[Note: This sermon expounds Mark 7:1–15 with the parallel in Matthew 15:1–11. Delivered 24 June 1979, Montreal. Part A focuses on the vertical dimension — the relationship to God; Part B will address the horizontal dimension of the fifth commandment.]
Some years ago a young nurse came to me and told me she desired to serve God as a missionary. I should have encouraged her and helped her find a way. Instead, I told her that the fifth commandment required her to stay and care for her parents. More than ten years passed, and when I next heard from her, she was married and had given up all thought of full-time service. I had used the word of God as a prohibition where God had never intended a prohibition, and I robbed that woman of her calling. I tell you this to illustrate the theme of this passage: how God's word becomes degraded when human tradition is placed above it, and how the results can be devastating.
The Lord Jesus here confronts the Pharisees and scribes, the religious leaders of Israel — the most religious people of their day. He does not congratulate them on their devotion. He quotes Isaiah: "This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men." And then he says: "You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men." This is not a minor rebuke — he is saying that their worship is worthless, empty, vain. They were doing more religious observance than almost anyone, and yet God says it counts for nothing.
The church today does exactly the same thing, almost entirely without realizing it. Consider the use of "thou" and "thee" in prayer. Many Christians insist that God must be addressed with the archaic second-person singular out of reverence, and those who pray "you" to God are sometimes criticized or even corrected. But the Greek New Testament makes no distinction between a polite form and a familiar form — there is simply the second-person pronoun, used equally for God and for other people throughout. The "thou/thee" usage is an English tradition, and it has been elevated above the plain fact of scripture to become a test of reverence. This is precisely what the Lord Jesus condemns: tradition defended against scripture.
The Mishnah, in Sanhedrin 11, paragraph 3, makes this explicit in Judaism: the words of a scribe are declared more authoritative than the words of the Torah. If you violate the law of Moses, you receive forty lashes; if you violate the words of a scribe, you are put to death. Today in some Reformed and Calvinist circles, Calvin's interpretations of scripture effectively carry more weight than the direct words of Jesus. People who follow Jesus' teaching rather than Calvin's formulation are viewed with suspicion. The tradition of men has again been placed above the commandment of God.
Seminary and Bible college training is another example. There is no instance in the New Testament of young men being sent out of the church community to an institution to learn how to serve in that community. The New Testament pattern is entirely the reverse: training happens within the church, under the living example of those already serving, in the midst of actual community life. Yet the church today treats a seminary degree as the basic qualification for ministry, while the lists of qualifications in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1 — which contain exclusively spiritual and character requirements — are effectively ignored. Pastoral job advertisements list degree requirements and years of experience, but not one of the qualities Paul specifies. Seminary graduates frequently emerge unable to conduct a wedding or a funeral, ignorant of how elders and deacons function, and untrained in the actual pastoral responsibilities of a New Testament church.
The Pharisees had reduced "be holy" to an elaborate system of washing pots and pans. They had reduced "keep the Sabbath holy" to the precise measurement of how many yards you could walk — 1,350 yards was permitted, 1,351 yards was sin. In every case, a living commandment of God was reduced to an external performance that could be measured, certified, and checked off. This is what human tradition always does to the word of God: it makes it manageable, predictable, and ultimately hollow. The process is always unconscious. Nobody decides to degrade God's word. It happens gradually, as convenience and habit and accumulated tradition quietly replace the living challenge of what God actually said.
# Man's Way or God's Way — Mark 7:1–15 (Matthew 15:1–11) (Part B) — "Personal Saviour" Versus Lordship; the Church as a New Testament Community
[Note: This is Part B of the sermon on Mark 7:1–15 (Matthew 15:1–11), continuing directly from Part A. Delivered 24 June 1979, Montreal.]
Perhaps the clearest example of the church degrading God's word in our generation is the phrase "accept Jesus as your personal Saviour." This phrase does not appear anywhere in the Bible. Its purpose, whether intended or not, has been to remove the Lordship of Christ from the gospel. The biblical message is always that Jesus is Lord — Lord over your life, Lord over your decisions, Lord over everything. To invite people to add Jesus as a personal Saviour, a kind of private religious option, while remaining the master of their own lives, is to offer something the New Testament does not offer and to withhold the challenge the New Testament always issues.
Hebrews 12:14 is plain: "Without holiness no one will see the Lord." Yet the evangelical church has come to treat holiness as optional — as a desirable extra for serious Christians, not a requirement for all. This is the same move the Pharisees made: reducing God's absolute requirement to something manageable and negotiable. The result is a church full of people who believe they are saved because they accepted Jesus as personal Saviour, while living in no meaningful submission to his Lordship. The judgment that awaits such a generation will be severe, because they had access to the whole Bible and chose to read it selectively.
The church today does not function as a New Testament church. In the New Testament, the church is a living community — people sharing their lives together, bearing one another's burdens, correcting one another, building one another up. What passes for church today is a twice-weekly meeting, where strangers sit in rows listening to one person, then disperse without knowing one another at all. A seminary functions like a secular university — lectures, examinations, degrees — with no experience of actual Christian community. This is why graduates are so often unprepared: they have been trained for an institution that does not correspond to anything in the New Testament.
We are only beginning here. I do not say this with pride — I say it honestly, because we have a long way to go. What we are attempting is to be a community that actually applies the word of God to every department of our common life: how we worship, how we make decisions, how we train those who will serve, how we care for one another, how we handle money and time and relationship. This is not our idea; it is simply what the New Testament describes. And it is far more demanding than anything a degree programme requires.
I want to say this clearly to everyone here: nobody is going to enter the kingdom of God on the basis of accepting Jesus as personal Saviour. The Lord Jesus does not offer himself on those terms, and he never has. He offers himself as Lord, and the only relationship he recognizes is the one where he is master and you are his disciple. Examine your own life in the light of God's word — not in the light of evangelical convention or church tradition, but in the light of what the Lord Jesus actually said. Your eternal life depends on what you find. Let us pray together.