We're looking at the subject of holiness night. The outlines are on the table, lesson 11, holiness. Before we get to the outline though, if you take your Bibles and turn to 2 Corinthians 6. 2 Corinthians 6, we're going to begin reading at verse 14, and we'll read down through chapter 7 and verse 1. 2 Corinthians 6, 14 through 7, 1. It is two Corinthians if you are reading the Trump standard version of the Bible. Second Corinthians 6, 14 is where we're gonna start. Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. For what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what fellowship has light with darkness? What accord has Christ with Belial? or what portion does a believer share with an unbeliever? What agreement has the temple of God with idols? For we are the temple of the living God. As God said, I will make my dwelling among them and walk among them and I will be their God and they shall be my people. Therefore go out from their midst and be separate from them, says the Lord, and touch no unclean thing. Then I will welcome you, and I will be a father to you, and you shall be sons and daughters to me, says the Lord Almighty. Since we have these promises, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from every defilement of body and spirit, bringing holiness to completion in the fear of God. God tells us you are to be holy because I am holy. And while God wants us all to be holy and we understand that, it's the kind of thing that makes us feel a bit skittish, isn't it? Not because we are afraid of holiness in its biblical sense, I think, but because we're afraid of holiness as the world makes us think of it. If you were to take a poll and ask folks, what does it mean to be holy? they would probably respond that it means to be joyless and to wear tortured hair and hair shirts, and to live in some kind of medieval monastery, or it's to live some kind of rigorous life of discipline that allows for no recreation, no place for love. to live a holy life is to have a kind of arrogant, be holier than thou attitude. And when you think of holiness in that sense, it's certainly not anything to which any of us, I suppose, would aspire. None of us want to live that kind of life. The question is, is that really what God expects of us when he says, be holy as I am holy? And I think the answer is no. And the passage that we looked at, uh, just, or read just a second ago is a pretty good indicator as to why that is the case. There are a number of things about what Paul writes in this passage that ought to catch our attention. And the first one is that in Paul's mind, if you are a Christian, you are already holy. You're holy because you'll notice as Paul puts in chapter seven and verse one, you are as a believer to cleanse yourself from every defilement of body and spirit, bringing holiness to completion. And the idea is that you are to bring it to its perfection. The word Paul uses in the Greek New Testament is usually translated as being perfect or fulfilled or completed. And the idea is that you already are holy, at least in some sense. Now is the time for you to further that holiness and to advance that holiness until you become completely holy. Now, in a few minutes, we're going to talk about the ways in which we are already holy, the ways in which we are becoming holy, and the ways in which we are going to be holy. That's sort of the outline for the lesson tonight. But the big idea that we simply need to know here is that in Paul's mind, holiness is not just a distant goal out there like a finish line at the end of the Boston Marathon to which we are running in hopes that one day we will somehow share in the prize of holiness. But instead, holiness is who we are by God's grace and what God is making us to be by his power. What makes us holy? It's not the fact that we're pure and spotless in our behavior. It's not that we always say the right things or seek the right things. In Paul's mind here, we are holy because God has already claimed us as his own. He has already separated us from the nations. In the last part of chapter six, Paul takes six Old Testament quotations and he kind of blends them together one unit here, but the point of those quotations is to let us know that as the church, we are the temple of the living God. God dwells among us. He is our God. We are now his people. We have gone out from the midst of the world. We are separate from the nations. And that's the very essence of the word holy. It means to be separate, to be set apart. And so the church, the body of Christians in the world is that group of people that God has already set apart from the nations. He's already claimed us as his own. He's already said, I'm going to be your father. You're going to be my children. I have bought you with the price, the blood of my son, Jesus Christ. I have already moved you out of the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of light. I have adopted you. I have justified you. I am sanctifying you. You are mine. Out of all the nations of the earth and all the peoples out there, you as Christians are my people. I have set you apart from all the rest and declared you are mine. And that by itself makes us a holy people. Just as God set