Hey, this is Pastor John Ryan Cantu from PNEUMA Church in Houston, Texas.

Thank you for listening to the message today.

I hope that it blesses you and all those that you share it with.

God bless you.

And we are going to go to the, to the, to the gospel of Mark.

Anybody excited to be in the house of God this morning?

Amen.

Praise the Lord.

Praise God.

Mark seven.

We're going to read a little bit.

We're going to read one through 24.

We'll skip down a little bit.

We won't read the whole thing, but if you have it, give me a, an amen, amen.

My wife couldn't be here today.

She was, um, we're going out of town tomorrow and she was giving a deadline by her boss and deadlines today.

And so she's, um, she's running around like crazy.

Um, so just be in prayer for her as well as us as we travel tomorrow, um, to, to Florida and pray for my skin.

Cause I have very sensitive skin.

Amen.

Amen.

Mark seven one.

It says this, this is now when the Pharisees gathered to him with some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem.

They saw that some of his disciples ate with hands that were defiled.

That is unwashed for the Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they wash their hands properly, holding to the tradition of the elders.

And when they came from the marketplace, they do not eat unless they wash.

And there are many other traditions that they observe, such as the washing of cups and pots and copper vessels and dining couches.

And the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, why do your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?

And he said to them, well, did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites as it is written, this people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.

In vain do they worship me teaching as doctrines, the commandments of men.

You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men.

And he said to them, you have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition.

And he called to the people again and said to them, hear me, all of you and understand 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 defiles him.

And when he had entered the house and left the people, his disciples asked him about the parable.

And he said to them, then are you also without understanding?

Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from the outside cannot defile him since it enters not his heart, but his stomach and is expelled?

Thus he declared all foods clean.

And he said, what comes out of a person is what defiles him for from within out of the heart of man come evil thoughts, sexual morality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, and foolishness.

All these evil things come from within and they defile a person.

Amen.

Let's pray.

Heavenly Father, we thank you for your word, my God, that you've spoken over your servant, Lord.

I just pray, Holy Spirit, that you would be on my lips this morning, Father God, and that you would also be in our hearts and our minds.

Father God, I pray against any distractions, Father God, and I pray, Lord, that we would just be attentive to your word, Father God, in Jesus' name, amen.

Amen.

You can be seated.

Amen.

The title of my sermon this morning is Private Spaces, Private Spaces.

And the sermon was inspired by a conversation that I had earlier this week with a brother and a friend.

And I'll get to that in a little bit.

But also, kind of just the recent failings of some, quote-unquote, high-profile pastors, which is never really a thing that I like to talk about.

You know, there's been many, many, many pastoral failings from well-known pastors and ministers over the years.

And I just, it's never something that I want to, you know, talk about from the pulpit.

It seems like a lot of that is going on anyways on social media.

And I'm not really sure it ever really does any good to dwell and analyze someone's moral failings from a public platform.

But it happens so often, whether it happens in private or public, to warrant some general thoughts on it.

Amen.

So I'm going to talk a little bit about this.

Because whenever a well-known Christian leader falls into sin, it seems to shake the church, right?

I kind of think of it like an old building in decay.

And whenever there's like a storm and high winds, something falls, something breaks, and it happens over and over again until it starts to affect the integrity of the whole building.

That's not what happens to the church, because the church is founded on the rock that is Christ and the church is resilient.

But that is how I think about it.

Amen, sister.

She's good.

She's good.

She's got the joy of the Lord.

She loves Jesus.

And you know what?

So people looking from the outside in, that's really where it hurts, right?

Because that's just another reason for people to not trust the church.

It's another reason for people to not trust leaders, Christian ministers, pastors.

It's another reason for them to call Christians hypocrites.

Because all of these high-profile pastors are preaching Sunday after Sunday, and they amass a huge following, and their preachings seem to hit, and people are attracted to them.

But then they fall in a really, really bad way.

