And he, Jesus, 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. 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? 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, evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within, and they to file a person. A little over 100 years ago, a British newspaper asked a bunch of famous authors to write essays answering the question, what is wrong with the world? One of them is so good, I'm going to read it to you in its entirety. You say, uh-oh. Then you're going to preach a sermon on it? Yes, I'm going to read the essay first, and then I'm going to preach a sermon. You say, I better take myself to a happy place. I won't be here a while. No, no, no. Listen, listen. Here is the essay. Dear sir, I am. Yours, G.K. Chesterton. What is wrong with the world, dear sir? I am. Now that's a little jarring, and because he only used three letters, I-A-M, he does leave some room for interpretation. So I begin by asking, was he insane? Was he a megalomaniac? Why is there cancer? Me. Why is there war? Me. Well, the reason the newspaper asked him for his essay is because they knew his work, and while he loves exaggeration and he loves paradox, he was a very sensible writer, actually. Once you got through all the verbal fireworks, of which he was very good at them, what he said was generally very commonsensical down there stuff. So when he says, I am what's wrong with the world, he's not a megalomaniac. He's not claiming to be the one that causes tumor cells to grow. So what does he mean? Well, if we take him as an intelligent person, which he certainly was, he means that he is what's wrong with the world, and she is what's wrong with the world, and you are what's wrong with the world, and I am what's wrong with the world. He means that human beings are what's wrong with the world, and by saying, I am, he's insisting that we not say, yeah, people are what's wrong with the world. Those people. Because, how can you say that? You are a human being. And you don't get to talk about human beings while somehow sizing yourself off as if you are separate from the madding crowd, and yourself are fine. If you want to say human beings are the problem, then you're saying that you are part of the problem. Which raises two questions. One, is he right? And two, if he is right, what are we supposed to do about it? So is he right? I mean, a lot of people would say, no, no, no, people are pretty good. We just watched The Wizard of Oz the other day. And sure enough, okay, toe-no-gone, and pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. Of course, they pay attention. There they are, talking to The Wizard of Oz, who's a big fraud. And Dorothy says, you're a very bad man. He says, no, no, no, no. I'm a good man. I'm just a bad wizard. And that encapsulates what you'll get in all kinds of things, all right? You could be watching, I forget which TV show it was, Friends or something, all right? You're like, oh, so bad. Oh, no, you're good. You just did some bad things. It's a constant drumbeat to assure us that we're not bad. that the problem is our circumstances. When people do bad things, it's because they had bad things done to them. People do bad things, it's because they were taught wrong. People do bad things, you know, that was their examples that they had in life. They're just imitating their fathers and mothers. Here's the thing. Circumstances are certainly very powerful. And they're often very adverse. Furthermore, people do some nice things. I've run through emails, about four years, and we've had those nice cushions on those chairs. Makes it more comfortable, very nice, very nice. But you can conceive that people do many nice things and conceive that circumstances make a lot of things worse without covering the whole problem yet. And what evidence for this comes in the history of people who've said, People are pretty good, but the trouble is circumstances. So what we're going to do is we're going to go buy 1,000 acres of land and go off with just the best people, the right people, and we're going to start society again and show people how it's done. People have done this a lot, particularly in America, because we're such optimists. So all through the 19th century, you have history of all these different movements. Some are more religious. Some are more secular. There's all these different movements of people going off to start their own Utopian, that's the word for we're going to do it perfectly this time, the utopian experiments. And then in the 1960s, of course, people are doing it again. You have an extensive history that you can study of people who go off on the side and say, now with just the good people around, we're going to do it right. In fact, when you drive up to White Lake, you pass a couple of historical markers for a guy named Horace Greeley. He ran newspapers, and he had one of the more famous one of these things. You pass historical markers for it as you go to campus. Now, you know what the history of these communes shows you? They always blow up. They always fail. Some of the religious ones last a little bit longer. Shakers lasted long enough to give us some nice