So Mark chapter seven, verses
14 to 23, the verses in view today. And I've titled this sermon,
The Evil Within. And in fact, there has really
been quite a continuity in some of our thoughts today. When the Lord Jesus Christ calls
his people to hear his words, he gives them ears to hear his
words. And when he would make his people
wise, he supplies them with an understanding heart and grants
them a discerning spirit. None of these abilities arise
within ourselves, but the call of the Lord Jesus Christ comes
with the power to enable and effect in the lives of his people. And that's what we find in these
verses that Edward has read to us today. Turning from these proud scribes
and Pharisees, in order to address the common people, the Lord called
for a hearing ear and for an understanding heart. And to all
those that were his own dear people, in that group that were
gathered there, he graciously provided both. So let us, by
way of introduction here today, mark this down, that when the
Lord Jesus Christ calls for something, when the Lord Jesus Christ commands
his people that something is required of them, he both enables
and supplies. because God's call is in itself
effectual and accomplishes the end whereunto it is sent. Romans chapter 11 verse 29 tells
us the gifts and calling of God are without repentance. Therefore
once again we see that in all God's ways and dealings with
his people he is the great supplier and provider and enabler of all
that we need. Distinguishing grace always characterizes
the Lord's dealings with men and women. Wherever we see God
at work, there is distinguishing grace being revealed. Because none of us would and
none of us could ever respond positively to the call of the
Lord if he did not also send with that call the power for
us to act. Do you remember when he stood
outside of Lazarus's tomb and he called, Lazarus, come forth? That voice, that word, that call,
took with it the power of life into Lazarus's body. It was the Lord Jesus Christ
that brought him forth from the tomb because he is the resurrection
and the life. And we understand that both in
that physical picture that was given to us in the occasion of
Lazarus being raised from the dead, but we also understand
it spiritually. And that is the discriminating,
discerning grace of God towards men and women. He calls and we
hear. He invites and we respond. And I'm delighted that you're
here today. I'm delighted that we have the
opportunity to share together today in this gospel message. I take your presence here today,
I take your company and your fellowship to be that obedient
response to the Lord's call in verses 14 and 15 here of this
passage. The Lord said to the people,
hearken unto me every one of you and understand. And this is the reaction, this
is the response. When the Lord said that to the
people, he sent the enabling power, he sent the desire He
sent the spiritual wisdom with that call which brought people
to hear his word and to understand what he was saying. And I take
it to be evidence of God's continuing goodness and mercy to his church
and to his people that we still have a gospel to preach and we
still have men and women with a desire to hear that gospel
declared. So I see this little gathering
here today as proof of His grace still working. His call is still
going forth with power. He is still gathering His own
dear people from the ends of the earth by the preaching of
His gospel. And there's a beautiful symmetry
in the way in which God works amongst us, the ways and the
means by which God accomplishes his purpose. There's a beautiful
symmetry. If he gives us ears to hear,
then he will supply the gospel for us to hear. And if he brings
the gospel amongst us, it is because he has those with ears
to hear that he is going to educate and illuminate and reveal himself
to. Wherever the Lord has sheep,
he will provide gospel food. Wherever there's gospel food,
he will gather his sheep. to feed in the green pastures
and beside the still waters. And that's why I feel so positive
and indeed, dare I say, excited about our activity here today. I have no doubt that the Lord
has opened this medium and I can only conclude that it's because
He purposes to have his sheep called and fed. So let me repeat the Lord's words
in this introductory section. Hearken unto me, every one of
you, and understand. And by God's grace, may we hear
the word of the Lord in the preaching of the gospel of the Lord Jesus
Christ. The Lord, as has been his practice
over these past chapters, and we've attended to this somewhat,
once again is about the task of teaching his disciples by
his words, by his actions, by his parables, by his miracles,
by the experiences that the disciples have themselves and observe around
about them. The Lord is teaching his disciples
and he is teaching us that we might better understand ourselves,
that we might better understand our saviour, that we might better
understand the gospel and the purposes of God and our place
and our ministry in this world. The Lord is teaching us in all
of these passages something about ourselves. So that is why he
calls us to hear and to understand. The disciples were not being
called to be the Lord's apostles so that they could simply replicate
a new, updated, cleansed version of Judaism. The Lord was setting
himself against these scribes and Pharisees. That's why he
turned away from them and he turned to the common people and
he turned to his disciples to teach them. The Lord's not going
to replace a failed religion with another religion of do's
and don'ts. The gospel that we preach, the
gospel Christ preached, the gospel of Christ, the gospel that he
committed into the hands of his apostles and that his apostles
have delivered to faithful men down through the ages and generation
of the church is a radical departure from working for our own righteousness
and to please God by the things that we do. And this little passage
explains why it must be so. This little passage is a foundational
doctrine in our understanding of the nature of our own hearts
and the need for sovereign grace. Here in this passage, in these
verses, our Lord teaches, number one, the problem of evil nature. When I was a little boy in Sunday
school, my Sunday school teacher used to talk about a pig that
rolled in the mud and covered itself with dirt. Now, I'm not
so very old, but I'm old enough to remember when people still
maybe at the end of a road or backing onto a field or in a
little allotment somewhere, would still have a pig that they kept. And you could see a pig, there
are not so many pigs around these days I guess, certainly in our
towns and cities, but you could see pigs and they would be wallowing
in the mud. They would be rolling in the
mud. And wherever you saw a little
patch of ground where there was a pig, it was always just a complete
bath of mud. And my Sunday school teacher
used to talk about that pig in its muddy little patch of dirt. And he would say that you could
take that pig and you could wash that pig down You could clean
it up. You could powder it. You could
perfume it. You could wrap it in a blanket.
