From false to true worship

This morning's scripture reading is coming from Matthew 15:es 1-20. You have your Bibles. It's going to come from Matthew 15 1-20. We'll be looking at all 20 verses this morning. As you know, we travel through the book of Bibles. We've traveled through 1 Samuel. Now we're traveling through Matthew. And last week we talked about Jesus and him walking on the water. And now we come to chapter 15. We're going to be taking a look at that this morning. Hear the word of the Lord. Then Pharisees and scribes came to Jesus from Jerusalem and said,"Wh do your disciples break the tradition of the elders? For they do not wash their hands when they eat." He answered them, "And why do you break the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition? For God commanded, "Honor your father and your mother, and whoever reviles father or mother must surely die." But you say, "If anyone tells his father or his mother, what you would have gained from me is given to God." He need not honor his father. So for the sake of your tradition, you have made void the word of God. You hypocrites. Well did Isaiah prophesy of you when he said, "This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts is far from me. In vain do they worship me, teaching the doctrines, the commandments of men." And he called the people to him and he said, "Hear and understand. It is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but what comes out of the mouth that defiles a person." Then the disciples came to him, "Did you know that the Pharisees were offended when they said when when they heard you saying this?" He answered, "Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be uprooted. Let them alone. They are blind guides, and if the blind lead the blind, both will fall into a pit." But Peter said to him, "Explain the parable to us." And he said, "Are you also still without understanding? Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth passes into the stomach as and is expelled? But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a person. For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a person. But to eat with unwashed hands does not defile anyone. This is God's word.

Jesus in this text is having sort of a theological debate with the Pharisees. The Pharisees have come down from Jerusalem or come up from Jerusalem rather. You remember Jesus's ministry was kind of on the north side of the Sea of Galilee up near Capernaum. And and Jesus has been drawing some attention. His teachings, his healings, the miracles, all of these things that are happening are beginning to draw the attention because Jesus doesn't follow the traditional patterns that a rabbi would follow. I mean, even, you know, not too long ago, he was going through the grain fields and his disciples were seemingly breaking Sabbath in the opinion and the observation of some of the Pharisees. And so, these you might say higher ranking Pharisees now have come to check out the scene and see what's going on. And they're watching Jesus and his disciples like a hawk. They're observing everything. And a question arises here amongst the Pharisees. They say in verse one, "Then the Pharisees and the scribes came to Jesus from Jerusalem and said, "Why do your disciples break the tradition of the elders, for they do not wash their hands when they eat." So in the time period of Jesus, there were all of these different rebbitical traditions that orally began to define what it meant to keep the law. Now, there is no law that says that you have that the average Israelite has to wash their hands before they eat. This was a tradition, an oral tradition that had been passed down. Now, if you were if you were a priest going into the temple, doing the temple work, you needed to wash your hands. And what many scholars believe is that the Pharisees and their desire to so like strain at following every inch of the law, took Exodus 19, which said, "I'm going to make you a kingdom of priests." Meaning that all the children of Israel are priests in