January 21,2025

Dear Church Family, 

It was a pleasure meeting with you yesterday, those of you who risked your lives to come to Church. I’m only joking. I laugh at how scared of snow folks are down in our area. In the Adirondacks, the roads were cleared much better and snow was more of a normal occurrence. Vehicles also didn’t last as long because of the salting. Even a Toyota would rust out before the engine wore out.

That reminds me of our sermon conversation from yesterday on ‘the heart of the issue’ from Mark 7. Our problem is not a putrid environment or an exterior problem, but we have an internal problem, a problem of the heart with sin in it. 

In Mark 7:21-23, Jesus makes a very clear statement on His anthropology, the study of man: man is not good. In fact, at the core of our being, people are evil. 

When you look at the list of sins that Jesus says are born from within man, Jesus describes all of them as “evil” in v23: “All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.” That’s remarkable to me because we like to sugar coat certain kinds of sins like “pride and coveting, slander, foolishness and even deceit” which are all on Christ’s list of despicable sins that come out of the human heart. 

We sugar coat these sins by saying things like, “well everybody is a little proud at times” or “oh, I didn’t mean to say that, it slipped out of my mouth.” 

We tend not to view some of the items on this list as “evil,” but Christ does and let Him be the Judge. Let Him be the Heart Doctor Who sees into the heart of every human being and evaluates us! (Heb. 4:12-13). The last thing that we should do as Christians is try to minimize the list or water down the potency of the ‘evil’ that Jesus defines every one of those sins as because it offends it (As Christians, that evil list should bless us because Christ was cursed for us, and we’re so thrilled that God has given us a new heart in Christ and put to death our old evil heart!). 

But the shocking part of that evil list is how it points to humanity as evil since the human heart describes who a person truly is. Isn’t it surprising how Jesus blames humanity for evil and not Satan? (of course, he has a big part in it, but he doesn’t take away our responsibility). 

Yet many people would like to insist that at the core of humanity, we are good. God says the opposite (Jer. 17:9, Rom. 3:10-12, Luke 18:19).

And for that reason, the word “deceit” on Christ’s list of human attributes could be one of greatest that measures the state of the human heart most precisely because people are so deceived that they are basically ‘good.’ 

I have experienced this in talking to people over and over again: they really don’t feel like or believe that they are bad people. And this experience only validates what God says about our heart: “It’s deceitful and sick above all, who can know it?” (Jer. 17:9). And the hallmark of the human heart’s deceitfulness is to continue to insist that we are good people at the core even though the world is super messed up. People blame everything else or anybody other than themselves. 

My wife has experienced this human refusal to believe that we are bad as she has worked in psych wards for sign language interpreting many times. And the counseling advice that psychologists and counselors give those whose lives are in disarray and those who have committed all kinds of abominable sins, (murder, rape, etc…) is by assuring them of how good they are but how victimized they’ve been from their bad background, a bad environment, ect… And unfortunately, when somebody is not willing to admit the immoral sickness of their heart, there will be no possibility of healing, because sick people go to doctors for healing, and sinful people will go to Jesus for cleansing. 

There is a reason that in John 16:8 Jesus says the Holy Spirit will convict the world of righteousness. Why would the world need convicted of righteousness? (wouldn’t it be sin?) Because they think that they’re righteous and good when they’re not. It is the Holy Spirit’s role to shine the light of truth into a person’s dark heart and dark mind to make them aware of how sick and not good (evil) their heart truly is. It takes the Holy Spirit for us as Christians to look at Christ’s list in Mark 7:21-22 and say, “amen, I agree, God, that describes my heart apart from You!” 

I can’t emphasize this enough, we as a Church, if we are going to have a very basic biblical worldview, must see humanity (including ourselves) as folks who are not good at the core, and in fact, we’re together responsible for the evil in the world because we’ve all contributed some of it. 


As Christians, the Gospel will make a whole lot of sense if we understand that at the core we are evil because look at what kind of death Jesus went through for our sins! He didn’t just get slapped on the hand for our sins because our sins deserve a far greater punishment than that. He was put to death as a terrible criminal because that’s what our hearts have produced, death penalty level sins, the sins of Mark 7:21-22.

Now as Christians, I told us yesterday that although that evil list does not depict the new heart that God has given to us in Christ through the Holy Spirit (Ez. 36:25-27) and that God does not look at us through that old wicked heart, nevertheless, we still have that old wretched heart in us capable of producing that terrible list of sins. 

If I can put it this way, our sin is covered (atoned for) but it has not disappeared yet or been destroyed (Col. 3:5!). That’s the tension that we live in today, and it should break your new heart and keep you humble. 

Considering that we as Christians can still produce this old hearted list of sins (experience would say that this is true), how do we conquer those temptations? I didn’t have much time to develop the way that we fight against our old nature (Eph. 4:22-24) yesterday, but I want to touch on it here because it’s vitally important. 

