would invite you to turn to the book of Deuteronomy Deuteronomy chapter 10 We'll be reading from verse 12 through verse 22. This is the word of the living and the true God. Now Israel What does the Lord your God require from you? But to fear the Lord your God, to walk in all His ways and love Him, and to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and to keep the Lord's commandments and His good statutes which I am commanding you today for your good. Behold, to the Lord your God belong heaven and the highest heavens, the earth and all that is in it. Yet on your fathers did the Lord set His affection to love them, and He chose their descendants after them, even you above all peoples, as it is this day. So circumcise your heart, and stiffen your neck no longer. For the Lord your God is the God of gods and the Lord of lords, the Great, the Mighty, and the Awesome God, who does not show partiality nor take a bribe. He executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and shows his love for the alien by giving him food and clothing. So show your love for the alien, for you are aliens in the land of Egypt. You shall fear the Lord your God, you shall serve him and cling to him. and you shall swear by His name. He is your praise, and He is your God, who has done great and awesome things for you, which your eyes have seen. Your fathers went down to Egypt seventy persons in all, and now the Lord your God has made you as numerous as the stars of heaven." And now we turn to the New Testament, to Mark chapter 7. looking once more at chapter 7 verses 1 through 13. The Pharisees and some of the scribes gathered around him when they had come from Jerusalem and had seen that some of his disciples were eating their bread with impure hands, that is, unwashed. For the Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they carefully wash their hands, thus observing the traditions of the elders. And when they come from the marketplace, they do not eat unless they cleanse themselves, and there are many other things which they have received in order to observe, such as the washing of cups and pitchers and copper pots. The Pharisees and the scribes asked him, Why do your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders, but eat their bread with impure hands? And he said to them, Rightly did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites. As it is written, This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far away from me. But in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the precepts of men. Neglecting the commandment of God, you hold to the tradition of men. He was also saying to them, You are experts at setting aside the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition. For Moses said, Honor your father and your mother, and he who speaks evil of father or mother is to be put to death. But you say, if a man says to his father or his mother, whatever I have that would help you is korban, that is to say, given to God, you no longer permit him to do anything for his father or his mother, thus invalidating the word of God by your tradition which you have handed down. And you do many things such as that. Let's pray and ask God's blessing. Lord, we thank you for your word. We thank you for Christ, our Lord. And we pray that the word of Christ would dwell in us richly as we hear your word expounded. We pray it in Jesus' name. Amen. Well, this morning we return one last time to the passage that has tremendous importance for the life of the church. We have seen how our Savior rejected the traditions of men because of their detrimental effect upon the Word of God. People must choose whom they will follow, the Word of Man or the Word of God. Too often, people choose the Word of Man in the place of the Word of God. They end up nullifying and invalidating God's word all for the sake of their own traditions. In our first treatment of this text, we saw how this impacts everyday Christian living. In matters like honoring your father and mother, traditions of men do much damage to the clear commandments of God. In our second consideration, last week, we focused on worship and how God truly desires to be worshipped in spirit and in truth according to the clear prescriptions of His word. Although it may seem like we have covered all of the bases that could be covered, I want to take one more look at this passage and at the bigger picture at the overarching themes that undergird this passage. So let's begin this morning with the heart of the matter. Then we're going to look at why human tradition is so offensive and finish with some practical applications. Although this is not always appreciated by conservative Presbyterians, this passage is not really meant to be a new set of rules governing Christian living and public worship. The mistake is easily made. From this passage and from its parallel in Matthew 15, theologians move to what is called the regulative principle of worship. And the regulative principle of worship teaches basically that God himself defines proper worship and that we know what is appropriate in worship by the prescriptions of God's word. And if you know me at all, you know that I support and believe the regulative principle