Jesus is After the Heart

SCRIPTURE
Matthew 15:16-18
16 "Are you still so dull?" Jesus asked them.
17 "Don't you see that whatever enters the mouth goes into the stomach and then out of the body?
18 But the things that come out of the mouth come from the heart, and these make a man 'unclean.'
19 For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander.
20 These are what make a man 'unclean'; but eating with unwashed hands does not make him 'unclean.' "

OBSERVATION
In the first twenty verse of Matthew 15, we see Jesus turning the whole system that the Pharisees had created upside down. The Pharisees had invested countless time and energy into figuring out how to best follow the Law of God — the Torah. But in their zeal for God's Law, they had actually ended up ignoring the very thing they set out to protect. They had not only missed God's heart, but they had failed to keep the Law anyway (see verse vss 5-6).

But Jesus didn't stop there, He also challenged some of the basics of Jewish tradition. The culinary rules were followed not just by the Pharisees but by any self-respecting Jew. These rules dictated what you could eat and what you couldn't eat. If you ate the wrong things, you became unclean. To us today, the whole notion of clean and unclean tends to refer only to the external state of a person (are they dirty or not?). But in the Jewish culture, the whole world was divided up into clean and unclean. And whether or not you were clean or unclean determined your ability to interact with others, worship God and generally operate in society.

So a lot was invested in not eating the wrong things and only eating the right things. This is what God laid out in the Law of Moses. It was okay to eat animals with cloven hoofs, but not those with scales. It was okay to eat fish with scales, but not those without. And so forth. Eat the wrong thing and you couldn't go to the Temple, you had to go through ritual ablutions to cleanse yourself and the list went on.

But Jesus turns to His disciples and says, it's not about the kind of food you eat, it's about your heart.

APPLICATION
The whole point of the Law was to try to teach the people of Israel God's heart. But as humans so frequently do, they reduced it to a set of rules and regulations. A set of checkboxes that could be hammered through like a pre-flight checklist. If I do these things, then I'm okay with God.

But Jesus is saying, God is not interested in the list as much as He is interested in the heart. It is not that what you do doesn't matter — because it most certainly does. What you do flows from something internal. You can do the right things for the wrong motives and vice-versa. The heart — the motives — are what is most important. Right motives will result in right action.

We get so fixated on doing the right things, that we forget that what God really wants is a hear that is committed to Him. What we give Him altogether too frequently, is a heart committed to the checkboxes.

PRAYER
Lord, teach me to operate out of a heart that loves You and seeks You first. Far too often I assume that there is a formula that I must follow in order to be close to you and I end up doing the formula rather then seeking your face. Help me to be a man that seeks after you with all of my heart. Amen.