Israel apart in the Old Testament and said, you are now a holy nation. Peter tells us in first Peter chapter two, that we are now God's holy nation, his chosen people, his royal priesthood, the people for God's own possession. The church of the New Testament is the new Israel, as Paul writes to the Galatians. And so we are the new set apart, distinct people for God's own possession. And in that sense, we're already holy. So what Paul is telling the Corinthians here is that God has already claimed you and he has already set you apart. Your job now is to bring your holiness to completion or to perfection. And how do we do that? Paul says we do that by cleansing ourselves from every defilement of body and spirit. All those things that leave us defiled or unclean or impure, whether they are physical or spiritual, whether they are external or internal, all those things that mark us as being the people we were when we lived in rebellion against God, we are to cleanse ourselves from those things. The word Paul uses here is the same word from which we get our English word catharsis. We've all heard people talk about having that cathartic moment where we It felt like we'd been cleansed of the past and everything had been brought out and made new. And Paul's using that kind of concept here. He says that because we're God's holy people, we need to rid ourselves. We need to bathe ourselves or wash ourselves of all that old stuff that used to mark us when we were the people of the world. And identify now with the people of God. Now, I think it's important that Paul tells us that we are to do this in flesh and spirit, because I think Paul wants us to understand, as he frequently does in his epistles, that to live a holy life is not just a matter of doing certain things outwardly in a clean or holy way. If holiness were simply following the list of thou shalt nots or doing this and doing that, one could easily go through all the same kind of rituals that the Pharisees did. And we remember how Jesus condemned them for being whitewashed sepulchers. They were good and clean on the outside but they were places of death on the inside. And so Paul wants us to understand that to cleanse ourselves so that we live the life that God wants us to live means that we are not only trying to do certain things in the correct way, but we're also wanting to love God inwardly. We're wanting to love our neighbor. We're doing those heart works that God requires of us in the royal law of Christ. And we are, Concern not only to look good to others. In fact, that's not even a primary concern for the believer, but we are wanting to do the things that please God because he has already adopted us as his holy people. What's interesting here is that Paul tells us that we do these things because we have these commands. Is that the word he used? No. He says we do these things because we have these promises. It's the promises of what God has set out before us that keeps us wanting to live a life that is pleasing to him. We're not trying to earn God's favor. We're not trying to blackmail him into loving us. We're not trying to work our way up the stairway to heaven. We are simply realizing, Paul says, that God has already loved us as believers. He's already justified us by grace through faith. We can sing, I belong to Jesus and Jesus belongs to me. And we can say with Paul, therefore there is now no condemnation for those who were in Christ Jesus for the law of the spirit of life has set me free from the law of sin and death. We can cry out with first Corinthians 15 that we have victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. And we have these things because God has promised them to us. We're living our life based on the promises of God. And those promises assure us that what God has begun, he will also bring to completion in the day of Christ. We know that God has already moved us from death to life, from darkness to light, from the world into the kingdom of God. And because God has already done these things and assured us that he will do these things unto eternal life and unto perfection or unto completion, all we're doing is cleansing ourselves because we know that that's the direction God is taking us. But we're wanting to be holy because we know God is going to make us holy. And he has assured us that at the end of the road, we're going to be holy. John White, the author of the book, The Fight, to which we have referred several times in these lessons, talks about how in his own life, one of the great periods of Christian growth came when he understood that to confess his sins and to repent of them did not mean simply coming to God and groveling and mourning. and having a pity party and talking about how bad he'd been and how sad. He says, you know, I have to admit before God that I have sinned and I have to be honest and say, Lord, you know, I know this offends you. And it offends me now that I realized that it's sin. It bothers me, it grieves me. But he said, what really brought me forward in the Christian life was when I realized that I was to come and admit these things to God, knowing that he was already working to forgive me of those sins and to cleanse me of them. and that God had brought