1070. Toward the Completion of Our Holiness

Welcome to The Daily Platform from Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina. Today on The Daily Platform, we're continuing a study series called Ministry According to Second Corinthians. Today's speaker is seminary professor, Dr. Greg Stikes. The title of his message is, Toward the Completion of Our Holiness, from Second Corinthians 6.14 through 7.1. All right, take your Bibles, please, and let's open to Second Corinthians chapter six, and we're gonna begin in verse 14.

But let's begin by reading it, and I'll keep the words up here on the screen as we look at this message under the title, Toward the Completion of Our Holiness, starting in verse 14. Paul says, Do not be unequally yoked together with unbelievers. For what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what fellowship has light with darkness? What accord has Christ with Belial?

Or what portion does a believer share with an unbeliever? What agreement has the temple of God with idols? For we are the temple of the living God. As God said, I will make my dwelling among them, and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. Therefore, go out from their midst and be separate from them, says the Lord, and touch no unclean thing.

Then I will welcome you and I will be a father to you, and you shall be sons and daughters to me, says the Lord Almighty. And then Paul says, Since we have these promises, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from every defilement of the body and spirit, bringing holiness to completion in the fear of God. Holiness, of course, is separation. It's separating from that which is evil, and cleaving to that which is good. Cutting yourself away from that which does not delight the heart of God, and embracing only that which pleases him. People don't like this idea today of separation.

I'm talking about in the church. They don't like separation. It sounds too much like legalism. I mean, we can't explain why it's legalism.

We just know we don't like it, so it must be legalism. We don't like this idea of separation. So rather than holiness as separation, think about it for a second in the idea of the covenant of marriage. Okay, so the bride and the groom pledge their love and devotion to each other, and what do they say? They're following the typical vows. They will say something like, And forsaking all others. That's separation.

Forsaking all others. Be faithful to him or faithful to her as long as you both shall live. Nobody seems to mind that language in the vows that you take at the altar when you're married. So the newlyweds come back from their honeymoon, and they set up their house, and the young wife walks into her husband's study, and he's got a picture of her on his desk, which he expects, but next to that picture is a picture of one of his old girlfriends. So what do you think the wife is gonna say? You know, oh, isn't that sweet? I don't remember meeting her before.

Tell me a little bit about her. Is that how the conversation's gonna go? Probably she's gonna say, What is that?

Is that a joke? Because if it is, it's not very funny. Some of you guys are gonna get married this summer. Guys, I dare you to try this, okay? I mean, I double dare you. See what happens.

And if he's like, You know what? It's like just a picture. What, do you think I don't love you? I mean, you're such a legalist.

You know, it's just a little picture. And we would never think of doing that. And we don't even, it doesn't enter our mind when we think about marriage. Well, why can't we figure out the same thing when it comes to our loyalty and our devotion to God? And we keep up appearances well enough, but we flirt with sin. We tolerate little doses of it. We make allowances for ourselves. We don't like making allowances for other people.

We make a lot of allowances for ourselves. Why do we know instinctively that we simply do not convolute certain relationships in our lives, but we don't think that God minds? In the contemporary world, holiness has really fallen on hard times because the idea of separation has fallen on hard times. In fact, a little while ago, Kevin DeYoung, some of you know, wrote a little book that he called The Hole in Our Holiness, in which he begins by pointing out that holiness in American Christianity is really on the decline.

He's not the first to point this out. In fact, before I shave down this message to fit the time period, there's a lot of discussion I wanted to have about what is going on in the writing, evangelical writing about the decline of holiness. But this will suffice today where Kevin DeYoung says the hole in our holiness is that we really don't care much about it. Passionate exhortation to pursue gospel-driven holiness is barely heard in most of our churches. It's not that we don't talk about sin or encourage decent behavior. Too many sermons are basically self-help seminars on becoming a better you.

That's moralism, he says, and it's not helpful. He says, I'm talking about the failure of Christians, especially younger generations and especially those most disdainful of religion and legalism, to take seriously one of the great aims of our redemption and one of the required evidences for eternal life, our holiness. What does the Bible say? Without which no one will see the Lord. And if you look at every kind of doctrinal system, I'm thinking of Catholicism, I'm thinking of Pentecostalism. If you take a lot of the doctrinal systems that at least source themselves at some point in the scripture, you always have a point at which the journey of salvation begins. And one way or another, the person who is a believer and trying to earn their way to heaven in one way or another is following this path to holiness. If you're in Catholic theology and you reach that holiness level, before you die, you're called a saint. In Pentecostalism, there's a crisis that has to happen in the preaching, in the service every week to get you up there again and you fall down and you come back to Sunday and you get up there again. Every model has its method of showing you how to become holy, but nobody denies that holiness is the end game because we need to be with God.