in a sense. And so let's take this priestly law and now let's through the oral law apply it to the ch to everybody to all the children of Israel that everybody needs to be doing something like that. And so in a way through the oral explanations they have elevated the law. It's not a law from the Torah. It's just a law that the rabbis have begun. They call the tradition of the elders. And so they see that Jesus's disciples aren't doing that and they're they're offended. They're breaking the rules. But Jesus looking at this wants to begin to have a theological debate where he begins to point out there's a problem here. You're giving too much emphasis to these oral traditions. And so Jesus comes in and he says, "You know what? Your oral tradition has gone too far and it's gone so far that it's actually invalidating the actual Torah itself. I'll give you a specific instance of it." Is what Jesus is essentially saying. And so he points out here, he says, you know that commandment where it says, and verse three, it says, ' And why do you break the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition? For God commanded, honor your father and your mother, and whoever reviles father or mother must surely die. But you say, if anyone tells his father or mother, what you would have gained from me is given to God, he need not honor his father. So for the sake of your tradition, you have made void the word of God. So in essence what Jesus is saying here is there's this tradition and and this is the oral tradition. So vows in the Bible numbers 32 for example says when a man takes a vow to the Lord or takes an oath to obligate himself by a pledge he must not break his word but must do everything he said. That's law. That's Torah. But what does that mean? And what does that look like? And these rebbitical traditions began to define different interpretations for how that was applied. And somewhere along the way, they began to say, you know what, it's so bound binding to make an oath that even if you give to the temple, even if it means alienating the inheritance or the caretaking of your elderly parents, because you have that oath, you got to keep it. But there by what Jesus points out is he says there's another law here that's going and bumping up against this and it's the law to honor your father and mother. And if you don't honor that, is this really honorable to God to keep your oath? That oath shouldn't have been made in the first place. Your oral tradition and interpretations are wrong. And so there's a there's a question here about authority and the weight of authority into the way and the rhythms of the average Israelite and what it meant to honor God, what it meant to worship God, and was it all the rulekeeping and and all of the extreme straining to do it to the nth degree through all these oral traditions that had been developed? or behind the actual law itself. Was there something deeper that the Israelites needed to understand? And Jesus is essentially going to redefine what it means to really worship God, what it means to honor God. See, what has been happening over the centuries since the exile? All these oral traditions that began to pass around, they've been moving from the worship of God from from true worship to false worship. And Jesus is coming here and beginning to show what is happening through all of this, through all of your oral traditions. It's not really honoring my father. It's not really true worship. You're missing the whole point of what the law is all about. So, what we're going to look at today essentially is that we're going to be looking at what it means as Jesus moves or how he moves us back from false worship to true worship. We're going to be looking I've bracketed this in three ways. I got some alliteration. I just got crazy with the the the alliteration when I was preparing this. We're going to look at three ways. From forms to fulfillment, from fatigue to fidelity, and from failure to faithfulness. So forms to fulfillment, fatigue to fidelity and failure to faithfulness.

