"Spiritual Distancing" 2 Corinthians 7:1 Sunday Morning Worship Service

2 Corinthians, that's where we'll be this morning.

2 Corinthians chapter 7, verse 1.

2 Corinthians 7:1

We'll be looking at just one verse this morning, 2 Corinthians 7.

Verse 1.

If you're making your way there, I'll read it for us.

The Apostle Paul declares, 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.

Mary Mellon, a name that perhaps some of you are familiar with, was a cook in New York City in the early 1900s.

While known for her excellent cooking, there was a catch with her in the kitchen.

She is one of the, at the time, only known asymptomatic carriers of typhoid, which means that she was highly contagious and yet showed no symptoms of the disease.

It's unclear if she even ever really came to terms with the fact throughout her entire life that she was contagious with typhoid.

But anyway, she felt led to the kitchen and made her life as a cook.

She allegedly was quite a good cook if you could get over the fact that her cooking would likely kill you.

She would be hired by a family.

It was usually wealthy families that hired her.

She would cook for them for a while.

Usually a few weeks, illness would break out in the house.

The family wouldn't associate the illness with her cooking.

Eventually they'd be unable to afford her anymore and would let her go.

And she traveled all over the greater New York area.

This is the early 1900s, doing this, before one particularly wealthy family hired a private investigator to figure out why they got so ill.

Typhoid was ravaging much of the world at the time, so typhoid wasn't that unusual, but it was unusual in the upper middle class area of New York City where she was working.

Eventually, the private detective worked with the health department and tracked down all these pockets of typhoid outbreak, and the one common denominator they all had was it happened only a few weeks after hiring an Irish-born cook matching Mary's description.

Eventually, the government tracked her down and arrested her in a kitchen, no less, and threw her in quarantine in the hospital and told her that she could be released if she agreed not to cook anymore and agreed to have her gallbladder out.

They actually believed that the typhoid uh disease was carried inside the gallbladder.

I have no idea if that is actually the case, but that's what they believed at the time.

She refused.

She denied that she was ill, she wouldn't let them operate on her, and so she was kept against her will for three years in a hospital in New York City.

Eventually, after three years, she promised, and she really, really meant it, that she would no cook no longer, and so they let her out.

She spent a couple years doing laundry for people.

She wasn't that good at laundry.

And so she changed her name and went back to cooking.

And the typhoid outbreaks began again.

It took the government less time to track her down this time around.

They finally caught her and threw her in jail again.

She would spend the rest of her life, 30 more years, in mandatory quarantine.

She refused to admit that she had typhoid.

She ended up dying in a hospital jail.

Now, you know, there are typhoid Marys all around us.

That's what she became known as typhoid Mary.

And there are typhoid Marys all around us.

Only I'm not talking about the physical disease of typhoid.

I'm talking about something really even more serious, the spiritual disease of sin.

There is a very real presence of sin and worldliness in the world, and the world is populated with people who refuse to come to terms with the fact that they are a corrupting influence on others, who refuse to come to terms with the fact that they are shedding their virus to others, that they are highly contagious as they seek to corrupt other believers.

They desire to infect others with worldliness.

They have no clue how sinful they are, and so they act with a kind of cavalier attitude as they spread their sinful temptations around.

And the Bible wants to warn you, and that's where we are this morning in 2 Corinthians 7, verse 1, where Paul gives us a warning against being being infected by worldliness, a warning against being infected by sin.

2 Corinthians 7:1

And he gives us some practical recommendations about how to protect ourselves against this virus.

And that's going to be the outline I give you this morning.

I'm going to give you three CDC recommendations to guard yourself against the sin virus.

And in this case, CDC, by the way, stands for the Corinthian Depravity Council.

That's what I think it came up with.

And if you're familiar with the church at Corinth, you know that's not a misnomer.

This church was a depraved church.

This was a worldly church.

The Apostle Paul had brought the gospel to them.

There had been some powerful teachers in their midst, but they had not gotten over their immaturity.

This was a cosmopolitan place.

It was sort of the intersection of the nations there.

Happened in Corinth, an intersection of the world, across roads of the world here.

It was kind of a sea town.

It was a transit town.

It was like a truck stop and a navy port all in one.

It was totally immoral.

And yet they had come to faith in Christ.

And the church had never really gotten over their immorality.

There were very few that were willing to walk away from the corruption of the world.

The Apostle Paul had moved on from them, and false teachers had moved in behind the Apostle Paul and had been selling a form of Christianity to the church that they could believe in Jesus but reject what Paul said and live the life of the world.

That's what they were getting caught up in.

And so you see immorality, sexual immorality in the church.

You see them denying God's purposes in marriage.

You see drunkenness in the church.

You see drunkenness at communion.

You see the idol worship of Corinth had trickled into the church.

They would eat meat sacrificed to idols.

And Paul makes some very powerful points in both 1st and 2nd Corinthians about this.

You know, on the one hand, there's nothing wrong with meeting meat sacrificed to idols.