And without holiness, no one will see the Lord. When I was in seminary in the 1990s, I read a book by James Means called Effective Pastors for a New Century. It's really an interesting book. This summer, I taught a D. Men course at another school and I had them as a project read James Means' book that was written before the year 2000, like 1998, 1999, and had them look at our culture and report on how close he came to determining what was going to happen in the future in Evangelicalism. The book is full of these, not prophecies, but he's saying, look how we're trending and this is what we're going to need to be as pastors if this is the trend that's going to lead us into the new millennium. And so he's attempting to describe the state of the church as we head into the 21st century and offer advice for church leaders on what to do about it. So in a chapter that he titled Syncretism, Pluralism, Eclecticism, What a Ride, Means discusses Neopaganism and he writes, Neopaganism distinguishes itself from the old kind by its baptism into the church. The lifestyle of innumerable professing Christians differs little from that of the practical atheists of our culture. Indeed, in most cases, their lifestyle is indistinguishable from that of the unregenerate and I will save you the evidence for that that he walks through.

It's very discouraging. But he says, more than 40 million Americans claim a born-again experience, yet it is difficult to imagine a time when so many professions of faith have produced so little evidence of transformation and spiritual vitality in daily lives. This passage here in 2 Corinthians chapter 6 calls us to holiness. And you notice at the beginning of the passage it starts with the words, do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers and it ends with this statement bringing holiness to completion in the fear of God. He's not talking about our standing with the Father. Positionally, we understand we're already made perfect in Christ because we're united with Christ when we come to the Lord Jesus Christ for salvation. We're a new creation in him and what we are is not yet revealed.

We understand that. But what he's telling us here to do is to take what is our position in Christ and live it out practically, to live in a manner consistent with the standing that God has given to us in Christ. And he urges us to perfect our holiness, to bring it to maturity, to bring it to completion. I've entitled the sermon toward the completion of our holiness because I don't think the Bible teaches we will ever get there on this earth. We will never become holy and perfectly obedient, pure in every thought and pure in every motivation and pure in every action.

In fact, if you're one of these people who thinks you're kind of getting close to that goal, you know, don't tell the rest of us because it's just going to make us discouraged. But if you're like me, we're waiting for that new creation to be fully revealed in the eschaton, to be like Christ when we see him as he is. Until then, Paul says you need to be on this path to practical holiness. Now, this message is for the whole church in this text, but I don't need to explain to you how devastating it is to your ministry when you as a minister, a counselor, a teacher, pastor are not living a holy life that is above reproach, how the word of God is demeaned, how God's people are discouraged, how the lost are turned away from the gospel, how the enemies of the truth rejoice when it is discovered that we are not practicing what we preach, that we are not striving for holiness, keeping a safe distance from sin and a relative closeness to God. Even if believers in general are struggling with holiness, they must see it in the people helping them walk with God.

They have to see it in us. So this is a matter of even greater urgency, I think, for those preparing for ministry, and that's why I think it fits so beautifully with the theme that we've chosen for this year, which is that aroma of Christ which goes before us in our ministry. In fact, for those of you who are called to pastoral ministry, there are really, in the New Testament, only two bases for your authority in the church. The first is the word of God, and the second is your holy life.

There's only two bases for your pastoral authority. In 1 Peter 5, he says, you can't drive people. He says, you can't be domineering, demanding, pig-headed, the King James says, lording it over the flock. He says, you have to lead your people, and you do this, he says, through your example, being examples of the flock. In this passage, Paul is convincing us of the importance of holiness, and he's charging us to live a holy life, and I think that Paul urges us to move toward the completion of our holiness by embracing three essential truths about holiness itself.

What are these essential truths? That's how we'll unpack the text, and the first one really covers all of the verses that are in chapter six. The first one is this, holiness is the basis for our fellowship with God. I mean, everything he says in verses 14 for the rest of the chapter is about fellowship with God, and the central illustration he uses is the idea of the temple, the structure built and centered in the middle of Israel to represent God's dwelling with his people in fellowship. Paul begins in verse 14, do not be unequally yoked together with unbelievers.

