Clean on the Outside, Filthy Within

Introduction

Good morning church! My name is Alex and I serve as one of the pastors here.

Becoming a parent in the last several years has started to open my eyes to things that aren’t as clean as you think they are. For example, when I give my daughters a bath, you get the tub filled and ready to go and as I’m rinsing them off I”m realizing that they’re just sitting in all the dirt, sweat, old food, or missed spots from a dirty diaper that they’re just splashing around in.

I start to realize and wonder if they’re even actually clean after the bath because the water is now nasty bath water and not sure they even end up clean.

But as I was thinking about that this week, I started to see how that is us with religion-we dunk ourselves in rituals, hoping the grime, dirt, sweat can be scrubbed off and floats away, but the tub of water (our hearts) stays dirty. This is the heart of what Jesus confronts in Mark 7-rituals that swirl around our dirty hearts, but never truly refresh them.

Context Tease

IN Mark 7, Jesus faces the religious elites who are obsessed with hand-washing rules-not for hygiene, but to signal superiority. But Jesus flips the script on them: true defilement isn’t on your hands; it’s in your heart.

Main Point

Our big idea this morning is that man-made religion, our traditions, rituals, and rules promise cleanliness but delivers contamination. It’s not the solution. Jesus is. He doesn’t just wash the outside; he renews the inside.

Point 1: Religious Rules Can’t Rewrite God’s Word

Explain

The Pharisees and the scribes as the religious elite have continued to hear about Jesus and his ministry. They travel 120 miles to come and find him to hear from him and see the works that he is doing. It would have taken close to a week of travel for them to actually make the trip up from Jerusalem. As they are watching Jesus and his disciples, they begin to notice that they didn’t wash their hands before eating.

This sends them to grow frustrated and confused as this teacher doesn’t have his students following the traditions of their elders that have laid out. Because of this they are led to ask Jesus about why this is and why he doesn’t do anything about it. They’re concerned because a teacher of the law would know to have any of his students following their traditions.

The leaders before them were creating these religious traditions to help be a fence so that it would keep them from even coming close to sin. But over time, what ended up getting lost was that their own rituals started to be so heavy-handed that they viewed them as actually being what cleaned people up, but in turn, it actually did the opposite of what was intended. They wanted it to protect them and help keep them holy, but when it was lifted up to be viewed as a standard, it actually moved to a works-based faith of purity rituals rather than a heart to worship God with.

But Jesus responds in such a way that catches them all of guard. He quotes from the Old Testament in Isaiah. Isaiah spoke this at Judah’s leaders centuries earlier for their idol worship that they disguised. Now Jesus aims this at these religious experts who have turned God’s law into a checklist the second to their traditions. These are the great teachers and scholars of their day that are treated with respect and honor where ever they go and this random man from Nazareth is calling them hypocrites claiming that they actually don’t have hearts for God.

Jesus begins to evaluate a little more what exactly he is saying about them using the example of how they claim to honor their parents but they make up their own religious tradition to actually avoid following the scriptures. It’s a command from the Scriptures that they are to honor their parents. But instead of honoring them and caring for them financially when they’re in need, they would say that their money has been given to God, it’s dedicated so that when they personally die those funds will go to the temple. So they can’t help their parents out financially because they have to keep it to themselves to “honor God” with their funds later.

It’s as if you had a family budget app that let’s you “donate” to charity with that money 10 years from now by skipping your parent’s medical bills today. It’s a tech-savvy tool to avoid honoring your parents that looks generous but actually nullifies what God’s law commands.

They’re making up their own traditions and religious rules and rituals to actually be loopholes for them to get out of actually following the Scriptures. These elites have traveled 120 miles nearly a week on foot from Jerusalem to scrutinize Jesus, only to be called out with a prophetic mirror from Isaiah They honor me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.

Argument

What they have done is start to lift up their own religious rules and traditions to be higher than the Scriptures are or equal to. When they accuse the disciples of unwashed hands, their accusing them of not following a tradition. This isn’t a law that God gave them in scriptures. When Jesus calls them hypocrites in v. 6-8 he is exposing that they treat their traditions as more authoritative that God’s word. Their traditions end up voiding God’s word.

But the truth is we can look at these religious leaders and judge them all we want but forget to recognize that we do the same exact thing escalating our own religious rules and preferences to be the standard and if people aren’t in line with us in them, they reallllly don’t bear fruit, they’re not christian enough, they aren’t close to God, they’re just not mature in their faith.