a particular sin to mind, White says, not so that he could just make me feel bad about how I had displeased him, but God had brought those things to mind so that I would know that he was still working to cleanse me of them. and that he still was working not only to keep me as his forgiven child, but also that he was working to make me his holy child. And so he said, all of a sudden I realized that when God brings to me and to my awareness, the things that I have done that demonstrate worldliness rather than godliness, it's not so they could put a heavy thumb on me to hold me down. It's not like humans do us when we fail and keep reminding us time and time and time again of how we failed them and how they like to make us grovel over and over again and how they always like to sort of feel one up on us by telling us how miserable we've been in the past. God brings these things to our attention so that we will understand that he still is disciplining us and correcting us and training us so that one day we will finally be free from these sins and we will be pure and holy as he made us to be. This is the promise of God that when Jesus comes, as John tells us in first John, we will see him as he is and we will be like him. That's the promise. There is a day coming when We will no longer have to swallow all those ugly words that we have said. And we will never have to lie awake at all those terrible thoughts that we've had. And we will never offend and hurt our neighbors anymore. And we will never again do things that bring grief to the Holy Spirit. And we know that we're not gonna do these things because this is what the Lord has promised us. And Paul says, having these promises, let's just go ahead and cleanse ourselves of all those things that defile us both in flesh and spirit, those things that dishonor God and that he is working to rid us of anyway, and let's pursue this holiness. One more phrase there we haven't looked at in the fear of God. I did a little talk in Jackson a few months ago for a ladies club. And one of the parts of the talk was about the fear of God. And I could tell there was one lady in front of the group. She was looking a little skeptical from the beginning. And after I got done, they had a little question and answer period. And she asked some questions. She said, I thought we were supposed to love God. I didn't think we were supposed to fear God. And she was concerned that I would talk about the fear of God. So I tried to explain to her that, you know, there are two kinds of fear in the Bible. There's the fear that grows out of a lack of faith. The fear that comes from not trusting God. That's why we fear the darkness or fear the, the powers of this world because we don't have adequate faith to trust the Lord. And then there is that good fear, the kind of fear that is rooted in submission. And I tried to explain to her that my father was the kind of father, he was a good father. He loved his children and worked hard for his children. You know, I wouldn't trade him for anything. But I can honestly say that the last thing I wanted to do in any given day was to anger my father because I knew where that razor strop was and where it was kept in the bathroom. And I knew how it felt when you had to stand and put your feet on the outside of that old claw-footed bathtub and put your hands on the inside of it so that the edge caught you right about here so you couldn't flinch. And he would spank you with that razor strop while he had a good, perfectly still target. And you didn't want that. And so there was a sense that while I loved my father immensely and would do anything for him and he loved me far more than I loved him, I still had a fear of offending him. I still had a healthy respect that knowing that I was supposed to submit to him and that healthy respect that almost reverence is what caused me to grow up wanting to do what pleased him. And the Bible tells us that as Christians, we are to have that kind of reverence and that kind of submissive attitude toward our heavenly father. It's not because we're afraid of him in the sense that we cringe and want to run and hide from him. It's because we know how much he loved us and we know how much he cares for us and what he's done for us in Christ. And we know how holy and good and pure he is and how he only wants us to be good and pure because that's what's best for us. And we have a healthy respect for him that wants us to obey. And there's a sense in which fear is the right way to describe that. And Paul says, we have these promises and we're trying to cleanse ourselves and body and spirit. And we're pursuing this holiness because we have a great respect for God. If you think about it, the one thing that causes all of us to sin is a lack of respect for God. When we begin to think that what we want is more important than what God wants, isn't that disrespectful? And when we think that we would rather be like the world than like our heavenly father who has loved us with an everlasting love, isn't that disrespectful? And when we would rather live in the mud of the sin hole, rather than walk in the cleanness of obedience. Isn't that disrespectful? And that's exactly what Paul's telling us. He's