of worship. Well, the regulative principle is indeed found in such passages, and so this move itself is not inherently illegitimate. I'm not questioning the connection between this passage and the regulative principle. It's the next step in the progression that I find more questionable. This is moving from a simple affirmation of the regulative principle to a careful examination of specifics and particulars in a typical worship service. Everything ends up under the theological microscope and then is examined in painstaking detail. The merits of practices like responsive readings are debated. Opinions are reached either in support of or against the specific practice in view. And after one micro-controversy is solved, They move on to the next slide under the microscope. Perhaps this time it would be the propriety of collecting tithes and offerings during the worship service. The same examination can be done on various hymns that appear to be borderline to the more scrupulous. It can even be a particular setting of a psalm, whether that's a good setting or not. and on and on it goes. What has happened is a transformation of a very important passage of scripture into a litmus test of orthodoxy. A brand new set of rules to be enforced. Now I'm suggesting that this passage before us this morning is definitely not intended or designed to be such a litmus test, to provide a new set of rules. I am not advocating reformed Pharisaism. But what then is it all about? What is at the heart of this passage? I believe it is really the question of preeminence. What is most important? What is the chief priority? Who or what matters most? Let me put a finer point on it. Are you God-centered in your thinking? Is the Lord Himself at the very core and center of your life? Do you have a vibrant, living, growing relationship with the Triune God of Heaven? Is God your focus and your chief delight? Or instead, are you really focused mainly and mostly on human beings, upon yourself, upon those around you? Is man your great interest and your chief commitment, or is God your great interest and chief commitment? Or to put it still another way, do you love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind? Is your relationship to God paramount in importance? Are you committed to Him, completely committed to Him? Many people in this world are man-centered in their thoughts and in their priorities. Now sometimes this means that they will focus on another human being as preeminent. They worship the ground those people walk on. But more often, I suspect, it really boils down to self-interest. A self-centeredness prevails in everything they say and do and think. They are committed to their own ease, their own comfort, to their own happiness, to their own success. Their bottom line commitment is to protect and promote themselves as number one. If God has a place in their lives at all, it is on the margins of their lives. Oh, they think about him when it is strictly necessary, perhaps during a time of crisis. or even as they enter the church building for that occasional Sunday morning service. Oh, he's important in a sense, but he is certainly not central to them. Now, you can diagnose this very easily. Just talk to someone. And begin asking them questions. Get them talking. Get them flowing. And then just sit back and listen. to what they say. Listen to how many times they reference themselves, their activities, their achievements, even their frustrations and their sorrows, as opposed to how many times they reference God, the Lord, Jesus. Just keep a mental tally As they're talking, as they're just kind of letting their hearts flow out, what are you hearing? Is it mostly mainly talk about self? Or is it mostly mainly talk about God? And by this, by their fruit, you will know them. You will know what's important in their lives. You'll see pretty clearly Who is at the center of their existence? And honestly, for a lot of people, it's themselves. A friend of mine who is one of my mentors gave me some advice. He said, you know, just ask a few questions of people and get them talking because everyone likes to talk about themselves and sadly it's very effective because he was right most people like to talk about themselves because they believe they are most important they live for themselves. They're self-focused, they're self-obsessed. Because sitting on the throne of their life are they themselves. But what undergirds Jesus' whole approach in this passage is a true commitment of the heart to Christ as Lord. where Christ is at the center, not self. And from that heart commitment to Christ as Lord flows all the priorities and commitments of life. It informs how they will spend their time, their energy, and their money even. Life is defined for a believer from the great cornerstone of God and of His Word. From this wholehearted commitment to God also flows true and proper worship. Because he knows and loves God, this man wants to render what is truly pleasing in God's sight. This person would never ever think of introducing something into God's worship which wasn't previously prescribed by God Himself in the Word. But rather he seeks God's worship to be consistent with the truth of God's Word. He wants