Scripture is Mark 7, 14-23. This is God’s holy word. And he called the people to him again and said to them, Hear me, all of you, and understand. There is nothing outside a person that by going into him can defile him, but the things that come out of a person are what defile him.
And when He had entered the house and left the people, His disciples asked Him about the parable. And He said to them, Then are you also without understanding? Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile him, since it enters not his heart, but his stomach, and is expelled? And thus He declared all foods clean.
And he said, what comes out of a person is what defiles him. For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.
Thus far, God’s holy, inspired, and infallible word. It will please the Lord to take his word and transform it in our lives into service for himself. Thanks be to God. Heavenly Father, we now come to study the word together. All the parts of the service, Lord, are important. They’re necessary to our worship, our prayers, our hymns, and so forth. But especially, Lord, when we open Your Word, when we hear it and understand it and live by it, these are great, great things. We pray this will be so in our lives now, and we ask it in Jesus’ name. Amen.
This incident of which we read follows the issue having to do with traditional washing of hands before eating, and generally has to do with the subject of following tradition rather than sticking with the law. Some were saying that failure to perform the ritual washing left both the person and the food defiled, that is, unfit for holy purposes. Jesus then proceeded to explain that rituals were only teaching mechanisms combined with tests of obedience. And so these ideas then led to our passage for today, wherein Jesus says defilement begins not with what is outside person, but with what is inside person.
So we’re going to look at our need for divine clarification. Because these matters that are at issue here are out of the Bible, but they need to be clarified, and that’s what Jesus did. We’re going also to think about God’s provision of ears to hear. He that hath ears to hear, let him hear. Then we’ll talk about the enemy within. And finally, the disciple’s new challenge that comes out of this whole matter. So our need for divine clarification. Jesus said in context of the passage we read, are you also without understanding?
The need for clarification, I think, can be seen, for example, in what we call the Sixth Commandment, which has to do with not killing. Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not murder. Now, if you just stop there, you might say, well, all war is wrong. All other situations where, like capital punishment, these things, these are also wrong. However, When we clarify it, we realize that the commandment there is just talking about murder. And I’m only citing that so that you understand that everything needs to be clarified. Everything needs to be better understood.
And it’s the work of the Lord to do this by His Holy Spirit. that He gives us as we study the Scriptures, and most of all, by the Lord Jesus Himself who came not only to die on the cross and to rise from the dead, which He did of course, but also to clarify things. He was the great clarifier. He said, you’ve heard it said of old such and such, but I say to you, in other words, let me clarify that for you.
Now the implication of verse 18 in our passage here where Jesus says, then, are you also without understanding? It has an implication there that the disciples were most certainly without understanding. That is, they understood some things, but they didn’t understand things as clearly as they should. And as Jesus speaks that way, are you also in need of clarification, of understanding?
And the obvious thing is, yes, I’m here to do that for you. I understand that there are a lot of things that you don’t quite get, but now let me explain them to you. Now, Jesus is not with us physically here anymore, but he sent his spirit to us. And as I said, the spirit’s work also is to clarify things. And he’ll use teachers, preachers to do that. But he will speak to us as we open the scriptures and look at the scriptures together.
The disciples had been trained, maybe not more than anybody else, but they had been trained in the Scriptures because they were Jewish people, because they were exposed regularly to the Scriptures, and yet they still were having some problems. Their idea was, and this is I think the idea of most of the people, was to live good lives, keep away from things that were designated as unclean. And so they didn’t eat certain things or behave in certain ways, even apart from what we would call the Ten Commandments. They were just very strict in their lives.
It was Peter later on when the sheet was let down from heaven. This is after Jesus’ resurrection and ascension, of course. But he said, Lord, I never eat any of those kind of things. Because the commandment was, Peter, kill and eat. And in effect, the Lord said, wait a minute, Peter.
You need some clarification here. Don’t say something is unclean that God has cleaned. It had not been emphasized enough. I wouldn’t say it had never been emphasized. But it had not been emphasized enough that what was unclean was not so much the things outside themselves, but the things in their hearts. That’s what the great clarification really involved. That’s why in the hymn that we sang today, Rejoice ye pure in heart. Well, how can we be pure in heart? Only through the work of Christ and His Spirit in our lives. But they were still dealing, the disciples, still dealing with this matter.
That’s why when they left the crowds and came in and asked Jesus about the parable, He said, don’t you see now that you need a lot of understanding yourselves. They needed understanding And part of Jesus coming into the world was to bring understanding, to bring the clarification, to clarify and remove confusion. And thus Christ did indeed bring clarity.