If you're a mature believer, you recognize that the idol is nothing.

It can't actually corrupt the meat.

And you're mature enough to know that.

And that's where people in Corinth bought their meat.

But if you're an immature believer, your conscience is compromised by doing it, and your faith is made shipwreck, and you begin fearing idols, and you begin compromising your faith all over the place.

And that's really the point here.

And so Paul asked the Corinthians to stop with their idol commingling, stop with their delusion of their faith and their causing immature believers to stumble.

And you can just look at the practical element of this, that they were rejecting the Apostle Paul's teaching as legalistic and as immature itself.

And Paul's point to them is listen, I perform signs and wonders around you.

You've got all these so-called fake apostles, these so-called super apostles that can't do any of the miracles that Paul did, that have none of the gospel that Paul had, and they're corrupting the Corinthians.

And so that's the background here is that the Corinthians were a depraved church.

They were suing each other, dragging each other into court.

I mean, this was a, this whole church was a wreck.

And Paul appeals to them to guard their lives against the sin that was so prevalent in their society.

And I'm going to call it the sin virus because Paul's point in 2 Corinthians is that it is highly contagious.

It is easily caught.

Surrounding yourself with people that, you know, bad bad company corrupts good morals was the attitude Paul was trying to convey to the Corinthians.

When you surround yourself with immature people that are trying to make a shipwreck of your faith, what do you think will happen to your faith?

I chose this passage this morning because I feel like we have some ears to listen to this now that we maybe didn't have a couple months ago.

Because right now we're living in a world where we go to extreme lengths to protect ourselves from a virus.

We go to extreme lengths to protect others around us from the virus.

And that's that's good.

It's good to be protective.

It's good to want to guard yourself and your household and those that you love from catching a contagious and deadly disease.

So we just have gone accustomed to changes in our world.

We grow accustomed to not going to the store all the time or to taking precautions when you go.

We go accustomed to this, you know, this incessant washing of your of your hands, and that you, you know, you sing a song while you wash your hands, and you know, 20 seconds minimum, and there's YouTube videos about how to wash your hands and things that would have seemed even common sense or we had taken for granted a few months ago or would have seemed overprotective a few years ago, perhaps, even with some of the ways that we're closing stores and stuff, things that you wouldn't have even heard of a while ago.

Now we understand.

The phrase social distancing wasn't even part of our an idiom we used a few months ago, and now it's something that little kids know.

There were kids in our cul-de-sac that were arguing over the proper distance to have social distancing as they were playing basketball with each other this week.

This is something that's just part of our world now.

We know that we need to close libraries, we know we need to close the parks, we know that dentist appointments are canceled, and there's probably some bad news in this also.

We know we have to close those things.

You can't let your kids go to the park.

Think of the precautions we're taking.

Now I want you to ask yourself if you believe that sin is more dangerous than a physical virus in the world, it's more contagious.

Ought you not to take seriously or similarly drastic measures in your fight against sin.

People become very quickly obsessed with how to protect themselves physically, and it is worth asking if we as a church are equally obsessed with how to protect ourselves spiritually.

Because there is a reality of spiritual defilement that is in the world.

I met these kind of people in college ministry all the time.

They would say they didn't have enough time to read their Bible, but they had enough time to go to the gym an hour a day.

They didn't have a prayer life, but man, they had a workout routine down.

And that's given way now to the kind of person that has the various models and projection of viral spread memorized, mortality rates and hospital utilization or concepts they're familiar with, and they understand how all that means and how that affects society, but they show very little awareness or alertness to the dangers of sin in the world.

And so it's worth asking yourself: what are we more afraid of?

Corona or compromised Christianity?

Fortunately, the CDC is here to help.

And so here's three practical steps that Paul tells you to have in mind to guard yourself against a compromised Christianity, to guard yourself against sin spreading in your family, spreading in the lives of those that you love.

The first step he gives you here is to cling to our father, to cling to our father.

And I do notice this.

I don't know if you notice this, but the graphics designer used the same font the CDC uses for the three steps on washing your hands.

I'm just noticing this now.

And so thank you, Stephen, for doing that.

I appreciate that font.

The first step is to cling to your father, to cling to your father.

This whole book begins back in chapter one, verse 20, with Paul declaring that all of God's promises are yes in Christ.

All of God's promises are yes in Christ, he says in chapter 1, verse 20.

Christ fulfills the ages.

Christ fulfills the promises, he fulfills the sum of history.

They're all fulfilled in Christ.

Does God promise that he's going to send a redeemer into the world?

That's fulfilled in Christ.

Does God promise that he will be with us?

That's fulfilled in Christ.

He's with us as we're in Christ.

Does God promise that he will defeat the devil and the grave?

He does in Christ.

Does God promise that he will judge the world?

Yes, he does promise that.

And he will through Christ.

All of God's promises are yes in Christ.

That's chapter 1, verse 20.

