Building God’s Church Part 3 - Holy Living
1 Peter 1:13-21 - 4th March 2007
Andrew Lim

We’ve been exploring some of the great values
God would want our new church to be marked by

First week / joy / unity / humility / truth-speaking
Last week / we explored the importance of mind and spirit
putting a premium on the Word / yes
but also filled with the Spirit of God

I want for us to explore one more mark this morning
This is a most crucial mark / because it has a direct bearing
on the reason / why we call our new church Christ Sanctuary

The word “sanctuary” speaks of a place
which is “set apart” / “set apart to be holy for God”
A sanctuary is a holy place / “set apart” for God

The Hebrew word for sanctuary is “miqdash”
it means a “sacred place” / it refer to a place that has been set apart
from common or secular use for the worship of God

And that / should tell us that God desires us
to be a people mark by holiness in our hands and in our hearts

Holiness is God’s desire for us / It is His heart-beat
At least half of the New Testament is concerned with holy living
- Hebrews 12:14 / “Make every effort to be holy”
- 2 Peter 3:14 / “Make every effort to be found spotless
and blameless and at peace with Him”
- Ephes. 4:1 / “I urge you to live a life worthy of the calling you have received”
- 1 Tim. 4:7 / “Train yourself to be godly”

But why is holiness so crucial to us God’s children?
It is fundamentally because God Himself is holy
If God is not holy / sin is no big deal.
“Sin” is only a problem because God is holy
Supremely / it is God / Who is holy / In fact / as someone once said
holiness is the most sparkling jewel / of God’s crown
Job refers to God as “the holy One” / Job 6:10
Hannah says / in her song “There is none holy as the Lord” / 1 Sam 2:2

More than any other single attribute
In fact God Himself singles out His holiness /as representing His very Being
For example / whenever God takes an oath
He takes an oath by His holiness
Because His holiness is the fullest expression of Who He is
- Amos 4:2 / “The Sovereign Lord has sworn / by His holiness”
- Psa 89:35 / “Once have I sworn / by My holiness”
God swears by His “holiness”

Remember / by the burning bush / God told Moses
“Do not come near here / remove your sandals from your feet
for the place on which you are standing is holy ground” / Ex 3:5

There is nothing about the ground itself / that made it holy
The ground was holy because God was there
It is God’s presence / that sanctifies the earth beneath His feet

Now when Moses realised / that he was in Gods presence
Now / he might have felt drawn to God / But he also felt repelled by God

You’ll remember that when Isaiah was given a vision of the holiness of God
he saw looked up and he saw seraphims
these are extraordinary beings / superbly beautiful creatures
And yet they become so blinded by the pure brilliant purity of God
they’re forced to cover their eyes / and cover the filth of their feet

They had to close their eyes
because they are flying so close to the face of God
and coming close to be exposed by His full glory
they are running the danger
of being consumed by the awesome holiness of God

These seraphim are creatures of staggering power and glory
And yet they were calling out to one another and saying:
“Holy holy holy is the LORD Almighty
The whole earth is full of his glory”

No creature can come this near to the full glory of God and live
God is sheer brilliance
God is unapproachable / in the sense that no single human has ever seen
or will ever get to see His full glory

It is no wonder / that after being visited by the angel of the Lord
Manoah the father of Samson / says to his wife:
“We shall surely die / for we have seen God” / Jud 13:22

And precisely because God is holy / He demands that we be holy / I Peter 1:16
“You shall be holy / for I am holy”

So precisely because God is Holy / that His is desires our holiness?
But surely He knows / that holiness can’t come easy to us
Surely He knows we’re fallen creatures
Why is He so insistent on our holiness?
Can’t He give us some slag? / What’s the big deal?

It IS big deal indeed
because some very good things will go missing / if we aren’t holy

First / Without holiness / none of us may see God
* Hebrews 12:14 “Strive for holiness without which no one will see the Lord”
* Matt 5:8 / “Blessed are the pure in heart / for they shall see God”

We cannot hope to play fast and win here / It just won’t get us anywhere
We cannot live unholy lives / disregard His commands
then put our heads in the sand
and go on to fool ourselves into believing that it will be all right
that God will go on covering us with His sacred canopy

Sooner we understand this / the better for us:
God keeps no fellowship with sinners
The Word of God affirms this categorically
“If I allow un-confessed sin to remain in my heart the Lord will not hear”
- Ps. 66:18.
We here at Christ Sanctuary want to see God / We sing / “We want to see you Lord”
But there are so few who see God in our day
And so few who have seen Him / because so few have been holy.

