True and False Purity Contrasted #1

We're going to look at a contrast today between true and false purity, and we're going to see, first of all, the true purity of the sheep, and then we're going to contrast that with the false purity of the wolves.

What is purity, and how can you tell the difference between the true kind and the false kind? For the answer, stay tuned to The Truth Pulpit with Don Green, founding pastor of Truth Community Church in Cincinnati, Ohio. Hello, I'm Bill Wright, and today Don continues our series in the book of Titus, titled God's Glorious Plan of Grace. He begins a message called True and False Purity Contrasted.

And Don, what are the main points you'll be hitting over the next couple of broadcasts? Well, you know, my friend, one of the most liberating things about Christianity is to realize that you are saved by the righteousness and shed blood of Christ, not by the deeds of your own hands. And what that means is that you don't need to do a lot of rituals in order to improve your standing before God. You stand complete in Christ, and that means that you are free to enjoy what God gives you with a clear conscience and a grateful heart. Study together with us today as we go into God's Word on The Truth Pulpit.

Thanks, Don. And friend, have your Bible open to Titus 1, verses 15 through 16, as we join our teacher now in The Truth Pulpit. We are looking to point ourselves to the perfection of Christ in all that He's done for us here today. So first of all, this first point, if you're taking note, the true purity of the sheep. Look at verse 15 with me. Paul presupposes so much in this initial line that he sets forth in verse 15.

There is so much packed into this. He says, to the purer, all things are pure. What does he mean by that?

What's he saying? Well, when he talks about the purer, he's talking about to the true Christian, and he's using purer in a couple of different ways here. To the purer, those who have been purified by the work of Christ on their behalf. Those who have truly been born again, he says all things are pure, and we're going to see what that means. But he's talking about those who have been purified by faith in Christ from their sins. He says they have a freedom in life because their righteousness has been secured by the Lord Jesus Christ. Paul is saying here, as we're going to see as we look at this passage and some other lectures, Paul is saying that you as a Christian are not burdened by the necessity of meeting external regulations about food and ceremonial conduct because Christ has already fulfilled the law of God on your behalf. When Christ lived on earth, he fulfilled the law of God perfectly.

He sustained a perfect, sinless life, and he met every demand of the law on behalf of those who would believe in him. Now, having put your faith in Christ, God applies that perfect righteousness of Christ as a free gift to your account. And it means that in the presence of God on the legal books of God, you have a perfectly righteous position before him that cannot be improved upon. There is nothing that you can do to make the righteousness of Christ somehow better. And what that means is that we rest in Christ and we are free from false regulations about what we need to do or things that we need to go through in order to somehow make ourselves more acceptable to God.

But to get to that point, you have to understand how we got there. And Paul lays this out for us elsewhere in the book of Titus. Let's go back to your life before you became a Christian and start there.

And remember what you came from and who you were. The Bible makes it very clear that before you were a Christian, you were defiled. You were utterly unacceptable to God because you were dead in your trespasses and sins.

There was nothing that you could do to improve your position. There were no religious rituals that you could do. The idea that you could go to church and kneel here and say this prayer and somehow make yourself acceptable to God is utterly, totally false. And Paul makes that very obvious by what he says about the nature of your life before Christ. Look at Titus chapter 3 verse 3. You need to see this and to recognize that Paul had this in his mind when he was talking about the purity that we enjoy as believers in Christ.

Here's a description. In the Scriptures, you can see a mirror of what you were like before you came to saving faith in Christ. And for those of you who are not Christians that are here today, perhaps some of you young people in particular, what you need to realize is that this verse that I'm about to read is giving a description of the inside of your heart. It is describing what you are like now if you are not a Christian.

And the picture is not a pretty one. Look at Titus chapter 3 verse 3. He's writing to true Christians here and he's reminding them of what they were like before they became a Christian. And he says in verse 3, we also once were foolish ourselves, disobedient, deceived, enslaved to various lusts and pleasures, spending our life in malice and envy, hateful and hating one another. Beloved, and this is true of you and it's true of me, before Christ intervened and saved us, your spiritual life was one of total defilement.

No matter how externally religious you may have been, no matter whether you were a good girl growing up and people would have looked at you and said, oh what a good girl you were. Inside is this true scriptural description of what we were like. Disobedient and rebellious toward the law of God. Untrusting in Christ.

In love with ourselves. Enslaved to lusts and various pleasures. Hateful and hating toward anyone who would cross your path. And those that were sympathetic to you were simply tools and instruments of your own self-fulfillment. You used people and those that didn't agree with you, you detested. You were enslaved by desires that you gladly pursued. This is a description of everyone who is outside of Christ.

And what you need to see from that brief description is this. You were totally the slave of sin. You were enslaved to that condition.

And there was nothing that you could do to get out of it. There were spiritual chains on your soul that prevented you from being any different than what you were. And in that condition you were under the wrath and judgment of God. And if God had left you to die in that condition, the outcome of that would have been eternal hell and judgment. And for those of you that are here that don't know Christ, that's your present condition. And the future is one of a threat from God to you.

