Whose fault is it that the trash can next to your bedside table or office desk gets full every week and you have to carry a big bag to the curb? As annoying as it may be, it’s your trash! Maybe if we could all stop eating and buying things and living we could stop generating trash, but this isn’t about trash.

“Are you so dull?” he asked. “Don’t you see that nothing that enters a person from the outside can defile them? For it doesn’t go into their heart but into their stomach, and then out of the body.” (In saying this, Jesus declared all foods clean.)

He went on: “What comes out of a person is what defiles them. For it is from within, out of a person’s heart, that evil thoughts come—sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. All these evils come from inside and defile a person.”

Mark 17:18-23

People are often convinced that sin originates with the Devil and comes to rest in a person when they do wrong, like it’s dirt you get on you when you’re around bad stuff. Jesus taught otherwise. Sin is a pollution produced by impurity within us. We need rescuing from problems of our own making, not accidents that happen to us. Meditate on this. Sin comes from within.

Ethan Kirl