Holiness

We'll move standing in line to the check out line of the grocery store. Notice the man behind her, very, very pale, somber-looking, black suit on skinny, black tie. She said, excuse me, sir, are you a preacher? And he said, no, I've just been very, very ill. What goes through your mind when you think of a person who's holy, somebody who lives a holy life? You get the image of a pale, sickly lurking person who's wearing drab clothespins a lot of time by himself or herself in a closed room with holy books scattered all around, having absolutely no fun whatsoever. H. O. Minken is supposed to have said that puritanism is the thought that somewhere, somebody somehow is having fun, and they're against it. Holiness, when we're looking at that in John chapter 17, if you're new to us, we're studying the gospel of John, coming down the home stretch of this study of John's gospel. And we are looking at John 17 the last night of Jesus' life, the night that he was led off to be arrested and then tried and then crucified on the next day. John 17, we often refer to as Jesus' real Lord's Prayer, the high priestly prayer. It's his final prayer in which he prays for his followers, prays for his disciples. He prays for the church. In his prayer, we see several marks of the true church. I'm indebted again to the late Dr. James Boyce, the first person to call my attention to these marks of the true church here in John 17. Two weeks ago, we looked at joy as a mark of the true church. Last week, we looked at unity. This morning, our subject is holiness. John 17, I'm going to begin the reading of verse 14. I have given them your word, and the world has hated them, but they are not of the world. Any more than I am of the world. My prayer is not that you take them out of the world, that you protect them from the evil one. They are not of the world, even as I am not of it. Sanctify them by the truth. Your word is truth. Let's pray together. Now Father, I thank you for this word, this word of truth. I thank you for your word. Lord, we are frail children of dust and feeble as frail. Lord, we are dust, but we're dust that has been made in your image, and you've loved us with an everlasting love, and you've called us to be your own. You've called us to come on up and come in, come closer, gaze upon you and your holiness so that we can be transformed, be more and more like Jesus, the living word, and whose name I pray. Amen. I remember the first time I went to visit a man in the hospital, the first time I went to the hospital room of a person who was HIV positive, and this is over 20 years ago back when we didn't really sure a lot about how this disease was transmitted, so you're a little bit taking your life in your hands as far as you go to the hospital, and I was asked to go to the VA to visit a man. He was an older man, he had been infected with HIV through a bad blood transfusion, and when that happened, basically everybody around him had deserted him, so I was asked if I'd go visit him at the VA hospital, and I went there to see him, I'll just come John, and I, this was over 20 years ago, and back then I actually looked a lot younger than I was, that I've caught up, but back then I looked a lot younger, and I went to the hospital and I was probably dressed the way youth passed or address, and I went to the nurses station on the floor that John's room was, and I said, hi, I'm here to see John, and the nurse behind the counter said, well who are you? And I said, I'm his pastor, it wasn't strictly true, it wasn't completely true, but basically he didn't have anybody else, and I was there to minister to him, so without explaining the whole thing I said, I'm his pastor, and the nurse said, you don't look like one. Now to that I'd probably say, thank you, but I didn't like the way she said it, she said, well you don't look like one, so what does one look like? She said, well not like you, and I was not then the model of diplomacy and decorum you see before you today, so when she said, well not like you, I said, well you don't look like a nurse either,

but I'm here to see John, now what room is he in? She didn't like it, but I went down to see him, what do you think of when you think of somebody who's supposed to be serious about following Jesus? One writer says, how little people know who think that holiness is dull? When one meets the real thing, it is irresistible, and we are called holy lives in the midst of a most unholy culture, a culture that openly mocks the very idea of holiness, how would you aspire to holy living in a culture like this? How would we be in the world but not of it? It's Jesus prayed. I resonate with Isaiah, we stopped the response reading before he got to that point, but maybe you know where Isaiah said, well is me, for I'm a man of unclean lips, and I dwell among a people of unclean lips. I resonate with that. I don't hear you're watching the late night talk shows, if you do, you're forgiven, but when you watch them, it's become clear to me in the events that this last week only bear that out, the name David Letterman, it's become clear to me that that they see our whole culture as basically a pig trough, and they cannot put the feed so low or make it so cheap that we won't consume it. I actually heard some talking heads this week say about Letterman, and if you don't know about it, it's nothing worth looking into, but I will just be discreet and say he has been accused of and has admitted to a number of inappropriate relationships with female staffers, and I actually heard some talking heads this week say, well when is it ever appropriate to have that kind of relationship with somebody you work with? I looked at how you said, when you're married to him, that wasn't even on the menu. It wasn't even part of the template for them. I'm just talking network folks, we don't do cable or satellite or director, have barcines beaming into our home, however you do the rest of that stuff, we're just talking network stuff, but I don't have to look at the television to see the unholiness in our culture, I just have to look within, I have to look within my own heart. When Andrew was little, he had one of those, I don't know if it was actually Gumby, but it was one of those dolls that you could, I'm sorry, action figures, boys don't have dolls. He had an action figure that you could twist like a pipe cleaner and contorted in all kinds of shapes. One day he'd taken this portal figure and had contorted it almost out of recognition. He came to me very seriously, said, daddy, he's led a twisted life.

