Washed Clean [Part 1]

Alan Wright, pastor, Bible teacher, and author of his latest book, The Power to Bless. It doesn't matter what it is that you try to do, it's a dead work. It might be a good thing to do. It could be a very good thing to do. There are a lot of good things to do. Giving up your money, praying, being in the Word, fasting, fellowshipping with others, being faithful to be in church. All of these things, wonderful things, wonderful things.

But if you're doing them to try to soothe your conscience, they're just dead works. That's Pastor Alan Wright. Welcome to another message of good news that will help you see your life in a whole new light. I'm Daniel Britt, excited for you to hear the teaching today in the series, Belonging to God, as presented at Reynolda Church in North Carolina. If you're not able to stay with us throughout the entire program, I want to make sure you know how to get our special resource right now. It can be yours for your donation this month to Alan Wright Ministries. As you listen to today's message, go deeper as we send you today's special offer. Contact us at PastorAlan.org or call 877-544-4860.

877-544-4860. More on that later in the program. But now, let's get started with today's teaching. Here is Alan Wright. Are you ready for some good news?

Yes, sir. As a Christian, you're not just forgiven, you're clean. I want to talk to you about how the blood of Jesus cleanses the conscience so that you could become totally free in the presence of the Lord. How the blood of Jesus cleanses the conscience. We're going to read two scriptures in Hebrews which, if you're newer to your Bible, can at first seem like it's a complex book.

In fact, today's message is sort of thick in its richness, but in every place of your walk with Christ, you're going to be able to connect in with this. Hebrews chapter 9 and then a passage also in Hebrews 10. Hebrews chapter 9 verse 11. When Christ appeared as a high priest of the good things that have come, then through the greater and more perfect tent, speaking there of the tent of meeting or the tabernacle, which we're going to look at a little bit later on.

Not made with hands, that is, not of this creation. He entered once for all into the holy places. Now, he's speaking here figuratively. He's not talking about Jesus literally going into the tabernacle. He's talking about in the heavenlies, figuratively. So, what we'll see today is the tent of meeting or the tabernacle that was a physical structure in ancient Israel was actually a symbol foreshadowing this spiritual reality that Jesus accomplished for us. So, Jesus has figuratively entered verse 12. Once for all the holy places, not by means of the blood of goats and calves, not by the sacrifices like the ancient Israelites would bring into the outer courtyard of the tent of meeting. There upon the brazen altar, not like that. But by means of his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption. Not something that you have to keep repeating, but eternal. So, the whole scope of what Jesus did is like what was happening in the old, but it is categorically new and different. It's eternal.

It's perfect. Verse 13, for if the blood of goats and bulls and the sprinkling of defiled persons with the ashes of a heifer sanctify for the purification of the flesh, he's talking about if the Old Testament Levitical laws were in a person who had been called ceremonially unclean for a variety of reasons, could be sprinkled with the ashes of a heifer that's been sacrificed and go through a ritual and at least for that time being would make them worthy of coming into the temple, how much more, verse 14, will the blood of Jesus, who through the eternal spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God. So, the blood of Jesus does something, the writer of Hebrews says, cleanses the conscience, purifies us from dead works. Works that have no life in them. They bring no life.

And when you try to do them, they're actually deadening to the soul. Now look over in chapter 10 at verse 19. Hebrews 10, verse 19. Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened us for us through the curtain, so there was a thick veil in the tabernacle and that veil was rent asunder when Jesus was crucified. And now we come in not by bringing animals to sacrifice dead things, we don't come by our dead works, we come by new and living way because Jesus is alive.

That's what he's saying here. By the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is the veil, which is his flesh. So again, symbolic.

We'll see this a little bit later on. The veil that was in the tabernacle was symbolic pointing to the actual body of Jesus, which was torn asunder on the cross, as a symbol of the fact that the veil would be torn open for all who are in Christ. And since, verse 21, we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart and full assurance of faith. Let us draw near. That's what this is all about today.

This is what he's talking about. Your confidence to draw near to God. That's what we want to come to. With our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. What's the best shower you ever had? You know, I mean like the time you were the dirtiest and you just couldn't wait to get a bath, couldn't wait to get a shower. I mean, can you think of a time where you just, I don't know, maybe you're just like working in the yard and you're just covered with stuff and you just can't wait and you just get that shower, it just feels so good.