furniture. But they always blow up, and sometimes they blow up in the most horrible way. Sometimes people end up actually drinking Kool-Aid to kill themselves, because that's where that expression comes from. Don't drink the Kool-Aid. Because one of these kinds of communities, Jonestown, went down to South America and killed all of them. Even the ones that don't go so spectacularly bad as that, they just always fail. You will notice we have not yet redone our country to imitate the example of any of these communes, have we? Why? Because none of them even really penetrated the thoughts of normal people, because they didn't last long enough. They weren't successful enough to penetrate our consciousness, must have been cool. Now someone would say, well, the problem is you only had 1,000 acres. You're going to take over the whole country and make the whole country work better. Well, that's called the communist movement. And they discovered they have to kill all kinds of people. And an amazing thing is when you kill all kinds of people, the country doesn't get better. So if you look at the history of communes, it does not confirm the basic goodness of people. It just doesn't. You can go off and do your own historical research if you want. I can give you names, you know, Fourier, you know, different guys who tried this. Instead, it would seem to come closer to confirming Mr. Chesterton. What's wrong with the world? Hiya. But then you might say, okay, well, people are the problem, and that's because people are defiled. And that's kind of like a little trick where you see for a second that the people are the problem, but then you go looking for the poison that people take in. And the interesting thing is, there's a part of the Bible that might make you think that's the right approach. In the Bible, the book called Leviticus, and there's a whole bunch of chapters where God said to his people Israel, through Moses, all right, listen up, these are the animals that will be unclean to you. Now, the to you is interesting. He didn't say unclean, full stop. He said unclean to you. But then he runs through the animals that his people Israel may eat, and the animals that they may not eat. He did it with a little rule about chewing the cud and dividing the hoof in case they find any new ones. They will know how to categorize it. And then he runs through the birds. All the birds that you may eat, all the birds you may not eat. And he runs through the fish. All the fishes you may eat, all the fish you may not eat. And then he goes on and talks about if you're sick, or if you're oozing, or if you're a leper, or if you're having your period, or you just gave birth. And he runs through all these different things and says, if this is happening, you're unclean, and this is what you have to do about it. And if it's not happening, well, then you're clean. So that might seem to suggest that uncleanness is something you contract, like a disease, and that in most cases can be solved, like a disease, but not always, like leprosy. Just like some diseases are not solved, like leprosy. So it might suggest that the problem is being defiled from the outside. The trouble, though, is if you read your Bible again, you'll notice there's other stuff before and after Leviticus. Genesis begins in a wonderful Utopian kind of way. It's a paradise and The man and the woman are their name in the animals and they're naked and they're not ashamed. This is this is great And what happens is when they listen to a different voice? They don't listen to God's voice a little bit different voice they break the relationship with God and then everything bad follows And, you know, if you want to talk about utopian experiments, if I may be permitted to use this kind of language, God, at the beginning of time, did the biggest one of all time to show us that it won't work. There's no more thoroughgoing way of getting rid of all the bad people than drowning all of them. And I'm referring to the Flood. In the Flood, God says, wickedness of man is so great, I want to flood everybody but the best guy in his family. You cannot do a more thorough utopian job than that. And the reason, he says, is before he sends the blood, he says, the heart of man is only evil continually, so I'm going to flood. And then he floods the earth, and then he brings away the water, and Noah comes out of the ark, and before Noah and his children do anything, God says, you know, I'm not going to do that again, because the heart of man is only evil from his youth. Yeah, well, wait a minute. So why deflood everybody? Well, he's got other reasons. He shows that evil is evil and that he will judge it. He makes his wrath against evil clear in the flood. And he also makes it clear that when you get just the best couple of people, down to eight, you will have evil reemerge because of the trouble of the human heart. So you were told that first. I'm not going to do that again, because this has not actually solved the problem. It's just made a demonstration of my wrath against sin. So you go through the Old Testament. Solomon says, you know, Lord, please listen when people sacrifice in this temple, because