It is a grave danger, a peril to the body of Christ. It will distort your view of you and remove from you a sense of need for God's grace. It is a seductive temptation that has troubled the church for generation after generation after generation after generation. In ways it defines the graphic difference between the religion of the Pharisees and the Gospel of the Kingdom that Christ came to preach. What is this thing that I am talking about? Well, it has various names: legalism, moralism, externalism.
A Gospel That Is Not the Gospel
They are a gospel that is not the Gospel, and yet they live amongst us; they trouble our hearts. These things do seduce us and do grip us and often define the way we think about ourselves and the way that we think about others. I would like to say to you that I am free of these things, but I'm not, nor do I think you are. If you would turn there to Mark 7 in your church Bibles, page 842, we find ourselves in what is really a pivotal passage in Mark, maybe one of the most theological passages right out front in this Gospel.
This passage really does march us to the Cross because it defines the collision between Christ and the Pharisees, the collision that would finally make them determine this man had to die. It also defines the need for the Cross, because if the diagnostic of Jesus is right, there is no hope for us but the shed blood of the Lord Jesus Christ - absolutely none! You know the history. The Pharisees had rejected the claims of Christ, and they're now out following Him around, trying to entrap Him. And they think they have Him in this moment.
We find this in the first few verses of this passage, as the disciples are eating without ceremonially washed hands; their hands were considered defiled. Now know that this is not a law of God that's being broken here. What had happened is the scribes had studied the law in their seriousness with the law, and they had interpreted and reinterpreted and re-reinterpreted; they had applied it and reapplied it and re-re-applied it until it became this superstructure of regulations that just overwhelmed people.
And one of those was the washing; you will notice in verses 3 to 5 that Mark actually makes sort of an editorial comment to Jewish readers, explaining to them this tradition of the washing of hands, and then Mark goes on to say, "Oh, by the way, there were regulations about washing cups and pots and copper vessels and dining couches; these people got washing obsessed." And a person's morality began to be judged by their keeping of all of these traditions, their knowledge of them and their keeping of them.
That's the context here. And so this passage becomes a wonderful way of looking at what this legalism and externalism and moralism does with Biblical faith. Let me just walk through the passage with that lens. First thing you will notice. It's very clear in the Pharisees' critique of the disciples that legalism, moralism causes you to be more concerned with the behavior of others than the spiritual condition of your own heart. Think about the men who were making this minute little critique of the disciples, who were outraged that the disciples hadn't gone through the detailed cleansing of hands (there were volumes written on how to properly cleanse your hands before you eat).
Who were these people? These were people in great spiritual peril; they were actually standing against the only hope of the universe - the Lord Jesus Christ! They were actually rejecting the Messiah that had been prophesied of old, who would alone provide redemption. They rejected His claims; they rejected the call of the Kingdom to repentance and belief. They were in deep spiritual peril, but they felt no peril because there was such confidence in their keeping of the traditions that they felt, rather than a sense of spiritual need, rather than looking inward, their eyes looked outward, critiquing and watching hyper-vigilantly the behavior of others.
Legalism, moralism, externalism is always connected to a condemning spirit. Is that spirit in you? Are you, at moments, more vigilant in your consideration of the behavior of others than you are the condition of your own heart? Parents, could it be that you have actually begun to think that you are not more like your children than you actually are? Do you say things to them like, "Well in my day, I would have never thought of doing such a thing. I can't believe you would do such a thing." Why can't you?
You Are a Sinner Too
You're a sinner too! Wives, are you watching the behavior, the words, the actions, and reactions of your husband, more convicted for him than you are convicted for yourself? Are you more irritated by his sin, weakness, and failure than you are broken by your own sin? Husbands, I would say the same to you. Do you walk around comparing yourself to others in the body of Christ and assessing that you're doing quite well, thank you? Or do you live with a deep awareness that every day of your life is a deep and abiding argument that you have no hope but the shed blood of the Lord Jesus Christ, and you give empirical evidence of that every day?
While these men are critiquing the disciples, they're blind to the depth of their own peril. The second thing you notice, verse 6: "These people honor me with her lips, but their heart is far from me." Legalism, externalism, moralism always emphasize external behavior and ignores the heart. Listen - true Christianity is always a religion of the heart. God will not be satisfied with words. He will not be satisfied with behavior. He will not be satisfied with knowledge. He will not be satisfied with public acts of religion.
He wants your heart. Now why? In order to understand this, you have to understand the theology of the heart that's given in Scripture. We've talked about this as we've walked through Mark, that the heart is the center of your personhood, the heart being the seeds of your thoughts and your desires and your emotions and your motivations and your values. The heart is your control center; the heart is the steering wheel of your life. And that would mean that what rules your heart, will rule your life and your behavior.