This is very profoundly serious. You were a slave. You were unable to free yourself. You and I could not cleanse ourselves from sin. We couldn't do anything to change our condition. The leopard can't change its spots.

The Ethiopian cannot change its skin. The sinner cannot convert his own soul. That's where we were. We could not do anything to improve our lot with God. We were lost, we were dead, and we were helpless. And because of that, beloved, what must be clear in your mind, what must be absolutely clear in your mind is that there was no merit in your life that commended you to a holy God in that condition. You not only didn't have the power to change yourself, there was nothing about you that a holy God would have found acceptable and something for him to receive and to embrace in his holy presence. There was nothing about you that deserved eternal life in heaven.

Nothing. And what you see is that the biblical assessment, the biblical diagnosis of our souls is one that utterly excludes any pride in ourselves, any claim to our own self-righteousness. We just have to humble ourselves before the accurate testimony of God's word and say, I was totally lost. And if you're not in Christ today, that's a present tense statement to you.

You say to yourself, I am totally lost. God knows the wickedness of my own heart. I stand exposed before him and I can't do anything to change it.

And the weight of your guilt and shame should crush you in his presence. Now, stay with me here, Christians. That's what we were like before Christ. It's obvious that from that condition, we did nothing to save ourselves, right?

You can nod your head and say that. There was nothing that you did or ever could have done if you had a thousand lives to live in that condition. You couldn't have taken one holy, righteous step toward God. We were lost.

And what does that mean? How is it then that we're here today gathered as a group of believers in Jesus Christ, forgiven and restored? How can that be? Well, it is obvious that something from outside of ourselves happened to us. Someone did something on our behalf that we could not do for ourselves. It obviously had to be that way because we couldn't do anything on ourselves. We were dead and splattered on the street with no way to pick ourselves up.

What happened? Look at Titus chapter 2 verse 14. Actually, peak at the end of verse 13, Paul was speaking about our great God and Savior, Christ Jesus.

Christ Jesus, crown him with many crowns. Can it be that he did something on my behalf? Verse 14, he gave himself for us to redeem us from every lawless deed and to purify for himself a people for his own possession, zealous for good deeds. Look at that verse carefully with me and understand that you were on the receiving end of an act of grace and mercy by Jesus Christ. He gave himself for you. He redeemed you from your lawless life. He purified you for himself so that you would be changed, as our youth sang earlier, so that we would be made new. Beloved, you must understand, it must be anchored in your mind that you are on the receiving end of grace.

You did not contribute something that forced God to respond to you in response to some conjectured righteousness that you might have in your mind. That must be clear. Christ, speaking very simply, Christ helped us in our sinful state because we could not help ourselves. The magnitude of that mercy and grace that our judge became our Savior, that the one who could have slayed us was instead slain himself on your behalf. The magnitude of that is so glorious.

It's so majestic. It so transcends anything of this earth. Keep that in mind because it's very important for what Paul is saying. Christ bought us at the price of his own blood, at the price of his own perfect life. Christ bought us out of our spiritual slavery and made us free. You were a slave, and Christ came and broke the chain and brought you to himself. You were dead, and Christ came and breathed new life into you.

The spiritual realities of that are so lofty and noble and magnificent that we could spend the rest of our lives talking about the different implications of that and not even begin to exhaust them. The wonders of Christ on our behalf exceed the ability of the human tongue to give full voice to them. Our blessed Savior purified us. Our blessed Savior set us apart by an act on his own initiative so that we would live a life of good deeds for him. If you're a Christian, Christ looked on you by name and had mercy on you and saved you from the wretched, sinful soul that you were beforehand. True of you, true of me. We are leveled at the foot of the cross. Now watch this.

This is very, very, very important. Our Lord Jesus Christ did not save us through religious rituals. He did not prescribe a list of things for us to do and then watch with arms folded to see if we would do them and keep them and then decide to save us. You were saved totally apart from any kind of religious ritual, apart from ceremony, apart from any human ancestry that you might have had.

You were saved by the work and the person of Jesus Christ. Look at Titus chapter 3, verse 4. Watch how he saved us.

Look and learn and love. Look, learn, and love what you see in front of you here in chapter 3, verses 4 through 7. I can't wait until we get here for the full exposition of this as we go through the book of Titus. Look at verse 4. How did he redeem us? Paul had been talking about that in chapter 2. Look at this inspired, inerrant description of the work of Christ on behalf of your soul, on behalf of every soul that he ever saved. Verse 4, chapter 3. But when the kindness of God our Savior and his love for mankind appeared, he saved us.

Watch this. Not on the basis of deeds which we have done in righteousness. Not from anything that you did did he save you. He saved you not according to your works. Not according to anything that you did or said or prayed. He saved you apart from your effort. But, in the middle of verse 5, by contrast, not on the basis of deeds which we have done in righteousness, but according to his mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewing by the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out upon us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that being justified by his grace, we would be made heirs according to the hope of eternal life.

