1 Thessalonians
5:23 NIV
May God himself, the God of peace, sanctify
you through and through. May your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless
at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.
How
Clean Do You Want To Be?
When
I was in high school I had a pretty severe case of acne. I used to lay out in the sun for hours trying
to dry out my back and face and sometimes was in serious pain from
sunburn. My mom brought me to a
dermatologist and I got a prescription for a topical skin lotion as well as
pills that were supposed to reduce the oiliness of my skin. I must say it did work. If you look at my senior picture, you can see
the effect it had on me. It caused my
face to tan and for two or three weeks I had dark brown skin and my pimples
faded. But then, like something from a
fairy tale, my skin started peeling, small sections coming off at a time so
that part of my face was like the girl from Ipanema and the rest like the
Riddler. Then I was back to my normal
blotchy complexion until the combination of the sun and my medication began to
interact again. The pills used to turn
my skin so dry that my hands inside the knuckles would split open and I had to
put band aids around my fingers to be able to play basketball. I endured this because I was desperate to get rid of my acne. What I needed was some sort of deep cleaning
treatment that would clear my pores but I never found anyone who could do that
for me.
Have
you thought about the possibility that you might need a deep cleansing of your
soul? You may contend that you don’t
need any radical work done in you.
Perhaps you just have a few issues that you could use fixing but nothing
really critical, nothing very important.
If that is how you see things, then you are like most people who feel
like they could use a little tweaking but nothing dramatic like psychological counseling
or psychiatric care. Perhaps there is a
gnawing sense of inadequacy in you or a slight throbbing that something is not
quite right. At the risk of sounding
melodramatic, most alcoholics never go to an AA meeting and how many commit
suicide without ever attending a session with a counselor. It is the natural tendency for nearly all of
us to ignore what is wrong with us for as long as possible and this may be true of you too. Perhaps there is something of great value God
could do in you, something necessary that you would one day be most grateful for
Him to have done. You would not be the
first person to be thankful for God doing something new in you, that He brought
changes to you that you did not realize you needed. Consider the possibility that there is more to
having Christ build His life in you than you expected.
Paul,
inspired by the Holy Spirit wrote out a most enlightening prayer in 1
Thessalonians 5: 23. May God
himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through. May your whole
spirit, soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.
(NIV) This prayer stretches across the centuries to
you and it is just as valid now as it was in Thessalonica in 55 AD. He is asking God to sanctify you through and
through. The Greek term translated “sanctify”
is a tricky word to translate. It could
be rendered “make holy” which is perfectly fine except many misunderstand what
the term holy means. The second
important term is one Greek word that is rendered here “through and through”. It means to be completely or all the way or
the whole of you made something. A
picture of this is a sponge that is so completely saturated that there is no
room in it for anything else. It is what
you see in John 2 when Jesus tells the servants at the wedding to fill the
water pots all the way to the top so that not another drop could be put in them
or they would spill over on the ground.
There is
built within the curse of sin in you and me a certain disdain for too much God
in us. It is as if there is a tolerance level
fixed by the spiritual and even psychological damage done to us when sin
entered our lives that makes it almost painful to have Christ get deeply
involved in us. We see this manifested
in common activities. There is only so
much Bible we can read before we need something more entertaining. There is only so much Christian music we can play
before it gets old, only so much preaching we can hear before we are bored,
only so far we can go with forgiveness or kindness or generosity or goodness or
praying before we grow weary of it. It
is strange but we all seem to have a holiness fill line which if we go past it
results in us growing uncomfortable with God and God activities.
There
are parts of you, which you aren’t even aware exist, that are wrecked by
sin. Your spirit, which is who you are
forever, is in need of a total transformation if you are going to be completely
healthy and happy. The Bible speaks of
your spirit needing to be sanctified through and through. Sanctified, at least when the Bible talks
about it, means that God gets worked into every part of you. You become saturated with Christ. All of Christ’s personality traits, whether
they are His courage, His peace, His loving kindness or His moral purity,
become in sanctification your personality traits. This is much different than trying hard to be
like Jesus. That is impossible anyway if
you have nothing in you that Christ has in Him to live like He does! Imagine a turtle trying to do calculus like a
math professor or a walrus trying to make an apple pie like your
grandmother. It is impossible because these
creatures have none of the mental tools necessary to undertake the effort. Without Christ in you, it is impossible to
copy His behaviors or imitate His way of dealing with life.
The
problem we face is that we have so much damage to us that we are impossibly
separated from real goodness and holiness on a consistent basis. In spurts we are good or at peace or full of
faith but without warning it all falls apart.
The ruin is in hidden places that are buried within us. Just consider the strange case of Saul, king
of Israel. His best and most successful
general drove him crazy…literally crazy.
