You know that song we just sang when Josh opened up? He said he wanted to focus on what Mary saw. I think what we sang is what she saw in the Lord Jesus, which made her worship.
And really, that song we ended with today at the Lord’s Table—I wish I could have said that as my ministry last week, because I think that expresses everything the Lord is trying to say: “This is who I am—holy.” Because He is so holy and so wonderful, our only response is to worship Him. What we were doing this morning was wonderful.
But I think this is exactly what Mary saw: everything we were singing about in Jesus.
Let’s go ahead and look at a couple of Scriptures.
In Leviticus 19:2, about the middle of verse 2, the Lord says to His people—He told Moses in verse 1, “Tell the people; speak this to the people”—He said:
Be ye holy; for I the Lord your God am holy.
And I’d like to turn to Hebrews 12:14. The verse says, “Pursue peace with all men,” but really my focus this morning is this:
Follow after peace with all men, and the sanctification without which no man shall see the Lord.
Let’s pray.
Father, we worship You this morning. We thank You that You have made it so that we can come to You through Your Son, Jesus Christ. Thank You for His sacrifice, for His coming down from Heaven to be that sacrifice, for His going to the cross, for Your raising Him from the dead and seating Him at Your right hand.
And what we do say with the songs we are singing: He is worthy. He is worthy to be where He is. He is worthy to be worshiped and adored. He is worthy to have all these accolades put upon Him. There is none higher than He, and we bow before Him this morning.
Lord, we ask that You would reveal Yourself to us through Your Word and encourage us to get hold of the things You want us to get hold of, so that we might be those vessels that You want us to be, that You have planned us to be from the beginning of time.
Lord, we tell You how much we need Your help. Only You can reveal Yourself. Only You can speak the things that You want to speak. Only You can open hearts. So we ask You, by Your Holy Spirit, to open up the Word and speak it into our hearts, that You might have a return for Your Word to us. We ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
All right. As a good teacher, what do all good teachers do? Review. Okay, all right.
We used these verses last week, but last week I wanted to look at them this way. This was really the key to last week: “Be holy, for I am holy,” with the emphasis not on us being holy, but on who He is—on who our God is.
I mentioned that I had been in some dark times—not spiritually dark through any fault of the Lord, but through my own fault. I had been reading the prophets, and we talked about that. Out of the prophets, I started asking the question, “Why are they telling these things to the people of God? Why do they have to tell these things to the people of God?”
Then finally, the people had to go into captivity. My question was, “Why do they have to go into captivity? They are the people of God. Why do they have to go? What is wrong with those people?”
Of course, you know, when you point a finger, you have three pointing back at you.
So in looking at that, I found this. This is what came to me: they had lost the sense of who God is for themselves. They lost that sense of who He is. That is what we were singing about today: He is holy.
Any time you lose a sense of who God is, it has an effect on your life, and it has a negative effect on your life. If you read the prophets, they are very corrective. They are correcting the behavior of God’s people because their behavior was messed up.
It is not only that they might have been stealing or committing adultery, but they were also profaning His worship and profaning His name.
Any time you lose a sense of who God is, then you lose the sense of His calling for you. It becomes different; you do not see it the same way.
That is what we were looking at last time. In reviewing, I talked about A. W. Pink, who wrote The Attributes of God. We had all these things listed there, and I added one because I said they should have had this one. Pink should have had this one: righteousness.
But all of those things—those sixteen attributes of God—He is all of these things. The sum total of all that would be this: He is holy. You add all these things together in one magnificent Being, and what you have is holiness.
We talked about holiness, in one way, as purity—a moral purity. But in other ways, as many people have said, it means “other.” He is not like us. He is other.
I asked, “Which one would you take out if you could take one out?” I think we all agreed: let’s take out wrath. Okay? That would make it a lot easier. But, you know, He has anger. He has wrath.
I wish I would have said this a little more last time: He has an abhorrence of sin. He cannot be in the presence of sin.
That is who God is—not merely what He is, but who He is. “I am holy.” That is what He wants us to know. He wants us to know His holiness.
