Inside Out
If you were to characterize Christians or the church today what would you say? How would you sum it all up? If you are a Christian chances are that you would have a pretty favorable view of other Christians and of the church on the whole. It’s logical that you’d like your own demographic. You might have some reservations here and there, but it’s still a group that you affiliate with, so pretty good, right? A 2017 Pew Research Study proved as much showing that Christians gave themselves a score of over 82 out of 100. A very positive view of Christians and the church. No real surprise there. The church seems to do a decent enough job of pleasing its own constituents.
It gets more interesting when you look at the numbers for those outside of the church. When asked, their view of Christians and the church consistently came back as the lowest. Non-Christians do not have a very positive view of it. Atheists apparently had the lowest view giving Protestant Christians a score of 29 out of 100. The only other low score was the Protestant view of atheists, which was 33 out of 100...slightly improved from the abysmal score of 25 in 2014. Obviously, there is some tension there. Roman Catholics faired a little better, but still were relatively low.
While it’s somewhat amusing to hear the scores Christians and Atheists give each other it actually reveals a sad irony especially on the part of the Christians. In large part, the goal of the Christian church is to win over those who are not a part of it. There are a few different views of the purpose of the church, but most would agree that it is largely a mission-focused organization. In other words, it is supposed to be an outward focused group…for the purpose of loving those outside of it. But the numbers say otherwise. Just looking at the Pew study Christians look like an insular group, and one that has pretty judgmental and disparaging views of those who are not a part of it; and this perspective is shared by many non-Christians. Surprise, Surprise! A report by the Barna Group in 2007 revealed that 87% of non-Christians think Christianity is judgmental and 85% think it is hypocritical. So the target group of the church, of Christians, has a very negative view of it. They do not feel loved or cared for, rather they feel judged.
And this makes the present day church a lot like the conservative religious groups of Jesus’ day. In Mark 7:1-23 we see the Pharisees, who are the religious teachers in Israel at the time, getting very bent out of shape over the behavior of Jesus’ followers. They complain to Jesus that his followers were not properly washing their hands before eating. This was not the same as your mom or dad telling you to wash your hands before dinner. It was not a hygienic concern, rather the Pharisees were concerned about proper religious observance. In other words, they were good rule followers. In order to be pure and right in their eyes one had to follow the ritualistic rules and washing your hands was a part of that. But here were Jesus’ own followers eating with “defiled” hands. They may have even been clean, but they were not cleaned in the right way, following proper procedure, so they might as well have been filthy.
The Pharisees are just like us. We may not be concerned over the same things, but we share their overall point of view. They were focused on doing it right. They were focused on behavior, on acting correctly, being good because they thought that was the key to being accepted as good, by the people around them and ultimately by God. They basically thought that a person’s actions defined them. What you do on the outside determines who you are on the inside. An outside in approach. SO behavior was of utmost importance to them.
And this is nothing new to us. This is the way that all of us think now. We say things like, “You are what you eat.” Which really makes no sense at all, but it articulates the fact that we think everything works from the outside in. When you meet somebody new what is one of the first things you ask them? “So, what do you do?” What do you DO? We are concerned about actions, behavior, doing. Even if it is unwittingly we think that it is what we do that makes us who we are. Outside in. We don’t have to ask that. We could ask: what do you like? What are your interests? If you could choose between being a unicorn or a Pegasus, which one would you be? What are your deepest darkest fears? Things like that…just for example.
The answer is obviously Pegasus!
The point is that we all tend to fall into this way of thinking: outside in, doing defines our being. Aristotle is given the credit for developing this line of thinking a few millennia ago, but I don’t think it would have been that hard to come up with. He probably went to some Athenian cocktail party the night before and had to meet some new people and realized that everyone was asking the same question. So, what do you do? Ergo, outside in.
But then there’s Jesus. In the face of the Pharisees judging his followers, focusing on their outward actions, and making conclusions about their goodness or lack there of, Jesus holds up a completely different viewpoint. He takes the focus off of the outward actions, off of a person’s behavior and puts it completely on the heart. He quotes Isaiah, which the Pharisees would have known well being the religious teachers, and tells them that they are the ones that put on the good show outwardly honoring God with their lips, but their hearts are far from God. And then he explains to the crowd saying, “Hear me, all of you, and understand: There is nothing outside a person that by going into him can defile him, but the things that come out of a person are what defile him” (vv. 14-16).
