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.

Welcome to Leviticus

Read Leviticus 11:44-45

Leviticus 19:1-2

Leviticus 20:7

Leviticus – Tom, what were you thinking.

Leviticus—what a book!  You think that it might be in the back of the Bible with the maps and lists of other things.  I mean, it’s just a list of do’s and don’ts, right?

But what if it is not just a list of commands but part of a story?  What if it fits right where it is supposed to fit in the narrative of God’s people?  What if it is a story with most of its roots in Egypt and a conclusion with the Lamb of God on the cross?

The Greek translators named this book Leviticus during translation.  The Hebrew people called it:   Viyikra which means “called out.”  The Hebrews did not title the books of the Torah.  They used the first few words of the book.

Why?  These accounts were passed on in the oral tradition for centuries.  What are the fist words of the book?  “The Lord called to Moses…”

Turn to the alphabetical index in the hymnals and this group look up It is Well with my soul.  This group, I want you to look up When Peace Like a River.

Think of some of the songs you know so well by their intro.  I don’t have a fancy satellite radio that tells me the name of the song and the artist, so I guess.

The road is long

With many a winding turn

That leads us to who knows where

Who knows when

Do you have it yet?

But I'm strong

Strong enough to carry him

He ain't heavy, he's my brother

How about Big wheels keep on turning

Carry me home to see my kin

Who doesn’t know Sweet Home Alabama?  Most know it right away from its musical intro.

Now, some of you may like the Greek titles.  They would indicate that maybe this book is just for the priestly order—the Levites.  Those don’t apply to me.  I don’t have to go out and buy a goat and two chickens to sacrifice because I got a tattoo.  Many of them are just for the priests but most are for all. 

So, let me have a look at your tattoos after the service and I will tell you if you can get off with a couple of birds or you had better save up for a bull.  No, the sacrifices in Leviticus point us to the one sacrifice for all time.

OK, so the Greeks liked title and author—or at least the Septuagint (2^nd or 3^rd century AD) did—so that’s how we get our modern names, but the Hebrew people knew these books by the first line.

Here’s the list for the Torah

Hebrew                Greek to English           Hebrew Meaning

Bereishit              Genesis                          In the Beginning

Shemot                Exodus                           Names

Vayikra                Leviticus                        And He Called

Bamidbar             Numbers                        In the Wilderness

Devarim               Deuteronomy                Words

OK, let’s talk about the story.  You know it.  God created.  Man fell.  Sin is in the world.  It gets really bd.  Noah and his family are saved from a devastating flood.  Tower of Babel, Abraham called out of Ur and promised descendants, a land, and that all would be blessed through him (his seed).

Abraham-Isaac—Jacob who is renamed Israel and has a bunch of sons.  One of them Joseph is sold into slavery and eventually rises to most powerful man in Egypt.  Only Pharaoh could overrule him and Pharaoh knew better.

Joseph saves his family—which includes 10 of the 12 tribes of Israel.  The other two come from Jospeh and they are Manasseh and Ephraim.  These are sons of Joseph.

Then in the book of Shemot—these are the names of the sons of Israel who went into Egypt.  Shortly after this introduction we find, and there was a Pharaoh who did not remember Joseph.  So slavery begins and last about 400 years.

Along come Moses and Aaron and the exodus from Egypt.  It all went like clockwork, well not exactly.

The people are a mess.  While Moses is up getting instruction from God, Aaron has the people build a golden calf.  That’s not their only transgression, but it’s a biggie.  The whole lot of them are a bunch of complainers who sometimes say they wish they were slaves in Egypt again.

And so we come to today’s verse—two verses.  I’m not starting with a whole chapter or even the first chapter which jumps right into making a sacrifice.  Remember, this book is the continuation of a narrative not an appendix in the back of the book.

Leviticus 11:44-45  (NIV)

 I am the Lord your God; consecrate yourselves and be holy, because I am holy. Do not make yourselves unclean by any creature that moves along the ground.  I am the Lord, who brought you up out of Egypt to be your God; therefore be holy, because I am holy.

The people whom God rescued from Egypt don’t really have the whole picture yet.  God has made them his chosen people.  What does that mean?  Among other things, they were:

·       Given an identity as his people

·       Given a sign in the flesh for the males

·       A land promised to them (all the way back to Abraham)

·       To be a great nation (back to Abraham)

·       Given the law (some already came in Exodus, more in Leviticus)

·       Through Abraham’s seed, all the world would be blessed—Messiah.

So, as we enter into this trip through Leviticus, understand that one of the things that should mark these people as God’s own, would be that they would be holy as God is holy.

You know the story.  They didn’t get 100% on the test.  In fact, there were a bunch of F’s and incompletes.

But as we move forward in Leviticus—Vayikra—keep that in mind.  Be holy as God is holy.        

OBTW—those words apply to us as well.

Amen!