Persecute Holiness

October 2nd 2022

Philippians 3:12-14

#1)

Here, brothers and sisters, in this life, we will experience hardship and turmoil. We will go through suffering and trauma. We will feel the mighty rushing waves of sorrow and loss, crashing against our shores and eroding away the foundation upon which we build our life. 

A loved one will betray us, and our foundation will crack and crumble. 

A child will turn from the faith, and the waters will seep underneath, freeze in the cool of winter, and crack away our foundation in ways that aren't visible until the spring thaw. And when the spring comes, and the ice melts and returns the water to the earth, the pieces of our heart that we thought were healthy, will be revealed to be broken and hurt. Pieces of a heart, held together with not but hopes, will beat in asynchronous rhythm within our chest, reminding us of the hurt with every off-tempo beat.

We will lose our job, get fired for reasons that may be legitimate or not, legal or not, and there will be nothing we can do about it. We will see the cupboards of our houses, shrink and shrink…we will see the bills, grow higher and higher. We will see the innocence in our children's eyes, and when we realize that the career we had relied upon to keep them sheltered, clothed and fed, is no longer there, and there is nothing we as parents can do to provide for them…the white capped waves of shame and guilt, will pull us into currents of depression and anger.

We are not perfected. We are not perfect.

“But”...you may say… “though those events may come upon me, in ways that I do not wish for them to do so…I am prepared! I am strong! I am clever! I contain within me the know-how, the grit, the passion and the courage to take this life by the reins, take the bulls that approach my family with intent to do harm, by their horns, and subdue them under my feet! Yes these events that come are less than perfect, but I am able to make the best of them.”

I pray, my friend, that you are not so bold and blasphemous to utter such things. For deep within the darkest, cob-webbed corners, of the bottom of the bottom of our hearts, where we dare not look, and beg of God to not look as well, those parts of our soul and mind, where we know…by experience…lies nothing but the strengths of our old man. He lies in wait, biding his time, wringing his hands in eager lustful anticipation of all the moments that you stare your Savior in His holy face, and descend into sin.

Your old man, lies within the cellar of your heart, in that dark corner that you know he sits within, smiling back at you with blackened eyes and shining teeth, waiting for you to descend into his basement with lust and violence on your mind. And as your foot first steps onto that rotten wooden staircase, sending shrieks and groans of tired wood and rusty nails, echoing off of the basement walls, he perks up! Looks you in your face, and offers up to you, in hooked hands and gray skin those sins that he knows you love and cherish. 

He offers up to you, lust and sex. Power and violence. Within the crooked hands that you have come to enjoy the touch of, your old man gives to you the selfishness and clout that you love, the wicked scent of debauchery and drunkenness. Laziness and cowardice are his wares, and your soul is the currency you give in exchange.

All of us, have descended into the basement of our hearts and visited with joy the old man who lives within them. For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. And every time we plunge into the dank and moist cellars of sin…we hurt ourselves. We hurt our families. We offend our God.

We weaken our hearts, bruise them, we draw blood from the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit, and it has an effect in every area of our life. Do you think, brothers and sisters, that your children are receiving from you a Biblical understanding of God and His ways, when they see you living in sin? Are you preparing for them a path free from obstacles and hindrances, or are you continuing to descend those cursed stairs? Because your sin---your imperfection---will, without a shadow of a shadow, cling to the hearts and minds of those you love most. It will change their decisions, mold their hearts and break and form the image of God that they will base their entire life upon. As tar refuses to be washed clean from one hand to the next, so will the sin in your life stain the lives of those around you.

You are not perfect.

However…that old man who peddles his filth within your heart…is restrained. He is held back. He is chained in one specific place within your heart, and can only stretch beyond the means of his fetters, at the permission of Him who holds the chains.

If you are a Christian, and have repented of your sins and believed in the Gospel of Jesus Christ, then the old you -- who lives within your heart…is not alone. The God of all Creation, The All-Mighty, All-Knowing, All-Powerful, Omnipresent, Transcendent, King of the Universe -- Yahweh the Undying lives within your heart. 

