God is Our Holiness Part 2

[0:00] The wonderful picture that God just gives us as a demonstration of His grace in our lives, just through the wonderful picture of baptism, as we make that decision to identify with Christ, to die to our sin, and to be raised up out of the water in new life, to demonstrate a new birth, which only happens through Jesus Christ's tremendous grace.

[0:31] I'm reminded of John 3.36. Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, but whoever rejects the Son will not see life, for God's wrath remains on him.

[0:49] May I ask you a simple question? Where are you in regards to your relationship with Christ?

[1:00] Can you call Him your Lord and Savior? Can you identify with Him as Lorraine has aptly demonstrated to us the power of the cross just in her life?

[1:17] Father, just as we learn from your Word today, we focus on the theme of holiness.

[1:29] Really, it's what does it mean to focus on you? What does the reality of your life look like in our lives?

[1:41] How do we reflect your majesty, your glory, your love, and your grace in how we live out this life? Father, I pray that you would give my words power, not power born of me, but power born of you.

[1:57] I pray that as we just apply biblical wisdom to our lives, I pray that you would unleash this grace, this love, and at the same time, this mercy and this holiness and greatness in our lives, O Father.

[2:11] Father, we ask you these things as we come before you, gathered together. We're thankful for this internet that allows us to have the technology in order to meet the way we are right now.

[2:27] We ask these things in your most holy and perfect name. Amen. So as you know, just a couple of weeks ago, we were talking about the attributes of God.

[2:38] We hit on the subject of God's holiness and how it's His beauty, His majesty, His purity. But one of the questions that always comes up is, okay, so we've got God's holiness is what does that look like in my life?

[2:52] How do I live out this call to be holy? And so today is actually the second part of a two-part series on practical holiness.

[3:05] So if you've been a Christian for any length of time, even before you were even a Christian, you heard the word holy or holiness. As Christians, we understand that according to the pages of Scripture, we are commanded to be holy.

[3:21] The Apostle Paul actually writes in 2 Timothy 1.19 is that after saving us, God calls us to be holy.

[3:35] 1 Peter, the Apostle Peter tells us that we are to be holy as God is holy. And as we read today in the letter of Hebrews 12.14 tells us that without holiness, no one will see the Lord.

[3:53] So we have this idea of holiness is to be a predominant characteristic of the Christian. Once we are made new, once we are declared children of God, that we are created with a purpose, that we are called to be holy.

[4:15] What does that mean to be holy? Some of us, when we hear that name, that word holy, we think of terms such as, that must mean we need to be more religious.

[4:30] I need to be more perfect or I need to be more pure. That means there's a negative connotation that also comes up.

[4:40] It means I have to be about following rules, living for rules, and all of a sudden I'm casting out fun from my life.

[4:53] For others, when we talk about holiness, there's almost like a spirit of discouragement or dejection that comes out over them. It's because, hey, listen, BK, I've tried to be holy.

[5:05] It's hard. I've tried to live by the law. I want to be holy. I want all these things that God has for me, but I encounter failure time and time again.

[5:18] So what I want to do is I had four parts to this sermon. The first two parts we looked at last week. One was we provided a definition for holiness.

[5:29] And two, we looked at what our greatest obstacle for holiness is. Today, I want to take a little bit of a different approach. I want to look at...

[5:42] We make that decision to be holy. And with all of the best intentions, we pursue holiness. And it doesn't work out the way we expect it to.

[5:55] So I want to give us some reasons why that is. But before I do that, I want to share with you what I believe is the core issue of holiness.

[6:09] The indelible spiritual law that we are to follow that makes all the difference in our lives.

[6:20] So before I go any further on today's sermon, I just want to give you a quick review of what I shared last week. So the first thing we talked about was the definition.

[6:32] And I provided this definition. It's the holiness is the habit of being of one mind with God according to what we find in the pages of Scripture.

[6:45] So what I'm talking about is there to be one mind with God. Not what I think or what others tell me, but what God is telling me through the pages of the Bible.

[6:56] That holiness is the habit of agreeing with God's judgment on hating what God hates and loving what God loves.

