Worthless Worship
The Life of Jesus Vol.2 (True Religion) Part 17 (Revised)
Mark 7:1-23       12-4-11

Summary: Jesus was very concerned to warn us about the error of the Pharisees. Their movement started out good, but became infected with the deadly disease of human wisdom. That human wisdom led them to externalism and became more authoritative than the Bible. That leads to disobedience (following external rules while ignoring the heart) and greater uncleanness (because nothing is done about the source of uncleanness – the heart). The way to be clean is for the heart to move toward Christ (faith).
				
Introduction
Vain Worship
The Definition of Phariseeism
Human Religion vs. the Gospel
The Disease of Human Tradition
Externalism
More authoritative than the Bible
The Accusation
What contaminates?
Our version of Phariseeism
The Disobedience of Human Religion
Effort
The Contamination of Human Religion
Revolutionary
The real source of contamination: the heart
Conclusion
 
Mark 7:1-37 The Pharisees and some of the teachers of the law who had come from Jerusalem gathered around Jesus and 2 saw some of his disciples eating food with hands that were "unclean," that is, unwashed. 3 (The Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they give their hands a ceremonial washing, holding to the tradition of the elders. 4 When they come from the marketplace they do not eat unless they wash. And they observe many other traditions, such as the washing of cups, pitchers and kettles.) 5 So the Pharisees and teachers of the law asked Jesus, "Why don't your disciples live according to the tradition of the elders instead of eating their food with 'unclean' hands?" 6 He replied, "Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you hypocrites; as it is written: "'These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. 7 They worship me in vain; their teachings are but rules taught by men.' 8 You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to the traditions of men." 9 And he said to them: "You have a fine way of setting aside the commands of God in order to observe your own traditions! 10 For Moses said, 'Honor your father and your mother,' and, 'Anyone who curses his father or mother must be put to death.' 11 But you say that if a man says to his father or mother: 'Whatever help you might otherwise have received from me is Corban' (that is, a gift devoted to God), 12 then you no longer let him do anything for his father or mother. 13 Thus you nullify the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down. And you do many things like that." 
14 Again Jesus called the crowd to him and said, "Listen to me, everyone, and understand this. 15 Nothing outside a man can make him 'unclean' by going into him. Rather, it is what comes out of a man that makes him 'unclean.' 16 " 17 After he had left the crowd and entered the house, his disciples asked him about this parable. 18 "Are you so dull?" he asked. "Don't you see that nothing that enters a man from the outside can make him 'unclean'? 19 For it doesn't go into his heart but into his stomach, and then out of his body." (In saying this, Jesus declared all foods "clean.") 20 He went on: "What comes out of a man is what makes him 'unclean.' 21 For from within, out of men's hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, 22 greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. 23 All these evils come from inside and make a man 'unclean.'" 24 Jesus left that place and went to the vicinity of Tyre. 

Introduction
Vain Worship
In verse 7 of our text today Jesus makes a frightening and shocking statement. Actually, it is a statement God made about 750 years earlier through the Prophet Isaiah, and Jesus is quoting it and applying it to His day.

7 They worship me in vain

Worthless worship. That statement applied to some people in Isaiah’s day, and some people in Jesus’ day - who would it apply to in our day? Who is offering God worthless worship? It is not talking about atheists. They don’t worship God in vain (they don’t worship Him at all). It is not talking about the guy who is out playing golf on Sunday morning – or sleeping in. Who is it talking about? Look what it says:

6 These people honor me with their lips…

These people whose religion is worthless and empty and rejected by God are people who honor Him with their lips. These are people who are coming to church every Sunday and singing things like: “Worthy is the Lamb, That was slain for us. The Son of God and man, You are high and lifted up, And all the world will praise Your great Name.” What comes out of their mouths is right on, but their worship is rejected by God because there is something making them unclean in His sight. And if you are unclean or defiled in God’s sight – not only will He not accept your worship, but it will be detestable to Him.
The Definition of Phariseeism
We have been studying the life of Jesus, and the last couple weeks we saw Jesus offend a crowd of five thousand	 families to the point where they all left Him. And not only did they leave, so did all Jesus’ disciples except the Twelve. There is another group Jesus had not offended in a while, but He will get the opportunity today, because that group is on the way from Jerusalem right now – the Scribes and Pharisees. If you are ever getting bored and want some real intense drama, just look up one of these confrontations between Jesus and the religious leaders. It is never boring. 

