Aim for Holiness

 

Read 2 Corinthians 7

If P, then Q.  Who remembers conditional statements from algebra or geometry? You can make truth tables and all sorts of cool stuff.

Back in the 90s, I took my first computer class. I was self-taught up to then, and there wasn’t a whole bunch to learn back then. Then I took a computer class at Drake University.

It taught me a lot. I loved the Word program. I graduated OSU in a degree with a lot of papers to write, and I wrote them on a manual Olivetti typewriter.

When I got to try a word processor a few years after I graduated, I thought I was in heaven. The thing was bigger than a refrigerator and all it did was word processing, but my language improved immensely as I didn’t have to start over after three mistakes. I just backspaced and retyped it.

Some years later, in this class at Drake, I was introduced to a relatively new software called Excel. It’s commonplace now, but it was cutting-edge back in the day. Nevertheless, I was underwhelmed. I wasn’t a numbers guy.

Then I discovered that Excel did conditional statements. If condition one is true or meets a specified criterion, you get condition two. Formulas use alpha designators instead of conditions one and two, but you get the idea.

You could imbed conditional statements inside of each other. That’s some fun stuff there. Or, it might just be me, but don’t we all like to get through the week and instead of going out on the town like we once did, we settle into our homes on Friday evenings and do conditional statements.

That’s how Paul started this part of this letter. Condition one is that we have these promises and that should produce condition two in us.  What?

We are promised life, abundant life, and eternal life in Christ Jesus. We are promised more, but these are three big ones.

Therefore, we should live holy lives. Holy means set apart for God. Our lives should be given entirely to God.

Our lives going forward from our professions of faith should not be tainted or tarnished by the ways of the world. It should be a no-brainer.

God gave you life—a full life—and the promise of eternal life—a promise we know to be true because it’s from God. Paul notes that alone should be enough for us to sing: Jesus paid it all, all to him I owe every day of our lives.

You shouldn’t need a moving sermon.

You don’t need a sign from God. We have all we need in this gift of life and the faith that God gave to each of us. We have what we need.

We don’t need a Blood Moon, a Hunter’s Moon, or a Moonpie to get us in the right frame of mind.

We love God because he first loved us. His love manifests to us in the life, death, blood, and resurrection of Christ Jesus. That should be enough for us to live fully for God.

And yet, it is a challenge for us. It should be a conditional statement without variation. God loves us. We love him back by being holy and untainted by the world.

We are his. That should be an unqualified statement—no conditions and no exceptions; yet, we continue to miss the mark. We still fall short.

What is it with you people! Other pastors don’t have to contend with this. Their congregations are set apart entirely for God. They don’t give in to their own understandings.

Well, maybe some do. OK, they all do as do their pastors and your pastor. We all fall short. We all miss the mark. We all transgress.

I bet that God wished he had known this about us before creation. I am quite certain that he did, and he made us anyway. He loved us anyway. He still loves us and keeps on loving us.

He knew that we would struggle. We wouldn’t always hit the target dead center. Sometimes, we miss it altogether. We struggle.

Struggle is part of life.

Look at the calf or the deer when it’s first born. It struggles to stand.

Look at the vegetation in nature. Everything struggles to get water and nutrients out of the ground and sunlight from above, except what grows in the parking lot cracks. That stuff doesn’t struggle. It thrives and would keep growing through a nuclear winter.

Look at the human child transitioning from crawling to walking. Learning to crawl was challenging, but the struggle in learning to walk is more pronounced. We all struggle.

Struggle is a part of life, but for Christians, we have a target to aim for—a target that we want to hit. We want to be holy as God is holy. That’s a holy target.

We can’t hit it every time, yet. I am confident that in the life to come, we will all be wearing those expert badges. But for now, it is a struggle.

You might be thinking. Like I needed a sermon to tell me that I fall short of God’s glory. I know the verse.

The first time that I qualified with a service rifle and pistol, I didn’t shoot expert. That was disappointing, so I threw in the towel.

No, I didn’t. I kept working on hitting the target every time until what I wore on my chest read double expert. That’s the only standard that was acceptable.

Condition one was that I was a Marine officer. Therefore, condition two must be that I could hit what I aimed at. It didn’t happen right away, but it happened.

The message isn’t that we fall short. It is that we have a target. That target is holiness. We can only hit it through life in Christ and even then, it is a struggle.

But it is still our target.  Holiness is still our target.

Holiness is our target!

Will we throw in the towel or keep aiming for the target?

Jesus made us right with God. Will we continue to aim for the holiness that we have been given without struggle?

The gift is salvation. The struggle is our discipleship. Condition one is that we are saved by the grace of God and have life, life abundant, and life eternal.

Condition two is our target, which is holiness. Can you keep your sights fixed on the target? Can you keep your eyes fixed on Jesus?

It’s a simple dichotomy. Throw in the towel on this discipleship business or keep aiming for the target of holiness?

Paul gives us a bunch of dichotomies.

·       Away from the body, with the Lord.

·       We are a new creation. The old is gone. The new has come.

·       Focus on what is unseen, not the things of the world that are seen.

·       Seeing is believing or believing is seeing?

·       By faith, not sight.

Now we get one for our modern age. Throw in the towel or pursue holiness?

You know the choice we are called to make so that we may grow in God’s grace. Just in case you don’t, it’s to pursue holiness.

Amen.