  1. Mind over feelings.
    1. Ephesians 4:22-24 says that we are to ‘put off our old self which is corrupt through deceitful desires.’ That means that sin often comes through impulsive feelings and thoughtless actions. However, there are good desires that come with the new heart that God has given us. So when you hear, “sin comes through what you feel is right or good” when in fact it’s not, that does not mean that as Christians we don’t have good feelings too that would lead us to do what’s good and right. Feelings are not our enemy, but they need to stand in their right place. When the Christian sins, we put our subjective feelings above what is objectively true, and that’s why Paul moves onto describe how we enact our new heart/new self in vv23-24: 
  1. ‘to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and put on the new self created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.’ This means that as opposed to following what feels right and pleasurable (which could or could not be true), the best & most definitive way to fight against our old wicked heart is by using our mind to listen to what God tells us is good. Therefore, as Christians, if we are going to be living with the new heart that God intended and fight off that old heart that still sends us desires for wrong doing, we need to think; we need to make a conscious and intentional effort to think through the Word of God and train our minds to think as God does. 
  1. This leads me to another way we fight against our old evil heart tendencies. 
  1. Scripture Memory:
  2. Psalm 119:9 says, “how can a young man keep his way pure? By guarding it according to your Word.” 
  1. Psalm 119:11 says “I have stored up your word in my heart, that I might not sin against You.” 
  1. It’s true that God’s Word is a weapon against our sin (Eph. 6:17). In Genesis 3, when Adam and Eve succumbed to temptation, they listened to the serpents’ words that asked, “Did God actually say?” Sin originated as an attack against God’s Word. 
  1. But in Matthew 4, Jesus, the better and perfect second Adam conquered the devil’s temptation by quoting Scripture back to Satan (within it’s proper context) 3 times. Jesus didn’t have a Bible in hand to quote that Scripture; He had it stored in His heart and studied with His mind so that He could quote Scripture back to Satan accurately which shut down his temptations. 
  1. So if Jesus conquered His greatest test of temptation with Scripture memory, how much more us! 
  1. Knowing about the Word of God is not enough to conquer sin temptation, memorizing it in our hearts is. And this is harder for some than others, but it must be an effort that we make “so that we may not sin against You.” 
  1. Scripture memory should always be directed towards our relationship with God, not just a spiritual discipline to cross off our list or achieve. 
  1. This is such a basic and simple discipline that is helpful for warding off our old heart tendencies, and yet it must be one of the most neglected exercises for American Christians. Why? I suspect that we are too busy, too distracted, or perhaps lazy.
  1. Next, we need to 
  2. Pray.
  3. In Ephesians 6:18, we’re told to be praying at all times in the Spirit for the saints.
    1. Prayer thwarts our old hearts nature. I have made the habit of constantly praying the Lord’s prayer from Matt. 6, especially the last line which says, “lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil.” I pray that constantly because I know that evil list of Mark 7 still applies to me and I feel it and I hate it. Therefore I pray that God would deliver me constantly from that potential. We all should be praying this and we should be praying this for all. 
  1. We need to be praying “deliver US from evil” as it’s plural in Matthew 6 and it’s a plural prayer in Ephesians 6 too, which means that we can fight off our old evil tendencies by:
  1. Protecting one-another
  2. To put to death the spiritually evil list of Mark 7 in our hearts (Col. 3:5), we must do it together.
  1. 1 John 5:18 says “We know that everyone who has been born of God does not keep on sinning, but he who was born of God protects him, and the evil one does not touch him.” 
  1. John emphasizes how evil lies outside of us too, while Jesus in Mark 7 emphasizes evil from within us. In both cases, we need protected by fellow Christians. That’s the way that we will not keep on sinning (giving into the evil list of Mark 7). 
  1. Individual Bible memorization or prayer is not enough. We need local Church accountability and close relationships that will help us stop sinning. We need to share our struggles with individuals in the Christian community. We need to be praying for other people’s hearts in our Church who have temptations. We are the Body of Christ and all of us are responsible for one-another because if one member sins in the Body, we all feel it just like any Body. Their old evil heart that comes out can spread like cancer or gangrene within the Body of Christ. 
  1. Therefore, we all have an obligation to be praying for and guarding each-other’s old evil desires. 
  1. To summarize that, listen to what Hebrews 3:12-13 tells US: 
  1. “Take care, brothers, lest there by in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God. But exhort one-another every day, as long as it is called ‘today,’ that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.’ 
  1. Those words from God have shaped the way that I’ve viewed myself and the Church since my late teen years. It’s a huge verse for helping us understand the danger that all of us are to ourselves because of Christ’s teaching on mankind’s heart, (Mark 7:21-22), and we will be a risk to ourselves until the day that Jesus takes us to heaven! 

That is not exhaustive advice on how to put to death our old evil hearts of Mark 7, but I hope and pray that we as a Church would take the list seriously, knowing that it still applies to us. 


While it applies to us, it does not identify us! We are identified with Christ and Him crucified for that evil list and risen from the dead! 

May our Church live as resurrected and renewed Christians, not focused on our old self but rejoicing in our new identity in Christ! We are more saints than sinners because we are in Christ! 

Praise the Lord! 

With love in Christ, 

Aaron

From Pastor Aaron

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