It Is From Within<title> <link rel="STYLESHEET" type="text/css" href="../../sermon.css"> <style fprolloverstyle>A:hover {color: #FF0000} </style> <style type="text/css"> p { font-family: sans-serif; font-size: small; text-align: justify; } </style> <link rel="STYLESHEET" type="text/css" href="../2002/sermon.css"> </head> <body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" vlink="#0000FF"> <table BORDER=0 CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=4 > <tr VALIGN=BASELINE BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF"> <td COLSPAN="2" BGCOLOR="#000080"> <b> <font color="#FFFFFF"> <span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: Times New Roman; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA">  It Is From Within </span> </font> </b> <font color="#FFFFFF"><br>A Sermon based on </font> <a target="_blank" href="http://bible.gospelcom.net/cgi-bin/bible?language=english&version=NIV&passage=Mark+7:1-8,14-15,21-23"><font color="#FFFFFF"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: Times New Roman; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA">Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23</span></font></a> </td> </tr> <tr> <td COLSPAN="2" width="640">  <p>Our men's breakfast on Thursday morning is always an interesting experience. We solve most of the world's problems in 20-30 minutes. This past week, we were again discussing the mystery of the Kennedy assassination. For those of us who are old enough, the day of the assassination is as burned into our memories as 9/11 is for this generation. We remember where we were and what we were doing. I happened to be in 4th grade, Mrs. Bell's 4th grade class at Colonial Heights Elementary School in Brownfield, Texas, that day.</p> <p>Now, 43 years later, we are still kicking around all the theories of what actually happened the day Kennedy was assassinated. Was it the act of a lone man gunman, or a mob hit, or a Communist conspiracy? All kinds of theories. It seems that there are nearly as many opinions of what happened that day as there are people who witnessed it or heard about it. And that's because there is what happens, and then there is how we perceive what happens.</p> <p>In many, reading the Scripture is the very same way. There is what the Scripture says and there is what we interpret it to say. Many times, there are a great number of differences. Which is why men have been fighting over the meaning of Scripture for centuries. One way of reading this mornings text is as pure history, nothing more. If we read it only as history, however, we miss the point of God's preserving it through all these centuries for us.</p> <p>But, just as pure history, the story goes that some Pharisees, the guardians of religious tradition in their day, were looking for yet one more way to nail Jesus. This time, they jumped on him through his disciples, who, according to the Pharisees, were breaking religious custom by eating before they washed their hands, which was a violation of the religious custom of the day.</p> <p>Now, this is history. But not history that means a great deal to any of us here this morning. In fact, if I continued long down that line, I'm not sure how many of you would even be with me in a couple of more minutes. Our parents taught us to wash hands, because now we know about pathogens that can make us ill or worse, if we fail to clean our hands before we eat. In Jesus' day, washing before dinner was about being right with God. A spiritually pure person would not allow herself or himself to be made impure by ingesting anything unclean. There were certain foods, of course, that were off-limits to the spiritually pure, such as pork, and that kind of thing. There were myriad laws that described the way pots and pans and dishes had to be washed, and all these kinds of things. Jesus' disciples were not so couth. The Pharisees caught them in the act of being uncouth and called Jesus' hand on it, holding him responsible for the behavior of his disciples.</p> <p>Now, we could stop there, with that history. I doubt seriously anyone in this room is just riveted with all of this as yet. In fact, I'd like to ask if I've really said anything here yet this morning that you haven't heard for years in Sunday school. All of this brings back the memory of an Old Testament professor who, in my memory, must have been born shortly after the Exodus. His name, and I only say this about him with genuine respect, and because he is now dead, his name was Dr. Hurst, and he taught the Old Testament very, very dryly. In fact, we got to calling, him behind his back, 'Sahara Hurst.' He could take the driest Old Testament lesson and make it even drier. This morning, if we just left this scripture as history, we would basically accomplish the same thing. Or, we can look a little closer at how Jesus responded to his critics and see if, in that conversation, we can draw something out of it that means something to us that's very relevant.</p> <p>Which is always where the real lesson from Scripture comes. Not just from the Scripture itself, but from the way it impacts our lives now. There is what happens to us in life. Yet, the real test of our character is how we respond to what happens. There is 9/11, the attacks carried out on our nation by foreign nationals and there is the way our nation has chosen to respond to those attacks. When history is finally written, long after all of us are gone, that history will be more than just about the attacks; it will also be about how our response to those attacks has shaped world history.</p> <p>There is what happened to Jesus and his disciples, the attacks on him by the Pharisees in this and countless other situations. But, the real lesson, where the real character development comes for us, is in watching how Jesus responded to those attacks.</p> <p>I think it's important for us to remember this morning, when we look at his response, that Jesus loved the Pharisees, too. He had come to die for them and to be raised to new life for them, too. Instead of just reacting to their attacks, he chose to respond by telling them the truth about their religious customs. "In vain," he said, "you worship teaching human precepts as doctrines. You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition."</p> <p>Why do we do that? Why do we abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition, specifically, the commandment to love God supremely and our neighbor as ourselves and instead hold to forms of worship that once represented those high ideals but may have now become ideals in and of themselves and, though they appear holy, no longer have any meaning. Surely one reason we do that is because we're creatures of habit. We tend to nest up in our comfortable routines and then Jesus comes along and stirs up the nest.