Mark 7:1–23
This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors.
Good morning. So I had planned to put a title for this sermon in our bulletins, but I was told by the bulletin overlords, we don't do that anymore. I thought to myself, Legalists. Here's the title I would have chose if I had asked for forgiveness and not permission.
You can write it down if you want. Why legalism is stupid. Now, hang on. Just a second ago, I called these anonymous bulletin overlords legalists. I mean, legalism, I think it's one of those concepts that we often refer to, but I'm not so sure that we really know what it means. So a legalist is not someone who simply enforces a rule that you don't like. A legalist is not someone who is slightly more morally scrupulous than you.
A legalist is not someone who doesn't watch the movies you watch or listen to the music you listen to or wear the clothes you like to wear or eat the food you like to eat. In other words, a legalist is not someone who, you know, avoids red dye and seed oils or only listens to the Gaither vocal band, I think they still exist, and only watches Andy Griffith. here's the thing legalism is a real thing it is a stupid thing a dumb thing as we'll hopefully see but it is widespread and common something the bible talks about something that we all of us need to be aware of not chiefly in others oh man it's so easy to be aware of stuff in other people but for ourselves. Something we need to be able to identify and eliminate, not only in others
but for ourselves. So we should know what we're talking about. A very brief working definition of legalism. This is not like the best definition in the world but it's the one we're going to work with. Legalism is the belief that what we do is why God loves us. It's the belief that what we do is why God loves us. A legalist is someone who believes that the ground of their standing before God, the ground of it, the foundation of it, before the God who made them, is what they do, not who God is.
Friends, legalism is stupid. But just because something is stupid doesn't mean we don't want to believe it's true. So this belief that what we do is why God loves us, I think it probably sounds relatable. As normal, as gravity, as assumed as an overlong introduction from me or an overlong point one from Pastor Greg. As common as the common cold, as widespread as those weeds you're going to pick in a month. But legalism is wrong. It's wrong. It's empty. It doesn't give us any help.
It's stupid. It's dangerous. It's deadly. And therefore, it should be eliminated. Yes, in others and in our church, but most fundamentally, before any of that, in our own hearts. Here's what I want to try to convince you of this morning, and I hope that the burden of this sermon would mirror the burden of this passage of Scripture, which is simply this. As simple summary I can give is, what separates us from God is us. What separates us from God is us.
I mean, the same idea, a bit longer. What separates us from God doesn't come from outside us, but from within us. In other words, it's our hearts, not our habits, that are the problem. What separates us from God is us. Open your Bibles, please, to Mark chapter 7. Mark chapter 7, this sermon has two points. There's the question version of the outline, and then there's the phrase version. So I'll just give them to you both, depending on what you like, you know, choose your own adventure. The first point is the question, what does legalism look like? Or if you prefer a phrase, the first point is the face of legalism. The face of legalism. The second question we're going to answer is why is legalism stupid? Why is it stupid? If you prefer, that's the question. If you prefer
the principle, you've got the face of legalism, point one. You could call the second point the farce of legalism. Very similar. See how I did that? Farce means the absurdity of legalism. So, point number one. Let's get started. Mark chapter 7, beginning in verse 1. Again, we're thinking about the question, what does legalism look like? Before I read God's Word, let me pray. Father in heaven, would you help us to not only understand what we're about to read, And not only to see its evidences in the lives of other people, but to see how we are so prone to this and we need your help to kill it. We pray all this in Jesus' name. Amen. What does legalism look like? Mark chapter 7, beginning in verse 1. I'll read the first five verses for now.
Now when the Pharisees gathered to him, that's Jesus, with some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem, they saw that some of His disciples ate with hands that were defiled, that is, unwashed. For the Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they wash their hands properly, holding to the tradition of the elders. And when they come from the marketplace, they do not eat unless they wash. There are many other traditions that they observe, such as the washing of cups and pots and copper vessels and dining couches.
