The Good News: Transformation!

Sermon Summary:

In this powerful message, we’re challenged to examine the authenticity of our faith beyond mere traditions. The story from Mark 7:1-23 serves as a backdrop, where Jesus confronts the Pharisees about prioritizing human traditions over God’s commands. We’re reminded that it’s not external rituals that truly matter, but the condition of our hearts. Just as the Pharisees focused on hand-washing rituals, we too can fall into the trap of emphasizing outward appearances of faith while neglecting inner transformation. The message draws a striking parallel to modern church debates, like the ‘worship wars,’ showing how we can become fixated on traditions at the expense of true discipleship. Ultimately, we’re called to pursue a faith that goes beyond rules and regulations, seeking a heart transformation that reflects Christ’s love.

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Key Points:

• Jesus is calling you and me to have a transformed heart, not just clean hands.
• Jesus isn’t after our blind obedience to the traditions that the church has made; he’s chasing after the transformation of our hearts so that we become like him.
• Jesus is calling you to have a transformed heart, not just clean hands.  

Key Takeaways:

• Religious traditions can become empty rituals when disconnected from genuine faith
• Jesus critiques the Pharisees for prioritizing human traditions over God’s commands
• True defilement comes from within the heart, not from external factors
• The importance of heart transformation over outward appearances of righteousness
• The danger of using traditions as loopholes to avoid true obedience to God
• Love should be the defining characteristic of a follower of Jesu

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Scripture References:

• Mark 7:1-23

Stories:

• The pastor’s experience working at a Christian summer camp called New Life Ranch
• The “worship wars” in churches during the early 2000s, debating traditional vs. contemporary worship styles
• The history of the organ in church worship and its initial rejection as a pagan instrument
• A personal anecdote about a church member calling down lightning on contemporary worship instruments
• The paraphrase of 1 Corinthians 13 to illustrate the supremacy of love in Christian faith

Transcript

Well, good morning. Question for the room. Who here had a memorable summer job in high school or college? Or maybe you’re in high school and college and you are having a memorable summer job right now. Anyone memorable summer jobs? Okay. Well, throughout all of my summers in college, I worked at a Christian camp in Northeastern Oklahoma called New Life Ranch. It’s a little different than how we do camp here at our church. Instead of having entire youth groups come, we would have groups of friends or just individuals register. They would come, stay, do a week of camp, and we’d have a lot of fun. And I was a counselor at that camp. I had the privilege of doing that with my wife, Kelsey, made a lot of really great friends. But we would do the same camp program week after week for eight weeks straight. And so if you’re not familiar with this type of camp, if you’ve never done it before, these camps have lots of really strange, bizarre, silly, crazy traditions, dress-up days, silly songs, et cetera. So as an example, I’ve got a picture of myself and my wife from our last summer working on staff at this camp. So there we are. She chose to marry me. I styled my own hair in that picture. So if you ever need help adding some volume to your hair, I know how to help you out. That’s from a dress-up night. All the staff would do, we would dress up, go roller skating at the start of every summer. And like that, we had lots of other just really silly traditions. Like any time we made an announcement on the PA system, we would end it with a squawk, a very loud squawk. We did something called polar dip every morning, where as a camp counselor, I would wake up and drag eight to 12, 15-year-old boys out of bed, to jump in an ice-cold creek at 7 a.m. Loved it. And then we also had something called morning camp party, where we would sing silly songs and play fun games. And that happened every day at 11, 11 a.m. And I frequently played bass guitar, this is not an audition, in the band for these silly songs. And we, again, played these songs over and over and over again. And at the start of the camp camp, we would just turn into July, the shine just really wore off. And so I’ve got a picture of me playing bass in the band. We’re just really digging deep in the archives here, looking happy, but dead in the eyes. So that week one energy was really gone by week six or seven. And my camp staff friends and I would have to remind each other that we would just have to fake it until we made it. Even though, you know, we really, we had to keep this going. Our hearts just weren’t there anymore. We were tired, we’re worn out. And traditions and rituals can really do that. We can follow them and play along really well, even when we’re not into it. And sometimes we can follow along with those traditions without even understanding how they got started in the first place or why we’re even doing them. Today, I want us to think about the times that we have followed tradition, even though our hearts just aren’t in the right place. So Mark chapter seven, verses one through 23, Jesus confronts the religious leaders of his time as they challenge him on why his followers don’t stick to the rituals and traditions of their religion. And as Jesus responds to them, his main critique is that his critics honor God with their lips and traditions, but their hearts couldn’t be further from what God wants. So let’s read it together. And as is our tradition in our church, please stand with me as we read from the gospel of Mark.

The Pharisees, and some of the teachers of the law who had come from Jerusalem gathered around Jesus and saw some of his disciples eating food with hands that were defiled, that is unwashed. The Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they give their hands a ceremonial washing, holding to the tradition of the elders. 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. 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 defiled hands? He replied, Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you.

