Holiness and a God of Intimacy: 2 Corinthians 6:16-7:1

Well, this morning we continue with uh another promise.

It's that time of of the month, and I know we've been sometimes offsetting this uh a little bit sometimes by a week or so.

But I do want to just take a moment to commend something to you.

Uh this little book here, uh nothing special in one sense.

It's it's uh it's just it's the joy of having scriptures come with you.

And so this is a book of promises, and I want to commend that to you because it's been a great blessing to me that I take these promises with me wherever I go.

And the the good thing about something like this is it breaks down the promises into little categories for us.

And so, whether it's anxiety or assurance, baptism, blessings from God, calling of God, the church, comfort, companionship, compassion, whatever it is, there's probably a category here that has a promise for you to take and to be fed by.

And so I just commend that to you.

That's it's pretty cheap.

Uh, you can find it on Amazon or wherever you buy your books.

And and uh I trust that you might also find the promises going with you always at hand as you go around in life.

And so um, 2 Corinthians 6 is where a promise is found this morning.

2 Corinthians 6, 16 through 7.1, page 908 in your church Bible.

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.

Let's pray.

Holy Spirit, we thank you that you are indeed holy, that you are our triune God, Father, Son, Holy Spirit, holy, holy, holy.

And so we as we come this morning, we ask and we pray, Holy Spirit, would you do your refining work in our own hearts this morning?

Would you give us to see Christ and to and to see you as you truly are, that we might be aided, that we might be nourished, that we might be spurred on to love you and to serve you in all the ways that you would have us.

In Jesus' name we pray.

Amen.

So a few years ago I was sitting in the densest chair, and perhaps an experience we all can understand and relate to, sitting in the chair, and sometimes you have moments where nothing's taking place, you're waiting, and and in this particular case that was that was required.

There was some waiting required, and and the staff there came to me and we just got chatting and they asked, they said, So what do you do for work?

And I said, Well, I'm a pastor.

And then came the questions.

And one question from one lady who was from an Eastern European country, asked the question of this if there is forgiveness of sins, what motivation do people have to live righteous lives?

To love others.

And the question that had context, as all pressing questions often do, she had evidenced in her own country those who would enter a religious service and yet were known to leave that service and go out and commit great atrocities, only to return the next week.

And it had left a lasting concern in her own mind and heart that religion brought no visible change.

And so we discussed this issue further in between mouthwashes.

But it was it was good, it was a good question.

And it's something that we often have to come back to and think about time and again, even in the Christian life.

And we might say that a similar concern was being raised about the church in Corinth.

These verses that we've just read have context.

The apostle Paul was concerned because there were many areas in the church in Corinth that resembled the world.

We're talking about severe divisions and factions.

We're talking about sexual immorality, we're talking about lawsuits between believers, the abuse of spiritual gifts, as well as the Lord's Supper.

And then there were challenges to Paul's authority as an apostle.

And yet it might surprise us that although Paul in his letter had some hard things to say, here we find him, and these verses were just read, reminding them of certain promises.

And we might ask, well, why is that?

Why bring their attention to certain promises, considering all their grievances?

Shouldn't the apostle be spilling more ink and addressing these specific issues?

And the reason for it is because of Paul's deeply held belief in the power and preciousness of these promises.

Precious for providing present power for the change that was needed.

To give the light that was necessary to fight against the darkness that had crept in.

He said, I think the greatest weakness in the church today is that almost no one believes that God invests his power in the Bible.

Everyone is looking for power and a program and a technique and everything and anything except where God has placed it in his word.

And unfortunately, that is still true today.

And yet, how much blessing there is when we do, look for it there.

A number of you have shared with me, even since the last promise, just how much God has been using that promise to work in your own heart as it pertains to anxiety.

How the Spirit has been working to work through in you through this promise, how you are finding increased peace, the ability to detail out your concerns and anxieties before God in a way that lays them upon Him and casts them into His care in prayer and supplication.

And so we see the power of these promises even in our midst today, for which I'm thankful.

We need these promises, the things, the words contained in these promises, to be present, not as an ancient relic of the past, but to be present for us today, for how we live.

And it was true in the church in Corinth, and it's true for us.

The points, therefore, this morning are simple.

We see through these promises three things.

That we are temples of the living God, that we are set apart, and that we are his children.

We are God's children.

First, we are temples of the living God.