Now, here in chapter 7, Paul gives you this reference right here.

Since we have these promises, beloved, this hinge here is on these promises that God has given us.

Now, these promises here in general refer to all of God's promises.

All of God's promises through the Bible are fulfilled in Christ.

He is the king of the ages, the center point of history.

He will return to earth again and establish his kingdom.

He will reign over the world from Jerusalem.

He will be the king.

They're all yes in Christ.

But specifically here, Paul has something more immediate in mind.

And these are the promises in verse 16 down through verse 18 of chapter 6.

On the one hand, this chapter break is kind of unfortunate here because chapter 7, verse 1 is obviously the conclusion of chapter 6, verses 14 through 18.

This is his final statement here.

On the other hand, I appreciate the chapter break here because it just draws out the promises.

The argument of chapter 6 was building really to chapter 7, verse 1.

Chapter 7, verse 1 could be its own chapter, honestly.

It's just standing here.

In light of the promises in chapter 6, you're going to make changes to your life.

But to get that, you need to appreciate what promises he's telling you to cling to.

There's really five promises in verses 16 through 18.

That I will be their God, he says.

That God will be our God.

Our Heavenly Father will be our God.

That they, the people that separate themselves from the world, will be his people.

That he will welcome us when we separate from worldliness.

I will be a father to you, it says in verse 18.

I will be a father to you.

That is a promise to you.

You will be sons and daughters to me, he says in the middle of verse 18.

If you take those five promises together, you get this overarching picture that God wants to be in a personal relationship with us.

It doesn't get more personal than him saying, I want to be your father, and you can be sons and daughters to me.

That's how these promises start.

I am your God.

Look up in the middle of verse 16.

I will be their God.

When you separate from the worldliness around you, he will be our God.

And more immediate than that, we will be his children, and he will be our father.

We'll be sons and daughters, he says in verse 18.

Now, all of these promises are contingent in chapter 6 on our separation from the worldliness around us.

And it's worth pointing out again that the Corinthians were intrinsically compromisers.

They were depraved.

They were capitulating in their faith.

They were compromising all over the place.

And so Paul's appeal to them was listen, look at the worldliness around you and step away from it.

He reminds them we don't have time to go through all of chapter 6 again, but just verse 14 should be in the back of your mind.

God was not actually caring about the ox and the donkey, although I'm sure there's some secondary, you know, benefits to the animals there.

God's primary concern was to teach the Israelites that they were separate people.

The ox and the donkey couldn't work together, so the Israelites would learn they weren't like the nations around them.

They couldn't do things other nations could do, and part of it was this division in the whole Jewish culture between clean and unclean.

And you can't mix the two.

Leviticus 19, verse 19.

Leviticus 19:19

You'll keep my statutes.

Don't let your cattle breed with other breeds of cattle, God says.

Don't sow your field with two different kinds of seed.

Don't make a garment of two different kinds of cloth.

That's Leviticus 19, 19.

That moves foundational to the Jewish world view that things had categories, and those categories were not to mix.

And of course, the overarching category that God gives the Jews is clean versus unclean.

Everything in the Jewish world fits into that category.

There's no neutrality with that.

And the American world, until recently, was very different than that.

But this is foundational in the Jewish world.

Everything is clean versus unclean.

You wouldn't touch an unclean person.

Again, Americans are more ready to understand that dichotomy now.

You know, when somebody goes to shake your hand now, you're going through a quick risk assessment in your mind.

This is the way the whole Jewish world has always been since the old covenant.

Some food is clean, some food is not clean, don't mix them.

Some kitchens are clean, some are unclean, don't mix them.

Some fields are clean and some are unclean.

Don't eat from both.

Divide everything.

And that principle was given to them so that they would learn to separate from the world.

And that's the principle that carries over to the church in chapter six.

You are allowed to wear a shirt that is cotton polyester blend.

You're allowed to.

You're allowed to eat a pluat, some random fruit, bread from two different kinds of fruit.

You're allowed to eat those as a Christian.

You have Christian liberty to eat the pluot, a turk duccin or whatever.

Eat it away.

The point is you're supposed to separate from the world.

That's the part of this that Paul brings across to you.

It's very interesting when he says this, though.

He says to the Corinthians as well, he's not even talking about the sexually immoral people of the world that you're supposed to separate from.

That's not his primary concern.

His primary concern is not the immoral people in the world, because he says, otherwise you have to come out of the world.

His primary concern is the worldliness that invades the church.

That's the big danger.

And so Paul pleads with them: separate from them.

Just like in the Old Testament, the concern for the Jews was not Egypt's Egyptians in Egypt.

It wasn't Kushites in Ethiopia.

It wasn't the Philistines across the sea.

The primary concern was those other nations as they infiltrated Israel, or more accurately, as Israel imported their gods and imported their wives.

That was the concern.

Separate from them, Paul says.

To do that would be so drastic.

You see a picture of this at the end of the book of Ezra.

