We're going to jump right in here to the gospel of Mark this morning in our study here, going back and forth between the written word in Psalms 119 and truths about the scriptures as they are written down for us in Psalms 119, and then over to the gospel. to see Jesus Christ live out the truth of the written word. Jesus Christ is the living word. The Bible tells us that in John chapter 1, the word was made flesh and dwelt among us. And we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. Jesus Christ is the living word. He is the author of the scriptures. He is the subject of the scriptures. He is the fulfillment of the scriptures. And he's the embodiment of it. And we see Jesus Christ living out the truths that were taught throughout the scriptures, that Jesus Christ in every way lived up to and fulfilled what the Bible tells us is right and what is true and what is good. And so we're thankful for the comparison that we can draw there. And we've been looking at this here now for many weeks. I believe we're through 16 segments of the Book of Psalms, or the chapter of Psalms 119, and we've got a few more to go there, and we'll keep going back and forth here for several more weeks, looking at these parallel truths here out of the Word of God. The last section that we looked at in Psalms 119, one of the kind of off-handed remarks almost, one of the less prominent remarks that was made in that, kind of rung true to me here this week. And you don't need to turn to this, but in Psalms 119, we looked at this last week in verse a 126. The psalmist is speaking to the Lord and he said, Lord, it is time for thee to work. It is time for thee, Lord, to work. And then he makes a statement, for they have made void thy law. And we hear that statement in certainly probably the most prominent application of that thought, of those that would make void the law of God, would be those who are absolute deniers of God and absolute deniers of the truth and those who are completely ensconced in wickedness and fleshly living and have no desire for anything that would be even remotely religious, and certainly that's the automatic reaction that we would have in our minds of who those proud actors that segment of Psalms was talking about. We find that that doesn't only apply to to the wicked broadly, to those who are truly evil, those who are truly God deniers, those who are truly anti-Christian, anti-God, anti-Bible. But it even applies, as we see here in the Gospels, and maybe applies even more so in Christ's ministry in the Gospels, to those who were the very most religious. and they were those who made void the law of God. Jesus says this to them down in verse 13 of our text in Mark chapter seven, that they made the word of God of none effect. And the way that they did that, essentially the same thing that the psalmist said, they made void the law of God, the way that they made the word of God essentially powerless was through their tradition. Just kind of look at that here this morning, what the Lord is teaching here, in this passage, the main opponents of Christ in his earthly ministry were the most religious and devout sects of the Jewish society, those who were of the scribes and the Pharisees, and there were other sects of the Jewish community, but the ones that opposed Christ most vehemently were those that were the most religious, the most traditional, the most literal in their hold and their stance on the Old Testament law and the Old Testament precepts. The Pharisees were a religious sect of Jews who were strict and literal adherents to all of the tenets of the law. They were those who really devoted themselves to studying and then applying the law of Moses to their lives. And so they would go into the law, and they knew the first five books of our Bible. They knew the Pentateuch inside and out, and backwards and forwards, and upside down, and right side up, and every which way in between. They knew the law. And beyond that, they had taken great measures and gone to great pains to even put some clarifications around that in order to define exactly what that looked like in lived out practice. their teachers, their rabbis from their particular viewpoint of the law had established kind of an oral law, an unwritten but a spoken and a known law, kind of a practice surrounding the actual laws of the Old Testament that would define exactly what that would look like. Whereas the Lord, for instance, God gave to his people a commandment to do no work on the Sabbath day, to remember the Sabbath day as a day of rest and a day of worship to the Lord, and they weren't to do any work on that day, and they weren't to take any trips on that day, they weren't to travel on that day, and they weren't to light fires, they weren't to do any cooking, and all those kinds of things. in order to observe the Sabbath day. And there was enough there in the actual written law to define that pretty well, but they went beyond that and they actually put a regulation on how many steps a person could take on a Sabbath day before it was considered work, before it was considered a journey. Actually had, there's a term you see in the New Testament, it's not in the Old Testament, but you see it in the New Testament called a Sabbath day journey. And that actually was a quantified distance that a person was allowed to travel on a Sabbath day. And if they went farther than that distance on the Sabbath day, they had violated the Sabbath by doing work on the Sabbath. Now, that wasn't something that the Old Testament law by Moses had defined. That was something that they had defined. Now, I think with good intentions they did it. I think with probably even sincerity of wanting to observe the Sabbath day, they had come up