[7:09] Essentially, it boils down to it's doing what God tells us to do. And it's doing not what we're told not to do. And I think the thing that encapped the thing, the thing, the idea that encapsulates this understanding of holiness is that we actually agree with it.

[7:30] When God calls us to something, we agree with it. We believe it is right and true. When God tells us to stay away from something, we believe it's right and true.

[7:42] And I believe that is the core at the understanding of holiness. The second element of the definition of holiness is it has to produce something.

[7:55] There has to be fruit of holiness. Real holiness produces meekness, humility, unselfishness, kindness, good temperance.

[8:07] It is demonstrated as it bends or breaks our tongues, our tempers, our natural passions, and our inclinations are influenced by holiness.

[8:22] How I love my wife. How a wife loves her husband. How husbands treat their children. How their children respond to their parents. How we act at work.

[8:32] Holiness has to be seen in all those elements of life. Because it means we are subjecting ourselves to God's righteous and perfect rule.

[8:48] Even in an imperfect world. J.C. Ryle, an old, I'm sure he was quite young when he wrote this, but in the late 1800s, he asked several questions in regards to the saint's holiness.

[9:07] He just simply asks, Do, when holy, do you become more content with your position in life? Are you more free from restless craving after something different from that which God has given you?

[9:26] Do fathers, mothers, husbands, and other relatives and friends find you to be more pleasant and easy to live with? And the last question he simply asks of us, Above all, do you grow in charity?

[9:42] Do you grow in love, especially towards those who don't always agree with you? Ultimately, holiness is a pursuit of God.

[9:57] It is a pursuit of his righteousness, and it's a pursuit of his love, grace, and mercy. And at that moment that a believer becomes a new child of the faith, they're indwelt by the Holy Spirit.

[10:12] And that spirit has to produce something. It is not a sterile spirit. It's not a bankrupt spirit. But it's the Spirit of God.

[10:23] And that spirit that dwells within us has to produce something. That's part of holiness. But as we all know, it's not that easy just to simply desire something.

[10:36] We have this obstacle in life, this thing. And our greatest obstacle is sin. And it's seen and reflected in our old nature.

[10:47] We lived according to this old worldly pattern. And some of our habits are burnt into us.

[10:59] And as much as God has redeemed us from the power of sin that separates us from God, sometimes we look, smell, and taste more like the world than we do of Christ.

[11:14] So there's this obstacle. And this world is a part of that foreign entity to God.

[11:27] It's a representation of everything that is against God. And this world calls us to desire things that are not of the Lord. It calls us to rebel once again.

[11:39] It calls us to be foolish. It calls us to doubt God. It calls us to not trust God. The world tells us there's a better way of wisdom.

[11:51] And it will give it to you with all your desires, longing, and passions. If only you would sell your soul to the world.

[12:03] What's interesting is the Bible, or God himself, is very aware of this call. He's very aware of the world. And that's why we have this Bible. And I went over several books of the Bible that are addressed to saints that deal with the issue of holiness.

[12:17] Why? Because God knows that this is going to be a lifelong battle. It's never going to leave us. It's a part of our journey.

[12:28] What's interesting is that when we are first saved, we see God delivering us from sins. And as we see us being delivered from sin, new sins kind of come in.

[12:40] And what sometimes frustrates mature believers in Jesus Christ is they don't sin as much, but they become much more aware of the effects of sin.

[12:51] Or as one author calls it, the sin of sinfulness in different aspects of their lives. Whether it be their attitudes, their thoughts, how they think, their patterns of how they do these things.

[13:04] And sometimes it's very discouraging and exasperating for us. We all get it. What's interesting, we all have sin to deal with.

[13:16] It may not look the same. But we still have to deal with it. And here is the crux of the matter. There is no arriving at perfection.

[13:28] It is not like that. The Christian life is never seen as a destination. The Christian life is seen as living in the light of the cross.

[13:40] As we move forward, we understand God's grace. So as we move from this idea, this understanding of what holiness is and what the obstacles of sin are, I want you to be at the point where you're saying, BK, I want holiness.

[14:03] I want victory in my life. I want to see God have victory in my life. But sometimes I am battled. I am beaten up. I am bitter.

