Inside out
Readings: Mark 7. 1-23 & James 1. 17-27
Who is truly good? And if we’re not, how do we sort ourselves out? Get our lives the way they need to be? More than that, how do we get right with God?
Imagine if you will the holiest person you know. I’m not going to define holiness for you, there is a definition of course but for now, in your eyes, imagine the person you know who you’d say is the holiest. Chances are you’re thinking about someone who you see to be good in some way. Perhaps they’re kind or patient in a way like no other. Perhaps they’re very devout in their Christian walk, always eager to pray about things, always in their Bibles. Perhaps there’s something about them which you can’t quite place but there’s this presence about them which makes you feel safe.
All of these things are of course about outward appearances, and whilst I’m sure the person you’re thinking of is a wonderful person, if we’d asked this question of the crowds around Jesus at the start of Mark 7, they’d have pointed at the Pharisees. These were the holiest of God’s people. They were the definition of good people. And yet here Jesus calls them hypocrites. By all outward appearances these are good and holy men, and yet something is wrong. Something has gone rotten.
For some context the Pharisees are a devout group amongst God’s people at this time. They’re so devout that in order not to risk breaking God’s commands they have added in all sorts of extra rules and regulations to keep even the risk of breaking a command out of reach. In many ways this diligence was born out of a love for God, but in all of their legislating they found themselves far from God, and far from the spirit of the commands He had given. As Jesus observes in today’s passage among the rules they’d added was one about being able to dedicate things to God, a good and holy thing surely, but in doing so created a loophole so that you didn’t need to care for your parents, breaking a command. And this isn’t the only place this happens Jesus says. They honour God with their lips, but their hearts have ended up far from God.
They’ve fallen into the understanding that keeping their rules, keeping their traditions and their rules and regulations will enable them to sort out the brokenness in their lives, even make them right with God, which was their ultimate aim.
And here’s the thing. 2000 years later, this is often our approach to discipleship, to being followers of Jesus. We want to be good people, and so our approach is all about outward conformity, doing the right things. Keeping to the rules we’ve either set for ourselves or inherited from those around us. We’ll be careful to turn up at church each week. We’ll volunteer for things that need doing. We’ll give faithfully to the church and other charitable causes. We’ll try to be better people, kinder, gentler. We’ll try to tell less lies, get less cross about stuff, try to love our neighbour more.
But all of this isn’t discipleship, it’s not what it means to follow Jesus. It’s not discipleship, it’s behaviour modification. And the thing about behaviour modification is that it won’t save you, won’t fix you. Behaviour modification is not only not discipleship, but it will destroy our discipleship for two reasons. Firstly because it doesn’t have the power to change our hearts, and secondly because it will drive us away from, rather than towards God.
So firstly it won’t change our hearts. You can look as pious as you like, as holy as you like on the outside, you can do all of the things I listed a few moments ago. Kind, generous, honest, gentle. You can be all of that and more outwardly. But inside you can still be a churning mess of envy, pride, lust and anger. All of that can still be boiling away inside you. And no matter how much we might try to tamp that down, keep it from seeping out, it’s still there. And that’s a problem. It’s a problem because whilst everyone else may think we’re great, we know the truth don’t we, we know our thoughts, even if we don’t express them. ‘I don’t want to have to deal with that person, they’re a nightmare’, ‘I’m doing so much better at being a Christian than the person behind me’, ‘ I wish I was as good a Christian as the person in the corner over there’.
We know the outside doesn’t reflect the inside, and we’ll work really hard to keep it that way. But doesn’t that just eat away at us. Because on the one hand we’re worried we’ll slip up at some point, that it’ll leak out, and on the other it’s heaping guilt and shame upon us because we know we’re not as we present ourselves and we don’t feel great about that.