And Jesus prays that we'll be holy. How do we do that? Well, first of all, we need to remember, our holiness is born of God's holiness, verse 14, I have given them your word and the world has hated them, but they are not of the world any more than I am of the world. They are not of the world, down to verse 16, even as I am not of it. John Piper in his book Desiring God says, God's holiness is the beauty of his manifold perfections. It's the wellspring of his love, his wisdom, his justice, his mercy, his righteousness. It all flows out of the wellspring of his holiness. Stephen Charnock says that holy is the most often used prefix for God's name throughout the scripture, holy Lord, the holy one of Israel, and that it occurs over 600 times in scripture. God's holiness is the sum total of all that he is and all that we're called to be. So I said, well, that's great, but that's just not very practical. What am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to take this home and put it into practice, preacher? Give me something I can sink my teeth in, something that I can take out of here with me and use. Let me ask you, men, assuming you're attracted to women, that first time you saw that woman that is now your wife or the first real love interest of your life. When you saw that woman, did you, you were drawn to or you were drawn maybe by the gravitational pull of your attraction. Did you maybe clean up your act a little bit? Did you maybe dress it up a little bit and try to act better than you would have if you weren't around her? So maybe there is some practical value to be drawn to the holiness of God. I mean, what's the practical value of watching a sunrise or a sunset? What is the practical value of listening to a piece of beautiful music, whether it's Bach or otherwise? What's the practical value of feeling the fur behind your dog's ear when you go to scruff or feel the skin, the smooth, supple skin of a baby's face? It's a practical value of those things, and yet do they not have an impact on how we live our lives? But even if there were no tangible, no practical value, no take-home takeaway message for us, it's still worth doing because God's holy, because he's worthy of being worship. Remember a couple weeks ago I mentioned to you from John Piper's book that the husband who brings on roses for his wife? She says, roses for me, what's the occasion? No occasion, honey. You're just worth bringing roses to. As opposed to the husband who comes home, roses for me? Oh, what's the occasion? No occasion, honey. It's just really good for me when I give you roses. One husband in the pen house, the other husband in the dog house, and it's easy to see which. God's worthy of being worshiped, just because he's worthy of being worshiped. Worship, as I've told you before, comes from the Old English word, worth ship, to declare the worth or worthiness of a person. In England, I'm told they still use that as a term of greeting. Your worship, your grace, worship. God is worthy of being worshiped. Psalm 29 puts it very succinctly, a scribe to the Lord Almighty ones, a scribe to the Lord glory and strength, a scribe to the Lord, the glory, do His name, worship the Lord in the splendor of His holiness. Now this goes to one of the great tensions we deal with in worship too, does it not? The tension between God's transcendence and His imminence. God's transcendence. That's what Isaiah was talking about in Isaiah 6 when he saw the Lord, high and lifted up in the seraphs, flying around and crying, holy, holy, holy in the train of His robe, filling the temple, the temple shaking, filling with smoke and the whole earth is filled with His glory. And that's God high and lifted up. This building does a good job of speaking to His transcendence, doesn't it? We get that from people. They don't put it that way if they talk about how this building inspires a sense of worship. I thank God for the people who were visionary enough to give us this building. The other side of that is His imminence, His closeness. The fact that God Almighty comes close beside us as close as a baby in a cradle or a manger or a feeding draw. He's closer than your next breath. He's closer than your fondest hope or your greatest fear. He's closer than your pain, than your grief. He's closer than that IV sticking out of your arm. He's closer than your prison cell wall. In worship, we declare both, God's transcendence, how He's not like us and His imminence, His closeness, how He is like us. In this passage of Jesus' prayer, it's His transcendence that's in view. It's His holiness. And ours is a reflected holiness. People talk about how bright the moon is tonight. Look how bright the moon. How that moon is so bright you could just about read a newspaper underneath it. No, it's not. The moon is lifeless and dead and dark. It has no light of its own. The moon simply reflects back the light of the sun. And that's what we're seeing. It's a reflected light. It's a reflected luminosity. And our holiness is a reflected holiness from the source of our holiness, God Almighty. Our holiness starts with God's holiness. It is shaped by God's word, verse 14 again. I have given them your word and the world