with a standard for what a Sabbath day journey was allowable. But that was something that they came up with. And there was a lot of that. There's a whole lot of that surrounding the actual revealed Word of God, the inspired Word of God. There's a lot of man's definitions and clarifications and teachings surrounding what God had actually given to them. And it wasn't all done out of, you know, impure motives or something like that. But the trouble was that these scribes and these Pharisees, those who knew the law the best, those who actually their lives were surrounded by knowing and teaching and practicing the tenets of the law. They felt that they had gained a special understanding of the law, and because of that, that they had a distinct authority over defining what proper worship and service to God was. and that if you didn't fit into, in every way, this well-defined little box that they said was appropriate and right worship and relationship toward God, then you were on the outside and you were in violation in some way. Their special understanding of the law was not, again, simply they understood the actual law inside and out, which they did, but that they held to that the strictest and most rigid and most traditional views of that law. And the word is found here several times in this passage that we read, and I want to be clear about what it is. It uses the word tradition over and over and over again. I think we can jump to a conclusion that what Christ is exposing here is that there's a problem with traditions as a category, and that's not the point that Christ is making. Now, first, I would say that the way that we tend to think of the word tradition and the way that it's being used here in the Scriptures is not exactly the same. When I think of a tradition, I think of something that I do on a periodic basis or on a special occasion every year, and I have a way that me or that my family will observe a special day or a special time. You have birthday traditions or you have Christmas traditions, you know, like if your family watches a particular Christmas movie every Christmas Eve and then has a dinner together, some of those traditions. Christ is not talking about traditions in that sense, nor is He condemning that kind of a tradition. anything that is practiced by a family or group or community or something like that as a special observance. That reminds me here, and of course we have family traditions and we mark certain occasions and special things. Sometimes those traditions have been held for so long that we don't even really know where they started or why we do that. And I heard this story, I don't know if it's a joke or if it's a real story or not, It's funny, anyway. There's a story of a young couple. They had just recently gotten married, and the wife was still learning how to cook and keep the home and all those things. And she wanted to do a nice special Sunday afternoon dinner. And that's always a good thing, right? A nice special Sunday afternoon dinner after church. And this one particular day, she was getting ready, and she was going to bake a ham. ham in the oven, and it was to be ready as soon as I got home from church. Ham for Sunday afternoon lunch, amen? And that's just good stuff, right? I mean, like, if you're having ham today, God bless you. I'm jealous, right? Great, great Sunday afternoon meal. Well, she's getting ready to do this ham, and her husband's just kind of ready for church, and he's trying to hurry her out the door, and he's waiting. He's like, come on, you're done. She pulls the ham out, and she's getting it ready to go in the oven. And she takes a knife out, and she just cuts the end off the ham. like three, four inches of good ham meat. She just cuts it right off and just throws it away. And he goes, what in the world are you doing? That was good meat. Why did you throw that away? She said, well, that's how you make a ham. And he's like, no, it's not. What are you doing? You're throwing away good ham. I'd eat that. You know, dig it out of the trash. And he goes, well, no, that's how you make hams. She says, no, it's not. And he says, yes, that's how my mom always did it. And that had to be a good enough answer, I guess. And he was kind of bugged about it. And then it actually made her think, well, why? I mean, maybe that is good meat. Like, why did my mom cut the end of the ham off? And so later that week, she was talking to her mom on the phone. And she's like, yeah, I made a ham for Sunday dinner. And she's like, just like you always did, I cut the end off. And I threw it away. And her husband got mad. He didn't understand that that's how you make ham. And she's like, why do you do that? Why do we cut the end off the ham? I know that's how you do it, but why? And she said, well, I don't know. That's how my mom always did it. And so even mom didn't know why she cut the end off the ham. And it got her thinking about it. Well, I've never even thought about it. It's just what I always did. It's what you always do. You cut the end off the ham and you put it in the oven. She finally bothered her enough next time she was around her mom. And she says, mom, we were wondering this, me and my daughter, why did we cut the end off the ham? Like, why is that how you make ham? And she goes, well, when you were growing up, I didn't have a big enough pan. And so I had to cut the end off so it would fit in the pan that I had. and three generations of wives cutting the ends off of their ham, and only one of them needed to in order to actually prepare it, right? And sometimes we get locked into traditions, and there was a reason for them in the beginning, there was a purpose for them in the beginning, and sometimes they kind of, they just