[14:13] I'm exhausted. I'm exasperated. But I want it. How do I get there? How do I pursue that? Well, today I want to share with you those two things.

[14:26] A, I want to talk to you about this one spiritual law that definitely affects us and our pursuit of holiness. And I want to look at five different ways that we pursue holiness in the wrong way.

[14:41] So the first law that I want to talk about this is the pursuit of holiness begins with an understanding about life. And the truth is we will become like what we focus upon.

[14:58] We will become like what we focus upon. Another way to say it is what we focus will affect our thinking, affect our actions, and affect who we are.

[15:11] You see, I'm not actually going to preach on how to get holy or how to mature in holiness or how to pursue holiness.

[15:24] And I want to explain to you why. I actually preached on it on December 8th. In the subject of spiritual warfare, I actually preached to you a sermon out of Hebrews 12, which was our text from today.

[15:38] And I believe it's a wonderful description of life. Why is it so good? Because one, the author explains that life is a race.

[15:51] It's a marathon. It's not a short sprint. It's not over in a short time. It is a lengthy time. And we need to prepare to run the marathon.

[16:04] The second aspect that I love at how it explains life is it identifies our enemies. It talks about sin, which distracts us.

[16:16] But it also talks about the things in life which distract us. It could be our hobby, our work, ideas that sound really good but can still take away from holiness.

[16:26] But more importantly, it identifies what our focus is to be. And it's simply Jesus Christ.

[16:38] I was just doing some reading this past week and the author made some very simple truth. He says, you don't attain holiness by focusing on holiness.

[16:49] Holiness is lived out in your life as you focus on Jesus Christ. The more you focus, the more you worship, the more you learn about him, the more you become like him.

[17:09] And that is why the author in Hebrews talks about discipline. And discipline isn't punishment. Discipline is training, that God brings training situations into our life.

[17:23] Sometimes it's family situations. Right now it's a health crisis. Sometimes it can be a job situation. But all those elements are meant to cut away the world and help us focus in on Christ.

[17:40] Ephesians 6 calls the temptations of Satan as flaming darts.

[17:53] And it also describes Jesus Christ as our shield of faith. And holiness begins on focusing in on Jesus Christ.

[18:07] The emphasis that I want to talk about today is not on that focus of Jesus Christ.

[18:18] We've covered that in a lot of our sermons. A big decision that we make is we just need to make the decision, are we going to focus on Jesus or are we going to focus on something else?

[18:30] It's actually rather quite simple. But what I want to address today is that sometimes we're tired of our sin.

[18:41] We want to be holy. And we sometimes choose shortcuts. That we believe in all sincerity and good-heartedness, that this will lead to a closer relationship with Jesus Christ.

[18:58] And sadly, it results in destruction and results in bringing us away from Jesus rather than closer to Jesus.

[19:13] So this is what I want to focus on this morning, is these five different false focuses that we pursue with all the right intention, in all the right understanding.

[19:31] So that's what I want to talk to you. So the first focus is that our focus is to be on Christ and not on our sin.

[19:43] And what I mean by that is when someone is making the decision that they want to lose weight, they want to get in shape, they do not focus on chocolate. All right? But sometimes because chocolate has been such a big part of their life or overeating, the focus is on the enemy, so to speak.

[20:04] But the idea to healthy living is to actually focus on healthy living, not focus on unhealthy living. It's the same thing spiritually. Often we get so tired of our sin, we hate our sin, we begin to focus all our energy on that sin as if somehow that is going to have some power to defeat it.

[20:26] Now, I want you to hear me loud and clear. We are to hate our sin, okay? We are called in the pages of history, in the pages of Scripture, to hate our sin.

[20:40] But that doesn't mean our hatred is to be our sole focus. See, what happens when I start to focus in on my sin, I want to work on defeating my sin.

[20:52] So what I'm going to do is I'm going to start to create rules. I'm going to start to create lists of things that I need to do. Now, some of these lists, these rules, begin with the best of intentions.

[21:06] And some of these rules are really wise. I'm not going to hang out with Jimbo Jambo because he's always talking about sinful things.

[21:17] So I'm not going to hang out with him. That's a good, wise decision. But that's not to be our focus. You see, what happens is when sin becomes the focus of our mind, Jesus takes second priority.

