The Cleansing Power of the Holy Spirit #1

External water applied to the body cannot remove the sin of your soul.

It cannot remove the deadness of heart. Physical water does not cleanse spiritual sin. We're glad you've joined us for 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. In his last lesson, Don showed us why God saved us because of his great love, kindness, and mercy. Today he begins a message titled, The Cleansing Power of the Holy Spirit. We'll discover how God saves us.

And Don, one thing we must realize is that we can add nothing to the process. Well Bill, thank you for framing it in that way, and my friend Bill is exactly right. Salvation is not a reward to you for your own righteousness, but rather salvation is a gift from God that he gives to the ungodly. Christ saves sinners, not those who are self-righteous, and through the proclamation of the word applies it to our hearts. It's going to be a wonderful time as we see the work of the Spirit of God in the hearts of those that he leads to Christ. Thanks Don, and friend have your Bible open to Titus 3 verses 5 through 6 as we join our teacher now in The Truth-Pulpit.

The motto of our church is teaching God's people God's word. And we have in front of us this morning a wonderful text that helps us understand how it is that we came to be the people of God. How it is that a person becomes a Christian. How it is that the work of Christ is applied to the heart of a sinner and converts him into someone new. Now the question for today as we continue on in the text is this. How is it that he accomplishes that salvation in individual lives?

Stated differently, I'd like you to think about the question this way. How is it that God bridges the historical gap between the crucifixion of Christ 2,000 years ago, his death and resurrection. How is that gap bridged over a period of two millennia to the point where a sinner today comes to saving faith in Christ? How does God bridge that gap? How does he accomplish salvation in individual lives?

Here's your answer in one sentence. He does it by a powerful work of the Holy Spirit. He does it by a powerful work of the Holy Spirit and that's what we're going to see in our text this morning. Titus chapter 3. We're going to begin at verse 3, although our text will primarily be verses 5 and 6. I want to read the text to set it in your mind. As we look to this powerful work of the Holy Spirit that brings salvation to individual sinners. Paul, speaking to believers, 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, hating one another.

Let's stop there for just a second. If someone was going to write a biography of my life or yours, they would need to write it from that perspective. This was the condition of each one of us before we became Christians. We were foolish, disobedient, enslaved to lusts, filled with malice and envy. That is the testimony of the Word of God on our lives. So you see that as we contemplate what it really means to be a Christian, it's a very humbling thing. We're not Christians because we were better. We were not Christians because we pursued it.

The testimony of Scripture is that we were lost in a dark life which manifested itself in different ways, but at root we were foolish, deceived, disobedient, and dead to the things of God. Beloved, there is no way that a man in that condition could rouse himself up and go look for Christ. There's no way.

That is simply an utter impossibility. If a dead man is going to live, someone has to act upon him from outside. There has to be something from outside the man to resurrect a spiritual corpse, and that's what we're seeing here going on as we go into verses 4 through 7.

Notice the contrast. Paul says, But, in contrast to that foolish, hateful life of verse 3, but when the kindness of God our Savior and His love for mankind appeared, He saved us. Basic grammar. The subject of that sentence is God. The verb is saved. The direct object, the one that received the action of the verb is us. God acted on us. We did not act on God to prompt Him to save us. God, motivated by His mercy, motivated by His goodness, acted on us to save us.

This is just clear and simple grammar. Verse 5. He saved us, not on the basis of deeds which we have done in righteousness. It wasn't anything good that we had done that motivated Him to save us. Quite to the contrary, it was according to His mercy.

That's where we ended last time. Now, in a text that I'm just delighted to bring before you here this morning, now we see how it was that He saved us. Last week we saw the motivation. It was His mercy. Now we're going to see the means by which He did it. What was the means by which God took us from death into life? That's what we're seeing here in verse 5. But according to His mercy, by, 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.

Look at verse 5 with me again. By the washing of regeneration and renewing by the Holy Spirit, whom He poured out upon us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior. This passage tells us how it is that we were delivered from the bondage of our selfish hearts. It tells us how we were delivered out of sin.

And I want to introduce a problem here with the way that probably the majority of commentators take this text. When they see the word washing of regeneration and renewing by the Holy Spirit, you can read multiple commentaries that say that that's referring to the ceremony of baptism, that it was in baptism that we were saved. And they take the washing and thinking about the literal water of baptism, and they say, there you have it, that's the ceremony of baptism.

What should we say to that? How should we think rightly about this term washing that is used in the text? Here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to go on a big, long circle.

You're going to think I've lost my way. We're going to start at that word washing and kind of circle a long way around and then come back to it to see what it really means. But I want you to start with some context from Scripture that's going to make this passage explode on your understanding and give you a great new appreciation for the work of God in your life. What should we say to the idea that baptism is the reference here? Let's set some context from Scripture. And in this message, I'm going to give you four points to follow along to just kind of give you some places to hang your notes and to build your understanding. This passage is talking about the Holy Spirit.

That couldn't be any clearer. Verse 5, it's the Holy Spirit who does the washing. He was poured out upon us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior. And we're going to see four aspects, four aspects of the work of the Spirit in the life of a believer when he saved him. And the first point is this, coming from a broader scriptural context. Point number one, this is so really exciting to me.