He did distinguish between what is symbolic and what might cause confusion. He came especially to emphasize what’s in our hearts, what needs to be dealt with first. And then all these other things would come into focus. So that was our first point, the need for clarification. We all need some clarification.
What can we do? Well, we can say, Lord Jesus, you’re the great clarifier. Lord Jesus, you sent your spirit to help us understand. So indeed, Lord, we pray that you would do that. Our need for divine clarification. Secondly, we have God’s provision of ears to hear. I was looking up some things, actually on the internet, I would say the encyclopedia, we don’t use encyclopedias too much anymore, at least the book kind.
But there are some animals that don’t have ears, yet they still can hear. Because the Lord has put a certain part of his creation within them. Snakes, for example, have hearing things, we’ll call them ears, behind their eyes. And there are other animals that only feel vibrations, but those vibrations go to a certain part of their brain and they make sense to them.
But in this case where Jesus is talking, He says, the Lord has provided you ears, you human beings there, the Lord has provided you ears so that you can truly hear, that is, understand. In Romans 121, the Lord talks about generally the unbelievers in the world.
And he says, they became futile in their thinking. Their foolish hearts were darkened. What does that mean? It means they couldn’t hear. Oh, they heard the vibrations or they heard the sound waves and all that, but they really didn’t hear down in the depths of their being.
One of the joys, to me anyway, and I’m a very poor musician, but one of the joys is to listen to a symphony orchestra and say, oh, that is a saxophone. That is a bass fiddle. That is a certain kind of horn. Just to be able to pick those things out, because to be able to hear those things in the midst of all the great orchestral presentations, it’s a blessing. to be able to do that.
There was a lady in the city of Philippi. She didn’t live there, I guess, on a regular basis. She was called Lydia. Her hometown was a city called Thyatira, which is in that same area of Asia Minor. Even though she was Jewish, evidently, and like the disciples, a person raised in the Jewish faith, and so forth, she still didn’t understand a lot of things. And we might ask why, and that’s found in that 16th chapter of Acts, where she’s spoken of. She just didn’t have a heart that was opened, at least opened enough, to take in everything. She needed that clarification.
And so when Paul, and notice the Lord Jesus is not there. He’s in heaven. He’s there in spirit, of course. But until Paul began to teach her these things with the guidance of the Lord in his spirit, then she finally came to see the truth about salvation, where sin was, what she needed to do. It says, the Lord opened her heart to believe.
And you see, that’s really God’s provision of ears, if you will, not so much the skin and cartilage and things that are there, but the ability to take in and make sense of what God is saying in His Word and what Jesus particularly has to say about Himself.
So the disciples and the multitudes had a lot of misunderstanding. Part of that was due to the fact that some people came along and said, oh, we know you listen to us. And Jesus had to come along and said, well, you’ve heard it said, but let me tell you what it really says. So the Lord Jesus in this matter of clarifying said, let’s get to the heart of the matter.
And that’s not just figurative language. You’ve got to get to the heart to know really what our situation is and what God has done for us. Luke later on, not right at this point, but later on Luke says that Jesus opened their understanding. Now it’s just like Lydia, you see, but a different part of the Bible.
It says He opened their understanding, meaning He gave them ears. He said, whoever has ears to hear, And now, from our point of view, he’s saying, you upon whom the Spirit of God is worth, you who take my word seriously, the Lord has opened your hearts to believe and to follow. And it says there in Luke 24-14 that they might understand the Scriptures.
What’s the purpose of having ears to hear? Well, it’s not to hear the great symphonies. That’s part of God’s creation and part of our participation. The real reason to have ears is to hear the true Word, to hear the truth and to be able to respond to it in the right way. And then all these other things will come along, orchestral or otherwise. They’ll come along if we understand what our situation is and what God has done for us in the sending of His Son.
So you don’t have Jesus now calling the crowds to Himself and saying, here’s my message to you, be more righteous. Well, they can’t be more righteous without the Spirit’s work, without God’s changing their lives. Jesus called them, first of all, to confession of sin and to repentance. Well, if you don’t know that your heart is full of evil, And don’t say, preacher, you’re making that up. Jesus said it right here. He said, out of the heart come all these evil things.
And he had this long list of things. Jesus said, God has given you ears in the spiritual sense so that you can know you need me, so that you can know you need a savior. And here in the passage, he says, let him hear. Let him hear. That’s a prayer, really. It’s not just an admonition to the crowd or to the disciples, but saying, Lord, let him hear.
