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Jan 30, 2022

Hygiene of the Heart

Hygiene of the Heart

Passage: Mark 7:1-23

Speaker: Patrick Lafferty

Series: Follow: Learning from Mark about Jesus’ Most Misunderstood Command

Keywords: holiness, heart, hands, clean, tradition, defilement

For two years now we’ve paid vigilant attention to our bodily hygiene. If there is a comparable kind of attention to our inner wholeness, what does it require? What purifies? Some approaches, valiant as they may be, fail. What approach holds promise? Following means many things we’ve learned so far. It also includes being renewed.

 Please note: We have recently experienced interruptions in our internet service affecting our livestream service. We will aim to have a recording of the worship service available by 5pm. Thank you for your patience and understanding.

Readings & Scripture

PREPARATION: Proverbs 20:6-9
LEADER: Many a man proclaims his own steadfast love,
but a faithful man who can find?
The righteous who walks in his integrity—
blessed are his children after him!
A king who sits on the throne of judgment
winnows all evil with his eyes.

ALL: Who can say, “I have made my heart pure;
I am clean from my sin”?

OLD TESTAMENT READING: Proverbs 4:20-27
Prov. 4:20 My son, be attentive to my words;
incline your ear to my sayings.
21 Let them not escape from your sight;
keep them within your heart.
22 For they are life to those who find them,
and healing to all their flesh.
23 Keep your heart with all vigilance,
for from it flow the springs of life.
24 Put away from you crooked speech,
and put devious talk far from you.
25 Let your eyes look directly forward,
and your gaze be straight before you.
26 Ponder the path of your feet;
then all your ways will be sure.
27 Do not swerve to the right or to the left;
turn your foot away from evil.

CENTRAL TEXT: Mark 7:1-23
1 Now when the Pharisees gathered to him, with some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem, 2 they saw that some of his disciples ate with hands that were defiled, that is, unwashed. 3 (For the Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they wash their hands properly, holding to the tradition of the elders, 4 and when they come from the marketplace, they do not eat unless they wash. And there are many other traditions that they observe, such as the washing of cups and pots and copper vessels and dining couches.) 5 And the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, “Why do your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?” 6 And he said to them, “Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written,“‘This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; 7 in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.’ 8 You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men.” 9 And he said to them, “You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition! 10 For Moses said, ‘Honor your father and your mother’; and, ‘Whoever reviles father or mother must surely die.’ 11 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)— 12 then you no longer permit him to do anything for his father or mother, 13 thus making void the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down. And many such things you do.” 14 And he called the people to him again and said to them, “Hear me, all of you, and understand: 15 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.” 17 And when he had entered the house and left the people, his disciples asked him about the parable. 18 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, 19 since it enters not his heart but his stomach, and is expelled?” (Thus he declared all foods clean.)

20 And he said, “What comes out of a person is what defiles him. 21 For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, 22 coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. 23 All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.”

BENEDICTION: Hebrews 10:19-23
LEADER: Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh, and since we have a great priest over the house of God,
ALL: let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful.

RELATED SCRIPTURES:

  • Exodus 30:19, 40:13
  • Leviticus 15
  • Proverbs 4:20-27
  • Proverbs 28:24
  • Jeremiah 17:9
  • Leviticus 19:2 / Matthew 5:48
  • Luke 6:45
  • Acts 10*
  • Acts 20:28
  • 1 Corinthians 15:1-4
  • 1 Timothy 4:16
  • 1 Timothy 5:4

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS:

  1. Talk about your own versions of personal hygiene. What are your best practices to stay pure and avoid infection? (whether during COVID or before). Now talk about what “measures” you take to remain in undiminished fellowship with God–both pre-emptively and in the event of something you regret. Why those?
  2. What were the Pharisees/Scribes espousing, and thus complaining about in the practice of Jesus’s disciples? Before you run to Jesus’s critique, what could be helpful or admirable about a devotion to an external practice as a way of making a truth settle inwardly? What patterns have you adopted that help move a truth inward?
  3. What was Jesus’s critique of their complaint? (There’s more than one thread of argument he makes.) How could any part of his critique be applied to us? That is, as foreign as those practices are to us, how might Jesus’s anguish over the disconnect between their words and true worship have relevance to us? Or the way some received “wisdom” we’ve embraced ends up being contrary to more crucial truth?
  4. From what you hear Jesus say emphatically in verse 15, what point is he making? But also, what assumption in the Pharisees is he challenging? 
  5. Jesus rattles off quite a list of movements of the heart that defile us (vv.21,22). Besides that commonality, what else would you say they all share? 
  6. His list includes some things that are seen in us. Others are hidden but present in our heart. Why would the latter still defile? How does that get us to a clearer sense of what Jesus (and Scripture) means by defilement? Why is it more than just “dirty,” or “immoral”? 
  7. The passage ends with Jesus identifying what really defiles, but without suggesting a remedy. How is he the remedy? (Sit quietly with that question and venture several possible answers.) How does one apply his remedy? (Again, sit quietly with that question, too. Resist pat answers. How would you offer guidance and encouragement to someone struggling with their inner defilement?) 
  8. How would believing–really believing–that God’s love in Christ is steadfast help you both to hear his honest appraisal of your heart, and also his call to repent of disordered loves?

Illustrations

InView Media: 1.30.22 Album

QUOTES:

  • Good things as well as bad, you know, are caught by a kind of infection. C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
  • No law can be sacred to me but that of my own nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferrable to that or this: the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it. Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried. G.K. Chesterton
  • The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart… Alexander Solzhenitsyn
  • We're not curable,
    but we're treatable.
    And that's why I still sing.
    May God love you like you've never been loved.
    - “May God Love you,” Over the Rhine
  • Grace does not call on the old self … to somehow traverse a new way. It announces him who is the Way. Gerharde Forde

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