Life, Love… and the Pursuit of Holiness

November 29, 2009

For the last two months or so, I’ve been struggling under the most extreme and intense conviction I’ve
ever felt in my life. Try as I might, I just couldn’t seem to get to the heart of it. It seemed to affect
everything, but it wasn’t until Monday morning that the light finally came on.

My goal has been to read through the entire Bible in two years. I started last year and am very close to
finishing. One of the last books on my reading schedule was 1 Peter. I’m a little behind schedule, so it
seems I could have had this little epiphany at least a week earlier if I’d kept on top of things! But I think
God in His wonderful providence, timed it perfectly to happen this week while I tried to prepare for this
morning.

That opening phrase in 1:13, “Therefore, prepare your minds for action;” jumped out at me and I knew I
was going to learn something that day. But what I learned broke my heart. It was like looking in a
mirror and seeing the short-comings; seeing that my Christian life had been devoid of a pursuit of
holiness. Seeing that I hadn’t really cared or even considered what “being set apart for God” should
look like in my everyday life.

The truth is, I’ve gotten too cozy with sin. Instead of being an influence on the world, I’ve let the world
influence me. I look around myself and figure if everyone else is doing it, it must be okay. If all my
Christian friends are doing it, it must be okay. I have been comfortably living in the “might makes
right/majority rules” philosophy of the world.

Forgive me if I’m being presumptuous, but because I don’t particularly stand out among the majority of
other Christians I see, I believe this message is for all of us: the Body of Christ needs to wake up, repent,
and remember their calling to be a royal priesthood! How often have I read or heard “Be holy, as I am
holy” and decided – consciously or not – that since there’s no possible way I can live up to God’s
standard of holiness and because HE knows that, it’s okay with Him if I don’t try? Or that holiness is
purely God’s responsibility; out of my hands? Hebrews 12:14 instructs us to “Strive for peace with
everyone, and for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord.”

There are two “levels” of holiness, if you will. Positional holiness is what God imparts to us when we
become His children. Since God is holy and we are sinners, we are reconciled to God by the blood of
Christ shed on the cross. God imparts Christ’s righteousness to us and makes us holy and blameless
before Him. That’s our spiritual position in Christ. We have been separated from sin and set apart to
God.

Practical – or personal – holiness, on the other hand, is the outworking and fruit of positional holiness,
evidenced in the way we think and live. Because we belong to God and His Holy spirit dwells in us, we
are commanded and divinely equipped to live according to His will every day, in every way. It is this
“level” of holiness where our efforts MATTER.

As I tried to understand a little more about the practical holiness God expects of us, I came across a
message about one of my favourite characters from the Old Testament. I’ve always been drawn to the
story of Nehemiah, but after this week, I have a new respect and admiration for him.

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 Here is a man with a heart for the things of God and an undeniable passion for holiness that compelled
him to care when God’s laws were being disregarded.

You probably remember his story – about rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem despite great opposition
from the likes of Tobiah, Sanballat, and Gesham. A great revival swept the land of Judah under the
leadership of Nehemiah and his friend Ezra, the prophet and priest.

As part of that revival, the people made a three-part covenant with God. In chapter 10 we see that:

1. They agreed that they would not intermarry with the unbelieving nations around them.
2. They agreed to revere the Sabbath by not buying, selling, or conducting any kind of business.
3. They agreed to support the needs of the temple and the Levites.

These were things they were supposed to have been doing all along, but we see here that they had to
repent and renew their covenant with God.

After serving in Jerusalem for twelve years, Nehemiah returned to Persia for a reason we’re not given.
We don’t even really know how long he was gone, but it seems to have been quite a few years –
possibly even several decades, given the changes he discovered upon his second return.

In any case, when he returned to Jerusalem, he was shocked to discover that the people had failed to
keep the covenant and they were flagrantly disobeying the Word of God.

So now we come to the final chapter, chapter 13, the part of Nehemiah’s story that I wasn’t familiar
with until this past week. Would you turn there with me? I won’t read the whole text, but I want to
encourage you to go back later and read that whole passage because you will get the feel, the flavor, of
what Nehemiah experienced, what he encountered when he got back to Jerusalem and—what I really
want you to see—how he handled what he saw.

Starting in verse 10, for example, he says, “I also learned that the portions assigned to the Levites had
not been given to them, and that all the Levites and singers responsible for the service had gone back
to their own fields.”

The Jews had promised to take care of the Levites, to take care of the temple, to give their tithes and
offerings. But they had stopped giving and so the Levites had to go back to farming to earn a living
because their needs were not being met.

Then you see, starting in verse 15, that they’d stopped observing the Sabbath, too. Nehemiah says, “In
those days I saw men in Judah treading winepresses on the Sabbath and bringing in grain and loading
it on donkeys, together with wine, grapes, figs and all other kinds of loads. And they were bringing all
this into Jerusalem on the Sabbath.”

