Tag: holiness

A Real Christmas Requires Remembering Why Christ Came

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(1 Thessalonians 3:9-13)

Although it’s unlikely that Paul had just stuffed himself full of turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, too many pieces of pie, and then passed out on the couch while the football games were on the TV. Nonetheless, the sentiments of Thanksgiving certainly are in line with what he wrote in this section to the believers in Thessalonica: “How can we thank God enough for you in return for all the joy we have in the presence of God because of you?” (v.9).

Paul was feeling gratitude. He was grateful for what God had done and had continued doing in the lives of the believers there. He directed his gratitude, his thanks, to God. He was rightly thanking God for the joy that the Thessalonians had brought into his life. And, as is the case with genuine gratitude, Paul was interested in more than just empty words, but backing that gratitude up with action. That’s why he desired to return among the Thessalonians to continue what had been started: keep feeding their faith by supplying what was still lacking (v.10-11). What Paul wrote after that is essentially a prayer.

In that prayer, Paul expressed his desire that  “the Lord make [their] love increase and overflow for each other and for everyone else…” (v.12). It’s as if Paul is providing a flow chart for us to see how the Christian life works. It all starts with God, who then funnels his gifts to us through faith. Then, as we grow in our faith, those gifts – like an increase in love as well as the other blessings that will follow, will all increase, too. Do you want a “Real Christmas” this year? Here’s your recipe! Go back to the basics: God and his gift of faith and growing it, which leads to other spiritual gifts spilling over, like the ones Paul continues to pray for. 

Paul’s prayer continues. “May he strengthen your hearts so that you will be blameless and holy in the presence of our God and Father when our Lord Jesus comes with all his holy ones” (v.13). We know the physical dangers of a weak heart. Not only can it cause complications, but even the slightest physical activity with a weak heart can potentially cause serious damage or even be fatal. 

But a weak heart spiritually is even more dangerous. A spiritually weak heart can lead one to drift from God or depend on some other source for strength and sustenance. That will certainly do damage for this life, but the greater concern of having a weak heart is how it potentially will leave us “in the presence of our God and Father” (v.13).

When will we find ourselves in that situation? Paul is looking way beyond the celebration of Christmas to the most monumental event, the Last Day, “when our Lord Jesus comes with all his holy ones” (v.13). The Gospels in the Bible record Jesus teaching and preaching about this day. Even Paul, in this same letter, speaks of what that day will be like. The Thessalonians believers were someone what confused on the details of that Last Day. It’s worth noting that even that much closer to the life and ministry of Jesus, Paul was already focusing on his return and what its looks like to be ready for that day.

What does being ready for that day look like? It means we “will be blameless and holy in the presence of our God.” The first part of that may grab your attention, as “will be” almost sounds as if that status of being “blameless and holy” is something still to come, something to strive for, something to be attained at some point in the future. 

That view would certainly fit the common ideas people have of good people getting into heaven. It’s based on the idea that good people would do – and keep doing – good things. Then, at the end of the day when their time is up, God would sit down with them for what amounts to a sort of performance review to determine if they’re in or not. So long as they have a strong enough track record, they’ll be fine. It’s no surprise then, that since we all imagine ourselves tending to have a pretty good track record in our own minds, replaying the “best-of’s” and the highlights of our lives, we’re rather confident that we’ve got nothing to fear.

The idea of eventually arriving at being “blameless and holy” might also seem to be supported by Paul’s own words, even in these very verses. After all, a faith that is “lacking,” love that can “increase and overflow,” and hearts that can be “strengthen[ed]” would imply that “holy” hasn’t quite been achieved yet.

So which is it? Are we holy right now, or is holiness a status that is arrived at by putting in the appropriate time and effort? How do we ensure that we’re blameless and holy on that final day?

Both can be true. We can be holy right now, and we can also be becoming holy. Now that doesn’t mean that we’re following in the footsteps of the world that says truth is relative and subjective, and that we can all have our very different truths, even when those contradict each other. There’s a difference between each of our individual constructs of truth as we drum it up in our own respective worlds and what we’d call a paradox in Scripture. Our subjective truths have no backing or support from anything authoritative – they are based purely on our own personal thoughts or feelings. The Bible, however, as the Word of God, is authoritative.