has hated them. Sanctify them by the truth. Your word is truth. You know, there are a lot of words that we use in church circles that don't have a lot of meaning outside the church anymore. Convicted? Next time you with a bunch of white collar executives say, hey, I've been convicted. They go under which kind of financial fraud or scheme that you were involved in. Convicted, regenerate, efficacious human instrumentalities. Those are words that used to get kicked around the church. They don't mean much outside anymore. They try this in conversation at the time. I have been convicted by the efficacious ministry of a human instrumentality and now I'm regenerate. I think you're speaking in tongues. I don't know what you're talking about, but this word sanctified. I think that's one of those churchy type words that still has great currency outside the church. I think people still understand that being sanctified is to be made something other than something better than you already were. It comes from the word we translate as holy. The Older Testament that word is codosh and the Newer Testament that word is high-yous. To be made holy is to be set apart for God's purposes. It is to be called out from your sins and called out for God's purposes. Out from your sins and for God's purposes. Part of Jesus' prayer for us is that we would be sanctified. There is no suggestion here by the way without the rest of scripture. The person who is so sanctified and set apart is any better than anybody else. Only that he is called out and separated for God's purposes. In fact, as we've talked about in here before the last couple of weeks and months, God seems to think of peculiar delight in using the most unlikely. The most unusually seems to delight Abraham, the great father of three-face claim Abraham. Abraham could be a real scoundrel. What? Abraham? How can you say that? Because at least on two occasions that we know of, he told his wife to tell people that she was his sister just to save his own skin. That is not a stand-up God. I don't care how normal that might have been in ancient Near East at the time. Jacob, Abraham's grandson, Jacob was a con man. He was a liar and a scoundrel. He was a con man. His word means deceiver. And so he lived up until he had a wrestling match with God Almighty and the angel of the Lord. Moses had a speech impediment and a rather nasty temper sometimes. Rehab. Rehab was a woman of ill-reputed. David was an adulterer and in fact a murderer. Apostle Paul was either a murderer himself or at least an accomplice to murder and a lot of the disciples were fishermen, a group not known for their elites to tell the truth. That fish was so big. I know people who would say that one of the problems they have believing a lot of what's in the Bible is that the only eyewitnesses were fishermen. God seems to get a kick out of using the unusual and the likely, unlikely people, maybe even including a lot of us. But let me ask a couple of questions. Does being a Christian ever cause you to do or not do something that you would do otherwise? Something that your crowd, your friends, they're going along. Does being a Christian ever cause you to say, you know, I really can't go with you to watch that movie. I really can't go with you into that club. Does it ever cause you to refuse to buy a certain product or patronize a certain business or company because of their anti-Christian stand or their anti-life stance? Does it ever cause you to refuse to cut an ethical corner at your work or to go the second mile or third mile or fifth mile for somebody that otherwise you wouldn't cross the street for? See we live in a time, we live in a culture where the only virtue left is tolerance, and the only sin left is intolerance. Hamilton College, New York, Professor Bunny Robert Simon tells the freshmen students coming in who will say in his class, not once, but it's happened many times, that while they personally dislike the Nazis and what they did, they can't really say that what they did was wrong. I mean who's to say? We live in a time and in a place where our culture has a hard time saying that anything is wrong except the sin of intolerance. And Jesus prayed that we'd be sanctified, set apart from the world, and we would set apart for God. So my soul, you're being legalistic here, you're trying to tell me that being a Christian is about a bunch of do's and don'ts. No, I'm not. If I were a legalist, I would give you my list of do's and don'ts. If I were a legalist, I would tell you you must do and I'd fill in the blanks of all the things that I think are right even though they have no biblical warrant or all the things that I think are wrong and that would be a much longer list. You know, the old thing, I don't drink, smoke, chew or go with those who do. I'd give you my list if I were going to be legalistic about it. I'm not. I'm asking the question. Is being a Christian ever calls you to do or not do something that you would otherwise not do or do as a case maybe? I was driving across Missouri one time. I'm going through a little town, a little church and they're marquee sign like I was out front here. Said this, four words, drink, drink, drunk, damned.