We said that God desires for us to know His name—His full name: “I AM WHO I AM.” Not the pick-and-choose version: “I am Your provision. I am this for you, this for you.” No: “I AM WHO I AM.”
Whether it is for you or not, this is who I am. Yes, if you take Me as your Savior, I am these things to you. But I am more than just for you. This is who I am in My entirety. It is the whole package. There is no pick-and-choosing.
You get His love, but you get His wrath. You get His righteousness, but you have His mercy. All of these things are ours in this One whom we worship, this One who has redeemed and saved us. They are all Him.
God desires us to know His name—His whole name—because that is who He is.
Then we looked at Moses and how God called him from the burning bush. The idea is that, in knowing His name, as terrible as that name is—by “terror,” I mean that it sometimes strikes terror in us. It is not love that strikes terror in us, but the other things: the righteousness, the wrath, the all-knowing nature of God.
He can look right through us and see us. He knows what we are thinking. He knows where we have been. “I know thy works.”
But He desires us to approach Him, and He makes a way for us to approach Him. As we come and approach Him, we find that He is holy. Our life has to be adjusted as we approach Him, but that does not stop Him from getting us to approach Him. He will deal with that as we approach Him.
He wants us to approach so that He can deal with us and draw us near. Then we talked from Isaiah about how He desires to reveal to us His majesty and His holiness.
He wants to do this so that we forever lose our idea that we are something—that we can merit something from Him, that we can earn something from Him, that we can be on par with Him in any way.
We have to see ourselves in the light of who He is, in His majesty and holiness, where we abhor ourselves. When we fall down before Him and say, “Who can ever save me?” that is when He says, “I can.”
So we are forever cured of looking at ourselves as if we are something, and as if we can do something to earn His favor or have any merit that earns His favor.
Then we talked about David in Psalm 8. God takes us and shows us how big He is. David was probably out in the fields, looking at the heavens.
Now, I do not know if you guys have ever looked into the heavens before, because you guys really do not have mountains here in Virginia. They are kind of hills. Okay? California, we have mountains. They are the steepest mountains in the United States—the Sierra Nevada.
You go backpacking out there. What are these mountains over here, four thousand feet? Yeah, that is right. The biggest mountain in the contiguous United States, Mount Whitney in California, is fourteen thousand feet.
You go backpacking there, and on a clear night, you see heaven. It is incredible what you see. You feel odd, and you feel so small.
That is what David did. David looked at that and said, “What is man?” That is when God shows him His purpose for man.
It is not just David’s purpose—“You are going to be king.” It is the eternal purpose that God has for him: that He wants him to share that rule with Him because He wants to rule through him. He wants a vessel through whom He can rule. That is His purpose for man.
That is what we talked about last time. We ended with this: those people who went to Babylon and were called back were in conditions that they should not have been in. But there is no longer, for us, a Red Sea experience.
You do not get the fireworks. You do not see that awesome power. You have to really hear the Lord’s calling you out, like He did those people when He said, “Whosoever will, can come back to Jerusalem.”
Whoever hears that voice then has to act on faith and simply come on faith and go back. As he steps out and starts on that trek, he finds out that everything has been provided for him to go back. Everything.
Cyrus had provided everything for those exiles, including building materials for them to build the temple again. All that had been provided, but no fireworks. Simple faith—simple faith.
That brings us to the practical part, the part that we cringe at a lot of times, because it touches us where we live.
I want to go back to this idea: “Be holy, for I am holy.” Even though we experience dark times in our lives, God does not change.
There is a great Horatius Bonar song for the Table: “I change, He changes not.” It is a wonderful song. That is us—we change. Our love for Him fluctuates. I wish mine did not. I wish I was red-hot for Him all the time.
But I do know this: my experience has always been that when I turn back, I find out that His love has never abated. His love has never gotten one ounce colder. It is always a white-hot love. He is always waiting for you to come back.
Now, there are consequences that we will face, but the thing is, the love is never gone. That is a wonderful thing. It is a wonderful thing to know.
Last time we looked at, “For I am holy.” This morning, what we want to do is look at this one: “Be holy.”
You guys who are as old as me, remember diagramming sentences? Yeah, okay. Wasn’t that fun? I loved diagramming sentences. It was better than writing, because you had all these little things and stuff like that.