[21:33] And he kind of gets lost in the static of all your thoughts on dealing with sin. You see, what eventually happens is that we can become pretty proud in our ability to stay away from sin.

[21:51] Sometimes the rules help us gain victory over that sin. However, we begin to drift towards having more confidence, more hope in the rules rather than the grace that God gives us.

[22:11] We begin to think that the victory that we are experiencing is because of our hard work rather than the power of God that works in us.

[22:22] Our lips may give praise to God, but in our hearts we praise ourselves. What happens is when we put that much emphasis on our works and our sin, the cross shrinks.

[22:41] And I spoke about this a couple of weeks ago. The cross shrinks. And when sin does overcome us, we run from the cross. We're embarrassed.

[22:52] We're shamed. Because we let God down. We didn't do, we didn't adhere to the rules. We think about focusing on self rather than Jesus.

[23:09] Now, what happens is when we start to adopt rules, we begin to develop degrees of Christian living. And when we start to develop degrees of Christian living, there are certain people that are higher than us, and there are certain people that are lower than us.

[23:29] And what that creates in us is a critical heart. Sometimes it can even create a bitter, envious heart because we're wanting to be higher.

[23:44] And we begin to look down on people who are lower. And the convictions that we eventually create through the rules is we create what's called our own moral code.

[24:01] Our own moral code. And this code is what we tend to believe God blesses.

[24:13] And then what is against the code, God doesn't bless. There's this great story. One of my pastors tells me as he was getting to know, this is an exceptionally well-known pastor.

[24:29] You would know him. And he had another pastor coming to preach at his church that is just as well-known around the world that he is. And when they went to get him to let him know that it was time to preach, they found him in the parking lot having a cigarette.

[24:46] And it turns out that was when he gets really anxious, he goes out and has a smoke. And my pastor shared that this man has perhaps written some of the best books on holiness and separation.

[25:00] But in his mind, if you were smoking, that's it. You're going straight to hell. Because he had developed this code in his life, in his view of life, that if he ever did something like that, that'd be such a betrayal of his body, his temple.

[25:17] And then he understood that this other man did not believe on that point. And he said he had to come face-to-face with his own legalism.

[25:28] What's hard is when you are a legalist, it's hard to admit that you're wrong. Because you've created your rules, you know what the rules are, and you come to believe that all sins are intentional at that point.

[25:45] So when someone comes to confront you over a sin, they might say, you know, you were really overly critical, you were mean or unloving. You will just say, well, I never intended it to be that way.

[25:58] And the problem is, we don't even know we're sinning. That's why David, at the end of Psalm 19, calls us, or he's asking God to forgive him for the sins he doesn't even know about.

[26:16] It's irrational to think that all our motives and actions can be pure because we're following these rules. What eventually happens for the legalist is they begin to hate the world, the world in which we are to call people out of.

[26:35] We're not supposed to be a part of, but we begin to hate it to the point where we don't have anything to do with it. Then we hate our friends and our family members that live in that world. What happens is when we hate them, we don't call them to the freedom that Christ gave us.

[26:50] We don't call them to be released from the prison that we were once imprisoned by. We don't try to remove the shackles from their eyes that once blinded us.

[27:04] So at the heart of it, why are rules so wrong for trying to attain holiness? It's because at the heart of the issue is the belief that if I can keep God's law, I am earning a measure of favor with God.

[27:31] If I keep his rules, God owes me something. That's at the heart of the legalist.

[27:42] You can always spot a legalist when their life starts falling apart because they believe that God made them a promise by these rules. So if they lose their job or their children don't follow after the Lord or there's some other explanation in life, they struggle with accepting God's will in this way.

[28:04] I have seen all sorts of crazy rules. I know one person, they believe that they cannot read a book while their spouse is working. So what they do is they tend to do something that makes them joyless rather than joyful because of the blessing of their spouse has and the work that they do which affords them the ability to stay at home and be enriched and nourished by the grace of God.

[28:33] I know others that will not garden on the Sabbath even though gardening is bringing life, it is relaxing, it is allowing them to create and using their gifts that God has given them and to do something they love because they would feel it is breaking God's law.

