9/3/23 Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23 “What Is Your View on Sin?”

01 Sep 9/3/23 Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23 “What Is Your View on Sin?”

9/3/23    Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23        “What Is Your View on Sin?”

We are at least a year away from our national elections and that is all we hear about in the news.  That and how they have caught this person or that person with their hands in the cookie jar.  Just about everything we hear is empty rhetoric.  Now before you get all upset with me, here is what I mean.  Number one is that no one has a plan for anything.  I have not heard one thing in the last several years as to what plan anyone has to help out the people of this country.  All I hear is how are we going to help these politicians win.  As far as I can see, there is no winning in this attitude. The second thing that I notice is that the people running for offices mostly have the mentality of little children.  The main thing we hear out of their mouths is how nothing is ever their fault.  It is always the fault of the opponent.  You can plug in your political party and the answer will be the same.  No one in Washington takes any responsibility for their actions.  Nobody!  So, you may ask yourself, “What difference does this make?  Things have always been like this.”  You may be right about that but I think that this type of behavior leads to leaders not being accountable, being corrupt and we do have a very corrupt city on the east coast.  In other words, our leaders, who we should hold to a higher standard, might be our biggest sinners.  Today, we are going to take a no holds barred look at sin.  We will do this from a Biblical standpoint because the world view means nothing as we found out last week.

I am borrowing this idea from Ken Pall.  This is a rural area and even though you may not be a farmer, just by living here we get to know something about what is needed to make the crops better and what are the enemies of a good crop.  First of all, water can be the enemy of a crop if we get too much of it or too little of it.  We have seen yields be down in certain years because of too much water.  Another enemy of good crops is insects.  I don’t know much about modern methods of insect control but I do see planes and ground sprayers out trying to get rid of bugs that destroy crops.  Another enemy of our crops is weeds.  These are those pesky plants that aren’t supposed to be in our fields.  They take all the water and nutrients away from the planted crops.  If something can be done about any of these enemies of the crop, it should be done or there will be no crop.  The same thing is true for us humans.  Our enemy is sin.  It is Satan.  If you don’t do something about your enemy, your lives will be miserable.  If your life is miserable, try getting rid of Satan!  If you don’t do something about sin, your eternity will be beyond misery.

We begin our reading today with some Pharisees watching Jesus and the disciples as they are beginning to eat their meal.  The Pharisees very quickly point out that the disciples are unclean because they have not washed their hands.  This was a ceremonial washing and not a real cleansing of the hands where they actually try to take the dirt off.  It is like just dipping their hands in special water.  I liken parts of this reading to where Jesus tells us that we cannot see the speck of dirt in someone else’s eye because we have a plank in our own eye.

This is the place where our political parties have stooped.  They are never wrong.  Everyone else is always wrong.  They demonstrate that we are to always blame someone else!    This is what we have been teaching our children, generally speaking.  We have raised at least one generation where no one has to be wrong and no one has to lose.  This is what pop psychology tells us.  This has led to many of the absolutely wacko behaviors we see in today’s world.  But the Bible tells us something totally different.  The Bible tells us that there is a right and a wrong.  It is your choice to decide which road you want to travel as you go through life.

So really the first thing that we have to recognize in today’s world is the world’s faulty view of sin.  Jesus had to contend with the Pharisees and their centuries old traditions.  This was where they kept the Law to the point where the Law had become their religion.  It was their God.  We can see this very plainly in today’s reading.  These guys were upset because the disciples didn’t wash their hands.

We have people watching and commenting on us today.  There is hardly a day that doesn’t go by that there isn’t some form of Jesus bashing on one of the social platforms or news networks.  It seems to me that everyone accepts this.  It really upsets me because there are people out there who are so lost that they write and believe this anti-Christian garbage.  The trick to all this is to recognize this type of wrongful thinking when we see it.

But I don’t think that is even the biggest problem we have today.  The biggest problem we have in this area is that we don’t do anything about it when we recognize sin in our society.  We have been brainwashed into believing that this is the right of everyone and to go against these minority opinions is to hate them.  Our sin is that we believe this.  Now listen for a minute.  I believe that all people have rights.  I don’t care who you are, you have certain rights.  I also believe that people can make up their own minds about things.  It is fine with me if you want to believe in little men from outer space.  I believe that you have the right to tell me about these little men.  So far, I think that everything is tracking pretty well.  So here is my question.  Why can’t I tell you about one great man when you can tell me about all these little green men?  Why can’t I tell you about Jesus Christ and all that He has done for you and all that He will do for you in the future?  It is your job to be able to discern the truth and then tell people about it.

So, the world has a faulty view of sin.  This is not ok.  People will not spend eternity with God because of their sin.  That is a fact, Jack!  Our Bibles are very explicit about this.  Jesus had to deal with the Law and we have to deal with people who hate us.  In my dealings with people like this, I have found that it is best just to state the correction.  If something is a sin, then call it a sin and let it drop.  The lost ones will try to argue with you but you don’t have to do this.  Just state the facts, mam, as Jack Webb used to say on Dragnet.  Then move on.  These people are lost and want to be lost.  There are plenty of others who are willing to listen.

So first we recognize that the world doesn’t understand sin or has a faulty view of sin.  Then we have to try to put Jesus in a way that people will understand.  At this point in our story Jesus is dealing with educated people, the Pharisees.  In order that they may understand what He is telling them, He refers them to Scripture, their Scripture.  This is a foreign thought in our modern world.  Heaven forbid should anyone rely on Scripture for their life.  They would even try to tell me this when I went to seminary.  Anyway, Jesus uses the Pharisee’s own books as a guideline to help them understand.  In other situations, He may use a parable to help the people understand.  He also uses healings and miracles to help people understand the message.  Jesus uses whatever it takes to help people to have a relationship with Him.