From Forms to Fulfillment

So from forms to fulfillment, if you see in verse 10 and 11, it says that he called the people to him and said, "Hear and understand, it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but what comes out of the mouth. This is what defiles a person." This is astonishing. And I know that we read it with modern ears and we don't realize this. Jesus just said, let me read it one more time for us to understand this. And he called the people to him and said, "Hear and understand. It is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person." The Old Testament law, especially in Exodus, defined all of these different laws for the clean and unclean animals. You could eat from the clean animals. You could not eat from the unclean animals. And there were all of these laws that developed of what it meant to be holy, what it meant to live in covenant with God was to walk according to these patterns and these practices in your life. And Jesus comes along and essentially says, "It doesn't really make you unclean." And they're they're just having trouble processing, "What do you mean it doesn't make us unclean?" You know, in fact, Peter, who doesn't still doesn't quite get it in this passage, he won't get it until the book of Acts, really, but Peter stops later in the passage and goes, "Can you tell us the interpretation of of your parable?" And Jesus is like, "It's not a parable. I'm speaking literally to you. I want you to understand what goes into your mouth doesn't make you holy or unholy." And he's just like having trouble. And Jesus is like, "What do you not get about this?" You know, I like to read in between the lines. Pet Peter's like, "Well, we've been told this for over a thousand years. It's in the Torah. We shouldn't eat unclean things." And to be clear, Jesus isn't saying break the law, eat unclean things. Jesus is saying those things pointed to something. They pointed to something deeper that is being fulfilled. And that's something that Jesus has been saying even at the the back in Matthew 5 when he stood on the mount, sermon on the mount, and began to say, "I'm fulfilling it. I'm fulfilling all of these laws. I'm bringing them to pass. I'm not doing away with them. It's just their time has come to fulfillment in me." And that's what Jesus is essentially going to address here. We're moving from forms to fulfillment in this passage. The food laws are covenantal identifiers because you follow these patterns. It shows it marks you as the people of God, the people that follow the Torah, that do what God said do. And it became identifiers. But somewhere along the way, because of the whole unclean and clean and separate language, they began to associate not just the fact that they that these were markers and identifiers, but that somehow by doing those things, they made you morally pure. And Jesus says, "Think about that. You can do those things and live a completely impure life. You can commit adultery and do all these other different things in your life. Does that make you pure because you ate the right food tradition? That doesn't purify you. That doesn't make you holy. You have to look behind this and see." So what they had begun to do is misinterpret the understanding. The whole idea is that Jesus is saying these pointed to what it meant to be in covenant with me. But now that I am here, the people that are going to be in covenant in the new covenant with God, the people that are going to be marked as holy, it's going to be the people that are identified with me. The people who follow me, the people who have bowed and let go of all of their their ways and their lives and said, "He is Lord. I'm following him." Those are the people who are now identified. And it's not about the clean and unclean laws and all the the covenantal identifiers are changing because they've now been fulfilled. Those were just to show you something. In fact, they can't serve their purpose because the the the the divider between Jew and Gentile which food laws developed is going away. Anyone who comes to me is now a child of Abraham. All of them are followers. Colossians 2:16-17 tells us, "Therefore, do not let anyone judge you by by what you eat or drink or with regard to religious festival, a new moon celebration or Sabbath day. These are a shadow of the things that were to come." The reality, however, is found in Christ. And that's what Jesus is ultimately beginning to point to right now is saying, "These things are fulfilled. The wall between the Jew and the Gentile is going away." the covenantal identifier. The thing that even makes you holy is because you come to me and I make you holy because I pass on the holiness that I purchased for you and I touch you in my life. I come into your heart. I put my spirit in you and it makes you holy. I'm fulfilling what the food laws could never do. I am the one that brings the fulfillment of all things. And we see actually everything, not to be on a side note here, everything begins to be fulfilled in Jesus. He is the true temple. He is the true high priest. He's all of the different things. He's the fulfillment of the law in every way. He is the true Israelite. What it means to really honor and follow God. Everything begins to be fulfilled in him. Now, if you're carefully thinking about this and and and probably the Pharisees and maybe even the disciples are thinking about this, Jesus is changing and saying, "I am fulfilling the law." But this shifts their understanding. It's a paradigm shift. And even in our own lives, you could say, well, like, couldn't anybody do that? I mean, couldn't I just say, you know, like, if you drive a BMW, that actually is a covenantal identifier. You know, you could say whatever you want. It's a truth claim. So, who is Jesus and why does he get to make these truth claims that define everything? And if he just stands up with no authority and says it, you're right. They're right to question that. But the thing that Jesus, and that's why they're always like, "Where did you get your authority from?" But what we see over the course of Jesus's life is that he's always pointing and saying, "Look at the miracles. How could I operate with this sort of power and authority unless it was from my father in heaven?" We already talked about it. He said, "It ain't from an unclean spirit. I'm doing good. I'm casting out demons. The spirit of God has come among you. The finger of God has come down." And we even see that when he dies on the cross, when he is raised from the dead, there's this vindication that he is from God. Believe these things. Believe the miracles. Believe the truth that he speaks. Believe his fulfillment of the law. He points and uses the Old Testament. He doesn't nullify it. He shows how he actually fulfills it over and over again. And then when he is raised from the dead, it's the final piece that reminds us this is the one. He fulfilled all the promises, even the messianic promises. One who would be born in the line of David. One who would be born in Bethlehem. All of the prophecies point to him at the end of the day. So we go from forms to fulfillment.

And maybe just to think about this is at the end of the day what when we think about the fact that we want to live not the form but the fulfillment in our own lives people who are marked by God whose lives are transformed by him who have been made clean and holy. And the thing he is saying is like it's not about all of these rhythms because behind them I am the one you need and I am the one you come to. I am your holiness. I am your God.