He turns everything on its head and proclaims that the outside does not inform the inside, rather the inside informs the outside. It is the state of your heart that matters. Your actions simply pour out of your heart. The classic example of this is agricultural. The root of a tree determines the fruit, not the other way around. An apple tree produces apples. It will always produce apples. You can’t graft on orange onto the tree and expect that it will turn the tree into an orange tree. It doesn’t work. Orange trees produce oranges and apple tress produce apples. The root produces the fruit. The inside determines the outside.
So why does this matter? Why is Jesus so bent out of shape about this? The reason is because the viewpoint that it all works from the outside in, that people’s actions determine who they are, does not actually address the true problem for all of us. That viewpoint simply says, Oh, you have a problem? Then change your behavior and everything will be fine. Just behave and things will be better for you. But think about your real problems. Think about the things that really bother you and think about what actually helps you in those situations. For example, I have had issues with severe anxiety attacks in my life, and I once had a doctor say to me, “You just need to calm down. Relax.” And I was like, “Wait, I never thought of that…I should just calm down. No @&#* I need to calm down! Do you think I would be here talking to you if I could just change my behavior and calm down?!” Of course I wouldn’t have been there. I needed something different from behavioral modification.
Or think of when your heart was broken by someone. Would it be helpful to you to have someone say to you, “Get over it. Just stop feeling bad about it. Stop feeling sad about it.” No. Telling people just to change their behavior does not fix the heart issue. It does not fix the deeper issue in us because it doesn’t work that way. Outside in does not work.
Jesus goes right to the core of it and says, “For from within, out of the heart of people, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.” He lists the real problems of society. He doesn’t give a crap about how people wash their hands. He cares about the things that really cause pain and destruction in our world and he says that all of those come out of our hearts. We are broken on a heart level, and no amount of behavior modification can solve it.
And if you have ever really been hurt by someone or if you have ever really hurt someone else you already know this. You already know that Jesus is right. There is something fundamentally broken with us on a core level, and it needs to be addressed directly not given some bandaid of an answer about behaving differently. Any counselor that is worth their salt knows this. They don’t just sit there and give you a list of ways to behave properly. The truth is most of the time you already know how you would like things to go, but they are not going that way. That’s why you go to counseling. You need someone who is going to help you get to the core issues…the pain deep inside that is driving the bus. The pain that manifests itself in the serial bad relationships, or the porn addiction, or the eating disorder, or the anxiety, or the depression, or the drug use, or the rampant people-pleasing. You need a heart level solution. We all do. We need new hearts. And counseling, while wonderful and I think absolutely vital in life, can’t even go that far.
BUT! that is exactly what Jesus came to do. That’s why he came…to deal with our broken hearts. Hearts that don’t love the way that they should. He came to give us a heart transplant and work on us from the inside out, to cleanse us from the things that really defile us: our self-centeredness. This is the truth of Christianity. It is not about outward actions, but we so often think it is, and we so often try to make it about that. This is why the prevailing view of Christians is that they are judgmental. People feel judged all the time by Christians because we only focus on behaviors, but the truth is that the behaviors are simply symptoms of pain.
Jesus teaches us that none of us have any room to judge each other because we are all in the same boat. We all have broken hearts. That knowledge changes everything. Instead of looking at each other with judgmental eyes expecting each other to simply change our behaviors and be better people, we can look at each other with compassion knowing that we are all hurting in some way or another. We can approach each other with understanding and instead of demanding outward improvement we can come together to where our real heart problems find their answer. We can come to Jesus and his cross where he promises to give us new hearts, forgiven hearts, hearts that are made of flesh and not stone.
When life actually works from the inside out, only one thing works in our lives and that’s grace. The radical love and grace of God for you and me in Jesus Christ. He came to set us free from judgment. He came to forgive us for all of those evil things that pour out of our broken hearts and give us a new beginning from the inside out. His radical grace for you means you are forgiven, you are accepted, and you are loved. That is who you are in Jesus, and that is what Christianity is truly about.
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