A 365b Dressing up for Church

We're almost at a position where we need another Reformation and there needs to be a rediscovery of a doctrine that has been buried for some time. Not only is the teaching of justification by faith to be preached, but verification by holiness. Verification by holiness.

What does that mean? Well, in more simple language, it indicates that you need to prove what you claim to be by what you are. Verification by holiness. Anybody can say, I'm a Christian.

I go along to a place where the Bible's preached on a Sunday evening. I believe that Jesus is the Son of God. He died on the cross of Calvary.

You can say that with a reasonable degree of ease. But you see, unless there's verification, unless there's some demonstration of that truth within your life by holiness, by the style in which you conduct yourself at school, at college, at home, in the shop, in the office, then the claim to be justified by faith is a bubble. What I am arguing is this.

That justification by faith and verification by holiness are two sides of the same coin. If the latter doesn't follow from the former, then I doubt whether the former has ever really been experienced. Now, this verse struck me when I was reading during the week as something that I need to bring to your attention this evening.

Holiness becometh thine house, O Lord, forever. Here is a psalmist and he's got in mind not just a specific house of God, not just one building, though obviously he must have thought of that as well, but but he is comprehending the household of God. Every man, every woman in Palestine, in that day, and by extension today, around the world, who claims to be a member of the family of the Lord, how are they to be singled out? What becomes them? What makes them fit rightly into that particular situation? Holiness, their manner of department, the way that they conduct their affairs, holiness becomes your house, O Lord, forever.

I was brought up just after the commencement of World War II, and as all the friends will remember in the tab, those years towards the end of the war and following were difficult ones. They say that we're going through an economic crisis in this country at the moment, but it seems to me a very ghostly sort of crisis compared with what I remember in 46 and 47 and 48. And I recall how back in the north of England, a bit of an industrial slump, it wasn't easy for people to bring up children.

Money wasn't flowing, not even in the dirty mills of Sheffield with, to any great degree. But nonetheless, in all honor to his name, my father, along with my mother, would ensure that annually my brother and I were kitted out with fresh clothing. And like the first rose of spring, what an analogy, we'd turn up at church with a new shirt and tie, and if it had been a good year, a suit and shoes.

And now I could take the shirt and the tie, it was the shoes that always gave me problems. Seemed to me that wearing a pair of new shoes is akin to breaking in a horse for the first time. It either cripples you, or you get some victory over it after a while.

But, but we go along to church at Easter or Wit, and there we were, dressed up and, and ready to, in our Sunday best. And it was quite a thing in those dim, distant days when I was born, when I had my youth. It was quite a thing to dress up to go to church.

Now, some of those old customs weren't so bad. Perhaps we took them, or my parents and their contemporaries, maybe took them to a bit of an extreme. But I'd rather see somebody looking smart than akin to Coco the Clown on a Sunday, quite frankly.

But I'm relatively old-fashioned. The thought of dressing up to go to church, it had some value. And yet perhaps it could be pushed too far, because you can get so concerned, can't you, in the idea of the Sunday best.

And that's why I've got some sympathy for modern thinking too. That it's not so much what you wear, but what you are that impresses God. And you can come into the tabernacle very well-dressed and very smart, and yet spiritually, internally, you're not dressed up properly.

You're not acceptable in His service. Because, you see, what God wants for us is holiness in the inner man. And it's easier to go to Marks and Spencers and buy yourself a 50 pound suit or whatever, than what it is to cultivate holiness day in and day out.

Come along to church as a pure person. What God is concerned about when people come into the community of His own, into His own household, is that they be holy. Why? Well, first of all, because God is holy.

That's one of the supreme characteristics of God that stands out in the Old Testament and in the New Testament. How holy is God? Ask Isaiah. He had an audience with the Lord and he felt that he was in the wrong place.

Woe am I, Lord, because, well, I'm a man of unclean lips. I mix amongst a people with impure speech. For Isaiah, it had been relatively easy to stomp the pavements of Jerusalem and call down woes, the wrath of God upon the people.