About you hypocrites, as it is written, these people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain. Their teachings are merely human rules. You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to human traditions. And he continued, you have a fine way of setting aside the commands of God in order to observe the commandments of God. And he continued, you have a fine way of setting aside the commands of God in order to observe your own traditions. For Moses said, honor your father and mother and anyone who curses their father or mother is to be put to death. But you say that if anyone declares that what might have been used to help their father or mother is Korban, that is devoted to God, then you no longer let them do anything for their father or mother. Thus you nullify the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down. And you do many things like that. After he had left the crowd and entered the house, again, Jesus called the crowd to him and said, listen to me, everyone, and understand this. Nothing outside a person can defile them by going into them. Rather, it is what comes out of a person that defiles them. After he had left the crowd and entered the house, his disciples asked him about this parable. Are you so dull? He asked. Don’t you see that nothing that enters a person from the outside can defile them? For it doesn’t go into their heart, but into their stomach and then out of the body. In saying this, Jesus declared, all for you. And he said, all for you. He went on. What comes out of a person is what defiles them. For it is from within, out of a person’s heart that evil thoughts come. Sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance, and folly. All these evils come from inside and defile a person. You may be seated. So we have in Mark chapter 7, Jesus responding to this criticism. He’s hot on the heels for context of performing some pretty amazing miracles. So Jesus has just fed 5,000 men and the women and children who accompanied them. He’s just walked on water and calmed a storm. And now he is healing people en masse just by them walking up to him and touching the hem of his robe. And in this miraculous time, some Pharisees and some religious experts have made the trip from Jerusalem to observe Jesus. And this isn’t just a hop, skip, and a jump from Jerusalem to where Jesus is. This is a two to three days walk from Jerusalem to this place. If you were to walk from modern day Jerusalem to modern day Ganasar, which is what the modern equivalent is, it’s 36 hours of walking according to Google Maps. And that’s roughly the same distance between here and Waco. So I want you to think about how important something would have to be for you to walk from Jerusalem to this place. And I want you to think about how important it is to walk to Waco. I don’t think Jim and Joanna Gaines are going to cut it. In other words, these people are not just curious. These are religious experts on a mission. They are here to inspect this popular up-and-comer that they have been hearing so much about and to make sure that his teaching is up to code and that he’s not going to overturn the legacy that they have worked so hard to build and to protect.

