{"id":5260,"date":"2014-04-20T00:05:24","date_gmt":"2014-04-20T07:05:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/?p=5260"},"modified":"2014-04-19T22:25:13","modified_gmt":"2014-04-20T05:25:13","slug":"no-one-made-you-do-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/2014\/04\/20\/no-one-made-you-do-it\/","title":{"rendered":"No One Made You Do It"},"content":{"rendered":"

Again Jesus called the crowd to him and said, \u201cListen to me, everyone, and understand this. Nothing outside a man can make him \u2018unclean\u2019 by going into him. Rather, it is what comes out of a man that makes him \u2018unclean.\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n

After he had left the crowd and entered the house, his disciples asked him about this parable. \u201cAre you so dull?\u201d he asked. \u201cDon\u2019t you see that nothing that enters a man from the outside can make him \u2018unclean\u2019? For it doesn\u2019t go into his heart but into his stomach, and then out of his body.\u201d (In saying this, Jesus declared all foods \u201cclean.\u201d) <\/p>\n

He went on: \u201cWhat comes out of a man is what makes him \u2018unclean.\u2019 For from within, out of men\u2019s hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. All these evils come from inside and make a man \u2018unclean.\u2019 \u201d (Mark 7:14\u201323)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\tWhenever the comedian Flip Wilson\u2019s character Geraldine was caught misbehaving, he would shout, \u201cthe devil made me do it!\u201d Jesus response to such a claim would be, \u201cno he didn\u2019t.\u201d <\/p>\n

\tWe human beings are quick to find excuses for what we do wrong. We want to blame our parenting, the television, the web, and the friends we hang out with. We\u2019ll blame our circumstances. But the reality is, what comes in from the outside is not what makes us do wrong. It\u2019s what comes from inside of us. Not all people with bad backgrounds, who play violent video games, become criminals. Two people may be raised in the same circumstances, but while one becomes a criminal, the other becomes a pastor. Our appetites are what drive us, not what we choose to satisfy those appetites. If we weren\u2019t already hungry, we wouldn\u2019t try to eat. If we didn\u2019t hate, we wouldn\u2019t gossip. Porn doesn’t fill people with lust. Lust makes people look at porn. The way that woman looked didn’t make you think those thoughts. You had those thoughts and that’s what made you look at her like that.<\/p>\n

\tJesus used food to illustrate that what comes into us from the outside doesn\u2019t pollute us. Mark commented that Jesus\u2019 words prefigured what would become explicit later on: the dietary regulations of the Old Testament no longer mattered, since food didn\u2019t actually cause uncleanness. Instead, it was only what came out of people that was unclean.<\/p>\n

\tJesus warned his hearers, as he warns us, that we have no one and nothing to blame for our misdeeds but us. The devil didn\u2019t make us do it. Violent games didn’t make us do it. TV didn’t make us do it. We<\/em> made us do it. And we did it simply because we wanted to. You can only be tempted by what you already want.<\/p>\n

Send to Kindle<\/span><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Again Jesus called the crowd to him and said, \u201cListen to me, everyone, and understand this. Nothing outside a man can make him \u2018unclean\u2019 by going into him. Rather, it is what comes out of a man that makes him … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_s2mail":"yes"},"categories":[18,17,16],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5260"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5260"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5260\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5262,"href":"https:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5260\/revisions\/5262"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5260"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5260"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5260"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}