And it's sad, and I wish more Christians in these positions would just stop falling into sin and have more accountability and better accountability, and that the church's reputation would truly be spotless.

But there's nothing we can do about the past, right?

What we can do is prepare us for the future by guarding our hearts, by guarding our testimonies, by guarding our eyes and our ears.

I heard a preacher recently say, and I want you to get this, because this is a good quote.

I wish I would have thought about it.

But he said, we need to stop chasing God's anointing of our public ministry and pursue God's approval of our private life.

I'm going to say it one more time, just in case you didn't get it.

We need to stop chasing God's anointing of public ministry and pursue God's approval of our private life.

Because I'll tell you this, everybody wants to be anointed and appointed for public ministry.

Everybody.

God, use me.

God, take me.

God, I'll do whatever you want me to do.

I'll say whatever you want me to say.

I'll go wherever you want me to go.

It's all about what you want him to do with you in public.

How many of us are truly praying, Lord, approve me in private where no one sees me.

Don't just smile down upon me when I'm ministering to your people and I'm preaching to your people and I'm counseling people.

I want you to look down on me with joy when I'm sitting in my living room with my family and I'm ministering to them behind closed doors.

How many of us are actually praying those things?

This isn't just for ministers, this is for the whole body.

If we don't designate private spaces for the Lord where we can pray, where no one hears us, no one sees us, where we can minister to the Lord and worship.

I know we have some awesome worship leaders and it doesn't matter if no one else is around to hear your runs.

I'll be honest with you, man.

Sometimes I'm at home in my living room, my piano and the acoustics are just right and I do like a killer run and I'm like, man, I wish people were here to listen to it.

But it doesn't matter because my audience is of one.

My worship is to God.

It doesn't matter who's around to hear or to see it.

We need to be able to honor him and serve him without the applause of other people.

If God is not behind closed doors, you know who will be?

The enemy.

The devil will be.

If God is not in your private spaces, the enemy will be because the devil is no respecter of your alone time.

He don't care if you need me time.

He doesn't care.

My wife is very good about letting me have some me time.

My kids, not so much, but I appreciate when I have the house to myself, Melissa will text me and she'll be like, you just live in your best lives, aren't you?

And I'm like, yeah, girl, I am.

Stay out as long as you want.

I like it.

I love me time.

I love going to have lunch by myself.

I don't need anybody with me.

I want just me time.

But the devil doesn't respect that.

He doesn't care.

So the devil will break in and he will tempt you and he will do everything that he can to make you fall into sin and he doesn't care what you do in public.

He doesn't care how well you preach, how well you teach, how well you minister to others because if he has you in private, he has you.

We have to create private spaces for the Lord.

We have to.

And this is so important.

Like man, our reputation rests on it and it's hard to do.

It's harder than doing it in public because worship, you know, you come into the house of God.

Worship is contagious.

When you're in a room with other people, man, worship night, Wednesday night, amazing, beautiful.

If you don't come to those, I say it every time, if you don't come to those, but you got to come to those and worship is contagious because one person's worshiping and one person's being ministered to by the Lord and it's just contagious.

It's easy to add your voice to the amen when everybody else is saying amen.

It's easy to serve when everybody else is serving because you don't want to be the only one that's not serving.

It's easy to do these things, but when you're alone, when for just a moment, the only accountability you have is the Holy Spirit.

It's not always easy in those moments to kneel down and pray.

It's not always easy to give God a moment of temptation when no one else is looking.

It's not always easy to worship when there's no band playing in front of you asking you to lift up your hands, but I'm challenging you all to create private spaces for the Lord if you don't already have them.

We need to be more concerned with what we show God in private than what we show people in public.

We have to be, but in our culture, it's the other way around.

This is why we get so dressed up on Sundays.

This is why we come so prepared and so polished sometimes because we care more about what people see in public than what God sees in private, and what God sees in private is the real you, and so when you come out in public, God knows it's fake and you're a fraud.

We need to be more concerned with what we show God in private, and I think this is what becomes challenging for many ministers, especially those with big platforms.

