Excuse me. I think that there can be no
more soul-crushing experience than for the Son of God to call
a person a hypocrite. Yet I fear that there will be
many in a day to come who will hear precisely that term used
about them. Many for whom religion has become
simply a traditional way of life, a fig leaf of respectability,
but never a soul-changing experience. never a personal salvation. And I say that that will be soul-crushing. First, because if the Lord so
judges, it is true. If the Lord ever calls a man
or a woman a hypocrite, it is because they are. And secondly,
it will earn Punishment in hell eternally, and there can be no
more soul-crushing experience than that. And thirdly, it will be a complete
surprise to those who are so judged, because they will have
imagined that they were doing very well, thank you, and that
everything was okay in their lives until that moment when
the Lord Jesus Christ said, depart from me, ye workers of iniquity,
into everlasting darkness. So let me summarise by saying
this. People who think themselves good
enough for heaven are blindly deceived and heading for hell. And I suspect that that is the
vast majority of people in the world today. It was the state
of these men, these Pharisees and scribes that had come from
Jerusalem in order to see the Lord. These were top men, top
men of their day. They were the leaders in the
most refined, exacting religion certainly of that time and perhaps
of all time. These were the top legalists
imaginable. When the Lord Jesus Christ set
himself against their man-made religion, he picked the biggest
bully in the playground. And I'm going to make two statements
now to explain my approach in the things that I've got to say
today with respect to these verses from Mark chapter 7. I'm going
to make two statements to explain my approach to this passage.
And I'm doing that because there is, dare we say, a route one
that might be taken here. by which we could spend our time,
or I could spend my time, asking you if you are the hypocrites
that Jesus is talking about. But I'm not going to do that
because I think that that gives the devil too much of an advantage
in the opening. If you are one of the Lord's
little ones, then you're already asking yourself that question
better than I can. So here's the first statement
that I want to make with respect to our approach to this passage
today. Hypocrites don't know that they
are hypocrites until and unless the Holy Spirit reveals it to
them. And whether it's these scribes
and Pharisees complaining of hand-washing, or the selfish
Jew that denied his parents any support by dedicating that support
that they could have had and should have had to the temple
or to God, it really makes no difference. They don't know that
they are hypocrites because they're hypocrites. The Lord exposed those men that
day. And all it did was harden their
hearts against Him to the point that they wanted to slay Him.
These men had come down from Jerusalem, no doubt sent to spy
out the situation. They'd come a long way. They'd
come from Jerusalem to Galilee. Scribes and Pharisees from Jerusalem. the elite, in order to witness,
to view, to hear, to assess, and to report back what this
man Jesus was all about. And what they discerned was that
his disciples didn't wash their hands properly. And if his disciples
didn't wash their hands properly, and he didn't do anything about
it, then that was tantamount to him condoning their opposition
to the teachings of Judaism. But if the Holy Spirit will not
show us our state, then we will continue in darkness and we will
continue in ignorance. The Lord exposed these men but
it takes the Holy Spirit to convert, to show us grace in Christ. And if the Holy Spirit ever does
show us that we are hypocrites, then it will be to give us that
grace. It will be to show us the Lord
our righteousness. It will be to grant us perfect
liberty in Him. If the Holy Spirit convinces
a sinner of true righteousness today, we will rejoice with the
angels in heaven and with the church of Jesus Christ upon earth. So the first statement is this.
Hypocrites don't know that they are hypocrites. And that brings
me to my second statement. My job is to comfort the Lord's
people against the attacks and the accusations of the devil
who delights to rob the church of our peace and draw our eyes
off from the Lord Jesus Christ by pointing us back to ourselves,
to our own works or to our lack of them. These verses in Mark chapter
7, they're not intended, they're not designed to convict the Lord's
disciples. That was the job of the scribes
and the Pharisees. That's the job of the wicked
one. That's the job of the devil.
