Be Holy Not Religious
Drawing from 1 Samuel 3–7, Tom Shrader traces God's judgment on Israel and the Philistines for mishandling the ark of the covenant, using these events to illustrate that God is holy and calls His people to genuine holiness. He warns that holiness reduced to external rule-keeping becomes empty religion, and points instead to a transformed heart as the only lasting foundation for obedience. Referencing Thomas Chalmers, Tim Keller, and Martin Lloyd-Jones, Shrader argues that only a new affection for Christ can displace love of sin, and that the evidence of true conversion is a life changed from the inside out.
“God saves us in spite of us, not because of us. God works in our life in spite of who we are, not because of who we are.”
— Tom Shrader
Series: Samuel
Recorded: 2009 at East Valley Bible Church
Duration: 46 min
Themes: holiness, obedience, judgment, heart change, religion, sin, transformation, worship, struggling with religion over relationship, going through church discipline, new believer, feeling spiritually dry, young adult, questioning your faith, raised in church but not converted, struggling with sin patterns
Scripture: 1 Samuel 3:1, 1 Samuel 4:2, 1 Samuel 4:3, 1 Samuel 4:17, 1 Samuel 4:18, 1 Samuel 5:2, 1 Samuel 5:6, 1 Samuel 6:4, 1 Samuel 6:7, 1 Samuel 6:11, 1 Samuel 6:19, 1 Samuel 6:20, 2 Samuel 2:34, Hebrews 12:6, Hebrews 12:8, Isaiah 6, Revelation, Matthew 5:14-16, James 2:14, John 17:3, Philippians 3, Ephesians 1:15-19, 1 Corinthians 11, Genesis 4:6, Jonah 3:1
Theological Themes: sanctification, becoming holy, divine judgment, heart religion, true conversion, legalism, the holiness of god, new affections
Full Transcript
Review of Previous Points
We are glad you are here. Open your Bibles to 1 Samuel, chapter 3. We will start there today. If you do not have a Bible, raise your hand — both here and over in the conference room — and the guys will come around and give you a copy of the Old and New Testament. We will be around page 202, somewhere in there.
Last week we said we were going to cover five points and did not get through them. We did not get through them today either, so next week we will finish for sure. Let me do a brief summary of the points we have already covered, and then give you a sense of what all five are.
The first point we drew from chapters 3 through 7 is that disobedience by God's people will bring about judgment. The Lord God says He is the one true God, a jealous God, and He was in the process of disciplining and judging the nation of Israel. Chapter 3, verse 1 tells us, "The word of the Lord was rare in those days; visions were infrequent." In the lives of Eli and his sons, we see how they had contaminated and damaged the nation.
What is encouraging, even in the middle of this discipline, is that Samuel is still there — God is still working in the nation. He is always present. But the rarity of the word is the beginning sign of God's judgment, and we see their archenemies the Philistines defeat Israel in chapter 4, verse 2: "Israel was defeated before the Philistines, who killed about 4,000 men on the battlefield."
In verse 3, Israel asks, "Why would the Lord do this?" The answer is plain: they were in the middle of sin, had turned their backs on Him, and everyone was doing what was right in their own minds. Judgment was upon these people. Disobedience in God's people brings judgment and calamity. Hebrews chapter 12, verse 6 tells us, "Those whom the Lord loves, He disciplines," and verse 8 adds, "if you are without discipline, of which you become partakers, then perhaps you are illegitimate children" — not children of God at all.
Dependence on God Alone
Running through this story is God working in the nation of Israel, and specifically in Samuel's life. Samuel had been called by God three times and finally recognized the call to him as a prophet. He responded, and we noted how he handled the difficult task of communicating to Eli that God's judgment was about to fall upon him. Eli understood what that meant, because God had already given him the sign back in chapter 2, verse 34: "This will be the sign to you — both of your sons will die on the same day." If you are one of God's children engaged in ongoing sin, there is a discipline associated with it.
