Why Truth Feels Like an Attack

Pastor Pat titles the message with a question: what’s my real problem? He pictures a homeowner who keeps patching cracks in the wall, replacing separated tile, adjusting a door that won’t close and redoing a buckling floor, until someone tells him he doesn’t have a drywall problem or a tile problem. He has a foundation problem. Pat also recalls the Florida tower that collapsed in 2021 after years of reports about structural damage. You could walk through a beautiful lobby and never know the danger underneath.

We do the same with our faith. We rearrange furniture and blame other people, because as long as the problem is out there, we don’t have to look at what is in here. In Matthew 15, Jesus names the misdiagnosis: “The real problem is not what you’ve let in. It’s what’s already there.”

The Pharisees had built a fence of oral tradition around the 613 commandments of the law, so complex that people needed experts to understand it. Jesus uses the written law to confront what men had added, and calls ordinary people to listen: what goes into the mouth does not defile, but what comes out does. Pat notes that later, in Matthew 22, Jesus sums up the whole law in loving God and loving your neighbor. Truth brings clarity, not confusion.

Clarity also brings offense. The Pharisees are offended because Jesus has shaken the food laws, Sabbath laws and circumcision, the rules that told them who to eat with, how to order life and who belonged. Underneath is the oldest human problem, self-determination. Peter asks Jesus to explain, and Jesus answers, “Are you still so dull?” Pat recalls Mr. Beaver on Aslan in Narnia: he’s not safe, but he’s good. “His correction is a sign of his affection for you.”

Jesus then lists what comes out of the heart, which Pat points out is the back half of the Ten Commandments. The Pharisees managed sin with more rules. Our culture redefines sin and trusts its own desires. Jesus transforms the heart. Pat walks through anger, sexuality, greed and false testimony, setting the Pharisee’s answer and the culture’s answer beside what Jesus says.

The prophets saw it coming: Ezekiel’s heart of flesh in place of stone, and Jeremiah’s law written on the heart. Pat’s application is to read God’s word and let God’s word read you, and the service moves into communion, remembering the one who took on our sin. “We don’t preach a gospel of try harder. We preach a gospel of surrender more.”