Although David was crucial to Saul’s success and thoroughly loyal to
him, Saul could not bear David’s popularity and tried a number of times to kill
him. There was nothing logical about Saul’s jealousy. It wasn’t David’s fault. The root of Saul’s bitterness was all within
his spirit somewhere. It may have
confused Saul and tormented him, this irrational hatred for David but it could
not be denied. Something was very wrong
with Saul and he could not fix it.
The
same could be said of David himself.
When he sent his servants to fetch Bathsheba so that he could sleep with
her, it was irrational what he did.
There were plenty of beautiful single women that David could have
had. He had numerous lovely wives and
concubines; so why did he need Bathsheba, who was married to one of his most
loyal and courageous officers? It isn’t
like he did not know wrong when he saw it.
When Nathan the prophet confronted David about his sin of sleeping with
Bathsheba and having her husband murdered, he did so by telling David a story about
lust. "There were two men in a certain town, one rich and the other
poor. The rich man had a very large
number of sheep and cattle, but the poor man had nothing except one little ewe
lamb he had bought. He raised it, and it grew up with him and his children. It
shared his food, drank from his cup and even slept in his arms. It was like a
daughter to him. Now a traveler came to
the rich man, but the rich man refrained from taking one of his own sheep or
cattle to prepare a meal for the traveler who had come to him. Instead, he took
the ewe lamb that belonged to the poor man and prepared it for the one who had
come to him." (2 Samuel 12:1-4 NIV)
David’s
reaction to hearing of this terrible act was appropriate rage. David
burned with anger against the man and said to Nathan, "As surely as the
Lord lives, the man who did this deserves to die! He must pay for that lamb four times over,
because he did such a thing and had no pity." (2 Samuel 12:5-6 NIV) Yet the evil David could see in another, he
could not find in himself until that evil bore fruit. This is a universal trait of sin wrecked
humanity. We easily see as Jesus put it,
the splinter in the eye of someone else but do not realize there is a beam of
wood in our own eye. Why is that? It is because the power of evil in us is
hidden in deep places of our spirit. It
surprises us when the ugly ungodliness comes to the surface, confuses us and we
react to it with the defense mechanism parents use when they hear about the
evil acts of their children: denial and befuddlement. “How could this happen? She wouldn’t have done that? She must have been provoked.”
The
absurd pockets of evil in your spirit and in my spirit contradict what we think
we are. We get fooled by the initial positive
results of becoming Christian into thinking that everything is right in us when
it isn’t. We need a complete reworking,
or to put it another way, a deep cleansing of the spirit. The Bible insists there is much wrong with us
that only Christ can fix. We must face
this squarely if we want to be perfect. This is
the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light; in him
there is no darkness at all. If we claim
to have fellowship with him yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live by
the truth. (1 John 1:5-6 NIV) The
difference between the evil we have in us and the absolute goodness found in
Christ is a great abyss…an uncrossable chasm.
Yet God Himself can get at those deep places of evil that sin has
wrecked in us and cleanse them, or to be precise, purify them. Consider the immensity of the promise found
in1 John 1: 7.
But if we walk in the light, as he is
in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his
Son, purifies us from all sin.
(1 John 1:7 NIV) Examine this
closely. The tiny word “if” makes clear
that we might not walk in the light.
This is not automatic; it is up to us to do. Walk is a metaphor that means to live and the
verse is saying it is possible for us to continually live in the light, to
always do what we do with God in charge showing us the way. We do not have to abandon God or go on our
own, we can at every moment walk hand in hand with Him, guided by Him, enabled
by Him to live like Christ lives. There
is a second part to the verse. As we walk in the light, the blood of Jesus
purifies us continually from all sin. The term translated “purifies” means to
cleanse constantly, to rework every moment of every day. It is the Greek word from which we get our
English word “cauterize. It is used to describe what happened when
Jesus removed the leprosy from those He healed.
When we are in tune with God and giving Him authority over what and how
we do things, a miracle occurs during these times. The blood of Christ works out of us the
damage sin has worked in us.
If
you just stay aligned with Jesus, just keep praying to Him as you go through
the day and let Him lead you when you sense His guiding, the damage Sin has
caused in your personality, your unconscious thinking and in the way you live
your life will be removed and healed bit by bit. There is no cure for certain broken and
wrecked parts of you except what Jesus can do if you let Him get hold of
you. This week make a conscious effort
to stay close to Jesus, to make Him the center of your concentration as often
as possible…no, as often as you are willing to do so.
True Pastor; its like detoxifying your body...... when you soak your feet into that detox water, then slowly all the toxins flow out. So its with our souls, as much as we soak ourselves prayerfully into the detoxifying love of Christ, we can feel all the toxins in our life flowing out. Walking with the Lord, helps us remain detoxed all the while! Praise the Lord!
ReplyDeleteThanks Jayant! What a great analogy!
ReplyDelete