If I asked you to think of a time in your life when you felt morally corrupted, dirty on the inside, you probably, if you're like most people, you probably wouldn't have to think very hard. You can probably think of some event, something you did in the past just really made you feel dirty. Even people who claim that they don't believe in moral absolutes or they don't think there's such a thing as sin or uncleanness, even those people have time. They feel it. They might use different words. Instead of dirty or unclean, they'll just say they feel inadequate or unacceptable or unfit in some way. It's a sense that there's something wrong with me. I don't measure up. Everybody feels that. Whatever words you use to describe it, this problem of uncleanness on the inside was not anything unique to the Pharisees of Jesus' time. It was a problem for every human being on the planet of all ages. It's a constant problem. If you're gonna go and meet with somebody who's important to you, maybe a job interview or a first date or just some big important meeting, what do you do? You clean up, right? You brush your teeth, you get a haircut, When you're doing that, what are you doing? You're getting rid of uncleanness, right? You're making yourself presentable. You don't want to look bad or smell bad or come off bad in any way to this person that's important to you in the meeting. That's especially true if the person that you're meeting with is God. You need to be cleaned up. All of religion is basically, how can a person get cleaned up in order to meet with God? Now, the first 23 verses of Mark chapter 7, Jesus teaches all about this issue of uncleanness. And if that's the topic, what would you expect? You would think that if he's going to talk about uncleanness, that his main point would be how to get rid of it, right? It's not. He doesn't actually say anything in this passage directly about the solution to moral uncleanness. What he talks about instead is the source of moral uncleanness. That's what he wants us to know. Why? Because the solution won't work if you don't understand the source. To deal with the problem of sin, sin has to be severed at the root. It has to be severed at the root. Most people try to deal with their sin at the level of actions. They'll just, they'll send, from now on, I'm not gonna do that anymore. I'm gonna change my behavior, I'm gonna try to do this, I'm gonna stop doing that, or maybe they'll even take it a step further and they'll say, I'm gonna avoid influences that push me towards that sin. And that's about as far as most people go in dealing with their sin. That'll never work. Fighting your sin problem at the level of your behaviors It's like trying to kill an apple tree by picking the apples. It doesn't matter how many you pick, more of them will just keep growing back after it. If you want to stop the growth of the apples, you're going to have to cut that thing at the root. Or to put it another way, you can't fight a war if you don't know who the enemy is. You've got to find the enemy first before you can engage. No matter how many tactics of warfare you master, if you're in the wrong continent, in the wrong country, whatever it is, you're not going to win the war. You've got to know who your enemy is. And if you're wondering how important this is, to know who the enemy is when you're fighting your own sin, to know what the source of uncleanness is, if you wanna know how important this issue is, just look at Jesus' response here in Mark 7. Look how long it is. It's one of the longest speeches Jesus ever gives in the book of Mark. Mark doesn't record long speeches by Jesus, by and large. Most of the time, what Mark does is he just records Jesus' actions. He just tells you what Jesus does, that's how he spends most of it, and then he just gives little snippets of Jesus' teaching here and there. except here. This is a rare exception where Mark just gives a long answer. And that long answer comes to three different groups in three phases. So this whole passage is three phases. Phase one, scribes and Pharisees. Talks to them first. Then he moves on. Phase two, he speaks to the whole crowd. And then phase three, he's alone in the house with his disciples. And all of it gets recorded in the Bible by Mark. He wants us to see all three phases. So Jesus' response here to this question that they ask him about uncleanness has important written all over it. This is a big deal. And here's something interesting. This whole thing, this whole response, 23 verses, Jesus' response to the Pharisees' question about hand-washing, the question was very simple. Why don't your disciples do the hand-washing? And in Jesus' entire response, He never once mentions hand-washing. He doesn't even use the word. And Jesus will do that. He often does that. He'll skip past the pretext and go right to the heart of the real issue. They ask about a ritual. He talks to them about ritualism. They ask about a certain point of religion, and he responds by just demolishing their entire religious system. This is another reason why this is such an important topic, because if you get this wrong, your whole religion is going to be wrong. It'll corrupt your entire approach to worshiping God, to where you'll be like the Pharisees. Your worship will be worthless, in vain, a waste of time. If you don't understand the source of your uncleanness, what it is that makes you unpleasant in God's sight, then you will very quickly become infected with the disease of legalism. This is what happens if you don't understand the source. If you try to grow a garden, No matter how perfect your garden is, if you just let it go, very soon it'll be taken over by weeds. In a similar way, no matter how pure and God-honoring your spiritual life is, if you let it go, the weeds of legalism are going to take over very quickly. It's just natural. It's the way it goes. It's a gravitational pull towards legalism. Legalism is an absolute spiritual catastrophe that every one of us is prone to and it is impossible to avoid unless you understand the source of spiritual uncleanness. So, phase one, that's the one we studied last time, that was his response to the Pharisees. They ask, why don't your disciples do the hand-washing? And Jesus says, because it's not in the Bible. That's human tradition, human tradition, human tradition. It's not in the Bible, so we don't have to do it. It's worthless. Anything that's not in the Bible, worthless for curing the problem of spiritual uncleanness. And he says, you want proof? Just look at you guys. You're as filthy as can be. I mean, you're great at the traditions, and you're as filthy as they come. You're hypocrites. You're far from God, and your worship is absolutely worthless. It's in vain. You don't even let people honor their parents. You're exhibit A of how useless legalism is. So that was phase one. In phase one of Jesus' response, we learn that there is no human solution to uncleanness. None. None. Not psychology, not religious tradition, not cleverness and problem-solving in your brain. All those things not only won't work, but they will make the problem of your spiritual uncleanness even worse. It's all dirty soap. The more you scrub, the dirtier you get. And by the way, If human wisdom did work, if you could fix the problems of the soul with psychology, with human wisdom, science, whatever, if you could do that, then Jesus wouldn't have bothered teaching about it. Have you ever noticed that Jesus doesn't teach us about stuff that we can figure out on our own? There's nothing in the Bible about how to solve air pollution, or noise pollution, or brain surgery, or rocket science. He doesn't teach about that in the Bible. Why? Because we can figure that out on our own. We don't need divine revelation for that. That's humanly possible to figure out. Jesus only taught us about things that were absolutely out of the reach of the human mind. to figure out on our own. And he taught a lot about what to do about the problems of the soul, right? Never rely on human wisdom to make you clean. Don't ever let anyone put rules on you that aren't in the Bible. Don't let someone saddle you with that. I don't care if it's been a religious tradition in that church for a thousand years, or something your pastor has repeated so many times that everyone in the church thinks it's a Bible verse. Or if you have all kinds of cultural expectations along that, it doesn't matter. If somebody tries to tell you it's binding on you, then you say, show it to me in the Bible. If it's not there, it's not required for godliness. Because everything that's required for godliness is there in the Scriptures. Alright, so that's phase one, that was last time. Now Jesus very deliberately, this is dramatic, He very deliberately turns away from the Pharisees and addresses the crowd. He calls the crowd to Him. So this response, phase two of His response, is for everybody. It's not just for the Pharisees, it's for everybody. And once again, we're going to see Jesus ratchet up the stakes. He's going to move it a step further. So He just shot down sacred tradition, He just shot down human wisdom, all the traditions of the elders, but He's not done. He's going to take it a step further, a huge step further. Verse 14. Jesus, again, Jesus called the crowd to Him. Now, that's unusual, isn't it? We've never seen that. All the way until now in Mark, the crowds gather by themselves, and Jesus is trying to get away from them, right? But now He goes out of His way to gather a crowd. Verse 14, He called the crowd to Him. Listen to me, everyone, and understand this. Now, that language comes right out of the Old Testament. That's the wording that the Old Testament prophets would use when they were about to make a divine pronouncement. This is a big deal. This is a prophetic, big-time, official statement from the mouth of God. It's like he's calling a press conference. He said, all right, get the cameras rolling, get your notepads out, this is a big deal, this is like Moses up on Mount Sinai, I'm going to make a pronouncement, I'm going to preach something to you, and listen and understand. And that listen and understand, that implies this isn't going to be easy. You've got to think. You've got to think. Listen and understand. Get this. So, this big prelude, and he calls them, he gathers them, he says, all right, you ready? Here comes the sermon, here it comes. Verse 