The pressure to perform for people becomes greater than their desire to give God their all, and so somewhere along the way, they neglect their private life to make sure their public life looks good.

People don't generally sin in public.

We don't sin in public.

As far as I'm concerned, all y'all are perfect.

We don't sin in public.

It happens when you're alone or with a handful of people who are down to sin with you.

It happens when there's not a voice of God or when the voice of God is being suppressed, and then we go out into the public spaces and we shut the door behind us and we make sure that it's locked so that no one really sees what's going on in those private spaces so that they'll never know how we treat our family.

They'll never know what we allow into our homes.

They'll never know what we're watching on TV.

As long as we can look good in public, they may never even ask about what goes on in private.

We need to invite the Holy Spirit into our most private spaces because the devil doesn't need an invitation.

He doesn't wait for an invitation.

He is a thief.

He's a liar.

He's a wolf, and he will break in and he will attack when the good shepherd is not leading you.

I'm not saying that the men who fell into sin, like many of these recent pastors, I'm not suggesting that they had no prayer life.

I don't believe they were habitual sinners, at least not all of them.

I'm willing to bet that many of them were spiritually mature, but they had a moment where they shut God out of their private space.

All the enemy needs is an inch, that's it, to cause destruction.

I had thought to call this sermon, What's in Your Heart?

Because Jesus here is reaffirming the principle of the heart.

What does God say?

He said, man looks at what's on the outside, God looks at the heart, right?

Even though we know this, we all know this, right?

We all know the scripture.

Even though we know this, we are still led by what we see on the outside.

But what's in your heart, that's what's true.

That's what God looks at.

What comes out of the heart, that's what defiles a person, happens from the inside out rather than the outside in.

And so many times we try to fix problems from the outside when the real problem is on the inside.

And so now the sermon is, I'm going to take it to the other extreme, okay, you still with me?

I had a conversation with a brother this week, and we were talking about worldliness, and you know, how worldliness has kind of made its way into the church in some ways.

And then it led to the question of, what do you think about blank?

If you've ever had a Christian conversation before, you've probably been asked that question, or you've asked that question.

What do you think about secular music?

What do you think about drinking wine?

What do you think about Christmas trees?

What do you think about fall festivals?

What do you think about women pastors, women wearing makeup?

What do you think about Christians going trick or treating?

You've probably all had conversations like that.

And these are referred to as, they're often referred to as open handed issues.

Open handed issues are abundant in the church.

And they usually refer to things that are personal conviction, but have no effect on a person's salvation.

Now some things that I would call open handed, you might call close handed.

Like some of you might think that if I put up a Christmas tree during Christmas, I am a sinner and I'm going to hell.

And that's cool.

You have the right to be wrong.

But for the most part, if you're a mature Christian, you will be able to recognize what is open handed and what is close handed.

Now, if you were to ask me, what do you think about Jesus being the son of God?

Well, that's a salvation issue.

That's close handed.

That means it doesn't matter what I think.

It matters what God has said.

And the Bible tells me that Jesus is the son of the living God.

That's close handed.

So whenever the Bible is silent on certain issues, listen, you still, I need you to get this.

Whenever the Bible is silent on certain issues, because the Bible is silent on a lot of issues, we have to be careful with how we judge.

I'm not saying not to judge.

I'm saying we have to be careful how we judge people when the metric is not the Bible, it's personal preference or culture or tradition.

We have to have the wisdom and the discernment to know that what we see on the outside is not always an indication of the assumed condition of the heart.

I know for a fact that some people in the room jam Selena.

I ain't gonna say names, but I know who you are.

I know for a fact that some people in the room play the lottery.

I know, this one's gonna hurt.

I know for a fact we got some people in the room who vote Democrat.

I mean, you know, in the church, and I'm not just talking about our church, the whole church, there is a mixed bag of personal convictions that if we were to all start confessing our personal beliefs about certain things, we might end up dividing the church even more than it already is.

