I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you. I will take the heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk in My statutes, and you will keep My judgments and do them." What God was saying through Ezekiel is, the day is coming when I'll put My Spirit in your heart, and in so doing, I will take away that heart of stone, that heart that's filled with sin and corruption, and I'll give you a new heart, a clean heart, a fleshly heart, a soft heart, a heart that's filled with love to God, a heart that, because it's filled with love to God, has a genuine desire to keep His commandments. We can't, out of a slavish obedience, Paul stresses this point, keep the commandments of God. But a son who loves his father will desire to do what God tells him to do. And that's the work that Jesus came to make possible, the change of heart that only he could pave the way for. Only his willingness to sacrifice himself on the cross for our sakes, as an atonement for our sins, and then to give us His righteousness, only that can make us free of sin, can put us in the way of being cleansed by the work of the Holy Spirit in us. And Paul spells it out this way in Titus, Titus 3, he says, for we ourselves, and he's speaking here, remember, he's speaking to Titus, who is an elder in the church, and he's describing Christians, all of us, this is, we all belong to this set as well, for we ourselves were all once foolish, disobedient, deceived, serving various lusts and pleasures, living in malice and envy, hateful, and hating one another. But when the kindness and the love of God our Savior toward man appeared, not by works of righteousness, which we have done, but according to His mercy, He saved us through the washing of regeneration and the renewing of the Holy Spirit, whom He poured out on us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Savior. And having been justified by His grace, we should become heirs according to the hope of eternal life." We were all at one point totally depraved, dead in our sins and trespasses, as he tells us in Ephesians 2. And that's why Jesus had to come. That was the only way that we could be saved from that spiritual death, by His dying on the cross, by His giving us that righteousness that we could never give to ourselves. And the Pharisees had missed out on the grace and mercy of the Lord, and were telling people to try to be saved by doing works, by following the traditions of men, by walking on the treadmill. And treadmills may be good in the gym, but when it comes to religion, to walk on a treadmill is fatal. You never get any closer to heaven. You can walk and walk and walk, and you don't advance a single step closer. Well, let me give you some applications of this. First, we need to be willing to follow the example of the Lord Jesus Christ in standing against. And this is hard. It's really hard. Calvin confessed he knew how hard this was. But we need to be willing to stand against all religious teaching that is not founded on the Word of God, no matter how popular that teaching becomes. And don't be afraid of numbers. Yes, there may be more people standing against you when you stand for the Word of God than are standing with you. But as John Knox said, a man with God is always in the majority. So when your belief is founded on the Word of God, and it's clear, Then don't be afraid. Don't be afraid to take that stand. Don't be afraid to follow your conscience. If your conscience is, as Luther's was, captive to the Word of God, then stand, follow it. To go against conscience is, as he said, neither right nor safe. I have seen Christians wound themselves again and again by doing things that they know go against the Word of God. I have seen good men buckle under the pressure to compromise even within denominations that we would call upright. They do themselves no favors. They certainly do their congregation no favors when they do that. It's better in that moment to be willing actually to be deposed from your office than to make a compromise and go against what the Word of God says. What will you say at the end of time that, well, my session, they didn't see eye to eye on this, and although I think we all knew that this was a tradition that had no basis in the word of God, I just had to do it. Otherwise, I would have lost my opportunity to pastor that particular congregation. Do you think that's going to be compelling at the end of time when you stand before the Lord Jesus Christ? Or rather, I was willing to give up that calling because I knew that if I had continued on in that way, I would have been going against Your Word and teaching Your sheep things that You don't teach them, things that You had not given me. We, brothers and sisters, are never to think that we are legislators creating new rules for God's people. We are always, if we are truly ministers, we are ambassadors for Christ, simply delivering what God has said. And when we teach, and keep in mind, we all teach in the way that we live, in the way we believe, in the way we teach our children, we teach the people around us. If we are to teach the truth, it must be based on the Word of God. And know this, Christians in every age have been called upon, including this age, to confront error. And we always have to fight against the world, the flesh, and the devil. And their great weapon has always been, in every age, to cast doubt on the Word of God. I mean, they did that in the very beginning. The devil, didn't he ask Eve, did God really say? Has God indeed said, you shall not eat of every tree in the garden? No, no, no, you don't understand. He's trying to hold back good stuff from you. So you need to reinterpret the Word of God in such a way that you're allowed to do that. Spurgeon wrote, and this is a hundred years ago, keep in mind, that, "'Philosophic unbelief of this age is blind with self-conceit, "'and fearful is the ditch towards which it is hastening. "'Alas, its teachers are carrying precious souls with them "'into the ditch of atheism and anarchy.'" So, even if everybody comes to believe in something that contradicts the Word of God, don't you follow them. Even if the church accepts evolution, don't you follow them. Even if the church gives itself over to sexual anarchy, don't follow them. And remember, you need to cleave to the Word of God, and it's only by being born again that we'll be saved. And if a man denies that, don't follow him. Second application, whatever you do, remember that true religion is and always will be a matter of the heart. Let it be a settled resolution with us that in all our religion, the state of our heart shall be the main thing. Let it not content us to go to church and observe