Let's turn together in God's word to Ezekiel chapter 36. Ezekiel 36, if you're using a pew Bible, that's page 724. We'll focus our attention this morning upon verses 25, 26, and 27. Give ear to God's word. I will sprinkle clean water on you and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses and from all your idols I will cleanse you. I will give you a new heart and a new spirit I will put within you. I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. I will put my spirit within you. and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules. Beloved, this is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Oh God, we thank you for your word and we pray, Lord, that you would help us now as we expound it. Lord, that you would apply your word to our hearts and indeed sanctify us by your spirit. We pray this in Jesus' name, amen. So our theme this morning is holiness or the Christian's sanctification. Theologian John Murray said, sin is dethroned in every person who is called and regenerated. If you're born again by the Holy Spirit and thus united to Jesus Christ by saving faith, then sin cannot reign in your life any longer. It's been dethroned. Yes, there will be remaining or indwelling sin, but the dominion of sin has been terminated. The righteousness of Christ now rules your life. And so, Murray, he goes on to say, the prevailing character of every regenerate person is holiness. If you are a regenerate, you are holy, you are a saint. So if you're a Christian here today, effectually called by God, regenerated by His Holy Spirit, then your victory over sin has already been secured. And I don't know about you, but that's very comforting. In Christ, you are victorious. And so once and for all, you are holy. You are more than conquerors. Paul says, sin will not have dominion, Romans 6, 14. So for the Christian, the victory is actual or it's nothing. God not only frees us from sin's condemnation, that is sin's guilt and the consequences of that guilt, but also sin's control, that is sin's power. Through the gospel, you've been set free from both the debt of sin and the mastery of sin. The debt's paid and the chains, they've fallen off. However, again Murray, he says, this deliverance from the power of sin does not eliminate all sin from the heart and life of the believer. There is still indwelling sin. And God's ongoing progressive work of sanctification aims at the elimination of all sin and complete conformity to the image of His Son so that you might live a holy life as the Lord our God is holy. Our Shorter Catechism is a great definition of sanctification. It defines sanctification as the work of God's free grace whereby we are renewed in the whole man after the image of God and are enabled more and more to die unto sin and live unto righteousness. You must know that sin, whether it's in the believer or it's in the unbeliever, is still sin. Just because your sins have been forgiven doesn't make sin any less offensive or vile. Murray says the presence of sin in the believer involves conflict in the heart and life. We are in an irreconcilable war, says our confession of faith, and in war you can't be complacent. In the words of John Owen, be killing sin or what? Sin will be killing you. It's a war. Murray says, there must be a constant increasing appreciation that though sin still remains, it does not have the mastery. There's a total difference between surviving sin and reigning sin. Between the regenerate in conflict with sin and the unregenerate complacent in sin. It's one thing for sin to live in us, it's another for us to live in sin. It's one thing for the enemy to occupy the capital and it's another for his defeated host to harass the garrisons of the kingdom. The Apostle Paul in Romans 6 challenged the Roman Christians to consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal bodies to make you obey their passions. Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life and your members to God as instruments for righteousness. It's the current concern of sanctification that sin be more and more mortified, that is more and more killed, rooted up out of your life. and holiness to be generated and to be cultivated in you. Our passage this morning leaves us no room for doubt about God's program of redemption. That God's program of redemption is meant to turn sinners into saints, to make us holy. He does this, he says in this passage, for his own holy namesake. Over and over again in this passage he says, I will. You can count them up, I will, I will, it's again and again. These are sovereign designs, his sovereign will. He says, I will sprinkle clean water on you, I will cleanse you, I will give you a new heart, a new spirit, I will put within you, I will remove the heart of stone, I will put my spirit within you. Notice our catechism, it's right in saying sanctification is the work of God, the work of God's free grace. We're completely, we're utterly dependent upon him, and in particular, it's the Holy Spirit who's the agent of sanctification. The Spirit indwells believers and progressively causes us to walk in God's statutes and to keep his rules. At the same time, God calls for our active participation. We can't just let go and let