Alan Kraft, in his book, Good News for Those Trying Harder, shares a story about a time when his wife borrowed his car and heard a CD he had loaded in the sound system. The song touched her. When she asked him about it, he was able to recite the lyrics, but had never thought much about their significance. So the next time he was in his car, he listened to the song, as though for the first time, and found himself weeping. He had heard the song dozens of times before, and was even familiar with the lyrics, but had never really heard the music. (Ken Moberg, “Book Review,” Forest Lakes District Update, September 2009)
Alan’s experience, I think, is not unlike the experience of many people, especially those of us who have been Christians for a while. If we’re not careful, we get to the point where we don’t hear the music of the Gospel anymore. Oh, we can recite the lyrics, but it’s message ceases to touch our hearts.
The question is: How can we keep that from happening to us? How can we keep the Christian life from becoming stale and lifeless in our own lives? Or if it has already happened, how can we learn to hear the music again? How can we recover the life and joy of our relationship with Christ again?
Well, if you have your Bibles, I invite you to turn with me to Mark 7, Mark 7, where Jesus responds to a group of people whose religion had become lifeless and stale.
Mark 7:1-5 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 “unclean,” 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 ‘unclean’ hands?” (NIV)
Now, for the Pharisees, washing hands was not a matter of personal hygiene; it was a matter of personal holiness. They had an elaborate washing ritual, which involved pouring an eggshell and a half of water over the finger-tips of the hand held upwards until the water ran down the wrists. The palm was then cleansed with the fist of the other. Then with the fingertips pointing down, they ran water over the wrist until it ran off at the fingertips. Then the whole procedure was repeated with the other hand.
Now, this was especially important after a trip to the marketplace, because there they might have touched something an “unclean” Gentile might have touched; or worse, they might have touched an “unclean” Gentile himself. You see, their hand-washing rituals were designed to exclude people as well as elevate themselves in their own eyes. It’s as if they were saying, “I’m better than all those ‘dirty’ people out there, and I must wash myself of them.”
That’s what the Pharisees were doing in Jesus’ day, and sometimes we do the same thing today. Whenever we define our own spirituality in terms of what we do, what clothes we wear, what music we listen to, what services we attend, what money we give, what duties we perform, or any other outward ritual, we’re doing just what the Pharisees did here. We’re in essence saying, “I’m better than those ‘dirty’ people out there,” and we in essence exclude them from our fellowship.
Now, there is nothing wrong with most of the things we do in and of themselves. It’s only when we use those things to define who is spiritual and who is not that we get into trouble. When we focus on tradition and ritual to define personal holiness, we exclude others who don’t share our traditions, and it makes Jesus angry. Look at how he responds to the Pharisees.
Mark 7:6-8 He replied, “Isaiah was right when he prophesied 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 but rules taught by men.’ You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to the traditions of men.” (NIV)
Jesus accuses the Pharisees of hypocrisy. They are disobeying God’s commands even while they hang on to their own traditions.
It reminds me of the story of a priest who was returning to his rectory after dark one evening. He was attacked by a robber who pulled a gun on him and demanded, “Your money or your life!”
As the priest reached his hand into his coat pocket, the robber saw his clergy collar and said: “I see you're a priest. Never mind, you can go.”
The priest was relieved and surprised by the robber’s courtesy, so he offered the robber a candy bar that he remembered was in his pocket.
The robber replied, “No thank you, Father. I don't eat candy during Lent.” (Harold A. Buetow, Embrace Your Renewal, Alba House, 2004; www.PreachingToday.com)
Who’s he kidding? Does he think a Lenten ritual will absolve him of his stealing? We laugh at that because it seems so silly. But it’s no more silly than a person who comes to church on Sunday, thinking he has fulfilled his spiritual obligation, and then goes out and cheats his neighbor on Monday. Jesus is not impressed with religious ritual or tradition, especially when we neglect the clear command of God’s Word to love our neighbor as ourselves.