simply telling us we need to remember the promises God made to us at the beginning of the verse. And at the end of the verse, he's telling us we also need to remember who God is. and what he's done for us and what we owe him and what is our relationship to him. And therefore every day we should pursue holiness. How important is this? Important enough that the book of Hebrews tells us that we have to pursue the holiness without which no one will see the Lord. I understand that salvation is by faith. through grace alone, apart from works of the law. I agree with the Apostle Paul completely on that. None of us are going to be saved by our obedience. But I also know that Jesus tells us that good trees bear good fruit and those who truly believe will become obedient. And that person who professes faith in Christ and who has no desire to be holy the book of Hebrews is telling us, is empty in terms of their profession. They're all words, no action. They're all bluster, but no reality. And so Paul urges the Corinthians, since we have these promises, beloved, let's cleanse ourselves from every defilement of body and spirit, bringing holiness to completion in the fear of God. All right, that's our introduction. Now on to the handout. What does it mean to be holy? We mentioned this earlier, to be holy in terms of the root simply means to be separate, to be distinct, to be set apart. When you open up your, or when you close your Bible and you look at the cover and it says, Holy Bible. The word Bible simply means book. The Greek word biblos, holy means it's a distinctive, unique book set apart from all other books. It's a book, yes, but it's not like any other book. And it's different because it is inspired by God himself. It is not a human composition, it is divine. a book that finds its origin in the work of the Holy Spirit, so that when the Bible speaks, God speaks, and when the prophets write, they can say, thus says the Lord. And the Apostle Paul can tell us that all scripture is God-breathed, or all scripture is inspired by God. The Bible is holy, it's unique, it's different, it's set apart because it is God's book. All right, if you can picture that, then you sort of know where we're heading. The Bible talks about God being holy. He's different. How's he different? Well, he's different from everything else in the sense that he is unmade while everything else is made. And everything else is part of his creation underneath his authority, but he stands over and above his creation and separate from his creation. He is transcendent as theologians tell us. He is also unique in the sense that his purity and his glory and his character and his attributes are infinitely wonderful. They're inherent, they belong to his nature, they're not gifts. from him or derived from him. So God, when he says he is pure and good and loving and gracious and all these kinds of things, he is that in and of himself. He didn't have to have anybody teach him these things. He didn't have those things infused into him at some point. These are inherent in him. And in that sense, he's different from the rest of us. So there's God and there's everything else. and therefore God is holy. He's set apart, he's different, unique. But the whole Testament also frequently talks about holy things. If you've ever read the book of Leviticus, for example, you'll remember that the place where the altar was was going to be holy. and the utensils that were going to be used on the altar for making sacrifices were declared to be holy. And that room where the priest, the high priest was only allowed to go once a year was going to be the holy of holies, the most holy place as modern translations tend to put it. And then there was the holy place where only the priests could go. And there was the showbread and this lamp stand and those kinds of things. This was reserved, it was set apart from and everybody else and every common use. And the people of Israel were going to be holy. They were God's separated people from everything else. So you had holy things. And what's meant by that is simply that they have been declared by God to be his in some kind of special sense and that they are consecrated to his service. You weren't to use the, and the utensils of the altar for any purpose other than what God set them apart for, the sacrifices of his worship. You weren't to use the tabernacle as a kind of civic hall or a wedding reception place or something like that because it was to be used only for the worship of God. God had made it holy by declaring it to be his. We also remember that when Moses met God in Exodus chapter three at the burning bush, what did God tell Moses to do first of all? Take off your sandals because the place where you're standing is holy ground. Well, it's not that the dirt of the ground there was any more holy or a finer quality or anything than dirt elsewhere in Midian. The idea was that God had consecrated this place as a meeting place between Moses and God. And so what they were about to have was a holy convocation, a holy gathering here. It was a, it was going to be a place where God would come and meet with his people. Same language is used to describe Sinai. when the children of Israel make their