But if you were diagramming this sentence, how would you diagram it? You put you in parentheses, because who is to be holy? You. It is understood, right? You, be holy, for I am holy.
This part is talking to us. This is what the Lord is saying to us. After He says, “Look, I am holy,” and He shows us Himself as being holy, then He says, “Now, I want you to be holy.”
That is where we want to start today. This is our calling. This is the calling God has for us. He wants us to be holy. He has called us to be holy.
In looking at being holy, we want to ask, “What is holy?” It means to be separate. “I want you to be separate.”
We have been delivered out from one kingdom into the kingdom of the Son of His love, right? We are supposed to remain in that kingdom. We have come out of one world, and we have been placed in another world. Now He is saying, “Be separate. Stay in that world. Stay in that kingdom that I brought you into.”
Be separate. Do not be mixed. Do not get mixed in there.
Then, be pure. What is pure? It means more than just an outward appearance of holiness. I think sometimes we mix up holiness and righteousness.
Righteousness does not get you holiness, but holiness gets you righteousness. What we think is that we have this outward appearance, like the Pharisees. The Pharisees looked like this: “This is us. We are pure. We are perfect. Look at what we do not do. Look at what we do. We do the right things; we do not do the wrong things.”
That is not what He is talking about. He is not talking about the outward appearance of holiness, but He wants an outward appearance that grows from an inward purity of thought and motive.
Remember when our Lord was preaching the Sermon on the Mount, how He took the law deeper than the surface? He said, “Ye have heard that it was said,” but then, “I say unto you.”
“You have heard it said, ‘Do not commit adultery.’” Oh, okay, I have not committed adultery. But He says, “Whosoever looketh on another…” Man, that is a whole different level, is it not?
It is an upward level. We are ascending. We are getting off the earthly plane, and we are ascending up that holy mountain, which we are called to live on in Zion.
That is what purity is in this holiness.
Then there is this idea of being “other than.” Our character is other than the world’s character. Jesus said about His disciples, “You are light.” The world is in darkness, but you are the light of the world. You are like a city set on a hill. You are other than the rest.
You are the salt of the earth. You have a different taste. You are the ones who portray Me.
Salt is not just something that tastes. It is something that preserves. It preserves the purity of who God is.
In a land where you had Pharisees running around who were righteous—outwardly righteous—but the purity of who He is was missing, the Lord said, “You are salt. I want to preserve who I am through you. I want people to see who I am through you.”
You are salt. Preserve My image. Preserve who I am. Preserve My dignity. Preserve My personality. Preserve everything that I am.
This is our calling. This is what it means to be holy.
Now, I can say that we are holy in this sense: it is a very positional thing, right? We are holy. He has made us holy.
He has separated us. Look at Israel in Egypt. Israel went down to Egypt, and they almost lost their identity. Then they were delivered from Egypt, and the Lord separated them from the Egyptians. He put the Red Sea between them.
So we are holy. We have a standing that is holy. God has already separated us to Himself.
But what we like to do is live in that standing and not walk in that standing. There is a difference.
Sometimes I think we have misunderstood grace so much because we have heard so much that grace means you do not have to work. Grace means you do not have to work as far as anything that has to do with getting right with God. There is nothing you can do. That is why we are saved by grace.
But there is another side of grace too. Grace is the response to what has been done for you.
The Lord brought Israel out of Egypt, and they got to Mount Horeb. Were they supposed to live at Mount Horeb? They were given the law there, right? Why did they not just put their tents up and live there?
Because that was not God’s purpose for them. He had a land for them to live in, a land for them to populate. They had to take it for themselves. They had to walk by faith, get in there, drive out certain things, and it took some effort.
Did that gain them standing with God? No. They were already a separated people. They were His people. But it gained them everything God had for them in the practical outworking of those things.
In that, they find out who God is. Every step we go, in the fulfilling of these things, we find that God reveals Himself to us a little more and a little more and a little more. We are always finding God.
When we look at this verse, “Pursue holiness, without which no one will see the Lord,” it is true. If you are not pursuing the standing He has given you, then you are never going to see Him, because you are stuck at Horeb. You are never going any further than that.