there's no one who does not sin. Ecclesiastes says, surely there is no one who does what is right and does not sin. Jeremiah says, the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately sick. Who can understand it? And David says, The fool says in his heart, there's no God. God looks down to see if anyone's doing good. There's no one who does any good. So actually, as you go through the Old Testament, it's got that part that might make it look like the problem is being defiled from the outside. But if you read it more thoroughly, actually, it's where Chesedin got his stuff from. Chesedin was not being original, other than how he phrased it and what kind of setting he set it in. But really, he's just echoing what you already have in Genesis. Now, what's going on in our passage? In our passage, this is a follow-on on the previous couple of paragraphs, the Pharisees had come to check Jesus out, some maybe heavier hitters had come up from Jerusalem to check out this new teacher, and they saw that some of his disciples were eating before they washed their hands. Contrary to the tradition of the elders about how to make sure that you are clean, as God says in Leviticus. And so they politely take him aside, and they begin to upbraid him, saying, why aren't your disciples keeping the tradition of the elders? And so, in the previous section, he deals with the tradition of the elders' questions. He says, well, that's not the authority. God's Word is the authority. And by the way, you're not doing a very good job of keeping God's Word because you're so distracted with the traditions. I don't want to hear about the traditions. Let's talk about God's Word. In other words, he deals with how do you know and the authority of things. But they might have said, yeah, but what about their hands? And so here, he turns from the how do you know question to the basic reality of the thing. Only he brings the whole crowd back. And with all the crowd and the Pharisees and the disciples there, he says, everybody listen up. There is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile him. But the things that come out of a person are what defile him. As we talked about in Sunday school, that is somewhat enigmatic because the whole cleanness code covers both things that go in, like food, and things that come out, like various discharges and so on. But he's using a parable because it's the crowd. And ever since Mark chapter 4, once opposition to him began to rise, he would always speak to the crowd in a parable, and then explain everything privately to his disciples. It's sad, really. It's an act of judgment on the people that comes about because of their opposition to God's Word. So his disciples know the drill, and they wait until they're in the house, and then they say, Jesus, what was that? And Jesus insists on certain biological realities. Certain facts of human anatomy are what Jesus then insists on. He says, why don't we think like scientists? When you eat things, it goes into your stomach. Your stomach does whatever it does with it, and then what's left goes into the toilet. And that's what he says. It goes out into the latrine, he says. He's not so delicate as to say expelled. He's more explicit. It goes into the toilet. So how can it defile you? You have a system for that, and it goes right on through. He's dealing with biological realities there. Your body handles stuff that you eat that isn't good for you, so you're good. Then he insisted on spiritual realities. He says, out of your heart. And now he's not speaking of the heart as a muscle. He's not speaking of the heart even as something that just feels. He's talking about the heart as the way the Bible talks about the heart. Everything inside of you that thinks and feels and wills and plans and intends, your conscience, all that interior thinking stuff that you might be able to conceal with a straight face or a mask, all that stuff going on in there, that's the heart. He says, out of the heart of man come evil thoughts and immorality and theft and murder. And all these evil things come from within And they defile the person. In other words, he says, defilement is not a matter of outside substances. It's a matter of interior sins. It's not about stuff. It's about morality. And it's not something that comes at you from outside. All the people's sins certainly come at you from outside, but what defiles you isn't their sin bouncing, well, hitting you. What defiles you is your sin coming out of you. Now this should produce two huge questions. One, an intellectual question, which I'll deal with first and get it out of the way. And then two, a personal, spiritual, existential question, that I'll leave second, as being more crucial. First one, though, has got a good point to it. If nothing outside of a person, by going into him, can defile him, then why did God tell Moses to tell the people of Israel not to eat pork? They've been doing this for 1,400 years because God said so. They may have added a whole bunch of rules to it, but God started it. He gave them the rules. We still have it. It's back here. Why, if what you eat cannot defile you? I want to observe that although we