You want to look like what it would want to see what it would look like for the Jews to actually separate from the worldly influence?

It is just tears and sorrow and divorce and orphans and weeping.

It's chaos and calamity if you want to take this seriously.

And it just was devastating to them.

How would you have that kind of discipline to actually separate from corrupting influences in the church?

From corrupting influences that want to take your faith captive?

How can you have the courage to actually make the hard choices to separate from those people?

Well, chapter 6 says you remember those promises.

If you're going to separate from believers that want to tear you down and bring you down into sin, you're going to have to really believe that God loves you.

That God is your father.

That you have a closer relationship with him than you would with your worldly friends.

That's the promise you need to remember.

Exodus 6, verse 7, I will take you to be my people, and I will be your God, he says.

Exodus 6:7

This is a promise to Moses.

Leave Egypt.

Leave Egypt.

Where are they going to go?

In the wilderness?

God says, You leave, I will be your God, and you will be my people.

Leviticus 26, verse 12 Walk in my ways, be my people, and I will be your God.

Leviticus 26:12

This is what Moses tells them.

Well, they're in the wilderness.

They have 40 years ahead of them in the wilderness in Leviticus.

And God says, leave those people, and I will be your God.

My people will become your people.

You think of Ruth leaving the land of Moab, leaving everything that she knew, all of the families she grew up with.

She's going back with Naomi to Israel.

She doesn't have anybody there.

She doesn't have a husband there.

She doesn't have a family there.

She doesn't have jobs there.

She doesn't have land there.

She has no hope there.

But she throws it all in with by declaring to Naomi, Your people will be my people.

Your God will be my God.

Where you die, there I will die, and there I will be buried.

And may Yahweh punish me so severely if anything but death separates me from you.

That's Ruth's declaration.

That's the declaration of a believer that we will cling to God and his people will become our people.

It is worth separating from the corrupting influences of the world, the corrupting influences even that have wormed away in the church, because we know that God will be with us.

Do you believe that you will have a closer relationship with God than you would have with friends that lead you to compromise?

If the answer is yes, then separation is simple.

Do you trust chariots and do you trust Sauls, or do you trust God?

And you have to remember to trust God, to value God more than the friends that you have developed, to value God even more than some of you, I'm sure, come from families where your families don't love the Lord, and your families don't want you to love the Lord as much as you do, and your families would love nothing more than to see you compromise in your faith.

And you have to ask yourself: do you believe that you will have a closer relationship with your Heavenly Father than you would with the corrupting influence that is trying to bring your faith down?

The only way you can say that is to say, I believe the promises of God enough to separate from the compromising in the world.

That's where chapter 7, verse 1 starts.

Since we have these promises, and it leads to the second principle cling to our Father, secondly, cleanse our lives.

Cleanse our lives.

Cling to our Father, and secondly, cleanse our lives.

Since we have these promises, he says, let us cleanse ourselves from every defilement of body and spirit.

Let us cleanse ourselves.

This is the ultimate, do this because Christ has done that.

This is the ultimate connection of because God says he wants to be your father, then you need to actually cleanse your life.

It's the promises of God that motivate us to holy living.

It's the promises in chapter 6 that give way to the command in the middle of chapter 7, verse 1.

You cleanse yourself because God has already promised He will be your God.

God has already promised that you will be his people.

On the basis of that promise, you now act thusly.

One of the most common words in the Bible, 700 times the Bible uses the word holy.

Holy means, at its very essence, the word holiness means to separate.

It means separate.

God is, of course, the ultimately holy being because he is ultimately separate from his creation.

He is the creator, we are the creation, so therefore God is ultimately holy.

He is the definition.

Because he is the creator, he is the definition of holiness.

He's outside of his creation.

He is separate from his creation.

So holiness then is defined as conformity to God.

Even the word holiness has its roots in the Israelite separation culture where everything is pure or unpure, holy or unholy.

And so we then are supposed to be holy.

We're supposed to be holy because God is holy.

This is the command in the book of Leviticus over and over again.

Be holy because I'm holy, God says.

Holiness means to have a clean conscience.

A holy person has a clean conscience.

Their conscience isn't convicting them for how they're living their life.

To have a clean conscience, you need it purified by the blood of Christ.

That's what Paul writes in the book of Hebrews.

To have a clean conscience, you need to have it purified by the blood of Christ.

There's no path forward to a clean conscience apart from the blood of Christ.

Because your conscience convicts you.

Your conscience has been deadened because of sin and it convicts you because of how you live your life.

In order to purify your conscience, you need the sacrifice of Christ to make atonement for your sin.

Because your sin has been paid for, now your conscience can be cleansed.

But a cleansed conscience should lead to an obedient life.

Because your conscience is active in your mind, applying the word of God to your mind.

It's telling you how to live, it's sanctifying your life.

The word sanctification is related to the concept of holiness.

Sanctification means purification as you're separating from the world.

It's the progress into holiness.

That's sanctification.