Application:

Personal

Personally i’ll find myself in places of judgement or pride in my heart toward other people and think my thoughts on rules are traditions are the right way to do it even though it’s not clear. I think that way about the Doxology at the end of church, it’s extra spiritual on a Sunday if we do that and if other churches do it, they don’t care about church history or praising God or they care about hype more than singing things that are true. Or if another leader tells me they do more topical preaching I can start thinking that is not the way to do church and their not making disciples properly if that’s what they do.

Church-Wide

But we all have these traditions or rules and guidelines that we uphold and treat them as gospel. We say things like if you sing these songs or play music from those bands, it’s not holy or good. If someone has tattoos they’re in sin. Your political party affiliation determine your salvation and ability to interpret scripture properly. Or you go against the traditional grain because you have been annoyed by past hypocrisy so you lean in and get lots of tattoos to prove a point, or the way I pray is going to be so “in formal,” or make a point to mention you drink whisky and smoke cigars, or wear sweats to church to prove your point but at the same time you’re doing the same thing.

The reason that we do this though is because religion is appealing. Religious rituals are easy to have control over. It’s man made and we can justify it by what we say and what we do an it is a visible thing that we can prove to people that our hearts are not far from God because we do these things.

We do this because we want to justify ourselves. We may know that it’s a loophole or we're trying to convince ourselves that it’s actual worship to God. We want God and people around us to think we're good so we offer up these words, phrases, excuses to convince others, God, and ourselves that we’re good.

We become the Pharisees in the passage. We start to look down on people because they’re not in our system that looks nice and cleaned up to the way that we have built it up in our own mind when the Scriptures don’t give 100% clarity on it. But we strive to be right and our pride and judgement lead us to lift up our traditions over God’s word.

A way to know if this is how you’re approaching something is if you ask the question “tell me where that’s at in the Bible” and if you have to give some reach around answer that it’s there but not super clear or it’s just been how you think about it and it leads you to look down on someone who doesn’t agree it’s probably a tradition you’re lifting up higher than God’s commands.

What we end up doing with our own man-made traditions is becoming religious hypocrites. We start becoming the ones who outwardly praise God, but inwardly, our hearts are far from him. Our lips honor him, but we nullify his commands. We nullify the Word of God for the sake of our religious traditions.

Transition

But the truth is that these traditions don’t actually clean us up or make us better; they just make us seem polished, but the inside is still a mess. Religious rituals can never rewrite God’s word. But Jesus digs deeper. What if the real dirt isn’t what we touch, but what we treasure in our hearts?

Point 2: Heart Level Filth that no Ritual can Reach

Explain

As Jesus goes on he draws the entire crowd to dig further. Now he centers on defilement. The religious elite were concerned with being unclean, with not being pure because if they ate food with unclean hands, the food would go in them and then make them completely unclean because of the unclean food that they had consumed.

As Jesus addressed the larger issue of defilement and understanding what actually defiles a person is not what you eat or what comes from the outside, the problem is actually what is from within. The issue is with the human heart. It carries what is actually unclean and from the heart is what comes out of someone which is actually what makes you unclean. Because it’s from the heart that this list of evil comes from.

Jesus doesn’t just give them an illustration to sit on and consider, but he directly addresses what comes out of the heart. Evil thoughts that fester into deceit. Sexual immorality hidden behind purity rituals. slander masked as discernment. These aren’t abstract; they are the very excuses we justify in our lives daily.

The gossip that happens about a coworkers ungodly choices. The wild purchases because we want to keep up appearances. The exaggeration of our prayer life. All of this comes from within.

Argument

We all have these defiled hearts, yet we too are like the religious elites and we downplay our wicked hearts. What the pharisees and scribes were doing was that over time they had a home that was filled with dirt and grime. They took all their best cleaning tools and began to scrub the home with their own cleaners as their traditions and rules. But what they did while trying to keep everything clean was they cut corners. They would make sure the counters were spotless, the table is clear, but behind the fridge and in the corners where no one looked the cob webs still built up. Jesus lists it out in v. 21-23; evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft-these aren’t external stains; they’re heart leaks that rituals can’t seal. Their rituals couldn’t actually reach every piece of their own home and it didn’t actually clean anything. They were just covering up what was really within.

They began to downplay their sin and loopholes to make them seem religious and kept up, but actually what happend was they treated sin like a minor spill that could be wiped up instead of realizing what they have is a toxic flood that needs great care. Their external religion can’t scrub this out; it only masks the symptoms.