way across the first part of the wilderness after leaving Egypt, and they come and they meet with God on the holy mountain. It's not that Sinai was more pure than anything else God had made. It was the fact that God had set this place apart as a place where he was going to meet with his redeemed people. But again, the idea is the same. The things are set apart or consecrated for God's glory and for God's use. So when God describes Israel as being a holy nation, we don't have to read very far in the pages of the Bible to realize that he's not talking about their moral purity, is he? He's not talking about how they're always upstanding citizens, that they always do the right thing, read, the books of Samuel and Kings and Chronicles and you will understand very quickly that Israel was anything but holy in terms of being pure. But they were a holy nation because God had claimed them as his own and set them apart from all the other nations of the earth. And he says, you alone have I loved and chosen and I selected you. not because you were greater than the other peoples or better than the other peoples, but I chose you because I wanted you to be mine and I moved you from category A over here to category B. So now you're different. You are unique. You are holy. Now, in the New Testament, the holy people of God is, of course, not the earthly nation of Israel, but the new Israel, the church of Jesus Christ. And those whom Jesus has redeemed by his life, death, and resurrection are declared to be God's separate, unique, and holy people. We are the temple of the living God, as we read in 2 Corinthians 6. In Ephesians one, the apostle Paul tells us that our holiness actually goes way back. He tells us that we were chosen in Christ before the foundations of the earth, that we should be holy and blameless. Now there, Paul tells us that God declared us his own and holy in Christ even before he made the world. But not only did God call us to be unique and set apart and holy, He also called us to be blameless. So while He has declared that we are His by virtue of His covenant grace and power, He is also working in us to make us pure and blameless like Christ is holy in His purity. and in his obedience. So there's a two-fold stage in Ephesians 1. We're holy because we belong to Christ and we are holy because that's what Christ is making us to be. Now you have to sort of grasp both of those ideas to really come to grips with what the New Testament teaches about holiness. This is, complicated stuff for people if you don't get the basic timeline. The New Testament uses holiness to describe us as Christians in three different ways. In the sense that we are already holy, we called it positional holiness on the outline. but also we are in the process of being made holy day by day, which we're calling progressive holiness on the outline. And then there is the sense in which we will one day be completely and finally and eternally holy, which we're calling on the outline, perfect holiness. So there's positional holiness, progressive holiness, and perfect holiness. We are holy. We are becoming holy and we will one day be holy. And the Bible uses all three of those terms in the New Testament. It speaks of holiness and it's a kin, a word sanctify or sanctification in all those senses. Paul will write about how we are sanctified. Then he'll write about how we're being sanctified. And then he'll write about how we're going to be sanctified. And it's not that Paul is confused or that he's trying to be loose with his language and give us some kind of concept of holiness that we can't grasp. He's simply emphasizing either what we are because of who we are or what we are because of what God is doing in our lives today, or what we are because of what God will one day have done for us in the new heavens, in the new earth. All three of those aspects of holiness are very, very real. So let's look at each of them. Point two is you are holy or positional holiness. In positional holiness, You'll sometimes see it referred to as definitive sanctification for those of you who need an extra word at the coffee shop tomorrow. And when they say, what'd you do last night? So we went to Bible study. What'd you study? We talked about definitive sanctification. They'll be impressed. Maybe they'll buy you your 50 cent cup of coffee or something by that. But positional holiness or definitive sanctification is simply the idea that I am holy in terms of my status or my position or my relationship to God because of Jesus Christ and what Jesus Christ has done. This is the idea in Ephesians 1, 3. He chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world that we should be holy and blameless before him. That in Christ phrase is key to understanding the Apostle Paul in the New Testament, just about anywhere, but particularly in Ephesians 1, because what he wants us to understand is that we who belong to Jesus are seen as Jesus's people. And the benefits of Jesus's perfection are attributed to us. So when Jesus lived a righteous life and obedient and holy life on our behalf, he did that so that we would be considered holy based on his works. And when Jesus died on the cross, as our substitute, he bore our sins so