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by Gary Sims
08/28/03
Not For Sale
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The Gospels
Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23 – CHANGE!
Key Verses:(NRSV)

¹"Now when the Pharisees and some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem gathered around him, ²they noticed that some of his disciples were eating with defiled hands, that is, without washing them.” – The religious leaders had sent investigators to see what Jesus was up to. They immediately began their criticism, pointing out how Jesus, as a rabbi, was not following Jewish law and tradition.
⁵"So the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, ‘Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?’” – This question was designed to illustrate to the gathered crowd that Jesus’ teaching was baseless. If He could not follow procedures that were designed to keep a person clean and holy then how could His message be from God?
⁶“He said to them, ‘Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites…⁸You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.” – Jesus quotes from Isaiah pointing out that worshipping God requires a changed heart, not simply an ability to say the right things.
¹⁴“…Listen to me, all of you, and understand: ¹⁵there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.” - Keeping our bodies clean by restricting what we eat and how we eat it is not the issue. How we demonstrate our changed heart to the world with our words and actions is how true holiness is expressed.
²³“All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.” – This is why it is so important to allow Christ into our hearts, so that we can be transformed by His love.

Points to Contemplate:

Are you a hypocrite? Jesus is teaching that the Pharisees profess to be something (holy) that they truly have no intention of being. Do you profess one kind of standard for living yet live another? Do you ever self-righteously judge the actions and beliefs of others yet fail to put yourself under the same scrutiny? Are you more like the Pharisees and scribes than you would prefer to admit? Do you resist change in order to maintain the status quo? Have you adopted a set of traditions and rituals that help you go through the motions of spirituality and worship yet resist any real transformation that Jesus has to offer?
What barriers do your church’s traditions and rituals create? Are there things you do that were initially designed to worship God but end up keeping people from accessing His transforming love instead? Are these traditions man-made or God-inspired? Do you see the importance of always evaluating your practices of worship to insure that they are effectively bringing people closer to Christ?
Do you resist change? Do you recognize how easy it is to become satisfied with a routine or an established method of worship? Have you ever been involved in creating something new in your church such as a new program or worship element? How did you feel when it became successful? Was there a sense of satisfaction? Did this satisfaction grow into a love for the program to the point that you wanted to insure that it remained firmly entrenched and established? Did you ever find yourself defending this program against changes that came later? Did you cling tightly to this program, resisting any attempt to change it or replace it with something new? Is Jesus teaching us to evaluate these tendencies to insure that self-righteousness does not get in the way of our relationship with Him?
Why is change so important? What is wrong with tradition and a set standard of ritual? Do you recognize that Jesus is in the change business? That our relationship with Him is based on our openness to allow Him into our hearts and change us from within? Do you see that without His constant presence, working and purifying us into His disciples that we can become stagnant? What is the result if we become stagnant, not growing or constantly changing? Is Jesus teaching us in these verses that our stagnancy becomes like a pond that has died, where the air around it reeks with foul smells and odors? If we are not constantly growing do we then produce foul smelling “evil things” from within? Does this mean that we must always seek out new ways and new practices in order to avoid stagnancy and death?

Promises of the Gospel:

All that Jesus teaches and everything He means to us in our relationship with Him and with God concerns the process of change. “Change”, one of the scariest words in our language, is required if we are to continue growing in our love of God. It is not acceptable to reach a plateau and stop. If we stop changing we become stagnant and our fruit produced through our relationship with God, rots. Our tendencies, as illustrated by the Pharisees and scribes, are to resist change in all ways. Instead, we create rituals and procedures that result in vain and useless worship because no one grows and our focus shifts from God to the ritual. The rituals themselves feed our obsessive-compulsive tendencies and because of our fear of change, we cling ever-more tightly to the rituals we have established. Jesus is teaching us that we need to remain open to encountering the Spirit of the Living God every day in our life. When we allow Him into our heart in new and wonderful ways then our transformation into “Christ-likeness” will continue along the path that God chooses and what comes out, as a result, will be beautiful tasting fruit of the Spirit.

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