Monday, Oct. 14
Matthew 13:53 – 16:12 Read it here
Often people will raise the question about one thing or another: “Does doing that make me a bad person?”
I’m often tempted to reply, “No, being a bad person makes you do that.”
While it may or may not be true that the particular action they’re asking about is bad at all, the first half of chapter 15 raises the same question: do our actions determine if we are good or bad, or does our goodness or badness determine our actions?
This is where the difference between the teachings of Jesus and the teachings of the religious leaders of the day are furthest apart: The teachers believe that righteous living leads to a clean heart. Jesus teaches that a clean heart leads to righteous living.
We can be tempted to dismiss this as wordplay. If both approaches end up with a clean heart and righteous living, does it matter what comes first?
Yes, it matters a lot.
When criticizing the traditions taught by the teachers of the law, Jesus calls them hypocrites and says, “Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be pulled up by the roots. Leave them; they are blind guides. If a blind man leads a blind man, both will fall into a pit.”
This is something he takes seriously.
Jesus says that traditions like dietary laws are not what produces cleanliness of heart. “What goes into a man’s mouth does not make him ‘unclean,’ but what comes out of his mouth, that is what makes him ‘unclean.’”
And he isn’t talking here about the words that come out of the mouth, but rather the condition of the heart that the words bear witness to. “The things that come out of the mouth come from the heart, and these make a man ‘unclean,’” he says.
“For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander. These are the things that make a man ‘unclean’; but eating with unwashed hands does not make him ‘unclean.’”
We sometimes hear the argument that things cannot be sinful if they are inborn, but the biblical witness is that sin itself is inborn into our nature and has been since the fall.
Salvation wasn’t offered to save us from the things we could free ourselves from; it was given to save us from things that are beyond our ability to free ourselves from.
We often quote Psalm 51 when we pray, “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me.” That isn’t the goal of Christian living; it’s the starting point.