Mark - Lesson 11...Continued from page 2

DAY THREE: Religion Produces Fleshly Fruit; Relation Godly Fruit

Please carefully read Mark 7:17-23 and answer the following questions.

1.  After this confrontation, Jesus and the disciples went into the house where the disciples asked Him what this meant.  Jesus rebukes them for their lack of comprehension of these things.  “Are you thus without understanding also?” (nkjv) or as the niv bluntly put it, “Are you so dull?”  As A.T. Robertson put it, “It was a discouraging moment for the great Teacher if his own chosen pupils (disciples) were still under the spell of the Pharisaic theological outlook. It was a riddle to them.”[ix] How did Jesus clarify for them what He meant (v. 18-20)?

2.  It isn’t the external things that defile us in God’s sight, Jesus said, but the internal state of our hearts that has defiled us, the sin nature we are all born with.  What do the following passages tell us about our natural heart?

Psalm 14:3

Isaiah 53:6; 59:1, 2; 64:6, 7

Jeremiah 17:9; Romans 3:10-12

3.  Jesus went on to define some of the resident evils we naturally have within us, thankfully not always manifested, but there nonetheless, which no amount of external religiosity will be able to purge.[x]  The word thoughts relates to discussion or debate, with an under-thought of suspicion or doubt of oneself or another. Evil is the Greek word kakos, bad in nature, base, wrong, or wicked. “The very sound of the word as it is pronounced, suggests the idea in the word ‘reprehensible.’”[xi] These evil thoughts or evil ideas are designs and attitudes that produce the vices Jesus described.[xii]  All these evils defile a person, and have their source from inside one’s heart. So Jesus took the focus of attention away from external rituals and placed it on the need for God to cleanse one’s evil heart.[xiii]  Read verses 21-23 and list in your own words some of these things in our wicked hearts. 

4.  In view of these things there are only two options for what they imply:  we are without hope, or we must have a spiritual heart transplant!  This is what Jesus meant when He spoke to Nicodemus in John 3 of being born again, the new covenant:

"But this is the new covenant I will make with the people of Israel on that day," says the LORD. "I will put my laws in their minds, and I will write them on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. And they will not need to teach their neighbors, nor will they need to teach their family, saying, 'You should know the LORD.' For everyone, from the least to the greatest, will already know me," says the LORD. "And I will forgive their wickedness and will never again remember their sins" (Jeremiah 31:33, 34, nlt).

He put His Spirit into our hearts as well, and through Him equips us to bear fruit of a godly nature, not these fruits of the fleshly, corrupt heart.  Read through Galatians 5:16-25, and list here some of the differences between the fruit of the flesh and that of the Spirit, and what we need to do to bear godly fruit.

Scripture Memory:  Try to fill in the missing words in the blanks below, by memory if at all possible, and then review the passage several times today.

For from within, out of the _______________ of men, _________________________ evil thoughts...__________ these ____________ things come from within and __________________ a _____________.   Mark 7:21a, 23 (nkjv)