They are the expert teachers, and they feel like it’s their responsibility to conduct a thorough classroom walkthrough on Jesus. But in the midst of healings and the miraculous multiplication of food, Jesus, they notice a problem. The Pharisees notice that Jesus has failed to uphold the tradition of the elders, and his disciples aren’t washing their hands before they touch food. And if this is what this new up-and-comer, closest followers are doing, can you imagine how incomplete and faulty the rest of his teaching must be? This teacher has failed to uphold part of the good rabbi curriculum, and they believe he has to be corrected. So it can be really easy for us to fly through this passage without much thought of some of the meaning behind this. So let’s point out a couple of things. First, the Pharisees are not the bad guys. It’s very easy for us to read the Gospels and think of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law as villains. These are people who feel an overwhelming need to preserve the integrity of the Jewish faith and people while they have been overrun by oppressive pagan influence from Rome. How many of you sometimes feel a similar desire to preserve the integrity of the Christian faith in the wake of secularism, pluralism, nationalism, and other issues? If you’re a Christian, how many of you feel a similar desire to preserve the integrity of the Jewish faith in the wake of secularism, pluralism, nationalism, and other issues? The Pharisees and the teachers of the law believe that by going above and beyond what the law taught, they could preserve the faithfulness and distinctiveness of the people of God while they lived under oppressive pagan rule. They are not the bad guys. There’s a whole other sermon in the direction about how we live as the people of God in the fallen world, but that’s not for today. The other thing I think we have to grapple with is, as modern readers who are by and large not ethnically Jewish, we really struggle with cleanliness as a concept in scripture. One of the more illustrious authors of our time, Mo Willems, has best summarized, I think, our grasp of cleanliness in his classic, The Pigeon Doesn’t Want to Take a Bath, or The Pigeon Needs a Bath. Clean, dirty, they’re just words, right? Clean and unclean are established in Old Testament law, and they do have meaning, value, and purpose in the life of the tabernacle, temple, and in the worshiping life of the people of God. And the easiest way to explain where uncleanliness comes from is if you think about things that would have been associated with death or the demonic, those are unclean things. So when you read the Old Testament Levitical code and you go, well, why are shrimp, dogs, and vultures unclean? It’s because they eat and touch dead things, so they’re associated with death. Blood from people, and the discharges of blood is also considered unclean. So again, if you think culturally, this is a pre-Band-Aid world. If you’re bleeding, you’re dying, most likely. And so blood and the discharges of blood were also considered unclean. Also think about how easy every teacher in here probably just took their blood-borne pathogen training. My wife did. How easy is it for diseases to spread by blood? It’s very easy. So there’s good reason to think about blood as unclean. And so you became unclean. Just in the course of normal everyday life, you would touch unclean things. It’s unavoidable. And so before you could participate in the tabernacle or the temple or the religious sacrificial life, you had to become clean. This is not a sin issue. It’s a contamination issue. If you touch something unclean, you become unclean. It doesn’t mean that you have become sinful necessarily. It just means I accidentally touched a dog. I’m unclean now. You wouldn’t intentionally touch a dog in this culture, but it could happen. So you became unclean by touch or by eating unclean food. So if you touched or ate something unclean, you become unclean. And this is not, again, about hygiene. I think it’s very easy for us to think about hand-washing as a hygiene measure, but we have to remember that germs and bacteria are not going to be discovered until 1676. Some 1,600 years ago, we had a dog that was 140 years after the ministry of Jesus. So this is not about stopping germs. This is just about ritual cleanliness. The next thing we need to know that’s in the background is the law given in the Old Testament only prescribes hand-washing for priests who are engaging in the leadership of the religious life of the people of God. So you would only actually have to ritually wash your hands in the Old Testament if you’re about to engage in leading a sacrifice. As a priest, or you’re about to enter the temple. That’s in Exodus 30. But at some point, this teaching given by God in the law morphs into a man-made tradition that applied to all Jewish people before any meal that they ate. Again, not for hygiene, but for ritual cleanliness. Basically, the idea is you could become accidentally clean throughout life. If you’re going to eat clean food, but you’re unclean, then when you touch it, your food will become unclean, and unclean food. And so this started as a oral tradition from rabbis, probably sometime between the years 516 BC and the time of Jesus. It’s an oral collection that got written down, known as the Mishnah, if you’ve ever heard of that. And the idea, again, we have busy hands, we unconsciously touch unclean things. We should just wash them, just in case, to get rid of any accidental This is the charge. This is the tradition that the rabbis, the Pharisees have said, your followers are not keeping this. But Jesus is the perfect teacher. And so Jesus replies instantly to their tradition by quoting scripture. And he quotes from the prophet Isaiah and says, Isaiah prophesied about you when he said, these people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain. Their teachings are merely human rules. And so Jesus gives an example. Another place where the Pharisees and teachers of the law have actually opted to follow tradition over the word of God. So in the law, in the Old Testament, it says, honor your father and mother. In this culture, that would have meant providing for them and caring for them through their old age. But the tradition of the elders, enforced by the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, had a rule that you could earmark your assets, set them aside, your money, your possessions, as set apart for the Lord, or korban. But strangely enough, that didn’t actually mean you had to actually, like, turn it into the offering plate, as it were. You just had to say, I declare this is set apart for the Lord. It’s like this. If you said, hey, mom, hey, grandpa, I know that we’ve been saving for assisted living and end-of-life expenses, but this money is for God, so I can’t spend it on you. That’s what’s happening here. You didn’t actually have to turn it over. For those of you who’ve watched The Office, this is like when Michael Scott says, I declare bankruptcy. And Oscar, the accountant, says, I just wanted you to know that you can’t just say the word bankruptcy and expect anything to happen. And Michael says, I didn’t say it, I declared it. Again, declaring it korban did not make it so. So Jesus gives this as an example and says, you actually do a lot of things like this. You had a command to honor your father and mother, but you’ve subverted it with a tradition that you created, and you do this all the time. Then Jesus explains what all of this is really about. Nothing outside of you that you touch or the food that you eat can make you unclean. It’s actually what comes out of you, what comes out of