They had promised God and Nehemiah they would not to do this. But here he returns, and they are
doing the very thing they had promised not to do.

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 Then dropping down to verses 23 and 24, we see another violation: “Moreover, in those days I saw
men of Judah who had married women from Ashdod, Ammon and Moab. 24 Half of their children spoke
the language of Ashdod or the language of one of the other peoples, and did not know how to speak
the language of Judah.”

The Jews had become fully integrated into the pagan, godless, unbelieving cultures around them. And it
started out by dating, courtship, and marriage that God had forbidden and that they had PROMISED not
to do. As Nehemiah saw these offenses against God’s law, as he saw that they had broken this
covenant, he was mortified. He boldly confronted the people over their backslidden condition.

You read, for example, in verse 11, he says, “So I rebuked the officials and asked them, ‘Why is the
house of God neglected?’”

Verse 17: “I rebuked the nobles of Judah and said to them, ‘What is this wicked thing you are doing—
desecrating the Sabbath day?’”

And when he saw the intermarriage, his reaction here was pretty extreme. Look at verse 25:

He says, “I rebuked them and called curses down on them. I beat some of the men and pulled out their
hair. I made them take an oath in God's name and said: ‘You are not to give your daughters in
marriage to their sons, nor are you to take their daughters in marriage for your sons or for yourselves.
26
Was it not because of marriages like these that Solomon king of Israel sinned?’”

“What is this terrible wickedness?” (verse 27, paraphrase).

Now, I want to insert here that the New Testament gives us, as the church, specific direction about how
we are to address sin in the body of believers. It doesn’t say anything about pulling out people’s hair or
beating them or cursing them! But what I want you to focus on is not the specific violations or physical
reactions, but that Nehemiah took sin seriously, that he was passionate about holiness, that he said,
“This has to be dealt with. It can’t be swept under the carpet.” – the DECISIVENESS with which he
addressed sin.

One of the most serious offenses that Nehemiah encountered when he came back to Jerusalem
involved the man Tobiah, the Ammonite. Tobiah was the man who, years earlier, had done everything
in his power to oppose the work of God when they had been trying to rebuild the city walls. But over the
years the Hebrews had gotten to know Tobiah better and he’d gone from being their enemy to their
friend and the social relationships had developed to a more intimate relationships, including marriage
ties between Tobiah’s family and the family of Eliashib the priest! Their sons and their daughters
married each other, and over time the differences between Tobiah’s people and the people who had
been consecrated and set apart for God, those differences all but disappeared.

By the time that Nehemiah returned, this sworn enemy of God, Tobiah, was actually living IN the
temple!! This was in direct violation to God’s command years earlier that no Ammonite should ever be
allowed to set foot in His temple. And God had given reasons for that. Yet here is Tobiah, living in a
room that had been given to him by the priest.

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 Undoubtedly that change of affairs did not take place overnight. Sin almost never comes into our lives
or our homes or our churches overnight. There’s a process that leads to the encroachment of sin into
our lives and into the church.

I think it probably happened in this situation the same way it often does in our lives. One seemingly
harmless little compromise leads to another and then another. Soon the priests and the people found
ways of justifying things that, years earlier, they would not even have considered justifying.

A spirit of tolerance became exalted over a spirit of truth. You can imagine the progression: “You
know, now that Tobiah’s realized he couldn’t stop the city from being rebuilt, he’s let up. He’s really not
such a bad guy. And his wife is a lovely woman and his kids play so well with ours…. It doesn’t seem
right to tell him he can’t stay just because he’s not one of us. We don’t want to be legalistic about this.”

You can imagine how the reasoning went and developed. So the godless Tobiah, the Ammonite, moved
into the temple while the people kept on doing church, doing their religious stuff, going through the
motions.

But to Nehemiah, who cared deeply about God and about holiness, this was unthinkable!! He was
furious, and he acted decisively. Nehemiah physically hurled Tobiah and all his possessions out of the
temple. Then he gave orders to purify the rooms that had become desecrated. He denounced the evil
situation, and then he called on the priests and the people to repent.

Now today, if you confront almost ANYONE about something that is not pleasing to the Lord, the thing
you’re likely going hear is: “Who are you to judge? How is this any of your business? This is between
me and God.”

Why wasn’t Nehemiah content to obey God himself and leave others alone?

I’ll tell you why. He was compelled by a passion for the glory of God to be displayed in God’s people.
His heart for holiness put him in a tiny minority even among God’s people. If you have a heart for
holiness today, it will put you in a tiny minority even among God’s people.

But Nehemiah didn’t seem to notice or to care. He wasn’t trying to win any popularity contests. All that
mattered to him was that the holy name of God had been profaned. He longed to see God’s name
hallowed once again.

