Clean Hearts over Clean Hands

“Here they were in the presence of the Son of God, and they are chiding Him over His disciple’s handwashing… they were missing it…

They had elevated their human understanding of how to please God over God’s desires for what relationship with Him really looked like…

Jesus’ use of “hypocrisy” here wasn’t ‘saying one thing and doing another’ these Pharisees were washing their hands… Within Jewish lit. “Hypocrite” had another meaning “a godless person who substituted human standards and desires for God’s commands.”

Some of the Pharisees acted as though they were concerned with the law, but broke it by their own ideas, traditions, and conveniences…

We can easily make God into our own image…

To follow His commands from a place of love and relationship is dependent upon Him, and your communing and faith is what drives this obedience, it’s an obedience driven by your love for Him…

Legalism is where we go off the rails… legalism depends upon rule following, and our own ability to somehow please God, and when we find this impossible we modify His desire for our lives to better fit our abilities, and our salvation and spiritual worth is based upon our abilities to keep these laws (altered by us or not)…

The Godly life is not about the fruit we eat, but the fruit we produce…

The power of the transformed life, isn’t consumed with issues of handwashing, the transformed life takes on the character of God not the desires of our sinful nature…

The key to it all is the Heart… only Jesus can transform a heart – men can modify a heart, but only Christ can transform it… only He can draw us close to Him…

Sometimes we can compartmentalize our heart…

Drawing near to God begins in our hearts not our actions (it’s not about washing our hands), though actions will follow…

The disciples missed it a lot but always turned back to Jesus and His heart… not from Him like the Pharisees…

Jeremiah 29:13 “You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart.”

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