When you or I think of a temple, we need to put ourselves in the mindset or the position of the audience that the Apostle Paul was writing to, and understood what was meant by that.

The temple was central to all of life in Israel.

And if we were to go back into the history of the life of even the Exodus and the Israelites when they came out of the Exodus out of the land of Egypt, we see that when God told them to set up the tabernacle, it was to be centered in the middle of the camp with all of the other tribes centered around.

And they were also given specific instructions.

They were given instructions on how they were to build it.

They were to build it with a courtyard, they were to build it with a holy place and a most holy place.

It was to hold various furnishings, like the table of shoebread and the lampstand, basin, altar, as well as the Ark of the Covenant.

These things were to be housed in there, and the priests were also instructed in how to serve.

But the design that he gave them was set up so that God occupied the central place in their lives, just as he had done with Adam and Eve in the garden.

And we see that design even in creation itself.

One of the amazing discoveries of science is that we can see how even creation, how the heavens are orchestrated in this way.

And I find myself back at school again with our sixth graders relearning sixth grade sometimes when they come to me with their books and homework and third grade, and uh not so much ninth grade, that's beyond me.

But uh one of the books they brought back just reminded me of this.

Uh they had one of these books that shows the earth and and its place in the solar system and and how the earth is is set in motion to orbit around the sun.

The sun occupying the central place from which all of life is derived.

Existence as we know it.

And so 24 hours a day, as the earth rotates on its axis, completing its 365-day journey around the sun, is how God has made creation.

The heavens.

And so creation itself reminds us that we're in need of something stable and steadfast, something central to our existence, something that we are dependent on outside of ourselves that accounts for our existence.

And the temple, in a similar way, was to be a reminder to the Israelite that their very existence and life was dependent upon God being at the center, everything else flows downstream from that.

Self is not central.

I know that's a common thing we have to deal with today.

Yet self is not central, it never has been.

God never purposed it to be.

Because it still doesn't address the we.

The reason he can say that we are the temple of the living God is because the temple Jesus Himself has come to live within us.

And we get a little bit more clarity on that when we look back to John's Gospel, chapter 14, where Jesus is having a conversation with his disciples, and he's about to depart, go to the cross, and depart from this world.

And Jesus says to them, Well, it's actually to your advantage that I leave for a time.

And the question is, well, from his disciples, is why?

How on earth could that be to our advantage?

And he says, Because a new day will dawn.

And then he says, If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.

We will make our home with him.

Jesus is alluding to the day when he would ascend to heaven and he would send the Holy Spirit who would come and would make spiritual realities known.

And in doing so, the Father and his own presence would come and live within those whom he dwells.

That is the plan of God.

Not only for them, but for us in receiving the Holy Spirit.

The promises that Jesus and the Father will be present.

We will make our home within you, is what Jesus is saying.

We will take up, I and the Father will take up residence at your heart's address.

I will come and we will live within you, right where you are.

And I will take that central place within your own heart.

And all of life will be derived when I am exalted there.

Now that's an amazing reality.

And it means that we are temples of the living God.

So why tell us this?

Why does the Spirit bring this to our attention even again this morning?

Because understanding this means God would have us to be clear that Jesus is central for us to be a fruit.

If we want to live lives that are flourishing, Christ must have that central place within us.

He is like the sun that everything else must orbit around.

Because to shelve that reality, to kind of push Jesus aside to a more peripheral place would be likened to removing the sun from its central place in the solar system.

An attempt to remove or obscure the very person that gives us that life and existence that we need to thrive.

Just as the sun does to earth.

And so when it comes to our own hearts, when it comes to us as a church, Christ must be central in our midst, collectively and individually.

And life with all its misery and brokenness is as it is because our hearts fail at this very thing.

And greatest difficulty after conversion is to keep the heart with God.

That's what makes the way of life hard and the gate of heaven narrow.

There was a pastor, Minister Donald Gray Barnhouse of Tenth Press in Philadelphia.

Some sixty years ago, he speculated that if Satan took over Philadelphia, all the bars, he said, would be closed.

Pornography would be banished.

The pristine streets would be filled with tidy pedestrians who smiled at each other.

There would be no swearing.

The children would say, Yes, sir, and no, ma'am.

And the churches would be full every Sunday where Christ is not preached.

And I think that's a sobering reminder that even happiness can be an idol.

And there will always be those who grow tired of Christ-centered preaching.

