Heart In The Right Place

Opening illustration: “Could they not carry their own garbage this far?” I grumbled to Jay as I picked up empty bottles from the beach and tossed them into the trash bin less than 20 feet away. “Did leaving the beach a mess for others make them feel better about themselves? I sure hope these people are tourists. I don’t want to think that any locals would treat our beach with such disrespect.”

The very next day I came across a prayer I had written years earlier about judging others. My own words reminded me of how wrong I was to take pride in cleaning up other people’s messes. The truth is, I have plenty of my own that I simply ignore—especially in the spiritual sense.

I am quick to claim that the reason I can’t get my life in order is because others keep messing it up. And I am quick to conclude that the “garbage” stinking up my surroundings belongs to someone other than me. But neither is true. Nothing outside of me can condemn or contaminate me—only what’s inside (Matt. 15:19-20). The real garbage is the attitude that causes me to turn up my nose at a tiny whiff of someone else’s sin while ignoring the stench of my own.

Introduction: In today’s text, Jesus is talking to the Pharisees, a group of the religious elite in Israel. They taught that obeying the law was the most important thing, so they emphasized external behavior. Jesus called attention to the condition of the heart and essentially said, “It doesn’t matter if you do everything right. If your heart is bad, you are still defiled.”

What heart is distant from God?

1. Mouth: What goes in or comes out? (vs. 10-11)

When Jesus says “hear and understand”, He wants to make sure that we are paying close and careful attention. This will be VERY important. So let us heed His words! Let us be careful this morning to hear and to understand that “it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but what comes out of the mouth; this defiles a person.”

Now when Jesus says this, is He saying something new? Is He saying something that wasn’t true in the Old Testament, but is true now? In other words, is this actually an announcement that the food laws of the Old Testament are now done away with? (Now that would be something “new”!) And most commentators and translations (cf. Mark 7:19) say “yes” – this is something new. May be not! “Hear and understand: it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but what comes out of the mouth; this defiles a person.” I believe Jesus is saying something here that has been equally true at every stage of history ever since the fall of man. So, then what about those Old Testament food laws?

Now the holiness of God does not consist in His abstaining from certain foods! The holiness of God is not an outward or external kind of thing. The holiness of God is who God is! So, when the people of Israel abstained from “unclean” foods, it was a constant reminder of their calling to be separate from the wickedness and idolatry of the Gentile nations and to be conformed to the moral purity and holiness of God. So in the New Testament, When the distinction between (“clean”) Jews and (“unclean”) Gentiles was abolished, so also was the distinction between clean unclean foods (Acts 10). When God’s law was written on our hearts through the Holy Spirit who indwells us, there was no longer any need for these outward reminders. When Jesus brought us the true “cleanness” to which the distinction between clean and unclean foods had always pointed, then there was no longer any need for the old pointers, and so they passed away (Col. 2:16-17). The food laws of the Old Testament were an external and outward sign that God had chosen Israel to be holy from the inside out – set apart from the “unclean” Gentiles, and set apart unto God.

So … an Israelite becomes ritually unclean because he has to pick up an animal carcass and carry it out of the camp. No big deal! He is not yet truly defiled in God’s sight. He has not yet failed to be holy as God is holy. But if he refuses to live the rest of the day as one who is ritually unclean, and if he refuses to wash his clothes, now his uncleanness becomes far more serious. Now his uncleanness has become a true defilement of the heart because he has mocked the very heart of the food laws. He is rejecting not just the food laws themselves, but also his calling to be holy from the inside out, even as God is holy. So, when Jesus says, “It is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but what comes out of the mouth; this defiles a person”, He is not denying that certain foods could make you ritually unclean. Instead, He is simply pointing out what has always been the case. He is interpreting the true heart of the law. It was never the foods themselves that truly defiled a person in God’s sight, but rather it was always the heart that brought about true defilement.* Now do you think that we would not have needed this instruction? Jesus says to us: Hear and understand.