And as I drove by, I thought, well, I'll just bet everybody in this town with a substance abuse problem. I bet they flock to your church. I'll just bet all the people who are addicted to one thing or another. I bet they're beating down the doors. I bet an alcoholic synonymous has their chapter being in your fellowship hall or your basement. It's not our place. It's not our place to condemn. Legalism is holding this defined primarily in terms of what we don't do. That's not what I'm about. Christianity is not a set of rules and regulations, folks. It is a living relationship with the God of the universe who has manifested His love and His grace and His mercy for us and the person of Jesus of Nazareth. It's a relationship that will shake you down to your very core. Turn you inside out and right side up and then it'll throw in a heart transplant to boot. Holiness is not a comparative thing. Now, I've gone to great pains to do some artwork for you this morning. I want you to stay with me on this. I'm going to put up a drawing here that I've slaved over for hours. This is your life, okay? And you start off here and then you're doing okay, but then you take a little slide to the right and you get a little out of line and then you try to correct and go a little too far to the left and then you come back and you get a little bit in the wilderness and you sort of turn yourself around in circles and then you over-credit again, but then you come back more or less to center. That's your life and it doesn't look so good. You can hold your applause from my artwork till later, okay? You don't look so good and they'll use you in my life. Okay, my life. I start at the top like you and then I come down and I swing a little bit to my left and then I really over-correct and I come back and I get a little weird on a few things and then I over-correct again and then I don't just go out in the wilderness. Man, I set up camp and I stay there and I wander around and around. I chase my tail and serve them finally. I take myself completely out of the picture and then sometime later like the product will say, I come back to my senses. I come back into the frame but then I come back to the far side again and I just can't quite make it and then I finish where I finish and you look at my line next year and you're thinking, I'm not so bad. I'm doing pretty good and then we look at the righteousness of Christ. See, you're holding this laughter of it's not about comparing yourself to me. It's about comparing yourself to Jesus. That's a perfectly straight line. Neither one of us look too good. You may look better than me but neither one of us measure up. So what are we to do? And God says to His people in Leviticus chapter 193, 19 verse 3, you shall be holy for I the Lord your God am holy. We don't compare ourselves to one another folks. We are held to the absolute standard of righteousness of God and Christ. How do we know what this righteousness looks like? We find it in this word. We read about it in the scripture. Following Jesus, it's not merely a matter of adhering to some externally imposed disciplinary code. It's to have a new heart, a new mind, a new will. It's to become a new creature in Christ. Holiness, our holiness is shaped by God's word. Peter said at this way, as obedient children, do not conform to the evil desires you had when you lived in ignorance, just to see who called you as holy. So be holy and all you do. For it is written, be holy. For I am holy. Remember those gatorade commercials? I want to be like Mike and show kids dribbling a basketball and people trying to shoot and people trying to dunk. Why? Because they want to be like Mike after his acceptance speech into the Hall of Fame couple weeks ago. I don't know if they want to so much anymore. They want it to be like Mike. I want to be like Jesus. I want to be like Jesus. Peter goes on to say you and that's y'all in Greek. You are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God that you made to clear the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God. Once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy and if you have received mercy, make it widely known. Jesus says, I have given them your word. The world has hated them for they are not of the world anymore than I am of the world. We are not to be of the world just as Jesus was not of the world and what that means folks is we got to declare our allegiance. We are going to have to take sides. We have to decide where our loyalty lies with Jesus or with a very unholy world. I am telling you that means above our allegiance to political parties to schools and to sports teams, to entertainers, to music bands, above even our devotion to our families. Jesus calls us to plan our flags and declare our allegiance to him. The world does not appreciate such men and women and young people. The world does not appreciate people who have a higher