But when he was brought into the presence of the Lord, Isaiah himself, he felt that he was unclean. Holiness becomes your house, Lord, and I'm not holy. And I've got a problem if I'm going to stay in your presence.

How holy is God? Ask Peter, for Peter has an encounter with the Lord Jesus. One very strange day in the experience of the fisherman, when having not caught any fish at night, he admits to the advice of Jesus, who goes, tells him to go at an absurd time in the morning and to, to fish again. And, and under pressure he did.

And he caught the fish and he realized that that was more than just a stranger on the seashore. That was someone who knew their stuff. That was someone who was more than just human.

And when Peter encounters Jesus, he falls at his feet and he says, depart from me, Lord, because I'm a sinful man. And John on the Isle of Patmos has a, an experience of the living Lord Jesus Christ. The Bible says that he falls at his feet as though he were dead.

You see, the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, the triune God, three in one, one in three, have this interdependence in this characteristic that all holy, the Holy Father, the holy thing that is bought, that is born from Mary. You remember Gabriel's prediction of the birth of Jesus. The Holy Spirit, God lives, exists in an order of holiness.

How dread are thine eternal years, O everlasting Lord, by prostrate spirits day and night incessantly adored. How beautiful, how beautiful the sight of thee must be, thine endless wisdom, boundless power, and awful purity. Oh, how I fear thee, living God, with deepest reverence, fear, and worship thee with trembling hope and penitential tear.

That's how one of the older hymn writers expresses his feeling as he moves into the presence of God. Now I know you can overdo it, and I believe to some extent the Puritans did just that. They got so concerned with the holiness of God and the otherness of God that it seemed there could be little joy in the presence of the Lord.

And we're always caught in evangelicalism down the centuries between the two extremes. God's so holy that you can hardly utter a word. And then one's inadequate conception of God, where the all-mightiness of the Lord is replaced by an all-mightiness as you wander into his presence, not really appreciating who this God is.

There is a balance. But the point that I'm trying to set before you this evening is that God is holy. That's an Anglo-Saxon word, word halig or hal, which means well, whole.

God is well. God is whole. God is perfect.

Do you ever feel uncomfortable in the presence of some people? I've known that experience. Praise God for some of the saints, saintly men and women that I've met who've been of help to me in my life. And there have been occasions when I've gone to their home and I've sat in their company and I felt uncomfortable.

Not because they didn't make me welcome, but because their standard of life, their standard of consistency was far superior to my own. Now take that to the absolute and here's the problem. God is holy.

Isaiah in his presence, Peter in his presence, John in his presence, they all agree with this. They're uncomfortable because the holiness that God has is not one that they share. Holiness becomes your house, O Lord, forever.

This is how you want people dressed. You want them to come before you, internally speaking, with the garment of holiness and purity. Yes, God wishes us to be holy.

It must be the case. You see, just apply a little bit of logic. That's a word I'm constantly using these days, logic, but thank God evangelicals are not bereft of their senses.

We are logical people. God says he wants to speak to us, but how can we speak to him when we don't have the qualification of being holy enough? Well, the logic of that is that God's going to make it possible for you and me to acquire the holiness which naturally has always evaded us. God wishes you to be holy.

Psalm 96 and verse 9 says, O worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness. Come together as good-looking people as far as your spiritual attributes are concerned. Worship God in the beauty of holiness.

And if you think I'm plundering the Old Testament and taking it out of context from the New Testament, then listen to the fisherman Peter, speaking of course with the authority of the Holy Ghost, as did the psalmist. 1 Peter 1 verse 15. But as he God who hath called you is holy, so be ye holy in all manner of your life, because it is written, Be ye holy for I am holy.