For me, I think it will always be this. Some years ago, my daughter and I had a chance to go to visit our missionaries, Jeff and Sissy Dejournis on an island off of the mainland of Papua New Guinea, on the other side of the world. It's very near the equator and we got to see a viable dedication. They didn't have any electricity there. They didn't have any running water there. They have no showers on the island. They have no way to bathe except the local Papua New Guineans, there was a little trickle of water that came out of kind of a rock down towards the beach and it formed about a two foot by ten inch deep pool and they would come down there with a little bucket and they'd kind of like this. And if we went over there, we didn't know how to do it. We'd muddy it up and so we didn't even, you know, so there was no shower or anything. And it's basically 95 degrees and 95 percent humidity every single day. Every day is the same.

They're just about on the equator. 95 degrees, 95 percent humidity. And let me tell you what you do in that. You sweat all the time. You sweat while you sleep. And add to it that my daughter and I were irrationally afraid of being bitten by a malaria mosquito and so we kept ourselves slathered in the mosquito repellent. So the only thing worse than sweating in 95 percent humidity and 95 degrees is to do so with mosquito slather all over you while you're doing it and just lie in this stuff for three days.

The only thing I do is go get out in the ocean to try to get a little cool off but then you just come out more salty than you were before and after we did this for three days on this little island we shuttled our little flight back over to the mainland of the highlands of Ucarumpa where they had mission houses and we could take a shower and I got in that shower and I was like, this is the best shower I've ever had. I want to talk to you about the best bath you could ever have and we're talking about something in the Spirit. We're talking about the cleansing of the conscience. It's a chance that you've never heard a sermon on the conscience. We talk about the heart, we talk about spirit, soul and body but conscience is something that's mentioned 22 times in the New Testament and I don't know if I ever heard a sermon on the conscience before. I want to talk to you today about what the conscience is, why it's so important that the conscience is cleansed and how the blood of Jesus cleanses the conscience. That's what we're going to talk about. So to be washed, to be made clean, to have the fulfillment of what David prayed in Psalm 51, created me a clean heart, all of this is related to this concept in Hebrews that we see here in chapters 9 and 10 that your conscience would be cleansed so that you could come into the presence of God with full assurance and confidence rather than a shadow of concern, doubt, worry or fear that you don't belong there.

And that's what we're talking about. So what is the conscience? Well, the conscience is that faculty that you have that, well, I think we all know this, it is alerting you to what's right and wrong, or at least it's supposed to.

You'll see a man who wrote to the Internal Revenue Service and he sent in a check for $1,000 and he said, to whom it concerns. He said, some years ago I cheated on my taxes and my conscience has been bothering me ever since, so I've enclosed a check for $1,000. And then he said, P.S., if my conscience continues to bother me, I'll send in the rest. A conscience is that thing that gives you a little voice that says you ought to be somewhere else right now. When I had my preaching on Friday afternoon, which I do for video capture, as I was leaving the house to get over to church and preach and I've just been immersed in this word, I stepped in to change my clothes in the bedroom and heard a kind of fluttering sound in the bedroom and I thought, what was that?

Is there a bug or something in here? And then, much to my chagrin, I discovered there was a bird in the bedroom and I proceeded for the next 30 minutes, making me late to my preaching assignment, to try to get the bird out of the bedroom, you know, with the broom and the sheet and everything and the more I tried to get him out, the crazier he got until finally I had to just go preach. My wife wasn't around and I had to just close him up in the bedroom, knowing that he is in there while I'm gone. After preaching, I was scheduled to go and have some fun and just have some coffee with a friend and I thought, you know, the bird is in the bedroom. How can I go drink coffee with a friend with a bird doing who knows what in the bedroom?

So I gave up the coffee and the friend and I went home to deal with the bird, right? So you have a conscience that says, you got no business sitting around drinking Starbucks when you got a bird flapping around and worse, your wife's gonna be getting home soon and if you leave her there alone with the bird, well, we're gonna have some discussions about that. So you see, this is kind of how the conscience works. In the Old Testament, the word conscience is not mentioned.

The closest thing is probably David speaking about the heart. I don't think the conscience is the same thing as what the Bible means by the heart, but it's the closest thing in the Old Testament, like when David's heart troubled him in 1 Samuel 24 or he said, created me a clean heart in Psalm 51. The word in the New Testament for conscience, syneidasis, is a word that has a prefix syne or you might see it in English like S-Y-N and it means with and the root of the word means to know or knowledge, so it is knowledge with and interestingly, in English, the etymology of this from the Latin is the same, conscience. C-O-N means with, that's a prefix. When you ever see it, it means with and if you ever see S-C-I-E, that root means knowledge.