So if your Christianity seems stale recently, you might want to examine whether or not you’re just following the traditions of men or truly obeying the commands of God. In other words, if you want the life and joy of your relationship with Christ to return…
FOCUS ON SCRIPTURE, NOT TRADITION.
Focus on what God has to say, not what others have to say. Concern yourself with God’s Word and God’s will, not with doing it the way it’s always been done, or doing what others expect of you.
You see, that was the focus of the Pharisees. In fact, their traditions led them to violate the very Scripture they were trying to keep by having all those traditions in the first place. For example, one of their traditions actually prevented them from honoring their parents.
Mark 7:9-13 And he said to them: “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 your mother,’ and, ‘Anyone who curses his father or mother must be put to death.’ But you say that if a man says to his father or mother: ‘Whatever help you might otherwise have received from me is Corban’ (that is, a gift devoted to God), then you no longer let him do anything for his 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.” (NIV)
Their traditions prevent them from obeying God’s Word! In this case, to pronounce your property “Corban” meant that you were dedicating it to God for sacred use. Nobody else could use it to meet their every-day needs. But that didn’t mean you actually had to give your property to God, according to the tradition of the Pharisees. In fact, you could still use it for your own needs. It’s just that your parents couldn’t use it or anybody else. Their traditions were actually preventing them from taking care of their parents in this case and from obeying the clear commands of God in many other cases.
Their traditions were like chains binding them from doing what God wanted them to do. And sometimes, our traditions do the same thing to us. They keep us from obeying God. God says, “Take care of your family” (1 Timothy 5:8). God says, “Love your neighbor” (Matthew 22:39). God says, “Reach out to the lost” (John 20:21). And sometimes our own financial policies, our own taste in music, or our own “reverence” for a church building keep us from doing these things.
The point is if we’re going to love people as God calls us to love people, life is going to get messy sometimes. There will be some stains on the carpet. There will be some discomfort. There will be some change in our traditions. But we must NEVER let any of these things keep us from doing what God wants us to do. We must focus on Scripture, not tradition; otherwise, our Christianity will become lifeless and stale, and we will find ourselves in bondage.
In his book, Teaching the Elephant to Dance, James Belasco describes how trainers shackle young elephants with heavy chains to deeply embedded stakes. In that way the elephant learns to stay in its place. Older, powerful elephants never try to leave—even though they have the strength to pull the stake and walk away. Their conditioning has limited their movements, so that even with only a small metal bracelet around their foot attached to nothing, they still stand in place without any stakes at all! (www.PreachingToday.com)
Now, that’s what happens to people, organizations and churches sometimes. They stand in place without any stakes at all, bound only by their traditions. Please, let’s not let that happen here.
Christ has set us free to love God, to love one another, and to love our neighbors who so desperately need Him. Let’s not let any tradition, no matter how sacred it seems, keep us from doing just that. If we’re going to keep our relationship with Christ vibrant and alive, we must focus on Scripture not tradition.
More than that, we must also focus on inward purity, not outward performance. Focus on the inner attitudes of the heart, not the outward actions of our hands. Or as Jesus puts it here, we must…
FOCUS ON A CLEAN HEART, NOT CLEAN HANDS.
Mark 7:14-23 Again Jesus called the crowd to him and said, “Listen to me, everyone, and understand this. Nothing outside a man can make him ‘unclean’ by going into him. Rather, it is what comes out of a man that makes him ‘unclean.’” 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 man from the outside can make him ‘unclean’? For it doesn’t go into his heart but into his stomach, and then out of his body.” (In saying this, Jesus declared all foods “clean.”) He went on: “What comes out of a man is what makes him ‘unclean.’ For from within, out of men’s hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. All these evils come from inside and make a man ‘unclean.’ ” (NIV)
Jesus speaks in a moral sense here, not a medical sense. It’s still a good idea to wash your hands before you eat so you don’t get sick. But a person is NOT defiled morally by what he eats even if his hands are not washed.