And all of the forms that we follow now should not be to make us holy or to check a box. They should be to engage the living God. When you read your Bible, do you say to yourself, "Read my Bible today." Or do you ask yourself, "How will the Lord meet with me today? In what way will he speak to me through his word? Where is the food and the nourishment that my soul needs? I am here to see that those things that we do when we pray or when we fast or when we Bible read, it's not checking a box because it makes you holy or makes you a better Christian. It's because you want to engage God. You want to meet with him. You want to experience his presence and his power in your life. We are the forms now become they light it lights them on fire. They become practices that bring us before the presence of God to enjoy him to experience him and to be shaped and transformed by him. Not just things that we go through a religious rote. It also empowers us because if things of this world do not make us unclean like in the sense of like things that go into us, we can walk in the midst of this world. I want to be careful here. You can walk in the midst of this world and not feel like you're tainted just because you're around unholiness. You can break bread at the table with someone who is not a follower of God. You can gather with, believe it or not, a Muslim at dinner. Even though you hold different truths and you have spiritual conversations or whatever it is, you can have these relationships and know you're not tainted by those. They do not make you less holy. The living God whose spirit in you makes you holy. Now, that doesn't mean, and I, this is where I want to balance it, bad company corrupts good character. So, there are some people that should not speak into your life. And you want to be careful about the inner circle of friendships you have. We live with wisdom, especially for teenagers. Please hear that. Be careful about the company you keep. It is important. But we are also released to not think that the associations and the friendships we have that if they're not Christians or if they're of a different faith that somehow we are tainted and made less holy by that. It actually releases us to walk in this world and to be the light, guys. To be the light. All right.

From Fatigue to Fidelity

Second point. From fatigue to fidelity. We're moving from fatigue to fidelity in how we begin to worship God. see the outward forms. Well, let's look at verses 12- 14 first. Then the disciples came and said to him, "Do you know that the Pharisees were offended when they heard this saying? I bet they were." He answered, "Every plant that my heavenly father has not planted will be rooted up. Let them alone. They are blind guides, and if the blind lead the blind, both will fall into a pit." These guys represent the law, the oral tradition. and it had gotten so wrote and so like just pattern specific that they've missed the heart behind it. They can't see the God to worship because they're so caught in all of the different practices and the forms that they don't see the God that they need to worship. And it had become so corrupted in some of the religious schools in Jesus's day that that literally the the few hundred years leading up to Jesus's time, it was a political position to be the high priest. You got in good with whoever, King Herod, Agrippa, all these different people, and you got into those social circles, you even married well. And you usually also paid a bribe. Yes, bribes were paid to be the high priest of the Jewish people. Things had gotten so corrupt because there was power and prestige and holding these kind of titles and interpreting the law and living the law and putting this weight and this burden and this tradition upon the people over and over again. and it had lost something inside of it of what God really meant. People kept the form of godliness, but they denied the real meaning and the power of what it was all to be about. Isaiah 29 speaks about this where it says, well, G, yeah, first thing Jesus literally quotes Isaiah 29. He says, "This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me." You can go through all of the patterns. Read your Bible, go to church, check the boxes and yet not encounter or be living your life for the living God.

The call to love him, to experience his presence in your life. And if it just becomes about religion and checking the boxes, we we fall into the pattern of fatigue because it will fatigue you to do that to see like I got to do this. I got to do this. I got to serve more. I got to I got to be a better Christian. I got to I got to try to be better and always trying to like outward outward conformity to to work your way into holiness. Jesus is going to redefine that. He is going to make people holy who come to him and that is going to transform and create a response within their own heart because the laws are not leading the people to love. They're supposed to point to something deeper. God even reminds us his complaint against the the people is like is found in Hosea for example. says, "I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings." Because in Deuteronomy 30, God I mean, sorry, in Deuteronomy Do I have it here?

Sorry, I don't. I'm going to read it real quick.

in Deuteronomy 6. It's a famous famous verse here, but it just reminds us, God says this. This is his law. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart.

He wants to move us from just the forms and the fatigue and the exhaustion of following the rules to doing something in our heart that makes us love him. You know, you could, you know, not to belabor it, but you know, it's just like a I mean, think about a husband that checked all the boxes, brought his wife flowers, took her on dates, bought her jewelry, did nice things for her, but he loved another woman.

His heart was with somebody else. It would hollow things. none of those things would matter. And so it is here that the people constantly they keep the rules, but they love other gods and they love themselves. And the story of the Old Testament is time and time again about the people fulfilling the laws, doing the outward conformity thing, but their hearts aren't for God. They're living over here. They're worshiping other gods or doing other things. Oh, they go to the temple. You know, Jeremiah talks about this. so much warning the people over and over again. It's like it's not about the rules like look at your heart guys. And the prophets over and over again remind us that it's not about those things. It's about the heart. Without knowledge of God's purpose and of his commands, we can get lost into it. We don't wind up really loving him. You can exhaust yourself in doing God's work and in checking the boxes and not know why you do it.