God. It's by grace that you are saved and it's by grace that you're being saved progressively through sanctification. But God works in us and we also work. Sanctification is the sanctification of persons and persons are not machines. And so the scripture again and again calls us to action. Work out your salvation with fear and trembling, strive for holiness, put sin to death, imitate the holiness of God. Friends, this is the battle we fight daily. But God is our strength. And this passage reminds us that he's in the driver's seat, working his will, working in us and through us as we more and more die to sin and live unto righteousness. Here in Ezekiel, God is revealing his will for your sanctification. He's setting forth his battle strategy. It's a plan of salvation that's covering your escape from sin's dominion. and your progressive defeat of sin's remaining influence in your life. It's a plan that you must follow unto holiness. And though not perfection in this life, Lord willing, we will be perfected in glory. There's never a time in this life when you're completely rid of indwelling sin. If someone comes up to you and says, I haven't sinned in 10 years, don't believe them. Don't believe them. Christian is called to a life of progressive achievements, however. Progressive advancements, a life in which you should be able to look back and see the dead carcasses of the works of the flesh. Sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger. rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these, says Paul in Galatians 5. These works of the flesh, you've put them to death, and you are putting them to death. Well, how does God do this? How does God lead us out of bondage, out of filth, into pure liberty? He tells us here in Ezekiel 36 that He will sprinkle us with clean water, He will give us a heart transplant, He will give us a new spirit, and He will cause us to walk in obedience. I want us to look at these four things one at a time. First, He sprinkles clean water on us. It's the clean, pure water of regeneration. Jesus, He had said, truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. So in order to enter the kingdom of God, the holy kingdom, sinners need a new nature. You were born with a fallen nature, a sinful nature inherited from Adam. You have free will, but you freely choose to do that which is according to your nature. A bird, according to nature, does what? Kids? A bird flies. A fish, by nature, does what? Swims. By nature, one in Adam cannot obey God's laws. We cannot please him. It's not in your nature as a fallen, corrupted man or woman or child. And so you need a new nature. You cannot renew your nature yourself. You cannot cause yourself to be born again. And so God must do it. God, according to His great mercy, causes His elect to be born again. He graciously sprinkles clean water on you. He gives you a new nature. And we see this represented in baptism, don't we? It's a washing with water that's a sign and a seal of being washed of our old nature and given a new nature. Of being engrafted into Christ. This new nature is further described here in our passage as a new heart. God gives you a heart transplant. And to do this, he first must remove the old one, the heart of stone. And a heart of stone is a heart that's stubborn and unresponsive. Can you grow a plant out of a stone? Well, maybe these air plants, but you can't plant a seed in a stone. You need a heart of flesh. God says worship me, the heart of stone says no. God says obey my commandments, the heart of stone says make me. God says the soul that sins must die and the heart of stone says I don't believe you and I don't care. It suppresses the truth in unrighteousness. Friends, this is a serious heart condition. It requires more than a triple bypass or a stent or a pacemaker. The heart of stone cannot be cured. It must be replaced. And so God does this. He gives a new heart, a soft, responsive heart of flesh and the new heart gladly worships God. The new heart wants to keep his commandments. It trembles at the threatenings of God's word. It rejoices in the many promises. It's a believing, obedient, humble, responsive heart. So this new life, this new life that God is working, in dead sinners that we're seeing here in Ezekiel 36. This includes the sprinkling with clean water and the giving of a new heart. It's described thirdly in verses 26 and 27. God will put a new spirit within us. This is not just any old spirit. Not just any old spirit will do. Only one spirit will do and that's the Holy Spirit. Formerly, the influential spirit in the life of a person was the flesh. They lived according to the flesh, doing things that gratified the lust of the flesh. The flesh was supported in this by the world around us and the devil. Anger and jealousy and selfishness and covetousness, this reigned in your life. God provides the born-again, soft-hearted person with a new spiritual influence, the indwelling of his own Holy Spirit. Ezekiel is looking forward to the day when the resurrected, ascended Lord Jesus Christ pours out his Spirit upon the church in a full and lasting manner. He's looking forward to Pentecost in this very passage. And who is this spirit that's poured out? What's