You're getting sanctified.

It's very difficult to sanctify something.

I mean, you understand this?

If something's contaminated with a virus, you would treat it in a certain way and spray it with certain chemicals and all of this.

And even then you're going to have doubts about if you cleaned it well enough.

How do you sanctify yourself?

You apply the death of Jesus Christ to your life through faith.

The blood of Christ washes your sins away, which is a great idiom for this.

It means the blood of Christ has paid the penalty for your sin.

It has the effect of purifying your conscience because your sins have been paid for.

Now your conscience, being purified, holds on to the promises of God.

So now your conscience is active, telling you how to live your life because it has tethered you to the promises of God.

So there's a choice to make, and your conscience convicts you about this and tells you to do that.

If your conscience is tethered to the Word of God, your defiled conscience, purified by the blood of Christ, you recognize that's wrong, this is right.

So only a believer in that sense can have a conscience that is motivating holy living.

Nonbelievers can have consciences that convict them of sin, of course.

I mean, that's the point of the conscience.

Non-believers can say, ooh, that looks bad and wrong, I shouldn't do it, and then they do it anyway.

But their conscience is still active.

But a believer, because you're freed from the power of sin, you've been purified in your conscience, for a believer, your conscience can actually motivate holy living.

The nonbeliever's conscience just says no to them.

The believer's conscience can say no to sin and yes to godliness.

That's the process of sanctification.

And it comes through the language Paul uses here is cleanse yourself of every defilement.

Sin is an obedience to the flesh, and it defiles the spirit and the body, is Paul's point here.

Very interesting pairing here of the body, the flesh.

Sarx is the Greek word, the flesh of your life.

It's normally a word with negative connotations.

The wages of sin is death, and it's the fruit of the flesh, the product of the flesh, fleshly living.

That's a negative connotation versus spiritual living.

Here, Paul pairs those two words, links them, that the body and the soul can be defiled, the body and the spirit can be defiled by worldliness, by idol worship in the context of chapter six, by compromised Christianity defiles both.

If you know anything about pagan religions, you know they do defile both.

There is a sexual immorality that does defile the body.

Paul makes that point back in chapter six.

Sexual immorality does defile your physical body.

And it brings defilement to the whole church.

It's very interesting how quick compromise goes to sexual immorality.

Compromise in any area of life often leads to sexual immorality.

But it's not as if sexual immorality is the worst sin.

The worst sin is the one that defiles the spirit, that defiles the soul.

But they go so hand in glove.

Compromise leads to sexual immorality, it defiles the body.

It will defile the spirit as well.

And so Paul says, you make choices to cleanse yourself.

It's a reflexive command here.

You're doing this to yourself.

He doesn't say, let your conscience be cleansed.

He doesn't say let your soul and your body be cleansed.

He doesn't say, let yourself be cleansed.

It's not a passive verb here.

I wouldn't tell my kids, let your hands be washed.

I mean, if there was a little baby, I would.

Stop kicking, let yourself have a bath.

But once you're old enough to wash your own hands, you switch to the the more, well, the reflexive.

You need to wash your own hands.

You're doing this to yourself.

And that's, you don't, it kind of stumbles us sometimes to think of sanctification with that kind of imperative to us.

But that's what Paul says here.

Cleanse yourself from every defilement, from everything that wants to corrupt you.

There's a tug of war match in your soul.

I hope you see it all over the world.

There's a tug of war match in your soul.

One side is pulling you towards sin and compromise, the other side is pulling you towards godliness.

Every decision is a battle right there.

Do you want to be dragged into the mud of sin, or do you want to take a stand for godliness and righteousness?

Every action has that battle in it.

It is a tug of war in the heart.

But it is more serious than simply a tug of war because sin is more than a tug on your heart.

It is a poison pill for your soul.

It will actually corrupt your life.

And so you cleanse yourself.

You fight the fight.

You run the race.

You keep the faith.

All imperatives that you are doing.

Now, of course, of course, of course, it is God that it works in you and through you to will and act according to his good purpose.

Of course, God is the ultimate agent of sanctification.

Of course, God is the one who defines holiness, who gives his Holy Spirit to you to convict you of sin and motivate you to godly living.

So of course, this is all God's work, but God is working in you and through you, and you are at work in your sanctification.

That's something called antinomianism, which means that there's no law for you.

When a person says, I don't need to apply God's commands to my life because that's works righteousness.

So there can be no commands in the Bible.

I just, you know, I let go and let God.

I just believe the promises and the commands take care of themselves.

But that is that's exactly the kind of crazy talk that has gotten the Corinthians into such compromises.

There is an actual war for our hearts, an actual war for our souls.

And we have to cleanse ourselves.

This is so significant because we're so sinful.

I mean, that's the problem here.

I mean, the real problem here is not the balance between gospel and imperatives or promises and commands.

The real problem here is that our hearts are wicked.

Our hearts are sinful.

We come into this world because of Adam's sin.