What owns your heart, owns the essence of what is you. And so God is after your heart; because if He doesn't have your heart, He doesn't have you. And so it's not enough to jump through behavioral hoops when really your heart is being ruled by other gods. That's why you have those shocking words in Isaiah 1 when Jesus says, "I hate your solemn assemblies; I hate your sacrifices. They're an abomination to me." Why? Because they were not an expression of the heart. The heart is a worship center; you're always worshiping.
You don't just worship on Sunday; you worship your way through every moment of every day. And I would ask you: at street level, in the hallways and kitchens and bedrooms and family rooms and vans of everyday life, what functionally and effectively rules your heart? What rules you? What do you want? What do you crave? Is Jesus Christ your Lord in those domains? Husbands, again, do you respond to your wife, not based on who she is and what she does, but based on a willing submission to the commands of the Lord Jesus Christ?
You want to honor your Lord in the way that you treat that woman. Parents, do you see yourself as God's agent in the life of your children, and what you long for more than anything else is not that your children would be what you want them to be, but what you long for is that you would honor God in the way that you respond to those children, so that you represent Him with beauty and with accuracy so they would be drawn to love their Lord? Friends, what controls you in relationships to one another?
What you want from people, the way you want to be respected and esteemed and accepted, or that somehow, someway, all that you say, and all that you do, and all that you desire, and all that you think would be the expression of functional worship of the Lord? Faith, to be true faith, is first a matter of the heart. Obedience, to be true obedience, is a matter of the heart. That's why Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount, moves the fences of the law, not just to behavior, but moves them into the heart.
Adultery Is a Matter of the Heart
And He would say, "Adultery is not just the physical act of adultery, but adultery is a matter of the heart. If you look on a woman to lust after her, you've already committed adultery." (13:36 - jack up the volume) Legalism, externalism, moralism ignore the heart as you see very clearly in the example of the Pharisees. There's a third thing. This externalism elevates doable human tradition to the status of God's law. It elevates doable human tradition to the status of God's law. Verse 7: "In vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.
You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men." Those applications, those interpretations of the Law, rise in importance, and at some point, they get viewed as if they were God's law. If my trust is in my ability to keep God's law, then it would make sense that I'd want to get it right, and so I think about it and I define and I redefine and I interpret and I reinterpret and I apply and I reapply until those applications, those traditional interpretations, begin to be viewed at the same level of importance and obedience as God's law.
Now, let me give you some examples. This is one of those moments where I'll probably be successful in making everybody in the room angry. Perhaps it's my job. Let's just take three examples. Let's take the example of dress in a worship service. Now it is absolutely right, that as you come to a worship service, you should want everything that you do to be an expression of honor and service and love and worship of God. You should want everything that you do, as you come to a corporate worship service, to acknowledge your deep need of Him and to point to His glory.
And so surely you should want to be modest; surely you should not want to draw attention to yourself; you probably shouldn't come on Sunday morning with a big long Indian headdress. That would probably not be appropriate (that was a joke; probably not a very good one). Now maybe the way that you personally apply that, wanting to honor God in that way, is that you come on Sunday morning in a suit. Every Sunday, it's a white shirt, a tie, a suit; that is a completely appropriate and honoring application of these principles of worship.
But it's not a law, and you must not make it that. You must not judge people who have made a different application of that, as long as that application is that within the boundaries of those principles we just discussed. I think that's hard for us, and I do think that we allow those traditions to become at a level of God's law. Let's talk about parenting. There are people who say if you want to break friendships with people, talk about their parenting. Well hopefully, we can be honest about these things.
Maybe the way that you've applied your call of God to be a godly parent is by homeschooling. You think that is a way that you can use the government requirement for education to instill in your children a Christian worldview that has as its center the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. That is surely a wonderful application of your God-given parental responsibilities, but it's not a law. And you must not look judgmentally toward, and you must not condemn, people who have decided to fulfill their Biblical responsibilities by sending their children to a public school or by sending their children to a Christian school.
What About Preaching?
We must be careful. Now let me get even more focused, I'll focus on myself. What about preaching? How do you define what a good sermon is, or the kind of preacher that you're prepared to listen to? Some of us tend to like more traditional, reformed, academic preaching; that's a wonderful thing. That is a very good application of all the things God calls a preacher to do. Some of you don't like that, and you would you would like to have a more contemporary form of preaching with heavier application.
We must be very careful that, in these areas, we don't do exactly what the Pharisees did: that we begin to elevate our application to the same level as God's requirement, and we begin to judge people, not in their failure to keep God's law, but in their failure to keep my particular application of God's law. (Now, there I have offended most of you). Fourth thing - and you see this in verses 9 through 13 - that legalism ends up setting aside the commands of God, because that superstructure of legalism begins to overwhelm the heart and overwhelm your actions and reactions and responses.