And the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, that's Jesus, why do your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands? We're going to have three observations to answer this question. The first observation is this, legalism elevates our opinion to be equal with God's Word. legalism elevates our opinion to the level of God's Word. So in Mark chapter 7, what we have, what we just read, is two parties in disagreement with each other. We've got the Pharisees and the scribes versus Jesus' disciples, okay? And they disagree on what it means to be defiled.
Now, if you're unfamiliar with that phrase, I'll just briefly try to explain it. In the Old Testament, clean and undefiled, someone was clean and undefiled, that meant that they were able to worship God and be among the people of God. Unclean and defiled meant that they were separated from God, unable to worship Him, unable to be with the people of God. This is the logic of Old Testament worship. Now, let me just say, its existence and its specificity, by which I am referring to every single law that you will find in Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, all of that is gracious proof that God delights to be worshipped and delights to set the parameters for worship. Now, this sermon is not on the goodness of the Old Testament law. That's just, but just so you know, that is true of the Old Testament law. This is not a sermon on that.
We are in Mark's gospel. Jesus is here, and as we read earlier in our service, in Matthew's gospel, Jesus has upheld the legitimacy of these laws and also signaled their expiration date. So, Mark 7. If you've been reading along through Mark, you would know that the Pharisees don't like Jesus. They don't like him at all. And they know that Jesus is applying pressure to their way of life. And so they are trying to apply pressure to him, to embarrass him, to out him as a fraud, to out him as out of step with religious norms. They're saying to Jesus, so you've claimed to be a reliable guide of Scripture. You claim to be a wise interpreter of Scripture. You've even claimed to have some unique relationship to the God of Scripture.
And so then they point at his disciples, and they say, they're not like us. That's a problem. In case you're confused about, like, what the expectations were, here's how it should have gone. The Pharisees, the scribes, they were the interpreters and the appliers of the Old Testament. They helped the people of God live under the law of God. Now, from this moment, it had been about 1,500 years or so since Moses finished Deuteronomy. That is a long time. And over the centuries, the Old Testament law was not getting any bigger, okay? So there was no like intrepid Jewish person who was like, hey, believe it or not, I found Deuteronomy 35. It was just chilling, and I found more inspired scripture. No, the Old Testament law was static. It was staying the same. But the tradition of the elders, again, that phrase gets repeated twice, verse 3 and verse 5, the tradition of the elders was getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and longer
and longer and longer and longer. And here's the thing, the accumulation of all of these things, it had not clarified, it had confused. Sometimes, updated rules exist to rein in our natural desire to stiff arm and or cleverly avoid pre-existing rules. So I think of the Constitution of the Third Avenue Baptist Fantasy Football League.
It is full of rules that didn't exist until someone, I'm not sure who it was, tried to create a pre-existing rule and said, there's no rule against that. I can do what I want. So someone created a rule to protect the person from breaking the rule. Maybe it was the bulletin overlord who created the rule. I'm not sure. But sometimes updated rules exist to help us sincerely obey what we want to obey, but we don't fully understand how to do it. So it's a regular conversation in our house where Melanie will say something like, hey honey, could you clean the house for me before I get home or before this, and I look at her, and I'll say, like, absolutely.
I just need you to be more specific. Like, your application of that request and obedience to that request and mine, you know, they're not the same. I need help. I need more help still, if you have ideas. All right, back to Mark 7. What's going on here? Well, the Jews wanted to know how to worship God, but the general commands of Scripture in the Old Testament had led to diverse understanding and inexact application. Now, it is true, some of them were looking for ways anyway, any excuse, to skirt the clear law of God. We're going to get to that in a second. Some just simply didn't want to obey, and so they came up with creative reasons for why they didn't have to. But others, they wanted to obey, but they didn't know how. Scripture, in their mind, lacked clarity and sufficiency.
They needed more. And so the Pharisees, doing what they should not have done, stepped in to create more and more and more conditions that they said people had to follow in order to fully obey God. Do you understand the lay of the land? That's what's going on. Now, in this particular case, The extra law had to do with hand-washing before eating in the temple. And then Mark kind of mentions other laws that they had about doing the dishes and washing the dining couches and all this stuff.