We come into this world born in sins and transgressions, we come into this world depraved, we come into this world loving things we shouldn't love.

You hear people object and you say, you know, this is sin or that is sin.

I say, how can you say this is sin?

How can you say that is sin?

You don't know.

Because everything is sin, honestly.

I mean, everything in this world is sin.

Our best actions are tainted by sin.

We have so much sin.

I mean, it the way we're worshiping, even this morning, has sin in it because of our pride or our apathy.

You know, are you proud in the way you're singing?

Then boom, you just ruined it.

Are you apathetic about how you're singing?

You don't care?

Boom, you just ruined it.

I mean, everything we do is tainted by sin.

That's why it's such a war.

So is this a sin or that a sin?

Yes, this is a sin.

Yes, that is a sin.

It's all sin.

Because our hearts are so wicked.

And so then Paul says, you cleanse yourself.

You go to war against the sin that's in your heart.

And you go to war firstly by remembering his promises.

Remember, that's where this started.

You can't flip these things.

You have to remember his promises in order to get to his commands.

Otherwise, you have behavior modification.

Behavioral modification says, stop sinning.

Stop sinning now.

Go, stop sinning.

Well, that's not effective.

The gospel does produce behavior modification, but it's always the product.

It begins with what God has done.

It begins with the seed of the gospel, the seed of the Savior, the seed of Christ.

Every imperative in the Bible rests on indicatives.

Every command to cleanse yourself rests on the promises.

That's why at the beginning of chapter 7, verse 1, it's not a throwaway phrase.

You can't get to cleanse unless you have a cling.

And you can't reverse the two.

Every time the Bible says do this, it's always rooted in what God has already promised us.

Now I want to say that one more time because I want you to hear it.

Every time the Bible says do this, it's always rooted in what God has promised us.

It's always rooted in who he is.

Even the very basic one, be holy.

Because I'm holy, God says.

I mean, the very basic framework of this in the Bible is rooted in God's identity of who he is, should motivate who we are.

Think of the Sermon on the Mount.

Blessed are the spiritually bankrupt.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for theirs will be the kingdom of God.

Gets to be holy because God is holy.

Gets to, if you look at a woman with lust, gouge out your eye or cut off her hand.

I mean, those imperatives are rooted in the promise that if you're spiritually bankrupt, God has a promise for you.

If you recognize your depravity, God has a promise, you'll inherit the kingdom.

Now he's got some imperatives.

And you cannot reverse those two.

You can't take the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount and make it the conclusion.

You can't flip these, you can't flip chapter six and chapter seven.

You can't say, purify yourself.

Oh, by the way, there's these promises that go along with that.

You can't invert the who and the what.

The who is that God is holy and God loves us through Christ who died for our sins.

The what is purify yourself.

There are those that have big time problems with saying you need to purify yourself.

Big time problems with saying sanctify yourself.

That here's imperatives of the Bible that you need to do in your life.

Whoa, that works righteousness, whoa.

It's not, though.

It's basic Christian living.

Basic Christian living.

You have a relationship with the living God, that relationship produces your sanctification.

And the person who says, I don't need to apply the, and sanctification comes through you applying the commands of the Bible, by the way.

The person who says, I don't need to apply the commands of the Bible, because of my relationship with God, doesn't understand what the relationship with God mandates.

I used to work with a guy who told me, he was he was upset about my preaching, actually, because he said I had too many imperatives in my preaching.

And he said the gospel shouldn't have imperatives in it.

That becomes work righteousness.

You shouldn't preach the commands.

The commands are always for non-believers.

That was his dichotomy.

The commands are for non-believers, the indicatives, the statements of fact are for believers.

And don't confuse the two or it leads to legalism.

That's what he told me.

And so I gave him a hypothetical.

I said, okay, here's my computer.

Put it on my office table, and I said, if you came in here and I said, hey, I'm thinking about looking at inappropriate things in the computer, what counsel do you have for me?

Would you tell me to stop and don't do it?

And he said, honestly, he said, No, I wouldn't tell you that.

I would tell you, think about how beautiful Jesus is.

And the more you think about how beautiful he is, the less you'll want to look at your computer.

Well, in a big sense, that's true, right?

Broadly speaking, that's true.

If you're dealing with lust in your life, think about how precious the gospel is, and that will be a powerful motivating factor.

At the same time, the Bible does have imperatives.

You know, if the right response should be, if I said, I'm thinking about looking at something bad and inappropriate on my computer, is to take my computer and throw it out the window.

It should be your response.

Tie a brick to it and dump it in the dumpster.

That's better than sinning.

And you should be able to tell people that.

You should be able to tell people, flee from sexual immorality.

Every other sin a man commits is outside of his body.

But sexual immorality is in you, and it unites your body to defilement.

And God is the avenger of it.

Those are the kind of imperatives that are given to believers.

You need both in your Christian living.

You need the indicatives of who God is, and you need the imperatives of what you're supposed to do.