Remember, at Horeb it was like, “Oh, this is too scary for me. You go up there, Moses.” We like that. It is so much easier to have someone else go off for us.
That is why we have offices in the church where someone says, “I am a pastor,” or, “I am a teacher,” and this is all I do, so now you guys do not have to do it. Isn’t that cool? You can just listen to me, and I will do all the work for you.
But that is not how it is supposed to be. We are all supposed to be priests—every man a priest—because that is what God originally wanted: every man having this relationship with Him, every man working out his own salvation with fear and trembling, because it is God who works in him.
Now, 2 Peter 1:10 says that we want to make our calling and election sure. We are to be diligent in making this calling sure. We are not supposed to be lax in doing it, just riding on somebody’s coattails. No, we are to be diligent in following into this holiness.
The question then is this: How do I pursue holiness?
I want to make three points about pursuing holiness. These are not the one, two, three steps to get holiness, but these three things are necessary for us to pursue holiness—to go after it.
When we talk about holiness, we are not talking about, “I am doing stuff that is not bad. That makes me a holy person.” That is not it.
I want to go down to the root of holiness. Where is the root of holiness? It is in the holy of holies in our own lives. It is in the very center of our beings.
There is a hymn, number 538. We are not going to read it, but how many of you know the hymn, “Take Time to Be Holy”? “Speak oft with thy Lord.” It is a wonderful hymn.
But this is vital: we have to take time to be holy. In our pursuit of holiness, we have to take time.
What does that mean? I want to make this really, really practical. This has to do with our quiet time. Some people do not call it quiet time. Some people call it a morning watch. Some people call it their daily devotion.
But I want to say this about your quiet time: this is the foundation of your pursuit of holiness. This is the foundation. Everything else—your whole walk with the Lord—is built on this.
I have to ask myself this question: How do I approach this time?
We get into habits. Just like at the Lord’s Table, we get into a habit, and pretty soon it becomes a rote thing. We are just doing things. We forget, and it becomes really easy to forget the presence of God and just do our routine.
So how do I approach this time in a way that really helps me in my pursuit? It can just be ritual. I am not saying that because it is a ritual to you, you should stop it. No, it is a good habit. But in the habit, let us think about this.
First of all, it says, “Take time to be holy.” Well, be holy—what does that mean? We just said it means to be set apart and separated.
This is my question to myself and to you: Do I set myself apart for this time?
What does that mean? Do I get myself away from distractions when I have my quiet time? I do not know when some of you have your quiet time. Some people have it in the morning, some in the evening, and some people have it both times.
But do I set myself apart for this time? That can mean a lot of things. What I really mean is: are you apart from distractions? What are the things that distract you?
I have an old timer. It does not have very much on it. It has a camera, no games, and I think I can text on it. What are your phones like?
How many of you guys have smartphones? Come on, raise your hand. You have a smartphone? The young generation over there, right? They have outsmarted you, have they not?
They are like what television used to be. Now you do not even need the television anymore to distract you, because it is all there on your phone.
What is on your phone? You have all these—what do they call them? Apps? I do not even know what an app is. I will, I am sure. But you have all these little whistles and bells that distract you.
Put your phone away, and go to your quiet time.
How about this? I know this is for some of us older people. All we think about is our day ahead. We have our day planner out. It is not this day planner here, but the day planner is right in here, right? You are trying to get it out, but you cannot get it out.
But are we separate from distractions? That is a big thing—to be separate from distractions—because the Lord is trying to speak to us. The Lord wants to break through to us. That is why I say, are we set apart in these times?
Another thing about being set apart: some of us are like this, “Oh, I will have my quiet time, but after I read the newspaper,” or, “After I check to see if the Dodgers won.”
You are laughing. How many of you have the same type of situation? It might not be whether the Dodgers won, or the newspaper, or something else, but there is something else you have to go to first.
Set apart. Who is first? That is a big question in your quiet time.
The next thing is this: holy means pure. There is a moral purity, but what I want to look at is the sins of omission and commission—the types of sins we pick up.