And they said, listen, you've got to follow this rule or you will be separated from God. And what did Jesus' disciples do? What did they do? They ignore it. They don't care. And the Pharisees and scribes are mad. So where is this Pharisee's law, this new law in the Bible? Well, you know, I could say, like, flip with me to Leviticus 11.8, right? It's nowhere.
It's not in the Bible. It's made up. This tradition isn't in the Bible. Now, in Exodus 30, priests are told to wash their hands. But you could read your Old Testament, the first five books especially, all day. You will not find any law that reflects the request here. It's simply a tradition. Hygienic, perhaps, but not holy. And yet the Pharisees are demanding that others do it.
They've elevated their own made-up opinion to be equal with God's law. And not only that, they have made other people's adherence to that law a test of maturity and a test of fellowship. stupid Pharisees, you can't do that. You can't elevate your own opinions to the level of God's Word. You can't roll your eyes at other people and measure their maturity based on something you've made up in your head.
You can't break fellowship over stuff the Bible doesn't mention. I texted a group of guys. for help on the sermon, I asked, like, hey, can you give me some practical ways that we struggle with something similar? The first response was, I don't struggle with legalism, and I'm pretty proud of that. Funny. We laugh because we know it's not true. Someone raises their kids a certain way, I mean, we're never going to be as brash as the Pharisees and walk into a crowded room and say, hey, why do you not raise your kid like me?
But you silently wonder, how could they make that decision? Someone spends a lot of money on something you would never buy. Someone doesn't show up every Sunday evening. They don't show up at members' meetings. They don't even know we have Sunday school. Someone posts something on social media that lacks theological precision.
Someone else posts something else on social media that lacks a certain social tact. My friends, the Bible applies to all of life. I am not trying to tell us that all decisions are morally equal. I'm not saying that wisdom is relative. The Bible addresses how we raise our kids and how we spend our money and how we take care of our bodies and what we say online and how we say those things online. His wisdom is universally applicable, and we all so desperately need it.
But just as we so desperately need wisdom, that acknowledgement should immediately accompany an acknowledgement that we desperately need humility. You see, a legalist is not someone who just tries to apply the Bible to all of life. That's called a Christian. A legalist is someone who believes that their own application of God's Word, even if it's in addition to what's in God's Word, is binding on everyone.
And therefore it doubles, their own wisdom doubles as a test of maturity and a test of fellowship. Here's one mark of an immature, unhealthy church. It's full of people who are easily offended and who constantly break fellowship and constantly draw lines. Here's a mark of a mature, healthy church.
It's full of people who are slow to take offense and quick to show grace. Brothers and sisters, I am not saying it's off limits to argue about your convictions. That would be very stupid. Certainly, argue over things that you think are important, but do so in love. We should help each other grow in the skill of applying all of God's wisdom to all of life.
Oh, but let's also be full of humility and grace when someone else comes to a different conclusion than we do. A good conversation at lunch might be to answer a question like, how can we fight with equal vigor, with equal vigor, the principles we find in God's Word and the protection of Christian freedom among brothers and sisters in the same church. I think that would be a fruitful lunchtime conversation. So the first observation is that legalism encourages us to elevate our own opinions over the opinion, or over or equal to the opinions of God. Second observation is this.
Legalism will make us preoccupied with outward conformity. Legalism makes us preoccupied with outward conformity. Look with me again, friends, down in Mark chapter 7, beginning in verse 6. And Jesus said to them, well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written, this people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.
In vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men. Friends, Jesus' judgment here is clear. He quotes the prophet Isaiah, and he calls the Pharisees hypocrites, because their obsession with obedience is only skin deep. Their preoccupation with clean hands and clean utensils and clean whatever is only primarily about appearance to others and not born out of their own affection for God.