1 The Pharisees and some of the Scribes who had come from Jerusalem gathered around Jesus

We have people in this church from a number of theological backgrounds. If I ask you to describe your distinctive beliefs, some might say, “I’m an Evangelical.” Someone else might say, “I’m a Pentecostal,” or “I’m a Calvinist.” How many of you would say, “I’m a Pharisee”? Do we have any Pharisees here this morning? How about this – has anyone here ever been called a Pharisee? A number of us have been called Pharisees, but none of us would identify ourselves that way. I think in our day the term, “Pharisee” is basically just the way to call someone a name in the church. In the world they call each other jerks and idiots – we call each other Pharisees.
But what is a Pharisee? If you ask ten people for a definition of Phariseeism you will probably get at least ten different definitions. I think most people just think Phariseeism is whatever they disagree with. If someone is different from me – he is a Pharisee.
But if you think about how much of the real estate in the gospel accounts is devoted to exposing the error of the Pharisees, it is obviously very important to the Lord that we understand what they believed and what was so wrong with it. Over and over in the gospels you see large portions devoted to warning us about their brand of religion. Even last week in Mark 8 when they were sailing across the sea, what was it that Jesus was trying to teach the Disciples? Watch out for the influence of the Pharisees. And our entire text today – the whole thing is devoted to teaching us what is wrong with the religion of the Pharisees. So if it is that important to Jesus to warn His people over and over about the danger of falling into the error of the Pharisees, we had better make sure we have a clear understanding of what it was they taught, and what is so wrong about it.

Human Religion vs. the Gospel 
The Disease of Human Tradition
The Pharisee movement started out as a wonderful thing. The Jewish people were drifting away from faithfulness to the Word of God, and so the Pharisees’ purpose was to call the people back to God. They were all about remaining faithful to God’s Word and not compromising with the world. Their goals were excellent at the beginning. But then something went horribly wrong. Their movement became infected with a deadly disease. This disease is so lethal and powerful that can not only destroy the best movements and religious systems, but it actually has the ability to empty the cross of its power! Can you imagine? You can actually be preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ, and if your preaching becomes infected with this disease, it can actually make the cross of Christ empty. “What is the disease?” Mark mentions it twice in verses 3-4.

3 (The Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they give their hands a ceremonial washing, holding to the tradition of the elders. 4 When they come from the marketplace they do not eat unless they wash. And there are many other traditions they have received, such as the washing of cups, pitchers and kettles.)