And if I never take the time to know you, I may judge you incorrectly.

Now, if, you know, if you ask me what I think about certain issues, I'm gonna tell you what I think, and I'm gonna use scripture as the source of my answer.

But the Bible is sometimes silent on a lot of issues that Christians argue about and not just argue about, divide over.

And it's not new either, because during Jesus' time and well into the early church, there were a lot of open-handed issues.

One that was very common in Jesus' day was over whether unclean food should be consumed or not.

That was a huge issue.

And it was an even bigger problem for the Jews who were converting to Christianity, because many of them wanted to hold onto their belief and their tradition that certain food that was considered unclean should be abstained from.

This is even after Jesus told Peter, do not call unclean that which God has made clean.

And so I imagine some Jewish Christians sitting down at the dinner table asking that question, what do you think about unclean food?

Should we eat it?

It's becoming like the thing now.

Well, I don't want to look like the world.

That's a worldly thing.

I ain't gonna do it.

But didn't Jesus make it clean?

Oh, no, you're taking that out of context.

He was talking about the Gentiles.

He wasn't even talking about food.

And you know how we do.

We interpret scripture in a way that agrees with us.

And perhaps the pressure to answer that question in a certain way was on the person who was being asked that question.

They wanted to answer it in a certain way to not be judged.

Traditions are sacred to us.

Amen?

We all have them.

We all have convictions.

And nobody's trying to tear those down.

And in these days, the Bible days, tradition was a huge element to the practice of the Jews.

The Jews had, and they still have, all these books that go beyond the Hebrew Bible that they hold in high regard.

Bear with my nerdiness for a second, okay?

The halakha.

I don't know if you've ever heard of the halakha.

It's Hebrew.

It's Hebrew for the way.

And the halakha is a collection of religious writings that were based off of scripture, but they were interpreted.

So just like we have many commentaries that we might reference when we're reading the Bible to better understand the Bible, the Jews had that as well.

And so over time, what happened was much of what was written in these books, though it was grounded in biblical truth, it became the tradition of men that was becoming a religion of man.

And Jesus speaks of this indirectly throughout his dialogue with the Pharisees in the gospels.

Here the charge for the Pharisees was, why do your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders?

Why don't they hold to the halakha?

Is your tradition, your preferences, your religion, the way that you think things need to be, is that affecting the precious children of God, the way that you see them?

How many of us, I wonder how many of us, don't raise your hand, but how many of us would have been on the side of the Pharisees?

Why do they eat with unclean hands?

Why does Jesus sit down with tax collectors and sinners?

Doesn't he know that bad company corrupts good character?

Why does he heal people on the Sabbath?

Why can't he wait one more day?

Now, I know that some of you might be arguing with me in your head, because there's always a caveat.

There's always a but.

But we have to guard our testimony, 100%.

But we can't be the cause of our weaker brother's stumbling block, right?

100%.

But we need to bear fruit, 100%.

All those things are true because it reflects Jesus.

But I also think all of us would agree that we need to be more concerned with what we show God in private than what we show people in public.

Because when you have a private relationship with Jesus, it is going to manifest itself so genuinely in public.

You don't even have to fake it.

Moses, you know, he had a private life.

He had a private moment with God, and it radically changed his public life.

You know what I'm talking about?

That encounter at the burning bush?

He had a private moment with God, and it changed his public life.

Paul had a private experience with Jesus, and it course-corrected his mission.

Peter had a private conversation with Jesus, and it reinstated his public ministry that shaped the way of the church.

And you know what?

People criticized these people.

They criticized Moses.

Not everybody liked Paul.

And Peter might have done some questionable things, some immature things, even after being reinstated to ministry.

And did you know that Paul even quoted pagan poetry?

Did you know that?

How dare Paul use paganistic language to support his arguments of the gospel?

But you know why none of us care about those things?

Because we believe that these men had real, private, authentic relationships with God, and even though they did some things that might not be the way that I would have done them, their hearts belong to the Lord, and we don't question them.

