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November 5 - November 24, 2020
We were created for good works. “For
God is the master and we are his servants.
For the glory of God
Love for Christ.
Fullness of joy
To experience God’s favor
God doesn’t command obedience “just cuz.” He gives us dozens of specific reasons to be holy.
If we are to be passionate in our pursuit of personal holiness, the first thing we must establish is that holiness is possible. It sounds humble to say, “I cannot obey God for one nanosecond in my life,” but it’s not true. Acting like holiness is out of reach for the ordinary Christian doesn’t do justice to the way the Bible speaks about people like Zechariah and Elizabeth, who “were both righteous before God, walking blamelessly in all the commandments and statutes of the Lord” (Luke 1:6).
Likewise, Jesus teaches that the wise person hears his words and does them (Matt. 7:24). James says the same thing (James 2:22–25). There’s no hint that doing God’s word was only a hypothetical category. Quite the contrary, we are told to disciple the nations so that they might obey everything Jesus commanded (Matt. 28:19–20).
Christians can be rich in good works (1 Tim. 6:18; Acts 9:36). We can walk in a way worthy of our calling (Eph. 4:1). We can be trained to live in a way that is holy and acceptable to God (Rom. 12:1–2).
Their “righteous deeds” were “filthy rags” (64:6, KJV) because they weren’t righteous at all. They looked good but were a sham, a literal smoke screen to cover up their unbelief and disobedience.
But for those who have been made right with God by grace alone through faith alone and therefore have been adopted into God’s family, many of our righteous deeds are not only not filthy in God’s eyes, they are exceedingly sweet, precious, and pleasing to him.
As R. C. Sproul puts it, “The idea of gradation of sin is important for us to keep in mind so we understand the difference between sin and gross sin.”6
The Mosaic legislation prescribes different penalties for different infractions and requires different sacrifices and payments to make restitution.
It’s true that there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus (Rom. 8:1), but this does not mean God will condone all our thoughts and behaviors. Though in Christ he overlooks our sins in a judicial sense, he is not blind to them.7
The fact that God disciplines his children (Heb. 12:7) means he can sometimes be displeased with them.
Yes, we can grieve the Spirit (Eph. 4:30), but the normal state for the Christian should be one of blessing and enjoying God’s favor (which, by the way, is not the same as health, wealth, and prosperity).
how does the Spirit work in us to make us holy? One of the ways is to strengthen us with power in our “inner being” (Eph. 3:16).
To summarize, then, the Spirit is a light to us in three ways. (1) He exposes sin so that we can recognize it and turn away. (2) He illumines the Word so that we can understand its meaning and grasp its implications. (3) He takes the veil away so that we can see the glory of Christ and become what we behold. Or to put it another way, the Spirit sanctifies by revealing sin, revealing truth, and revealing glory.
As our covenant God, he guarantees blessing when we obey and threatens curses for disobedience. The blessings may not be what we expect and they may not come until the next life (Heb. 11:39–40), but they are always good and always for the ultimate end that we may become more like Christ (Rom. 8:28–29). The holy life is always a life of faith, believing with all our hearts that God will do what he has promised.
God’s mercy does not automatically produce obedience. We must be told to obey and then go do it.9
Let’s not make the mistake of the old Keswick theology with its “let go and let God” view of sanctification.14
Sanctification is not by surrender, but by divinely enabled toil and effort.
Only by knowing our position in Jesus can we begin to live like Jesus.
Every blessing is received in Christ (Eph. 1:3). No aspect of our salvation can be excluded from our union with him.
Union with Christ is like wedlock, where we are joined to Christ in a covenant of love.
Becoming like God means growing in the qualities and virtues of God. There is no mixture of human and divine. Our humanity is fully retained, but it is also set on a process of being fully restored. We cannot become God; but we can become like him.
We aren’t interested in being virtuous just to be good people. Our first love is Jesus. Holiness is not ultimately about living up to a moral standard. It’s about living in Christ and living out of our real, vital union with him.