[28:53] The reality is we cannot pay back God's love for what he did on the cross. We can't. But what we can do is live in light of that cross.

[29:10] The law is good. The law to an unbeliever tells them that they cannot be saved and in that way it is a curse. But for those who follow the Christ, the law provides us safety.

[29:26] It's love. It keeps us continuing to reflect the love that God has. Holiness at any part has ever been about following the rules.

[29:39] Holiness is about living with your heart full of Jesus. And when our heart is filled with Jesus, we want to turn from evil.

[29:54] We want to turn from what is not profitable. So that is the first false road to holiness.

[30:06] And I know that road very well because that was me. I first read the book Pursuit of Holiness and I really believed it was all my energy, all my strength, all my commitments that kept me holy.

[30:21] And God knocked me down from that pedestal. And I finally came to the understanding that holiness was only a part of his wonderful grace and his discipline and love for me.

[30:34] So that's the first false focus. The second false focus is a focus on grace rather than focusing on Jesus. It's kind of the flip side.

[30:46] And I know this is the struggle that every Christian faces. We're either going to lean towards legalism or towards grace when we're meant to be in the center focusing on Jesus.

[30:58] Now what does that look like when we focus on grace? This is the person, this person who focuses on grace will argue that Jesus came to abolish the law.

[31:11] This person will tell you that the law is evil and it's absolutely restrictive and we are to avoid at all cost. The argument that they will use is that Jesus died to free you to live for yourself.

[31:26] You will hear the word authentic quite a lot. God wants you to be you. They failed to mention that he wants you to be you in Christ Jesus.

[31:40] And what happens is they live life as if they've got this form of diplomatic immunity. They're still going to partake in their sin but they're just going to rest in the idea that you know what?

[31:54] God forgave me on the cross already. I can just confess it tonight and I'll be good with God. And the reality is they're going to point to the legalist and they're going to say look at how unhappy this person, how insincere, how inauthentic this person is.

[32:11] You don't want to live like that. They're joyless. And actually the legalist is joyless. But they're believing the lie that they're full of joy because they're on the freedom side.

[32:23] You see, when we focus on grace, we're focusing on the half truths about the Christian life. We believe that there's words such as personal fulfillment, personal freedoms that we're supposed to have and the word holiness detracts from that.

[32:46] Detracts from that. It's holiness is going to be a drag on my witnessing. Holiness is going to be a drag on how I live. How am I going to attract people to Christ if I'm just about rules?

[33:00] That's their belief. They have a wrong understanding of holiness. They will tell you it's better to show all their weaknesses in their witness so people can understand that, hey, we're just like you.

[33:15] You'll hear words such as being relative to our culture. We're going to hear thoughts such as, I have to be like them to reach them. And it will end up being the person who argues these things at their heart of heart wants their sin in Jesus too.

[33:38] I read this amazing quote the last couple of weeks and it's one of the best quotes I've ever read on the subject. And the author simply states, Jesus never promised to be our pack mule to carry us and our favorite sins together to heaven.

[34:00] Jesus never promised to be our pack mule to carry us and our favorite sins together to heaven.

[34:15] It ignores the fact that our freedom came at a cost. And that cost was the death of God's only son.

[34:33] When we believe we can wink away sin, we can disregard sin, we can say that the legalists focus too much on it, we're supposed to forget it, we're supposed to bask ourselves in God's love, we're forgetting the cost of freedom.

[34:58] You see, Jesus Christ did die on that cross to bring us joy. But the joy he promises us comes under his righteous rule.

[35:13] He did not save us and say, hey, go live however you want. Because however you want is horrible.

[35:24] It is destructive. It is self-serving. There is no joy in that. True joy comes from living only under the creator's rule for us.

[35:38] Christ freed us from the tyranny of sin and broke us out of the prison of sin so that we could walk with him, not walk away from him, thinking we have a free pass.

[35:56] Let me tell you right now, Jesus is amazingly interested in our happiness. But he provides it by bringing us life under his loving and caring rule.

[36:11] Just as we read in Hebrews 12, a father or a mother or a parent who doesn't discipline his child does not love their child.