We don’t see Him as an individual / we don’t see Him as a Church
You know I don’t mean seeing Him with our physical eyes
but knowing His presence / being near to Him
knowing all is well between you and God
tracing the way He is moving in our church
recognise that God is at work

Secondly / Without holiness / the sacrifice you offer can never be holy
You’ll only be offering polluted sacrifice on His altar

What’s this sacrifice I am referring to
It includes everything I give to God
- my time / my energy / my resource / my worship / my devotion
- the time I spent studying the Word my material offering
- my sacrifice is everything I give to God for His sake

Now / I’ve got to ask myself / that everything that I have given to God
Am I offering to God what is blemished / polluted /defiled and unholy

I would be offering just that
if my heart is not clean / I can offer no holy sacrifice
If my heart is unclean / then my sacrifice is polluted
even before it leaves my hand / as I place it on the altar

Watchman Nee writes these words:
“We should realize that in the matter of serving God
there is even the possibility of offering “unholy fire”
- that which is un-spiritual
This arouses God’s wrath
Any fire which is not kindled by the Holy Spirit in our spirit
is but unholy fire and is deemed sinful in God’s sight”

How does the Lord feel about Cain’s sacrifice? / Let God’s Word speak
“But as for Cain and for his offering God had no regard
So Cain became very angry / and his countenance fell”
God did not have regard for Cain’s offering
because He did not have regards for Cain
and He did not have regards for Cain
because Cain’s heart was not right with God

Like the sone of Aaron / what Cain offered was unholy fire

Let’s be careful that we do not offer up unholy fire / to God / strange fire
Remember / only when we are holy / only when our hands are clean
will our offering be clean

A holy sacrifice comes from a holy heart
Without holiness / there can be no holy sacrifice

Three / Without holiness / we cannot serve Him effectively

When our hearts and hands have not been clean
our service for God will not have the kind of a cutting-edge it ought to have

2 Tim 2:21 / It is ONLY when a person cleanses himself from filthy things
ONLY then / will he be a vessel for God’s honour
only then will he be sanctified / and useful for the Master’s use

No holy heart / no holy service

How many church elders’ there are / who have no real ministry left
because in their hearts / they’ve harboured an unholy ambition
How many youth leader there are / who have lost their punch
because of a besetting sin in their lives which had not been dealt with
How many preachers there are
who have lost the ring of conviction in their preaching
because their feet have taken them to places they should not have been.

You want your service to count for something for God
you’ve got to have holy hearts and holy hands

Four / Without holiness / you’ll never be a force mighty for God

I have a book here in my hands entitled Memoir of Robert M. McCheyne
It contains his notes and entries from his diary
What makes his diary entries so remarkable
is that he was only 19 years old / when he recorded them

Later he became a minister / but only for a short seven and a half years
for he died at a young age of 29
He left only a few sermon notes / yet the impact of his life remains to this day
This book / his biography
has gone through more then a hundred editions
with more than half a million copies circulating around the world

Until today young men and women in seminaries all over the world
have picked up this book and read it / and many have been touched

Because this young man made it his ambition to be holy before God
he became a mighty force in the hands of God

When Robert McCheyne was only 27 yrs old / he wrote these words:
“How diligently the cavalry officer keeps his sabre clean and sharp
every stain he rubs off with the greatest care
Remember you are God’s sword / His instrument
I trust a chosen vessel unto Him to bear His name

“In great measure / according to the purity and perfections
of the instrument / will be the success
It is not great talents God blesses
so much as great likeness to Jesus
A holy minister / is an awful weapon in the hand of God”

Holiness gives you boldness with God
Don’t miss out on what Job said: “You shall put away sin far from you
then you shall lift up your face to God” Job 22: 23, 26

Lifting up the face is an emblem of boldness

A wicked man may lift up his hands in prayer
but he cannot lift up his face

When Adam had lost his holiness / he lost his boldness / he hid himself

Boldness and confidence comes from knowing
that before God your hands are clean and your heart is clean

When you know / that you are holy before God
you will have the confidence / you’ll otherwise never have

When you know that God’s favour is upon you
you’ll be reinforce / fortified / strengthened / braced

Remember / “the man of integrity walks securely
but he who takes crooked paths will be found out” Pr 10:9

But some of you might be asking
“Will holy living / make you out to be a boring person?