That word hypocrite, you know, that Greek word hypocrite is the same word for actors. Back then, obviously, they didn't have movies. They had plays. These plays would often have just a few actors who would play different parts, and those different parts would be signaled by different masks that people would wear, right? I'm this person now, and then I go off stage, and now I'm this person. You understand. Hypocrites were people who wore masks for a living.
That's what Jesus says the Pharisees are. It's all just a show. Jesus' judgment here should be a warning to us all. Do we have different masks when we wear at school, when we wear at home, when we wear at church? When I taught the students for several years, I would regularly talk about the sort of mask you wear at youth group. Are we so caught up in looking right, in wearing the right mask at the right time in front of the right people so that they see us doing the right thing?
Are we so caught up in being seen by other people doing stuff that we have totally forgotten to ever acknowledge the real God who really exists? It's all just a show. Now, I understand right now at 1153 a.m. on a Sunday, we are in a church building.
And our bodies and our lips and our hands and our eyes and our ears, everything that we are doing here is meant to provoke what should look from the outside observer as worship. Jesus wants us to know it doesn't matter, fundamentally, it doesn't matter where your body is. It doesn't matter what your lips say.
It doesn't matter if your hands are by your side or up in the air during the songs. It doesn't matter. None of it matters if your heart is far away. Like, do we really believe that? It doesn't matter. Friend, are you just going through the motions?
Is your heart far away and cold? here's the thing if that's true I'm not going to know your spouse may not even know but the Lord knows and it's not a scary thing to confess it's a wonderful thing to confess because the remedy as we'll see is available to us all but we got to be honest this week i released a podcast that i've been working on for three years i spent hours and hours and hours on it i tried to make it the best possible version of itself that it could possibly be i turned it over dozens of times i could practically recite it from memory tuesday morning exists it gets launched out into the world within minutes of its release
i have two texts well one email one text pointing out two very obvious flaws one a typo and one just a factual error both of them guess whose fault they were mine What I thought was pristine was immediately exposed once it faced the scrutiny of a few thousand imperfect human eyeballs. My project's supposed perfection wilted away.
That's okay. We should stop living for the approval and the applause of imperfect humans and their imperfect eyeballs and what they can see and what their imperfect ears can hear. We should stop living for their approval and their applause. Here's the thing, because their approval is contingent.
It's temporary. Their applause, their clapping, will so quickly turn to condemnation should the circumstances change. And besides, their assessment of you is incomplete. It's imperfect. And to be honest, ultimately, it is irrelevant. we should live for the approval and the applause of the real God who really exists.
His assessment of you, after all, is perfect. It's complete. It is extremely relevant. And he's interested in so much more than what you produce, so much more than merely your outward behavior. He wants your heart, your whole person. And what he gives you when your heart turns toward him in faith, what the real God who really exists gives you when your heart turns toward him in faith is so much better than temporary applause and fickle approval.
It's true. But here's where Jesus' warning to the Pharisees should probably worry at least one person in this room. Which is if you hope to stand before God one day, and you will, with a resume of your righteousness, with a list of all of your good deeds, if you are planning to present before the real God who really exists, if you are planning to present to Him the best possible version of yourself, if that's your hope, you will not withstand his scrutiny.
You won't. In your supposed perfection, your relative morality, all of it will melt away. Because what separates us from God is us. It's our hearts, not our habits, that are the problem. Our righteousness, again, Our relative morality is never enough. More on that in a sec.
Third observation. Legalism kills love. Mark chapter 7, beginning in verse 9. Jesus said to them, you have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition. For Moses said, honor your father and mother, and whoever reviles father and mother must surely die. But you say, if a man tells his father or his mother, whatever you would have gained from me is Corban, that is given to God, then you no longer permit him to do anything for his father and mother, thus making void the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down, and many such things you do. Okay, so real quickly, here's what's going on. Jesus gives us one of the Ten Commandments, honor your father and mother, verse 10.
