Mark 7:1-23 From the Inside Out

First Things: Devotions in Mark’s Gospel

Mark 7:1-23 From the Inside Out

It’s flu season. Wash your hands. Wipe the handles. That’s how you protect from the flu. Until you get it. 

It’s Pharisee season. Wash your hands. You don’t want to be unclean. But you are. From the inside out.

“For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed the evil thoughts, fornications, thefts, murders, adulteries, deeds of coveting and wickedness, as well as deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride and foolishness. “All these evil things proceed from within and defile the man.” (Mark 7:21–23 NAS95)

That’s the message of Jesus in this longer passage. The religious leaders are focusing on the outside in. Jesus is focusing on the inside out. He says that a hand scrub is not going to do it. It’s going to take a heart scrub. So how do you do that?

Hand washing is doable. Heart surgery, not so much. We cannot open our chests and cleanse our hearts. We cannot trim the ugly off it. It requires more than what we can do. Which is why self-salvation is impossible. We cannot cure our hearts. Only God can.

And so it seems that the Pharisees thought they could manage cleansing and acceptability before God in worship through a set of routines that they and their forefathers had established. Jesus steps on the scene and says that our first step is repentance - to agree with God about our sinfulness - and then to find in Jesus our only hope of receiving a new heart that is like His heart - clean.

And then, there is another point. All those ugly things that leak out of your life - those things that flood your mind or let loose from your mouth - where do they come from? We would like to have someone or something to blame. Is it the devil? Our parents? Our environment? Lack of discipline? No, it’s actually worse than that. It’s your heart. It’s the real you, not-yet-cured from sin. And so we are reminded, once again, that we need Jesus’ work from the inside out, re-fashioning our heart to be more like His. It is a process that has a beginning, but it will take time, a life-time, in which every moment is important and every battle is critical. 

Most of life as we encounter it from day to day operates from the outside in. But here, in this central issue of the kind of person that you are and will become, there is another kind of principle at work - the Jesus principle - in which He works on you from the inside out.