That's what conscience is. It means joint knowledge. It means knowing with. It began to emerge during the time of Socrates. They would talk about conscience, but it started out, according to the ancient literature, just like self-awareness, but soon the word began to be known like, so it meant initially like knowing within myself, being aware of myself, but soon it began to be known as knowing right and wrong and a faculty and so this is the word that comes in that Paul is using and that we see here in the writer of Hebrews, to know with.

That's Alan Wright and we'll have more teaching in a moment from today's important series. Imagine for 99 days in a row, someone tells you, I love you, I'll never forsake you. Wouldn't you feel cherished? But what would happen if on the hundredth day that same person said, I'm not sure you're good enough for me. If you don't measure up, I don't think I'll love you anymore.

Wouldn't that one day contaminate the meaning of the other 99 days? Wouldn't one percent of conditional love poison the other 99 percent? Well, just one percent of law is enough to spoil grace. The tiniest bit of law can introduce an unlimited capacity for fear. What if I don't measure up?

When might I be rejected? When the Judaizers infiltrated the Galatian church, the apostle Paul was outraged and wrote a letter that describes the essence of the gospel of grace and why it must not be mixed with any form of law. Alan Wright's 12 message audio series trumpets the power of the gospel in order to set you free and empower you with pure grace. It's called Galatians, and that's the gospel.

Discover the purity and power of the grace of God. When you make your gift to Alan Wright Ministries today, we'll send you Pastor Alan's messages in an attractive CD album or through digital download as our way of saying thanks for your partnership. Call us at 877-544-4860.

That's 877-544-4860. Or come to our website, PastorAlan.org. Today's teaching now continues.

Here once again is Alan Wright. To know with implies that the conscience is not functioning alone, so to speak, but it is a joint knowledge with something else. And what I would suggest to you is that your conscience is a God-given faculty.

It is something that is different than who you are as a spirit, living spirit, and it's not the same as your soul or your mind. But your conscience is in and of itself a gift because working with God's revelation of truth, the highest truth, when your conscience is working with that, then your conscience is serving you apart from just the promptings of the Holy Spirit just for you to inwardly know what is right, what is wrong, where to be, where not to be. But the problem with the conscience is that the conscience is not something that is utterly reliable because it is joint knowledge and if what's joined to the conscience is something that is just the natural mind that is not necessarily walking in spirit-revealed truth of God's word, then it's something that could be unreliable to you. Interestingly enough, both Christians and non-Christians have a conscience. Paul talks about this in Romans chapter two. We won't go there, but what he says is that the Gentiles, the non-Jews, had a conscience and at times just because of their conscience they were conforming more to God's standards than even the people of Israel were who had been given God's law. That's what he talks about in Romans chapter two. So this idea of a mystical yet real faculty that is some part of the human makeup in which there is joint knowledge that is either agreeing with spirit-revealed truth, the word of God, or agreeing with natural thoughts that may not at all really be the revealed truth of God, the conscience is therefore relying on joint knowledge with.

Therefore, it can be that it's a wonderful gift but not always reliable. I was reading a book this week by J.D. Crowley and Andrew Naselli who've written on the idea of conscience and Crowley said that the reason that he's decided to write this book was because of his hesitancy to step over someone's legs when they propped him up on the coffee table. He had been living in Cambodia and he came back home to the United States and was at a family gathering after years of being in Cambodia and he got up to get some chips and salsa and somebody in the family was sitting on the couch had their legs propped up on the coffee table and he stood up and assumed that they would move their legs but they didn't and his conscience wouldn't allow him to step over the person's legs because in Southeast Asia you would never do such a thing.

It would be utterly disrespectful in the culture in which he'd been living for the last years and now he's in America, you know, we're Americans. Feet up, go get your own chips, step over my legs, I don't care. So it wasn't wrong for him to step over his brother or cousins or whoever's legs it was but his conscience was telling him, don't you do that.

And he thought, wait a minute, that's not necessarily reliable in this situation. My conscience has been conditioned. It always has to do with the context. So for example, I was preaching last week in Salt Lake City in the Presbyterian church where I preached was a little bit more formal than what we're accustomed to. They had a little young guy in a white robe who came in as an acolyte before the service and lit the candles. They had more written prayers of confession. They had more written liturgical elements and so I knew it was a little bit more formal and I didn't know fully the culture of the church. Someone had provided for me when I preached a cup of water and it was one of those red plastic cups and after I preached I was standing up front and I was talking to people after the service and I drank some of the water and I set it down on the communion table and when I set it on the communion table all of a sudden a memory came back to me from 20 years ago or 25 years ago that a friend of mine who was a very casual and informal pastor was speaking at an Episcopal church and he was speaking casually and standing in front of the communion table and in the Episcopal church the sacrament is held very, very highly and he leaned back against the communion table and next thing you know without thinking he hoisted himself up and sat on the edge of the communion table and the whole place did what you did. That story was 25 years ago and when I set the red plastic cup on the communion table it came back to me and I picked up the red plastic communion cup and I put the plastic cup of water and I put it somewhere else because I thought in this culture probably they're holding this table and a more high view and I don't want to offend somebody. That was my conscience that was at work in that particular context.