merely the forms of religion, said J.C. Rell. Don't be content with the washing of baptism if you don't also have that inward washing of the Holy Spirit in your heart. And remember this. Religion does not consist of a series of rules that we keep or we don't keep. Things we do eat, things we don't eat, things we wear, things we don't wear, movies we watch, makeup we do or don't wear, and so on. That is not the heart of religion. The heart of religion is our relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ. And so don't be taken captive by systems that tell you you have to go back and you have to follow the traditions of men. follow after their example. I know of many Christians who've started out well, who've fallen into various errors and have gotten caught up in this treadmill of, I have to do this, I must not do this, I won't taste that, I won't handle that. People, for instance, who've gotten caught up with Messianic Judaism and now are observing the Jewish holy days and eating kosher and so on. And they say, no, no, we don't think that this saves us. But actually, after a while, you see how they separate themselves from Christians who do. It's like Peter refusing to eat with the Gentiles anymore when the people from Jerusalem came. What we're doing there is we're once again being taken captive. Remember that all of our good works also, and this is something else that we have a tendency, don't we, because of our fallen nature to start in faith and then gradually as our humility begins to wane and our pride begins to increase, we believe that we're staying in the faith by doing good works. And often people will point to our good works and say, yeah, that's what saves us. It's funny, I was reminded just recently, dear friends of ours, the Reyes's, had posted that they're going through the book, The Hiding Place, with their kids. And kids, if you haven't yet read The Hiding Place, you need to. It's not as important as Pilgrim's Progress, and it's certainly not as important as the Bible, but it's like number four, you know, somewhere around there in order of the books you really need to read. And get it in you. It's not just also, we remember The Hiding Place as this wonderful tale of how the Ten Boom family saved many Jews during the Second World War, giving them a safe place to hide from the Nazis for so long until they were betrayed. But it's also a biography of the Ten Boom family, and it talks about their faith, their reformed faith in detail. Well, one of the characters, obviously, in The Hiding Place was an aunt. Her name was Tante Jans, Tante meaning aunt in Dutch, and Tante Jans was known as a stern person who was full of religious good work. She belonged to various societies and was always arranging things, but she suffered from diabetes, and at that point in time, of course, there was no insulin, there was no cure for diabetes, nothing to control it, and eventually, people who suffered from diabetes were going to die. There was no way around it. And at one point in the book, Tante Jans is given the terrible, terrible news that her diabetes has reached a terminal stage. She is going to die. And the book puts it this way. It says, we will tell her together, Father decided, though I will speak the necessary words. And perhaps she will take heart from all she has accomplished. She puts great store on accomplishment, Jans does. And who knows, but that she is right. And so the little procession followed up the steps to Tante Jans' rooms. Come in, she called to Father's knock. and added, as she always did, and closed the door before I catch my death of drafts. My dear sister-in-law, father began gently, there is a joyous journey which each of God's children sooner or later sets out on onions. Some must go to their father empty-handed, but you will run to him with hands full. All your clubs, Tante Anna ventured. Your writings, Mama added. The funds you've raised, said Betsy. Your talks, I began. But our well-meant words were useless. In front of us, the proud face crumpled. Tante Jans put her hands over her eyes and began to cry. Empty, empty, she choked at last through her tears. How can we bring anything to God? What does He care for our little tricks and trinkets? And then as we listened in disbelief, she lowered her hands and with tears still coursing down her face, whispered, dear Jesus, I thank you that we must come with empty hands. I thank you that you have done all, all on the cross and that all we need in life or death is to be sure of this. Brothers and sisters, our salvation, and the Word of God teaches us this, is all of grace, or it's not true salvation. If your salvation is a mixture of faith and works, or if it's based entirely on your attempts to save yourself by your works, I pray that you would remember what we read at the beginning of the service about how all of our best works are just filthy rags. None of them impress God. None of them come up to His standard of perfection. Only the finished and completed and perfect work of His Son hits that mark. And if we have faith in Him, if we are united to the Lord Jesus Christ, then we have all that we need for salvation. Follow Him. Be like David Dixon, a minister in the 17th century who said he had taken his good works and his bad works, and he had put them all in a pile, and he had run from them to the Lord Jesus Christ. Remember that not even our best works can save us. Be like J. Gresham Machen, who in his final telegram to his friends wrote these words. He said, I'm so thankful for the act of obedience of Christ. No hope without it. And truly, that's true of all of us. We need the act of obedience of our Lord Jesus. Without it, we have no hope of heaven. But in Him, we have the salvation we need. We have everything we need to get to heaven. So believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved, you and your household. Let's go before him. God our Father, I do pray, Lord, that you would help us to remember that sin is something that is within us and that it needs to be cleansed by you, Lord, that we can never wash away the stain of our sins. Only you can. But Lord, once you have poured out your regenerating grace in us, once you've given us the gift of the Holy Spirit, once we've been united by faith to the Lord Jesus Christ, there is no sin. so great that it can close Heaven to us. Grace is the great key that unlocks the gates of Heaven. And if we have Your grace in our heart, then we have that key as well. Help us then never to despair, but to know that we are assured of certain salvation in Jesus Christ. And help us follow Him all the way to Heaven according to His Word. And we pray these things in Jesus' holy name. Amen.