But the Bible tells us in those uncertain words that our problem is not that we're good people who have lost our way and we just need to be cut a break every once in a while.

In a few areas here and there.

Our problem is much greater than that.

Our problem, the Bible says, is our tendency to put ourselves in the center of our own universe.

My needs, my desires, my plans, my preferences.

And so we experience all of the brokenness that results downstream.

And so the Spirit works in us, even through these promises, to bring us to our place of need, to our own self-denial.

Each day, affirming that we belong to an entirely new order, an entirely new way of seeing reality, that God doesn't exist to orbit around us.

But that he is at the center.

As the sun is in relation to the earth, his presence is our life, collectively and individually.

We are his temples.

Second, we are set apart.

Verse 17, therefore go out from their midst and be separate from them, says the Lord, and touch no unclean thing.

God's intention with the people of Israel was that they were to be a people set apart from the other nations.

We read that throughout the Old Testament.

The purpose of God was to call them out, to be distinct.

And it's important to understand what this means because this has been prone to be misunderstood all throughout history.

If we read the history books, we read of those who were led to isolate themselves in deserts.

Others who sought to isolate into monastic communities.

But as the as the church father Saint Augustine found out and commented on, he said, yes, but the problem with that is that kind of isolation doesn't solve the problem.

And why?

It didn't solve the Problem in his own heart because he came to see that even in such a community, he brought his own impure heart with him.

Life still went on and caused pain.

Death still caused grief.

The problem is deeper than what lies outside of us.

It stems from within the heart.

The presence of indwelling sin.

And so J.C.

Ryle, a bishop, Anglican bishop, he stated this tension that we all experience when the Holy Spirit comes and makes us temple temples of God.

He stated this tension well.

He says, I do not say for a moment that holiness shuts out the presence of indwelling sin.

No, far from it.

It is the greatest misery of a holy man that he carries about with him a body of death.

That often when we would do good, evil is present with him.

That the old man is clogging all his movements.

And as it were, trying to draw him back from every step he takes.

But it is the excellence of a holy man that he is not at peace with indwelling sin as others are.

A fault line emerges when we receive the Holy Spirit in our hearts that puts us at odds with the influences and powers of the world, the flesh and the devil.

An anti-God stance.

And so we ask, well, what is the answer to all of this?

The answer is not in turning our backs on life, but in dealing with and putting off all that isn't according to the will of and the likeness of God.

And so I wonder this morning, do you know that tension within you?

Are you aware in your own soul of that battle taking place?

This clogging that tries to uh draw you back from the good that you would otherwise want to do.

And yet, is there also a willingness to work against it?

Hating, mourning over, longing to be free from it.

As one theologian said, be killing sin, or sin will be killing you.

There's no neutral ground.

And that, friends, is a key evidence of being set apart.

It's true that we won't ever come to a place of perfection in this life, but it is a reality.

Our striving against sin can be seen and identified by people around us.

If we have this kind of soundness and liveliness in our own hearts going on, it will show itself in our own directions with others.

I think John Newton said it better than anyone else.

He said, and summing all of this up, I am not what I ought to be.

I am not what I want to be.

I am not what I hope to be in another world.

But still, I am not what I once used to be.

And by the grace of God, I am what I am.

We are set apart.

And then third, we are his children.

We might ask, what is the purpose of holiness?

To what end do we seek to engage in this daily struggle?

And we see the answer to that in verse 17 and 18, where it says, 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.

The reason why we engage in this struggle is because it impacts our communion with God.

God says, I will be a father to you.

I've promised it.

I've made the determination to direct my love towards you as the apple of my eye and shape your heart after my own.

There is something about cleansing that brings with it fresh sight.

And as I've been doing that, it's just like appearing everywhere all of a sudden.

And you've got to say, well, that's wonderful.

What accounts for that?

Well, there is something about that cleansing work that the Spirit does that brings with it a fresh sight to see God as He truly is: His purity, His beauty, His glory.

And so, whereas the law says, clean yourself up, then I will accept you, the gospel says, I have accepted you.

Therefore, be clean.

And so I, you know, I do think at times we can hear this.

Uh certainly it's been part of my experience.

At times, I've heard the word holiness, and it's tended to give off negative connotations.

Uh if we just think of the times when we've heard someone referencing uh the saying, right?

Uh holier than thou.

Oh, you're just holier than thou.