I hope it will be to you. Point number one, the Spirit cleanses like water. The Holy Spirit cleanses like water. And when you look at the broader context of Scripture, you see this very plainly. Turn back to the book of Ezekiel, chapter 36. We'll just kind of let Scripture set the context for us. Ezekiel, chapter 36, looking at verse 25 to begin with. As God speaks to the nation of Israel and promises them a coming future redemption, he says in verse 25, Then I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean.

I will cleanse you from all your filthiness and from all your idols. Let's just stop there for just a second. God in this passage is not speaking about giving a nation a literal bath, is he?

That would be ridiculous. That's not the context. That's not what you do with a nation. He's obviously using water as a metaphor for something else. God isn't promising them a literal bath because they're physically dirty. He is promising them cleansing from sin. He is promising them cleansing from their false religion, from their false idols. He says, I'm going to do a reviving work on you that will deliver you from false religion and will deliver you from the defilement of sin.

And he says it's going to be like sprinkling water on you. It's going to be like cleansing you. You probably didn't realize it, but in your normal practice of personal hygiene this morning, you prepared yourself for this message. I would venture to say that every one of you in one manner or another used water as part of your preparation for coming here today. You took a shower.

You brushed your teeth, most of you. And water had a cleansing effect upon your outward physical body. We use water like that all the time.

We use it without even thinking about it. Water has a cleansing impact on us. Well, God is taking that well-known property of water and applying it as a symbol to what he does to the human heart inside. From the filth and the dirt of Titus 3, verse 3, of the hatred and foolishness and deception, the idea of washing is that he's going to cleanse us from all of that. Now, along with that cleansing, he promises to put his Holy Spirit in them.

Look at verse 26 of Ezekiel 36. He says, moreover, in addition to this spiritual cleansing I'm going to give to you, I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.

I will put my spirit within you and cause you to walk in my statutes and you will be careful to observe my ordinances. Now, notice, again, you can see that there's a symbolism, an evident symbolism in that passage when he talks about a heart of stone. Nobody has a literal rock inside their chest. He's talking about a heart, an attitude toward God that is cold, hard, and non-responsive. He says your heart is just like stone.

It's dead, it's cold, it's inanimate, it won't move. And he says, speaking to the nation of Israel, there's a day coming when I'm going to take out that heart of stone, your unresponsive condition to the love and goodness that I've shown to you. I'm going to take that out and replace it with a heart of flesh, something that is warm and responsive and living. And so he's saying to Israel, he says, there's two things that I'm going to do for you in the coming, the coming restoration, I'm going to cleanse you from sin and I am going to put my spirit within you. It'll be two aspects of one great act of redemption. Spiritual cleansing and the impartation of the Holy Spirit.

Now, with that in mind, follow along with me. Go to the book of John chapter 3, the Gospel of John in the New Testament. John chapter 3. What I want you to see is that this imagery of water and the Spirit is used repeatedly in Scripture to speak to the single act of redemption, two aspects of the one great work of salvation. John chapter 3, verse 3.

You know the story. Nicodemus came to him by night and in verse 2 he said, Rabbi, we know that you've come from God as a teacher, for no one can do these signs that you do unless God is with him. And Jesus immediately confronts him with Nicodemus' own spiritual deadness. He answered and said to him, truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.

Nicodemus, while you're trying to flatter me with this praise about the kind of teacher I am, as if I needed affirmation from you, let's get right to the heart of the matter. You need to be born again. You can't enter the kingdom of God when you're spiritually dead. You need to be spiritually born before you can even begin to talk about the kingdom of God. Nicodemus said to him, verse 4, how can a man be born when he's old? Lord, I've been like this all my life. I don't know what you're talking about. He cannot enter a second time into his mother's womb and be born, can he?

How can I start over? I'm locked into this. You can see the desperation with which he speaks. And give Nicodemus some credit. He's picking up on a metaphor. He's not talking about literally re-entering his mother's womb.

He's an intelligent man. He wouldn't speak that way, as if that was what Jesus was talking about. He's simply taking the metaphor and building on it. How can I be born again?

This is impossible. And Jesus answered in verse 5, Truly, truly, I say to you, watch this now, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. He's using the exact same metaphor that Ezekiel did. He says, Nicodemus, you need to be cleansed from sin. You need to be washed, like God spoke to the nation of Israel in Ezekiel. You need to be washed from sin. And you need to be born of the Spirit.

You need your prior defilement removed. And you need a new life, a new Spirit given to you if you're going to enter the kingdom of heaven. And this is something, Nicodemus, that you cannot do on your own.

You're in a desperate situation. Your only hope is by an act of God outside of you, upon you. You must be born of water and of the Spirit. You must be cleansed from sin and receive the Spirit of God. One more as we're setting the context for Titus 3.

Remember I told you we're going on a long circle and we're going to come back to the main point. Look at 1 Corinthians chapter 6 now. 1 Corinthians chapter 6, beginning in verse 9. In a different way, Paul is speaking in the same manner as he does in Titus 3, looking back at the life of the church at Corinth, looking back at their individual lives before conversion, and then speaking to what the result is after conversion. And he says in verse 9, in words that should shake our modern society to the core, Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God?