Jesus Christ remained not far from His children, atop the golden clouds of eternity, forever enthroned upon their praises…but He descended to this world, he climbed down the stairs of the cosmos, and joined His sons and daughters. Stood beside them, lived beside them, felt hurt and sorrow and sadness beside them. He felt betrayal, He was cast aside, abused, struck down, and forgotten…those He loved the most, denied Him, nailed Him to the rotten cross of sin and shame, and He died under the weight of their sins. Not only did He die when we should have, but He was raised to life so that we will be as well. 

When we are resurrected, brothers and sisters, we will be made perfect! We will be sinless, shining with the light of the Author of Eternity, eternally reflecting from us. No longer will that old man live within us. His crooked hands will be forever replaced by the nail marked hands of our King. Our old self, who knows exactly which words to say to cause our fall, will be slaughtered and silenced by the double edged sword going forth from the mouth of the Lamb of God. His aged and broken body will be finally and completely crushed under the weight of Jesus Christ’s rod of iron by which He will rule the Nations.

1st Corinthians 15:51-52: “Behold, I tell you a mystery: We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed— in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.”

We will be made perfect ------- but we have not laid hold of it yet. 

#2) 

We must press after holiness and goodness. Righteousness and truth. We must never cease or break from our efforts. Never tire, never lessen. We must incessantly hunt down and capture holiness with all of our strength and all of our efforts. We must go after, follow, and eagerly seek after personal holiness. We must persecute holiness. Go after it brothers and sisters.

Do you know where it lives? Do you know where holiness, at the end of the day, lays its head to rest? Are you looking for it? Do you hear whispers upon the winds of this culture - where holiness resides? Do you heed their hints and clues about where to find it? Have you heard a neighbor speak about holiness being found in such and such a place, or in such and such an activity? Do you trust them to point you in the right direction? Or do their words betray them to be spies of our enemy? Do they give you wrong directions, on purpose, so that you may never lay hold of perfection, because if you were to lay hold of it, it would mean that they themselves were on the wrong trail?

Beware of such people, who have their own righteousness as their standard of perfection, and follow not their directions in your search.

When the Apostle says “Reaching Forward” in v.13, he uses the Greek word “Epekteinomai” which has for its meaning: “strain every nerve to reach”. He is using the metaphor of a foot race. Not a short sprint, but a long and arduous Cross Country trek through rough and hostile terrain.

For that is what this world is. Our enemy roams about like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour, and we are tasked from on high, to live here in the jungles and wildernesses of this world, and strain every nerve to reach holy perfection. We must give our all brothers and sisters! Every nerve of your body, every thought of your mind, every feeling of your heart, must be united in your efforts to push yourself forward to perfection. 

Do not give up! You will sin, you will fail, you will falter and hurt yourself and others in ways that you feel are irredeemable…but we serve not a God of human limitations. We serve not God of flippant passions who loses His temper and acts in rash and hurried ways. We serve a God who is long suffering, patient, and who loves to forgive His children. When those within whom the Holy Spirit dwells, give in to their favorite sin, our God is waiting with open arms to welcome you back into His loving embrace. He loves to forgive His children.

So take the forgiveness of God, trample not upon it in a fit of sin and lust, and seek after eagerly, straining every nerve, and persecute the holiness that He wrote down within the pages of His holy Scriptures.

For your old man holds property in your heart. He is aware, and hates, that Jesus Christ holds the lawful Deed to your heart, and refuses to vacate. This is why, when Paul uses the words “lay hold” in v.12 he says, in Greek “katalambano”. Which means: “to take, to obtain, word used for colonists appropriating land”. Our heart, fellow Saints, belongs to Jesus Christ, our old man refuses to surrender the lease, and we are tasked with taking it -- by force. By force and exertion and willpower we must humble ourselves before our God and kill our sin.

Leave it no foothold in your life. Do not accommodate and arrange and fit your sin into your daily life, but take drastic and extreme steps to force it from the land that rightfully belongs to Christ. Feed it not with passion and pride, but set up the siege walls of daily prayer and Scripture reading to starve it to death. Invade the enemy territory that lies within you, and force it into submission and surrender. Storm the black gates of hell, sons and daughters of the most High God! Advance upon your enemy with the sharpened steel of the Word of God, and leave your old man bloody and broken, afraid to fight you again.

Kill your sin! 

