Emphasis Preaching Journal

It is far too easy to become caught up in complex theological argument and miss the forest for the trees. Jesus could and did argue as a Pharisee among the Pharisees. But as he argued, Jesus kept pulling his hearers away from the minutiae of ritual purification, of cups and pots and vessels of bronze, and on to a different level altogether. He pushed them to understand that all their washing, all their dietary laws, all their righteous acts could not clean up a toxic-waste dump of the spirit within a person's life.