to offer the worship that God Himself seeks. Now this is not something particularly new. Let me just read again a few of these verses from Deuteronomy 10. Now Israel, what does the Lord God require from you but to fear the Lord your God, to walk in all His ways and love Him, and to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and to keep the Lord's commandments and His good statutes, which I am commanding you today for your good?" See, that's what Jesus is after. that you would love the Lord your God, that you would serve Him with all your inmost being, that you would cling to Him, that you would give Him your heart, your soul, your very life, offering up yourself to God promptly and sincerely, and saying, God, You have saved me and I give myself to You. Because you are my God, and I love you for all you have done for me." And so the choice is really very clear. Do you love and serve yourself preeminently? Or do you love and serve God above all things? Who's your real Lord? Is it you? Yourself? Or is it Jesus Christ who is your Lord? Well, for many centuries there has been a movement to seek to blend human tradition with God's Word. And it ends up producing a hybrid approach. You might say the best of God's ideas and the best of man's opinions mixed and mingled Very rarely in this world do we find anything that is naked human tradition, that is purely and solely human invention. It most often is packaged in combination with some of God's ways. So you add some human tradition, you add some divine prescription, You mix it all up, and you end up with a potent combo that promises to make everyone happy. But the inclusion of human tradition, even in low doses, is very offensive. It is offensive to God, and it likewise will offend godly men and godly women. So why is human tradition so deeply offensive? For what reason does God take offense at human tradition? Well, the first reason that human tradition is so offensive is that it elevates man to a central position. It elevates man to a legislative role and it authorizes him to begin making up rules and regulations. Whenever human tradition is involved, man becomes a legislator. His power is no longer ministerial and declarative, but it becomes magisterial and legislative. He thinks that he is on a par with God. And he supposes that he can do what previously only God has done, make the rules. He becomes his own lawmaker. Once man is put into a policy-making role, he immediately begins to introduce worldly corruptions. He can't help himself, for that is his true nature. He is of this world, and He conveys a mindset of this world. His mind is darkened by sin, and that darkness is reflected in everything He invents or introduces. When it's taken to its logical conclusions, man-made worship involves things, in fact the very things, that God says He hates. You know, things like child sacrifice in the name of divine worship. Human beings are simply incapable of coming up with things which are truly high and truly holy. He cannot invent practices that actually reflect the righteousness of God. At best, human ideas are mere imitations of the holy. And at worst, they become the opposite of what is holy and good. Corrupt and wicked, displeasing in God's sight. That's where human tradition eventually ends. The third reason why human tradition is so offensive to God is that it inevitably nullifies the Word of God. Or at least it seeks to nullify the Word of God. Human tradition and religion always forces the choice, whom will you obey? Whose word will you honor? Human inventions require worshippers to choose man's word over God's word. It is the dethroning of Jesus Christ, as Arthur Perkins used to say. Now the traditions of the elders in Jesus' own day were very powerful. They were viewed as binding. Those traditions took no prisoners. They demanded complete and total compliance. And if you had the audacity to disregard the traditions of the elders, you would be interrogated as to why you didn't obey what everyone else obeyed. Jesus and his disciples were minding their own business when they were accosted by the Pharisees and the scribes. Why didn't his followers keep to the traditions of men, they asked? Why did his followers eat bread with unwashed hands, they asked? Again, this has nothing to do with hygiene. Why don't you comply with our rules? That's what the Pharisees were asking. That's what the scribes were demanding. You are not good team players. Why not? Answer! Answer! And so they upbraided and scolded Jesus and his disciples. Human tradition, when it is allowed to gain the upper hand inevitably enslaves human beings to human ideologies. It lifts up ideas, ideas like environmentalism, socialism, racism, wokeness, transgenderism, the cult of abortion, You name it, and it will enforce compliance to the ruling agenda of the culture. Those who yield to the reign of human tradition will find themselves enslaved to the current agenda. Now, oftentimes Christians say, well, there's a lot of stuff going on in the culture which we won't accept. and we're not going to celebrate those things but if you're enslaved to human tradition you will be forced to bow the knee sooner or later it's a cruel master human tradition and it