Do we not even think about that when we come into the Lord’s presence? The Lord Himself cannot abide with sin, even the smell of it. He is holy.
He does not wink at it either. “Oh yeah, I’ll let it fly. Oh yeah, that is just a small thing. Just come into My presence.” No. He is holy.
That is why David said in the Psalms:
Search me, O God, and know my heart:
Try me, and know my thoughts;
And see if there be any wicked way in me,
And lead me in the way everlasting.
“Search me, O Lord, and see if there is anything wrong, so I can come into Your presence.” That is part of preparing our way to come into His holy presence.
Come in and think, “Lord, where have I been today?” Not just, “Where have I been physically?” Where has my mind been? Where has my heart been? I need to come in. I need to get it clean.
When you entered into the holy place, what was the first thing you came to? The altar. Altar—sacrifice. Sin has to be dealt with. You have to come in through the altar. Once you get through the altar, you can come in with your offering.
Be pure. We have to come in without our sandals, because sometimes our manner of life has been unpleasing to Him before we come in. That has to be dealt with.
We need to see sin as God sees it. A lot of things, we say, “Oh, that is not sin.” But to God, it is something.
I am not saying you should start looking really closely at yourself. You will know when there is something wrong if you are tolerating something that the Lord thinks is sin, because you will lack His presence. You will lack the sense of His presence in your quiet time.
He will not give it back to you until it is dealt with. You have to see things as sin. You have to agree with Him that they are sin. Then you have to do away with them as He directs you.
Sometimes we are caught in sins that, because of the weakness of our flesh, we are over and over confessing and confessing. We need to be praying for deliverance.
The Lord wants to deliver us from those things. He does not want us to just tolerate them and say, “I can never get over it.” We need to seek the Lord and say, “Lord, You know my weakness. Here I am. I need that deliverance.” Sometimes we need other people to come in and help us.
But it is worth it, because it gets you back into His presence. So there is a purity there.
Then it says, “Take time.” What do we mean by taking time? The first thing, I think, is that when you are taking time, you focus.
I just heard—I do not want to offend all you people that have this—but the guy who came up with the term ADHD said it was not a real thing, and then he died.
Okay, no, I am not saying there is not such a thing. With so many different drugs that have been around to help us cope with life, I have no problem with that.
But we are so tantalized by visual things. We have to see. We are watching television, looking at the computer, doing these things. I can see that.
I look at my students. They start reading an assignment and say, “Oh, look—ten pages, the reading assignment.” They start to read, and then they say, “No, this is too much. Ten pages.”
History books have pictures and graphs and stuff. Ten pages—how much text is that? What, six pages? Too much. Too much for me.
We have to focus on things. Even television shows today have three plots going through them because people get bored with one. Everything has to be new. Everything has to be moving fast. Everything has to be moving—boom, boom, boom, boom. We have to get that stimulation somehow.
You have to get focused. What are you looking for in your quiet time? Looking for the Lord? You have to get focused.
When I was a basketball player in junior college, I had a coach. I was about a fifty-percent free-throw shooter in high school, so it was really like flipping a coin whether I made it or not.
This coach took me aside and said, “Your free throws stink. Come here. You have to concentrate on your free throws.”
Every day, he made me take a basketball, go up against the wall, and practice my follow-through one hundred times. Talk about boring.
My free-throw percentage went up to over eighty percent because he got me focused.
It is the same thing in our quiet time. You have to be focused. How can we hear the Lord? How can we see the Lord if we have all these other distractions? We have to focus.
Then, invest the time. Investing means a couple of things. It means you are spending something. You might say, “Well, I am saving.” No, you are not. You are spending it.
When I invest my money in something—like my, what is it, a 401(k)?—I give it to Tom Roberts, and he takes care of it, so I do not know what is happening. But I give it to him and invest it.
Really, I am spending money. I am giving him my money, and they are investing it. They are putting it in other things, right? So really, I am spending it—or, better yet, I am giving my money.
But I am expecting a return. Right, Tom? Tom’s in here—you hear that, Tom?
But the whole thing is this: look at time in that way. Your time—you are investing your time in something. You are spending your time. You are giving your time. But you are expecting something back from it.