But once you understand the doctrine of union with Christ, you see that God doesn’t ask us to attain to what we’re not. He only calls us to accomplish what already is. The pursuit of holiness is not a quixotic effort to do just what Jesus did. It’s the fight to live out the life that has already been made alive in Christ. If I had to summarize New Testament ethics in one sentence, here’s how I would put it: be who you are. That may sound strange, almost heretical, given our culture’s emphasis on being true to yourself. But like so many of the worst errors in the world, this one represents a
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You are one with Christ, so live like Christ. Be who you are. That’s the consistent message of the New Testament:
Time after time, the Bible reminds us of our identity in Christ in order to call us to obedience to Christ. Do not strive after holiness because you cower in dread of God. Strive after holiness because you are confident you already belong to God.
As Christians we do not always feel close to Jesus. But that does not change the reality of our union with him. We are told to “consider [ourselves] dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 6:11) because that’s what is true of us as Christians.
The Bible is realistic about holiness. Don’t think that all this glorious talk about dying to sin and living to God means there is no struggle anymore or that sin will never show up in the believer’s life. The Christian life still entails obedience. It still involves a fight. But it’s a fight we will win. You have the Spirit of Christ in your corner, rubbing your shoulders, holding the bucket, putting his arm around you and saying before the next round with sin, “You’re going to knock him out, kid.” Sin may get in some good jabs. It may clean your clock once in a while. It may bring you to
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If you go back to the vice lists, you’ll see that every one of them mentions sexual immorality.
Any sexual activity between those who are not married, or between two men, or between two women, or among more than two persons, or between family members, or between those married to other people—any sexual activity in these contexts is sin and can be included in the prohibitions against porneia.
Apparently they liked to affirm that “all things are lawful for me.” They were proud of their Christian liberty. And yet Paul explains that even “free things” are not free if they enslave you.
The body is no longer for self-gratification, but for God-glorification (v. 20). We have been bought with a price and belong to Christ.
To put it bluntly, if you shack up with a whore it’s like dragging Christ into bed with her too.
The bottom line is, you are not married until you are married. And until you are married, I believe it is a fair inference from biblical principles that you should refrain from all sexual activity—even the kind that stops well short of intercourse.
We must consider the possibility that much of what churchgoing people do to unwind would not pass muster for the apostle Paul. Not to mention God.
Have we made a false peace with ourselves whereby we have said, we won’t do the things you do or be as sensual as you are, but we will gladly watch you do them for us?
We must always remember that in seeking after holiness we are not so much seeking after a thing as we are seeking a person.
Union with Christ is the irrevocable work of the Spirit. Once united, nothing can separate us from Christ. Nothing can make us a little more or a little less united. Union with Christ is unalterable. Communion with Christ, on the other hand, can be affected by sin and unresponsiveness to God’s grace. It’s like marriage: you can’t be more or less married (union) but you can have a stronger or weaker marriage (communion).
By communion I simply mean fellowship with Christ. In his brilliant work Communion with God (1657), John Owen takes four hundred pages to unpack how we can have communion with each distinct member of the Trinity. The Father’s special communion with us is love; the Son’s communion is grace; and the Spirit’s communion with us is comfort.
A complete disregard for holiness indicates that we do not have fellowship with Christ and are not in him. Conversely, walking with Christ and enjoying communion with him involves walking as Christ did and keeping his commands.
We pursue communion with Christ through prayer.
We pursue communion with Christ through the word of truth.
We pursue communion with Christ through fellowship with other Christians.
In more than a decade of pastoral ministry I’ve never met a Christian who was healthier, more mature, and more active in ministry by being apart from the church. But I have found the opposite to be invariably true. The weakest Christians are those least connected to the body. And the less involved you are, the more disconnected those following you will be. The man who attempts Christianity without the church shoots himself in the foot, shoots his children in the leg, and shoots his grandchildren in the heart.
We pursue communion with Christ through partaking of the Lord’s Supper.
