Clean the Inside

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Matthew 23:25-26 "'Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. Blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and dish, and then the outside also will be clean.'"

Think

Everybody has that water bottle.

The outside is fine. You wipe it off. It has stickers on it. It looks completely normal sitting on your desk. And you have not actually washed the inside of it since roughly the first week of school, and you know it, and you have decided not to think about it.

Then one day you unscrew the lid and look down into it in good lighting and go, oh.

Jesus picks up that image and hands it to the most religious people of his day.

“You clean the outside of the cup,” he says. “Inside it is full of greed and self-indulgence.”

These were not lazy people. That is what makes this sting. The Pharisees were the most disciplined, most committed, most impressive religious people in the country. If holiness were a competition of visible effort, they win it every year without trying. Jesus is not upset that they did too little. He is upset that all of it was on the outside.

And then he gives the order, which is the most important part of the verse. “First clean the inside, and then the outside also will be clean.”

Inside first. Then the outside takes care of itself.

We almost always run it the other direction. We work on behavior and hope the heart catches up. Stop doing that thing. Delete that app. Watch your mouth. Be at church more.

None of that is bad. But if the inside never changes, all you have built is a cleaner outside of the cup, and you will exhaust yourself maintaining it.

Here is what that looks like in real life for a student.

You can worship on Wednesday with your hands up and live completely differently on Thursday, and both can be honest expressions of the same divided person.

You can know every right answer in small group and have a totally different life running on your phone at eleven at night.

You can be the friend everybody calls when they are struggling and have nobody you tell anything to.

You can be at church every time the doors open and still be the loudest voice in the group chat when it turns cruel.

None of that makes you a fake. It makes you a normal person with an unwashed inside, which is exactly who Jesus is talking to. Notice he does not tell them to stop cleaning the outside. He tells them to start somewhere else.

Revival does not just change how loudly you worship. It changes how you live when nobody is watching.

So how does the inside actually get clean? Not by scrubbing. You cannot reach in there. That is the point. The blood of Jesus purifies. Your job is to bring the cup and stop pretending the inside is fine.

That means being specific with God about the inside things and not just the outside things. Not just, “God, forgive me for what I said,” but, “God, why do I need to be the funniest person in the room so badly?” Not just, “God, I looked at something I should not have,“ but, “God, what am I actually going for when I go looking?”

Those are the questions about the inside of the cup. They are more uncomfortable and they are where change actually starts.

Unscrew the lid today. Look in there with him. He is not disgusted. He has been waiting for you to stop wiping the outside.

Apply

Ask the inside question – Take one behavior you keep trying to fix and ask God the why question underneath it. Write down what comes up and bring that to him instead of just promising to do better.

Pray

Jesus, I have been working hard on the outside of the cup and avoiding the inside. Show me what is actually in there. I cannot clean it and I am not going to pretend I can. Wash me on the inside and let the outside follow. In Jesus’ name. Amen.