The parallels between the story of Nehemiah and the church in our day, I think, are striking. There are
countless people today who call themselves believers, active members of their churches; they’re turning
out a lot of religious activity. But we have, to a large extent in our personal lives and therefore our
churches, thrown out or rewritten the law of God. We have prostituted the grace of God. We’ve said,
“We’re not under law. We’re under grace! So we’re free!” And what we mean, of course, is “We’re free
to sin.”

But the grace of God according to Titus chapter 2 and according to the whole of Scripture does not give
us the liberty or the license to sin. The grace of God teaches us to deny ungodliness. It helps us to live
lives that are free from sin.

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 But how often do we look around us today and see that a spirit of tolerance has triumphed over the
spirit of truth? And how often, if we really examine our own lives, has the same thing happened in our
hearts? It’s happened in mine. Spurgeon said, “Those who tolerate sin in what they think to be little
things, will soon indulge it in greater matters.”

And before we know it, Tobiah, the enemy of God, is living in His temple.

You say, “What do you mean by that? Who’s Tobiah and how is he living in the temple?”

Think about some of the enemies of God that we have allowed to come into our lives today – lust,
greed, materialism, anger, selfishness, pride, bitterness. These are ENEMIES of God! Sensuality,
indulgence, divorce, deceit, ungodly entertainment, worldly philosophies…

Little by little we’ve let down our guard. We’ve cultivated a relationship with these sworn enemies of
God, and we’ve either welcomed them into our lives or not even noticed them sneak in. Either way,
we’ve helped them to feel at home here in our lives.

Beyond that, we’ve worked so hard to make lost and backslidden people feel comfortable that there is
very little conviction of sin left, very little sense of God’s holiness, very little life transformation, very
little repentance going on, very little manifestation of the presence of God.

You know why? Because a holy God cannot make Himself at home in an unholy place.

I’m not suggesting that we ought to try to alienate unbelievers. I’m not suggesting that irrelevance is a
virtue or that we should make an effort to make people as uncomfortable possible. But what I am
saying is, if relevance to an unbelieving world is our objective, we are ultimately going to do
some things that will forfeit the presence of God. That’s true in our personal lives AND our
churches.

I am saying that sinners ought to be uncomfortable in the presence of a holy God. Sinners – not just
unbelievers. That includes US!! Sinners – Christian and non-Christian alike – will never be truly
converted and truly transformed until they have experienced the conviction of God’s Spirit over their
sin. And that is not comfortable. BELIEVE ME!

Nehemiah’s gripe was not with the unbelieving pagan world; his concern was about the people of God.
When the people of God get right with God and when we have this fiery, passionate, pure holiness that
loves God, then the world will stop and take notice.

The church has been waiting for the world to get right with God, but the world is
waiting for the church to repent.

We need to realize that the world is not impressed with what amounts to nothing more than a religious
version of itself. Our greatest effectiveness, our greatest weapon is not found in being like the world,
but in being different. You say, “but this really isn’t a salvation issue.” You’re right.

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 THANK GOD the sin of believers isn’t a salvation issue!!!! We will never be sinless, and yet we are
positionally holy, reconciled by the perfect shed blood of Christ. While pursuing a life of practical
holiness might not affect your eternal destination, it WILL determine the effectiveness of your witness.
Remember that verse from Hebrews? “Strive for… the holiness, without which no one will see the
Lord.”

According to that verse, no one will see God in us if we are not passionate about holiness. You and I will
never be the witnesses we were called to be if we do not deal with the sin in our lives. We CANNOT be
the witnesses we were called to be if we do not deal decisively with sin. And I’m not just talking about
the huge ones that anyone would be able to see; I’m talking about all the sneaky “little” secret sins, too.
The ones we believe affect only ourselves.

You say, “but that means I might have to give up some things I really enjoy doing!” Yes, it might mean
that.

I’ve reconnected with a bunch of old high school friends via Facebook, and one of them, a professing
NON-Christian, has been participating in any discussion involving faith and the Church lately. He said
something not that long ago that amazed me because it appears he has a real grasp of holiness, of being
set apart. He said: “I imagine being Christian means missing out on a lot of things. But not being
Christian means missing out on something far greater.”

When the fire and the presence of God in our lives and in our churches is evident, when it’s manifest,
people will be drawn to The Church, The Body of Christ – not because of the entertainment, not because
of the programs, but because God is there and they see the reality of a holy God. When we, the people
of God, humble ourselves; when we allow the Holy Spirit to show us the hidden sins in our lives, the sins
we didn’t even realize we’d allowed – and we turn away from those sins in repentence to pursue a life of
holiness…

THEN the world will have a reason to know and to believe that our gospel is true
and that our God. Is. Real.

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