This is an area in our modern world that really needs some work.  How many times have you seen someone get in someone else’s face in order to make a point?  To see this, just turn on your TV.  The point is made but it is at the expense of losing the battle.  People don’t listen to you if you are telling them how totally wrong they are for believing as they do.  They will only give you, at most, a little lip service if you show them just how superior your ideas are to theirs.  This is one of the reasons that everyone is so sick of politics.  If everyone is as dim as the other side tells us, then what in the world are we doing voting for any of the candidates?  The way to win people is to talk in their language.  When people are against Jesus, then we need to gently show them by our actions and our gentle words just how wonderful Jesus really is.  All we have to do is plant a seed.

Then we finally come to the crux of this whole conversation.  The problem of the listeners was a problem of the spiritual realm and not the physical realm.  But the Judaism of this time would have none of this.  They thought if you didn’t wash before you ate, even if it is only ceremonial, then you were unclean.  Then you were subject to many more rules and regulations of the religion in order to get back and be clean again.  It is very hard for me to understand how they could reduce their religion to these rules and regulations, like merely washing your hands.  There was a rule for just about all situations.  The rules had mushroomed into several volumes of books.  At least we have out grown this.  Or have we?

I don’t know how many funerals, weddings and other services I have been to where only a select group of people can take communion because I am not good enough to take it in their church.  This sounds like a pretty strict rule to me.  Or how about baptism?  There are many churches that will not accept our baptisms because we aren’t good enough for their denomination.  If you stop and think about it, we are very good at excluding people from our churches and making them feel inferior and not good enough.  This is not what Jesus wants from us.  There should not be a person in the world who would not be welcome here!

Now, none of these things really matter in the big scope of things because, now listen to this, because it is what is on the inside that makes us clean or unclean.  Jesus is saying that you can wash your hands until the cows come home and it will not make you clean.  What makes you clean is what is already in your heart.  He is telling the Pharisees that they worship God in vain.  They have let go of the commands of God and are holding onto the traditions of man.  He is telling all the pastors and priests of the time that they are full of baloney!!  Quit teaching all of these people the wrong way and come back to the ways of God.  People, this is not very hard stuff.  All we have to do is believe in Jesus and God will take care of the rest.

This is why I always say that if you don’t know Jesus, then confess your sins to Him and ask Him to live in your heart.  First of all, you will be cleansed in a way that you have never been cleansed before after you confess.  Then you have to ask Jesus to come into your life because He won’t come unless He is asked.  Then He lives in your heart.  As long as He is there, then you never have to worry about being what the ancients called ‘unclean.’  You will always be clean with Jesus inside of you or you are able to be clean.

Hopefully, we are all sitting here clean today.  If we are then good things will come out of us because Jesus is always good.  But we do make mistakes.  Sometimes I just say or do the wrong thing.  You see, I’m just like you and I make mistakes.  As a matter of fact, I make a lot of mistakes.  When we do make these mistakes, then we can come back to Jesus and ask for forgiveness again.  We can do this again and again and again.  This is part of the beauty of the plan Jesus has for us.

It is the people who don’t know Jesus who have all the darkness or uncleanliness in their hearts.  They are the ones who give us the nightmares.  They keep tempting us with ways that are not from God.  They want us to do what society tells us.  Any of us can lapse in these areas but we have a way out where many people have no way out.

Now some of the sins of the heart that tempt us are named by Jesus.  Let me just refresh you a bit.  What can make us unclean or sinful are evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, slander, arrogance and folly.  I would like to go back to where we talked about excluding people and making them feel inferior.  Anyone can be attacked by any of these things and there are many, many more.

However, we are very quick to condemn those with evil thoughts.  We condemn people with sexual immorality problems.  Jesus is referring to all immorality problems and not just the homosexual problem where we like to exclude them from everything.  Thieves, murderers and adulterers are not welcome in most churches.  People, these are the people who we are trying to help.  These people need Jesus more than they need food or water.  These people are in desperate situations or they would not have gotten themselves into so much trouble.   What makes this tragic is that we cannot see the greed, malice, deceit, slander, arrogance and folly in our own lives.  If you are greedy or arrogant, you are just as unclean or sinful as a thief or murderer.  The trouble comes in because our world tells us that all these things are ok.  It is not even such a big deal to murder someone any more.

Jesus wants us to wake up.  Wake up!!  All these sins are bad.  Period!  We think many of them are ok because the people around us tell us they are ok.  We follow them and then we are unclean.  We are not following Jesus.  Jesus has set up these things that we are not to do so that we can have a better life.  That is the bottom line.  We don’t have a bunch of rules and regulations to follow.  We do the things that Jesus tells us so that we can be honoring and praising God at all times.  In return He will give us a better life.

(The next time you take Holy Communion) In a moment we will be taking communion.  I would like you to think of something that is not working well in your life.  Then take it to Jesus for some help.  If you are not sure of what to do, then take that to Jesus.  If nothing else, just lay your life open for Jesus to do with what He knows best.  The bottom line in all this is that Jesus loves you.  He loves you so much that He made this entire world for you.  And thank you, Jesus, for first loving us.  Let’s pray.