The second point is that we should not place our dependence on anything but the one true God. Israel is defeated, as recorded in 1 Samuel 4:2, and they ask, "Has the Lord defeated us today before the Philistines? Let us take to ourselves from Shiloh the ark of the covenant of the Lord, that it may come among us and deliver us from the power of our enemies." What follows is the account of how they knowingly mishandled the very thing God had prescribed for them regarding the ark. They placed their trust not in God but in a symbol.
The ark was a picture of the presence of God. It spoke of His authority over them, His revelation to them — the copy of the Ten Commandments contained within it — and His reconciliation with them. It represented His presence. But there was nothing mystical about the ark in and of itself. What Israel had done was turn their back on God and cling to a symbol, as though it were a genie in a bottle that would somehow get them out of trouble.
We need to be careful to apply this in our own lives. We know there are people in some faiths who venerate statues, or carry a coin to a saint, or keep a picture in their home or something on the dashboard of their car. We would never do that. But we might do something similar in subtler ways. We might fall in love with and worship the Word of God while never falling in love with the God it points us to. We might place our faith and trust in an object, or put our dependence in our own faithfulness or obedience.
We may reach a point where something unpleasant enters our life and our mind begins to turn, landing on this thought: "God, why would You do that to me? Why now? Look at what I have done for You." That reveals a heart that has been in the process of constantly trying to earn favor with Him. When something hard arrives, we realize we may have placed our faith and trust in a ritual or an object rather than in God Himself.
What Comes Next
Those are the first two points. Here are the final three we will be working through. Point three, which we will look at today, is that God wants for Himself a people that is holy. Point four is that God is a God of the —
Picking Up Where We Left Off
Number five is the counterbalance to the first point. The first point is that disobedience by God's people brings judgment. Number five is that obedience by God's people brings blessing and restoration. Let's pray that God would show up here, because we need this desperately.
Father, we open Your word, and as we do, I ask that You would fill me with Your Spirit and that the words I say would bring honor and glory to You. I pray that the conviction and belief so much in my heart, You would allow me to express in a way where all of my flaws and weaknesses get out of the way. Speak through Your word and Your Spirit and pierce our hearts. That we would look at these people who are in the midst of sinful and really foolish behavior, and rather than mock them, we would see ourselves in the midst of this. We pray this in Christ's name. Amen.
The Report Comes to Eli
If you look at chapter 4, verse 17, Israel goes out to fight the Philistines, and it does not go well. The report comes back in verse 17 and reaches Eli with four things. First, Israel has fled before the Philistines — they are in retreat. Second, there has been a great slaughter; as we saw in verse 2, that meant at least 4,000 men had been killed.
Third, his sons are dead. I want to make sure we don't miss the significance of that. It is not just that they were dead, but Eli had already been told that the judgment of God would come upon him, and that the sign of that judgment would be that both boys would die on the same day — which has now happened. Fourth, the ark of God has been taken. The ark of the covenant is gone.
When Eli hears this, verse 18 tells us he fell off his seat backwards beside the gate, his neck was broken, and he died. That almost becomes a metaphor for the condition of the nation of Israel — separated from God in the midst of their sin, and God beginning to judge them.
The Ark Among the Philistines
In chapter 5, the Philistines now have the ark, but they quickly realize they do not want it. They take it, verse 2, to the house of Dagon, which is one of their gods. When the Ashdodites arose early the next morning, behold, Dagon had fallen on his face before the ark of the Lord. So they took Dagon and set him back in his place. When they arose early the next morning, behold, he had fallen on his face again on the ground, and his head and both his palms were cut off — only the trunk of him was left.
This launches a significant turn of events, because God begins to move powerfully against these people. Verse 6: "The hand of the Lord was heavy on the Ashdodites, and He ravaged them and smote them with tumors, both in Ashdod and in its territories." When the men of Ashdod saw this, they said, "The ark of the God of Israel must not remain with us, for His hand is severe on us and on our god."
They understood what this ark represented. They knew it was connected to the God who had brought Israel out of bondage in Egypt. Now that they possessed it, they were experiencing this punishment, this severity, this devastation inflicted on their people. So they sent the ark away to Ekron.