You're just holier than me.

It's used in a more disparaging sense when we say it like that, isn't it?

And it's really getting at the egocentric moral superiority of someone.

But in one sense, all of that kind of breaks down when in the moment that we need to live with someone who is actually lacking in actual holiness.

Right?

We long for holiness when words are used to curse rather than to bless.

When selfishness uh tramples over other people and feels justified in doing so.

We feel a desire for holiness when anger becomes an excuse for evil.

I think in such moments we long for beauty.

We long for love, we long for righteousness and peace.

And so theologian Michael Reeves, he reminds us that far from being negative, holiness is a thing of beauty.

He says the beautiful, loving holiness of this God makes true godliness a warm, attractive, delightful thing.

It's not about becoming more mean and pinched, for this our God is not mean and pinched.

Holiness for God, said Jonathan Edwards, is as it were the beauty and sweetness of the divine nature.

And so Christians that shine by reflecting the light of the Son of Righteousness do shine with the same sort of brightness, the same mild, sweet, and pleasant beams.

Isn't it true that we all long for more of that beauty?

Aren't relational difficulties often the ones that weigh heaviest on us?

Right?

We can be doing the things that we love.

We can be engaged in some kind of activity, we can be engaged in things in life, but when a relationship is strained, well then that can color our entire day.

I think some can be quick to denounce sin in others.

We like to, some of us like to root out sin whenever we see it.

But we can fail to lift and build up one another.

Others are more accepting and agreeable, but fail to root out what stands in the way of intimacy.

Both are needed, and the gospel does give us both.

The gospel says the gospel first humbles us because we are called purely to Christ by his grace.

We're called to be temples of God purely by his grace.

Nothing that we have done enables us to be temples of the living God.

And so it humbles us.

The gospel humbles us.

But because Christ needed to die, it also says that sin needs to be rooted out.

It denounces sin.

It says that if Christ needed to die, then sin is not something trivial to God.

And so the cross denounces sin, but because Christ lives, the resurrection lifts us up and empowers us, forging in us even greater beauty.

It transforms us.

We are transformed through this gospel so that we begin to shine with the same brightness as Christ.

We are brought intimately near to God who shares his blessedness with us, who invites us to call us Father, as we sang before.

Who else would offer his only son, lest we forget how loving he actually is.

Only a holy God.

This week I found my heart stirred as I read the story behind the song that we're about to sing in a moment.

Take my life and let it be.

And the songwriter was a girl by the name of Frances Ridley Hevergall.

She was born in 1836 and she died at the young age of 43.

But she said, kind of she gives a glimpse as to why these words were penned and how it came to these words that we will sing in a moment.

She said, as I went, I went for a little visit of five days.

And there were ten persons in this house that I went to visit, some unconverted and long prayed for, some converted, but not rejoicing Christians.

And he, the Spirit, gave me the prayer, Lord, give me all in this house.

And he did just that.

Before I left the house, everyone had got a blessing.

The last night of my visit, I was too happy to sleep and passed most of the night in praise and renewal of my own consecration.

And these little couplets formed themselves and chimed in my heart, one after another, till they finished with ever only all for thee.

And I think the reason why that struck a chord with me is because that sounds to me like a heart that is coming to know something more of the beauty of our Father.

And so I urge you this morning, let's likewise spend these promises.

Let's convert them into current coin, spending them so that we might purchase greater stability in our walk with Christ, that we might have greater joy and gratitude in our walk with Him, that we might enjoy more of His righteousness and peace.

Let's pray the men and let's purify ourselves as He is pure.

And in doing so, shine with more of the beauty and sweetness of our Heavenly Father's nature.

Amen.

Let us pray.

Oh Father, what a joy it is, how marvelous it is to see the purity of your heart shining, glorious as it is, majestic, the kind of heart that bids us to come.

The kind of heart that moves us to want to be with you more.

The kind of heart that wants us to be just like you.

And Father, though we know we often fall short of this, Lord, we ask and pray that by your Spirit you would give us even greater clarity in our days, even this week, that you are indeed to be central in our own hearts.

And that in doing so, Lord, you have so much blessing in store for us as we walk with you.

You in our hearts, you first in our hearts, and us with you.

And so, Lord, in all this, we praise you and give you thanks for this treasure that we hold in jars of clay.

And we give you thanks and praise in Jesus' name.

Amen.