You could tie a bow around its neck. And for a little while,
that looked like a clean pig. But if you put that pig outside
again, if you let that pig do what it wanted to do, it would
go straight back to rolling in the mud. Why? Because that's what pigs do. You couldn't, by painting it
up on the outside, cleaning it down on the outside, change its
nature. And if you couldn't change its
nature, you couldn't change its practice. What am I pushing at here? Well,
this gospel that we preach is sometimes called the Sovereign
Grace Gospel. Because in this gospel, we declare
God's power to change a man's heart and to change a man's nature. Men, women and children need
to have a new heart and need to have a new nature. And that's
what the Lord Jesus Christ is teaching us in this passage.
Indeed, if it wasn't for God's sovereign grace, a power that
was over and more powerful and dominant than man's free will,
we would be in a very sad state indeed. Because without God's
converting mercy, we would never submit to his will and we would
never be able to satisfy His righteousness or His justice. So that unless God sovereignly,
powerfully changes our hearts, we're just like that pig. We might scrub up nicely on the
outside for a little while, but our real desire, the real lust
of our heart, will soon drive us back to the dirt and back
to our sin. And to serve their hearers properly,
and to serve our hearers properly, the apostles of that day and
gospel preachers of today must learn where true spiritual power
lies. And they must speak that truth
to men and women and boys and girls. because God has said that
he will use only gospel truth to convert the adamant hearts
of sinful men and women and bring sinners under his grace. And
this lesson The disciples needed to learn, and indeed we all need
to learn, and that was the purpose of the Lord's discourse here
to these men and women on this day when he had been confronted
by the scribes and the Pharisees. They were concerned because the
disciples didn't wash their hands properly when they were eating
food but the Lord was teaching a much more significant lesson
than that and this is true gospel doctrine and it's something we
need to know. Our guilt before God is not primarily
because of our actions. Our guilt before God is not primarily
because of the things that we do and don't do. Our guilt before
God is because of our nature. Our nature is opposed to God. Our heart is opposed to God. We are a fallen creature before
we are born. We come into the world rebellious
against God. We come into the world opposed
to God. And that foul nature merely manifests
itself as we grow up and we grow older. and we get more experienced
and expert about finding ways and means and avenues of satisfying
our own fallen nature's desires. It's not what we do that condemns
us, but what we are. Until we are changed inside,
There's no meaningful, lasting change on the outside. Until
our hearts are renewed by grace, there will be no pleasing God,
there will be no serving the Saviour, there will be no entering
into heaven, there will be no spiritual relationship, there
will be no union with the Church of Jesus Christ. A pig is always
a pig. but God makes a sinner a new
creation. So that's the first point that
I want to address today, the problem of the evil nature. The second point is this, that
we need transformation, not reformation. Someone might say to me, well,
didn't God give us the law to show us how to live a holy life? And I say no he didn't. The law
could never make us holy because our problem is not what we do
and don't do but what we are. The purpose of the law is to
show us how far short of holy We really are. Men and women,
they imagine that if they take the law, whether they're thinking
about the Ten Commandments, or whether they're thinking about
a broader explanation and manifestation and revelation of those rules,
or whether they're thinking about their own rules that they make
up, or their society's rules, or their family's rules, or their
country's rules, it doesn't really matter. They imagine that if
they abide by the rules, then they'll be alright. But really, the revelation of
God's holiness merely shows us how far short of perfection we
really are. The law doesn't enable righteousness. It condemns sin. It condemns the lack of righteousness. It doesn't make us pleasing to
God in any way. It reveals how far short of pleasing
to God, we really are. These scribes and Pharisees that
the Lord had been speaking to, they imagined that if you fulfil
God's law, because they measured by an outward appearance, they
hosed the pig down, if you like. They hosed the pig down and they
said, there, that's an acceptable pig. but they didn't realise
that sin isn't just on the surface. Sin is a problem of the heart
and that we need to be transformed. The list of sins that the Lord