These verses weren't designed to convict the disciples, but
to support the disciples and to teach the disciples. Therefore
my purpose today will be to show what we have in the Lord Jesus
Christ as our saviour and why these accusations have no hook
for us, have no catch for us, do not lay hold or hand upon
us. And this I suggest to you will
be much more helpful and constructive to your soul and mine as our
approach to these verses. Using the Lord's words against
these accusers of the disciples, I am going to take three things
from this encounter, this encounter of the Lord with these scribes
and Pharisees, to show what a believer is and why we have hope in the
Lord Jesus Christ. So here is the first one. A believer
in the Lord Jesus Christ has a mouth that is competent to
confess Jesus Christ. We've got a little saying, I'm
sure that you've heard it. It says, words are cheap. Words are cheap, and some people
will say anything for an advantage or to impress, but their words
are empty. They're without meaning, they're
without substance, they're insincere. And when we speak to the Lord
as the people of God, we cannot, we do not approach Him with empty,
meaningless, insincere words. A believer knows better. You
and I, as we come to worship, you and I as we come to the Word
of God, you and I as we come, whether it's public or private
worship, we do not come to Christ insincerely. The mouth of a believer
is competent to confess the Lord Jesus Christ because we have
learned who He is and what He has done. And we may not be able
to speak cleverly or wisely or eloquently, but we speak sincerely
of what we've seen and heard and what we believe about the
Saviour and the way of salvation. We confess with our mouths the
Lord Jesus and we believe in our heart that God has raised
him from the dead. We serve a risen Christ. We serve an ascended King. And we have learned and we believe
that our acceptance with God is based not on our efforts but
it is secured for us by the Lord Jesus Christ. That our sin is
completely cleansed by the blood of Jesus Christ. That it is gone
from God's sight, never to be remembered against us again. We have learned that our righteousness
is imputed to us. not earned by us. That means
that it is freely given to us and that it is God's righteousness
given to us by grace, freely. So that our fitness for heaven
is due entirely to the goodness, the love and the mercy of God
towards us. and believers are competent to
confess such things. If you know those things to be
so, if you believe those things in your heart, if you trust in
that Lord, then it is because the Holy Spirit has taught these
things to you and given you the faith to believe them, and you
are competent to confess such things. These scribes and Pharisees,
they came to complain of the disciples' lack of hand-washing
and hygiene. Now that's good practice, I'm
sure, but it has nothing to do with God's law and it is not
to be compared with those things which the Lord lists a little
later in this passage where he speaks about evil thoughts and
adulteries and fornications and murders and thefts and covetousness
and wickedness and deceit and lasciviousness and an evil eye
and blasphemy. Pride and foolishness that fills
the hearts of every man and woman but which Christ has borne himself
for us, for his people, for those that he represented on the cross
and removed for all time from the account and from the charge
of all his own. This is the work of Christ upon
the cross. This is what the Lord Jesus Christ
accomplished for us and whether it is the hand-washing, cleansing
rules of the traditions of men, or the deepest sins of the greatest
dye and hue. We look to the Lord Jesus Christ
for every cleansing and for everything to be taken away, no matter what
our sin has been. No matter what Satan can accuse
us of, no matter what the men and women of this world may legitimately
lay at our feet, no matter what our own hearts
tell us and our own memories tell us of the things that we
have done and the places we have gone and what we have seen and
heard and said, Christ has taken it all. and scribes and Pharisees
and legalists and worksmongers and free willers and accusers
of the brethren of every kind and colour. They will come and
they will level a hundred allegations against us and some of them may
be fair and some of them may be valid. But we will not be
deterred from looking to the Lord Jesus Christ for our cleansing
and for our righteousness and for our acceptance with God. And we will not be tempted to
look back to ourselves because we know that that way brings
discouragement and that way brings anxiety and hurt. Let us look
to Christ. The truth is, these Johnny-come-lately
accusers rarely better our own self-critical loathing for sin. We don't need anyone else to
tell us how unworthy we are. And yet having our Father's approval
is enough. We have learned Christ. We have
believed in Christ. We rest in Christ. And a believer
in the Lord Jesus Christ has a mouth competent to confess
Jesus Christ. The second thing that a believer
in the Lord Jesus Christ has, drawing from these words of the
Lord Jesus Christ, is that he has lips taught to worship Christ. A believer has a mouth competent
to confess Christ and lips taught to worship Christ. Our Lord Jesus
exposed the hypocrisy of those who utter words without heart. You see, we cannot tell who is
the Lord's and who is not because we can only hear what men say. God, however, looks upon the
heart and he knows his own residence, he knows his own house. He knows
if a heart is a heart in which he dwells, where he resides and
where he rules. He knows if this is a heart in
which he has been placed and he has taken control, and in
which he has put a new song of praise and worship. Do you remember
Isaiah, when the prophet Isaiah in the Old Testament, when he
glimpsed the glory of Almighty God? he thought he was a dead
man. Such was the contrast, such was
the starkness of the majesty of God and the holiness of God
compared to his own self-loathing that he said, woe is me for I
am undone because I am a man of unclean lips and I dwell in
the midst of a people of unclean lips, for mine eyes have seen
the King, the Lord of hosts. Then do you remember what happened?