calling and a higher allegiance than whatever their cause is. In the Roman Empire, they were told to say Caesar is Lord or else space, persecution, imprisonment, torture, and death and our forebears refused to say Caesar is Lord and they were persecuted and imprisoned and tortured and put to death and oh yeah, they changed the world. They changed the entire world today in this country. We are not told so much what we have to say as we are told what we cannot say. Don't you speak of God in the public arena and whatever you do and declare your allegiance to Christ? We have to say no, folks. We have to say no. We have to say I will speak. I will speak out for what I believe to be true and what I believe about God and if it costs us and it may, and that's the price, we have to pay. We can't compromise with our culture and we can't disengage from it either. That's what a lot of us want to do. We want to back up, move away and move into compounds a hundred miles from any known sin. Guess what? We take our sins right with us. We're called to declare our allegiance. Our holiness springs from God's holiness. It is shaped and is structured by God's word and it's set on fire by God's grace. This goes to our motivation for living God in life. Folks, why not conform to the evil desires as Peter said that you have when you live in your ignorance? Why be holy and all you do because some preacher said so? It's wonderful as I am and thank you for that, Bernie. Your job is secure. You don't have to worry. It's wonderful as a preacher might be. If you do something because a preacher said that's going to last about as long as, no, I don't know, your New Year's resolutions. It's going to last about as long as that last diet did. Why be holy? Why not live like the rest of the world? Not because some preacher said to do it, but because you have a higher allegiance. Listen, you don't lose weight by deciding you hate food, okay? You don't lose weight by deciding that you don't like those kinds of food anymore. Yeah, you do. You don't stop smoking by deciding you just don't like nicotine anymore. You don't stop drinking because you decided that you just don't like alcohol anymore. You lose weight by deciding by God's grace. You want to be slender more than you want that next piece of chocolate cake. You lose weight by deciding you want to exercise more than you want to sit on the couch and watch TV. You stop smoking when you decide by God's grace. You want to be healthy. You want to breathe more freely. You want to live a little longer to cherish your loved ones more than you want that next cigarette. You stop drinking when you decide that by God's grace, you'd rather be sobering and control of yourself more than you want that next drink. In other words, with God's help, you replace one desire with a greater desire and whatever lifestyle sin it is that has you bound up and chained down. You won't get over it by deciding it no longer appeals to you. It will and it will back to you all the more strongly as soon as you call it forbidden. You will get away from, you will break free from the chains of that lifestyle sin. When you desire it, you want to please God more than you want to indulge your own desires. You replace one desire with a greater desire. I don't remember where I read it, but I think it's magnificently put. The true soldier fights not because he hates what's in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him. The true disciple will become more like Christ, not because he hates what it was out there, but because he loves the one who redeemed him, gave him his life. Holiness is being separated from sin, set apart under the Lord. We love because he first loved us. The Father will say to us, you know, all those sins are so appealing to you. They're a spiritual toxic waste dump for your soul. Why will you drink from the runoff of the toxic waste dump? I don't know if you all the living water and the bread of life you can stand. The Puritans used to say that the goal of sanctification was to put our mouths out of taste for those pleasures with which the tempter bates his hooks. To put our mouths out of taste for all those pleasures with which the tempter bates his hooks. In the screw tape letters, C.S. Lewis writes about the patient who has gone from being lost, being found, come from being a non-Christian, being a Christian. Lewis writes, all the delights of sins or heart or intellect with which you once could have tempted him. Now seem to him in comparison, but as the half nods his attractions of a rattled harlot, which seemed to a man who hears that his true beloved, whom he has loved all his life, and whom he had believed to be dead, is alive, and even now at his door, folks, your true love beckons you. He calls you armored and upward to a life of holiness. You want to know what that holiness looks like? Looks like Jesus. Looks like Jesus. Let's pray together.