The law is wonderful. The law is doing its job. All these commandments and things, what are they supposed to do? Well, in the first place, they’re supposed to tell you you need a Savior. You need deliverance from sin. Now, after you have a Savior, the law is a blessing. It shows you what directions to go and how to live and what to be concerned about. That won’t save you, but it comes after you’re saved. So Jesus, again, doesn’t say be more righteous.
He says be aware of your sin, confess that sin, repent of it, and then you’re on the right road. See, ears to hear are the product of what we call the new birth. You must be born again, said Jesus. In other words, you must have ears given to you, among other things. And that will result in repentance and faith.
And so I ask you this morning, do you have ears to hear? Has the Lord opened your heart to believe? Do you understand that you’re a sinner and that you need Jesus and you need His cleansing power? That’s your only hope. You’ll never understand. You’ll never be righteous enough unless Jesus does that work upon you. So Jesus here is particularly saying, has the Lord now brought you to Me? Has the Lord showed you that you need what I can give you that can come from no other source?
That is a clean heart. What did David say? Create in me a clean heart, O God. Renew a right spirit within me. Jesus says, I’m the answer to that prayer of David’s, to everybody’s prayer, who knows their sinner and they need the cleansing, they need the Savior.
And that brings us to our third point, and that’s the enemy within. Years ago, there was a movie called The Enemy Below. But I’ve never seen a movie that said the enemy within. That’s us, folks. Remember Pogo in the comics paper? He’s, I think, probably the most well-known thing that Pogo ever said in the comics was, we have seen the enemy and he is us.
What is sin in the heart? Well, we have an inherited sinful nature. Now, it’s tempting to say it’s all Adam’s fault. He did it. Now, we have a sinful nature that’s been handed down to us from Adam, but we also have a self-produced sin. If we had been Adam, we would have done what he did or worse. Our inherited sin nature and our actual sin. And these are the enemies within. Okay? We have a sinful nature. And we commit sins right and left.
Now Jesus said, food that enters the body is ultimately eliminated from the body. And that’s his biology lesson for those folks at that point. I think they understood that quite well. But what they didn’t understand was that already there’s this sin within you and it issues forth out of you and pollutes everything. Pollutes your life, pollutes those around you, pollutes the world. This is a problem of mankind. And God says, I have sent my Son to do something about that. He says, those things you take in don’t defile you, but what comes out, that shows that you are defiled already. And therefore, by way of examination, they are what defile you.
Out of the heart, he says, out of the heart come, and then we have this long list of things, evil thoughts, immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance, and folly. That’s one of the longest strings of sins you’ll find in the Bible. Out of the heart come these things. What is sin in the heart?
Well, should you need specifics, there they are in verses 21 and 22 of the passage. This long list is Mark’s way of summing up all sin. In other words, Jesus is saying, when it comes to sin, you’ve got it all. Not all of it comes to light, not all of it you pursue all the time, but you’ve got it all. And this long list just emphasizes that for us. It doesn’t mean stop after the last thing said and there’s not any more. There’s lots more.
But out of the heart come all these evil things. And all of them are summed up there in this matter of the heart, out of the heart. And if you go back to the Old Testament, to Jeremiah 17 verse 9, The prophet says the heart is desperately wicked. The heart is desperately wicked. That’s just Jesus’ way. He said Jeremiah by the Holy Spirit speaking through the writer there. But the heart is desperately wicked. You’ve got all the sin you could possibly imagine there. And that has to be dealt with or you’ll perish. You’ll never get out of trouble.
So, instead of condemning eating, drinking, or various behaviors, Jesus says, first, first, repent of your own heart sins. That’s what you need to do first. The enemy is you, Jesus is saying. He had no sin, but the rest of us, He says, the enemy is you. And you need to repent, you need to come to the Lord. And when you’re willing to do that, when you’re ready to do that, then everything else will follow. But you’ve got to do that first. The enemy within. And it’s hard for us to admit sometimes, I’ve got an enemy within. And even as Christians, as believers, there’s still that indwelling sin that clings to us. It doesn’t have victory over us in Christ, but it’s still there.
And we just have to keep going back every day and saying, Lord, I did it again. Lord, I just can’t stop sinning. Lord, what am I going to do? But even that attitude is a good one because it says, Lord, I don’t want to do it. And the word of the Lord Jesus is, I’ll help you. I indeed help you not to do it.
