What Jesus Says About Hollow Routines and Genuine Devotion
A message from Matthew 15:1-20 at The Woodlands First Baptist Church
There is a moment in Matthew 15 where Jesus pulls his followers aside, away from the confrontation happening with the religious leaders, and says simply: come here, listen, and understand. It is, as Pastor Matt Poe describes it at The Woodlands First Baptist Church in The Woodlands, TX, a sweet moment. Jesus is not lecturing. He is not making a list of rules. He is drawing his people close and speaking directly to them about something that clearly matters to him deeply: the difference between going through the motions of faith and actually having a heart that is devoted to God.
The passage begins with a confrontation, but it does not end there. In the middle of an encounter with the Pharisees about ritual hand washing, Jesus pivots. He turns away from the religious gatekeepers and toward his followers, and what he says to them applies as much to us today as it did to the crowd standing in the region of Gennesaret two thousand years ago.
Pastor Poe brings two questions from this text that are harder to answer honestly than they appear at first. Both are worth sitting with.
The Confrontation: When Tradition Replaces Obedience
Eighty-Five Miles for a Hand-Washing Complaint
The Pharisees in Matthew 15 have traveled roughly eighty-five miles from Jerusalem to confront Jesus about his disciples. That kind of trip was not casual. It meant something had gained enough traction to be worth investigating. So they arrive and deliver their complaint in verse 2: why do your disciples break the tradition of the elders? They don’t wash their hands before they eat.
The practice in question, called the “Netilat Yadayim” in Hebrew, was a specific ritual of hand washing developed over time by Jewish teachers. God had prescribed ritual washing for temple priests before they performed their duties. Somewhere along the way, however, religious leaders extended that requirement to everyone, adding detailed procedures and elevated stakes. Skipping the ritual was considered a serious sin, in some cases punishable by death.
Pastor Poe is careful to clarify what Jesus is not saying. He is not criticizing the disciples for poor hygiene or calling the practice inherently bad. The issue is that a tradition God never prescribed for everyone had been elevated to the level of divine command, heaped onto ordinary people as a spiritual burden they never agreed to carry.
A Pointed Response and a Direct Quote
Pastor Matt Poe asks two questions from Matthew 15 that are harder to answer honestly than they first appear: Do I have hollow routines masked as holy devotion? And what is the posture of my heart?
Jesus does not answer defensively. Instead, in verse 3, he turns the question back on them: why do you break the command of God for the sake of your tradition? He points to the Corban practice as his example.
Corban was a type of offering dedicated to the temple, which the Pharisees had been using as a loophole to avoid financially caring for their aging parents, a clear violation of the commandment to honor your father and mother.
The hypocrisy was exact: the very people accusing others of violating tradition were themselves using tradition to avoid obeying Scripture. In verses 7 through 9, Jesus quotes Isaiah: these people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain; their teachings are merely human rules.
That quote lands hard because Jesus is not describing atheists or obvious sinners. He is describing religious people who had let performance replace devotion. The outward actions were present. The heart was somewhere else entirely.
Question One: Do I Have Hollow Routines Masked as Holy Devotion?
After addressing the Pharisees, Jesus calls the crowd to him and refocuses. In verse 10 he says: listen and understand. What goes into someone’s mouth does not defile them, but what comes out of their mouth, that is what defiles them. The disciples are still nervous about having offended the Pharisees, and Jesus’ response to their worry is telling: leave them, they are blind guides. If the blind lead the blind, both will fall into a pit.
Then, in a moment Pastor Poe finds genuinely warm, Jesus pulls his followers aside and explains further. He is patient even when they are slow to understand. He is not irritated that they need more. He keeps teaching.
Know Your Why
The question Jesus is pressing toward, according to Pastor Poe, is this: do you know why you do the things you do? Tradition can become a substitute for obedience when the original reason is forgotten. He illustrates it with a simple family story.
A little girl watches her mother prepare a ham before putting it in the oven. Before placing it in the pan, her mother cuts both ends off. The girl asks why. The mother says she doesn’t know, that’s just how her own mother always did it. They call the grandmother. Same answer. They call the great-grandmother, who is still alive, and she laughs: well, I only had a small square pan and the ham didn’t fit, so I cut the ends off to make it work.
Nobody ever asked why. The practice continued across three generations for a reason that stopped being relevant decades earlier. As Pastor Poe puts it: knowing your why drives clarity, promotes simplicity, and deepens intimacy in your relationship with God. It is not that the practice was harmful. It is that nobody had thought to ask whether it still meant anything.
A Gentle Invitation
After the confrontation with the Pharisees, Jesus connects the same principle to an invitation in Matthew 11:28–30. Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.
Following Jesus is not always easy, Pastor Poe is honest about that. Life is not always light. However, what Jesus is offering here is different from a promise that nothing will be hard. He is saying: I am with you, I am your teacher, and I will carry what you cannot. Religion that heaps burdens without offering the presence of God is not what Jesus came to establish. He came to establish something entirely different.
Question Two: What Is the Posture of My Heart?
The second question flows from Matthew 15:18–20: the things that come out of a person’s mouth come from the heart, and these are what defile them. For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander. These are what defile a person; but eating with unwashed hands does not.
Jesus is doing something specific here. He is shifting the diagnostic from behavior to motivation. The real question is not whether someone is doing the right things. It is whether those things are flowing from a heart that genuinely desires to honor God, or from a heart that has quietly elevated its own preferences and habits to the level of divine requirement.