You can do this! Press on brothers and sisters! Press on! Your sins have been forgiven you, your heart has been made new, you are forgiven, redeemed, made new, the blood price of your sin has been poured out from the storehouses of heaven onto the body of Jesus Christ on the cross and He was killed for your sin, saving you from the wrath that you deserve.

1st Timothy 6:11-16: “pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, patience, gentleness. 12 Fight the good fight of faith, lay hold on eternal life, to which you were also called and have confessed the good confession in the presence of many witnesses. 13 I urge you in the sight of God who gives life to all things, and before Christ Jesus who witnessed the good confession before Pontius Pilate, 14 that you keep this commandment without spot, blameless until our Lord Jesus Christ’s appearing, 15 which He will manifest in His own time, He who is the blessed and only Potentate, the King of kings and Lord of lords, 16 who alone has immortality, dwelling in unapproachable light, whom no man has seen or can see, to whom be honor and everlasting power. Amen.

#3)

We are told to press toward, to go after, to eagerly pursue, stretching every nerve toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. For there is no higher calling. It is the upward, the utmost, the highest most noble calling that any human will ever experience. We are called to be holy as God is holy, we are called to perfection, to nobility, to honor. We are called to look in the face of our deepest fears, and with unblinking eyes…..not-give-in. Not an inch of ground should be surrendered. This is a task only suited to the strong, the brave, the powerful. 

But before you claim “I am strong, I am brave, I am powerful” I must remind you of the old man, living within the basement of your heart. We are fallen, weak, small, given to various sins that we always promise we never will again.

What hope is there then? If we are called to be perfect and holy, and go after with the ferocity of a heavenly army…yet we are bogged down with various sins…what hope is there?

There is hope, because of what 1st John 4:19 says: “We love Him because He first loved us.” We are called to press on and lay hold of that for which Christ Jesus laid hold of us. He made the first move. The perfect sinless King of the World, reached out to his undeserving sinful children, and plucked them from their graves. He died the death that we deserve, so that we may live the life that we don’t deserve. 

And when we repented and believed in the God who chose us from before the foundation of the world, not only was our punishment accounted to Him, but His righteousness was accounted to us.

This, is how we are able to press on.

This, is how we are able to strain with every nerve. Pursue holiness and righteousness. 

The power of the living God, flowing through the souls of His Children, empowers them, to live rightly. To live how they should. To live lives of honor and integrity. To stand against the strongest temptations and not fall, and when they do fall, to get back up, make plans to not fall again, and keep moving forward.

We are the descendants of the Thrice-Holy Monarch of the world, whose robe fills the entire universe, who wear galaxies as rings, and uses planets as footstools. He is our Father, and we go forth in this world and into the enemy territory within our hearts, bearing His name across our shields, with His blood across our doorposts, with His sword firmly gripped in our hands ready to do violence against our sins.

You can pursue perfection, with everything inside of you----because Jesus Christ chose you. Not because of you, and who you are…but because of Him and who He is. All strength and honor belong to Him.

Not only does His electing call upon us, empower us to pursue holiness---giving us the ability, but it gives us the desire to do so. We want to be holy. We want to be righteous. We want to live the right way. We want to resist temptation to its crooked face, and it hurts and pains us when we sin. We have the desire to not sin.

In closing:

Because Christ loved us first, we can do two things: 

First- We can give it our absolute best. We can try our hardest, with nothing held back. No amount of strength will be in our tanks when we go screaming into our graves. When you die, die with an empty tank. Leave no sin in your life unchallenged, leave no person un-evangelized, leave no parts of Scripture unread and leave no parts of Scripture unwrestled with. Leave no prayers unprayed. Leave no worship unsung. Give everything you can to the pursuit of holiness.

In this life, we are afraid to give of ourselves, in fear of no return. We try not our best, because if we still fail, it will mean we are unworthy. We hold back prayers, out of fear that God will not hear us. We hold back evangelizing, over fear that the person won't repent and believe. We hold back fighting off our sins, because of the fear of what our life will look like when we aren't the ones in total control of it. 

But, brothers and sisters…the war is already won! Jesus Christ already has the victory! We are able to fight with all of ourselves, because the victory is already guaranteed, so give this life your everything! 

Second, because the war is already won, and there is no final failure awaiting the Children of God, we are able to enact heart changing, life altering, nation-shaking changes to this world. We can literally, because of Christ loving us first, take over and change the entire world.