So we have seen our need for divine clarification. We’ve heard about God’s provision of ears to hear. We’re made aware of the enemy within. And now we join the company of the disciples. Because the disciples have a new challenge. Of course they have to deal with themselves and their own sins. But they really now in their ministry on behalf of Jesus and what will follow after He dies and rises from the dead and so forth, this is what they have to be concerned about.
Because the Lord has said, you’re not only My disciples, but I make you My apostles. You say, what’s the difference? Maybe you’ve wondered all these years, what’s the difference between a disciple and an apostle? Well, the word apostle means someone who’s sent, means an ambassador, someone who’s sent on behalf of somebody else.
And the disciples were already learning this. He had sent out the disciples two by two to minister and so forth. They’re still learning. And by the time Jesus is finished with them now, they’ll be prepared to go out and to be those who say, examine your hearts. Look into your hearts. Why? Because you have to lay the foundation before you can build on it. And this matter of the heart is the foundation. That is in terms of our understanding of the clarification. Do you realize you’re a sinner? There’s been many a person in a church who’s come to the preacher and said, I’m not a sinner. Yes, you are. Yes, you are. You’re a sinner. But lay that foundation. Yes, I’m a sinner. I acknowledge that.
And then the Lord can build upon that. But as long as you say, no, there’s nothing wrong with me. Did you ever build a little hut in the yard or maybe even buy one of these huts but you don’t put any foundation under it and you have a hard rain? And pretty soon that little building that was nice and steady, it’s over this way because the rain has washed out from under it and so forth. You need that foundation. Yes, I’m a sinner, but praise God I have a foundation.
I come and I say, now upon Christ who saves sinners, that’s where I go from here. So getting the disciples straightened out, you see, you took them away from the crowd and so forth, and they were asking about the parable. You get them straightened out, and the first order of business, you’re sinners, right? Yes, Lord, we’re sinners.
And in talking about the heart, Jesus did not mean just outward actions, oh, I haven’t committed adultery, or I haven’t stolen, or I haven’t lied, or something like that, although virtually everybody has committed all of the sins that there are to commit. But he didn’t mean just outward actions. He meant get your heart right.
We used to sing a Sunday school song, if your heart keeps right, if your heart keeps right, then that’s what will keep you for the rest of your Christian life. Is your heart right? Who cleanses the heart? Who makes the heart right? Well, it’s the Lord God Almighty who’s in the business of the new heart, of cleansing the heart.
And there’s a transition going on here. It’s a transition from the old covenant, which didn’t clarify things a whole lot, but then the new covenant comes and it clarifies things so wonderfully. It lessens the importance of rituals And it replaces that with cleansing the heart and following the Lord in the clarification that He brings.
The disciples then will go forth and they’ll teach that even the Old Covenant, all they had to begin with was just the Hebrew Scriptures. But they said, look here, the heart is desperately wicked. Who can know it? And they could see that even in the Old Testament, which was kind of hard to grasp, but now they said, oh, now I understand what that means. And they could preach that. Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit in me.
That was David in Psalm 51.10.
And there will be resistance to this new emphasis because people want to save themselves. From now on, I’m going to turn over a new leaf. From now on, I’ll be different. That resistance, you see, goes against the fact you’ve still got sin in your heart. How are you going to deal with it? In Isaiah 64, verse 6, The writer says, all our righteousness is filthy rags. All the so-called good things that you’ve accumulated and so forth, really, it’s nothing compared to what you really need. There will be resistance to this new emphasis, but the truth is that there is cleansing.
There is forgiveness. There’s newness of life. It is because Jesus died on the cross and rose again from the dead for those who believe in Him, but it’s also because Jesus clarified things and made us to understand what’s going on here. He came into the world to save sinners, not the good folks. The well people don’t need a physician, He said, but the sick people do.
And we’re all sick, sick at heart. And Jesus says, I’ll give you a new heart and keep it clean so that you can go to heaven with me and live forever and ever. Let’s pray. Heavenly Father, we confess that we are sinners, big sinners, full of sin. Lord, we’re like Peter saying, depart from me, I’m an unclean person. But Lord, you can make us clean. You can make us well. You can make us acceptable to God. We thank you for that. We expect that. We rejoice in that. Yes, we rejoice. Because of Jesus, we’re pure in heart. And we do pray in His name.
Amen. All right, let’s sing one more, and it’s on the back of your bulletin. Now blessed be the Lord our God, the God of Israel, for he alone does wondrous works in glory that excel. And blessed be His glorious name to all eternity. The whole earth let His glory fill. Amen, so let it be. Have a blessed day. As you go, take God’s blessing with you. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God the Father, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with us all, now and forever. Amen.