It's a reference to God's command in Deuteronomy 22, 10, where God says, don't plow your field with an ox and a donkey at the same time, because you're tying together two different kinds of animals that behave differently and want to go different directions. If you're a believer in Christ, you have a different worldview, a different set of loves, a different end, a different hope, if you have hope at all, as an unbeliever, a different hope than a person who does not know Christ. You are living to glorify God. They are living for something else.

You're not going to go the same direction. So if you join them in the same mission, in the same goal, you will find yourself compromising your own call to glorify God. That's exactly what was happening at the church at Corinth. Paul dealt with them because they were allowing people who did not desire to glorify God to be in fellowship with them in their church, and it was compromising their mission. He says in 1 Corinthians 5, I told you not to associate with sexually immoral people. But then he says immediately after this, right, I don't mean the sexually immoral people of the world or the greedy and swindlers or idolaters.

Since then, you would need to go out of the world. Paul says, I don't mean you can't make friends with them and love them and give the gospel to them. The whole New Testament is full of that charge.

You're supposed to do that. Holiness is not isolation. It's not insulation from unbelievers.

That's a whole other issue. Some Christians get the idea that in order to be holy, they can't ever be seen with sinners or have close relationships or fellowship with them. That's not holiness. That's what the New Testament refers to as Phariseeism. The Pharisees criticized Jesus because he was associating with sinful people.

We understand that. But on the other hand, associating with unholy people cannot mean that I'm down in the pit with them, living out their lifestyle and their choices. There's a version of evangelical gospel witness that sounds like that. Living out their lifestyle and their choices. I need to live as if I'm outside of the pit in the light so that I can see clearly to help others out of it, or in the language of Jude, to snatch them out of the fire as an act of mercy with fear while hating the garments stained by the flesh.

So I love them, and I desire to reach them, but I cannot plow with them. If we minister to them in a way that compromises or shrouds or hides the clarity of the gospel of Christ, which is the only thing that has the power to rescue them, then we are not ministering biblically. We are compromising our holiness. So after saying this, Paul asks a series of rhetorical questions that logically lead us to his conclusion. He's doing this all throughout his letters, isn't he? He makes a big deal about this, this question and answer kind of method that leads us, surprise, to his conclusion.

And he doesn't masterfully hear. He says, for what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? And the answer is none. That's how you're supposed to answer that question. Or what fellowship has light with darkness?

None. Those are two completely different things. What accord has Christ with Belial? That's a Hebrew word that refers to a dishonorable person.

It might even be a reference to Satan. We're not 100% sure. But we are identified with Christ. How can we be identified with Satan or somebody who's like him at the same time? We can't.

It's impossible. Or what portion does a believer share with an unbeliever? What agreement has the temple of God with idols? And here he jumps, notice in the text, to the theological foundation for that last question. For we are the temple of the living God.

And here is an example that stretches back all the way to the Old Testament where the Jews struggled with idolatry. When wicked kings like Ahaz, for instance, were corrupting the temple, they were actually changing the blueprint of the altar. Ahaz went over to Assyria and saw an altar he liked a lot better than the one that God had designed in the Old Testament or in the Torah.

And so he comes back and he says, okay, here's the blueprint. I want you to change the altar, bringing idolatry into the Lord's temple or going through the motions of worshiping the Lord in his temple and then going off to one of the high places in the land and worshiping another God there. And Paul says, no, there is no agreement between the temple of God and idols.

And guess what? He says, you are the new temple because God dwells in you. The glory of God through Jesus Christ fills you as believers and fills the church and believers together. And we gather together with the indwelling Christ. So he says, how can you come together and worship the God who dwells among you, who is with you, and then go off into the world and commit sin?

It's unthinkable. And this is exactly what Paul has already told the Corinthians, remember, in 1 Corinthians chapter six. In 1 Corinthians six, Paul is dealing with men in the church who are participating in the pagan practice of temple prostitution.

You're familiar with these words, I think. He says, do you not know that your bodies are the members of Christ? I mean, you're yoked with him. Jesus said, take my yoke upon you. Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? I think this is one of the times where he says, may it never even come into the realm of possibility.

Never. Or do you not know that he who is joined to a prostitute becomes one body with her? For as it is written, the two will become one flesh. But he who is joined to the Lord becomes one spirit with him.

