Clean Your Heart
He continued, “What comes out of a man, that is what makes a man unclean. (Mark 7:20)
The Jews believed that God had given Moses some extra laws and explanations to laws, that Moses had not written down. Instead, he passed these down orally from Moses to Joshua through the generations, until they were finally recorded starting in 20 AD. These laws told the people what to do in order to keep from being made unclean. It had exceptions for many of God’s laws that Moses wrote down in Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy. It included purification rituals and other such rituals. This oral tradition became known as the Mishna, and the Jews viewed it as God’s Word.
When God gave Moses the laws regarding clean and unclean, he was trying to point his people to look to him for salvation. He was not giving them regulations by which they could save themselves. And yet that was exactly what these oral traditions sought to do. It sought to give them guidelines by which they could save themselves and earn righteousness before God.
Jesus denied the oral tradition of the elders and showed the Pharisees that it is not the things that go into a person that make them unclean. It is not what they put into their body that makes them unrighteous before God. It is the sin that comes out of them. It is the sins that overflow from their heart and their mind that make them unclean before God.
And that is why Jesus came. He came to this earth because sins were the only thing that came from our hearts. All-day, every day, we could only sin before God. We were slaves to sin, and it separated us from God. But Jesus came to free us from our slavery and make us clean before God. He took on the wrath of God and paid for our sin, once for all. On the cross, he gave up his perfect life so that we could stand before God, with hearts overflowing with his love. He gave us a clean heart, from which comes the deeds that we do through God’s grace. Amen.
The song for today is “I Need You/Create In Me (Medley)” by Maranatha!Music