Let's open our Bibles please to the Gospel of Matthew chapter 23. The Gospel of Matthew the 23rd chapter. The focus of our study this morning is going to be verses 25 to 28. So follow along then as I read Matthew 23 verses 25 to 28. Matthew 23-25, Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you may clean the outside of the cup and of the platter, but within they are full of extortion and excess. Thou blind Pharisee, cleanse first that which is within the cup and platter, that the outside of them may be clean also. Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones and of all uncleanness. Even so, you also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within You are full of hypocrisy and iniquity." Now, as we have been studying Matthew 23 together, we have seen that this is the last public discourse that Jesus will give before He is arrested and crucified. Jesus opened this discourse with a word to His own disciples and the multitude who followed Him in verses 1-12. And there, Jesus encouraged them to obedience and to humility and to servanthood. They were to recognize Christ alone as their Master and as their final source of authority. But though he opened this chapter in the first 12 verses with a discourse to his own disciples, the vast majority of this final discourse was reserved to pronounce judgment and condemnation upon the lost. Upon the scribes and the Pharisees who represent all of the unsaved religious formalists of all of history. Upon these scribes and Pharisees, Jesus pronounced eight statements of woe for their hypocrisy, for their willful blindness, and for their iniquity. Jesus declares that they were fools, both in character and in conduct, thinking that they could pervert the meaning of the Scriptures and engage in corrupt moral behavior and yet still be acceptable to God. Now, we have spent two Lord's Days looking at the first five woes which Jesus pronounced upon the scribes and the Pharisees, and by way of extension, upon all religious formalists. Jesus did not just charge them with being fools and hypocrites by way of labels, though he certainly did that. Jesus also proved those charges by citing abundant proof and numerous specific examples of the evil that they had done. He who asserts must also prove Jesus asserted woe upon these people. He asserted that they were hypocrites and fools and blind. And then He proves those charges by providing numerous specific examples of them. We saw that they rejected the Gospel and did all they could to get others to reject it as well. In verse 13, We saw that they used a deceptive spirituality for the purpose of abusing those under their care. In verse 14. We saw that they made unsparing efforts to reduplicate their hypocrisy in others. In verse 15. We saw that they twisted the Scriptures to justify whatever behavior and deceits they wanted to engage in. in verses 16-22. And then we saw that they carefully observed minor obediences to God's law while completely failing to observe the major duties and responsibilities of justice and of mercy and of faith in verses 23-24. But having pronounced and proven these five woes upon the scribes and the Pharisees, Jesus did not end his exposure of their hypocrisy at this point, where we concluded in our last study in this chapter. Jesus still has several more points of proof yet to set forth. and his indictment of their evil, which they practiced in the name of their religion." And so there are yet three more woes pronounced, and three more points of proof provided to support the justification of those woes and the condemnation that Jesus brought to bear upon them. Now today, we want to consider the sixth and the seventh points of evidence that Jesus brings to bear in His proof of their hypocrisy and the evil they practiced in the name of their religion and thus the justification for the woe He pronounced upon them. And then we want to see the results that such hypocrisy produces in the lives of those who practice it and the judgment that it brings upon them. So notice then, first of all today, regarding the scribes and the Pharisees that they practiced outward ceremonial purity, but they indulged in inward moral wickedness. They practiced outward ceremonial purity but they indulged in inward moral wickedness." Now, the fact that they practice outward ceremonial purity while indulging in inward moral wickedness is set forth in verses 25-26. Notice verse 25, "'Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you make clean the outside of the cup and of the platter, but within They, that is the cup and the platter, are full of extortion and excess. Thou blind Pharisee, cleanse first that which is within, the cup and platter, that the outside of them may be clean also." Now, though this is the first point in our sermon today, it is of course the sixth point in Jesus' sermon that is directed to the scribes and the Pharisees. This is the sixth example Jesus provides of the hypocrisy of the scribes and the Pharisees. Now here in this section in verses 25 and 26, we see the essence of external