You are supposed to cleanse yourself from immoral thinking.

It's not separate from the indicatives.

The promises lead to purity.

The promises lead to your mandates.

The promises lead to your sanctification.

And again, sanctification is you taking the commands of the Bible, applying them to your life in holy living.

What Christians do is always based on what Christ has done, and what Christ has done should always influence and direct what Christians do.

So actually cleanse yourself.

Turn off your TV, pause your Netflix, read a book, read a good book.

Compare how you defend yourself against a physical threat to how you defend yourself against a spiritual threat.

Compare what you do to ward off a physical virus and ask yourself, do you take the same precautions against spiritual mold?

If I said, here, I went grocery shopping for you, here I bought you a bag of groceries.

By the way, I dipped it in a bag of coronavirus first, but I think I got most of it off.

Here you go.

I don't know what a vat of coronavirus looks like, but work with me.

And yet we do so often we le allow cheesy Christian books, silly Christian theology, silly Christian readings into our house.

And we're like, we justify it by saying, oh, you know what, 10% of this book is true.

Here's a book filled with frivolous stories and just cheesy, lame theology that's designed to not offend rather than to cause you to grow.

Like, yeah, you know, 10% of it's true.

That should be fine.

I'll let my kids read this.

You know, read the Puritans, read good theology, read books that will challenge and feed your soul.

Read your kids Pilgrim's Progress.

Turn off the silly stuff.

Read biographies of missionaries and evangelists, not biographies of athletes and mediocre politicians.

Feed your family good things that strengthen you spiritually.

You wouldn't let your kids have only starches and breads, and yet so often we feed our souls just that.

If you want to actually cleanse your lives, scrub, scrub, scrub, and 20 seconds under hot water is not gonna do it for your soul.

You're gonna need something more nutritious than that.

That leads to our third point here.

Cling to our Father, cleanse our lives, and thirdly, complete our salvation.

We're doing all of this, Paul says, we're doing all of this.

Bringing holiness to completion in the fear of God.

We have the promises of Christ, but they're not fulfilled yet.

Jesus has fulfilled all the promises of God.

They're yes in him, but they have not been actualized, so to speak, in our own lives yet.

Another way of saying this is that you will be cleansing your life the rest of your life.

You will never get to a point in this world where 2 Corinthians 7 verse 1 is done.

2 Corinthians 7:1

It's not like figure out how to buy milk, pay your Netflix bill, and be completely sanctified.

And you can go down the list and cross them off.

Okay, I paid the bill, I got completely sanctified, now what's next?

Mow the grass.

No, you're never going to move through the list.

You're always going to be on cleanse yourself.

You will always be stuck there.

Progressive sanctification goes on the rest of your life.

So there is a command in the Bible to be perfect because God is perfect, but we recognize you have to have the rest of it, that it goes on the rest of your life.

Otherwise, you become perfectionistic, which is also bad.

You become the person who insists on doing everything perfectly and they become miserable to be around.

They make themselves a slave to their own wrong expectations.

They have this idea that there's a right way to do something, and if they do it the right way, then there won't be any sin in it.

No, you're this is a battle the rest of your life.

So you've got to have the long game here.

You recognize the rest of your life you will be striving after this.

Yes, the command is to be perfect, like God is perfect, but no, I'm sorry to tell you, you're not gonna get there.

And I just I love the Spurgeon line that he says, you know, if you meet somebody who says they have gotten there, they have reached the point of no sin, Spurgeon said, just stomp on their foot really hard and see how they respond.

That's just that's just great.

Philippians 3, verse 12.

Philippians 3:12

Not that I've already obtained this or I'm already perfect, but I press on to make it my own because Jesus Christ pressed on to make me his own.

And then Paul says, brothers, I don't think that I've arrived.

But one thing I know, I forget what lies behind, I strain forward for what lies ahead.

I press on towards the goal of the upper prize of God in Christ Jesus.

I mean, notice how this is mandated, because Jesus led the perfect life, he motivates you to, but you recognize you're not going to get it in this life.

You keep pressing forward.

So he says here, bringing holiness to completion.

That's the rest of your life.

Notice what's behind that is why God saved you.

He saved you to glorify himself through you.

That's the point of your salvation.

He saved you so that he would reveal more of himself through you to you into the world.

If God is holy because he's separate from the creation, how can you be made perfectly holy if you're part of this creation?

I mean, you won't be.

You've got to press on until you're reunited with him.

It's all lifelong.

And even the language completion here, it just kind of gives it away again.

It gives it away.

It says, God did this because he's got a purpose, and the purpose is his own glory revealed in you.

That's when you're you're complete when you're like him.

Not that you'll, of course, ever be a God.

This isn't Mormonism, but you're complete when you know him, when you know him fully, and you will be known as, you will know him fully as you are already fully known.

And then he staples on this uniquely Christian phrase.

This is such a difficult phrase.

Non-Christians just can't understand what's meant by this phrase at the end here, in the fear of God.