You are what I would call a spiritual entrepreneur. You are spending your time, and you are risking it. “What if this does not work?” You are taking a risk.
But we have the promise:
Draw nigh to God, and He will draw nigh to you.
He who comes and diligently seeks Him—He will show Himself. Again, diligently.
Here is the thing: we give Him something temporal, our time, and we reap eternal. We get the presence of God. We get the wisdom of God. We get something eternal for our lives.
This is the first thing. It brings in the dividends of faith.
The second vital thing is found in 1 Timothy 6:12:
Fight the good fight of the faith, lay hold on the life eternal, whereunto thou wast called, and didst confess the good confession in the sight of many witnesses.
Secondly, if you want to pursue holiness, we have talked about having that quiet time. Then you have to make the good confession. This is a public thing. We need to confess who we are.
The world needs to know. There are no closet Christians. There should be no closet Christians. It should all be out in the open.
Even if we do not say something, at least our life should show it so people are asking, “What is different about you?” Then we have that word in time and due season.
But the whole thing is: make the good confession. What is the confession you are making? The confession is this: “I belong to God. I do not belong to this world.”
Like that Ira Stanphill song:
This world is not my home;
I’m just passing through.
This is our confession: I am not a part of this world.
It is just like Mimosa, when she came back from Donover and came back to her home. She had met the Lord. This little girl had met the Lord.
The next day, all the people in the village took Shiva’s ashes—the village god’s ashes—and put them on their foreheads. She refused to take them. She was making the good confession: “I am not his anymore. I belong to Someone else.”
We talked about Monday, right? We want to acknowledge Him before men. We are having a baptism next week. Baptisms are public things.
You are making a public confession that you no longer belong to this world, but you belong to Christ. You are no longer following the ways of this world. You are following Christ.
“This is who I am now. I am not this other one that I used to be. I am a new creation. I am a new creature.”
Going along with this good confession, we are to be faithful to Him who called us.
Some of us went to a wedding last night. When Laura and Justin took those vows and put those rings on, what they were doing was setting their hearts on a course of faithfulness.
From that moment on, they were saying, “I am going to be faithful to you, whatever happens.” The ring shows that outward profession.
Our profession should also be the way we walk in this world, the manner of life that we have. I set my heart on a course of faithfulness.
Like Daniel in Daniel 1: he purposed in his heart, “I do not want to defile myself with the king’s stuff.” He set his heart not to defile himself.
When things come up, I set my course on that faithfulness. When something comes in to disrupt it, all of a sudden I look to the Lord: “Lord, You want me this way. What are You going to do? How are You going to work this out for me?”
We find that the Lord was ahead of Daniel. He had that eunuch who liked him and said, “I do not know if I can do this, but you talk to me in the test. Okay, we will give you ten days.” Daniel set his heart on that course of faithfulness, and he was rewarded for it.
This is one of my favorite album covers: Keith Green’s No Compromise. Not a great picture, but it reminds me of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.
No compromise. All that means is that when the world’s piper plays the tune, I do not dance the dance.
You see the guy being carried in the sedan chair. Everybody is bowing down, and they are saying, “Get down. What is the matter with you?”
How many of our brothers and sisters are like that guy right there? What about me? Am I that guy?
I am not going to compromise. I no longer belong to that world. I am not going to live one foot in one world and one foot in the other.
I am glad my wife—I know my wife loves me because she took my name. She did not hyphenate it, you know what I mean? She is not called Barbara Hendrix-Bogdanowitz. She is wholly mine.
No vestige of the old. She does not even answer to Barbara Hendrix anymore. It is a foreign name to her. She goes by my name.
That is what we are supposed to do. We go by His name. We are called by His name and do not compromise that. I am His.
We like to think of the hymn, “I am His, and He is mine.” But the first part of that is, “I am His.” That is the first part.
You want to know Him as yours? Then you need to be His. That is first. I am His. I give myself to Him fully.
I am not going to dance with the piper. I am not going to bow down, even if He does not save me from the fire.
Isn’t that what Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego said? “Even if He does not save us, we are not bowing down.”