15. Nothing outside a man can make him unclean by going into him. Rather, it's what comes out of a man that makes him unclean. That's all. He doesn't say anything else. That's it. The people are just standing there like, what? That's it? Two sentences? What is that? Jesus spent almost as much time introducing his sermon than he did preaching it. I mean, he gathers everybody around, gather around, get this, come over here, listen to this, make sure you get this, this is going to be a big thing, are you ready? Here it comes. It's not what goes in, it's what comes out. Okay, take it easy. And he walks away. What kind of a thing, what is that? Well, he's taking us to phase three. That's the end of phase two. It's over. He's done talking to the crowd. Now he walks away. and, phase three, verse 17, after he'd left the crowd and entered the house, his disciples asked him about the parable. They call it a parable, which means hard saying. It's a difficult thing to understand. It was hard because it seems to contradict the entire Old Testament, right? The Scriptures in the Old Testament are loaded with laws about things that make you unclean if you eat them. All the kosher laws, right? Chapters about that. So how can Jesus just suddenly stand up and say, nothing that comes into you can make you unclean. Nothing. That's a hard saying. I can see why they're calling it a parable here. So they catch up to Jesus in the house and ask Him. Now why didn't the crowd ask Him? They didn't care. They didn't ask because they didn't care. That's what parables do. They weed out the people who don't even have enough interest to just ask a question, what does that mean? But the disciples, they want to know. To their credit, they want to know. And so they catch up to Jesus in the house and say, hey, Jesus, you know when you said the thing about listen and understand? Well, we don't understand. We don't get it. What did that mean? And verse 18, look at his answer. He's like, are you so dull? The word dull means dumb. This is not a compliment. This is a rebuke. Which implies, if they would have done what Jesus said to do, if they would have just given some rigorous thought, they would have been able to figure it out. But they didn't, and so Jesus rebukes them, but then he goes ahead and just explains it to them anyway. verse 18. He says, "...don't you see that nothing that enters a man from the outside can make him unclean? For it doesn't go into his heart, but into his stomach and then out of his body." Literally, into the toilet. So, he's very graphic here. He's talking about spiritual things. He's talking about the heart. This whole section is about the heart. You see it three different times. Verse 6, their hearts are far from me. Verse 18, it doesn't go into his heart, but into his stomach. And then verse 21, for from within, out of men's hearts come evil thoughts and all the rest. It's all about the heart. That's what Jesus wants to point to here. You know, I don't know of any theme in Jesus' teaching more prominent than getting people to stop focusing on the external and look into the heart. Get off of the external and look at the heart. And that's exactly what He's doing here. In the Old Testament, There's two different kinds of uncleanness. There's symbolic, external uncleanness that has to do with your body, and then there's real, moral uncleanness that has to do with your heart. If you do evil, if you blaspheme God, worship an idol, commit adultery, murder someone, steal, lie, all those kinds of things, you do that stuff, your heart becomes morally unclean. repulsive to God. On the other hand, if you do things like eat pork, eat non-kosher food, or you touch a corpse, or you touch a leper, or you have a baby, or all those kinds of things, those cause symbolic uncleanness. Symbolic uncleanness. It doesn't affect your heart. It affects your body. and they were illustrations of sin, not actual sin, just illustrations of sin. So, every once in a while, the Old Testament prophets would stop and remind the people of that. They would remind all these symbols, they're just symbols, like Isaiah 1, Psalm 51, Deuteronomy 10, Ezekiel 14, lots of passages where the prophets would remind the people, all your sacrifices, the festivals, the new moons, the Sabbath, circumcision, external forms, temple worship, all that kosher stuff, all that stuff, You can do all that stuff until you're blue in the face! And if your heart is bad, it's all worse than worthless. Those things are symbols, pictures, illustrations, but they're not the real thing. They're not the real moral issue. Reality happens only in the heart. The only part of you, now mark this, the only part of you that can be unclean is your heart. The only part of you that can have real moral uncleanness is your heart. That's Jesus' point in verse 19. Otherwise, verse 19 makes no sense. He says, if it doesn't go into your heart, it doesn't make you unclean, period. That means the only part of you that can be unclean is your heart. Nothing that happens to your body can defile you. Unless it arises out of your dirty heart, nothing that happens to your body can defile you. And that's good news, by the way, for people who have been molested. A lot of times people who are rape victims or they've been molested, they feel like they've been defiled because of what happened to their body. But your body can't be morally defiled, you know that? Your body can't be morally defiled, only your heart. No rapist can do anything to your heart. Only you can. Only you can. So, Jesus is pointing them back to the heart, just like the prophets, just like Isaiah 1, all those passages. This is what Jesus is doing, He's pointing them back to the heart. But that's not all He's doing, and here's where it really gets big. He's not just saying that the heart is more important than the symbols. It sounds like what He's saying here is He's eliminating the symbols altogether, because the statement is absolute. Nothing that you put inside you can make you unclean at all. When Jesus uses that strong a language, What is he doing? Is he just canceling the whole kosher system? Yes. Yep, that's exactly what he's doing. And in case we have any doubt about that, Mark just comes around and tells us that. Verse 19, in saying this, Jesus declared all foods clean. Literally, all these foods that in the Old Testament that God had declared unclean, like shellfish and pork and all birds and everything, all these reptiles, all this stuff that's unclean, Jesus just makes them clean. In fact, literally here it says, cleansing all foods. Jesus didn't just declare them clean, He cleansed them. Jesus cleansed pork, and lobster, and reptiles, and birds, and every, even meat sacrificed to pagan idols, He cleansed. Romans 14, 14, no food is unclean in itself. Jesus cleansed it all. We see this played out in the rest of the New Testament. In Acts chapter 10, very important chapter, God commands Peter. He shows him a bunch of unclean animals in a vision, and he says, kill and eat. Eat that unclean stuff, Peter. And Peter practically has to get into a wrestling match with Peter to get him to eat. Peter's like, no, no, I would never do that. I've never eaten unclean food. And he panics. God says, don't do it. Do it. Three times he repeats it. So Peter will finally get it. Nothing was harder for the initial Jewish Christians in the first century than the idea that the kosher laws are gone. That was just impossible for them to fathom, which is why there's whole chapters in the New Testament, numerous places in the New Testament, devoted to explaining this issue about the food, kosher foods. Alright, so Jesus started in phase one by throwing all their traditions out on the junk heap where they belong. Then, phase two, he points them back to the heart instead of external forms, and then he goes all the way and cancels the entire system of kosher foods that have defiled the Jewish people for thousands of years. All the symbolic laws of the Old Testament, they're just gone. Nothing you can eat can make you unclean. In fact, The statement isn't even limited to just food. In the context, he's talking about food, but he just says, nothing outside you can make you unclean. No influence. Now think about that. Because if we get back to our original question, what is the source of evil? Where does it come from? When Jesus says it doesn't come from anything outside of you, that is a revolutionary idea, not just for Jews. That is a revolutionary idea for all people. We all naturally think that we're infected with uncleanness from some outside source, right? That's just the way that we think. Some influence. That's why we think that we can deal with our sin problem by just separating ourselves from certain influences. I'll stop doing that, I'll stop hanging around that, and I'll stop watching that, I'll get away from these influences, and then I'll solve my sin problem. And different people have different ideas about what influences are causing the sin, where the evil comes from, Religious people tend to think in terms of religious defilement coming from religious taboos, breaking those. Secular people, it's cultural taboos. For conservatives, it comes from TV and movies and the internet and video games and all that stuff. For psychologists, it's imposed on you by people who mistreated you, or maybe It was toxic masculinity, or bullying, or trauma, or whatever. The social justice crowd will say that evil comes from oppressive governments, and people in power, and rich people, and then, of course, the greatest evil of all, evil corporations, right? Jesus said, no, none of that. None of that is the source of evil. So what is it? Where does the evil come from? Well, it's right here in verses 21 to 23. And this is just devastating, look at this. Verse 21, for from within, out of men's hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. All these evils come from inside and make a man unclean. It all comes from inside you. Jesus doesn't hold back, does he? tells it like it is. And at first it seems kind of harsh, but isn't that what we need? Think about your life. Where do the real changes come from? Don't they come from those people that are just honest with you? I mean, most of us have like one friend who, they'll just tell it like it is. They'll just be brutally honest, right? They'll tell you. I just, this morning, there was a guy in our men's group