[36:25] There is no respect for their child. All right, I want to quick it up a little bit. The third wrong area that we focus on.

[36:35] So the first two, both on sin or grace, that is a balance that we're always going to fight for the rest of our lives, my friends. It's always going to be there.

[36:46] It's important we focus on Jesus Christ. The second area that we can focus wrongly on is people. Now, I'm not talking about comparing each other to our friends, but sometimes we develop heroes of the faith.

[37:01] We look at other people as if they are powerful, and we try to emulate their lives. We'll read a book, a biography, we'll be really emboldened by that.

[37:12] I've got a funny story about my friend, deeply influenced by the life of John Piper. He finds out that John Piper doesn't have a TV, so he throws out his TV and all his media, and he goes crazy for like six months.

[37:25] First of all, he doesn't understand that he's different from John Piper, and not from a sinless perspective. John Piper just doesn't care about TV, but my friend does love the culture, and he loves commenting and learning, and he likes movies and stuff like that.

[37:41] Those are some of his heart loves, and sure enough, he re-bought himself a TV and stuff, and he found out that wasn't going to be the way to holiness for him.

[37:52] If you come from a Reformed background, as I do, we get knocked around because we love a bunch of dead guys. If you go upstairs at a church, you're going to see great men of the faith that we have their portraits on the walls, men who pursued God's word, who died to give us the Bible.

[38:14] But what's interesting is when we read biographies, people report to us the good things about them. We rarely read about their struggles in being a father, being a husband.

[38:29] We don't read about their bad decisions, financial indiscretions. There's a whole litany of problems with other people, but the reality is they live different lives than you or I.

[38:46] Yes, there's really good things to learn and take from some of the saints. They've got good wisdom. It's interesting that there's a well-known seminary today.

[38:59] They've jumped on the social justice issue. Then they found out their school of preaching is actually named after a slave owner. So they got to go back and revisit if they really want to call that school that name because it reflects wrong ideas that were seen as right ideas in that culture.

[39:21] just even in the last couple, this last two months, two well-known, one more than the other, Ravi Zacharias, as you know, passed away from cancer this week.

[39:35] And I was reading an article and some people were already talking about some of the sin that he was involved with. And a couple weeks before that was another pastor who they believe possibly committed suicide and that was dialoguing or corresponding with an elder at his church has been deeply influenced.

[39:57] And the overview is the one pastor fell from grace, the one who committed suicide. He had been removed from his pastorate for the last several years.

[40:11] And people are almost ashamed to admit that he blessed them in their ministry. Here's the thing.

[40:24] God uses broken people all the time. He does. God used a donkey to deliver a word to Balaam.

[40:38] Balaam was smart enough not to worship the donkey. It was a means and method that God used. Jesus Christ is to be our focus.

[40:51] I rejoice for the life that both of these men lived. They preached Jesus and in different matters they fell into sin.

[41:01] But that didn't destroy the testimony of who Jesus is. It did not destroy the work of God. when we tend to over play our confidence on man whether we try to act like him, talk like him, that can be very destructive because if their faith dies, we're going to feel like our faith will die as well.

[41:32] I have a very good friend at his church is a world famous woman's author. She is a homeschooled genius. She's written books.

[41:42] She teaches seminars. And his wife has been living in dejection for years because she kept trying to be like this superwoman. What my friend just finally told his wife, he says, the only thing I want to make sure is that our children are raised under the admonition of the Lord and that we make an effort to homeschool them.

[42:05] I don't care about books or writings or any of those things because the reality is you and I all come from unique and different backgrounds. So do other people.

[42:17] Some people are first generational Christians. Some people are eight generational Christians. And some people live under the blessing and wisdom of eight generations before them.

[42:29] Some of us we're still figuring this stuff out day by day, month by month. God is perfectly glorified and justified in each of those lives.

[42:44] In fact, they're both the same. We are called to be holy in whatever context that God has given us. I believe when we move our focus from Jesus Christ to man, we start to emulate the man rather than Jesus.

[43:04] We're setting ourselves up for a fall. There's two other wrong focuses that I want to mention. Quickly, we focus on our past works. We believe that our past is an indicator of our future.