So when the Bible speaks both ways, so do we. And the Bible does. It says that we can grow in our faith. Nearly half of what Paul writes in the New Testament is Paul addressing Christian living and spiritual growth. It lines up with exactly what he is writing in these verses, encouraging growth in our spiritual lives. Moreover, we personally know how necessary it is for us to grow as Christians in all areas of our lives. Yes, we are saints, but on this side of heaven we are saints who still sin and are still a work in progress. We want to grow and mature in our daily responsibilities and vocations, and rightly so!

But the Bible also speaks about our status before God. God calls us holy, and he calls us holy right now, in the present, as we are in this very moment. “But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light” (1 Peter 2:9). “And by that will, we have been made holy through the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ once for all” (Hebrews 10:10).

We notice two things in just these two passages – and we could have mentioned many other passages as well. First, there are no “ifs” in these verses. There is no carrot-on-a-stick holiness that is held out to us if we meet certain conditions or criteria. Holiness isn’t conditional.

Second, the tense of the verbs speaks volumes! We “are” holy because we “have been made” holy. There is no “someday down the road if you play your cards right.” There is no “once this happens, then…” There is only who we are because of what happened to make us that way.

So how does it feel? You are holy right now! And it is because God declares you to be holy right now that you also strive to live holy lives right now as you grow in holiness.

Perhaps one of the clearer Bible passages that ties our status as holy before God with our call to continue growing in holiness is found in Colossians 3:12. “Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience” (Colossians 3:12). Compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience aren’t the prerequisites to achieving holiness; rather, they are how our holiness is expressed as we grow in them and put them on display in our Christian lives. You are holy right now. And you are growing in holiness right now.

But if this holiness isn’t something we arrive at or achieve on our own, then how does it happen?

The answer is Christmas. Holiness left heaven and entered earth to bring holiness with him. If holiness is required to get into heaven, but holiness cannot be achieved outside of heaven, then holiness had to be brought to us. And to be brought to us, God had to come to us, which is exactly what happened at Christmas.

When you assemble enough things over the years, at some point you’ve experienced the frustration of arriving at a dead end. You can’t move forward because something is missing. You retrace all of the previous steps in the directions to make sure you didn’t use the wrong piece in the wrong place, and confirm that each step was properly followed. Just as you are getting ready either to disassemble everything and return it or contact customer service, convinced a piece was missing, in trots one of your children, caught up in some imaginary game, or possibly pretending to “help” you, and you notice they have in their hand the piece you need to finish the assembly. Now that you have that piece, you finish putting everything together.

Jesus is that piece. Only he is much more than a missing piece to our holiness (as if we were somehow almost there and he just needed to come in and supply what was missing)! He isn’t just a missing piece; he is the whole thing! He IS our holiness, through and through. We cannot have holiness apart from him. 

And for him to be able to be our holiness, he had to provide our holiness by entering a holi-less world and bringing it with him. On Christmas, he was born to bring his holiness into a holi-less world. His perfect life in perfect obedience to God’s perfect law resulted in our holiness.

Therefore, dear friends, because of what Jesus came to do in the past, we know that we already have what we need when he comes again in the future on that Last Day. By faith in Jesus, we have holiness. His holiness. Yes, we have all that we need to be “blameless and holy in the presence of our God and Father when our Lord Jesus comes with all his holy ones” (v.13). Christmas can’t get any more real than that!

DAILY PRAYERS FOR GUYS

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To Love God’s Law

Holy Father,
Your holiness both attracts and repulses me. As a sinner, I am well aware that I have no business being in the your presence, face-to-face with your perfection. Yet at the very same time, I know that apart from your holiness, I would be hopeless to ever attain righteousness on my own, so I am drawn to you. In Jesus Christ you provide not only the forgiveness my sin requires, but also the holiness I cannot achieve on my own.

It is the new man in me, raised up by the Holy Spirit through faith in Jesus, that now loves your law. I desire to carry out your will. Obedience is no longer the dirty word it used to be, but a daily delight to be pursued. All that is good and right in your sight is also pleasing to me. The good news of the gospel and the freedom I have in Jesus Christ compel me to seek your kingdom and your righteousness, and to reflect it in my thoughts, words, and actions. Help me to show my thanks for Jesus, who perfectly kept the law for me in my place, by continuing to develop my own love for your law. Graciously fill me with both the desire and the ability to keep it as I follow in Jesus’ footsteps.