It is unfortunate that people think of holiness as something dull and boring
that if you’re a holy person / you’re a dull person

Was Jesus ever dull? / NEVER!
Dorothy Sayers reminds us
that we may think of Jesus as gentle meek and mild
But the fact is that He was
so stiff in his opinions and so inflammatory in his language
that he was thrown out of church / stoned
hunted from place to place / and finally hang on the gallows
as a firebrand and a public danger

Here is someone who is the most colourful personality in world history
Yet he is the holiest of all

Holiness is not dullness
John MacArthur says to associate holiness with dullness or boredom
is a caricature of the worst sort

In fact just the opposite is true
Only those who holy has the deepest joy

Jesus / in asking us to obey His commands says these words:
“I have told you this so that my joy may be in you
and that your joy may be complete” Jn 15:10-11

He knows that if we are holy / our hearts will be filled with joy
It is the joy that comes from knowing that all is well between me and God
that I am walking right with Him / that I am no longer resisting Him
that I have finally allow Him to take away the craving in my heart
that got me trapped for years
It’s a joy that comes from knowing I have been set free

In fact / it is people who are not holy who are the most miserable

When David committed adultery and murder
he sinned and lost his sense of God’s joy
he lost his joy / because he was out of touch with God

In his prayer for forgiveness he cries out to God / He says:
Lord / “restore to me the joy of Your salvation” Ps 51:12

Unholy people may have fun / but fundamentally they cannot have joy

It is when all of us here at Christ Sanctuary
become so filled with the joy of walking right with God
that we can be such a beacon light shining on our city

Our holiness will be our vibrant testimony

For me personally / the greatest motivation to strive to live a holy life
is God’s constant reminder to me that my body is His Temple

I Cor. 6:19-20 / “Do you not know / that your body is a temple of the H Sp
You are not your own / You were bought at a price
Therefore honour God with your body”

In ancient Israel / King David and King Solomon built a magnificent temple
It was lavishly built with 300 tons of gold
and a great amount of silver / precious stones and copper
But the temple in Jerusalem was destroyed in 70 A.D. It was never rebuilt

Today / God wants to live not in a palatial Temple
Today / God has made you and I a spiritual temple / your body my body
If you’re a Christian your body is a temple of God / a sanctuary of God

For me personally / knowing that God lives in my body
is the greatest one single motivation for me to live a clean life.

If God / the Almighty God of the entire of the Universe
desires to make my body His temple / then the very least I could do for Him
is to have it swept clean every day
so that He might be pleased to live there

Is it any wonder why God comes to us this morning
and He says to us: “Be holy / as I the Lord your God / am holy”.

How then may you and I be found to be holy?
If God wants Christ Sanctuary to be a holy sanctuary
it must begin with you and I

Sin is a problem because God is holy
If God isn’t holy / sin is no big deal

And the reason we cave in so easily to the seductions of sin
is surely because we don’t really understand the true meaning of sin

When we sin / we are not simply doing something wrong
We are doing what God hates

Sin is something / which is a total affront to a holy God

Jerry Bridges says / we often try to soften the blow of our spiritual failure
by using words like “defeat” and “victory”
and we would say “I suffer a defeat there / and scored a victory here”

He says we should be using words “obedience” and “disobedience”
because / at the bottom line / that just exactly what it is

Bridges says we should be saying “I disobeyed there / I failed Him”

You either obey God and not sin / or you defy God and sin

Bridges says / of course we might have been defeated
But the reason we are defeated is because we have disobeyed

You’ve got to make a resolve / to deal ruthlessly with the sin in your life
You’ve got to make a commitment / to fight with sin tooth and claw
if you want to be holy

Bridges tells us that “We need to cultivate in our own hearts
the same hatred of sin God has”
He tells us to be like Joseph
Remember / when Joseph was tempted / he said
“How then could I do this great evil, and sin against God?’”

Of course / as Bridges says
simply because you’ve made a commitment to be holy
doesn’t make you holy
But having said that / without a serious commitment to be holy
you will never attain to any measure of it

How can we be committed to not sin?