That is with us, because they were going to see the Lord. Remember, I tell you each time: they were going to see the Lord whether they saw Him come down and save them from the fire or whether the fire consumed them. They were going to see Him in His presence either way.
That is His will for us: to see Him, to know Him in this way. We want to be faithful to the One who called us.
The third vital thing is our testimony.
“The blood of the Lamb, the word of their testimony, and they loved not their lives even unto death.” The question is: What is your testimony?
We used to think your testimony was how you got saved. That is not your testimony.
Every one of our testimonies should be this: Jesus Christ is Lord.
Not “Lord” as merely a title, something we just say. No. Our testimony is that our life bears out that Jesus Christ is Lord. He is Lord in my life. That is my testimony.
This is vital to pursuing holiness. If He is Lord, then what is He looking for in His people? He is looking for obedience, because He is Lord.
He is not president. He is not elected. You made Him Lord when you were saved. You said, “Come in, save me from my sins, and be my Lord and Savior.”
The Savior part we like. The Lord part is a little tough. But that is supposed to be our testimony.
What do I mean by obedience? We just like to do this: “Obedience—okay, we are going to look up things in the Bible and obey them.” No, that is not obedience.
Well, it is obeying—it would be obeying the letter. But the letter is not going to do anything for you except lead you to find out that you are a failure, and then you turn to the Lord.
What He is saying is: Who are you obeying? You are obeying the life of Christ that He has put in you.
Someone mentioned it today in a prayer—I think it was Bobby Greco—about the Holy Spirit living in us. That is it. That is how we obey Him.
We can grieve Him, and we can tell Him no, yet He resides in us. We are holy because He resides in us.
Isn’t it interesting that He is called the Holy Spirit? Yes, that is because of who He is. He is holy. He is pure.
But at the same time, because He is the Holy Spirit, He knows how to lead us into holiness. That is His nature. He knows how to lead us there.
We do not have to have people telling us everything. In 1 John 2, it talks about how we have an anointing. We do not need someone standing up here teaching us every detail.
Even using Mimosa again: the Spirit of God was in her. Though she was illiterate and everything, how did she know to do certain things? Because she had that Spirit living in her, saying, “Do not do this. Do not go this way. Do not do this.”
It is the same with us. We have the Holy Spirit living in us. He convicts us of sin: “Do not do that. It is not right.” Or, “Let’s go here. Let’s do this. Say this to this person.”
“You were reading this verse this morning in your time. I want you to go and share it with that person.” We are obeying Him. We are obeying the Spirit.
Our testimony is that He is Lord because we are obeying Him. It is not just that we say, “Oh, Jesus is Lord. We love You.” No, because we are bowing the knee to Him every day. It should be every minute.
When we fall out of that place, we should just confess and say, “Lord, I am sorry I took You off the throne. Forgive me. Have mercy on me. I want to put You back on the throne.”
These things are very, very vital to us. Then we find out in this that we are brought into something greater:
But ye are an elect race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God’s own possession, that ye may show forth the excellencies of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light.
You are not alone. You do not have to make this journey alone. We are called out together.
A holy nation—what is a nation? You can say a nation is one type of people, but we do not have one type of people here. We have Chinese people here. We have African American people here. We have Polish people here. I am sure we have Scottish people and Italians. We have a whole hodgepodge of things, right?
What makes us a nation? We are all governed by one Lord. We are all under one government. That is what makes us a nation.
This is His eternal purpose. Back in Exodus 19:5-6, He said, “I want you. This is what I want of you. I want you to be My special people.” This is My desire for you.
Here in the New Testament, it has not changed. It is an eternal purpose.
Look: “That ye may show forth the excellencies of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light.” That does not mean we are just praising. It means that what is coming out of us is His very character, going out to the world. We are proclaiming who He is.
It is almost like when Moses was hidden in the cleft of the rock. When the Lord came by, it says He proclaimed Himself. Well, now that is us. He uses us to proclaim Himself.
That is why He asks us to be holy: because He wants His name and His character to be unadulterated.
This is a wonderful thing that He has called us to: that we might be these ones through whom He can flow, and people can see Him.
It is many-faceted because we are all different—many-faceted because He is so big, so great, and so wonderful.