says we're in charge here we make the rules here you will comply and if you don't willingly offer us your devotion, we will exact it from you. In many ways, human tradition is not that different from Sauron in the Lord of the Rings. He enslaves and controls his people through fear and intimidation and threats of violence. And that's what human tradition does to people. At the same time that human tradition enslaves its victims, it also cancels out any true freedom of conscience. You may no longer think for yourself or speak for yourself. Someone else will do all the thinking for you. And you will be then supplied with talking points. And those talking points will let you know what is acceptable and what is unacceptable to your overlords. And just like that, all true liberty of conscience is gone. So this is not something which is harmless. Cute or even funny. Purely optional. No. When you're a slave of human tradition, you may not think for yourself anymore. You may not make your own decisions. You may not say what you think or want to say. Compliance is demanded of human tradition. Let me close this morning with five practical applications of this passage, and these applications have specifically to do with the church. Now I could give you some applications which have to do with your family life or your own personal life of faith, but I'm focusing here on the church. And I think through these applications to the church, maybe you can jump to some personal applications in your own life, your own personal life, in your family life. But these are church-oriented applications. And the first application has to do with the so-called church calendar. The church calendar is popular in all sorts of churches, from the Roman Catholics and the Anglicans Lutherans to Baptists, non-denominational charismatic churches, you name it. Almost every branch of the visible church is A-OK with the church calendar. Just being honest here. It's widespread and it's unquestioned in the broader Christian community. It's really only in Reformed circles that you find any pushback against the ecclesiastical calendar. And that's not even universal among Reformed Christians. The church calendar institutes holy days for ecclesiastical celebrations. Some of those holy days are based on the broader culture. Things like Mother's Day, Father's Day, Grandparents Day, the Fourth of July, Veterans Day, and even Groundhog's Day. Nobody that I know claims that these special days are commanded in scripture or even that they appear anywhere in scripture. They're just done in the broader culture, so why not import them into the life of the church? Other ecclesiastical holidays have historically arisen from within the church. Days such as Christmas, Good Friday, Easter, Pentecost, Ascension Day. And then there are a bevy of special days for specific saints. And these are instituted and most often celebrated by Roman Catholics and Anglicans. Now all of these special days, all of these holy days, no matter which category they inhabit, they are all mere human inventions. They are nowhere commanded by God in Scripture. I had a dear friend, a minister, and he and I had a difference of opinion on this topic. And I said to him, well then please show me where in Scripture these things are commanded that we should celebrate these days. And so he went back to his Bible And he worked and worked, studied and studied, and he finally came back to me in some frustration and said, that's an illegitimate question. He couldn't find anything. I'm still waiting. Show me where these things are commanded in scripture and I will be the first in line to celebrate them. But if there is no biblical prescription, then we must conclude that the celebration of the church calendar is really just an exercise in human tradition. It is not obedience to the Word of God. Again, if God commands these days in His Word, if we have biblical warrants then we have to be the first to obey those commands and honor these days. And yet nowhere has God required or commanded their celebration. And so we conclude it's all mere human tradition. Now there is a holy day which is commanded by God in His Word. It's today, the weekly Sabbath. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. The seventh is the Sabbath of the Lord your God. In it you shall not do any work. You are to rest from your work. You are to engage in worship. It is the holy day. God has sanctified it and made it holy. And so the weekly Sabbath is prescribed by God and His Word. But show me where these other days Show me where Veterans Day is commanded by God's Word. All of these things which are pushed forward and celebrated by so many different churches have no biblical backing. And so that's one application. A second application is something that I dealt with last week, so I'll just mention it briefly again today. This is the seeker-sensitive movement coming out of the church growth movement. According to the seeker-sensitive movement, let the unbeliever tell us what he wants to see in worship, and then the church will scurry to supply whatever the seeker demands. Again, this is human tradition, it is not the word of God. God has not commanded us to turn over the reins of public worship