who was telling his testimony, and he talked about how for ten years of his life, his Christian life was just wasted. He didn't make any progress spiritually. And then finally, a friend just pinned him down. And the way he did it, he was just talking to his friend about his financial troubles. He's like, oh, I've got all these financial woes, I'm struggling financially, I don't have any money. And the guy said, well, you realize you're sinning, right? In the way that you're handling your money, you realize you're sinning, right? At first, this guy was real offended, but that got him to realize, oh, I'm supposed to be doing something different. The Bible has commands how I'm supposed to handle my money. I'm disobeying God. And it turned him around, turned his whole Christian life around. Those are the friends that have the most impact on us in the long run, aren't they? But there's not many of those people out there. You need a friend, you need at least one friend that'll give it to you straight, that'll just say, they're not afraid, they'll just say, look, what you're doing here is, it's sin. You know, I don't wanna hurt you, but it's not pleasing to the Lord, you need to repent, you need to do something different. That's sin. And you're getting a little fat. You know, I mean, just that kind of a friend, they'll tell you, whatever, whatever you need to hear, they'll just tell you. Jesus is that kind of friend right here. He tells it straight. What is the source of evil? Your own heart. Your own heart. All these things that make us filthy in God's sight originate inside us. Good luck. If you're gonna try to avoid bad influences that make you evil, good luck because the worst influence in your life is right inside your chest. and it's incurable. Jeremiah 17.9, the heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it? So this is Jesus' answer to the question about the source of uncleanness. He says it comes from inside. It's revolutionary, and yet it really shouldn't be any big surprise, right? I mean, it's self-evident, isn't it? I don't know of any passage in the whole Bible that's easier to prove than verses 21 to 23 right here. How can you deny it? Even the people who try to deny it, all they do is transfer the problem from their heart to somebody else's heart, but it still comes from a human heart, right? If you say it comes from TV, and movies, and Internet, and all this, how did all that evil get into that evil programming? Human beings, right? It wasn't dolphins, it wasn't Martians, right? It's human beings. If it comes from evil corporations, what are evil corporations? What are corporations? They're people. No document, no legal entity ever committed an evil act. Only human beings can commit evil acts. If it was your parents and they inflicted on you, what are they? They're human beings with human hearts, right? At some point, it has to come from the human heart. No matter how hard you try to push it off to another source, the origin of evil always ends up being the human heart. Who can possibly deny, just look at this list of sins, adultery, murder, stealing. How can you possibly deny that comes out of the heart? It comes out of the heart. Where else could it possibly come from? Even if somebody pushed you into it, still, why were you pushable? It's like, it's not my fault. She just pushes all my buttons. Why do you have buttons? Did Jesus have buttons? He got all the same bad treatment from people that we get. He never flew off the handle. Why? Because even though Jesus faced all the evil influence of the world that we face, still there was no corresponding evil in His heart that latched on to that stuff. And so He didn't sin, but we do because we have evil in the heart. beginning I asked you to think of a time in your life when you felt really dirty on the inside. Most likely you thought of some act that you committed, some sin, some physical action you did that was really bad. But we find out that's not what made you unclean. The really hard news is you were unclean long before that. The reason you did that act is because of the unclean that was already in you. We tend to think we are what we do, but in reality we do what we are. So Jesus brings this crushing indictment on the entire human race here. Look again at the list, see how, just look how ugly this is. It's like a wasp, like somebody kicked a wasp nest and it just, you kick out this whole swarm of stinging, biting horrors rise up out of our hearts when it gets kicked. And just this whole list here, and then the passage ends, verse 23, all these evils come from inside and make a man unclean. And that's it. That's the end of the passage. The next verse moves on to the next section. Jesus leaves the country and goes somewhere. That's it. What kind of an ending is that? I mean, this just sounds morbid. It's like your hearts are just hopeless cesspools of evil factories. The end. That's a little abrupt, isn't it? Where's the conclusion? When Jesus does that, what He's doing is He's forcing you to stop and go back through the passage and see the conclusion in the words that He's already said. It's all through there. And so I did that. I combed back through the passage and I looked, what are the applications for this? Why is He telling me this information? What good is it to me? And there's four things that stood out to me, and I'll just give you these four. First, This is great information for us because in our war against sin, this passage exposes the wrong solution, the wrong front to fight the battle, the place that isn't the source of evil. So we don't waste our time fighting that. And that is legalism. I mean, when you look at this list, as soon as you look at the list, can you see how utterly useless legalism is? Look at this horror show again in verses 21 to 23. All this wickedness in our hearts. Which one of the Pharisees' traditions or rituals is gonna do anything about any of that mess? I mean, hand-washing? That's gonna take care of malice and greed and murder and all. For that matter, we could include even God's ritual commands, right? What symbolic laws in the Old Testament are gonna take care of this problem of my heart? Avoiding shellfish? In fact, We can even take it another step further and say, even God's moral law doesn't help. It doesn't have the power to change the human heart. God says, do not covet. What does that make your heart want to do? It just makes you want to covet all the more. Romans 8.3 says, the law was powerless to justify you because it was weakened by how sinful our nature is. There's no power in the law to change your nature. You can't cure uncleanness of the heart by law-keeping any more than you can cure rabies by putting a muzzle on a dog. And when we understand that, we will abandon legalistic solutions. We'll stop fighting the war on that front. which will totally change the way that we live our lives, it'll change the way we think about ourselves, it'll change the way we think about others, and it'll eliminate judgmentalism. As long as I'm focused on external rules, then I'm always going to be pointing a finger at people that don't keep the rules that I keep, that break the ones that I'm able to keep. But if I realize that that's not the issue, the issue isn't that, the issue is the heart, How can I be critical? How can I be critical of you if I can't even see your heart? If I see you smoke a cigarette, or drink a beer, or yell at your wife, or do less work in the church than I do, that stuff I can see, but I can't see what you spend most of your day loving, or hating, or hoping in, or trusting in. I can't see any of that. If you do a sinful action, I don't know if that thing that you did is the delight of your soul or if it's something that you hate with all your inner being. I can't see if your repentance is real or phony. I can't see any of it. How could I possibly judge you? How could I call you a hypocrite? Did you know that the word hypocrite is never used in the Bible by anyone except for Jesus? Nobody, Jesus uses that word 17 times, 17 times he's calling people hypocrites. But nobody else. Why? Because Jesus is the only one that can see the heart. The word hypocrite means your actions don't match what's in your heart. Well, I can't say that about you. I don't know what's in your heart. I can see your actions, but I don't know what's in your heart. Only God knows the heart. Now, there are plenty of Christians who think they're the exception to that. They think they know people's motives. They know why people do what they're doing. They can see into people's hearts. They think it's the gift of discernment. They think 1 Samuel 16, 7 really says, man looks on the outward appearance, but me and God look on the heart. That's kind of their attitude. But that's absurd! That's absurd! We don't have that power! If you think we do, just try it right now. Just take a good look at me. Just gaze into my eyes. Look hard at me and tell me right now, am I coveting something? How much do I love my wife? Which of my actions tonight or today have had prideful or selfish motives mixed in with good motives, and what's the mixture? Just tell me. You don't know any of that. You can't possibly know. You have no idea. I barely know. See, focusing on the heart really spoils the party when you want to be critical of people. Especially since not only can I not see your heart, but I can see my heart, and that's not a pretty picture. If we're even a little bit honest with ourselves about what goes on inside us, how could we possibly be critical of anybody? If you see someone smoke a cigarette or fail to use his turn signal or whatever it is that makes you look down on people, be critical. If you see that, are you gonna assume from that that they're worse? You look at that and then you look at your own heart and you see that whole disgusting hornet's nest in verses 21 to 23, are you really gonna be critical of that guy with the turn signal? Isn't that the pot calling the kettle black a little bit, except for you don't even know how black he is, you just really know how black your heart is. Can you imagine the difference it would make in our judgmentalism in the church if we understood that the issue is the heart, that only the heart can be unclean, and only God can see the heart? If we really believe that, instead of justifying ourselves and criticizing others and condemning other people, we would always