Habits are developed and reinforced by frequent repetition
The more we sin / the more we are inclined to sin

But the opposite is equally true

The more we say no to sin / the more we are inclined to say no

Through the empowering of the Holy Spirit
you and I need to systematically work at inculcating the habit
of saying no to sin

We all know what those weakest links are / stuff we are most vulnerable to
We begin by concentrating on saying no to these
and then the more we succeed through the power of the Holy Spirit
to say no to these sins / the easier it becomes to say no

At the same time that you are starving these sins
develop the habit of thinking thoughts that are pure / true / and good

One crucial point here
As you go about starving those sins by saying no to them
never let an exception take place
Watch out for the “just this once” kind of thinking

When you indulge in that
you’re helping the foundations to erode / right before your eyes

Never allow an exception to take place / Never say “just this once”
Why? Because / every single exception / reinforces the old habit
Every time you make one single exception
you’ve fallen deep into the trap again

One encouragement here for all of us

The fact that we fail once / does not make a failure out of us

There is a vast difference between failing / and being a failure
And the devil wants to confuse that difference for us

When a baby who is learning to crawl

We become a failure when we give up / and stop working on it altogether
But as long as you are working on starving that sin
no matter how often you fail / you are NOT a failure

As long as you are working
dependent on the empowering of the Holy Spirit
you can only expect to see that sin finally starved to death

And one morning / you’ll wake up / to find
that you have been totally delivered from that sin
that has plagued you for all those miserable years

Many of you would have heard the name Frances Ridley Havergal
that great hymn-writer / Some of her hymns include
Take My Life and Let it Be / Lord Speak to Me
True Hearted Whole Hearted Faithful and Loyal

She had a besetting sin which caused her much grief
But she worked on it through tears and prayer

One day / without her being conscious of it
a verse of Scripture came to her with the authority of God
Ex 14:13 / “The Egyptians whom you see today / you will see no more”

“What Lord / no more?” was her amazed response

She tells us it was a s though a voice replied “No more / forever”

Her sister tells us that / she believed God / rose from her knees
and wrote this great hymn
“Like a river glorious / is God’s perfect peace.”

Be encouraged / if you work at combating your sin
which stops you on your track in your pursuit of holiness
the day will come when you will be delivered from it / you’ll be set free

God wants Christ Sanctuary holy
But Christ Sanctuary has no entity without us
We / each one / make up the church

And if each one of us take our own personal holiness seriously
Than Christ Sanctuary becomes a holy place

And God’s holy fire must be set ablaze in our hearts
We must be aflame / with God’s holiness

Only when we sweep this place clean / by standing before God
with clean hands and clean hearts
will God to be pleased to come and live in our midst

Beginning with those who lead this sanctuary
let us all be set blaze with God’s holy fire
so that the glory of the Lord / may be clearly seen in our city

Let us not domesticate the consuming fire into a candle flame
where we see
no burning heat / no blinding light / no purifying power

Let us each one of us here take it upon ourselves
to begin today to be prepared to respond to God’s holiness

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++++++++++++++++++++++++

Romans 8:13 / “If you live according to the flesh you will die”
1 Cor. 10:9 / “We must not put the Lord to the test / as some of the Israelites did
and were destroyed by the serpents”
Galatian 5:21 / “I warn you / as I warned you before
that those who do such things shall not enter the kingdom of God”
_____________________________


God is a awesome in His holiness
Look at the way some people in the Bible
some have responded when they come before such a holy God
- Adam hid from God / Moses hid his face / Ezekiel fell on His face
- Isaiah prayed curse upon his own head
- the apostles / on the Mount of His transfiguration
saw His holiness / and fell on their faces
- John / on the island of Patmos / fell at his feet as if dead
- the twenty-four Elders fell down and worshiped

So yes / God is a terrible / fearsome / and holy God
And yet strange as it may seem
it is only by coming before this terrible / fearsome / and holy God
that will we be saved

Because although God is what theologians call “transcendent” high above
He is also “immanent” / near and available

His holiness does not stop Him from coming down to earth
in grace and mercy / to save sinful depraved human people
_______________________

Although Isaiah was devastated by God’s holiness
God did not leave him grovelling there
He commanded one of the seraphim
to touch Isaiah’s mouth with a burning coal
- the fiery coal cauterized his impurity
- the holy fire of God refined his heart
- until finally his heart was stung
with the conviction to serve God / “Here I am sent me”

When Isaiah confessed his sinfulness / forsook his sin
God / forgave him

God may high and lifted up / but he is not remote
He may be lofty / But He is not aloof

And the greatest news
Our terrible and holy God / is also a compassionate and merciful God
He does not come to us to destroy us
He comes to us to redeem us
and He will cleanse you of your sins / and restore you

Yes / He thoroughly abhors sin and filth and evil
But He also recognises a repentant heart when He sees one

And repeatedly / right through the Bible / we’ve seen
that whenever people turned their back on sin / and turn to God
He receives them readily / like a Father

Whatever you do / never neglect the confession of your sins
each time God brings those things to your mind

Be genuinely sorry for your sins
From the depth of your heart / cry out to Him
Ask for His forgiveness / and He will forgive you / He will