One Way to Tell
Pastor Poe offers a practical test. If your way of doing spiritual things is the only way you can imagine being genuinely devoted, and if you find yourself quickly concluding that people who do it differently are doing it wrong, that reaction is worth examining. Because what it may reveal is that somewhere along the way, you have elevated your tradition above the actual heart of what God is after.
He references Tony Jones’ book The Sacred Way, which documents the remarkable variety of spiritual practices across Christian history. Some of them, Pastor Poe admits, are genuinely strange. However, the consistent thread running through the strangest practices, as Jones points out, is that people were trying to find a way to express love for God with who they were and what they had. The problems arose, as they always do, when someone drew a line and said: this is the only way.
The Waffle Illustration
Pastor Poe used a Texas-shaped waffle to make the point visually. Everyone agreed it was a good-looking waffle. Then he asked: how should you eat it? Butter and syrup? Fruit and powdered sugar? Peanut butter and honey? Peanut butter, banana, and honey?
Everyone had a preference. Some had strong opinions. However, none of those preferences changed what the waffle was. A heart genuinely devoted to God can express that devotion in a number of different ways, and the variety does not make any of them less real. The moment a preference becomes a requirement for everyone else is the moment the waffle argument starts, and Jesus has already told us where that road leads.
Pastor Matt Poe used this Texas waffle to make a simple point: everyone agreed it was a great waffle, but everyone had a different idea of how to eat it. The same is true of how we express devotion to God, and that variety is not a problem unless we start insisting our preference is the only right one.
A Personal Tension Worth Naming
Pastor Poe is careful to be clear that what follows is his personal tension, not an agenda or a position statement. He shares it because the text pushed him there, and he thinks honesty about the hard parts of studying Scripture is part of what it means to actually study it.
His tension is this: when he says he is a pastor at The Woodlands First Baptist Church, conversations sometimes stop. Not because of anything the church has done, but because the word Baptist carries associations for some people that make the invitation harder before it has even been extended. He wonders, honestly, whether he sometimes cares more about his denominational identity than about being known first as a follower of Jesus who wants to get people to the feet of Christ.
He is proud of the church, proud of its heritage, and not suggesting anyone change anything. However, Jesus’ question in this passage is whether the tradition has become more important than the mission. That is a question worth asking, and Pastor Poe is asking it out loud because he thinks it is healthier to ask it honestly than to quietly assume the answer is no.
Time, Style, and the Things We Fight About
Two other examples follow. One is the question of when to have a quiet time. Pastor Poe used to tell people the morning was the right time, drawing on the image of God’s mercies being new every morning. He still loves the morning. However, Scripture also records Jesus withdrawing to pray at night. What matters, he has come to believe, is not the hour but the posture: making a regular place in your life to sit with God without being in a hurry.
The other is worship style. Neither a traditional nor a contemporary service is inherently more pleasing to God than the other. Worship directors Don Barrick and Daniel Pratt model what thoughtful stewardship of this actually looks like at The Woodlands First: they are careful about the theological accuracy of every song in every style, because what matters is that what is sung is true and that it is sung from the heart. Ephesians 5:19 says to speak to one another with psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit, and to make music from your heart to the Lord. The style is not the measure. The heart is.
The Invitation This Week
Pastor Poe closes with a challenge that requires some courage to accept. Sometime this week, alone with God, read Matthew 15 for yourself. Then ask honestly whether any of what Jesus describes is present in you. Not as a self-condemnation exercise, but as the kind of honest self-examination that the Holy Spirit uses to grow people.
He suggests two things the Spirit might surface. One is a tradition or practice you have been following more out of habit than genuine devotion, something that may have started with meaning and quietly become hollow. The other is a viewpoint or preference that has drifted, without you realizing it, from being your way of honoring God to being a standard you hold others to.
Neither of those is a disqualifying failure. Both are normal, and both are exactly the kind of thing Jesus addresses in Matthew 15 with patience rather than condemnation. Furthermore, both are worth bringing to him honestly, because that kind of honesty is itself a form of devotion.
As Psalm 119:9 asks: how can a young person stay on the path of purity? By living according to your word. The answer has not changed. What clean devotion looks like is a heart aligned with what God actually says, not just with what we have always done.
If you are searching for a church near me in The Woodlands, TX where this kind of honest, Scripture-rooted conversation happens every week, we would love for you to join us at The Woodlands First Baptist Church.
Learn More about The Woodlands First
► Watch the full sermon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUKHzS6IBGM
► Plan your visit this Sunday: https://thewoodlandsfirst.org/new/
► Learn about our church: https://thewoodlandsfirst.org/beliefs/
► First Kids (Children’s Ministry): https://thewoodlandsfirst.org/ministries/first-kids/
Visit The Woodlands First Baptist Church
We offer worship services in traditional, modern, and Spanish-language styles across two campuses in The Woodlands, TX, along with Bible study classes and small groups for all ages.
South Campus: 11801 Grogan’s Mill Rd, The Woodlands, TX 77380
North Campus: 5148 FM 1488, The Woodlands, TX 77354
Phone: (281) 367-4317
Website: thewoodlandsfirst.org
Looking for churches near me in The Woodlands, TX? The Woodlands First Baptist Church has served this community since 1979. Come discover a community that takes Scripture seriously and welcomes everyone who is searching.