to unbelievers. We are not to go to unbelievers and ask them how they would like to be entertained for that hour on Sunday morning. But rather we are to look to the word of God, not the word of men, especially not the word of unbelieving men. This too is tradition. And again, it's widespread. Go to many churches in our country and you'll find some version of Seeker Sensitive. It lives on. And especially in the megachurch movement. It's basically how they order things. But it's all human tradition. Another strain of human tradition that has made deep inroads in the evangelical world is the corporate model. According to this approach, we should really look to the business world and business principles in order to learn what the church ought to be and to do, how it ought to be organized, how it ought to be run. Find a successful business. and imitate them. Now this approach ends up casting ethics to the side and it looks to bolster the bottom line at all costs. That's how corporations work. Instead of having a pastor, you end up with a CEO. Instead of elders, you have members of the board of directors. This approach looks to the traditions of the business community for its guiding and governing principles. You know, I've known quite a few businessmen throughout my tenure as a pastor here and elsewhere, and one thing which I have heard from businessmen over and over and over again is that business models change about every six months or so. Some guy comes up with a brand new idea. He writes a book. He sells millions of copies. They plug it in and it's going great. But then it doesn't go great. And then some new expert shows up six months later with a whole new approach. So they say, let's junk that and let's put this new approach in place instead. And it just cycles and cycles and cycles and cycles. Is that really where we want to look for our governing and guiding principles as a church? To the shifting sands of business models. The corporate model is pure human tradition. The church is not a business. God does not send us to Fortune 500 companies to gain insight into ministry. It tells us to look into His Word. Another closely connected branch of human tradition has to do with the advertising model, which is based on the entertainment industry. I will never forget years ago when a very large and influential Baptist church in Texas actually hired the Disney Corporation in order to advise them on how to make their church more engaging and entertaining to visitors. Disney? Maybe we should look to Taylor Swift. She's making a lot of money these days. Taylor Swift has like conquered the entire Western world. And she has just raked in money. She has marketed herself in such a way that the world is rolling around at her feet. Should we really look to Taylor Swift to guide us in how to be a faithful church? And so the advertising model based on the entertainment industry is just as bankrupt as the corporate model. And then finally, there is the success paradigm. If you think about it, this may be even more pervading than anything else I've talked about. The success paradigm is a branch of human tradition that says success is ultimate, and it's success as defined by this world. That ends up being primarily viewed in terms of attendance figures, revenue streams, and worldly acclaim. So if you've got thousands of people attending, if your budget is flush with money, and the world is recognizing you, you have attained success. So if Time Magazine lists you among the great influencers of the day, You have achieved what you were after. And after all, who really cares about faithfulness or fidelity to God and His Word? If we're successful, if enough men are praising us, we have won the prize. Now you might be saying to yourself, Pastor, you've just burned everything to the ground. And you wouldn't be far off. What is your alternative, Pastor? You've torched everything. What do you propose in its place? Well, it's very simple. Hearts devoted to Christ who are obedient to His Word, who seek His Word and what it would say for their own personal lives, for their own family lives, and yes, for the life of the church. Let the Word of God guide us and govern us. God has given us all these commands for our good, he says. Not for our harm, not for our frustration. He says, I've given these things to you for your good, and if you would take them and obey them, I will bless you and you will be happy. It will be good for you. And that's all I'm saying. Let us live our lives individually, as families, and as a congregation, according to the Word of God. Let us do what God commands us. All of what He commands, and only what He commands. And let us keep human tradition pushed out. so that it doesn't sneak in and seek to enslave us and to steal our freedom from us. True liberty is to live life under the Word of God from a heart that loves Christ and desires purely and fully to obey what he has said. Let's pray. Lord, we thank you that your Word gives us freedom and that you have given us your Word for our own good and for your glory. Give us humble hearts that would seek to honor and obey your Word and to fulfill what you have called us to as your people. We ask it, Lord, in Jesus' name. Amen.