On the other hand, a person IS defiled morally by what he thinks in his heart even though his hands are scrubbed so clean they squeak. Notice, in verse 21, “evil thoughts” is listed first, because all the other evils are the result of evil thoughts: Sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly, none of these evils arise from external forces. They don’t come from poverty, as some would have us believe, or a bad environment, or bad practices. No. All these evils arise from within, from an evil heart, i.e., from evil thoughts.
The Bible says, “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:10)
Kay Warren, in Christianity Today magazine describes the first time she visited Rwanda. She said she went looking for monsters. She had heard about the 1994 genocide that had left one million people dead—tortured, raped, viciously murdered—and somehow she thought it would be easy to spot the perpetrators. She naïvely assumed that she would be able to look men and women in the eyes and tell if they had been involved.
What she found left her puzzled, confused, and ultimately frightened. Instead of finding leering, menacing creatures, she says, “I met men and women who looked and behaved a lot like me. They took care of their families, went to work, chatted with their neighbors, laughed, cried, prayed, and worshiped. Where were the monsters? Where were the evildoers capable of heinous acts? Slowly, with a deepening sense of dread,” Kay Warren writes, “I understood the truth: There were no monsters in Rwanda, just people like you and me…”
Then she concludes, “You might as well face the shameful truth: You and I, put in the right situation, will do absolutely anything. Given the right circumstances, I am capable of any sin. I've grown more afraid of the monster lurking in the dark corners of my soul than of any monster lurking in the dark corners of my house. (Kay Warren, “The Only Hope for Monsters,” Christianity Today magazine, October 2008, p. 98; www.PreachingToday. com)
The question is, how do we take care of that monster lurking in the dark corners of our souls? How do we take care of the evil within? How do we get a clean heart?
Well, only Jesus can give us a clean heart. 1 John 1:7 says, “The blood of Jesus, [God’s] Son, purifies us from all sin” (1 John 1:7), but only if “walk in the light.” In other words, when we walk in the truth and admit that we are full of evil on the inside, then and only then does Jesus apply the work of the cross to our own hearts and begin to clean us up from the inside out.
If you want to be clean, truly clean, it doesn’t start with you trying to clean up your own act. It doesn’t start with you attempting to change your outward behavior. NO! It starts with you admitting your inward sinfulness and trusting JESUS to change you from the inside out. That’s because true holiness is not a matter of outward actions; it’s a matter of the heart; it’s a matter of what’s on the inside in your own thought life.
My friends, that’s what keeps our relationship with Christ fresh and vital. It’s trusting Christ to continue His work of changing us from the inside out. It’s a life-long process, but it will continue only as long as we focus on Scripture, not tradition; and only as long as we focus on clean hearts, not just clean hands.
Pastor John Ortberg puts it this way: “Conforming to boundary markers too often substitutes for authentic transformation.
“The church I grew up in had its boundary markers. A prideful or resentful pastor could have kept his job, but if ever the pastor was caught smoking a cigarette, he would've been fired. Not because anyone in the church actually thought smoking a worse sin than pride or resentment, but because smoking defined who was in our subculture and who wasn't – it was a boundary marker.
“As I was growing up, having a ‘quiet time’ became a boundary marker, a measure of spiritual growth. If someone had asked me about my spiritual life, I would immediately think, Have I been having regular and lengthy quiet time? My initial thought was not, ‘Am I growing more loving toward God and toward people?’
“Boundary markers change from culture to culture, but the dynamic remains the same. If people do not experience authentic transformation, then their faith will deteriorate into a search for the boundary markers that masquerade as evidence of a changed life.” (John Ortberg, “True (and False) Transformation,” Leadership, Summer 2002, p. 102)
My friends if our faith has become lifeless and stale, we need to check and see if we have substituted “boundary markers” for “authentic transformation.” And if we have, let’s ask God to truly change us from the inside out.
Change my heart, oh God.
Make it ever true.
Change my heart, oh God.
May I be like You.