formalism in religious life. These scribes and Pharisees were very concerned with performing, with scrupulous care, all of the ceremonial rituals of outward cleanliness. And this, of course, involved things like hand washing before eating. for fear they may have touched something a Gentile had touched. And we looked at that in some detail back in Matthew 15 when we studied that chapter together. But there were numerous other prescribed washings for various reasons. Both of people and also of objects. And particular procedures that had to be followed in performing them. The cleansing by various washings of their hands, their bodies, their clothing, and their dishes was something that was a matter of great concern to them. In fact, Mark speaks of it in some degree of detail when in Mark chapter 7, verses 1 to 5, Mark says, Then came together to Jesus the Pharisees and certain of the scribes which came from Jerusalem. And when they saw some of his disciples eat bread with defiled, that is to say, with unwashing hands, they found fault. For the Pharisees and all the Jews, except they wash their hands often, eat not, holding the tradition of the elders." Now notice Mark 7 and verse 4. And when they come from the market, except they wash, they eat not, and many other things there be, which they have received to hold, as the washing of cups, and pots, brazen vessels, and of tables." The point being, is that there was a lot of external washing of people and things in the tradition of the scribes and the Pharisees. And so this is what Jesus is referring to in Matthew 23 and verse 25 when He says, you make clean the outside of the cup and the platter. But, even though they made clean the outside of the cup and the platter, they were not concerned at all with the defiled food that they put into those vessels. Now, the food they put within those vessels, within the cup and within the platter, was not defiled because it somehow violated Jewish dietary laws. They didn't do that. It's not like they were putting food like pork into their cups and their platters. Rather, though the food they put into those cups and platters was ceremonially clean, and though it was in harmony with Jewish dietary laws, yet the way in which they obtained that food by the extortion and the robbery of other people made that food unclean. It would be like robbing someone and then using the money you stole to buy food that you then eat. The way the food was obtained made the food morally tainted. And that was the point that Jesus is making here. The dishes were ceremonially clean But the food that they contained was obtained by force, and it was obtained by fraud, thereby making the food itself unclean because it was illegitimately acquired. But not only was the food in the ceremonially clean dishes defiled, because it was obtained by extortion, but also because of the manner in which they indulged in its consumption. It was defiled because it was used to excess. It was used in an intemperate and in a self-indulgent fashion. In a word, they used what they had stolen to indulge in gluttony and surfeiting. The way this defiled food was consumed in a drunken debauchery of excess in riotous feasts made it doubly defiled. Not only were they eating food that they had stolen, but they were eating it in a gluttonous fashion. The food was obtained by sinful means and it was consumed in a sinful fashion. but all out of ceremonially clean dishes." Now, Jesus has counsel for these people in verse 26. In verse 26, He says, Thou blind Pharisee, cleanse first that which is within the cup and the platter. that the outside of them may be clean also." And so he says to them, cleanse the contents of the cup and the platter. And then the cleanliness of the cup and platter themselves will matter and it will be maintained. But a clean platter filled with corrupt content becomes corrupt itself by virtue of its contents. And no amount of cleansing it may have gone through prior to that matters one iota." Now clearly, there is an application of this to the scribes and the Pharisees themselves. The scribes and the Pharisees were very careful to maintain the outward ceremonial purity of their clothing and their bodies. But they allowed their minds and their hearts to be filled with every kind of evil and vice, and to practice every kind of fraud and impurity. And so, Jesus is telling them, if you take care to cleanse and purify your mind and your motives, If you take care to exercise self-discipline and self-control, then your bodies will be pure as well. When the purity of the inner man is pursued, automatically, the purity of the outer man is achieved. But when you fill your inner man and mind with evil, then your body becomes evil as well. Now, the point that Jesus is making is this. Christianity is above all else a religion of the heart and of the mind and of the thought and of the motives. In other words, it is a religion of the inner man. And if these are right, If our heart and our mind and our thoughts and our motives are right, then everything else is right too. But if these things are wrong, then nothing else is right. And so, let us take great care of what we put into our minds and our hearts, lest it defile the vessel in which we live. And we become wholly unclean in the eyes of God, both without and within. Let us fill our minds with the Word of God and not with the extortion and the excess that is glorified and celebrated in the entertainment provided in the media and the movies of this world. Those who take a shower and dress up in the cleanest of clothes to present themselves at church on Sunday, but whose minds are filled with the corrupt entertainments of this world, and who relish the evil it portrays, are the hypocrites that Jesus speaks of in this passage. Clean your minds and clean your hearts from evil and fill them with the Word of God, so that you may be as clean on the inside as you are on the outside." This counsel of Jesus to the scribes and the Pharisees is as relevant to us today as it was to them when it was spoken. So as for the scribes and the Pharisees, we see that they practiced outward ceremonial purity, but they indulged in inward moral wickedness. And Jesus said, it doesn't matter how clean you are on the outside, if you're corrupt inside, you're corrupt throughout. And so, we have to be careful. to not only not put any corruption into our minds and into our inner man, but whatever arises out of it needs to be mortified and put away. If there be any virtue, Paul says, Think on these things. Things that are true and lovely and just and good and right. And you can't be thinking about those things while you're watching filthy Hollywood movies that glorify violence and deceit and revenge and all forms of sexual immorality. You cannot put those things into your mind. and be clean within. Rather, take the time that you spend watching the entertainments of this world and spend it taking in the Word of God. Read your Bible. Read good books. Listen to sermons. Fellowship with believers. Take in wholesome information. Be clean inside. And then the outside will be clean too. Well, that brings us into our second major point. Having seen that as for the scribes and the Pharisees, we saw that they practice outward ceremonial purity, but they indulged in inward moral wickedness. Notice now in the second place that they provided an illusion of purity to the public while inwardly they were completely corrupt. They provided an illusion of purity to the public. While inwardly, they were completely corrupt. Now, this is recorded in verses 27 and 28. In verse 27, he says, Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you were likened unto whited sepulchres. which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness. Even so, you also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within you are full of hypocrisy and iniquity." So, they provided an illusion of purity to the public. While inwardly, they were completely corrupt. Now, there are some similarities between the previous woe that was pronounced about having a clean platter, but putting defiled food in it. And this woe that is pronounced about the whited sepulcher. Both of these points, the sixth and the seventh woe, both of them speak of a contrast between the inward and the outward condition of the scribes and the Pharisees. And in that sense, they are parallel. But there are important differences between these two woes as well. And it's important that we take note of them. In the sixth woe that we have just considered, Jesus spoke to them about what they did in relationship to themselves and what they needed to do in order to fix it. He said to them in the sixth woe, you may clean the outside, but you need to clean that which is within. He says, this is what you're doing. This is what you need to do. Here's what you're doing wrong. Here's the path of repentance and change you need to implement. But in this seventh woe, we are considering now in verses 27 and 28, there are no instructions given. He simply tells them, this is what you are. You are corrupt within, though you appear outwardly pure. Furthermore, he tells them, this is what you are in relationship to men. This is how you appear to men. So, in the sixth woe, no mention is made of how they appear to men. In the 7th woe, the focus is on how they do appear to men. In the 6th woe, they are told what they are doing and what they need to do differently. In the 7th woe, they are told what they are and the state they are in. And they are not given any direction at all. So from the 6th to the 7th woe, Jesus moves from direction to declaration. Jesus moves from telling them what they should do to telling them what they are. Jesus moves from their behavior to their condition. And Jesus moves from telling them what they are in private to how they appear to the public. So these are not identical, parallel, repeated ideas. And the question is, then, how do they appear to the public? Well, Jesus says they provide an illusion of purity to the public by their outward appearance. He says you're like a whited sepulcher. Now, A whited sepulcher is a sepulcher that's been painted white. They used lime back in the day, but nevertheless, they would make up a mixture and they would whitewash the tombs that contained the dead people. And they were really clean and white on the outside. White is, of course, a symbol of purity. And if something's white, it seems clean and pure. And so they provided an illusion of purity to the public by the outward appearance. Now, what was this whitewash that they plastered on themselves to make themselves look pure to the public? Well, first of all, they dressed wholly. Notice verse five. It says they make broad their phylacteries and enlarge the borders of their garments. And we talked about that when we expounded that passage, the little boxes of Scripture on their forehead and on their hand. And they had this blue border on their garment, tremendously enlarged in terms of its width to really draw attention to how holy they were and people who were set apart into God. And then not only did they dress holy, they acted. Holy. Verse 14b, it says, they for a pretense made long prayers. So they'd stand out in public on the street and they would make these really long prayers in public where everybody could see them and hear them and watch them. But not only did they dress holy, not only did they act holy, but they talked holy. Notice verses two and three of this chapter. He says, the scribes and the Pharisees sit in Moses' seat, all therefore, whatsoever they bid you observe, that observe and do. So they would talk about the Scriptures, and they would expound the Scriptures, and they would apply the Scriptures, and they would say, this is what you need to do in obedience to the Scriptures. So they talked holy. And so they dressed holy, they acted holy, and they talked holy, and to all appearances, They were holy. They are consummate actors who are experts in their stage performance before the eye of the public. Now, you recall the definition of a hypocrite that we gave earlier in this chapter when we were expounding it. We said that a hypocrite is a stage player in religion. He is an actor. He impersonates someone he is not. And he acts the part of someone he is not at all like. He pretends to serve God while actually serving himself. He pretends to obey God while actually doing his own will. He pretends to glorify God while glorifying himself. He has the outward form and the outward talk of a godly person, while inwardly he is full of pride and self-will and corruption, the very opposite of godliness. Now Jesus, in our text, uses a very graphic metaphor to describe such people, and that is the metaphor of a whitewashed Now, such tombs in Palestine were small stone buildings that housed dead bodies, and they were whitewashed by relatives in honor of the dead and outwardly made to look very clean and very sanitary. But the truth about what was really inside of them, was revolting and sickening. You would look at this neat, sharp little building with all this white paint. It looked so clean and so pure, but inside there were rotting corpses in putrefying decay. And so it is with these Pharisees. To the world, they looked externally like pure men of God. They successfully deceived others. But God knew the truth about who they were on the inside, in secret, when the public was not observing. And what they were was revolting to God. God saw all the hypocrisy and all the lawlessness. God saw all the iniquity and the wickedness. God saw all the evil in their private conduct that was done outside of the sight of the public? And the point that Jesus is making is the hypocrite may fool men, but he does not fool God. Ecclesiastes 12 and verse 14 says, God shall bring every work into judgment with every secret thing. whether it be good or whether it be evil. There are no secrets from God. Man looks on the outward appearance, but God pierces right through the wall of the sepulcher and he sees right into the heart. And so if we are hypocrites and workers of iniquity, then the good opinion men may have of us will never compensate for the wrath of God that will fall upon us when our hypocrisy is exposed on the day of judgment. So the lesson of these woes of Jesus is this. Practice heart religion. Be on the inside what you present yourself to be to others on the outside. Strive for consistency between your outward image and your inward reality. If you think, what would others think if they knew I was doing this? And that thought makes you fearful that they would know. then stop doing it. And if you would be okay with others seeing you do what you do in private, when you're out of the eye of the public, then carry on. In other words, be in private what you would be before men. But above all else, know this. Know that God knows. And live with judgment day honesty before Him in all you think and say and do, knowing that what He thinks of you is in the end all that matters. And He knows everything. So live. And so labor in your most private thoughts and actions that God will say looking upon them, well done, thou good and faithful servant. Because who you are when you're alone is who you really are. Now, none of us live perfectly in privacy. all of us, in private, fail in greater ways than we do when we know folks are watching. And we hate ourselves for that. And we are aware of how we fall and fail. But if you fall, Know that the blood of Christ cleanses from all sin for those who confess those sins. And renew your obedience and walk before His eye. Listen to me. God knows the difference between a complacent, prideful, hypocrite and a humble, struggling believer. God knows the difference between one who is genuine and honest and sincere and who seeks to press on in faithfulness and renewed obedience, and one who is just a play actor before men. And one who is genuine and honest and sincere before God, who seeks to press on in faithfulness and renewed obedience when he falls, such a one will never be labeled a hypocrite on the day of judgment. God is looking for honesty. God is looking for humility. God is looking for sincerity in His children, not perfection. He knows you're a sinner. He just doesn't want you to be a hypocrite about it. And He doesn't want you to make peace with the sins that plague you, especially the sins that you commit in private. And so, as Proverbs 4.23 says, keep your heart with all diligence, for out of it are the issues of life. Strive to cultivate a true heart before God and all will be well. Just be genuine and honest and sincere before God. Press on in faithfulness and renewed obedience when you fall. Repent and seek the Lord once again. Those kind of people are not hypocrites. Those kind of people are struggling believers. And all of us experience that condition and situation. But the hypocrites, is perfectly happy with his wickedness in his inner man. He does what he can to cultivate it. And he relishes and indulges in the enjoyment of it. He's not at war with his sins. The only thing he's at war with is anybody finding out about them. And so, God knows the difference between a hypocrite and a struggling believer. And the difference between them is one is filled with pride. The other is filled with humility. One has no intention of changing. The other one desperately wants to change. One does nothing to strive to overcome his sins, while the other applies himself with all the vigor he can muster to expose himself to the means of grace so that he might, over time, grow out of those sins. That's the difference between the hypocrite and the struggling believer. Well, be honest with God. Be honest with yourself. Press on towards the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus. And endeavor to cleanse yourself from all filthiness of the flesh and of the spirit, both of the outward man and the inward man, striving to perfect holiness in the fear of God. This is the challenge Jesus is setting before these people. He is saying to them, don't think that if you delude the public, you've deluded God. And don't think that just because outwardly you look clean and act clean, that that's going to cover for the willful, defense of and indulgence in private sins with which you've made peace and in which you increasingly indulge and defend." He says, such people are like rotting corpses. They only decay into worse corruption as time goes on. And ultimately, what happens is the stench comes through the whited walls and it can't be hidden any longer. And so the time to mortify hypocrisy is now. The time is now to say to yourself, you know what? I put on a better act before people that I live in my private life. I need to bring my private life up to the level of the behavior I engage in before people so that if somebody suddenly sees me, they won't see anything. that I wouldn't have done had I known they were standing there. May God help us to be true and honest people and live with purity in our inner man. Shall we pray together? Father, these are great challenges and difficult things. Because there is in all of us an awareness that we're not what we should be and a level of shame over the thought that somebody would find out who we really are. May that be a goad to us, Father, to become better people. Not by mere human self-effort. but by seeking the application of the benefit of the blood of Christ shed on the cross for the mortification of our sins. Father, your son has purchased on the cross the power and the cleansing of our lives from all sin. And so may it be applied now in our lives so that we might overcome the sins that we struggle with. And Father, we pray that you would help us to be sincere and transparent and honest and humble people who live what we image before others. Father, help us to realize that though a just man falls seven times, yet he gets up in repentance and he moves forward again. And so, Father, may we be faithful today in making a new effort to be men and women of God who have integrity all the way through from our public image to our most private thoughts. Father, purify us and cleanse us by the power and grace of Jesus. And in the merit and power of his shed blood, Father, we ask it in His name. Amen.