The disease that destroys any religious movement and that can even destroy the preaching of the cross itself is the disease of human tradition. When we decide we want to help the Scriptures out by adding in our own, human wisdom, we destroy the Scriptures. Human wisdom in spiritual matters is like arsenic. No matter how fine the wine is, you add arsenic to it and it is poison.
Externalism 
And if you want to know what the active ingredient is in the poison of human religion, I can give it to you in one word: externalism. Human religion focuses on the outside rather than on the heart. Being a good person was a matter of your actions, rather than your inner man. So they saw the law as mainly governing actions rather than the heart.
And if the law just regulates actions, there is no end to the rules because there is an infinite number of loopholes. If you are trying to get people to behave the right way without addressing their heart, there is no end to the number of rules you will have to make. And that is exactly what happened to the religion of the Pharisees. The traditions of the rabbis just piled up and piled up until finally it was this massive tangle of rules and human wisdom. They finally gathered it all up and put it in book form and named it the Talmud. It is huge - at least twenty volumes in Hebrew.
More authoritative than the Bible 
And as soon as you introduce human wisdom into your religion, it won’t be long before that human wisdom becomes more authoritative than the Bible.  And that is exactly what happened. Listen to this statement from the Talmud: “The words of the scribes are more lovely than the words of the Law.” Here is another one: “It is a greater crime to transgress the words of the scroll of Rabbi Hillel than the words of Scripture.” It was just like the Roman Catholic Church of our day. This is what the current Catechism says: “the Church…does not derive her certainty about all revealed truths from the holy Scriptures alone. Both Scripture and Tradition must be accepted and honored with equal sentiments of devotion and reverence.” So they claim that church tradition is equal with Scripture, but in reality it is above Scripture because whenever there is a conflict, it is the authority of the church that gives the only authoritative interpretation of the Scriptures. It means what they say it means, even if they say it means something other than what it clearly says.
The Accusation
Another characteristic of this kind of legalistic religion is this – it tends to be very harsh. Any time someone does not care about the heart, look out, because there won’t be anything to reign in their anger, jealousy, pride, hostility, and thirst for power and control. So when Mark says these men came up from Jerusalem, as soon as you read that statement you should hear some dramatic, frightening music in the background. This is a crisis. These men are dangerous. The reason Jesus left Judea in the first place is because after John the Baptist was captured, these men came sniffing around Jesus, so Jesus fled. The last time Jesus had an encounter with them, they accused Jesus of being satanic. And for a whole year now they have been plotting with the Herodians about how they could kill Jesus (Mk.3:6). Legalists hate people who do not follow their rules. So it is dramatic enough when Mark says they were coming up from Jerusalem. But then it gets even more dramatic.

1 The Pharisees and some of the teachers of the law who had come from Jerusalem gathered around Jesus 

They have Him outnumbered and surrounded. Usually in these encounters the writer just tells us what they say and what Jesus says. But here he gives us this picture of them gathering themselves around Him.

and 2 saw some of his disciples eating food with hands that were "unclean," that is, unwashed. 
What contaminates?
Is that a big deal? It is a huge deal. There is an entire tractate of the Talmud devoted to the purification of vessels – that goes on and on for thirty chapters. Those are the rules Mark is talking about in verse 4, with the cups, pitchers and kettles. And there is another tractate devoted totally to ritual hand washing – four full chapters on that. To give you an idea of how important this was to them, one Rabbi said, “Whosoever has his abode in the land of Israel and eats his common food with rinsed hands may rest assured that he shall obtain eternal life.” Salvation by hand washing. (And if that sounds bizarre to you – it is no different from any other religion that teaches salvation through some action, whether it be hand washing or baptism or going to church or praying or whatever.) The story is told of the very famous Rabbi who was imprisoned and given a reduction in his water ration. Instead of drinking it, he used it to wash his hands before eating, claiming he would rather die than transgress the tradition of the elders.
Jesus never, ever broke the Law of God. However He went out of His way to break the traditions of the elders. Remember Jesus’ very first miracle – turning water to wine. Have you ever wondered why He made all that wine in the ceremonial water jars? They had run out of wine, which means all the wine containers were empty, right? So when Jesus creates all that wine, why not do it in the wine containers? Why do it in the jars that they used for the ceremonial hand washing ritual? He did it to desecrate that ritual. Using those jars would be like going into a Catholic church and using their holy water to mix up some Kool Aid for a potluck. Over and over Jesus purposefully forced the issue with their ritualism. So they come up and call Him on this. 
Our version of Phariseeism
Now, before we look at Jesus’ response, we need to think through the question of what any of this has to do with us. Nobody today thinks they are saved through ritual hand washing. So why is Jesus so concerned about warning us about Phariseeism? In what form has the enemy disguised the religion of the Pharisees in our day? The most obvious place is in the Roman Catholic Church. They believe in salvation through ceremonies and rituals, they hold church tradition above Scripture, and they tend to focus on the outside rather than the heart. So Catholicism is very close to Phariseeism. However there is a subtle way that these errors work their way in to our Protestant Christianity as well. For the Pharisees it was ritual cleansing rules, for the Catholics it is the seven sacraments, but for us it tends to be things like church attendance, ministry activity, Bible reading, and prayer.
Here is a very common scenario: you have someone who believes in heaven and hell, believes Jesus is God, and wants to be right with God; but his heart is really in this world. If you look at his calendar, you look at his checkbook, you see how he spends his free time and how he spends his money, and you listen to the conversations he has – it is pretty obvious that his heart is enamored with this world and not with the Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus is not the great treasure of his life – the things in this world are. He really does want forgiveness, he really does want to go to heaven, he does not want to be at odds with God – he wants to be a Christian in good standing; but he does not want to let go of this world. He does not want to let go of certain sins, he does not want any drastic changes in lifestyle. And so he goes hunting for a church. And he keeps looking until he finds one where the preacher makes it sound like God will accept him just the way he is without making any demands on him. He goes from church to church until he finds a preacher who only talks about God’s love and acceptance, and makes him feel like he is fine with God just the way he is. Maybe God would like him to change his lifestyle, but nothing is really required. And now that guy can go to church faithfully every Sunday, go to Sunday school, pitch in his fair share into the offering plate, volunteer for some ministry, and he is good. And in the process of finding a church like that, if he comes to a church where the pastor preaches about repentance and requires a wholesale forsaking of this world to follow Christ – he writes that preacher off as a legalistic Pharisee and moves on. But the irony is, that man is the one who is the legalistic Pharisee because he thinks he can be right with God through religious actions even when his heart is far from God.
That is just one example. There are others who think they are right with God because they routinely share the gospel with unbelievers. Or because they homeschool, or because they don’t drink or smoke or go to movies, or whatever. There are as many varieties of Phariseeism as there are people who want to be accepted by God through their religious works. 

