✨ Reflection ✨️

Mark 7:13–23

In Mark 7, Jesus confronts something that is still happening today.

He tells the religious leaders that they are canceling out the Word of God by clinging to tradition. They are majoring in rituals and minoring in transformation. They are honoring systems while neglecting substance.

Then He gathers the crowd and says something disruptive.

Nothing that goes into a person from the outside makes them unclean. It enters the stomach and passes through the body. It does not stain the soul.

And that is where the shift happens.

Because we focus on what goes in.

What we eat.

What we wear.

What we say publicly.

What prayer we prayed.

What church we attend.

We think salvation is sealed in a moment — and in one sense it is. The sinner’s prayer is real. Confession matters. Surrender matters.

But confession opens the door.

It does not renovate the heart overnight.

Then comes the part that stopped me cold.

He went on — It’s what comes out of a person that pollutes: obscenities, lusts, thefts, murders, adulteries, greed, depravity, deceptive dealings, carousing, mean looks, slander, arrogance, foolishness — all these are vomit from the heart. There is the source of your pollution.

Vomit.

Not weakness.

Not struggle.

Not personality.

Vomit.

Something that was inside.

Something that made you sick.

Something that could not stay hidden.

He was not condemning. He was diagnosing.

You can be saved and still have residue.

You can confess Christ and still carry pride.

Still carry denial.

Still carry the need to be right.

Still replay the courtroom in your mind.

And if it is still in there — it will come out.

That is the part of salvation that is often missed.

Salvation begins with surrender.

But sanctification is soul work.

H-E-A-R-T work.

It does not happen in a single altar call.

It does not always happen on a Sunday morning.

It often happens quietly — when something breaks inside you.

For me, it was the need to be right.

And when that broke, peace replaced it.

Because when the heart is being worked on, what comes out changes.

The goal is not behavior management.

It is heart transformation.

You must first identify who you are — a child of the Most High God.

Then you begin to take on His character.

And taking on His character requires surrendering what is still inside.

Not to earn love.

But because you already belong.

If pollution comes from the heart,

then healing must begin there too.

That is not condemnation.

That is invitation.

— LeYonce

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