And he says, you can't have it both ways. And so he says, in 1 Corinthians six, 18, flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin that a person commits is outside the body, but sexual immorality, if you could, if you practice that, he says, you sin against your own body, or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God, you are not your own, you are bought with a price. So glorify God in your body. We grow up, if you grew up in the church, you grew up hearing this preached a lot.

And it applied to all kinds of different things that whoever was preaching didn't want you to get involved into. But the issue here is the fellowship you have with God. And it convulates our fellowship with God, if we're fellowshipping with that which God hates.

Why? Because we are a separated people. By definition, God dwells with us, we're in fellowship with him.

And it's a wonderful thing. It's like that marriage covenant, I would never dream of being unfaithful or going outside of that covenant. Why in the world would I think of doing it with God? And this is exactly where Paul is headed in second Corinthians six, how does God or how does he come to the conclusion that we should be separated unto God and from the world? Well, if we pick back up here in verse 16, he says, as God said, I will make my dwelling among them and walk among them and I will be their God and they shall be my people. Therefore, go out from their midst and be separate from them, says the Lord and touch no unclean thing and I will welcome you and I will be a father to you. And you shall be sons and daughters to me, says the Lord Almighty, seven times here.

Notice Paul reiterates the promise that God will dwell with us. I will make my dwelling among them. I will walk among them. I will be their God. They shall be my people.

I will welcome you. I will be a father to you. You shall be sons and daughters to me, says the Lord Almighty. Paul is reaching into the Hebrew scriptures, our Old Testament, and he's drawing out a mixture of promises maybe from memory here because he's drawing together all kinds of texts.

It's really fascinating to walk through the different texts he draws from. Leviticus 26, Ezekiel 32, 2 Samuel 7, you notice there, I will be a father to him, speaking of the Davidic kings primarily. We find phrases from the Exodus 6, Exodus 29, Jeremiah 31, Isaiah 52, they're all in here like a cosmopolitan collection of texts from the Old Testament.

And we don't have time to do it here, of course, but if you want to fully appreciate this text in 2 Corinthians, you need to find out where each of those verses is coming from and go back to the Old Testament and read those verses in their context. But you'll find that all of these promises speak of the same thing. God's promise of his presence and personal loving relationship with his people as they walk with him. Paul's drawing on all those places in the Old Testament where God has made this promise. And so he says in verse 17, therefore go out from their midst, right in the hearts of these promises.

Be separate touch no unclean thing. In other words, and you see it visually here, right in the middle of these promises, the promise of God that he will dwell among his people assumes that we are the kind of people who have separated ourselves from sin and unto him. Like the Holy Temple of the Old Testament, we are personally in fellowship with God. And we are able to be that instrument, that instrument that God uses to bring others into fellowship with God. It's not just about our personal walk, it's about our ministry. The basis for that fellowship is our personal holiness. And so that is the first really big idea.

The next two I'm going to cover will be very brief, by the way, I cut off a lot of material here, but that's a huge idea. We don't think about it. We take for granted the fact that God saved us. We're in fellowship with him. Christ is interceding us, interceding us before us, interceding for us before the throne. One day we'll be with the Lord forever and praise God for all of that. But he wants us to be fleshing this out along the way. He wants us to be moving toward what we are ultimately going to be even before we get there. And that's why he's encouraging us to move toward this maturity in our holiness. But not only is holiness the basis for our fellowship with God, we also see here that holiness is accomplished through spiritual cleansing of flesh and spirits.

And I wanted to highlight this. All of the verses we've already read are given to us really, I think, so that we can make sense out of verse one of chapter seven. So he says, since we have these promises, beloved, that is the promises that God will dwell over this holy people, let us cleanse ourselves from every defilement of the body and spirit.

Now stop there for just a second. If you cleanse something, you wash away what is undesirable. You wash away the dirt, you wash away the filth and the grime. And we have to see sin in our lives as something that is unclean, something that is undesirable to God.

In fact, undesirable is not a strong enough word. God hates sin. Why did Christ have to come and die for it?

So much so that he cannot dwell with it. So much so that the Lord Jesus had to take our sins upon him in order for God to be able to keep his promise to dwell with us. So the Lord is asking us to look into our hearts and examine our lives and identify those areas where we are falling into sin. We are not glorifying God with our lives and to determine by God's grace what we need to wash away, what we need to cleanse. Practically speaking, he's not talking about Christ cleansing but he's talking about our practicality and making it real for us even now. And we may struggle with those sins and we may need to learn how to cleanse ourselves. That's what I'm not touching on here.