outlive their purpose, they outlive their usefulness, and we continue to do those things even though they no longer, have the meaning or the purpose that they used to have. But the Lord is not talking about traditions in that sense anyway. Tradition meant more of, by tradition the Lord is speaking about the methods, the means by which they lived out their faith and their beliefs Again, the Lord said, keep the Sabbath. And so they defined keeping the Sabbath as this, this, this, and this. And they built up some patterns, and they built up some routines, and they built up some habits about that. The Lord said, the Lord commanded them to eat a certain way and to not eat a certain way. And they put some more definition around that. Now, I want to be clear that he speaks here About in verse 3 it says the Bible says the Spare sees and all the Jews except they wash their hands and eat not holding the tradition of the elders and When they come from the market except they wash they not many others there be which they have received to hold as the washing of cups and pots and braids and vessels and of tables and You may read that for a second. There's nothing wrong with any of that like wash your hands before you eat, right? Wash your dishes when you're done with them. We just consider these things all to be the matters of good hygiene and good practice before we would eat a meal. And what the Lord is exposing here is not the fact that they did these things. And having traditions, even having some ways in which we kind of define our faith and we set some limitations and we set some boundaries and set some standards for ourselves as far as what we will and will not do as believers is not what the Lord is exposing here either. It's not saying that, well, we shouldn't have a pattern of going to church on Sunday. We shouldn't have a pattern of waking up in the morning before we before we do anything else, we go and spend time with the Lord in prayer and devotion. If that's your pattern, that's a good pattern to have. The Lord is not saying that you shouldn't have good patterns and good routines and good practices of spiritual discipline in your Christian life. He's also not saying that, but what he's exposing here is the spirit behind it, the spirit behind it. And what we find about the Pharisees over and over and over again in the word of God was that they were outwardly the most righteous people that you could find. If you were looking for someone who was a model citizen, you just look to the Pharisees because they did all of the right things on the outside. But when the Lord, who could see the inside of their hearts, looked at me and said, you look completely good and right and perfect and squared away on the outside, but on the inside, you're like a whited sepulcher. You're full of dead men's bones. You're dead on the inside. Your religion is completely superficial. It's not produced by real and genuine faith on the inside. And that's what the Lord was exposing here. He's not saying, hey, well, you know, it doesn't matter if you wash your hands. It doesn't matter if you clean your dishes. What he is saying is it doesn't matter more that you wash your hands. That doesn't make you right with God more than having an actual relationship with him of faith. They were doing those things because they thought it made them right with God. Not because it made them healthier when they would eat and less susceptible to sickness and disease through the things that they were touching and handling before they would eat their meals. They were doing that to be right with God. and you can wash your hands all you want. You wash the outside all you want, the inside is not clean, it's not clean. He makes this point about the Pharisees in Matthew, you can read Matthew 23 at some point, it's an entire chapter where the Lord is just really calling out their hypocrisies, and he says that about them, that they're like a cup that is clean on the outside, but on the inside it's dirty. It's not a cup you would wanna drink out of. You want a cup that's clean on the outside and on the inside. And then the inside's more important than the outside. Both are important, but the inside's more important than the outside. But he's condemning this spirit that they have toward their righteousness. Your spirit matters as much as your actions do. Your obedience and compliance with the Lord's commandments are not enough. It is important that we obey the Lord. It's important that our faith comes to the outside, but it should genuinely be our faith working its way out to the outside in the deeds that we do, in the words that we say, in the things that we practice as believers. Your obedience must be coupled with and really produced by a spirit of humility, a spirit of submission, a spirit of gratitude towards the Lord, a spirit of true worship with God. Just a couple of verses in Matthew 23, we read Mark 7, we'll come back to that. But in Matthew 23, this is when Jesus is speaking about the scribes and the Pharisees and their spirit. And if you don't turn, that's fine. But in Matthew 23, in verse one, it says, then spake Jesus to the multitude and to his disciples, saying, the scribes and the Pharisees, sit in Moses' seat. All therefore, whatsoever they bid you, observe, that observe and do. But do not ye after their works, for they say and do not. They bind heavy burdens and grievous to be born and lay them on men's shoulders, but they themselves will not move them with one of their fingers. But all their works do they, for to be seen of men, to make broad their phylacteries, and enlarge the borders of their garments, and love the uppermost rooms at feasts, and the chief seats in the synagogues, and greetings in the markets, and