It is like the top ten list of unambiguous Jewish laws, okay? They would have all known it. Well, it seems that the Pharisees of this era had found a very righteous-sounding loophole to this very clear commandment. Now, part of honoring your father and mother, both now and then, is caring for them as they age, okay? So Mark chapter 7, verse 11, imagines a conversation in which a Jewish man or woman explains why he doesn't actually have to do that. He says, well, you know, sorry. Sorry, mom. Sorry, dad. I actually, believe it or not, I actually declared my savings or my 401k or whatever they had back then, I declared all that Corbin, which means, Dad, you're going to be so proud. You're going to be so happy for me.
That means it's dedicated to the Lord, so I can't help you. Sorry. This seems righteous, giving money to the Lord, giving money to the synagogue. Who knows? Maybe they'll even get a wing of the synagogue named after their dying parent. Who knows? I don't know. Jesus disagrees, of course, because here's the thing, the result of legalism is often not more obedience. In other words, it's not, wow, that guy really takes their faith seriously. He's so holy.
No, the result of legalism is disobedience. Do you understand? Our made-up rules make us do stuff we don't have to do and keeps us from doing stuff we ought to do, like love others. Legalism kills love. Back to our own temptations here in this church. I don't think that we struggle with this particular example, despite Brandon, you named one of your sons Corbin. I'm not even really sure how that applies. He dedicated you to God, so you're on your own for college. I'm not sure.
He said amen. Sorry, I can see everything up here. But you can imagine the mom looking down on the other mom who parents her child in a way that she never would. You can imagine the UofL student seeing something that the boy student says online.
And the UofL student thinks to themselves, that's pretty lame. That's pretty self-righteous. Whatever the specific situation, these little legalisms, which come so naturally to us, all of them kill love. They fuel excuses for our lack of love. Here's the thing, brothers and sisters, if we fill up our minds with made-up standards of fellowship and maturity, then we will empty our hearts of its ability and desire to love. I'm going to say that again. If we fill up our minds with made-up standards of maturity and fellowship, then we will empty our hearts of its ability and desire to love.
Three observations about the face of legalism. It elevates our opinion to the level of God's Word. It makes us preoccupied with outward appearance. Third, it kills love. The second and shorter point is why is legalism stupid? why is it a farce? Why is it absurd to commit yourself to? Look down at verse 14. And Jesus called the people to him again and said to them, hear me, all of you who 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 entered the house and left the people, his disciples, So notice his audience is getting smaller.
His disciples asked him about the parable. And he said to them, are you also without understanding? Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside can't defile him, since it enters not his heart but his stomach and is expelled? Parentheses. Thus he declared all foods clean. And Jesus 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, covening, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness.
All of these things come from within. And they defile a person. As simple as I can put it. Legalism misdiagnoses the problem that we all face. You see, the Pharisees were obsessed with stuff making them dirty, with becoming unclean. Don't touch the food, it'll make you unclean. Don't touch blood, it'll make you unclean. Don't touch dead bodies or pig's hooves or shrimp cocktail, it'll make you unclean.
Now, here's the thing. When such instructions followed God's Word, as revealed in the first five books of the Bible, that was fine. It was fine. It was temporarily fine. The Lord intended it that way. But remember, the tradition of the elders had grown like kudzu, like those weeds, and it had covered God's law. It had made it unrecognizable. So stuff like, wash your hands before you eat in the temple. If not, that will make you unclean. No, wrong. The Bible doesn't say that. You can designate your money, Corbin, and it's untouchable for your parents, even if they need it.
God's okay with that. No, that's wrong. The tradition of the elders had tutored God's people from the wrong textbook. It gave them the wrong instincts. It taught them to look out into the world and see a host of things that separated them from God, and then to look out to humans to see where they get that help. But the exact opposite is true. So Jesus drops the hammer.