that he made full payment for those sins and atoned for those sins so that by virtue of Jesus's death, God sees us as sinless. It's not that we're not going to sin. It's the fact that Jesus by his death has already made full satisfaction of that sin. And he has already dealt with all the repercussions in eternity of that sin problem. So that when God looks upon us, he sees us as righteous for Christ's sake. He sees us as sinless for Christ's sake. And when Jesus was raised from the dead, Paul tells us in first Corinthians 15, that his resurrection was for us and we are raised in him so that just as surely as Jesus is raised from the dead and sits at the right hand of the father, We are dwelling in the heavenly places in Him so that Jesus is there as our head and it is just as sure that you and I who believe in Christ are going to live a resurrected life in eternity as it is for Jesus to have it because He did it for us and we are in Him. We are joined to Him. And therefore, if Jesus is holy, then we're holy. And if Jesus is set apart, we are set apart because we are united to him. And it is an inseparable union. No one can separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus, our Lord. So we're holy in Christ. But we're also holy in the sense that God has already declared us to be his. This is one of the great themes of both the Old and New Testaments, and it's one that you miss only at your own peril. God created Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve were God's people. Adam and Eve sinned. God immediately sets into plan a means by which he's going to save Adam and Eve and their descendants. And so the seed of the woman is going to come who will bruise the head of the serpent. And there's going to be a savior by which Adam and Eve will be delivered. In other words, God says, you're still mine. I'm still going to keep you. I'm still going to love you and have you as my holy ones, even in spite of your sin. And then you go on and you see that not everybody falls into this but God keeps this line through Seth by where people are gonna call on the name of the Lord and then things get so terrible that it looks like God's work has come to an end. But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord and God was gracious to him and he claimed Noah and his family and he saves them when the rest of the world is deluged by the flood. And then God continues to work and he calls Abraham and all of Abraham's descendants to be his. And then they go into slavery in Egypt. And it looks like the things are coming to an end for 400 years, but God does what he rescues out of people and says, you are mine. You're going to be my holy nation. I'm going to keep a witness in the world. And these people turned out to be mumblers and murmurs and complainers and groaners. And they have all kinds of unfaithful Kings. And it looks like once again, they're going to undo God's kingdom purposes, but no, God says, I'm always going to keep a lamp in Jerusalem. I'm always gonna have my Davids and somebody like David, who's one of his descendants to sit on the throne. And God then goes and talks about how he's gonna keep a remnant in the days of the apostasy. And when the people go into exile and it looks like all of Israel has turned against God, he says, no, I've still got a people who are going to love me. And then when it looks like Israel itself has fallen off the end of the world, God says, no, I still have my holy one, my Messiah. And he sends Jesus and Jesus builds a new church, a new holy people. And so from beginning to end, the story of the Bible is that there frequently are days when it looks like God's work has come to a complete and sudden stop. But God, by his own grace and his own power, has always maintained a holy people for himself. Remember when Elijah thought he was the only one who hadn't bowed the knee to Baal? And God says, no, I have thousands that I have maintained. I have reserved people that are mine. That's the story of the Bible. God is always keeping for himself a people. And these people that he keeps and sets apart And with whom he makes covenant promises are his people. They're called by his name and they are saved by his grace. And therefore they're different from all the rest of the people in the world. And they are by definition, a holy people. They weren't always good people. Read Jacob. I mean, you can't miss that. Read Simon Peter in the gospels. Can't miss that. Read the fences of the church in the New Testament and the church of Corinth, for example, and all they went through. And yet God still calls them his holy ones at the beginning. They're holy ones because he has claimed them and made them his own. He set them apart from the nations. They are unique. But then there's a third sense in which we are positionally holy. In fact, in the New Testament, God has also given to us his Holy Spirit. And so those of us who are believers in Christ are indwelt by the Spirit, and this makes us holy. It makes us holy by definition. We may not always be walking in the spirit and we may sometimes grieve the spirit, but there's nothing we're going to do that is going to make the Holy Spirit withdraw from us or leave us or divorce us. He