Seven Months of Plague
The ark stays among the Philistines, and chapter 6 opens with this: the ark of the Lord had been in the country of the Philistines for seven months. The Philistines called for their priests and diviners and said, "What do we do with the ark? Tell us how we shall send it to its place. We need to get it out of here." God is killing people. People are dying all around them, and they are beginning to sense judgment in the midst of all of this.
Their spiritual advisors respond in verse 3: "If you send away the ark of the God of Israel, do not send it empty, but you shall return to Him a guilt offering. Then you will be healed, and it will be known to you why His hand has not been removed from you." When asked what the guilt offering should be, verse 4 tells us they answered: "Five golden tumors and five golden mice, according to the number of the lords of the Philistines, for the same plague was on all of you and on your lords."
They would make images of these tumors in gold and present them as a guilt offering. This is very much a pagan idea — they are attempting to satisfy the wrath of the gods. Something inside them, though, is still uncertain. Maybe it is just coincidence, they think. Maybe this is not really the judgment of God.
A Test with Milk Cows
So they devise a test. Chapter 6, verse 7: they will take a new cart, a brand new one, and hitch two milk cows to it — cows on which there has never been a yoke. Then they will take the calves away from the cows.
Now, everything we read tells us that a cow that has never worn a yoke would resist. There would have to be a process of training.
God's Holiness and Judgment
The cows resist. They would fight, they would buck, they would go in separate directions. Taking two of them and yoking them together, they had never been in that position before, and their calves had been taken away from them. So they were agitated and would never pull together in any way, shape, or form.
The Philistines said they would watch. They would take the cart, place the ark on it, along with the articles of gold as the guilt offering in the box, and send it away. If it went by way of the territory of Beth Shemesh, then He had done them a great evil. But if not, they would know it was not the hand of the Lord. If the cart went in that direction, they would know it was God; if it didn't, it was coincidental, or they had misunderstood.
What happened is they took the ark, placed it on the cart in verse 11, along with the golden images. The cows took a straight path, going along the highway, lowing as they went, and they did not turn aside. The lords of the Philistines followed, and they understood at that moment that this had been God's judgment. God returned the ark to the nation of Israel.
But along the way, certain men had looked into the ark and mishandled it. Verse 19 tells us that because they looked into the ark of the Lord, He struck down all the people — 50,070 men that day. It causes them to ask the question in verse 20: "Who is able to stand before the Lord, this holy God? And to whom shall He go up from us?"
God Wants a Holy People
Point three: God wants a holy people. God wants a people set aside for Him. The nation of Israel at this time, as well as the Philistines, mishandled the ark and violated what God would have them do. The Philistines were probably ignorant about it, but God is a holy God, a righteous God, a God of judgment, and a God of wrath.
Because He is holy, He wants us to be holy too. This is where it gets really interesting. So let us go back to the idea of the gospel, and of man and our relationship with God.
Martin Lloyd-Jones writes these words: "We must have the full message. We must deliver the whole counsel of God. It starts with the law. The law of God that demands of a righteous God the wrath of God. That is the way to bring men and women to conviction. Not by modifying the truth. We must confront them with the fact that they are men — that they're fallible men, that they're dying men, that they're sinful men — and that they will all have to stand before God at the bar of eternal judgment."
That is the condition of man. We have to say this. He is a holy God, and we are not.
The Repetition of Holiness in Scripture
As we look at the scriptures, for example in the New Testament, Jesus is teaching and says, "Truly, I say to you." That grabs our attention. If He says, "Truly, truly, I say to you," that really grabs our attention. But there are only really two places in scripture where we see a word repeated not twice but three times.
Once is in Isaiah 6: "Holy, holy, holy." And then again in the book of Revelation, where God is pronouncing judgment and says, "Woe, woe, woe." God is a holy God — a very difficult word to define. It means other than us, separate from us, distinct from us, different from us. And He wants us to be that people too.
He is really serious about this, and I'm not sure we always grasp that. When He says He does not want them to mishandle the ark and lays down these rules, it is important for us to understand that God still expects obedience in our lives today.