have the parentheses, thus he declared all foods clean. Nonetheless, the apostles did not react to this by going out for a bacon cheeseburger. They don't go for bacon cheeseburgers for maybe another 10 years. We don't know how many years, but it was a while. And the reason is, and we can tell you when through the Bible, not until Acts chapter 10, which is some years later. Because first, Jesus has to complete His teaching career. He has to suffer under Pontius Pilate. He has to be crucified dead and buried. He has to rise from the dead and ascend to heaven. He needs to sit down at God's right hand, and He needs to pour out the Holy Spirit on the Church. And the Church, empowered by the Spirit, needs to preach the Gospel in Jerusalem, and in Judea, and in Samaria, And then when they're ready to go and preach the gospel to the whole world, that's when it's time to stop keeping the kosher laws. That's how it works out. Food laws are a barrier to friendship. We lived across the street, quite a friendly Orthodox Jewish guy some years ago. Very friendly on the street, but I mean, I was never in his house, and he was never in mine. There's a barrier there that he's not going to eat, probably, pretty much anything I give him beyond water. Food laws are a barrier to friendship, which means a barrier to marriage, which means a way of keeping identity separate. But when Jesus gave the Great Commission to the Church, go and make disciples of all nations, And when He gives the Holy Spirit to the Church, so that we are empowered, we are now able to be in the world and not of the world. The Kingdom of God switches from defense to offense. From putting the walls up, to going out to the whole world. That happens in the Book of Acts. And in particular, in Acts chapter 10. So that's what goes on there. Why the food laws? Well, they were first there to keep Israel separate So salvation was ready to be sent out. And secondly, the food laws were there to teach Israel something that we also need to learn. And that is to constantly be evaluating, is this good or evil? Without the food laws, you simply ask one question of food. Does it look good? Is it a delight to my eyes? Yes. Well, I'm going to eat it. And without having the food laws, my family makes fun of me. Well, how about chocolate? I guess I ate it. I'm not sure. Just goes down the hatch. But just as they were to evaluate every bit of food, can I eat this? That was to teach them to evaluate every word. Should I say this? Might delight me to say it, but would God have me say this? Should I do that? Might delight me to do this, but would God have me do this? And that spiritual lesson we do need to know. We're not bound to the food laws as a teaching device to get us there. But the point is still there. Before we speak, we're to consider what we say. Before we act, we're to consider what we act. Not just say, is this a delight to my eyes, but what has God said? That's to be the primary question. So, why were there food laws? There's two reasons. To teach the spiritual lesson, evaluate what you do before you do it. And, to keep Israel separate until the Messiah had come, and salvation was ready to be sent out to the world, as God had told Abraham. from the beginning. So, you can rejoice. You can't eat bacon cheeseburgers. Or, you can abstain. Whatever you like. We are freed from that guardian of the food laws, as it says in Galatians 3. Now, the intellectual question, why the food laws, and then why turn them on and turn them off, that was the good news. It's time to get to the spiritual existential question, where this is actually bad news. Now we're back to the what's wrong with the world. Ayah. Because Jesus is teaching here, while He removes uncleanness from food, He then re-situates it inside our hearts. Takes it from the outside to the inside. Takes it from the some people to the all people. Takes it from, you can manage this problem, to actually, you cannot manage or solve this problem. He's just out of the heart. What's he talking about? Evil thoughts. Oh, we're all guilty. He got us all on the first item on his list. So he makes it harder here. And he gives us a long list both to teach us about evil and to make it clear that he catches everybody. If you look at the middle of that list, you see a whole bunch from the Ten Commandments. Immorality, Seventh Commandment. Theft, Eighth Commandment. Murder, Sixth Commandment. Adultery. Seventh Commandment. Coveting. Tenth Commandment. Wickedness. I guess that's everything. Deceit. Ninth Commandment. Sensuality. Seventh Commandment. Envy. Tenth Commandment. Slander. Ninth Commandment. It's not a fun list. And I dare say we usually rush over lists. It's kind of the point of a list, right? You want to cross the items off. I did my job. You want to check them off. I got all the things on my list. I don't usually spend a lot of time on a list. But these are worth spending a little time on to say, what's it mean? What's it look like? Where do I need to repent? And then we get a few that are a little harder to understand what you're doing there. The list ends with foolishness. Now, why is foolishness a defiling sin? Why is it a sin to