Which brings me to the second reason behaviour modification will destroy our discipleship; it’ll drive us away from God rather than towards him. Because we know God’s standards, and we know we don’t measure up. And so we need to sort ourselves out before we dare come into God’s presence. And that might be about sorting out the outside and hoping God won’t notice, taping our face into a smile when we come through those doors each week and hoping it doesn’t come unstuck.
Or it might be that we really do try to get to grips with the inside, with the state of our hearts, but it just drives us deeper and deeper into despair every time we mess up again, every time we fall back into that same sin yet again, or find new ways to disappoint God. Which means eventually we’ll either give up on God; we can’t be good enough for him so what’s the point. Or we’ll assume God has given up on us; how could he forgive us yet again. It’s got to be too much water under the bridge now. Either way we’ll be driven away from God, not towards him.
Not only will behaviour modification not fix us, it will destroy our discipleship, destroy our faith. So what are we meant to do? Because that’s all the world offers us isn’t it, that’s all that’s on offer, sorting out our behaviour, fixing the outside. But Jesus offers us something else, something deeper. He offers to cleanse us, to clean us up from the inside out.
The prophet Ezekiel, writing about 500 years before Jesus was born, wrote these words that God was speaking ‘I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your impurities and from all your idols. I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws’.
In Jesus God has come to wash away our mess, to make us clean from the inside out. To take away our hearts that have been hardened by our sin and mess and to give us hearts which feel and move with him. To give us his Spirit to renew our lives, to bring us alive in him to help us to follow him.
And where does all of this start?
It starts at the cross, as we see Jesus, God in the flesh, taking upon his shoulders the weight of all that pours out of our broken, sinful hearts. Taking upon himself all our envy and arrogance and anger and lust and pride. Shouldering the lot and plunging it down into the hell it deserves. Whilst we might want to hide our mess and sin from God, he wants to take it from us, to carry its weight for us, to deal with it for us.
And once we understand that God doesn’t flee from our sin and mess, but rather it causes him to run towards us to bind up our wounds and set us back on our feet, that knowledge will set us free. For whilst we might fear that if people knew our hearts they would think less of us, might not even want to know us anymore. Here is the God who truly knows the deepest secrets of our hearts, better than we do ourselves, and yet still loves us, still comes to save us and set us free.
Tim Keller summarised the Gospel like this; ‘We are more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we ever dared believe, yet at the very same time we are more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ than we ever dared hope’. To come to God we don’t need to sort ourselves out first, to modify our behaviour enough to be accepted. God already loves us, even in our sin. And so he’s come to pay the price for our sin, come to take it from us and deal with it. And He has come to raise us to new life, just as Jesus rose to new and everlasting life 3 days after his death.
He’s come to change us not from the outside in, from the inside out, to wash us clean from our hearts outward. Because the Gospel works from the inside out. We don’t obey to be accepted, we’re accepted and so we obey. A life lived loving God, lived from this truth that we are more sinful than we feared and yet more loved than we ever hoped, that truth will change us. We’ll find ourselves doing as James tells us in his letter this morning, wanting to be doers of the word, not just hearers, we’re to put it into practice, but from a place of assurance, of love poured out back to the God whose love pours down to us, not out of fear of rejection.
Who is truly good? How do we make ourselves good enough for God? Define good.
My brothers and sisters, that’s the scandal of the Gospel, the scandal of the cross. It’s not about what’s on the outside, but about our hearts. No-one is truly good. No-one except the one who chooses to die that we who are not good might have his reward, Jesus Christ. Those who are good on the outside are as deeply flawed and broken on the inside as the rest of us. What’s needed isn’t outward conformity, just behaviour modification, but the cleansing of our hearts and the renewing of our lives which alone comes from Jesus.
It’s great news, the doors to come back to God are flung wide open, come in all who are broken and messy and hurting and know their sinfulness and discover the healing and cleansing power of God. But it’s scandalous because it grates against everything we think about how the world should work. It means it’s not about being good enough, it’s about trusting in Jesus, even in our sin.
Amen.