The Disobedience of Human Religion

5 So the Pharisees and teachers of the law asked Jesus, "Why don't your disciples live according to the tradition of the elders instead of eating their food with 'unclean' hands?"
How is Jesus going to answer this? If these men are convinced you are teaching people to break the traditions of the elders it could cost you your life. They surround Jesus and then make this accusation; what is Jesus going to say to defend Himself here? 

6 He replied, "Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you hypocrites

Wow. Have you ever called someone a hypocrite to his face? This is some extreme language. Jesus was not one bit intimidated by these men. He scolds them like children. He takes some hard words that Isaiah pronounced against the false religionists of his day and applies them to these Pharisees. 

6 …as it is written: "'These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. 7 They worship me in vain; their teachings are but rules taught by men.' 8 You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to the traditions of men." 

These men ate, drank, and slept their religion. It meant everything to them. They had incredible self-discipline and kept all the rules to the letter. They were the most devout, devoted, committed, disciplined people there were. And Jesus just gathers up their whole, massive system in one, giant ball and tosses the entire thing right in the dumpster. All their worship is in vain – worthless, a complete waste of breath.
Why is Jesus so against adding in some human rules? Is it really that big a deal? So they have some rituals – extrapolated from the very commands of God’s Word; what is so bad about that? What harm does it do?

8 You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to the traditions of men."

Rule-keeping leads to disobedience. It is ironic – the opposite of what you would naturally expect.
In a ritualistic system the assumption is, “If God says don’t do X, then avoiding X means you are being obedient, and therefore if you stay one hundred feet. away from X then you are being ultra-obedient. So if we just come up with rules that are stricter that God’s laws, we can guard ourselves from ever violating God’s law. If God says the speed limit is 70, and we make a rule saying, “Don’t go over 40” – then we might go 45 or 50, but we for sure would not ever break God’s law.
That idea would work great if God’s laws were designed to govern external behavior. But they are not. They target the heart. And you cannot make any rules stricter than God’s to govern the heart. His standard is already as high as it is possible to get. But here is the problem – if you think it is all about external behavior, and you miss the fact that God’s commands are designed to govern the heart, you can keep thousands of external rules to the letter, and at the same time completely disobey the command of God that targets the heart. If God commands that I am to love you, and we invent one thousand rules about things I have to do for you, I can do all one thousand of them and still fail to love you. If God commands, “Honor your parents,” and mom tells her son to go clean his room, and he rolls his eyes, and then says, “Yes, ma’am,” and then cleans his room, has he obeyed?
No. His disobeyed the honor command in his heart when he rolled his eyes. And that is exactly what happened in the Pharisees’ system. 

