Personal Piety (Mark 7:1-23)
The problem comes when we allow our desire for control over our lives to guide us instead of allowing God’s word, which tells us to love one another and pray for our enemies and feed the hungry and visit those in prison, to guide us. The next thing you know, we’ve taken actions that started out as merely convenient, or which supported our desires, and made them into rules to live by. Eventually those rules were codified and we began to remember them as coming straight from God’s lips.
Modern people didn’t start that fire. The problem of teaching human precepts as doctrines is an old problem – thousands of years old. That’s what was behind the argument in this passage from Mark.