This is a trustworthy statement, and concerning these things I want you to speak confidently. None of your religion contributed to the salvation of your soul. You were purified by a work inside you that was beyond your power to procure, and it was a work done by the Holy Spirit who took the death and resurrection of Christ and applied it to your heart to purify you in a spiritual way from spiritual sin. No religious ritual could have ever done that. You could have counted beads for the next 10,000 years and it wouldn't have cleansed just one sin from your soul. You could have gone to church every day for 50 years and you would have been just as lost as you were when you started.

It would have been a waste of your time. You see, salvation is a matter of an inward transformation that only God can accomplish. We didn't achieve it through our human effort. We didn't achieve it through human ritual.

And that has great consequences for the way that we interact with life around us now. You see, external ritual, ceremonies and all of that stuff, before you were saved did not contribute a thing to your salvation. It didn't do anything to help you achieve the righteousness of God. That was a gift given to you by the Holy Spirit when he brought you to faith in Christ.

It was a gift! There wasn't anything you did or anything that you could have done. If God had withdrawn his spirit, if God had left you alone in that condition, you would have perished in your sin. And so, here we are. Here we are, purified, purified by a work of grace inside our hearts apart from anything we did on the outside.

Now watch this. That means that there is nothing that we can do now as Christians on the outside that contributes to our righteousness either. We can't increase our purity by anything that we do. We already have received a perfect righteousness from Christ. And as a result of that, there are no religious rituals or ceremonies that we engage in now that can make us any better positionally before Christ than what we already are. So, for example, biblical scripture makes a big issue of this.

For example, to a believer, all foods are clean. Look over at Mark chapter 7. And all of this that we're about to see in the moments to come, we're looking at Mark chapter 7 now. There are no external things that we can go through to improve our position in Christ. He's already given us everything in Christ. Every spiritual blessing, Ephesians 1 says, He has given to us in the heavenly places in Christ.

He hasn't withheld anything from us. And so, external ritual has nothing to do with the salvation of the human soul. Look, for example, at Mark chapter 7, beginning in verse 14.

We are free from the threat that somehow a failure to do external rituals will somehow contaminate our soul. Mark 7 verse 14, Jesus called the crowd to Him and began saying to them, Listen to Me, all of you, and understand. You're meant to know and understand this so that your life will reflect the glory of Christ as it should and that your conscience would be free from the false shackles that false teachers try to put upon it. Verse 15, He says, There is nothing outside the man which can defile him if it goes into him, but the things which proceed out of the man are what defile the man. Verse 16, If anyone has ears to hear, let him hear.

When he had left the crowd and entered the house, his disciples questioned him about the parable. And he said to them, Are you so lacking in understanding also? Do you not understand that whatever goes into the man from outside cannot defile him, because it does not go into his heart, into the spiritual seed of his personality? It doesn't go there, but it goes into his stomach, verse 19, and is eliminated.

Watch this, verse 19. Thus he declared all foods clean. What Scripture is teaching us there, once you have been purified by faith in Christ, there is nothing that you can eat that would somehow rob you of that purity. There is nothing that you could eat that could defile you. Now, I realize that people have watched what they eat for medical reasons, but it doesn't do anything to improve their spiritual righteousness. And staying away from certain foods doesn't make you more righteous than you already are in Christ, and eating food doesn't diminish that righteousness in any way.

So despite the animal rights activists, despite the nannies that try to tell us what we can and cannot eat, we are under no obligation to worry about any food regulations whatsoever. If you want to go to a good steakhouse and order a 20-ounce ribeye slathered in butter, go for it and enjoy it to the glory of God. It's not going to spiritually defile you.

There's nothing wrong with that. God has given us all things richly to enjoy. You see, there's a greater point at stake here.

There's a much greater point at stake here. This is about the purity. This is about the perfect righteousness that Christ has given us. It's about the way that He has purified our souls. Beloved, pay attention here. Christ has purified you as a Christian so perfectly that nothing external can diminish it. Christ has purified you so perfectly that nothing external that you do can improve it.

And therefore, don't worry about that kind of stuff because it can only tie up your conscience and bind you in a way that will distract you from loving the glory of Christ. We'll pause right there for today, but Pastor Don Green will have the conclusion of his message, True and False Purity Contrasted, next time here on The Truth Pulpit. We hope you'll join us then. But right now, Don's back here in studio with some closing words. Well, friend, if you have enjoyed this broadcast today, let me encourage you to do something that would be an encouragement to the partners who helped make it happen. Drop a note, if you would, to the radio station that you've heard this broadcast on. They would love to hear that they have ministered to you because they love to share God's Word with you. And also, it will help them know that they're reaching people with God's Word through the ministry of The Truth Pulpit. So drop them a note and give them thanks, and be sure to tell them that you heard The Truth Pulpit on this station.

Thanks, Don. And friend, if you'd like information on getting free CDs of the messages you hear on our broadcast, just visit us online. Our web address is thetruthpulpit.com. That's thetruthpulpit.com. Thanks for joining us today. We'll see you next time on The Truth Pulpit with Don Green.