9 And he said to them: "You have a fine way of setting aside the commands of God in order to observe your own traditions! 10 For Moses said, 'Honor your father and your mother,' and, 'Anyone who curses his father or mother must be put to death.' 11 But you say that if a man says to his father or mother: 'Whatever help you might otherwise have received from me is Corban' (that is, a gift devoted to God), 12 then you no longer let him do anything for his father or mother. 13 Thus you nullify the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down. And you do many things like that." 

In the Jewish system they had rules about gifts devoted to God, and if you were a slick enough lawyer, and you really knew your way around all the traditions, there was actually a way that you could use those rules to devote all your money to God, but still hang on to it and spend it however you wanted, but you were not allowed to use it to help your elderly parents. And you could pat yourself on the back for not breaking one single rule. And all the while you are smashing to pieces the law itself, because the law of God had to do with the heart. The reason Jesus was so against human rule-keeping was because it actually promoted disobedience to God’s Word, under the guise of obedience. Anything that pulls your attention away from the issues of the heart is going to result in less obedience to God’s Word, not more.
Effort
This is where a lot of people get confused about legalism. Some people seem to think that legalism is any effort to obey God. They say, “Any time you try to obey God – any time you put forth energy to do something God commands – that’s legalism.” That is as wrong as it can be. It is not legalism to obey God. Legalism is turning your attention away from obeying God in order to obey human rules.
Now, is there any legitimate role for human rules? Sure. If we make a rule that says you cannot drive 90 mph past an elementary school – that is a good rule. If a church has a rule against having coffee in the sanctuary so they can be good stewards of their $18,000 carpet, that is fine. There is nothing wrong with institutional rules as long as they are not made requirements for being right with God.
In fact, it is even OK to make up human rules for helping you keep God’s law, as long as the only purpose of the rule is to help move your heart in the direction of God’s will. For example, someone might come to the conclusion that for him, whenever he watches TV, his heart is pulled away from the things of the Lord and toward worldly affections, he might say, “OK, no TV for me for a year. Instead I’ll devote my TV hours to doing something that will actually help draw my heart closer to the heart of God.” That is not legalism; it is wisdom.
However, it could very easily become legalism. There are two ways it could slide into legalism. One is if he starts imposing that rule on other people. If that guy finds out that you watch TV every night, and concludes that you are not following God’s will for your life – that is legalism. Now he has taken something that was supposed to be a tool to help his heart along, and turned it into a law to judge your heart.
Another way it can become legalism is if he imagines that God is pleased with him because of his keeping that rule – regardless of what is in his heart. Once he starts thinking that, the next thing you know he is following the TV rule, and he is patting himself on the back for being so faithful, and yet he is listening to music that pulls his heart away from God and watching movies that pull his heart away from God and books and conversations and fantasies and all kinds of other things, so that he is ignoring the heart and focusing only on the rule. 

The Contamination of Human Religion 
Now, Jesus is not finished. There is one more very important thing He needs to explain, so…

14 Again Jesus called the crowd to him 

Evidently this conflict with the big shots from Jerusalem has drawn another crowd, so Jesus now turns His attention to the crowd and ends up making what is probably the most shocking, outrageous statement in the entire New Testament.
The reason people fall into ritualism, or external religion, or legalism; is because of a failure to understand one very, very important truth. It is a failure to understand the source of contamination. 
When you sin, it makes you dirty. It makes you filthy in God’s sight, which is why you cannot draw near to Him until you are cleansed. That is one thing the Pharisees had right. They got that. Where they went off track was in their ideas of where the contamination came from. They thought the filthiness and dirtiness that alienated you from God came from the forbidden action. You do something you are not allowed to do, and doing that thing makes you spiritually unclean before God. That was their theory, and Jesus is going to correct that.

14 …"Listen to me, everyone, and understand this. 15 Nothing outside a man can make him 'unclean' by going into him. Rather, it is what comes out of a man that makes him 'unclean.' 