And so the call for us today is is to remember that he wants us to love him. I've seen I've seen good churches get so caught up in even doctrinal practices. I love doctrine, guys. Love this stuff. I read theology. But I know that sometimes we can get so caught up even in in all of the different doctrines that we just that we begin to miss the heart of what it is to worship God. And I've seen traditions block some of that where we lose our way and we get so focused on doctrines and creeds and fulfillments. They're important, but they cannot replace who God is. They cannot replace who God is in our heart. We don't love them. Through them, we should love the living God.

From Failure to Faithfulness

Finally, we have from failure to faithfulness verses 18- 20. failure to faithfulness. But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart. This defiles a purpose, a a person. For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false wisness, slander. These are what defile a person. But to eat with unwashed hands does not defile anyone. At the end of the day, Jesus says it's not the food that's the problem. It's the heart that is the problem. There is something broken in you that needs to be healed. Jeremiah 17:9 reminds us. Jeremiah says this. He says, "The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately sick, who can understand it?" Paul feels the weight of this in Romans 7 when he talks about the things I want to do, I don't do. And the things I don't want to do, I wind up doing. and he feels this wretchedness in his own heart and he's like, "What's wrong with me? Something is broken in his heart. Something is making him sin and sinful. He is enslaved to this life." And so our heart needs to be healed because if we're trying to do it externally, if we're trying to live up and measure up, if we're thinking that all the food laws or all the Bible reading or all these things are going to going to make us holier people, they're going to finally make us acceptable for God. We're going to exhaust ourselves and you're going to fail. And as good as the law was, it couldn't do it. If the people would have kept the law perfectly, that'd have been fine. But we can't. And the writers of scripture remind us over and over that there's something that needs to be healed and changed in our heart. And we see this through the prophets. Ezekiel 11:19 through20. He repeats this also later in the book. He says, "I will give them one heart and a new spirit I will put within." He's talking about the days are coming. I'm going to do a new work because the heart is deceitful. The heart is flawed. So, I'm not going to put the b the the burden on you to fix it. I'm going to fix you. I'm going to do something in your heart and it's going to change you. And he says here, he says, I will give them one heart and a new spirit I will put within them. I will remove the heart of stone from their flesh. And I will give them a heart of flesh that they may walk in my statutes and keep my rules and obey them. And they shall be my people and I will be their God. If you have come to Christ, you've experienced this.

I once had a heart of stone that I was not interested in the things of God.