There's a whole other conversation. How does this work out in the actuality of it? We may need help and encouragement from others who can encourage us and hold us accountable. That's one of the reasons we have the body of Christ. But notice that Paul says that we should cleanse ourselves from every defilement of body and spirit.

And what he means here is that we should not be satisfied until we have discovered every sin that needs to be cleansed, whether it is a sin of the flesh or a sin of the spirit. Now as a lot of you know, it's easy to focus on the sins of the flesh. Laziness, drunkenness, stealing, lying, immorality, sexual sins, murder, substance abuse, lack of prayer, gossip, evil speaking, cursing, disobedience to authority.

I mean we could go on and on. There's vice lists in the New Testament for these things. And they are sins that God hates and we have to cleanse ourselves from them.

But God equally hates sins of the spirit. A lot of you may be familiar with Jerry Bridges book that he wrote a few years ago called Respectable Sins. And maybe you've seen that book. Maybe you've even studied it.

It's a really good study. He names ungodliness. He says that's at the heart of the issue.

Anxiety, frustration, discontentment, unthankfulness, pride, selfishness, lack of self-control, impatience, irritability, anger, judgmentalism, envy, jealousy, worldliness. He says these are respectable. First because they're easier to hide. I can look good and still harbor these in my heart. And also they're respectable because everybody deals with these sins. I mean everybody tells little lies and everybody struggles with worry and doubt and so forth.

And so it's the kind of thing we can share with everybody and it sort of takes on this respectability he says. But we have to remember God hates those sins just as much as the others. Some of them may have deeper implications for us when we commit them. But God hates all sin. And we're not serious about holiness until our standard no longer is what other people think we are. But what God knows us to be. And we are equally dependent on his grace to cleanse ourselves from these, to identify them in our lives, to confess them and by God's grace to do what it takes to get rid of these ugly sins while trusting in his strength and power to mold us into the image of Christ. It takes just as much of our concentration to do this by the grace of God as it does to any sin that we can commit externally.

Although as I said some of those have deeper implications and they're impacting us very deeply. God wants us to take holiness very seriously. And finally, very briefly, there is another essential truth about holiness that I think we should at least touch on this morning. And that's at the very end of this text. Holiness is motivated by the fear of God.

You notice that there? We recognize our sinfulness and strive to complete our holiness because we fear God in the right sense of that term. He says that at the very end of verse one there. What does it mean to fear God? To bring holiness into completion because of the fear of God. I really like how George Guthrie puts it in his commentary and I'm not actually quoting him.

I sort of reworked his commentary a little bit here to make it a little easier to understand. But he says cleansing ourselves in the fear of God means that we are motivated by an appropriate reverence and awe for God. Because when we reflect on God's mighty acts, especially what he has done for us through Christ and we believe him by faith, realizing that we, even though we are lovingly embraced by God, we really deserved eternal condemnation. He says that thought should produce in us a grave and profound respect for God.

The fear of God is not merely being cautious about God because he's watching us and neither is it living in dread of God because we know we're saved for eternity by Jesus Christ. It's the attitude we have when we reflect upon all that God is and all that he has done for us and we are appropriately sobered by it. And we are more and more devastated that we still sin and we learn to detest the ugliness of it and to yearn more for the final deliverance from it and from its very presence. These are the essential truths about holiness that I think we have to understand and embrace if we are going to live and minister as holy people. We have to understand that holiness is the basis for our fellowship with God and that holiness extends both through our flesh and our spirit and that it is highly motivated by this profound respect that we have for the father. I think the aroma of Christ is in part an aroma of holiness. If we are not moving toward it, we are a stench to God apart from his son and we are out of fellowship with God. We are believers, but we are out of fellowship. And we have nothing pleasing of an aroma to offer to the world that demonstrates that the beautiful transformation is possible through Christ. So I think we need to take Paul's urging here and take seriously this charge to move toward the maturity of our personal holiness for God's glory and for the good of his church. You've been listening to a message preached in Seminary Chapel by Dr. Greg Stikes, Seminary Professor at Bob Jones University. Join us again next week for more preaching and teaching from the Bob Jones University Chapel Platform.