the spirit of sanctification? Spirit is the agent of sanctification. He's the one who takes the things of Christ and makes them known to us. The Holy Spirit brings life, death, the life, death and resurrection of Christ to bear upon our lives. He bears witness to you that you have died with Christ, that you've been raised with Christ, that you've died to sin and been raised to newness of life. And through this witness and by his powerful influence in you, the Spirit is graciously causing you to walk in newness of life. And so this is the fourth thing that God tells us he will do. Notice the first three are about regeneration. But the fourth here is about our sanctification. God says, and I will put my spirit within you and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules. Statutes here, it's another word for instructions. The spirit makes us into disciples. He sanctifies you through the Word, the Word of God, giving you instructions for the blessed life, for the happy life, the holy life, lived before the face of God. And friends, the Spirit isn't a teacher that you have to go to school or to church to visit, although the church is a great place to enjoy the teaching of the Spirit. The Spirit's also a private tutor. who makes his home in born-again Christians, and he's driving out from this home, out of your hearts, out of your minds, the demons and evils of your past. He's making you to be holy temples of the Lord your God. And he's furnishing this temple with righteousness and with truth. He's planting in your heart a holy garden full of fruit, and he's causing it to yield 30, 60, and 100-fold. He makes you holy as the Lord your God is holy. So if you're a Christian, you're presently indwelt by the Holy Spirit of God and He's causing you to walk in God's statutes and to be careful to obey God's rules. Again, what we have in Ezekiel 36 is God's plan to turn sinners into saints. He makes his new creations through the Spirit's work of regeneration. Regeneration is that one-time event. It doesn't happen over and over again. No, it's a one-time event in which he sprinkles us with clean water, consecrating us for his own holy purpose. In regeneration, he's giving us a new nature, a new heart, a new spirit. But after regeneration, God doesn't say, okay, I'm done. No, the work's just begun. There's sin to kill, there's piety to cultivate. When the Christian is born again through regeneration, they are immediately justified and adopted as a one time act of God. But they're also immediately and initially sanctified. That is, the throne of sin is destroyed once and for all, the battle is won. Now, the work of sanctification continues from this starting point progressively throughout the life of the believer. We've just seen eight children make professions of faith. That's not the end point, is it? It's the beginning. It's not the end point. We know all Christians are equally justified once and for all, but Christians are not all equally sanctified. Some are further along on the journey than others. Some have killed more sin, some have cultivated more righteousness, more holiness than others. This killing sin and this cultivating of holiness, this is the work of the spirit in us throughout the Christian life. And we call it sanctification. He's causing you more and more to walk with your God in holiness. I want to stop there and ask the question, what exactly is holiness? What is holiness? When we pray the Lord's Prayer, we pray, hallowed be thy name. What do we mean by that? We mean that we have a desire that ourselves and others would treat or would honor God as holy. The Bible again and again emphasizes the holiness of God. We just sang about it in Psalm 99. He's holy, holy, holy. What does it mean that God is holy? We had Terry Johnson here last fall, and he describes God's holiness as His purity and perfection, His love of righteousness and truth, His abhorrence of sin, His rewarding of the good, His wrath and anger against evil, His demand for repentance, and His insistence upon the purified lives of His people. That's the holiness of God. It means that he's free from any and all hint of evil. He's the purest being. And you know the world finds the holiness of God and the holiness of his people absolutely offensive. They hate the brightness of God's purity. All sin is a direct assault upon the holiness of God. God's law calls us to separate ourselves from what is evil, from murder, adultery, greed, idolatry, atheism, disobedience, lies. The Ten Commandments, we have a mirror of the holiness of God. God hates anything that doesn't perfectly line up with His holy law. Any form of sin is lawlessness. Because God is holy, God hates sin. He hates lawlessness. Because we are called to be holy, we're called to hate sin too. Scriptures use many things to highlight the absolute nastiness of sin. It's like the smell that comes from an open grave. It's like dog's vomit. It's like a pig's muddy stye. snake venom, menstrual impurity. God hates sin. But how does God view the sinner? Jonathan Edwards, you may recall his famous sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, said, the God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you. and is dreadfully