Dear Family at Christ Community,

I would imagine that many of us struggle with the temptation to control our own behavior or the behavior of others with our own rules and regulations that are stricter than God’s law. I would also imagine that we convince ourselves that our own rules and regulations serve the greater good because of our good intentions. Maybe we hope they will be more efficient and effective than, say, steadfast love, patience, longsuffering, forgiveness, mercy, or grace. A good dose of adjudicated law transforms the heart, right? Unfortunately (or fortunately), no, rules and regulations, especially the ones we create, don’t transform the heart from stone to flesh. The best that rules and regulations can do is expose what the true problem is: the wickedness of our hearts apart from Christ. They can’t bring about the transformation we truly need for eternal life.

Last Sunday, we saw from Mark 7:1-13 Jesus expose the hearts of the Pharisees. They created additional rules and regulations for their own benefit often to the detriment of others. Yes, they held people to their vows. But in doing so, they denied the greater law at work in love.

This Sunday, we will see from Mark 7:14-23 that the problem isn’t the insufficiency of God’s laws to govern us; the problem is the hardened arrogance of our hearts that can powerfully ignore all of that to our own destruction. A hardened heart requires the transformative power of a new covenant by God’s grace accomplished in and applied by Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit. James R. Edwards in The Gospel According to Mark succinctly declares it this way:

“Mark profiles Jesus as the one who, in contrast to the oral tradition, is the true revealer of God, for Jesus can produce the inner transformation that the law requires but cannot effect.”

The Lord’s Table will serve to remind us of the transformative power of the life, death, resurrection, ascension, and promised return of Jesus. It will also serve to nourish our hearts as we grow in the love of Christ for us and in the ability to more deeply love God and our neighbors. Please come hungry to taste and see that the Lord is good in love!

In Christ,
Cameron