Illustration

Imagine having a sparkling sports car with a flawless wax job, but the engine is clogged with sludge ready to seize. You can polish forever, but without an internal rebuild, the car will stall. Or the filtered instagram feed that paints pictures of the perfect routine, the best system to live a holy life but the posts actually hide the envy and comparison that the person is rotting on the inside from. We fool ourselves and make light of our sin or idols but it’s actually a front that is hidden behind the name of religion.

Application

Personal

I’ll gladly commit gluttony and binge eat food or dessert to cover up emotions or stress and say that I’m feasting to celebrate a good week of work or time with friends or family. I make it spiritual and call it a feast to celebrate God’s gifts rather than commit tot he Lord my stress and seek after food to satisfy me. I’ll be envious of other preachers speaking at events and grow bitter that I don’t get picked but disguise it in my heart as being ambitious and feeling like God’s given me something that crowd needs to hear more than the other speaker.

Church-Wide

Maybe you struggle with deceit and find yourself saying or doing things like; copy a friends assignment but justify it by saying “i’m just borrowing God’s gifts to get through this tough time. He’ll understand because I’m serving in other ways.” lying about your actions and excuse it’s okay because God knows your heart and forgives your mistakes.

We love to justify how good we are as parents, so it's fine for our kids to be an idol and their calendar runs our life. We’re getting a ton of discipleship conversations on the window drive time, they're my primary ministry. We slap the Christian sticker of discipleship on it.

Well, we don’t give because we have debt and we want to honor God with our finances so we are putting it all toward our debt. Boasting of being busy because of how much we serve or are doing on mission for our neighbors & friends.

Maybe it’s pride and you exaggerate or always bring up your accomplishments or your spiritual journey that you’ve been on but it’s to boast about yourself and what has happened in your life. “yeah I just struggle to get plugged in because i’m just not sure they’ll be able to pour into me.”

That’s just the small stuff that's acceptable. What about the corners of our hearts that are filled with filth that no one sees and we keep excusing it. What about the evil thoughts, sexual immorality lust, slander that we do behind closed doors that is hidden but we just say well no one sees it so it doesn’t need dusted.

These aren’t just slip ups, they’re symptoms of a heart that no ritual can reach.

FCF

Here’s the real problem church - no matter what habits, traditions, rules, and man made regulations you have it can’t actually clean you up. No matter what lie we keep telling ourselves to fool ourselves that what we’re doing is actually holy will ever actually bring our hearts to be clean and pure. No matter how much you hide the filth and try all you can to keep scrubbing and pouring different solutions, band aids, won’t actually deal with the deeper issue that needs not just a clean up, but a transplant. You can’t clean yourself enough, you can’t wash way your sin. No amount of religious scrubbing reaches the heart’s core. So what is going to actually clean us? How can we actually be pure from the inside.

Gospel Hook

In Ezekiel 36 we have God’s prophecy explaining what the sin of people looks like to him. He says that Ezekiel 36:17–18 ““they defiled it with their conduct and actions. Their behavior before me was like menstrual impurity. So I poured out my wrath on them because of the blood they had shed on the land, and because they had defiled it with their idols.” But in God’s kindness, he restores us as he goes on to how Ezekiel 36:25–27 “I will also sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean. I will cleanse you from all your impurities and all your idols. I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; I will remove your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. I will place my Spirit within you and cause you to follow my statutes and carefully observe my ordinances.”

Here is the good news: Jesus doesn’t condemn us and walk away because of your sin-stained heart. Jesus enters into your life and takes the filth on himself while declaring you clean. His blood doesn’t stain; it purifies. The work of Jesus is the greatest thing we need because, as we look at this passage, it presents the major problem that there is nothing we can do to actually cleanse ourselves before God. But in our desperate need, Jesus has offered himself as the one who would take the punishment for our sin and wipe us clean to give us this new heart that actually honors God.

Stop scrubbing. Church, recognize the traditions you’re clinging to. Let the light of the world shine upon the sin that you’re downplaying. Confess and ask God to heal the hidden corners to give you new desires and his people to help as the Spirit works in you.

If you’re tired of external fixes, confess today that Jesus can actually clean what we never could.

Conclusion

Man-made religion scrubs the surface but leaves us filthy. Jesus alone is the solution. His cross drains our dirty bathwater, his resurrection gives us a new heart, and his Spirit empowers purity from within us. What can wash away my sin, nothing but the blood of Jesus. What makes us whole, nothing but the blood of Jesus. He is the one who makes us white as snow. Nothing but the blood of Jesus.