spoke of here in this passage, the list of sins that he describes,
it shows this. as does indeed the Lord's Sermon
on the Mount which we read in Matthew chapter 5 and then on
through 6 and 7. But the Lord's teaching was always
that God condemns the angry word and the lustful look as much
as he condemns the murder and the adultery. The angry word
precedes the murder. The lustful look precedes the
adultery or the fornication. But the Lord condemns both because
the one finds its source in the other and the origin is because
of our fallen rebellious nature. Everything short of perfect holiness
renders the sinner guilty. And that's why the Lord starts
this list of really quite... horrendous sins that he speaks
about there when in verse 20 he says that which cometh out
of the man defiles the man and then he goes on to speak about
for from within out of the heart of men proceed evil thoughts
And then he goes on to speak about these others. But notice
that, that it's evil thoughts that are the head of the list. Because it's the evil thought. See, we don't condemn the evil
thought, not in our society, not in our law. We can't do that. We can't get into men's heads,
into women's heads and say, oh, you're thinking bad things. We
have to wait until we see the action, but not with the Lord.
The Lord searches the heart and he knows the origin of the wickedness. It's the evil thoughts at the
head of the list that inspires the adulteries and the fornications
and the murders and the thefts and the covetousness and the
wickedness and the deceit and the lasciviousness. Again, it's
a sexual impropriety, it's the lustfulness that drives our actions. The evil eye, the blasphemy,
the pride, the foolishness. It's those thoughts that reside
in our hearts and our nature that spawn the evil actions. And it's they that defile and
condemn us as guilty before the holy God. Now religion, is a
worldwide phenomenon. And religion tries, always possible,
to educate and to reform poor behaviour. To eradicate evil
by changing the circumstances. Reforming the character by removing
temptation or denying opportunity for sin. censorship or whatever
it might be. But the reality is that wickedness
and evil lurks unmoved inside the man, inside the woman, inside
our hearts. And without a new heart, nothing
will set us free from its rule or its reign in our lives. And a new heart is exactly what
God provides. Remember what we said, that God's
call also brings the effecting and enabling power? The Lord
calls for a holy people and he sends the heart that makes us
what he requires. A new heart is what God provides. Religion tries to reform a man,
but grace transforms. And so we find the Lord speaking
in Ezekiel chapter 36 and verse 26. A new heart also will I give
you and a new spirit will I put within you. Isn't that beautiful? Way back in the Old Testament,
the Lord was speaking about a new heart and a new spirit to those
Old Testament saints. And the Lord Jesus Christ is
speaking about exactly the same thing here. When he teaches his
disciples, he teaches these apostles to be, to understand the true
nature of our need before God. We need a new heart because the
heart is a filthy source of all our sin and wickedness. And that
transformation that the Lord God gives is that
which effects our conversion. The change that comes by grace
It is a work of God from the inside out. And we've no power
to do that for ourselves. We require sovereign grace to
do it. The power of God to save a sinner
from their sin. The power to renew, the power
to restore a fallen sinner. And here's the third point then.
We don't need reformation, we need transformation. And that
transformation is the gift of a new nature. The Bible has many
terms to describe this transformation that we need. It speaks about
a new beginning. It speaks about a new heart,
as we've already seen, and a new spirit in Ezekiel. It speaks
about new life. new life in Christ. It speaks
about a new creation or a new creature. It speaks about the
new man, a new name, even a new thing, because perhaps the writer
had said, well, we've run out of describing words. It's just
a new thing that the Lord does. but it is always God's sovereign
life-giving work in the experience of a spiritually dead sinner. And that points us to that great
transaction by which God's sovereign grace is freely given to sinners
while God's righteousness and holiness is upheld and honoured. What is that? The work of Jesus
Christ on the cross. And I suspect that we will never
fully grasp the depths of God's love for us in Christ, or indeed
Christ's suffering for us on the cross. When our saviour took
our place and died as our substitute and as our surety, as we were
thinking about a little earlier, he bore not only all our sin
that we have committed, but the sickness that spawned our sin. Think about that for a moment.