And Hebrews chapter 12 and verse 14 also tells us that we are to follow peace with all men. And we are, and here is a correct translation from the original, we are also to strive for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord. Why does the writer of the epistle to the Hebrews talk about the holiness? Well, he does so because there are types of holiness which is pseudo, which are false.

It's very easy, isn't it, to try and put on a holy, pious attitude. The Lord Jesus makes reference to that sort of holiness in Matthew's gospel, chapter 6. The context is the Sermon on the Mountain. He's referring to those who are always giving a public display as to their piety.

Men who go into the temple and they take out their money and they drop their shekels in into the coffers, and they do so publicly with someone playing a fanfare on the trumpets as the most benevolent, the most generous of Jews goes into the temple and there makes his donation. No, says the Lord, that's not holiness, that's pseudo holiness. As also the Pharisees standing by the marketplace in an attitude of prayer so that everyone can pass by and say, why, my, what a holy man.

That's a pseudo holiness. Or those who want others to know that they fast so they go around looking miserable and indicating that they're engaged in that spiritual discipline. No, there's a false holiness, my friend, that's nothing more than skin-deep.

But it's not holiness that's just the label on the container that God is after in your life. It's a, it's a deep-rooted holiness. Oh, I wish I could get the burden of my message across to you with such forcefulness.

You couldn't, you couldn't forget it at all. You see, sometimes we've, we've worked ourselves into perhaps a situation akin to that of the Pharisees of the, of the New Testament era. Provided we're, we're in church on a Sunday morning or a Sunday evening and maybe a Thursday or a Monday thrown in for good measure, then we're doing all that God wants.

Not at all. Holiness becomes your people always. Living a holy life on a Monday when I'm at school and the algebra is diabolical.

Living a holy life when I'm frustrated because of the way that my children are behaving. Living a holy life even though every relationship seems to have gone skew. Holiness becomes your children forever.

The Bible gives you a bull's-eye of which you are to aim as a New Testament Christian. You are to perfect holiness in the fear of the Lord. You see, again, Peter makes it so clear that this is something far more than just skin-deep.

He talks to ladies, but we'll interpret this as applying also to men in the, in the lesson that, that, that he gives. He's speaking about Abraham's wife, Sarah, and there he tells us in his epistle that the beauty of Sarah was not just something on the, on the surface. Beauty, he says, as he's giving instruction to wives is not just a cosmetic thing.

1 Peter chapter 3, for after, verse 5, for after this manner in the old time the holy women also who trusted in God adorned themselves being in subjection unto their own husbands. And in the previous verse, let your holiness, let your adorning not be that of the outward plaiting of the hair, of wearing of gold, of putting on of apparel. Let it be the hidden man of the heart, in that which is not corruptible, even the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit, which is in the sight of God of great price.

You've got the picture. Let's imagine Sarah in front of the dressing table, and she's got her gold, and she's got long hair, and it's plaited, and so on. You've, you've got the picture.

Ah, but Sarah wasn't concerned with this, you see, that's the wrong picture. What Sarah was concerned about was the inner beauty, the inner holiness of her life, and that's what God wants from you and me. Holiness in, in everything we do.

Ah, but you say, you used the word logic a little while ago. Surely I did. Well, we find your logic to have a flaw, because you said that God is holy, and He wants us to be holy, but we can't be like God.

We can't present to Him the holiness that He asks for. So, what's the resolution of that problem? He's asking from us what we innately can't give. Well, I'll tell you what the resolution of the problem is.

Turn to the epistle to the Hebrews, and in the twelfth chapter, you find these verses referring to our Lord Jesus Christ in particular. In the ninth verse of Hebrews 12, the author is giving a little bit of encouragement and teaching to those who have been corrected by God. Furthermore, he says, we have had fathers of our own flesh which corrected us, and we gave them reverence.

Shall we not much rather be in subjection unto the Father of spirits and live? For they verily for a few days chastened us after their own pleasure. But He for our profit, and here's the explosive phrase, that we might be partakers of His holiness. That we might be partakers of His holiness.