have the perspective that I am the worst person I know. I am the worst sinner I know. Why? Because I can see the filth of my heart. I can't see the filth of anyone else's heart, but I see mine every day. How would that change our relationships? How would that change our marriages? If we thought this way, if we had this attitude, how would it change our parenting? You know, we tell our kids, I can't believe you did that, and we're all condemning, you know, I would never dream of doing something like that. When I was your age, I would never have thought of that. Oh, really? Oh, really? You would never dream? Why? Why not? Are you not a sinner? What if circumstances were different? Are you sure? Are you positive that you would never dream of doing that evil thing if you were in their same circumstances? When you say, I would never dream of doing something like that, what if Jesus were standing right there at that moment and said, oh, would you like me to remind you of some of the things that you've dreamed of in your lifetime? Because I remember, let's just take it from, say, your teenage years, and we'll go from there, and I'll remind you of some of the stuff, some of the thoughts that you've entertained in your heart. I mean, is your heart really that much better than theirs? with as much exposure as we have to our own evil. Why is this even an issue? Why does Jesus even have to tell us this? Why is this in the Bible? Shouldn't this be the most obvious fact in the world? Why do we need to be told? Here's why. Did you notice the last two items? Look at the list again, verses 21 to 23. Look at the last two items on the list. What are they? Arrogance and folly. That means we're fools and we're proud of ourselves. That's quite the combination, to have folly and arrogance. I mean, our folly is the reason why human wisdom can never solve the problem of our uncleanness. Because we're just full of folly. We're full of foolishness. That means to be a moral fool. How can my own heart figure out a way to clean itself when all it produces is evil and folly? Obviously, nothing I could ever do is going to solve the problem, because I'm the source of the problem. If you want to purify some water that you drew out of a filthy well, you're not going to do it by drawing more stuff out of that well. That's not going to work. If my heart is the problem, nothing my heart can ever come up with will ever solve the problem. Neither will any solution from some other sinful well, some other evil heart. It's got to come from God. And all of that should just be patently obvious. But it's not because another evil our hearts have besides folly is pride and arrogance, which is just amazing. You would think a heart this twisted and this perverse, this ugly, this diseased, would just want to crawl under a rock in shame. But instead, it's puffed up with pride and proud of itself and arrogant and looks down on others. That's why we need Jesus to just be honest with us and tell us straight and point out the real source of evil is in our hearts. It should be obvious, but it's not because of our pride. Probably the biggest reason why we're so attracted to legalism, why there's that gravitational pull towards legalism all the time, is because we need legalism to justify ourselves. If I want to feel good about myself, it's a whole lot easier to go down a checklist and say, I didn't touch that, I didn't watch that, I never went there, I didn't do that, I said this, I did all my stuff, and I read my Bible, and I went to this, and I went to that, and I prayed. That's a whole lot easier than looking at my heart and asking questions like, how much did I love God today? How much did I hate evil? What were my attitudes? And if I stick with hard issues, justifying myself just gets a whole lot harder, doesn't it? I get a whole lot more dependent on Jesus' grace and His blood covering my sin. But don't think that Jesus' purpose here is just to condemn you. It's not. It's not. It's to motivate you to seek cleansing. He wants to clean you. But you gotta seek it first, right? We won't get serious about dealing with the problem until we know how serious the problem is. When people make excuses for not coming to Christ, that just shows they don't have any idea of how filthy they are. Because if you knew, you would want it. You know, when I was a kid, I'll just tell you this story. When I was a kid, I spent a summer on my uncle's dairy farm. Now, the barn where they had all these cows, where they milked the cows with these machines, they had all the cows lined up in a row, and behind the cows there was a trough where everything that came out of the cows went, that caught the mess that came from the cows. Now, I'm not going to ruin your week by describing what was in there, but I'll just tell you, it's enough to know, what was in there was like the consistency of a milkshake. Well, one sad day, guess who fell into that trough? It's like the worst day of my life. I fell into that mess. It was so disgusting. I go run into the house and My aunt meets me there now imagine this Imagine I get to the doorstep and my aunt sees that sees me like that and she says Daryl Get in the shower. Take a shower and I say well I don't know. You know, people who take showers, they just think they're cleaner than everyone else. And I'm not really into that. I don't know about... She's like, no, no, seriously, you need to take a shower. Get in there and take a shower. I'm like, oh, I don't know. You know, there's so many brands of soap. I don't know which one is the best one. How could anyone know? And I'm just not into that. Take a shower. You're filthy. You stick. Well, you know, there's plenty of people out there that are dirtier than me. And I've been clean before. If I did that, if I'm throwing out arguments like that, what does that mean? It means I don't really think I have a problem. But that wasn't what happened. I can tell you, I was desperate. More than anything else, I wanted someone to get a hose, point it at me, open it up, and spray that stuff off of me. I couldn't wait. I didn't care if it was cold or uncomfortable. I just wanted that stuff off of me. See, Jesus is doing us a huge favor by letting us know you're covered in manure. You need to be desperate for a shower because if you're not desperate, you won't seek it and you won't get the cleansing. So this passage isn't as morbid as it sounds when he just lists all these sins and then ends. It's not morbid. If you wanna cure a disease, you've got to figure out the cause and that's not morbid. If you wanna have success in fighting it, you gotta find the source, the sin beneath the sin that's causing it. One of the classes, speaking of morbid, one of the classes that doctors have to take in medical school is called morbid anatomy. Morbid anatomy, the word morbid technical meaning is diseased. Morbid anatomy is this field of studying the diseased organs, diseased body parts. Obviously they have to study that, right? If a med student enrolls in Morbid Anatomy 101, is that a morbid thing to do? No, it's not. Because he's got to know how to cure the disease. So he has to know the cause of the disease. Our granddaughter, Abigail, had to be taken in an emergency C-section because she wasn't moving. That was why they took her. She wasn't moving. So what's the solution? They take her out of her mother's womb. What's the solution? Just get her moving? No. You've got to find out why she's not moving. Turns out she wasn't moving because she wasn't getting enough oxygen. So they just give her oxygen? No. They've got to figure out why isn't she getting oxygen. It was because of trauma to her major organs. Well, what caused the trauma to the major organs? Well, that was caused by a problem with the mucus that her body was producing. It was too thick, and that was causing all kinds of damage. Why? What caused the mucus in her body to be too thick? That was caused by a lack of ability for her body to retain enough salt. Okay, so now what's the solution? Did they just salt her? No, no. Why isn't she retaining the salt? What's going on? And they kept going down and down and down until they finally found the root problem, which was cystic fibrosis, which is causing all that. Now that's something they know how to treat. They didn't know what treatment to give her until they found that root cause, and then they could give her a treatment that will help. I'm so grateful for doctors who have spent countless hours in study of morbid anatomy, because they're the ones that figured all that out, and now they're taking care of her. That's exactly what our sin problem is like. The same thing. We say and do evil things, and we try to deal with it just by changing our actions. It's like we're taking an emotionless baby and just moving his arms or something, or we're throwing salt on him. And we don't have success because we don't get to the root problem. We don't understand morbid anatomy. And what Jesus is doing here in verses 21 to 23 is giving us a class on morbid analogy of the heart. It's not just a random list of sins. It's a morbid anatomy class. and notice how complex the heart is. We get a lot of insight from this list. Again, it's not just a random list. Sometimes psychologists will criticize biblical counselors because they say we're being too simplistic when we talk about heart issues. It's just an issue of the heart, and they think that's simplistic somehow. This is anything but simplistic. Just as your body has all kinds of different organs and tissues and systems and all the complexities of your body that don't interact, it's the same way with your heart, your inner man. Just look at the variety of things that Jesus lists here. He starts with evil thoughts. So what is that? That's a function of your mind, right? Your thinking. Then he says sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery. Those four, those are physical actions that result from an act of the will, right? A decision that you make. Next one, greed. That involves your desires and your affections, what you love, and your values, what things are more valuable to you than other things. All right? So we've got thoughts, we've got decisions, we've got the will, we've got desires, we've got affections, we've got values. Next one, malice and then arrogance. Those are both attitudes, an overall attitude. Deceit, that involves the will and speech and values. Lewdness, lewdness is somebody that's just unrestrained by social restraints, they just have all this immorality and they don't care about mores. That has to do with, again, attitudes and values. Envy, that has to do with desires and affections. Slander, that has to do with words and attitudes. Folly, that's the product of your thinking and your values and your perspective. So the point is, there's all these, when you sin, If you're serious about dealing with it, getting that cancer out of there, you've got to look down to these kinds of things. You've got to ask yourself questions like this. Anytime you're dealing with any sin in your life, here's some questions for you. What were the inclinations? Start with desires. What were the wrong desires that led me into this sin? And what inclinations of my heart caused me to have those kinds of desires? And what were my motives? And what feelings and emotions led me to be vulnerable to that temptation when it hit? And what thought patterns resulted in those emotions? I mean, I felt that way because I was thinking a certain way. What thought patterns started that? What perspectives did you have that caused you to have those kinds of thought patterns? What sinful attitudes and desires caused you to look at things from those perspectives? And what caused those attitudes? What was the origin of your desires? 1 John 2 16 says, all your desires come either from God or from the world. Where did the desires come from? What was your heart in love with that it should have hated? What is your heart apathetic about that it should love? and rejoicing, what were you hoping in at the time? What were you trusting in at the time? What were you seeking? What, and here's the bottom of it all, what wrong beliefs were the soil out of which all that stuff grew? You short with your spouse? You just like give a sharp remark or whatever? Don't just say, oh, I'm sorry, I need to watch my tongue. No, ask yourself, where did my selfish attitude come from? What pattern of thoughts nurtured that attitude? What started those thoughts? Why did I want to think those thoughts? Keep going deeper, keep going deeper until you find those culprits and then sever those roots. That's where you deal with the problem of sin. Otherwise, you'll just pick the apples, you'll pull the weeds, and five more will just come right up after. All right, one final point of application. This is the fourth out of my four. When we look at this passage, we see how severe the problem is of our evil, and we see there's no human solution, and we're just left at the end of the passage like, what hope is there? Is there a power somewhere in the universe that can take care of this impossible problem of my incurably evil heart? How about the guy in verse 19 who cleansed all foods? Foods, he's got the power to cleanse pork. He's got the power to make every unclean, all these unclean foods that God himself made unclean in the Old Testament, this guy can just make them all clean. He has the power to cleanse all foods just with an act of his will. He can do that. He can cleanse anything, right? He can cleanse anything. Jesus Christ is the solution, and where does that, how does that solution come to you? What's the avenue? I mean, Jesus is there for everybody, but not everyone is being cleaned, so how do you get that cleaning? Well, what hints do we have in this passage? Let's go back to phase one. What did the Pharisees, how did they get it wrong? What'd they do? Verse eight, you have let go of what? the commands of God." Verse 9, you have a fine way of setting aside what? The commands of God. Verse 13, you nullify the word of God by your tradition. So that's very clear. The wrong way to do it is human tradition. The right way is the word of God. That's the pipeline. That's the fire hose that'll spray you off. When you deal with sin in your life, Keep digging, keep digging, keep digging until you find you got a handle on the complex root causes down beneath the sin, beneath the sin, all the attitudes and beliefs and perspectives and values and all the rest. And then find out what does the Word of God say about this wrong value? What does the Word of God say about how to change this desire? What does the Word of God say about having this wrong perspective? How do I get a better perspective? Find out what the Word says, apply it to your heart, cleansing will come, and the power will all come from the Lord Jesus Christ. In the message, I said that the kosher laws were symbolic laws, not moral laws. And I want to clarify that a little bit. When I say that, I don't mean to imply that they were unimportant or they were somehow optional or anything like that. Not at all. God actually required the death penalty for breaking some of those symbolic laws. They were very important. Symbolism can be important. You know, in the military, Is standing at attention and saluting your superiors, is that symbolic? Yes. Are stripes on uniforms symbolic? Yeah, they're just stripes, they're just fabric. But are they unimportant or optional in any way? No. No. If you refuse to salute a general when he walks in, you're going to be in a lot of trouble in the military. Symbolism is important. And the people understood that. It was very important to them. The big heroes in the Jewish culture at Jesus' time were from the Maccabean period, just not long before Jesus. They were people who stood up to Antiochus Epiphanes. He tried to force the Jews to eat pork, and they died in the hundreds rather than do so. In chapter 7 of 4, Maccabees tells the story of a widow and her seven sons. They refused to eat the pork, and so he tortured them to death in front of their mother, one at a time. The first son had his tongue cut out, and the ends of his limbs cut off, and then he was roasted alive in a pan. The second had his hair and the skin of his skull torn off, and on it went, one by one. And all they would have had to do to make it all stop was just eat a piece of pork. Can you imagine being fried to death in a pan and all you have to do to make it stop is just eat a piece of bacon? This is how big a deal this was to them. And it was a big deal not only because of the uncleanness issue, but because the kosher rules were one of the biggest ways God made the Jews distinct from the rest of the world, from the Gentiles. Again, another symbol. God wanted his people to be holy, set apart from sin, that's the reality, but as an illustration of that, he made them set apart from other nations in lots of physical, visible ways to illustrate it. So they dressed different, they spoke different, they ate different. So following the kosher rules was a big part of what gave Jews their identity as a people. That's one reason why Christian Jews had such a hard time throughout the New Testament, because the gospel was requiring them to become one with Gentile believers, and that was just unthinkable for them. And we see in Acts 10 that a big part of what set them apart from Gentiles was the kosher laws, because when God told Peter to go eat with a Gentile, he prepared Peter for that by giving him a vision of unclean food and telling him to eat it. So the kosher laws were not just a cultural preference for the Jews, they were the essence of religion. And there's no real parallel that I can think of in our culture. I mean, if you could imagine Jesus coming today and saying, okay, go ahead and start using F-words, you know, that's fine now, you can speak that way. I mean, even if Jesus told you you could do it, you probably wouldn't, right? Or if he said, adultery is okay now, you can go ahead if you want to do that, that's fine. That would just be hard for us to accept. You wouldn't be able to do those things because they would violate your conscience, even if Jesus legalized them. You've grown your whole life thinking something's evil. And that's what happened with Christian Jews. For a lot of people, eating unclean food just bothered their conscience. Even after they knew that Jesus said it was okay, they couldn't bring themselves to do it because it bothered their conscience so much. That's what we read about in passages like 1 Corinthians 8. Now, that analogy about the F-words and adultery, that's not a direct analogy because those are moral commands, not ceremonial ones. But in their mindset, there wasn't much difference between the two. That's the thing. They had obliterated the distinction between symbols and reality. In fact, if anything, the ceremonial laws were even more important than the moral ones to them, and none more than the kosher laws. You know, we've studied in the past about the Sabbath, another really big part of the Jewish identity was the Sabbath, and yet as big a deal as the Sabbath was, When Jesus brought that to an end, that wasn't nearly as big a crisis as the kosher laws. There's a couple of verses in the New Testament about Sabbath controversies. There are whole chapters on the issue of what to do about the non-kosher foods. Galatians 2, Romans 14, 1 Corinthians 8, Colossians 2, Acts 10, Acts 11, Acts 15. It was a very, very big deal. And by the way, just as a side note, the fact that the kosher laws were one of the main things that distinguished Jews from Gentiles could explain why Mark places this account right here in his gospel. You know, there's no sequential marker. He's not saying that this happened right after the event before it, or right before the event after it, like he does other times. So, we don't know when this happened, but Mark puts it right here in his book, right before Jesus leaves the country and starts going into Gentile territory. That's significant. Jesus is already laying the foundation for the removal of the wall of hostility between Jews and Gentiles. One other thing about the distinction between moral laws and symbolic ones. In one sense, the kosher laws were moral issues simply because it's always immoral to disobey God. If God commands something, then it's immoral to disobey Him. When I say they're different from what I'm calling the moral law, and those are my terms, moral law and symbolic law, those are just terms I'm using, those aren't biblical terms. But when I make that distinction, the difference that I'm talking about is this. The moral laws are actions that are inherently opposed to the nature of God, like lying, stealing, unfaithfulness, idolatry, that kind of stuff. God would never say that, okay, now those things are all right, they're legalized. That would never happen because those violate His very character. The symbolic laws don't inherently violate His character, so He can require them for one period and then allow them in another period without being inconsistent. So it would have been immoral for Jews in the Old Testament to disobey those commands. But in the case of the Pharisees, their devotion to the symbolic laws actually became immoral. Their devotion to those laws became immoral because they lost sight of the spiritual realities that were being symbolized. They lost sight of the heart. It would be like, if you get consumed with the symbol above the substance, an illustration of that, imagine I pointed to my wedding ring and said, this ring is a symbol of my commitment to Tracy, this is my marriage, and I just want to be the greatest husband ever, and so from now on, I'm going to wear 20 wedding rings. Well, does that make me a better husband? No. It just means I don't understand symbols, right? Because a symbol doesn't become more symbolic or more meaningful by doubling it up. It already means whatever it means. If baptism symbolizes spiritual cleansing, if you go and rent scuba gear and get baptized 40 meters under, you're not any cleaner before God than the guy who gets dunked in the trough, right? In fact, you might be less clean because you don't understand what's going on. You don't even understand the gospel if you're doing something like that. Now, if we want to compare the ring illustration with the Pharisees, it would be like this. Suppose my wife is starving, but I refuse to sell all my gold rings to get her some food because selling my wedding rings would be a betrayal of my marriage. That's the kind of attitude they had towards the symbols. Or if a mugger had a gun to my wife's head and says, give me those rings or she dies. And I say, go ahead and shoot her. I'm not giving this up because this ring, this is my marriage. I'm committed to my marriage. That's the sort of thing the Pharisees were doing with the symbols that God had given them for cleanness. And that's not just unique to the Pharisees. As I said in the message, there's a gravitational pull in the direction of externalism for all people, focusing on religious forms instead of the heart. That happens throughout Israel's history. For Jews of the Old Testament, circumcision. Very big deal, right? God commanded that. But they forgot that it was a symbol. They forgot that circumcision was a physical act designed to be symbolic, illustrating a spiritual cleansing. And so multiple times in the Old Testament, Deuteronomy 10, Deuteronomy 30, Jeremiah 4, God reminded the people, you need to circumcise your hearts. Ezekiel 14 condemns the people for setting up idols in their hearts. The book of Isaiah begins in chapter one with God telling the people that he's had it with all their sacrifices and new moons and assemblies and all the rest, stuff that he commanded, and he was sick of it because their sin remained in their hearts. In Malachi 1, God tells the priest he wishes they would just shut the doors of the temple because of what was in their hearts while they were doing the ceremonies. In fact, take a look at the really good example of this is in Psalm 51. Turn to Psalm 51, take a look at that. This is David's prayer of repentance after his sin with Bathsheba, and in this prayer you can tell he really, really wants to be clean. He had soiled himself, he was filthy in God's sight, he knew it, and he desperately wanted to be clean again. He asked again and again through that psalm to be cleansed. But look at verse 16, Psalm 51, 16. You do not delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it. You do not take pleasure in burnt offerings. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, a broken and contrite heart. That's in the Old Testament. Even the words Jesus spoke to the Pharisees back in verse 6, these people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. That's a quotation from the Old Testament, Isaiah 29, 13. So the primacy of the heart over rituals and external religious forms was nothing new. That's everywhere throughout the Old Testament. So the disciples should have known this. Verse 17, it says, after he left the crowd and entered the house, his disciples asked him about this parable. And you might read that and say, wait a minute, how's this a parable? I thought a parable was a story, you know, an earthly story with a heavenly meaning or something. Not always. The word parable can just mean riddle or hard saying, any hard saying. Well, is this a hard saying? Well, it was for them. What's the definition of a hard saying? Any saying that's hard. I mean, it's not that if Jesus says something and you don't get it, then for you, that's a parable. That's a hard saying. See, a statement doesn't have to be complicated to be hard. It just has to contradict something you believe. If I believe the earth is flat, you tell me it's round, that's a hard saying for me. It's not complicated, it's not complex, but it's hard because it doesn't fit my current beliefs. And so that's what happened here. So the disciples asked Jesus what it means, and he rebukes them. Verse 18, are you so dull? Their dullness and lack of understanding actually becomes a major theme and a big issue in chapter eight, verses 14 to 21. And it's just surfacing here. Actually, it's surfaced already in the book. He's mentioned this a few times, that they didn't understand things they should have understood. By this point, at the very least, the disciples should have been able to figure out that Jesus was talking about the heart, not ceremonial, symbolic, uncleanness, external things. So, the heart was always the issue for God. That's always the issue. But then someone might think, well then, why did God command all those rituals and symbols? If he wanted people to focus on the heart, why didn't he do like he does today and not have very many rituals and symbols? The reason he had the rituals and symbols was they were necessary to teach the people that the problem of uncleanness could only be solved by God. They needed to understand that. They didn't have the Messiah to look to, so they had to look to something. They needed to understand that cleansing before God is a supernatural act. No human effort can possibly get it done. A ritually unclean person couldn't even enter the temple, right? If you had violated the codes, you couldn't go in the temple and worship God. If you tried to invent your own way of becoming clean, you could just scrub yourself with special soap, or scrub yourself with a wire brush, or take a bath in acid, or whatever, nothing would work. There's no way you could possibly clean yourself. The only thing that would work would be the exact ritual that God had prescribed for that particular thing. Why? So that the people would learn that only God can do the cleansing. And how did God do it? How did he accomplish the cleansing? Well, that wasn't revealed. I mean, it was hinted at in passages like Isaiah 53, but it wasn't fully revealed until Jesus came. It couldn't be. So the cleanness rituals and the sacrifices, the kosher laws, all of that was like a stand-in until Jesus came. Something for the people to look to for cleansing until Jesus came. Once Jesus came, those had to go so that all eyes would be on Christ. See, that's why Jesus did away with those. He fulfilled all those pictures so that all eyes would be on Him and there wouldn't be a divided focus. Jesus is the one who cleanses and God doesn't want that spotlight shared with any ritual illustrations. So we don't need the illustrations anymore because we have the reality. So, in the Old Testament, they did need them, so God gave them all these rituals, all these illustrations and symbols. What happened? Well, the weeds took over the garden, and their entire religious system coalesced around the symbols, and they forgot about the realities. They got so caught up with the external rules of Sabbath restrictions, and dietary restrictions, and religious procedures, they forgot the spiritual realities that those things were symbols of. They thought they were being great Jews by practicing circumcision, and offering sacrifices, and observing Sabbath, and only eating the right foods, kosher foods, avoiding any kind of symbolic uncleanness. They thought they were being great Jews. That's what Jewish religion had become. The ritualism, the symbolism, the external forms, that was their whole religion. That was everything. And it's why they kept adding even more rituals and ceremonies, because If that's what religion is, then the more the better. If rituals bring you closer to God, then twice as many rituals should bring you even closer to God yet, right? And so then Jesus comes along and says, as of right now, I'm canceling all the symbolism. It's done. You can forget about it. It's gone. And what did they have left? Nothing. They had nothing left. Can you see how devastating this was to them? Can you see why they wanted to kill Jesus? When Jesus took away the symbols, all the rituals and Sabbaths and sacrifice and circumcision and kosher laws and all that, there was absolutely nothing left because that was their whole religion. We can kind of point the finger at them or religions today that have a lot of symbolism, but really this is a problem for all of us. Elevating symbol above reality happens in every culture, in every person's life, just like weeds happen in every garden. they have shouting and fistfights at peace marches. We get caught up with symbolism and forget about reality, the internal reality. Christians go online and debate about the doctrine of baptism and their tone is full of venom and disdain and sarcasm and arrogance as they argue over a symbolic act. Symbolic of what? Spiritual cleansing. They soil themselves spiritually arguing about the best way to symbolize cleanness. We all do this. We all tend toward externalism. I mean, don't you, isn't it true, don't you feel a lot cleaner if you get to the end of the day without having performed any bad actions than you do on a day when you did commit some bad actions, even if the day you committed those bad actions, most of the day your heart was good, and the day you didn't commit any bad actions, most of the day your heart was bad. We should feel worse if our heart was bad most of the day, but we tend to feel good or bad based on actions. And isn't it true that your natural tendency is to look down on people who don't perform the same kinds of actions you perform in all your efforts to live out your faith? It's like I said in the message that this is why legalists are so critical all the time. Because here's how it goes. It starts good. We read something in the Bible about our hearts, and we say, okay, I want to obey that. How can I put that principle into practice? The Bible says, love your neighbor. Well, that's not very specific, right? If I love my neighbor, what will that look like in specific instances in my life when I see panhandlers on the way to work? What does love my neighbor look like? Do I give them money? Do I give them food? Do I give them the gospel? Do I ignore them? What if my child gets arrested on a DUI? Does love let him sit overnight in jail to learn a lesson or bail him out or what's the best thing? We all have to answer hard questions like that and it can be difficult. but we do it, we wrestle through it, we land on a conclusion, and we say, okay, I think this would be the best way to fulfill God's command to love my neighbor. This practice, this will be my policy when I see panhandlers, here's what I'm gonna do. So far, so good, right? That's exactly the way we should respond to the word of God. The problem comes when I do that, and I come up with the practice of what I think best reflects love, and then I start focusing on that practice, and I forget about the actual heartfelt love. I give whatever I've decided to give, but I look down on the homeless person, or I'm annoyed by them, or I think I'm better than them, and yet I'm having this bad attitude, I'm not loving them, and yet I'm patting myself on the back for obeying the command to love because I'm following my policy that I came up with. or you could go to the other branch of legalism, imposing my practices on you. So I come up with this policy that I landed on, this is what I'm gonna do for homeless people, and then I expect you to follow it. Otherwise, I'm gonna accuse you of not really loving them. I came up with this policy for watching movies that's the best way for me to guard my heart from impurity, and then I turn around, I look down on you because you don't have the same policy about movies. See, we need to remember, our policies for how to implement God's Word are not the same as God's Word. And we can't impose them on others that's legalism. And when a whole bunch of people adopt the same policy, and that goes on for a lot of years, then it becomes a binding tradition, right? And once that happens in a church, it rises above God's Word very often in importance because it's so much easier to interpret that tradition than it is to interpret God's Word. It's easier to interpret because it's all about actions, not the heart. And this is how legalism creeps into churches and denominations. You've probably heard the old joke, you know why Southern Baptists are against premarital sex? Because it could lead to dancing. Now that joke is funny because it gets a little too close to the truth. We set up a safeguard to keep us from breaking God's law, and before long we're more committed to the safeguard than we are to the actual biblical law. Now, some people argue that Jesus didn't really eradicate the kosher laws, especially in the Messianic movement. You're gonna find this a lot. They say that Jesus didn't make all foods clean, and their argument is there's no way Jesus would make such a massive, earth-shattering change in Judaism in such an offhanded way, because it's just a, in verse 19, it's even more offhanded than you think. The literal translation of verses 18 and 19 would be this. Jesus asks, don't you see that nothing that enters a man from the outside can make him unclean? For it doesn't go into his heart, but into his stomach and then into the toilet, thus cleansing all foods. That's all it says, thus cleansing all foods. And Mark, you know, he just kind of throws that in, thus cleansing all foods. It seems like such a monumental upheaval to Judaism would require a little more verbiage than that. And so they say, it must have meant something else. And they come up with strained interpretations to avoid Jesus canceling the kosher laws. One approach is to say that the elimination process, when Jesus says it goes into the toilet, that's the literal phrase there. They say it's that whole elimination process that cleanses all foods, because after it passes through the system, then it's not considered unclean, which makes no sense to me, because what goes into the toilet is definitely unclean. Ezekiel 4, 12-15. Another approach is to take it to mean that the body cleanses itself of the food. It's not talking about cleanness before God or ceremonial cleanness. It's just saying the body cleanses itself through the elimination process. But even if that's what we're saying, you still have the problem of Jesus saying very clearly that nothing that enters a man from the outside can make him unclean. Even without the phrase at the end, even if you get rid of that phrase, thus cleansing all foods, you still have to deal with the statement. Nothing can make you unclean. So that would include food. In fact, food is in the context. Now, others have argued that if Jesus cleansed all food in Mark 7, then why would it still be an issue in the book of Acts? Wouldn't the church have just said in the book of Acts, oh, Jesus settled this 10 years ago when he cleansed all foods back in Mark 7? Well, the reason it was a big deal still in Acts is because it was so hard for them to accept. Now, Paul actually did take that approach. For him, it was cut and dried. Romans 14, 14, he just says, no, food is unclean in itself. That's it. I mean, that should settle the whole thing, I would think. And that would even include food sacrificed to idols in context. But as for why it's still a controversy in Acts, it's because it was so hard for them to accept. God told Peter in plain language, kill and eat. He showed him unclean animals in the vision. He says, kill and eat. He commanded him directly. And Peter knew he was talking to God, and yet he argues in Acts 10, 11. He saw heaven open and something like a large sheet being let down to the earth by its four corners. It contained all kinds of four-footed animals, as well as reptiles of the earth and birds of the air. Those are unclean animals. Then a voice told him, get up, Peter, kill and eat. Surely not, Lord, Peter replied. I've never eaten anything impure or unclean. The voice spoke to him a second time. Do not call anything impure that God has made clean. This happened three times. Now that's very clear. God commanded Peter to eat unclean animals, and when Peter refused, because he had never eaten unclean food, God told him not to call impure anything God has made clean. Some people have tried to say, well, God is only speaking of Gentiles, not of unclean food, because that's how this ends up being applied later on. But the context is very clear. It was the unclean food that God commanded Peter to eat in the vision. Now it was connected to meeting with Gentiles, because again, that's what set Jews apart from Gentiles. Okay, now some notes about the source of evil, the list of evils in the heart. In verses 21 to 23, there are 13 items in the list. The first one is evil thoughts, followed by two groups of six. The first six, the first group of six are all plural, referring to individual incidents of sin. The second group are all singular, referring to the overall condition of having that sin in you. And the fact that evil thoughts heads the list, I think would be, kind of come as a shock to most people in our culture, because most people think that evil can only be an action, not a thought. They think if they have evil thoughts but don't act on them, then they're patting themselves on the back for being so self-controlled. Again, but Jesus said, no, evil thoughts belong in the same list with things like stealing and adultery and murder and all the rest. And if you wonder why that is, all you have to do is read more of Jesus' teaching and you find out all the other evils and lists spring from evil thoughts. If you hate, you're guilty of murder. If you lust, you're guilty of adultery and so on. Jesus taught that in the Sermon on the Mount and elsewhere. So if you let your thoughts run in a natural direction, when you're done, you'll be worse than you were to begin with. The sin inside us is like a fire and evil thoughts are like kindling. So evil thoughts are at the beginning. Next, sexual immorality. That's the broadest term for any kind of sexual sin, including everything that the Bible forbids with regard to sexuality. Adultery, fornication, homosexuality, incest, lust, all of it. Next, theft. You know what that is, stealing, finding stuff before it's lost. Murder. Those are the first three. Sexual immorality, theft, murder. The next three correspond to the first three, adultery, greed, and malice. So adultery is one form of sexual immorality. Theft and greed go together. The act of stealing obviously comes from the attitude of greed. Malice and murder go together. Malice is ill will towards someone, and murder carries that out. So that's the first six. Then deceit, which includes fraud, treachery, trapping someone with bait. It's kind of a broad concept, any kind of deceit. Lewdness, that's when someone just goes off the deep end with indecency, debauchery, sensuality, total disregard for social moral standards or mores. Next, envy, literally the evil eye. That can refer to stinginess or envy. Envy is when you feel unhappiness at someone else's good fortune. It's such a wicked thing. I mean, it doesn't do you any good. You just are upset. It's the opposite of rejoicing with those who rejoice. You're unhappy because something good happened to somebody else. Slander, that's abusive speech, hurting someone's reputation. And then folly, that's Moral stupidity like the fool in the book of Proverbs And Jesus says all these evils come from inside and make a man unclean The fact that you have all that in you is what makes you unclean before God And even people who try to deny the existence of any set morality or absolute moral standard, if they look at this list, they would have to admit those things are bad, right? I mean, Jesus chose sins that everyone can see are bad. If Jesus would have listed the worst sins, things like failure to love God, failure to fear God, idolatry, blasphemy, stuff like that, Most people in the world don't see that stuff as being all that evil, but Jesus chose a list that everyone can see as really, really evil. It's just an ugly list. Now, still, our culture tries their hardest to put their heads in the sand when it comes to evil in the human heart. They rename everything with innocent-sounding terms so they don't have sin, they have issues. Who could be blamed for having an issue? It doesn't sound very evil. They don't have unforgiving, vengeful hearts. They just have baggage, dysfunction, imbalance, disorder. They're not guilty of sexual immorality, they're just passionate people. It's not arrogance, it's self-esteem. It's not folly, they just have insecurities. Just all these different words. But with all their efforts to convince themselves of all that, they still act like people who are unacceptable, unfit, and broken, and who desperately want to become acceptable, worthy, and restored. They sense that. You strip away all that terminology, and you look at this stuff for what it is, and it is ugly. And even though they deny the authority of God's Word, and they set up their own standards of good and evil that they say are good and evil, still, no matter how much they dumb down the standard, they still fall short of whatever lame standard they came up with, and they're left feeling unclean. And they go to great lengths to remedy that feeling of being unfit, unlovable, not acceptable, not valuable. And when they search for a solution, it's always a human solution, which is why it never works. And it's always an effort to separate themselves from whatever they think the source of evil is. They don't think they're the source. They think there's some other source, so they just separate themselves. They run from this influence or that influence and try to outrun the condemnation that's right on their heels, but none of it works because you can't outrun your own shadow. That's why monasticism doesn't work. You can't escape the disease when you're the carrier. Very few people understand how deeply ingrained evil is in human nature. One of the most fundamental markers of human nature is the mistaken belief that we can change human nature. After the Enlightenment, everyone was convinced that mankind had turned the corner on finally improving human nature. And they're thinking, oh, we just need a little technology, a little education, and we got it. We got ourselves enlightened, and mankind is finally lifted out of the dark ages, and we're on the doorstep of utopia, right around the corner. And people attribute it to different things, education, or capitalism, or communism, or scientific advancements, or psychology, or whatever, religious factors. In fact, at that time, post-millennialism got really popular. That's the idea that the church is going to get more and more influential, get better and better, until finally we just usher in the millennial kingdom on the earth prior to the second coming. And people would look at the graph of progress and say, yeah, I can see that happening. I can see that. We're changing human nature here. Then came World War I and World War II, and they put the entire human race back to square one, and all the theories fell apart. And post-millennialism became much less popular in theological circles, because human nature turned out to be way harder to change than everyone thought. All our efforts to reach enlightenment and utopia, or world peace, fell apart because of what we are. And you can't change it. I always get a kick out of it when I hear people, educated, erudite, know-it-all talk show types saying, those who fail to understand history are doomed to repeat it. Every time I hear that I think, yeah, that's true, but so are those who do understand history. Everyone's doomed to repeat it, repeat the follies of the past, because those follies didn't come from lack of education, they came from evil in the human heart. Each new young generation looks to the older generation and says, well, we're not going to make those same mistakes. And every generation grows up and does the same stupid things that the last generation did because they have the same sin-sick hearts. Mankind doesn't make moral progress as time goes on. The church does, and cultures influenced by the church benefit from that. But as a whole, mankind makes no moral progress. Every baby born into the world brings with it the whole problem all over again. Years ago, a friend of mine got an iPad when those were just coming out, and he was raving about it. He told me, you got to get one. It'll make you a better person. And he was joking, and it was a funny joke because of how absurd it is. Technology does not make us any better, does it? Technology, modern medicine, all the advancements of our day, they made life better in a lot of ways, but has it made man any better? No. No, you just look at the list in verses 21-23. Has mankind made any progress in any of those sins over the past 20 years, 150 years, 2,000 years? No. And yet the world still tries to cling to the fantasy that the human heart is essentially good. You know, the guy has too much to drink and beats his wife, but, you know, he's a good-hearted man. He just had too much to drink. Or a teenager does all kinds of horrible things. Well, yeah, she did that, but she's a good kid. You hear that all the time. He's not a bad person. He's good at heart. Human beings are basically good. The folly of that is a heart can never be any better than the deeds it produces. What kind of insanity pulls up a bucket of black sludge from a well and says, well, no doubt at the bottom of the well is crystal clear water? The evil of the human heart is self-evident, and yet our culture is just so blind to it. And they're mystified whenever evil happens. They're mystified whenever there's a mass shooting. How could anyone possibly do something like that? And their first guess, of course, is always mental illness, even though there's no evidence that that could be connected. The vast majority of people with mental deficiencies are not violent. There's no reason to make that connection. But that's always the assumption, because they don't have any other answer. They get someone like the Las Vegas shooter who showed no indication at all of a mental deficiency. In fact, he's really sharp. And they're just completely stumped. And so then some people say, well, maybe it's the guns themselves. It's the guns, you know? And that doesn't work because other people have guns and they don't commit murder. So what could possibly be the cause? And so along comes Jesus and says, well, how about evil in the human heart? Oh, that's ridiculous. The human heart is good, not evil. People are fundamentally good at heart. Then where does the evil come from? It's obvious it has to come from the human heart. You know, we just naturally tend to think that humanity is divided into two groups. The good guys and the bad guys. That's just the way we think. But that doesn't work. There might be better guys and worse guys, but evil can be found in every heart. Lots of it. No matter how many people you find who are worse than you, still, any honest person has to admit we're all part of what makes the world a miserable, broken place. We are all part of what makes the world a miserable, broken place. We have to admit that if we're honest. Plenty of people have groaned about how broken this world is after having some encounter with me. And I'm guessing the same might be true of you. And there are some political ramifications to this as well. It's ignorance of human nature that enables socialism and communism to survive. So many people in our country now are clamoring for socialism, and so I just want to make a comment about this. The idea is, let's take the money from the rich people and distribute it fairly to those who really deserve it. Now, capitalists will argue that the more you do that, the more you destroy incentive, which reduces risk in production, which results in less wealth all around, so that very soon there's no money to redistribute to the poor people and it hurts everybody. And that's an economic argument. Let's set that aside for now. And just think about the colossal ignorance of human nature that's required in order for someone to support socialism. Let's say it works. Just economically, let's just pretend it works. Let's just grant that. Let's pretend there's enough money in the pockets of rich people to put everyone in a good place financially. If we just distributed it fairly, everyone would be wealthy if we just took that money and distributed it fairly. And let's pretend that the rich people, if we did that, they would keep right on producing all that wealth, even though they didn't get to keep it, they would just keep working and keep reproducing it so that we could all keep redistributing it to the people who kept losing theirs and squandering theirs or whatever. Because we know if you gave everyone a million dollars today, a week from now, somebody would be broke. That's just reality. So it would have to keep going. So just let's pretend all that's true. We can solve all society's problems if we just take money from the evil, selfish, greedy people and redistribute it fairly. Here's my question. Who are these sinless angels who are going to be in charge of that program? Who are the politicians who can be trusted to redistribute all that money fairly rather than keeping it for themselves or giving it to the people who promised to get them re-elected and give them power? There's no such animal. I mean, to think that there are politicians like that is just a complete ignorance of human nature. Secondly, if the people with the money are evil and selfish and greedy, what's going to happen when you give all that money to other people? Will those other people, the oppressed people, the people that are being trampled on now, when they get all this money, will they be selfless and generous and magnanimous? Or will they be just like the rich people are now and become selfish and cruel? This world absolutely has its head in the sand when it comes to human nature. Are rich people selfish? Yeah! But so are politicians and so are poor people. Evil doesn't come from income inequality, it comes from the human heart. Every human heart. you