has already claimed us for the sake of Christ in the name of the Father so that God lives with us and among us and in us who are believers. And we are therefore holy temples of God because the Holy Spirit lives in us. So this is positional holiness. This is the idea in which you are holy. But then the Bible also talks about how we're in the process of being made holy, or what we've also called here as progressive holiness. When you become a Christian, you do not all of a sudden become perfect, do you? We might wish that were the case, but it's just not so. On the other hand, The Bible does teach us that if we do come to faith in Christ, we get a new birth. And this new birth brings with it a new heart. And this new heart brings with it a new nature. And this new nature brings with it a desire to put to death the old ways and to learn how to live in the new ways. Paul writes frequently about taking off the old self and putting on the new self or putting to death the deeds of the flesh and living in the righteous life of the Holy Spirit. He tells us that we're no longer to participate in the works of the flesh, but we are to produce the fruit of the Spirit living in us. And all of those passages, and there are dozens of them in the New Testament, all those passages remind us that the Christian life, while we are immediately declared just and righteous, At the time of our conversion, we are justified as an act of God's free grace that is followed by a subsequent sanctification or a work of God's free grace, whereby the Holy Spirit enables us more and more to die to sin and self and to live more and more into Christ. And this is a struggle. You can't miss that when you read the New Testament, can you? There's a kind of, we talk about spiritual warfare. You hear people talking about that frequently and they're usually talking about battling with forces of unbelief and demons and those kinds of things. But when you read the New Testament, primarily the spiritual warfare is where? Right inside of our own hearts. Paul talks about how even as an experienced believer and as an apostle, every day he says, I do the things that I don't want to do. And I don't do the things that I know I ought to do. And inside I face this inner turmoil. I face this kind of warfare so much so that I want to pull my hair out. I guess Paul had hair at the end of his life. I pull my hair out and say, who's going to deliver me from this body of death? And when Paul writes that, every true Christian says, I know that war. I know what God tells me I'm supposed to do. And I know how my sinful nature still wants to do the other thing. And I know God says, don't do that. And my sinful nature wants to say, well, let me look and see what it is I'm not supposed to do. It might be nice. And every day we have to fight that inner war of becoming obedient. The great tools that we have to help us in this fight are one, the Holy Spirit. The Spirit enables us to fight this battle. He's the one who keeps us fighting when we're tired and weary. He's the one who, as Ralph Davis likes to put it, helps us slog through the muck of life and put one foot in front of another when we feel like just giving up altogether. And then also, we remember that the Bible tells us that the word of God is able to make us grow even unto holiness. Jesus talks, for example, in the high priestly prayer, he prays, Father, sanctify them in the truth. Your word is truth. And we remember how the apostle talked to the Ephesian elders in Acts chapter 20, and he talked about the word of God's grace, which is able to make you holy. So God has given us his word, that word directs us, shows us where we ought to go, but it also innervates us and energizes us and motivates us, reminds us of what those great promises are out there, reminds us of what God is doing so that we will pursue that battle and we'll keep fighting and we'll keep trying to grow. And as Paul wrote to the Philippians, we are to work out that salvation that God has already put in us. Be sure that you note that Paul says, you don't work for salvation, but he says, you work out your salvation, knowing that God is at work in you, both to will and to do of his good pleasure. You are to bring to the surface or bring to completion is the language of 2 Corinthians 7, 1. The holiness that God has for you, knowing that he's gonna give you both the desire and the energy and the power to do this. And when you think that you can't do it anymore, the Lord's gonna make sure that you keep going. So just keep fighting. Cindy and I were watching some documentary. I don't know if Cindy was watching. She might've been diverted. Some documentary about Eisenhower and World War II the other day. And you looked at those men who were fighting in North Africa and in Italy and seemed to be getting nowhere. And the mud was just deep and you couldn't move your vehicles and the snow came and they ran out of rations and food because nobody could get supplies to them. And here are men who were just thinking, this is it. We've been brought here to die. And you watch that and you realize that there are a lot of Christians who live like that every day. God just put me here. to let me shrivel up and die. And