We're told, then flew one of the seraphims unto me, having
a live coal in his hand. which he had taken with the tongs
from off the altar, and he laid it upon my mouth, and said, Lo,
this hath touched thy lips, and thine iniquity is taken away,
and thy sin purged. Do you know what was happening
with Isaiah there? He was being given lips, taught
to worship Christ. When a believer's sin is purged,
when it is removed and taken from our account, lifted off
our shoulders, drawn from off our conscience, it is everlastingly
gone. It is sunk in the sea of God's
forgetfulness, never to be remembered against us again. Christ has
taken it away. and our worship and our praise
takes on a new meaning and a new impulse. It's not simply rote
or ritual anymore. It's real. It's genuine. It's true and it's sincere because
we see what Christ has done for us. And our words may be the
same as another person's words. Our hymns, we may sing the same
hymns, we may repeat the same prayers. Our hymns, our prayers,
our worship, the content of our worship may be indistinct from
those words and prayers of the formalists and the self-righteous
religionists. but our lips have been touched
with a live coal from off the altar. There's a warmth in our
worship now, a purity in our praise, and there's feeling in
our fellowship with one another and with the Lord, because we
have union together with Christ. The psalmist says in Psalm 149,
verse one, Praise ye the Lord, sing unto
the Lord a new song, and his praise in the congregation of
the saints. And that's a task that we desire
to do. Praise of God and praise of the
Lord Jesus Christ comes easy and true when it is heartfelt
and when it is genuine. and the praise of Christ and
the congregation of the saints is praise offered and accepted
on the merits of Christ's sacrifice and issues from a grateful soul. Believers in the Lord Jesus Christ
have lips taught to worship. Lips whose worship is genuine
and true, because he has put a new song in my mouth. So believers have a mouth competent
to confess Christ, and believers have lips taught to worship Christ. And thirdly and finally, Believers
have a heart that is knit together with Christ. The Lord was quoting Isaiah when
he spoke to these scribes and Pharisees and when he said of
them that their heart is far from me. But all who are the Lord's own
people have a heart that is knit together with Christ's heart. We are one with Him. We are of one heart and one soul,
the servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart. And what is the will of God?
to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, to trust in Him by that
faith which has been placed in us, issuing forth and focusing
objectively upon what Jesus Christ has done as the grounds of our
acceptance and peace with God. The believer's union with Christ
is full and complete. It's pictured in the marriage
theme that we encounter in scripture. The picture of Christ as the
bridegroom and the church as his bride. Joined together, made
to be of one flesh. One, united in the sight of God. The church died when the Lord
Jesus Christ died. The church was raised when the
Lord Jesus Christ was raised. The church, the people of God,
those for whom he died, those who were raised with him, ascended
with Christ when he ascended back into heaven and we will
reign with Christ for eternity. He loved us and gave himself
for us and we love him because he first loved us. The believer's
heart is not far from God, as a hypocrite's is. It is one with
God in Christ. Because all that is needful to
enable that union has been secured and confirmed. Our eternal union
with the Lord Jesus Christ is done and complete. And no one
can ever take that away. It is all of grace. It's not
dependent upon us holding up our end, of us doing what is
needful and necessary, of us believing certain things or doing
certain things. These things are given and granted
as the gift of God. It's all of grace. And it's a
prelude to the glory which comes hereafter. Actually, it's the
glory that we have now. It's simply that there's more
to come and we will see it more easily in a day to come. Lord
Jesus Christ once said to Peter, his disciple, and I'm paraphrasing
here. He said, all who live by the
sword shall die by the sword. And we might also say that all
who live by the law shall die by the law. All who are married
to the law will find her to be a heartless partner. These scribes and Pharisees came
to Jesus complaining about the disciples' faults and failures
as they saw it. but the very traditions and commandments
that they claimed to uphold would rise up against them in the judgment
and condemn their own hypocrisy. But the just would live by faith,
not looking at their works at all. Their works are dealt with
and gone in Jesus Christ, but the just live not by the law,
but by faith, trusting in the precious blood and righteousness
of Jesus Christ. By the grace of God we are what
we are. We are one with Christ. No one
can ever take that from us. Let that therefore be our comfort
and the source of our joy. Believers have a mouth that is
competent to confess Christ. Believers have lips that have
been taught to worship Christ. and believers have a heart knit
together with Christ. May the Lord be praised. The
Apostle Paul says in Romans chapter 10, verse 10, For with the heart
man believeth unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession
is made unto salvation. May the Lord bless these thoughts
to us. Amen.