to be called of men, Rabbi, Rabbi. And so we see one of the biggest problem and maybe the most obvious problem with the spirit by which they were doing these things, they were keeping these religious practices and traditions was that it was born out of a prideful spirit. that they did those things, it makes the point to say there in verse five, of all their works they do for to be seen of men. To be seen of men, to be pleasing to men, to be honoring to men, to be approved of men. They wanted man's approval, not God's. And the truth of the matter is, and the Bible makes this clear in many places, and this is one of them, that ultimately we are seeking to please God or we are seeking to please men. We can't do both. Now, in seeking to please God, there can be other people that are pleased with us. I believe, honestly, that if we are diligently seeking to be pleasing to God, that for the most part, the right people and the best people that need to be pleased with us will be. You know, my kids, My kids can live to be pleasing to me. They certainly can. I'd be okay with it, I suppose, right? If my kids were trying to be pleasing to me, they might succeed. I might be pleased with my kids. That doesn't necessarily mean that they would be pleasing to God. But if my kids were seeking to be pleasing to God, I guarantee you that at the same time, I'd be pleased with them. If my kids, if their goal in life was to be pleasing to God and to serve God and to love God and to live for God, in doing that, that would be a much higher standard than anything I could hope for in their lives. It'd be a much higher goal for them than anything I could hope for in their lives. And in living their lives to be pleasing to God, they would be pleasing to me. They would be pleasing to my wife. They would be pleasing to the other members of our family. It'd be pleasing and well within the expectations of any kind of good and appropriate authority in their lives. But if you live your life to please men, you're not going to please God. So they were desiring the approval of man. They were motivated in their pride, they were motivated to simply have position and influence over people they wanted. It says there in verses, in verse six and seven, it says that they loved the uppermost rooms at feast and the chief seats in the synagogues, and they desired to be greeted In the markets, they wanted people to call them rabbi. Rabbi, they wanted to be called teacher. They wanted to be called master. They liked that title. They wanted people to look up to them. They wanted people to look to them as leaders and as influential people in the community. And they weren't doing what they were doing in order to help other people. They were doing what they were doing to be looked up to by other people. They wanted that power. That was all born out of a spirit of pridefulness. Also, if you go back to Mark chapter 7, there was another detrimental spiritual condition that the Pharisees had. The Lord is exposing here. A lot of what they were doing was out of a critical spirit. In verse 2 it says, And they saw some of his disciples eat bread with defile, that is to say, with unwashing hands. They found fault. Now this is not merely a statement saying that they saw a problem, and we're all going to see problems from time to time. This actually indicates the fact that they were looking for a problem. I referee basketball in the school system around here, and I enjoy doing it. It is my job as a basketball referee to find fault, to look for them, to look for problems, to look for fouls, look for penalties, to look for violations, and to enforce the rules of the basketball game. And what the Pharisees were doing is they had self-appointed themselves as spiritual referees in the community. Walking around with a whistle in their mouth, gotcha. Here comes Jesus and his disciples, and I know there's something wrong going on over there, and I don't know what it is yet, but hey, oh, oh, found one. Flag on the play. You didn't wash your hands before you ate your lunch there. They saw a problem because they were looking for a problem. Sometimes it's our job, sometimes it's our responsibility to see a problem and to handle it. This was not the case. This was just a critical spirit. They were looking for a problem. And it was that classic expression, I guess, of insecurity, right? If you're threatened by somebody, you try to find some way to tear them down to lift yourself up. Rather than being challenged by the ministry of Jesus Christ, rather than being attentive to the words of Jesus Christ, they were looking for a reason to discredit him. Over and over and over again in the Gospels, the Pharisees and other groups would come to him and they would ask Jesus Christ a question, trying to trap him in his words. They weren't asking sincere questions because they had questions. They were asking trick questions that had bad answers to them. They thought there was no way that he could answer it without offending somebody. This was the spirit that they were coming with. They were looking, they found a fault because they were looking for one. They were looking for a problem. One of the ways that we see a critical spirit expressed is through making comparisons. Bible challenges is about this. In 2 Corinthians 10, Paul said that they measuring themselves by themselves and comparing themselves among themselves are not wise. that the standard that I should hold myself to is not anyone else, it's not you. I shouldn't determine if I'm living for the Lord well enough or not by whether or not I'm a better Christian than you are, or you a better Christian than I am. And that's an unwise standard to hold for ourselves because you can always find