your heart that defiles you and makes you unclean. The food that you eat, the things that you touch, they just pass through your body without ever touching your heart. So as people who don’t really live in a world where we think about ritual cleanliness, this is where this teaching, touches our lives. We are still religious people who have man-made traditions that shape our faith. And Jesus is telling his disciples, including us, that no amount of hand washing or ritually clean or unclean food is going to touch our heart. You can honor God with your hands, with your food choices, with your regulations, with your beliefs, but if your heart isn’t in the right place, then the words of the prophet Isaiah apply, turns out that the defilement that we actually have to worry about doesn’t come from the world. It comes from our own hearts. Jesus is calling you and me to have a transformed heart, not just clean hands. When I think about how this plays out, I remember growing up in my church, and I grew up during a unique time. I grew up in a unique time. I grew up in a unique time. I grew up in a unique time in American Christianity. And if you were a part of an established church with a rich tradition, then there’s maybe a chance that you remember these times as well. And when I was a child and early teenager growing up in my Baptist church in small town Missouri, my church experienced what came to be known as the worship wars. So some of you are nodding. You remember this. But basically, if you weren’t there, weren’t a part of this, bless you. But basically, during the early 2000s, many churches across the United States entered into the church. And I remember going into debates, sometimes bitter, about what kind of music belonged on stage during worship. And if everything should be hymns, choirs, and organs, or if it was permissible for the kind of worship we just had in here to happen. And there’s an irony in this too, because if you think about it, we’ll do a little history aside. The organ, which was held up as sacred, at least in my church, I’m not going to speak for First Baptist Arlington, I wasn’t here. It was held up as a sacred instrument in these debates. The organ was invented by the Greeks, and then later used by the Romans at their violent pagan celebrations. And it was likely the instrument that would have been playing in the background as the Roman Empire martyred Christians. Writers in the early church actually thought the organ was pagan and evil, and that the church should have nothing to do with it. But human traditions change and flow with culture. And sometime around the year 900, the organ was invented by the Greeks. The organ got adopted into use in the church, though not without debate for the next 700 years. It had some strong critics, including Martin Luther and the Puritans. So I talk about organs and pick on them. I actually love the organ. I think it sounds beautiful. If you’ve never been to classic worship here, it sounds amazing. But why talk about this? It’s very easy for us to claim a particular tradition as holy, sacred, or ordained by God. When it’s actually not. It’s not just something that the Pharisees and teachers of the law did. We do it too. We had bitter debates in my childhood church over this. And when I say bitter, I remember a church business meeting where a rigid critic of contemporary worship actually called down lightning from heaven against those who would bring guitars and drum sets on stage. Again, I didn’t grow up in this church. That didn’t happen here. But that experience has always stood out in my mind, though, because I learned that what church people can actually be like when it comes to be about rules and regulations and the preservation of tradition instead of the transformation of hearts. Someone who I had thought of as a child, as a faithful follower of Jesus, was now calling down lightning from heaven against a guitar. When in reality, music is just a tool that’s meant to enable people to be able to do things. People to express themselves to God. But my church spent more time arguing over the music instead of worrying about whether or not we were producing hearts that looked more like Jesus. I learned an important lesson in an unfortunate way in church that day. Being in church, keeping man-made traditions, cultural traditions, and following all of the rules could make you a really good church person, but not necessarily a person following the Jesus way. After all, Jesus is not about our blind obedience to the traditions that the church has made. He is chasing after the transformation of our hearts so that we become like him. And what’s that like? The tradition of the elders that Jesus critiqued and called out enabled the religious people of his day to take the easy way out. You could say that you honor your father or mother, but here’s a loophole so you don’t really have to do it. You can say that you’re ritually clean, but your heart doesn’t have to be transformed. It allowed them to live in ways that gave them the appearance of holiness without actually having to become the kind of people that God wanted them to be. They could have the appearance of obedience, but instead have unclean hearts full of evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance, and folly. Jesus is not interested in the appearance of righteousness or holiness. Jesus wants to transform your heart so that you become a person whose life is rooted in and defined by one attribute above all others, and that’s love. And I’ll paraphrase the Apostle Paul from 1 Corinthians 13 here. I could speak in spiritual languages or have the gift of preaching, but I don’t have the gift of preaching. I don’t have the gift of preaching. I don’t have the gift of prophecy. Delve into mysteries of the faith and know everything about God. Have enough faith to move mountains. Give everything I have away to the poor. In short, I could be the ultimate perfect Christian, but if my heart isn’t being transformed into being ruled by and rooted in God’s love, then it is all meaningless. Jesus is calling you to have a transformed heart, not just clean hands. And as we move into our time of response today, I want to invite you to do a couple of things. First, I want to invite you into a time of repentance. I want you to invite God to help you examine yourself for the places where you are following tradition at the expense of following the Jesus way and having a heart like Jesus’s. I want you to ask God to show you all the places that you’re trying to be a good, religious person instead of being a person in pursuit of the Jesus way. If you’ve never followed Jesus before, I want to invite you to consider it. The Jesus way is not about rules and regulations. It’s about grace. It’s not about getting everything right. It’s about transformation. It’s about opening yourself up to Jesus who died for you so you don’t have to get it all right. It’s about allowing the Holy Spirit to come and dwell inside of you and transform your heart so that you become someone who resembles Christ more and more every day. And we’ll have ministers here at the front to talk with you and pray with you if that’s something you’d like to learn more about. And I also want to invite you into a time of worship. Michael is going to lead a new song for us. And while you may not know the words, I want you to listen prayerfully to them and make it your prayer for your life this week. And as you listen, I want you to invite God, or I want to invite you to respond as you feel God leading you. If that’s silent prayer, then pray. If it’s repentance, then repent. If it’s to begin a journey of following Jesus, then come and talk and pray with us.