provoked. You are 10,000 times more abominable in his eyes than the most venomous serpent is in ours. Do we think of sinners that way? Unfortunately, many people, even Christians, have adopted a false view of God. They think that God's an indulgent old man sitting in the clouds rather than a consuming fire. Stephen Charnock, Puritan, said it's too common for men to fancy God not as he is, but as they would have him. Right. This has been going on for millennia, people making God in their own image. This is idolatry. He says they strip him of his excellency for their own security. Such notions of God render him a swinish being and worse than the vilest idols abhorred by the Egyptians when men fancy God. Indulgent to their appetites and most sordid lusts. You might be thinking, well, Pastor, does God really hate sin that much? Aren't you overstating this a bit? Is he really that concerned with the ethical purity of his creatures with me? Friends, it's at the cross. of the Lord Jesus Christ that we see most clearly the hatred of God for sin. When our sin was set on the shoulders of His Son, His wrath fell with full, unmitigated force. The whole cup of God's wrath was poured out on His only begotten Son. Without a right understanding of the holiness of God, the gospel, especially the cross, it looks like utter folly, it looks like madness. It's only when God's holiness is rightly understood that the cross makes sense. Only then does the cross become beautiful in our eyes. Only then do we see it and see the gospel as the wisdom and power of God unto salvation. How then should we live in light of God's holiness and in light of the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ? What does holiness look like in the Christian? What does it look like in you? If you want to see what God expects from his people, you must not look at the world. You must look to his holy law and to his holy son. The law of God, it's God's transcript of holiness. And Jesus, His Son, is holiness incarnate, holiness in the flesh. Jesus, we're told, was blameless in His walk before His Father and God. He kept His law exactly and entirely. There wasn't a jot or tittle that He ignored. Again, Terry Johnson, he said, Jesus is the perfect revelation of the meaning of divine holiness in the life of a human being. And Murray. He said in the incarnation of Jesus Christ, the holiness of God comes to perfect expression and illustration. So you want to know what does holiness look like in me? You look to Jesus. But it's not only in the law or in Jesus that we get a picture of holiness. It's also in the church and the people of God. Or it should be. Notice here in Ezekiel, God by the spirit is causing us to walk in his statutes and to be careful to obey his rules. He's regenerated, he's redeemed his people so that they might demonstrate to the watching world what holiness and godliness really looks like. Israel, they were commanded, be holy for I, the Lord your God, am holy. And the church today is commanded the same. We must imitate God's holy character. Likeness to God is the ultimate pattern of holiness. God wants to renew his image in man. He wants his holiness to be seen in the creature, in all the world, in all the spheres of life, in your family, in your office, in your commerce, in your recreations, in church courts, in civil courts, everywhere. We want to see the holiness of God on display. Author Jerry Bridges wrote a book entitled The Pursuit of Holiness, and that really should be a motto for the Christian life, the pursuit of holiness. We are to pursue holiness. God saves us so that we might be holy, to be separated from sin and dedicated to God. Johnson, again, he asked, is the love of holiness and the abhorrence of evil characteristic of us. Do we love godliness and hate evil? Do we cherish piety and scorn iniquity? The cross of Christ should inspire both a deep love for holiness and a firm hatred of sin. Whenever we consider how our Savior suffered to pay our debt and to set us free from sin's dominion, should make us hate any and all forms of sin. The thought of turning back to such slavery, to the very thing that Christ saved us from, that should make us sick to our stomach. Are we rightly grieved by sin? Or do we secretly enjoy it? Terry Johnson, again, he tells the story of when he was a boy, His pastor preached a sermon that was entitled, The Unfunny Joke. The pastor pointed to how so much humor in pop culture is based on immoral behavior. My, my, isn't sex funny, he said sarcastically. Comedians treat us to a constant barrage of winks and nods and double entendres. Then there's the drunk. Isn't drunkenness hilarious? He's slurring his speech. He's stumbling about, oh, the happy drunk. Johnson remembers the preacher leaning over the pulpit and saying, if you think promiscuity is funny, Why don't you come to my office when a 15-year-old girl is in tears telling me she's pregnant? Sit with me then, have a good laugh. Or come down with me to Skid Row, see the wasted lives. Come laugh at the doctor who's lying in his own vomit in the gutter, his career destroyed, his family ruined, and come back and tell me how funny that is. Do we grieve or do we grin over sin? Jesus died to free us