What does that mean? When Jesus died, He offered a pure life on the cross. He died that we might be forgiven. He died to make us good, that we might go at last to heaven, saved by His precious blood.

Jesus, when He died, had got no will. He got nothing to leave to any of His disciples, materially speaking, because He was bereft of any finances. But the thing that He had, that was more valuable than all the heaped-up wealth of the world, was the holiness of His life.

And the Bible tells us that He makes His holiness available to all those who put their trust in Him. You say, I don't understand that. How does it happen? Well it happens like this.

The person who is a Christian not only accepts that Jesus died on the cross to save them, that Jesus was raised again to demonstrate that He has the power to forgive sins. The man, the woman who is a Christian, has opened his heart to the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is no spook, is no phantom.

Very hard for us to understand that the reality of the Holy Ghost, because we we think in terms of magic, and we have very difficult problems in giving personality to a spirit. But nonetheless, the Bible says that the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Ghost, is a person and He takes up residence within the life of the man or the woman who acknowledges who Jesus is. And you see, a little bit of the Lord Jesus Christ comes to reside in you by the Holy Spirit.

The Apostle Peter talks about being partakers of the divine nature. What is a Christian? A Christian is a man, a woman, who has been linked up to God by Jesus Christ and by the Holy Spirit. So that means to say that the very holiness of the Lord Jesus Christ can flow through our lives.

In the New Testament you sometimes come across the word saint. And that word saint really means holy one. The Roman Catholic Church has not really helped us in making certain people saints.

St. George, I think they've discovered he didn't exist. There are many who did and they were beautified by the Pope. They were made saints in the estimate of the Catholic Church.

But the New Testament, when it speaks of saints, holy ones, it's speaking generally of everyone who's trusted Jesus our Savior. My sins are forgiven because he died on the cross of Calvary to save me. And his righteousness, his holiness becomes my own.

And therefore I'm accepted by God. Not because of what I've done, but because of what he's done for me. If all the plugs, the electricity plugs in my home, Shakespeare Road, were dead, and then the electricity board sent along an engineer to connect everything up, I would get power from the mains that would help us in running our home.

Now this is just what's happened to a Christian. Every Christian, he's got power from the mains. He's got power from God himself.

He knows the holiness of the Lord Jesus in his own life. And one of the things that he has to do is to demonstrate that fact. Holiness, you see, becomes the community of God's children forever.

It's a reasonable way of dressing up. Have you verified by holiness that you're saved? By the way in which you live your life? By your relationships? By your reading matter? By what you watch on the television? Have you demonstrated to other people that you're different than the non-Christian because your life is a holy life? That's what God wants of young people and of older friends. An indication.

Not just because our lips say so, for words are cheap. Because our actions demonstrate the fact that we belong to Jesus and the holiness which Jesus illustrates absolutely is at least reflected partially in our own lives. Holiness becomes your house forever.

That's how God wants you to dress. Having confessed your sins, to have purity within and to live by the enabling of the Holy Spirit, consistent lives for the Lord Jesus. Let's pray.

Father we just come before you. Thank you that you are the Holy One. You want us to enter into your presence with joy but always reflecting upon the fact that you're well, whole, no blemish and naturally we're not like that.

We're rotten, putrid, full of spiritual cancer and you tell us to be holy and you seem to mock us but then you point us to the cross and you say there is the antidote. There's the remedy to your problem. And so we come and we acknowledge that Jesus was holy and that he surrendered a holy life on the cross for us.

We clothe ourselves in his righteousness. We do it right now. We confess our sins and accept your forgiveness.

But Lord you go beyond that. You tell us we're not just to be justified by faith but we are to verify that by the way we live. So Holy Spirit of the Holy God come into our hearts afresh and make us pure.

Help us men to think purely. Help ladies to act honorably in all our relationships, in all our speech, in all our activities, every hour of the day. May we be a holy people that pleases you, a holy God.

Amen.