In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen. 

Live Holy Lives

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(Matthew 5:21-37)

What do the concept of sharing and rules have in common? Would you agree that they are very good things… for everyone else to do. Sharing is great – for other people to do with me. Rules are great – for other people to follow. When it comes to me sharing or keeping rules, though – that’s a different story. So when they apply to me, I am not as crazy about them.

That’s because our primary view of God’s law is to see it as a list of restrictions and prohibitions. In his law, God spells out the things we are to avoid and the behavior we should avoid carrying out so that we don’t sin. In that sense then, God’s laws will always serve to accuse, convict, and condemn, for when addressed to fallen sinners, they can only serve that purpose. My guess is that you feel that sting as you read the verses from our Savior’s sermon in Matthew 5. 

So God’s law makes it abundantly clear that his demand for perfection is not one that can ever be attained by us. Whenever we slip into the pharisaical false sense of security, God’s law sets us straight. It uncovers another nuance of our inherent sinfulness that we didn’t even know was there until the law exposed it. The words of Jesus this morning fall into that category of God’s law. Jesus addressed some pretty standard sins, but then took it a step further. 

Regarding murder, he took it to another level by pointing out that murder itself was only a symptom of the real culprit – a hating heart. So one does not even need to be guilty of ending another’s life to be under the same judgment! Regarding sexual immorality, one does not even need to remove a single article of clothing to be guilty – his eyes permit the heart to be lured into lust. Regarding your word, no official oath or contract or signed document is needed as proof against you – if you simply go against the very yes or no that you spoke to someone, you have broken your word and are an untrustworthy liar. Jesus’ words before us today do not at all leave us brimming with confidence! Quite the opposite – they knock us clean off any personal pedestal on which we may have imagined ourselves standing.

Moreover, Jesus’ sermon provides perhaps one of the starkest cautions against sin that we find anywhere in verses 29-30. “If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell.” We miss the point if we too hastily presume that Jesus is speaking in hyperbole and conclude that he wasn’t serious about gouging out eyes or lopping off limbs. The point Jesus is making is that we had better take sin seriously because it is not a thing to be trifled with. 

Sin is not a plaything that we can pick up on occasion to entertain ourselves and then put back down at will when it has served its purpose. It is not content to be relegated to such a role! Rather, it seeks to ensnare and master anyone who willingly gives it the time of day. Sin will never be content sharing a soul with the Savior – it wants all of us, and so to treat it lightly or innocently ignores the damage it seeks to inflict. Sin longs to inflict irreparable harm on our relationship with Jesus. It seeks to turn us against him at every opportunity it gets. So what will happen if we warmly welcome it into our lives? What will happen when, instead of confessing it, we become comfortable with it? What will happen when we deceive ourselves into letting it “harmlessly” hang around? Shouldn’t we have learned this lesson early on with Cain and Abel?

See how the Lord described it to Cain in Genesis, following Cain’s less-than-pleasing offering before God. The Lord said, “If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must rule over it” (Genesis 4:7). Sin is not and will not remain an innocent bystander! Sadly, the need for the Lord’s urgent warning was validated as the very next verse records for us the first murder in the Bible. Cain disregarded the Lord’s words and murdered his brother, Abel. With different words, Jesus is reiterating the same potentially devastating impact sin can still have in our lives today when left unchecked. So yes, the law exposes our sin and makes clear the very real damage – even eternal damage – that sin can inflict. We do well to take Jesus’ warnings seriously.

However, is that enough? To this point, have you read anything new? Did you not already know about the ways we could sin that Jesus mentions in these verses? Did you not already know that sin is bad? Did you not already know that the danger of hell that Jesus warns about is very real? Assuming you knew all these things, then why don’t you stop doing them? Why don’t we stop doing them? We know God doesn’t want it. We know it’s bad for us. We know hell is real and not someplace we want to be! So why don’t we take Jesus seriously and just stop doing what he says to stop doing?

Because the law cannot empower us to. It cannot equip us to. It can only show us what we are to do and sadly, by extension, what we have not done. It has no power or ability to enable us to stay on its path. 