Huh? What does that mean? These people had been taught all their lives that non-kosher food made you unclean. Touching a corpse or a leper made you unclean. They had always been taught that uncleanness is something that comes from contact with some defiled thing. But now Jesus says, “No, that’s not true. The only thing that can defile you is what comes out of you.” And then He walks away. Just makes this baffling statement, and then walks away leaving them scratching their heads.

17 After he had left the crowd and entered the house, his disciples asked him about this parable. 

If you are not curious enough to ask and seek and search to discover what something in God’s Word means, don’t expect God to reveal it to you. But the Disciples are interested enough to ask, so Jesus explains: 

18 "Are you so dull?" he asked. "Don't you see that nothing that enters a man from the outside can make him 'unclean'? 19 For it doesn't go into his heart but into his stomach, and then out of his body." (In saying this, Jesus declared all foods "clean.")

Food cannot contaminate you, why? Because it does not go into your heart. There is only one part of you that can possibly be contaminated spiritually, and it is your heart. Your body cannot be contaminated spiritually; only your heart can. The laws in the Old Testament about cleanness and uncleanness were pictures – illustrations about what sin does to the heart. Those pictures had a purpose temporarily, but then when Jesus Christ came, that purpose was finished and the pictures were no longer needed. So Jesus just brings it all to an end with a nonchalant explanation to His disciples. Isn’t that amazing?
Revolutionary
That statement in verse 19 may very well be the most revolutionary statement in the entire New Testament. To the ancient Jew, to say that there was no food that would defile you was an incredibly extreme statement. 4 Maccabees tells the story of a widow and her seven sons. When the authorities demanded that her sons eat some pork, they refused – even in the face of torture and death. The first had his tongue cut out, the ends of his limbs cut off; and he was then roasted alive in a pan. The second had his hair and the skin of his skull torn off. And on it went through all seven, and they could have stopped it at any point just by taking a bite of pork.
The kosher laws were the essence of religion to these people. And with one sweeping pronouncement Jesus declared the whole thing over. What kind of authority does it take to just say, “You know what, I think I’ll just move all of humanity to the next dispensation right…now”? This is as radical a claim to deity as there is. Some of the changes Jesus made were easier to take than others. For example, the Sabbath was a big deal to the Jews, and yet, in the book of Acts, the Church does not seem to have any problem changing their day of corporate worship from the Sabbath to the first day of the week. We do not read of a lot of controversy over the setting aside of Sabbath day observance. This, on the other hand, was a huge controversy in the early church. In Acts 10, God tells Peter to go eat with a Gentile and Peter says, “No way – I’ve never eaten unclean food in my life.” God speaks to him directly from heaven and he says, “I can’t do what You’re asking, God, because it would violate my religion.” All foods have been clean now for ten years, and still Peter has not put one non-kosher thing in his mouth and he wants to argue with God about eating with a Gentile. Finally after a half a chapter of persuasion, Peter was willing to go do it. Then Peter has to spend most of Chapter 11 explaining himself to the Jews, because what he did was considered a major scandal. The issue comes up again at the Jerusalem Council in chapter 15. The setting aside of unclean foods was a massive stumbling block for the Jews. You see it again in Galatians 2, where Paul ends up having to rebuke Peter. It was so hard for the Jews to accept the idea that no food can make you unclean.
The real source of contamination: the heart
So then what can? What is it that defiles us and separates us from God?

20 He went on: "What comes out of a man is what makes him 'unclean.' 21 For from within, out of men's hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, 22 greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. 23 All these evils come from inside and make a man 'unclean.'" 