somebody who makes you look good. You can always find, and we do, right? We always find somebody who can make us look good. We always find someone who's struggling more than we are, and yeah, I'm doing okay then, right? Talk to people about the gospel, and sometimes they say, well, you know, you talk about the problem of sin, and a lot of times the attitude is, well, you know, like, the sins I've done are not like the bad ones. you know, tell a lie here and there, you know, this, that, you know, do a little bit of this, a little bit of that. But, you know, like I don't do the bad ones. Right, well you can always find someone who's done something worse than you. The comparison, the standard by which we are judged is not someone else, some other person. The standard that we're judged by is Jesus Christ. I'm always going to have work to do if I compare myself to Jesus Christ. I've always got a mark to press toward if my mark, if my standard is Jesus Christ. In Matthew 7, in the Sermon on the Mount, the Lord addresses this also. This is a familiar passage. In verses 3 through 5, He says, And sometimes the problem we find in someone else is much less serious than the one we are ignoring in our own lives. But when we have a critical spirit, that's exactly what we do. We justify, we excuse the spiritual issues that we're having while we nitpick at other people. Start to draw conclusions. Matthew, right before that in Matthew chapter 7 it starts with verses, we also, Judge not that ye be not judged, for with what judgment ye judge ye shall be judged, and with what measure ye meet it shall be judged to you again. John 7, the Lord said, Judge not according to appearance, but judge righteous judgments. And righteous judgments means that we should judge things according to biblical parameters and not according to our own opinions and our own feelings and our own emotions about things. We're going to have to make some judgments sometimes. And sometimes the judgments that we ought to make, we don't to make judgments that we shouldn't be making. You know, if there's something going on that you really have no ability to influence or change or have any responsibility for, then you're just being judgmental to be judgmental in those cases. We're told to judge righteous judgment, judge the things that we're supposed to be judging and handle your own business before you start trying to handle everyone else's. And a critical spirit will lead you to ignore the things that are going on in your life and ignore the responsibilities that you have in your life in order to insert yourself into business that's not your own. Book of Proverbs calls that a very unwise thing to do. It actually says that when you meddle in business that is not yours, it's like taking a dog by the ears. I got a real friendly dog. don't grab him by the ears, right? He's the nicest dog in the world until you do something like that that will hurt him. That's what the Bible challenges us about here, this critical spirit that the Pharisees had and that sometimes we can have as believers as we start looking at everybody else's problems to make ourselves feel better about not handling our own business, not letting God work in us and change us. And we say, you know, almost that spirit of, what they call schadenfreude, right? The pleasure in someone else's suffering. Like, I hope they fail a little bit so that we can do better. I look a little bit better if they fall, if they fail. Shouldn't develop a spirit like that. It's very pharisaical. And then we see also in the end of this and said, He said unto them, in verse 9, He said unto them, Fool, well ye reject the commandment of God, that ye may keep your own tradition. For Moses said, Honor thy father and thy mother, and whoso curses father or mother, let him die the death. But ye say, if a man shall say to his father or mother, It is Corbin that is to say, a gift, by whatsoever thou mightest be profited by me, he shall be free, if ye suffer him. No more to do ought for his father and mother, making the word of God of none effect through your tradition which you have delivered and many such like things do ye. And this is really a spirit of hypocrisy and hypocrisy in very, very accurate sense of that. I think sometimes the term is bandied about a little bit too liberally, hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is holding a standard for others that you don't hold for yourself. It's like what we saw when Jesus calls the Pharisees hypocrites in Matthew 23, that they would lay burdens on people that they won't lift themselves with one finger. It's expecting, having an expectation of other people that you don't have of yourself. There's a difference, I believe, a difference between sincerely holding a belief and sincerely desiring to do the right thing and falling short of that. There's a difference between that and or saying that you believe something and not actually believing it. And so a lot of times what is called hypocrisy, again, I believe is kind of inaccurate because we may genuinely believe the things that we are attempting to do for the Lord and we're trying to do in our walk with the Lord and we just fall short of that often. You're not a hypocrite because you say it's important to read the Bible and then sometimes you don't. You're just weak in that area of life. Now, if you say, I believe you should read the Bible, and you never make any attempt to read the Bible, never make a plan to read the Bible, never read the Bible outside of a church service, that's hypocrisy, right? But it's not if you have good intentions and expectations, and you make attempts at it, and you just fall short sometimes. There's a difference between that. But when he speaks of the