Do you see how complicated it is? In 1 Corinthians chapter eight and in 1 Corinthians chapter 10 Paul talks about matters of conscience and interestingly he says you can have a weak conscience which I think by this he means an undeveloped or immature conscience. So the conscience is something that's not always reliable and some people's conscience is gonna be more clear and more mature than others and yet in the sense in which what he teaches here is you've got to go with the conscience that you have because what he says in 1 Corinthians chapter eight is he's talking about this issue that they had in the early church in which Paul teaches that we are free in Jesus Christ. It doesn't matter the rituals that you do.

It doesn't matter the things that you eat and drink. That's not what makes you closer to God or not closer to God but there was food that would be offered to pagan idols and then would be eaten and Paul is talking about is it okay to eat this food and what he says in 1 Corinthians chapter eight verse seven he says not all possess this knowledge but some through former associates with idols eat food that's really offered to an idol and their conscience being weak is defiled. So if you think that it's wrong to eat food that's been offered to an idol even though it's not wrong to eat food that's been offered to an idol because Paul's saying listen we are free we are set free by the blood of the Lord Jesus you're not gonna be defiled by something that you eat. But if you think that you are being defiled and then you violate that you violated your conscience or if the person that you're with thinks that it is wrong and you know that they think that it is wrong and you still do it you're now violating conscience because it's going to offend them even though it's not wrong. Do you understand what I'm saying? That there are times in which there is something that is not wrong and yet because somebody thinks that it is wrong you have to pay attention to that. And he's even saying that you have to pay attention to your own conscience even though you know your own conscience is not reliable because until your conscience matures and until you become more in line with the knowledge of the gospel and until you see it at that level then you still have to heed your conscience which is an odd thing to say because on the other hand the conscience is not always reliable. Alan Wright and the kids these days they say mind blown okay I'm really getting this. It's part of our teaching it's called Wash Clean and the big series Belonging to God. Alan is back in a moment with additional insight on this for your life and a final word. Stick with us. Just one percent of law is enough to spoil grace. The tiniest bit of law can introduce an unlimited capacity for fear. What if I don't measure up?

When might I be rejected? When the Judaizers infiltrated the Galatian church the Apostle Paul was outraged and wrote a letter that describes the essence of the gospel of grace and why it must not be mixed with any form of law. Alan Wright's 12 message audio series trumpets the power of the gospel in order to set you free and empower you with pure grace. It's called Galatians and that's the gospel.

Discover the purity and power of the grace of God. When you make your gift to Alan Wright Ministries today we'll send you Pastor Alan's messages in an attractive CD album or through digital download as our way of saying thanks for your partnership. Call us at 877-544-4860.

That's 877-544-4860. Or come to our website PastorAlan.org. Alan, I do think it becomes a situation and you have another message for another day that's titled Why Wouldn't Everybody Want to be Filled with the Holy Spirit? And I often think of that. You know, fill in the blank there. Why wouldn't everybody want to be washed clean and yet that transformation is happening.

Yeah. Well, I think that it's one thing to say, okay, I've been made holy. It's another to begin to have a sense that I am clean and that what God's done is so thorough that I can have a clear or a clean conscience. And, you know, and I give this along with other illustrations but we'll be talking about in this message, you know, anybody can think of the time if you go to sporting events like I do or maybe you didn't have a good seat and then you move down to a better seat because somebody didn't show up for their seat. But the whole game, you know, you can be sitting there going at any moment.

Somebody could tap me on the shoulder and say this is my seat and you'll feel really bad. Right. Well, that's where you don't have a totally clean conscience, right? It's not totally clear.

It's like, you know, the other shoe could drop, something could be going on. Well, God wants every believer to not only know that they're forgiven, but for them to have an absolutely clear conscience. And that's what we're talking about today, how much different and freer life is with a conscience that's been washed clean. Today's good news message is a listener supported production of Alan Wright Ministries.