the promise of the New Testament is, no, at that very moment when you think that you can't go a step farther, God's going to supply the need out of the riches of his grace in Christ. He's going to keep you going. That's one of the promises that keeps us cleansing ourselves from every defilement of flesh and spirit. It's because God by his word and by his spirit is not going to let us fail. You also have to remember that we have a great high priest and that Jesus is seated at the right hand of God today. And the book of Hebrews tells us that he is praying for you. And he's making intercession for you. And you may not think that your prayers get higher than the ceiling. And I'm here to tell you At a certain level, it doesn't really matter because Jesus's prayers are always effective and powerful. And his prayers are what's going to get you to heaven. And it's his intercession for you, his pleading. These are my people. These are the ones that were bought with my blood. They are righteous for my sake. For my sake, Father, keep working in them. Keep sanctifying them. Keep making them holy. And then as we saw in 2 Corinthians 7, 1, we also have God's reliable promise. Jesus said that if we came to him, he would give us what? Eternal life. Now, if he has promised to give us eternal life, can he give us anything less than eternal life? Can He ever let us fall short of that goal? Can He ever let us fall from a state of grace to the point that we who trust in Him will get anything less than the perfect salvation He has promised? Of course not. That's the very nature of God, that He cannot lie. He's holy in that sense. He's pure and perfect in His promises, and we, keep fighting because we know that what God has already assured us of is eternal life. Think of all those doctors in that first year of medical school when they're trying to weed them all out and they're doing everything they can to find out who needs to be there and who doesn't and life is miserable and they get no sleep and they live in fear every day that they won't get that degree and be able to practice. And then they get to that place where they see the light at the end of the tunnel and they realize that thousands of other people survived medical school and God has brought me here and there is something to keep striving for and the Christian is pretty much in that position. It's hard sometimes. We're tired. We're weary. We're grumpy. We're hard to live with. We're not holy in terms of our behavior every day, but what keeps us going is the fact that we are holy in Christ and Christ by his word and spirit through his promises has assured us that we will not fall short of the goal, that we will get there. We may not know how we're going to get there, but that's not our job. The job belongs to God. He has promised to give us eternal life. So we are holy, we're being made holy, and then very quickly we're going to be holy in the perfect sense. We mentioned earlier the verse in 1 John where he says that we will see Christ as he is upon his return and we will be like him. And we'll be like him because in the new heavens and the new earth, everything will be holy. There will be Everything will belong to God. Everything will have been redeemed by Christ. Everything will bear the image of God. There will be no more sin, no more death, no more mourning, no more crying, no more pain. All those things will have passed away. Everything will have become new and we will be holy, Christ-like holy. Everybody here knows Romans 8.28, right? We know that God works all things for the good of those who love him, to those who are the called according to his purpose. But do you know what that purpose is? Paul tells us, he tells us that we were called to do good. Everyone that God calls and justifies and everyone he justifies, he sanctifies and everyone he sanctifies, he glorifies, and that the whole goal of this is that you and I will be made after the likeness of God's Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. We will be made in conformity to the image of Christ. That's the destination. Everybody likes to know before they go on a trip, where are we gonna be when we're ended up? And for the Christian, the destination is clear. God is gonna take you to a place where you will one day bear the very image of Christ. And you will be as pure and as spotless and as innocent and undefiled as Jesus is. And you will live in a world that's like that, where everybody's like that, because all wickedness and evil will have been destroyed. The goal of your salvation is holiness. And so the new creation is not only an eternal place, but it is a place of holiness and purity as well. It wouldn't be heaven, I guess, if everybody just went there like they are today, would it? What joy would that be? If we still had to deal with all the same crises and problems that we know in this world for a passing time, if we had to deal with those for eternity, there wouldn't be much blessedness in that. But as God's holy people, he's gonna bring us to a new creation where he has destroyed all sin and death. and he makes all things new and glorious and wonderful through his son. And in his grace, he allows us to share in that as well. Let's pray.