In closing, I want to say this to you young believers. By young believers, I do not mean teenagers and people in their young twenties. I mean anybody who is young in the faith. You could be eighty years old and just be saved. You are young in the faith.
Here is an exhortation for you: Daniel purposed in his heart.
Young brothers and sisters in the faith, the beginning of being holy is purposing in your heart.
Purposing in your heart is one thing; it is going to be tested. The first thing is to go to the Lord and just tell Him, “I want to be Yours. I purpose in my heart to be Yours.”
You will find out that Daniel had to act by faith as the Lord gave him opportunity to live out what he had purposed in his heart: “I do not want to defile myself.”
Then the Lord gave him opportunity not to defile himself. You would think He would keep us from the opportunity to defile ourselves, right? But what did He do? He brought him an opportunity where he could defile himself.
That is so strange, but He has given us the Holy Spirit. Daniel acted by faith as the Lord gave him opportunity to live out what he had purposed in his heart.
The Lord wants to put in our hearts that purpose to live for Him.
For you guys who are like me—the older guys who have maybe hit a snag and found yourselves in Babylon, in captivity—we read that verse in Hebrews 12. I want to go back and preface it, because before it gets to “pursue holiness,” I think this really speaks to exiles.
Starting in Hebrews 12:7, it says:
It is for chastening that ye endure; God dealeth with you as with sons; for what son is there whom his father chasteneth not?
But if ye are without chastening, whereof all have been made partakers, then are ye bastards, and not sons.
Furthermore, we had the fathers of our flesh to chasten us, and we gave them reverence: shall we not much rather be in subjection unto the Father of spirits, and live?
For they indeed for a few days chastened us as seemed good to them; but He for our profit, that we may be partakers of His holiness.
All chastening seemeth for the present to be not joyous but grievous; yet afterward it yieldeth peaceable fruit unto them that have been exercised thereby, even the fruit of righteousness.
Wherefore lift up the hands that hang down, and the palsied knees;
And make straight paths for your feet, that that which is lame be not turned out of the way, but rather be healed.
Follow after peace with all men, and the sanctification without which no man shall see the Lord.
For those of you who are in exile, let me say this: do you know how you get your hands strengthened, your knees working and not feeble, and how you make straight paths for your feet?
At your quiet time.
That time is under such an attack right now, unbelievers. It is something that you really have to grapple for. That is what the Lord is asking you to do.
Be jealous for that time, because without that time you are not going to see Him. You are going to be swept away, and you are not even going to know it.
I wrote a little note here that said, “Use the yellow paper.” Okay.
Quiet time is being assaulted by work, by social media, by the computer. These things addict us—not just our kids, but us older folk.
If we give up the sacred ground of our quiet time, we will not see God. If we do not give place to God, that place will be taken by the things that we love instead of Him. Do you understand that?
It will be taken, so that you do not have it anymore. It will be replaced. It will lead us away from Him who loved us and washed us from our sins.
Hebrews has five warnings in it. This is a warning. This is a warning to me. Maybe it is a warning to you. But this is serious stuff.
The Lord wants us to be holy. He wants us to know Him, and we cannot bypass any of the things that we have to do to know Him.
This quiet time ranks first, because that is our holy of holies.
It is being taken from us, and we are letting it be taken from us. I am sorry—not we. I will say I.
But thank God He sends us prophets. Even in exile, those prophets came and got the people back on this, so that you hear His voice.
Today, if you hear His voice, harden not your heart.
Answer Him. I plead with myself and with us: be holy. Be holy. Pursue holiness so that you can know Him and see Him.
Let’s pray.
Heavenly Father, how we thank You that You have set before us this morning this Table, and now You have set before us this purpose: this purpose to know You, to be the ones who show who You are to the whole world. What a glorious purpose that is.
Oh Lord, we pray, do not let us be robbed of this by the things of this world. Help us not to love the world and the things thereof.
Lord, we are prone in this world to do these things, and we ask in Your holy name that You would give us deliverance from them.
Lord, encourage us to keep that time holy for You. Help us, Lord, set it apart for You. Lord, we pray that we would see You in it.
We ask this in Jesus’ name.