act without thinking? Well, who gave you a brain? God gave you a brain to make you different from a pig. He gave you a brain and He made you in His image, and God thinks and plans before He acts. And so you abuse the gift within you when you act like an animal. You fail to live up to the gift of humanity, the gift of the image of God, when you simply act without thinking, when you act foolishly. You're supposed to act like In a certain sense, act like God, act in the image of God. And then he has pride on there. You might say, now why is pride a sin? I was always taught by my mother to take pride in my work. Well, we can see the Apostle Paul saying, I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. It's good to do a job well and to be able to say, I have done my job to the best of my ability. Paul also says, I have always tried to live with a good conscience before God. Now that's a high bar, I've always tried to. But, evidently a good thing to be able to say, if you can say it honestly. The pride that we're speaking of here is the pride that denies any need for God. Or any need for God's mercy. Or any need for God's Son. I don't need that because I got it. I'm good. That's the pride that we're talking about here. The pride that separates us from God is a deadly pride because God is the source of life. So it's a long list worthy of thought, but as I said, on one level you only need the first item, evil thoughts. Because all of us obviously are guilty of evil thoughts. guilty and evil thoughts every day. So, instantly we see, from the get-go, and he's talking about us, and he's saying that we are defiled fountains. That we're fountains that spew forth, and at least some of what we spew forth is defiled. Because it arises from our evil thoughts. And the thoughts, if they're evil, they're defiled. In other words, Jesus says G.K. Chesedim was right. What's wrong with the world? Jesus doesn't have to say, I am. But he agrees that we are. So since defilement is now a worse problem, or it's understood and seen to be a more serious problem than the Pharisees had thought, what are you supposed to do about it? Well, in regard to people, this is a great call to humility. We love to put ourselves above others. I certainly find that in myself. We love to say, I'm better than you. Or at least, I didn't do that. To put ourselves above, and to put separation in there, and to draw apart, because I'm better than you. On certain levels, some are a little better, or a little worse, but Jesus here calls us all to be defiled. So it really doesn't make a lot of sense for one fountain spewing out salt water to put itself above another fountain spewing out salt water. It's a great call to humility. But that doesn't solve the problem. What is the solution to the problem? Well, way back at the beginning of the gospel, a leper came to Jesus. That is, somebody with a skin disease all over, Someone who, by that law of Moses, had to stay away. He didn't stay away. He came up pretty close to Jesus. And he knelt before him and he said, if you are willing, you can make me clean. And Jesus touched him. Ah! Don't do that. But Jesus touched him and said, I'm willing. Be clean. And the man was clean. And so, all through the Gospel, from the beginning, we're to look at Jesus and say, Here is the One who makes clean. First, the Gospel didn't explain how and why it's needed. Here we see that it's universally needed. That we're all lepers. And we're beginning to see how it is that He can make us clean. It's related. So what I said earlier, that he had some work left to do before they could get to the cheeseburgers. That he had to suffer and die to be the sacrifice for our sins. All the sacrifices that have been offered, the thousands of animals pointing to him. Not something worth less than us to redeem us, but something worth more than us to redeem us. And having paid for the sins of all his people, Then He ascended to heaven, having conquered death, to pour out the Spirits. And when He poured out the Holy Spirit on you, you know what the Holy Spirit does? It makes you holy. That's why it's good to remember the Holy Spirit's full name. And so new life is possible. Being clean is possible. But you can't do it on your own. You can't do it with an unchanged heart. Because the heart is the problem. And the heart needs that external change. You need to come to Jesus and say, You are willing to make me clean. Because when you say that to Jesus, He says, I am willing. Be clean. He says, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone opens, I will come in to him and eat with him and make my home with him." Because this is the gospel. That we are much worse than we want to think. But we can face it. Because in Jesus, we are more loved and forgiven and accepted than we dare imagine. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, help us not to look for small solutions for big problems. Help us not to pretend that big problems are small problems. But help us to come to You. Come to You for a big solution to our big problem. A heart that is defiled. Thank You that Jesus can make us clean. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.