from sin. He sent his spirit to cleanse us from all idolatries, to cause us to be careful to obey all his rules. You may know the Puritans had a pretty bad reputation for being legalists. Look at those legalists, people who never have any fun because they're so concerned about breaking God's law. They were accused of being precisionist. And it's true, they were precise. Just look at our larger catechism and read the section over the law, the Ten Commandments. Catechism and confession, these are Puritan documents. It's so precise. It's so comprehensive, they sought to apply the law of God to the whole of life. Work, recreations, relationships, worship, even to one's thought life. One's affections. When Richard Rogers, a Puritan, was criticized for being too careful in his Christian walk, he responded by saying, oh sir, I serve a precise God. He could have said, oh sir, I serve a holy God. Johnson again, he says, we are ethically sloppy today. We might avoid the big sins, but he says, what about the petty sins of whining and grumbling, griping and complaining? Complaining about the providence of God? What about immodesty? Gossip? materialism, greed. We're apt to entertain slight thoughts of so, so many sins. How's our highway morality? Are we honest at work, filling out time cards or putting in an honest day's work? Do we cheat on tests? Do we obey our parents? Do we obey the laws of the land? Is our yes-yes and our no-no, as Jesus said, they must be? Are we there at 8 p.m. when we say, hey, I'll be there at 8 p.m.? Do we fulfill our obligations to one another? Do we pay our bills on time? How about male-female relationships? Is there integrity in our relationships? Are we honest? Are we creating false hopes? Do we think that the God who sacrificed his own son because of sin is casual? As casual towards sin as we are. Many professing Christians seek to compartmentalize their lives. They have their work life over here, their home life here, and over here is their church life. Friday night life and then their Sunday morning life. We think that if we give God his Sunday or maybe just his Sunday morning, we're doing what Christians ought to do. We're doing our Christian duty. Is that the kind of notion you get from God's declaration here in Ezekiel 36? Does he merely want a casual commitment? I read somewhere that God wants full custody of his children, not just weekend visits. Gospel is not an invitation to a happier version of the life you already have. It's an invitation to die. An invitation to become completely new. It's an invitation to complete, comprehensive holiness. To a life that's wholly dedicated and lived unto God. Doctrine of Sanctification reminds us that we are not finished products. We still have a long way to go, a lifetime of repentance, a lifetime of renewal, a lifetime of battles with sin and hard labor in our hearts and in our minds, tilling the soil of our lives so that we bring forth the fruit of the Spirit. This passage in Ezekiel should be both encouraging and challenging to you. God again and again says, I will, I will, I will. It's by grace that you're saved. Praise God. It's by God's power that you're made a Christian. By God's power that you stay a Christian. Praise God. So very encouraging. But don't think for one moment that since God has Does all the work at the Christian life is going to be easy? Now, the grace of God doesn't put us on autopilot. Paul, you might recall in 1 Corinthians 15, he said, By the grace of God, I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me. God's grace doesn't lead to complacency, but to us working harder. It spurs us toward holiness. His gracious provision of his son. His gracious provision of a new heart. His gracious provision of his Holy Spirit. All of this must spur us on to work out our salvation with fear and trembling. To be zealous for good works. To pursue holiness. The whole point of salvation is to make sinners into saints. To make that which is unholy and vile and profane into something holy and pious and God-glorifying. That we might dwell as a holy people with our holy God in a holy realm forever. We'll close with the words of Thomas Watson, another Puritan, who said, What are all the showers of ordinances for? And ordinances, by that he means, what's the purpose of the preached word, the reading of God's word, the prayers, the singing of Psalms? What's the purpose of all of these ordinances? What are all the showers of ordinances for but to rain down righteousness upon us and make us holy? What are the promises for, but to encourage holiness? What is the sending of the sun into the world for, but to anoint us with the holy unction? What are all afflictions for, but to make us partakers of God's holiness? What are mercies for, but magnets to draw us to holiness? What is the end of Christ dying? That is the purpose. What is the purpose of Christ dying, but that his blood might wash away our unholiness? who gave himself for us to purify unto himself a peculiar people. So that if we are not holy, we are crossing God's great design in the world. Church of the Lord Jesus Christ, do you not know that God's program of redemption is meant to turn sinners into saints, to make us holy. Amen.