True Purity from Within
Click here to listen to this sermon. Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ! Picture a society where the path to God is blocked by invisible barriers of ritual impurity, where even a slight touch can render someone unworthy to approach the divine. This was the burden imposed by the Law of Moses, which had evolved into a complex web of manmade traditions by Jesus’ time. As the Pharisees enforced these laws, their rigid adherence overshadowed the essence of God’s commandments and His message of grace and forgiveness. In our text from Mark 7, Jesus confronts this distortion head-on, revealing a more profound truth about what truly defiles us and how we can genuinely draw near to God. The Law of Moses contained a series of statutes about what could make a person “unclean.” This was not a question about sanitation or good personal hygiene but applied to ritual purity. Unclean things defiled a person so that he could not draw close to God without first purifying...