Pharisees being hypocrites, he's saying that they say they believe something that they really don't believe. And they put those expectations of that belief, their so-called belief, on other people, but they do not hold themselves to it at all. This situation that he's talking about in verse 10 and 11, 12, this thing about the honoring thy father and thy mother, but then not actually honoring them. It's kind of an interesting situation, kind of suggesting that in this day and age, of course, the family was the support unit for those who were in the family and needing financial assistance, needing basic just provision for life. And this is a situation kind of where a mother and father get into their older age, and they're doing without, and the grown children, rather than stepping up and helping to provide for their parents' needs, were making the excuse that, well, the money that I could give you to help you pay your bills and to provide for your basic needs, I've already I've already dedicated this as an offering to the temple. That's what Corbin was. Corbin was something that was dedicated as a gift to God through the temple and the monetary offerings that were given. And the Lord is saying that it would be better for them to honor their parents and to help meet their parents' needs than it would be for them to give money at the temple. And if it comes down to one or the other, they ought to honor their parents and not use some kind of loophole in the law in order to let their parents go without and not do what they ought to do in honoring their mother and father. It's kind of a unique way of seeing this here. But they made the word of God, and through that, and through things like this, the Lord said, they made the word of God of none effect. took their preference over principle. They did what they wanted to do instead of what they ought to do. They defined what was good and right based on how they felt about the situation, and very relativistic in the way that they were approaching these things. They were showing partiality to each other. Even the Pharisees said, you'll help one of your friends make this excuse for not taking care of their parents, and you'll justify them by that because you're partial to them. They're your friends, but you wouldn't give that same excuse to someone else that wasn't a friend of yours, someone that wasn't part of your group, or show partiality. Hypocrisy always propagates a spirit of partiality toward friends and allies, but never, but always against, partiality against those who are opponents or threats in some way to that person. Hypocrisy finds loopholes and makes exceptions for those who live in hypocritical spirit while holding other people to the very highest standard of the law. It's the spirit of hypocrisy. The Pharisees, again, in their traditions, the traditions themselves, the things that they were just doing as a practice, were not what was wrong. It was the spirit with which they were doing them. The motivation behind why they did it. We can have some good practices. We can have some good routines. We can have some good patterns in our lives that will help us to draw closer to God. I really believe that. We establish some good routines in our lives. Those can help us draw close to God if those routines themselves do not become how we define whether we're right with God or not. If someone, if I were to ask you the rhetorical question, not to say that I am, but if I were to ask you the rhetorical question, am I right with God right now? And your answer is, yes, because I read my Bible this week, I prayed this week, I'm here at church this morning. If you go back to something that you did and some pattern that you held to, some routine that you followed this week and it was performative, Probably not right with God. But if you can say, I know I'm right with God because I'm walking in the spirit. I'm walking with the Lord. I'm in the will of God. The Lord is speaking to my heart. The Lord is leading me day by day. And yes, he's doing that because I'm praying. And he's doing that because I'm in the word. And he's doing that because I'm fellowshipping with brothers and sisters of Christ in church. Those things are helping that, but the spirit behind it is a right spirit, a godly spirit. It's truly spiritual. If you can say that, that would be an accurate statement. Jesus closes by the following part of this. You go down into the next 10 or so verses. The Lord reminds us that it is the heart that the Lord looks at and it's the heart from which our actions really come that define whether they are good or evil. In other places, the verse is said that out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks. And Jesus said in verse 20, that which cometh out of a man, that defileth a man. For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within and defile the man. It's the heart condition that matters. And if a good heart is producing good fruit on the outside, then great. But if it is simply on the outside trying to do works, hoping that that matters, while on the inside the heart is depraved and wicked and far from God, that's not going to accomplish anything. So we all struggle with prideful spirit. We all struggle with critical spirit. We all struggle with having a hypocritical spirit at different times. Let's not be OK with that. Let's not be satisfied with that. Let's not just bury that deep below the surface. Let God work in us to change that and help us with that. We must not excuse it or ignore it just because we are still, quote unquote, doing the right things on the outside. Let's go ahead and close with that here this morning. Let me, if you would, invite you for a time of prayer here at the close of the service.