And probably many of you, maybe I guess I should say all of you at some point were that too. And yet God came along at some point. And he began to woo you and call you and draw you and create this stirring and this hunger within your life. And when you came to Christ, when you bowed the knee, when you realized whatever I am doing is not working, it's not bringing me satisfaction or joy. My heart, it's not only wicked, it's just breaking. And I'm tired of this. And I love all these things in life. And they fail me because they were idols and they could never fulfill me completely. And so I turned to Christ and something happened in that moment that it was the new heart. I traded the old and Christ comes in and he puts his spirit within us and he puts his heart within us. He removes that heart of stone and he puts the soft heart that loves him. And that's how that comes about in our life. How does that happen though? And it ultimately happens because God did the work for us. See, when you realize that all you do is you come and receive the grace that he is offering to you, the free gift, that you don't climb your way to God, that you don't have to live up and measure up and do better and be good, that he says, "I already paid the price. Your darkest things that you've ever done, you don't have to atone and try to outweigh them with your good works. You'll never do it. I've done it for you. Now receive it. receive the forgiveness, receive the grace that is in me. And like I mean, think about that. We always feel like we need to like kind of contribute. He's like, I did it. Mine was sufficient. And you kind of feel like I I'm this feels too good to be true. I'm getting off the hook. It doesn't even feel right. And it's free. And that feeling of just this this sense of awe and this this sense of like I don't know what to say and to receive that. What does it do? What has it done in your own heart? Think about that. It births a response of gratitude and of love and of joy. I can't I can't believe it. I can't believe it. And in that your heart is reborn. You are made new. That's how God does this great exchange. It it totally melts us and breaks us. And when we begin to understand and respond to that, it just our heart expands. I had this sort of like picture. I don't know if you guys have ever watched the most recent Grinch. It's the cartoon. It came out about 5 years ago. I love it. I don't really like Grinch. It's very It's actually very redemptive, but it shows the the picture, you know, the ultra microscopic heart. And the Grinch at the end begins to like kind of have a repentance moment. And in that moment like it shows that picture like his heart like starts to like just explode and enlarge and he literally like in the cartoon he goes it's like he's like coming to life. So it is when you are reborn in Christ. That's the thing where he puts his heart in you and then you just naturally want to please him. Now we fail but you know what we can know? We can know first John 1:9, if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgiven us and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. And time and time again, you can come to him over and over and receive that and once again be wowed and awed by this incredible gift. Jesus ultimately made this all possible. And how how did he make it possible? Well, the first Adam sinned. And we know through Romans that that sin brought a curse and we were all sort of doomed. We sinned in our own sin, but that sin itself already brought us guilt and it br it enslaved us in a way. It broke something and and as Romans and Paul points out that that through sin, death came, bondage. But through the second Adam, through the obedience of one one true Israelite, life came because of his obedience. and it reversed the impact and the power of the curse. And then he gives that free gift to all who come to him. And we respond with joy. And that if anyone who is in Christ, you have to remember you're a new creation in him. The old is gone. Behold, the new has come. Second Corinthians 5:17. So what do we do with this? How do we continue if we have moved from false forms of worship to true forms of worship? Well, if you're trying harder and somewhere in there you feel cuz we always kind of go back to this when we fail. We feel like it and there's nothing wrong with penance. There's nothing wrong with repentance and there's nothing wrong with like turning from something and running back to God, you know, when when we fail. As long as you remember that doesn't make you more holy or more acceptable. You are acceptable because of what Christ has done and him alone. And so we can look at our works as only a response. That's it. It's a response. And it is sweet and it is good. And it frees us from the trap of trying to measure up. And people exhaust themselves and burn themselves out in Christianity because they're trying to measure up and be holy before a God who has already made them holy. And if that is true, we can live out lives of worship. This passage moves worship from outward forms of ritual to an inward posture of the heart. It moves from something that you have to generate to something that moves your heart and invites you to respond. That's one reason we begin with silence. And that's why we didn't do it this morning, but that's why we add scripture and creeds traditionally through our liturgy is to have these moments where we can hear the voice of God and then we can respond to it. In these, we are given the space to respond to God. Worship is always about us responding to a God who acted first on our behalf. The challenge for us, for all of us, isn't to go and do a better job worshiping God. It's simpler and yet harder than that.

If you are in Christ,

the challenge is to simply stop trying to earn the verdict that you have already been given.

If you're in Christ, he has pronounced over you clean, holy, forgiven, loved, accepted. Maybe even in the deep parts of your heart, you may feel really if he only knew, he knows and he still loves you. Let that sink in. Let it sink in every day. Martin Luther used to remind us. He said to preach the gospel to yourself every day. Preach that to yourself every day. Let that verdict sink in and produce the response of love and joy and worship to God. Let it naturally shape your life to produce the obedience that you've been trying to do on your own. The new heart isn't something you earn or something you build on your own. It's something you receive. Receive it. And then remember our chief aim as it says in the catechism is to live for the glory of God and enjoy him forever. Forever.

Forever. Amen. Let's pray.

How rich the love of God is that we should be called the children of God. And so we are that you have esteemed and put titles on us that we do not deserve. And we are so thankful and overwhelmed by the beauty of that. We praise you today for this wonderful, wonderful truth. And yet I am also reminded that though it means something beautiful for this life which is so important, there is a forever coming.

And so even in the hardship of this life when we feel weighted down by our own sin and brokenness, we can lean back into that new heart and know that one day when the heavens peel back all will be made new and right.

And in your we will enjoy the fullness of God. We will receive new bodies. not bodies that are corrupt but incorruptible in the age to come. Thank you for it Jesus name.