Doesn't perfect love drive out fear?

How can he say, produce, sanctify your life and pursue holiness the rest of your life in the fear of God?

I thought Jesus died to take away that fear.

And this is why it's just it's all the tension of the gospel right in this phrase.

And I've even heard people say, you know, the fear of the Lord, that's the Old Testament way of living.

Well, here we are, smack dab in the middle of 2 Corinthians.

Yikes.

How do you pursue holiness with fear?

Because how could you pursue God without fear?

Somebody says they don't have any fear of the Lord, doesn't know the Lord or themselves.

Some people I think are so deluded they don't see their own sin and so they don't have fear of the Lord.

And some people have such a low view of God they don't have fear of the Lord.

You know, the person who says, I can only worship, I couldn't worship a God that doesn't do things I don't like, is a person who says, I can only worship a God that's just like me, is a person who's not going to have fear of the Lord, right?

Because they've created a God that's just like them.

But if you have the Bible's God, the God of creation, you're going to have fear before him because he knows your thoughts.

He knows the secret motives of your hearts, he knows your lustful thoughts, he knows your proud thoughts, he knows your secret twisted thoughts, he knows your angry thoughts, he knows all of those.

And you're gonna stand before him and he will have full knowledge of them.

How could you not be afraid?

This is why Moses, when he has the encounter with the Lord at Mount Sinai, do you remember what Hebrews, what is it, Hebrews 12 says about it?

That he was undone with fear.

So terrible was the sight that Moses said, I'm overflowing with fear.

And the people begged that God would stop talking to them.

They couldn't do it.

This is how we relate to God is through that fear that he knows everything about us and he is the perfect judge.

But like all things, this is all fulfilled in Christ.

And so as we approach the mercy seat, we have a fear of the Lord, but we also recognize that because we're in Christ, God's wrath at our sin has been paid for.

Because we're in Christ, he's not going to pour out wrath on us because of our sin and our twisted thoughts and our secret motives, because he's already done that and he poured it out on Christ.

And that's why we can stand before the Lord filled with joy.

You see the scene in heaven in Revelation 5.

And everybody's looking around.

Who is worthy to open the scroll?

Who is worthy to reclaim the world?

And everybody's doing a self-assessment, aren't they?

Why aren't I worthy?

Why do the angels already know I'm not worthy?

God knows I'm not worthy.

God knows that I've sinned.

God knows I deserve judgment.

There's no one worthy.

And when you realize that you are not worthy and you have a fear of the Lord, then you can open your eyes and behold, there's a lamb.

There is someone who has taken away God's wrath for sin.

And you're in him.

And so, yes, you pursue holiness with the fear of God in you.

But you recognize, as Paul told the Corinthians, chapter 3, verse 18 of 2 Corinthians, we all with unveiled face behold the glory of the Lord.

And we're being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.

This comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.

You behold the Lord with an unveiled face, and he changes you and brings you into completion in Christ Jesus.

So remember, there is a war for your soul.

There is a war in your life.

Will you love Jesus or love the world?

But as you think through those two options, remember that Jesus loved you so much that he died in the world.

Did the world love you enough to die for your salvation?

But Jesus did.

The world loves itself and killed Jesus.

Jesus loved you and took your sins and died in the world.

I mean, it's not a competition even.

In rising from the grave, Jesus declares, Take heart, take heart, I have overcome the world.

Lord, we think of all the people in different situations listening to this, and we're thankful that your word is living and active.

We think of the people in nursing homes who are under lockdown, who don't have interaction with anybody, who are perhaps live streaming this.

I pray that this would have a particular application of grace in their life and encouragement as they meditate upon what you've done for them in Christ.

Pray for the families that are watching this with kids crawling all around and the threat of compromise everywhere in our lives and in their lives, and I pray that you would apply this in our life.

Particularly in a way that motivates us to holiness and obedience.

Think of the single people watching this, perhaps more prone to loneliness and isolation than the rest.

I pray that your spirit would apply the truths of this verse in a way that gives them particular grace.

Particular encouragement on the promises that you are their father, that they are your people, even in isolation.

We know that your promises are legion and yet they're fulfilled in Christ.

And we are numerous watching this, all different kinds of people with different dispositions and circumstances, and so we're thankful that the Word of God is living and active and can bring a fresh application to every person, whichever situation they're in.

We give you thanks for these promises of your word in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Thank you for being with us today.

And now a parting word from Pastor Jesse.

If you have any questions about what you heard today, or if you want to learn more about what it means to follow Christ, please visit our church website, emmanuelbible.church.

If you're not a member of the local church and you live in the Washington, D.C.

area, we'd love to have you worship with us here at Emmanuel.

I hope to personally meet you this Sunday after our service.

But no matter where you live, it's our hope that everyone who uses this resource is involved in their own local church.

Now may God bless you this week as you seek Jesus constantly, serve the Lord faithfully, and share the gospel boldly.