Do not be deceived. Neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. That sounds like a blueprint for modern-day advertising, doesn't it? The blueprint for modern-day advertising is the very thing that excludes people from the kingdom of God.

That's an aside point. What I really want you to see is in verse 11. Such were some of you. Past tense. This is what you used to be like. But what happened? How is it that you went from that realm of darkness in verses 9 and 10 to the realm of the kingdom of God? How is it that you sit here now as a member of the kingdom of God, as a born-again Christian?

How did that happen? Is the question. Such were some of you, but you were washed. But you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.

And here it is. The spirit of our God. You were washed from that prior defilement. You were born, you were set apart by the spirit of God to enter into the kingdom of God. There was a cleansing from sin, and there was a being born again. There was a reception of the spirit of God in your life. They were washed from sin and set apart in the spirit of God.

Here's what I want you to see from that. Remember the whole first point here was the spirit cleanses like water. And we see over and over again in the Scriptures this description of the forgiveness of sin, the cleansing of sin as being something like a washing.

A removal of dirt and filth so that what is left behind is something clean and pure. And so water symbolizes an internal cleansing in the realm of salvation. And God provides the spirit of God to secure conversion.

A cleansing of prior defilement. The spirit of God securing conversion. Now, none of those passages that we just looked at.

Ezekiel 36, John 3, and 1 Corinthians 6. Not a one of them have a drop of water baptism in them. It has nothing to do with that. It's talking about a spiritual cleansing.

And listen. External water applied to the body cannot remove the sin of your soul. It cannot remove the deadness of heart. Water on the body can't impart life to the inner heart of man.

Physical water does not cleanse spiritual sin. The context of all those passages is a spiritual cleansing of sinful people and the work of the Holy Spirit. Now, with that in mind, beloved, go back to Titus chapter 3. Titus chapter 3. And what you see here in Titus 3 is simply another variation, an application, an extension of what Scripture has been teaching throughout the progress of Revelation. From the Old Testament to the ministry of Jesus to the work of God at the church of Corinth, you see the same thing being described when Paul talks here in verse 5.

And it brings us to our second point. We're talking about the cleansing power of the Holy Spirit here today. We said, first of all, that the Spirit cleanses like water. Now, secondly, the Spirit cleanses with power. The Spirit cleanses with power. How is it, how is it, for those of you that have truly been born again, how is it, why is it that your life changed?

Why did your life go from one of walking in darkness to one of walking in light? As I was preparing this, I couldn't help but remember my own conversion and what happened in the immediate aftermath of my conversion. I used to be a man with such a foul, profane mouth. It makes me shudder to remember it, how easily the most profane blasphemies came off of my lips and how utterly restrained I was to speak the two simple words, Jesus Christ. I couldn't say his name unless I was cursing, unless I was somehow blaspheming. My mouth was so foul and I was converted.

And you know what? All of that went away. The profanity, the profane nature of my mouth changed overnight. All of a sudden, my lips were released to speak the name of Christ and to praise Him and to honor Him.

How did that happen? How is it that that occurs in the life of someone? How is it that church history shows people who were drunkards becoming sober, productive members of the church? How is it that homosexuals are converted and changed into righteous people? How is it that unbelieving people who hated the name of Christ are found shortly later praising and honoring His name?

How is it that people who had no regard for the Word of God, who would toss it aside gladly, suddenly find in the Word of God the very Word of life and it captivates their heart and they can't let go of it, they can't read it enough? How does that happen? Listen, it's not because somebody made a decision to up and change. It can't happen that way. It doesn't happen that way.

In Jeremiah chapter 13 verse 23, it says that the Ethiopian cannot change his skin. The leopard cannot change his spots. He says you who were accustomed to doing evil could not convert your own nature.

If you're blind in deception, you can't suddenly open your eyes and see with clarity. Something has to happen outside of you. Something great and magnificent and powerful has to come to pass in your life.

Otherwise, you just go on like you were. We have no built-in spiritual momentum that overcomes the inertia of sin. A real genuine work of the Holy Spirit takes place in the life of a Christian. God had to save you if you were going to be saved because you couldn't save yourself. And by His Spirit, that is what He did. God saved us through an act of the Spirit that cleansed us from within and imparted new life.

That is a blessed gift. The Holy Spirit cleanses us like water and then bestows the power we need to live changed lives. Pastor Don Green will show us two more ways by which the Spirit works to save us on our next program as he concludes the message The Cleansing Power of the Holy Spirit.

So plan now to join us. We invite you to visit our website, thetruthpulpit.com. There you can download podcasts or find out how to receive CD copies of Don's radio messages for your personal study library. And if you want to go even more in depth, you'll also find the link Follow Don's Pulpit. That'll take you to Don's full-length weekly sermons not subject to the time editing we need for radio broadcasts. And if you're in the Cincinnati area, there's service times for Truth Community Church also on our website. We do hope you'll plan a visit because we'd love to welcome you. Thanks for joining us today. We'll see you next time on The Truth Pulpit with Don Green.