I want all of us to get to the point where we know we love God so much that we don't need to prove ourselves to anybody.

Where we don't feel the need to waste our energy to those who want to criticize our every move and our love for God based on an open-handed issue that we don't see eye-to-eye on.

Ouch!

Ouch or what?

About a year ago, I saw somebody post that said, if you don't homeschool your kids, you don't love your kids.

As you can imagine, the comments were filled with angry mamas defending their children, defending their love for their kids.

I didn't feel the need to chime in.

I saw it, and whenever you see something, your blood starts to boil.

You know that feeling?

You just want to say something, but the Holy Spirit is like, it's fine, it's fine.

I didn't feel the need to defend my love for my kids to a person who barely knows me because I know I love my kids.

My kids know I love my kids.

My wife knows I love my kids.

The people that matter know that I love my kids.

I don't need to spend negative energy trying to prove to a hard-headed person that I love my children.

When you open all the doors to the Holy Spirit, the public ones and the private ones, you become confident in who you are in God.

You don't need to prove to anyone that you love Jesus.

Maybe you jam Selena, but you love Jesus.

Maybe you put up a Christmas tree, but you love Jesus.

Now, I'm going to say this.

Sometimes, and this is going to hurt even more, I'm just digging the knife in today.

Sometimes, and I say sometimes for a reason, sometimes when we engage in these types of conversations with people, we get defensive, right?

Some people get defensive just because they like to argue, that's fine.

But sometimes, that defensiveness comes from a place of insecurity because we know that we have no private life with God, so all the more reason to defend the public perception of our relationship with God.

Did you get that?

Some of us feel the need to prove our holiness to other people because deep down, we're not really sure if we are holy.

And so it hurts when our convictions are convicted because now we got to fight back because I need you to see me as holy because you're a person and I care more about what people think of me than what God thinks about me in private.

That's insecurity when you feel the need to defend your holiness to other people.

And I don't know who I'm speaking to, but Jesus rebuked the Pharisees saying, these people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.

In public, we worship.

In public, we make sure not to look like the world.

In public, we make sure to hold to the traditions of the church.

All the while, our hearts are not even in the room.

I believe that the Lord is speaking to more people today than I might realize because again, I see what's on the outside.

I see what you do, what you don't do, what you say, what you don't say, and off of that, I can make my judgment about your character, but God is looking at the private spaces in your life.

You know, we often preach about not being ashamed of God, right?

We often preach to not be ashamed of the gospel.

Just a few weeks ago, I talked about how all of us need to tell our testimonies and be more proud of who we are today in Christ than we are ashamed of who we used to be in the world.

Like, we celebrate water baptism.

Why do we do that?

Because it's a day of public profession of your new life in Christ.

We tell people to go out and shine their light for Jesus because we are called to be the light of the world.

And so we're always talking about making our relationship with God public, but I also want to challenge you to make it private.

Make it private.

I think the best case to be made for why moral failings happen so often is because there was a failure to create private spaces for God.

God needs, hear me, God needs to be in your home.

He needs to be in your bedroom.

He needs to be in your car.

He needs to be in your computer.

He needs to be in your Netflix queue.

He needs to be in your Spotify playlist.

He needs to be in your text messages.

He needs to be in your DMs.

He needs to be in your emails.

I know it sounds silly, but these are the places that the devil likes to creep in.

Why?

Because those are private spaces.

The devil's not here waiting for you to get to church.

That's dumb.

That's like waiting to jump somebody at a police station.

Why would he do that?

He don't care if you're here.

Be here.

Worship God here.

He's waiting for you at the doorstep of your home where no one else is there.

He's waiting for you in your bedroom.

He's waiting for you at your laptop.

That's where the devil is.

You give God your public moments at church, but have you given him the private spaces that you probably haven't even thought of?

The devil knows that whatever you do in private is probably an indication of what's already in your heart.

Verse 20, one more time, it says, what comes out of a person is what defiles him.