That is devastating. Can you imagine how this hit them? Imagine spending your life - all day every day just trying to avoid spiritual contamination. Constantly being careful to steer clear of everything that could defile you – a corpse, a leper, a Gentile, a non-kosher animal, and countless other defiling things - and you are moving through life being SO careful to avoid any contamination, and when you do bump into one making sure you do all the cleansing rituals exactly right to the letter. And you do the cleaning rituals even if you do not touch anything unclean just in case you maybe touched something without knowing it. That is your whole life, and then Jesus comes along and says, “Guess what – none of those things can defile you. The source of defilement and contamination is – your heart”! They worked so hard to never touch anything like a corpse, and then they find out they have a rotting corpse inside them – touching them all the time. It would be like someone who is paranoid about getting sick, so he avoids touching anything that has any germs on it, and he washes his hands twenty times a day, and then the doctor tells him, “I’m sorry, but you have a rare disease where one of your vital organs is actually generating deadly flu germs inside you all day long.”
They believed that spiritual contamination would separate them from God – and they were right. They believed spiritual defilement would make them detestable and disgusting in God’s sight and would cause Him to turn His face away from them, and they were right. So they devoted their lives to avoiding spiritual contamination. And then Jesus comes along and says, “You have a geyser of contaminating, filthy, uncleanness in your heart.”
So many people think that their guilt before God is all about what they have done. It is not – the problem is what they are. The reason I need forgiveness from God is not just because I have done evil things; it is because I am evil. The most essential component of who I am, that part of me that defines me – my heart; is a mass of filthy, contaminating, defiling uncleanness.
And so what good is external religion? If the source of my defilement is my own heart, and I am busy doing things with my body to clean myself up (like go to church and volunteer and read my Bible and say my prayers), none of that stuff will do anything to clean up my heart.
We will never find the right solution to our uncleanness until we understand the source. If you think the cause of your sin is outside you – like if you think your anger is caused by the people who provoke you, or if you think your worry is caused by circumstances, or your attitudes came from what happened to you as a kid – any failure to understand that your heart is the source of one hundred percent of your sin will keep you from ever finding the solution. And it will set you on a goose chase looking for the wrong kind of religion, because any religion that does not do something about the heart – even if you think you find that religion on the pages of the Bible – any religion that does not address the heart is worthless religion. And the people who worship God like that are the ones Isaiah was talking about who honor God with their lips but their hearts are far from Him and therefore all their worship is worthless, and their prayers are not only ignored in heaven, but they are actually detestable to God. Can you see why it was so important to Jesus to expose the worthlessness of this kind of religion? 

Conclusion
Well, where does that leave us? If external religious observance cannot do anything to cleanse us of our filthiness, and if our hearts are smokestacks spewing out constant defilement all the time, what is the solution? The solution is, we need something that can actually cleanse the heart. But how is that done? He does not say explicitly because that is not His purpose in this text. However He does give us a clue. Look back at verse 6.

6 These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. 

If the problem is a heart that is far from Him, it stands to reason that the solution would be a heart that draws near to Him, right? So the way to address the problem of a defiled heart is some kind of movement of your heart toward Jesus Christ in a way that honors Him. How do you do that? How do you come to Him – move in His direction, with your heart? If you were here two weeks ago you know the answer to that question, because Jesus answered it in John 6. And if you weren’t here I would urge you to get that sermon. It is the message from Nov.20th, 2011 titled “Will Believe for Food.” I can’t repeat that whole sermon now, but I can tell you that the bottom line is this: The way to move toward God in your heart is through faith – entrusting yourself to Him to the point where you look to Him alone to satisfy all the cravings of your soul (instead of looking to this world). It is when you look at Him and see infinite treasure – treasure that is worth more to you than every pleasure this world has to offer all put together. It is when you trust Him so much that you say, “Whatever You say, I believe. Wherever You want me to go, I’ll go, because I trust You to know the best way. Whatever You say to give up I’ll give up. Whatever You command, I’ll obey no matter what the cost.” That attitude is what faith is. And when we exercise that kind of faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, He responds by pouring out the one thing that actually has the power to cleanse a filthy heart – grace. And He offers that grace for free to anyone who trusts Him in that way. So do not leave here today with a dirty heart.

24 Jesus left that place and went to the vicinity of Tyre. 

What is that? That is Uncleanville. That is Gentile land. And you are not going to believe what Jesus does there. We will take a look at that next time. 

Benediction - 1 Thessalonians 3:12,13  May the Lord make your love increase and overflow for each other and for everyone else, just as ours does for you. 13 May he strengthen your hearts so that you will be blameless and holy in the presence of our God and Father when our Lord Jesus comes with all his holy ones.