</p> <p>All of that becomes particularly evil when we confuse the habits we've formed, meant to express worship to God, with God himself. So that people who are at church on Sunday, in our minds, are oftentimes thought of us as more holy than those who are, say, at Starbucks right now, getting a latte. We can only think that way when the form we have developed to aid us in worshiping God, as the Pharisees had the traditions and the customs of washing before eating, becomes a god to us in itself. When we let the ways we worship, where we worship, when we worship, fool us into thinking that because we've done them we are more okay with God than those who are not. When we do that, then we've turned even our forms of worship into false gods. You see, a false god is anyone or anything, a person, a job, a possession, even a way of worship, that we allow to define our worth to us more than the God who created us. False gods have one thing in common. They take more than they give. Ultimately, they can take our very faith and our life.</p> <p>A good friend just recently put me onto a book I've never read before. Perhaps some of you have. Philip Yancey's book, Soul Survivor: How My Faith Survived the Church. Yancey tells about being raised in a very strict Southern religious tradition. He talks about how he almost lost his faith, like many people do, when he lived according to his church's standards, including unabashed racism preached from the pulpit, and those traditions began to suck the very life out of him. As a young man, as a child, he assumed that if it was said from the pulpit, it was the Word of God, so that he began to confuse racism with godliness.</p> <p>This was all happening because the church of his youth had developed human traditions that were more like human traditions than they were like God. But those traditions had taken on a God-like stature in his mind until the church that was supposed to support his faith began to kill his faith. Yancey's book is about, he says, his journey toward learning that the church is not God. That, like the Pharisees of Jesus' day had yet to learn, God is more interested in our true character, what's in our hearts, than he is in how well we have perfected the rules we've established that make us feel holy, whether or not we are.</p> <p>So, we can end up living double lives. Like the lives Jesus described in this text to these Pharisees. Jesus said to the Pharisees, and to us, that the real problem for all humanity is not the world around us that might get into us, but the world within us in which we live every day. Jesus said that it is not our capacity to play the God-game, with all of our rules and institutions, that impresses God. It is what is in our hearts that is of greatest interest to him. And, should be to us.</p> <p>There is a church that uses the Internet to keep its people connected, with a website, mysecret.tv. The pastor has begun soliciting the confessions of his people on the Web, where they can do it anonymously. They can say anything they want to, any way they want to in confessing their private sins, their shame. He tells that he has been shocked that, behind all the smiling faces he sees in the pews on Sunday morning, were incredibly painful secrets his people were living with that were killing them, despite the holy smile they plastered on their face.</p> <p>Some of the things confessed on this website include addictions, gambling, use of pornography, adultery, lying, stealing, sexual abuse, substance abuse and self harm, and so on and so on. All of these things are being confessed by those who wanted to impress the pastor publicly that they were really okay, when, in fact, they were dying on the inside. Dying in part because they knew that if anyone knew the truth about them they would no longer be accepted by those in the pews who sat by them every Sunday and sang, 'Amazing Grace! How Sweet the Sound.'</p> <p>By the way, did I touch any raw nerves while ago when I read that list? Behind your smiling face, is there a private shame that's killing you? Well, now these people have learned that they can go underground, on the Web, and confess what is underground in their soul, and they're finding new life. Again, that web site is www.mysecret.tv.</p> <p>Alcoholics Anonymous teaches its folks that they are no healthier than their secrets. If that is true, how healthy are you? How healthy is Cliff Temple? Jesus says it is not the world on the outside that we might ingest that hurts us. It's the secret shame we live with within that expresses itself in fornication, theft, murder, adultery (I'm reading Jesus' words here), murder, adultery, greed, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness (that's a big church word that means living as though there are no moral boundaries, even when it hurts yourself and others), envy, slander (that means saying untrue things about others, either behind their back or to their face) their backs), pride, folly. That's the stuff that kills us. Not the terrorists who terrorize us, and at whose hands most of us will never really die, but our secret shames behind our church smiles. I don't know of a more miserable person on the planet than someone who is trying to prove how religious they are while living with secret shame. That is the most horrible place to live I can possibly imagine.</p> <p>When you're that miserable, it's easy to want to find someone to blame, even God. Jesus was saying to the Pharisees, and to us, 'If you're that miserable, you're going to have to look within to deal with what's there.' Jesus' half-brother, James, would later put it this way.</p> <p>'Those conflicts and disputes among you, where do they come from? Do they not come from your cravings that are at war within you' (James 4:1)? We are no healthier than our secrets. It is also true that when people can tell the truth about the shame within them, true living begins. Jesus once said, "Out of the believer's heart shall flow rivers of living water" (John 7:38b).</p> <p>Do you know what it means to believe in Jesus? I grew up in a tradition in which it was easy for all of us to confuse believing in Jesus with making a public profession of faith. For many of us, we were following in the footsteps of our parents, who taught us that that was the case. We walked the aisle, we filled out a card, we were baptized and then dove right back into our world of private shame. I'm coming to believe that believing in Jesus means trusting him enough to tell him my deepest secrets. If I can't tell Jesus my deepest secrets can I really claim to believe in him?</p> <p>Where does the healing begin? A kind of healing that overcomes all the things that Jesus said would kill us. 'It is from within,' Jesus said. So, I have this question to ask you, before we leave here today, and we go back into our private worlds. If our faith is only as valid as the depth and honesty of our true confession, then what is it like where you really live every day?</p> <hr WIDTH="100%"> </td> </tr> <tr> <td> Glen Schmucker, Pastor </td> <td> <div align=right>  September 10, 2006 </div> </td> </tr> <tr> <td COLSPAN=2> Copyright © 2006, Glen Schmucker </td> </tr> </table> </body> </html>