[43:20] Paul warned us about this in Philippians 3. I know men and women who have done many wonderful things. And I know churches too that in the past, 20, 30 years ago, they were exceptionally vibrant.

[43:33] One of my friends who's a church mediator went into a church and he had these different ideas that was supposed to help them just to get organized. And they kept saying, well, we did all that, we did all that, we did all that.

[43:44] And they used to talk about years ago about how there was 100 kids that would come to the Sunday school and how the youth group used to be busting at the doors and how their senior ministry had hundreds of people citywide being influenced.

[44:00] Now they were a thumbprint compared to a whole body print. And what he soon discovered is that over time, they really want someone else to do it, not them, because they feel they've done enough.

[44:16] You see, when we focus on Jesus and the lives that are around us, we know there's no end. It's a journey that we're on with a specific destination, which is to glorify God in all that we do.

[44:31] And if we understand that our past is based on the grace and love of Jesus Christ, we understand that our future is as well. And we look to him to guide us.

[44:43] And the last thing that I want to just quickly talk about is when we begin to focus on our feelings and how we experience something as God's guide to holiness, I believe we're in trouble.

[44:57] Because sometimes when God is moving in our hearts and he's cutting something out of us, it doesn't feel good. But it is good.

[45:10] As any weight trainer will tell you, no pain, no gain. And sometimes this Christian life is painful as God is setting himself to do something mighty in the future.

[45:24] And that is why the author of Hebrews calls us to look to Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith. My friends, God holiness is a Godward love and gratitude which is continuing to work itself out in our lives.

[45:49] It's not something that is achieved. It's not a goal at the end of life that we can somehow be perfect. It is an image that God is carving into us to make us be more like him.

[46:10] And the only way that can be truly satisfied in our lives is if we look to him to be the author and the perfecter of our faith.

[46:25] It's not going to be in our rules. It's not going to be in our grace. It's not going to be trying to look like other people. It's not going to be looking at our past and it's not going to be looking to feelings.

[46:39] Holiness is going to be created when we focus and we come to know Jesus Christ as he has revealed himself.

[46:52] People often ask me what I do for my devotions. My time in the word preparing for sermons is my study, but my devotional time pretty much nine times out of ten days is spent in the gospels.

[47:09] I want to know my Jesus. I want to be like my Jesus. And I want him to transform my life as I get to know him more.

[47:23] My prayer for you, if you've been struggling with sin, you're frustrated, dejected with this idea of pursuing after a goal of holiness, may I suggest it's the goal of knowing Jesus.

[47:39] And may you give yourself to understanding who he is. Read about him, learn about him, talk about him. Make him the focus of your life.

[47:52] Let's pray. Dear Holy and Heavenly Father, I think sometimes we, it's easy to be broken over our sin.

[48:08] It's easy to be broken over the rules that we've broken. It's easy to be exasperated and frustrated with our lives.

[48:20] Sometimes we just clearly say it's nothing like you. We don't want anybody to look on the inside of us. We wouldn't even want someone following us and looking at us for how we talk to people, how we act to people, how forgetful, insensitive, unthoughtful we are.

[48:42] And we try and try as we might to defeat sin. We find it always coming around. Father, I pray that we would be quick to confess, repent, and move on.

[48:55] And our moving on would be moving on towards you. Father, there's so many different lives that are represented in our church, and I pray that each and every one will understand that God has them and created them uniquely for who they are, their likes, their dislikes, their habits, things that they love for a purpose.

[49:21] And you can be glorified as they pursue you in every aspect of their life. It doesn't matter if they're an artist, an athlete, an investor, cleaner, a pastor, a dentist, a doctor, a lawyer, it doesn't matter.

[49:43] I pray that we would be more concerned with our inward life and allow that to influence our outward life. Father, give us a healthy fear of you.

[50:03] Father, as I conclude this sermon, I just ask you to forgive my sins, my unrighteous thoughts, my frustrations, when things don't go the way I think they should go.

[50:22] Lord, if there's anything that I pray that we take to mind, it's the grace that you so willingly offer us, and a love that is so great.

[50:37] May we focus continually on all of you. In your most holy and precious name, amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen.