We have finished our VBS and what a challenging week it has been. We learned about “God’s unshakeable truth”. The motto for the week was ‘know the truth, speak the truth, and live the truth”. The kids learned it was important to know the truth, but it was also important to speak it and to live it.
It’s not enough to know the truth, there has to be action behind the truth. Truth needs to be played out in front of the world around us. Truth needs to seen and heard. But the only way that can happen is by having a changed heart. Let’s read Mark 7:1-23
Jesus has just feed the five thousand; he has healed the sick, walked on water, and set the captives free. People are talking about him everywhere and he has gained the attention of the religious leaders of his day. In fact we see they have sent out a party ‘to check things out’. The first thing the leaders observe is the disciples not washing their hands before eating. In Jesus’ day, there was an elaborate ceremony before eating.
These Jewish rituals where performed before each meal. Devout Jews would perform a short ceremony, washing their hands and arms in a specific way. The disciples did not have dirty hands, but they were simply not carrying out this traditional cleansing. Jesus understood exactly what they where accusing him of and it was not following tradition. The cleansing wasn’t in scripture it was tradition. So Jesus uncovers this entire line of thought and he challenges them on this because he knew where their hearts were, their hearts were in the traditions they followed and not in God.
Jesus accuses them of hypocrisy in v.7. They are saying they worship God, but in fact they are worshiping rules made by men. Hypocrisy can be defined as pretending to be something you are not and have no intention of being. Jesus called the Pharisees hypocrites because they worshiped God for the wrong reasons. Their worship was not motivated by love but by a desire to attain profit, to appear holy, and to increase their status.
We can become hypocrites when we pay more attention to reputation than to character, or carefully follow certain religious practices while allowing our hearts to remain distant from God, and lastly anytime we over emphasize others' sins, by emphasizing our own “virtues”.
In fact the Pharisee’s and zealot religious followers had used the excuse of giving to God to get out of their obligation to care for their own parents. They thought it was more important to put money in the Temple treasury than to help their needy mothers and fathers!
Jesus is identifying the real problem; the Pharisees and religious leaders had a ‘heart condition’. It’s not what goes into a man that makes him unclean, but what come out from his heart that makes him unclean, v.20-21.
Today
Looking at this passage I think it is easy to see, even today the church has a ‘heart condition.’ We have become so locked on to our traditions, our ‘Christian Culture” we have lost our ability to influence the culture around us. It has become ‘good enough’ to listen to Christian radio, go to a Christian bookstore, and attend church once a week. But slowly our hearts have changed. Christians no longer influence our culture because we know the truth, but we don’t speak the truth and we don’t live truth.
Because of this we have slowly watched our freedoms slip away. 36% of evangelicals think ‘homosexuality’ is alright and the number is much higher in other Christian denominations. This week we will celebrate our “Independence Day”, when we as a nation fought off the shackles of religious oppression, taxation without representation. We fought for the freedom of speech, freedom of religion, for the right to govern ourselves…without government dictating what we were to believe.
Yet today those very ideals are being threatened. This week I attended a meeting of local pastors in a conference call. All over the state of California pastors gathered in conference rooms to hear about the threat to traditional marriage. See this threat is more than a man marring a man, or women marring another woman. It’s about telling you what you are to accept as normal. It’s about telling you what is acceptable in church and what is not.
What are we to do?
I believe it all starts with our hearts, before we can start to influence our culture, our
friends and our families, we need a change of heart. Jesus says this in verse 21-23 “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.” Yet these are the very things are being reflected in churches today. We need to repent as Christians and start to live the way Christ intended us to live. We need to repent of not setting the example in marriage, we need to repent of pornography in our homes, we need to repent of greed and materialism, we need to repent of arrogance. The list is right in front of us, we need to start living the truth.
Freedom
Freedom isn’t free, it has a price. It is a price as Americans we are familiar with. We have watched generation after generations give their sons and daughters for the freedom of others. Our faith is not different, you where bought with a price. Christ gave his life for you; Christ lived and died, so that you might live. Christ came to heal the “broken hearted”, He wants to fix our heart condition. It starts with putting our faith in Him, trusting him to remove our sin. It starts by trusting him to come into our hearts and to change us from the inside out. Freedom start with Christ in us, freedom comes from Christ changing us, freedom come from the spirit living through us in our lives.
Do you want to change to world? Do you want to see culture change, start by allowing Christ to live through you. Galatians 2:20 says this “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”
-ps
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