Pastor Nick Gatzke

You have probably relied on the five-second rule especially if you have kids. Food hits the floor, you scoop it up fast, and tell yourself no harm done. But in 2016, a Rutgers food microbiologist named Donald Schaffner put this “rule” to the test. He examined four surfaces, four foods, four contact times, and 2,560 measurements—and discovered that not one piece of fallen food escaped contamination. Bacteria, he concluded, contaminate instantly on contact.

Most of us carry a private version of the five-second rule for our souls. We wager that if we move fast enough, behave decently enough, and stay consistent enough, the sin we come in contact with will not stick to us. But Mark 7 is where Jesus takes this rule apart.

Rules that Look Like Righteousness

The trouble starts with unwashed hands. The Pharisees and scribes notice that Jesus’s disciples are eating without the ceremonial washing and press him, “Why do your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?” (Mark 7:5).

While the Old Testament required priests to wash, by Jesus’s day the oral traditions collected in the Mishnah had extended that requirement to anyone wanting to be thought devout. They added prescribed washings for cups, pots, and dining couches.

Jesus answers by quoting Isaiah, “This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me” (Mark 7:6). Then he calls them hypocrites. The word means a pretender, like an actor swapping masks on a stage. But no one pretends his way past God. As evidence, Jesus points to “corban,” a tradition by which a man could claim to dedicate property to God in order to set aside that property and refuse to use it to support his aging parents. Corban was hypocrisy. It used God’s name as a cover for breaking the fifth commandment.

What Rules Cannot Reach

Nothing chokes a walk with God faster than legalism. But outward action is easier to measure, so it is where we often go to work. We create rules, guidelines, and benchmarks to demonstrate our holiness. If we live inside a rigid system, over time our man-made rules will distort our view of righteousness. The same instinct shows up in people who read the Bible faithfully with no intention of actually obeying it. Sooner or later the text gets bent to fit the life.

There is a structural problem with justifying yourself from the outside. It distorts people. There is an old story about Hans the tailor, whose reputation drew a wealthy customer for a custom suit. The finished jacket had one sleeve twisted one way and one the other, one shoulder bulging and one caved in—and the man wrenched himself into it anyway. As the wealthy man stood, arms akimbo, other people admired him marveling that Hans the tailor could fit a suit so well to such a deformed body.

Man made rules do not purify the heart. Instead, they cause us to contort ourselves in such a way that we appear “holy” to other distorted people.

Inside Out

In response to the accusations made by the Pharisees and the scribes, Jesus says the thing that dismantles the system. “There is nothing outside a person that by going into him can defile him, but the things that come out of a person are what defile him” (Mark 7:15). With one sentence he declares all foods clean, opens the way for Gentiles to be clean, and drives a dagger through the oral tradition. Then Jesus goes deeper with his disciples saying plainly, that food passes through the stomach and is expelled, never touching the heart. What defiles comes from within: “evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness” (Mark 7:21–22).

Our central problem is not that we commit sins but that we are infected with sin at the core. Why is sexual sin such a battle? Because our desires about sex are disordered rather than godly. Why do we covet? Because we want what we cannot have and think we deserve it. Jeremiah described the heart as “deceitful above all things, and desperately sick” (Jeremiah 17:9). That explains why many sincere Christians are bewildered by the same moral failures that keep returning no matter how often they resolve to do better. If we simply treat the symptoms and leave the disease, the symptoms come back. Paul puts it bluntly: before Christ you were a slave to sin, and slaves do what their master requires.

A New Heart, Not a Better System

If the heart is the cause, the heart is what must be addressed, and that is exactly what Jesus came to do. “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21). So the useful question is not how your behavior is doing. It is how your heart is doing, and what the sins you keep returning to reveal about the cleanliness of your heart.

When you sin, dig underneath the surface and go after the root: God, forgive my materialism—in my heart I am hunting for fulfillment where you never placed it. When the heart changes, the behavior follows. And know that legalism always breeds hypocrisy. If you believe your rule-keeping makes you pure, you will become a pretender. But if Christ’s righteousness is credited to you and his Spirit is remaking you from within, you will find what legalism can never manufacture—joy in growing obedience.

There is no five-second rule for the soul—no amount of speed or self-discipline that can outrun what has already touched us at the core. The gospel does something science cannot: it decontaminates. Christ doesn’t just catch the fall in time. He makes the heart clean. Revelation pictures the end of the story: a bride clothed “with fine linen, bright and pure” (Revelation 19:8). This kind of purity will come from a new heart.

“A Word From Pastor Nick” is based on Pastor Nick Gatzke’s Bible teaching on A BETTER WORD.