Verses 16 and 18. There's 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. In other words, what separates us from God is us. Don't listen to what these guys say. They're hypocrites. They make stuff up. their disciples, Jesus' disciples, their mouths are on the floor. They're confused. They even call this one sentence a parable. They're vexed. They don't understand it. So, and why do they not understand it? Because this is a paradigm-altering assertion, which is why Mark adds in parentheses, thus he declared all foods clean. In other words, this principle extends to everything, not just hand-washing, not just honoring your parents, but to everything. Because when Jesus shows up, everything changes. Christianity is not merely Judaism 2.0. What defiles a man was never shellfish and pork or scallop and pork ribs that goes into the stomach. It never was. The Lord told
Israel to avoid these things, number one, as proof that they trusted him, number two, so that they would be distinct among the nations, not because those things in and of themselves defiled them. The Old Testament Pharisees, or the Pharisees, had taken the wrong lesson from the Old Testament. Again, they looked out into the world and saw a host of things that defiled them. And taught people to, where do they look for help? To the traditions of men.
A Christian knows it's the opposite. We look down at ourselves and know we are the ones who separate us and up to God for help. Why is legalism stupid? Well, very simply, my friends, it just doesn't work. It's built on a fundamentally broken assumption that what we do determines God's love for us. It offers men and women a list of do's and don'ts, some of them true, some of them made up, and it says, hey, good luck, keep them, do your best. And you know what? Look for an updated list in the future. It mistakes, legalism mistakes, regardless of how it affects us all differently, it mistakes certain kinds of behavior. Abstinence, sobriety, fitness, discipline, church attendance, attentive parenting, entertainment moderation, financial stewardship.
It mistakes all of those behaviors. And it treats them as functional substitutes for faith. It substitutes those behaviors as proof of our righteousness. Legalism puts its finger on the correct problem, but offers an impossible solution. And in the process, it ignores that the righteousness available to us in Christ through faith, a righteousness that spurs us to love others, and instead cultivates self-righteousness, which causes us to judge others.
So friends, as we close, I want to say, don't be a legalist. But more than that, I want you to heed the words of Jesus as he says, hear and understand that what separates us from God is us. What separates us is not our habits, but our hearts. And friends, this is good news. Because the thing that makes us sick is the very thing that Jesus came to heal.
The separation caused by our sin is the very separation that Jesus' life, death, and resurrection closed for good. Friends, the Bible is clear. We don't need a new list of rules. We need our hearts to be fixed. We need the spigot of sin turned off. And only God can do this. Only Jesus has done this through his perfect life and death and resurrection. And what he offers to us is something so much better and more secure, again, than our relative, potentially made-up morality.
Can you believe this? That Jesus offers to take our uncleanliness. And look down again at Mark chapter 7. There's a helpful diagnostic list for us. I mean, these words hit us all. Our evil thoughts. our sexual immorality, our theft, our murder, our adultery, our coveting, our wickedness, our deceit, our sensuality, envy, slander, pride, and foolishness. Oh, brothers and sisters, all of these things that defile us and have come from within us, Jesus has said, listen, I will take it on the cross. I will take it. It is mine. And the debt that we owed to God for our sin, and the price that we owed to God, our own death for our sin, has been paid for by God. And through His resurrection, we know that this payment, brothers and sisters, has been accepted.
If you struggle with legalism, I would encourage you to remember passages like these, just a few. Maybe even think of memorizing verses like Galatians chapter 3, verses 13 and 14. Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us so that we might receive the promised spirit through not morality, but faith. Or maybe memorize the provocative question Paul asked earlier in Galatians 3, did you receive the spirit by the works of the law or by hearing through faith. Are you so foolish? So maybe Paul would say legalism is foolish.
You never received the Spirit by works of the law. You received it by faith. Oh, my friends, rely on Jesus's righteousness. He is righteous. He is resurrected. And He is why we stand before the God who made us. What separates us from God is us what brings us back to God is God friend if you are tired this morning of believing that what you do determines why God loves you I have a solution stop looking inside and instead look up, rely on Jesus, because in him you will find everything that you need.
Let's pray. Lord, would you help us to apply this passage to our lives? Would you help this church to be known for its love of you and its love of others. Lord, we all need your help in this. It's in Jesus' name that we pray, amen.