For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual morality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, and foolishness.

All of these things come from within, and they, somebody say they, defile a person.

The most, I'm going to have the worship team come up, the most personal thing that you can give to God, church, the most personal thing that you can give to God is your most private thing.

That's the heart.

It's also the most valuable thing.

And I don't think that anyone aside from Jesus has given God their whole heart.

At least not, not all at the same time.

We like to say that we have.

We like to sing that song.

And I love that song.

Brother Larry's favorite song, Lord, I'll give you my heart, beautiful song.

But I, I don't truly think that all of us have gotten that down to where we've given God 100% of our hearts.

Anytime there is a deviation of godliness within my heart, it means that I haven't given him the private spaces.

And these are the areas that we have to be concerned with, church.

Because believe it or not, man, all of these things that we just read, all of these things we are all capable of, that is the human condition.

Humans are, are, are, are capable of murder, of slander, of foolishness, of pride, of adultery, all of these things, wickedness.

The heart is deceitful.

That's what, that's what the scripture says.

It is a natural producer of sin.

So every space in our heart has to be given to God continuously.

Every single day, every single day, every single day.

It's not just once.

I just, I, I come to, I come to the feet of Jesus and I give my heart.

You have to give it every single day, every single moment.

And I know that's hard.

And so, you know, if my heart is weak, if your heart is weak, you still with me just three more minutes.

If your heart is weak, if your heart is vulnerable, you need to avoid things when you are in that vulnerable state.

There are people that you should avoid in that vulnerable state.

If the temptation to drunkenness is in my heart and I just feel like I need to have a bus and I need to run away from some problems and I just need to sink it into something.

Stay away from the public spaces that might tempt you because you don't have the private space in check yet.

But once you get to a level of spiritual maturity where you've given that continuously to God, it becomes like a just muscle memory.

It's happening every single day and God has filled that space with the Holy Spirit and it has been healed and you've developed a new lifestyle.

Then you can start bringing some friends back into your life so that your holiness is what influences them.

That is development.

That is reconciliation.

That is restoration.

God doesn't call you out of the darkness forever and don't misinterpret me.

He calls you out to refine you and to do something with your heart and to redeem you and transform you so that he can send you back out.

But now I got the confidence.

I can go to the enemy's camp and I ain't even afraid because I have given God the most private spaces of my heart continuously.

I have a real relationship with Jesus.

I don't have to fear anything.

But too often, we're not giving God our private spaces.

God wants us to become holy as he is holy.

And we have to watch what we do and we have to watch what we say behind closed doors because all of that is a reflection of God in us.

But what is in your heart, I'm going to ask you to stand, what is in your heart will always be a reflection of what you keep behind closed doors.

So I'll close with this.

Matthew 6, Jesus says this, he says, and when you pray, you all know this.

When you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites, for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and in the street corners that they may be seen by others.

Truly I say to you, they have received their reward.

I'm going to stop real quick right there.

People in public spaces, their reward, see, you have to choose what reward you want more of.

You have to choose that.

Because if we condition ourselves to desire the praises of people and the applause of people, then we're going to chase the public spaces.

That's what we're going to chase.

Because the better I can be seen in public, the more I'll get that reward.

So Jesus says they have gotten their reward.

That's easy.

But when you pray, he says, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your father who is in secret, and your father who sees in secret will reward you.

What do you care about more?

What is in your heart?

I want to challenge you this morning, church, to begin creating private spaces in your home, in your closet, in your car, in your text messages, in your phone.

Create private spaces for the Lord because God desires for you to be holy.

Not just look holy, to be holy.

As the worship team sings, I just want to, I want to invite you, I don't have any specific altar call.

If we could just have a moment in the presence of God, one-on-one, one-on-one, I want you just to begin talking to God privately, privately.

Thanks for listening.

If you'd like some more information on PNEUMA Church, visit us on our website at myPNEUMAchurch.org.

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Thanks again and God bless.