So, if you are legalistic in the way that you think about dress and someone is near you and they've offended you, not because they've broken God's law but because they have offended your application, and so you are not warm to them, and you are not loving to them, and you are not offering them the mercy and grace of the body of Christ, the traditions that you are holding on to have caused you to break the clear commands of God. And I think, if we're honest with ourselves, that happens to us often.
I would plead with you, at this moment, to search your heart; where is that dynamic a temptation in your life? Notice the words here: You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition! For Moses said, "Honor your father and your mother"; and, "Whoever reviles father or 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 or mother, thus making void the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down.
And many such things you do. This is the example that Christ gives us. Corban is a pledge that someone would make to give a gift to the Temple. And so a son would say, "Everything I'm going to make, I have pledged to the Temple, and therefore, mom and dad, in your older age, I cannot make provision for you." And the tradition of the Corban sets aside God's call to honor father and mother--very clear example, but notice the words after, "...and many such things you do." That was just one example. There are a myriad of examples where we're tended to be more exercised by tradition than we are from the clear call of God's Word.
Final thing here. Legalism, externalism, moralism, whatever you want to give the term, misdefines and mis-locates our struggle with sin. You have Christ making that very clear in the final verses that follow. Let me read them. 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?" [Giving a physical example there.] (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.
Evil Comes From Within
All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person. You see, we would, all of us, be tempted to think that our greatest, deepest, most abiding difficulty exists outside of us and not inside of us. And Jesus is saying just the opposite; that what is outside of you cannot defile you. Now He doesn't mean that we should be lax in our contact with external evil. What Christ is teaching is this very important point: it's only ever the evil within that hooks you to the evil without. Our problem is an internal problem, and so acts of external behavior do not solve the problem.
If your problem was just behavior, then the law could provide rescue, but your problem is not behavior; your problem is your very nature; your problem is the essence of who you are; your problem is you! Jesus came to rescue you from you; to rescue me from me; to deliver us from us. My problem is not first murder; my problem is first a murderous heart that allows me to hate other human beings, beings made in the image of God. I wish I was free of that hatred, but I am not. My problem is not first physical, sexual immorality, but an immoral, lustful heart that wants things that are outside of God's will for me, that craves the pleasures of sexual immorality more than I crave the honor of my Lord.
My problem is not physical stealing, but a ravenously materialistic and covetous heart that seems never to be satisfied. You know that's true. You know how hard it is, if your mouth has just finished a glorious chocolate chip cookie, to stop at one. And you know you should; you know you have patterns of eating that are not submissive and done in a glory to the Creator who made everything you would ever eat. That's not a problem of cookies; that's not a problem of chocolate chips; you don't solve that problem by removing 'chipdom' from your world, because that struggle with those cookies is empirical evidence of a much deeper struggle within you.
You see if you get a hold of this, you are broken by what's inside of you. You are so broken by what's inside of you that you are humble and gracious and loving to other broken people. How could it be that we would take a message of deep, personal, moral evil and undeserved grace and turn it into a basis for condemning others? How dare we! Because the fact of the matter is that I have no argument to make before God but Christ, because my heart is not yet cleared of all of these things. This is a diagnostic.
You should look in this mirror, and you should say, "I'm not yet free. Oh, my Lord and Savior, continue Your work. Free me by Your grace from these things. I long for a heart that is ruled by You and You alone." I said to you that this passage drives us to the necessity of the Cross. It's impossible for us to achieve acceptance with God by the keeping of the law because of the perversity of our hearts. And so the only hope for us was for God to send His Son who would live with a pure heart; who would perfectly keep God's law; who, by means of that, would be an acceptable sacrifice, satisfying God's requirement; on the cross, purchasing for us forgiveness and righteousness and deliverance, life eternal.
I would say to you that I'm deeply persuaded that Christianity is not yet free of these distortions. I would be more pastoral; some of you won't like this; I don't think Tenth Church is free of these distortions. And so we cry out for grace that God would own our hearts; that our hope would be in Him alone. And because our hope is in Him and not in us, we would be able to look into the mirror of the Word of God with hope and confidence and confess how grave our need still is and love others, who like us, are still in the midst of spiritual struggle.
If you have never put your trust in the Savior, I would encourage you to do that this evening. If Mark's diagnosis is right, and it is, you have no hope but Jesus, and He is able, and He is willing to forgive. Let's pray: Lord, what a significant passage of Scripture, not just in the flow of the history of Mark, and not just in the lives of the Pharisees and disciples and the Jewish community, but in our lives as well. We pray that we would be honest about our condition and celebrants of Your grace so that we don't fall into the dangers that we've considered this evening that distort our view of ourselves and suddenly and progressively remove our sense of need for what You alone are able to offer us. In Jesus's name, Amen.
