Wash Up!
Mark 7:1-23

“The heart of man’s problem is the problem with man’s heart.”

“Wash up! Dinner’s ready!” Mom didn’t want dirty hands at the table. Whether or not cleanliness was next to godliness, it was required at the dinner table.

The Pharisees weren’t so much concerned with hygiene as they were with self-righteousness. Their cleanliness wasn’t about playing in the dirt, but about contact with certain classes of people: lepers, Samaritans, and Gentiles to name a few. And Jesus and his disciples had been in personal contact with these and more (Mark 1:40, 2:13, 5:1, 5:25, 5:35).

Yet, all their scrubbing didn’t make the Pharisees clean. In fact, Jesus calls them hypocrites. And in Matthew 23, he righteously goes off on them and their hypocrisy, saying among other things:

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people’s bones and all uncleanness. (v27)

Their problem is our problem. We are not defiled by who and what we come in contact with, but by who and what we are. “What comes out of a person is what defiles him,” Jesus says. And he gives quite a list of the kinds of things that come from within in verses 21 and 22. In that list is something, or some things, that make each of us uncomfortable because that’s us. And no matter how hard we may try, we can’t wash it off and be done with it.

The truth is we need a cleansing within. To be given a righteousness we don’t possess and cannot produce. To be forgiven of our sins. To be given a new heart.

We need Jesus, the righteous one who died to cleanse us from our sins and give us a new heart. So, quit trying to clean up your act and trust Jesus.

And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules. (Ezekiel 36:26-27)