In Isaiah chapter 53, verse 5, Isaiah there writes, he was wounded
for our transgressions. He was bruised for our iniquities. The chastisement of our peace
was upon him, and with his stripes we are healed. There's our transgressions
and our iniquities, but there's also our healing. The death of
Christ not only paid the price, the debt of our sins, it also
made the healing possible. It healed us. John Gill, That's
his picture that's up over my shoulder there, one of them.
John Gill has a lovely statement on this. He says this, listen
to this. He says, Christ is a wonderful
physician. He heals by taking the sicknesses
of his people upon himself. He doesn't just treat the sickness,
he takes the sickness upon himself. He bears their sins, and being
wounded and bruised for them, and by enduring the blows and
suffering, death itself for them. Our Lord Jesus Christ took our
sin, he took the sickness, he took the symptoms and he carried
them away, he bore them. And I don't want to neglect,
I'm not going to be too much longer, but I don't want to neglect
2 Corinthians 5.21 because it is very opposite here as well. He became sin for us. This is the teaching of the gospel. This is the teaching of Christ's
intercessory work and his substitutionary work. He took it all upon himself. You know, we sometimes have a
very, I don't know, immature, simplistic view of these things
in our mind, in our imagination, as if that a particular sin is
more wicked than another sin. Well, this sin is that carries
a penalty of two. And that sin, well that carries
a penalty of five. Oh, that's a really bad one.
That carries a penalty of 20. And then we add up all the twos
and the fives and the twenties of the sins that we've committed,
and that great big number and its computation was laid on Christ. Well, That's a poor way to think
about this, as if God merely meted out an amount of punishment
for every sin that we've committed and then Christ carried an equivalent
load of suffering. Much more to it than that, surely. He united himself to us. He took our body. He made himself one with us. He became flesh with us. He became a real living soul
to unite himself to his people that he might be our fit representative
and carry the load of our suffering in that way. in order to become
the soul that rebels. He became one with us in order
to have that heart that instigates wickedness, that mind that conceives
the lustfulness, the body that performs the crime, the conscience
that regrets the wickedness, the back that bears the scars,
the shoulders that carry the responsibility, the guilt, the
shame, the grief, the sorrow, and everything connected with
and pertaining to our sin was laid to Christ's charge. Why? That we might be healed,
that we might be renewed, that we might be made the righteousness
of God in Him. And that's the triumph of grace. The Lord's people are a new creation. Old things are passed away. There's
a new governor in the land. There's a new king on the throne.
There's a new regime. There's a new occupier of a new
house. Romans chapter 8 verse 10 says,
If Christ be in you, the body is dead because of sin, but the
spirit is life because of righteousness. But if the spirit of him that
raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, he that raised
up Christ from the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies
by his spirit that dwelleth in you. You see, this is a transformation
beyond anything that we could ever achieve by our own works
or by our own religious practices. God demands holiness and perfection
and that is impossible from a fallen nature and a rebellious heart. So God has given his people a
new nature and a new heart and he has taken away the heart of
stone. Let me conclude by saying this
one more thing, perhaps by way of application or whatever. Let's just pause and think of
this. I am under no misapprehension
about the trials and the troubles that many of you are experiencing
right now. And nor do I wish to imply that
a believer's life is easier in any way because of God's grace. On the contrary, it may well
be harder, because we are called to fight on fronts that the men
and women of this world know nothing about. Sin still besets
us, though God is on the throne of our heart. Sin still afflicts
us. Satan is riled. He is angry at us. He's not angry
with those who are in his charge and under his dominion. The world's
temptations still prod us and provoke us, and our own flesh
is often our own worst enemy. But, but, having taught us in
the Gospel that the Lord Jesus Christ has taken every angry
judgment, every blow of wrath, every ounce of punishment for
our evil thoughts, for our adulteries, for our fornications, for our
murders, for our thefts, for our covetousness, for our wickedness,
for our deceit, for our lasciviousness, for our evil eye, for our blasphemy,
pride, foolishness, We must conclude, and we do conclude by faith,
that nothing but love remains for us. Therefore, every challenge
that you are facing today, every trial that is weighing you down,
every chastisement at the hand of God is only his tender hand steering and keeping us from
hurting ourselves. It is only his prompting for
our goodness and mercy in order to keep us looking to Christ. May the Lord Grant us this insight
even to our own trials today because the Lord Jesus Christ
has taken away all God's anger from his people and only love
remains. May the Lord bless these thoughts
to us. Amen.