That’s why Jesus had to come. Do you get it? If Jesus came to be another lawgiver in the same way that Moses first codified God’s law as he came down from Mt. Sinai, then we didn’t need Jesus for that! We don’t need Jesus for that. We need him for another reason, a reason that he laid out in his sermon in the words just prior to our verses this morning. “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them” (v.17). What does it mean that Jesus came, not to abolish the law, but to fulfill it? It means that everything that Jesus listed in this section of the Savior’s Sermon that we’re hearing today was carried out. It was completed. It was done perfectly. Everything that Jesus commands in these words was carried out. And by whom? By the very individual who spoke them. Jesus commanded them… and it was Jesus who kept them. 

One of the knocks people have against Christian preachers and Christians, in general, is that they are hypocrites. They preach one thing and do another. They point out the moral failures or shortcomings of others but are guilty of those very same things themselves. By that standard, if only those able to perfectly keep the law are the ones permitted to point out the law to others, then no one but Jesus could ever speak. Everyone else would be hypocrites. Jesus is the sole individual who could never be labeled a hypocrite. He’s the one about whom it can legitimately be said that he practiced what he preached.

But do you know why he kept everything he commanded? Not for his own sake. He had nothing to prove. He was already holy when he left heaven. No, he kept what he commanded for our sake. His perfection was to benefit us. By his perfect life, we have been made holy. By faith, his obedience serves in place of our disobedience. His sanctification stands in place of our sin. How can this be? Did God just decide that our sin suddenly didn’t count against us?

You know the answer to that. In addition to his obedience, or rather, as yet one more example of it, Jesus paid for our sin with his life. When he died, the blood he shed was the payment price for our sin. So he took our sin on himself and placed his perfection on us. 

So now, you are free. What do we do with this freedom? There is no burden of law. There is no picture of God keeping tabs on our disobedience, tracking each transgression in order to formulate a proper punishment that fits our crimes and exact that punishment on us when we die. There is only freedom. 

So if God doesn’t need your perfection, which he already has in Christ, if God doesn’t need your obedience, for he already has Christ’s, then why does Jesus call us to live such holy lives as he describes? Because while God doesn’t need our holiness, your neighbor does. Your holy lives are a blessing to your neighbor. As you thank and honor God with your holy living, what you are really doing is loving and serving your neighbor with your holy living. Consider three benefits of your holy living: it shows love to God, it serves your neighbor, and… it feels good!

The Bible is very repetitive with the first one. How do we show love for God? We keep his commands. “This is love for God: to keep his commands. And his commands are not burdensome…” (1 John 5:3). A husband and wife express their love for each other with words. But blessed is the marriage in which that love is carried out through acts of service for each other. Love is not just spoken, but shown. In the same way, it is one thing to say we love God – anyone can do that. But holy living shows it. 

And what we’re doing in that same process is also serving our neighbor. You are protecting their marriage. You are keeping your word to them. In contrast to a fly-off-the-handle world, you show them patient kindness that keeps anger in check. You are doing for them exactly what Jesus encouraged previously in his sermon: making their world better and brighter as you are salt and light in your holy living.

Will your neighbor always acknowledge it? Not necessarily. Will she always appreciate it? Don’t count on it. Will your neighbor become a believer through your holy living? Never through that on its own, although it very well might provide the first step in that process. 

Finally – it feels good to live holy lives! Think of the alternative. When is the last time that you were well aware of a sin that you had just committed? None of us has to go way back on the mental surveillance tapes. I want you to remember how you felt when you reflected on your sin. I believe I know the answer. Not great. That may be an understatement. And don’t mix up the sin itself with the guilt over that sin I’m referring to. Even if the sin itself may have felt good at the time, when you become acutely aware of it, it doesn’t feel good.

But you know what does feel good? Doing the right thing. I don’t know if we give as much attention to this as we ought to. If feels good to do the right thing. And we don’t need to feel bad about feeling good! That’s OK – in fact, it’s one of the blessings attached to doing the right thing – it feels good. Consider how the psalms speak of it again and again. The pictures associated with righteousness and doing the right thing are pleasant pictures, pleasing feelings – it feels good!

Too often when we set out to do the right thing, what derails us is that we zero in on every single time we fail. We let the failures crowd out the successes. We hardly ever celebrate the successes, because we linger in the guilt too long to remember them! Live holy lives because it feels good to do the right thing.

Live holy lives. Jesus kept his own commands so that you could. So do it. And love doing it. And love God and your neighbor in the process.