Salvation by Grace Alone
We need to understand that our fundamental problem is that we are sinful people. Lloyd-Jones continues: "We then must present to them the full orb doctrine of the grace of God and salvation. We must show that no man is saved by the deeds of the law — by his own goodness or righteousness or church membership or anything else — but solely, utterly, entirely by the free gift of God in Jesus Christ His Son."
We are saved by grace through faith. Our fundamental problem is that we are separated from God by our sin. The answer to that is not to clean up our own act. The answer is not to begin attending church or doing something that somehow makes us acceptable to a holy God.
This is really important to get our arms around: God saves us in spite of us, not because of us. God works in our life in spite of who we are, not because of who we are. God did not look at any of us and say, "If I can just get him, if I can just get her, if I can just get that couple into the kingdom, they will be significant trophies I can use in a powerful way." That is not at all what He says. Salvation is solely, utterly, entirely by Him.
Preaching the Whole Counsel
Lloyd-Jones writes that we must preach the full orb doctrine, leaving nothing out — the conviction of sin, the reality of judgment and of hell, and of free grace and justification and sanctification. We must also show that there is a worldview in the Bible, that here alone, in the Bible alone, we can understand history past, present, and future.
We must show this great worldview in God's eternal purpose. At the same time, we must be careful that we are giving it to the whole man. The gospel is not only for man's heart — you start with his head. It is a great message given by God, which in turn we pass to the mind, to the heart, to the will. There is ever the danger of leaving out some part. We must be certain that we address the whole man — his mind, his emotions, and his will.
A Transformed Heart, an Informed Mind, a Radical Life
The gospel does not simply deal with our behavior — it deals with our heart. This is not behavior modification. This is a heart change, a transformed heart. God changes our heart and begins to inform our mind, and the end result is that our behavior begins to change.
What does that have to do with this idea of holiness? The minute I start talking about holiness, I begin in my mind to go through some sort of checklist. I identify — and I think most people do — holiness based on what I do or what I don't do. I do these things I never did before, or I used to do all that stuff and I don't do it anymore. That is a very dangerous place to be if all I am evaluating is the external.
One author writes this: "True Christians need to flee to Christ as their only hope — not their behavior." A mark of maturity is that we no longer are constantly worrying about our spirituality, but rather our focus is on Christ and His accomplishments — meaning His death on the cross and what He achieved. Those who are glorying in the flesh, in their own works, will exhaust themselves because they are looking to their own resources. It is in the cross where we find strength.
Christians flee to Christ as their only hope, casting aside all self-confidence. Paul calls everything other than Christ — this is in Philippians 3 — rubbish. The King James calls it dung. So the question is: are we trusting in rubbish, or are we trusting in Christ?
The author then quotes A.W. Pink: "Just as a sinner's despair of any hope from himself is the first prerequisite of a sound conversion" — meaning I have to understand there is nothing I can bring to that — "so the loss of all confidence in himself is the first essential of the believer's growth in grace."
Holiness Is Not Simply a Checklist of Behavior
When I say holiness to you, we inevitably think of behavior, and there are good reasons for that. Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount that you are the light of the world, and we are to let our good works shine in such a way that people see those good works and glorify our Father in heaven. So if I say Jesus is Lord, there should be a difference in how I live.
James says it this way, in James 2, verse 14: "What use is it, my brethren, if someone says he has faith, but he has no works? Can that faith save him? If a brother or sister is without food and in need of daily food, and one of you says to him, Go in peace, be warm, and be filled, and yet you don't give him what is necessary for the body, what use is that? Even so, if faith has no works, being by itself, it's dead."
So I understand — when we talk about holiness, we immediately think of works, of action, of what we do. But we come back to this point over and over again, and it is really important: our Christian faith is not an ethic, but a body of doctrine. It is what we believe. There are people from all sorts of different faiths, and even secularists, who feed hungry people, take care of hurting people, and do nice deeds for one another. But the motivation for it is not the result of a transformed heart.
Eternal Life Is Knowing God, Not Merely Doing Good Works
When we talk about eternal life, we go to the words of the Savior Himself. The night before He died, here is what Jesus said: "This is eternal life, that they might know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ." This is eternal life — not the works.
Do the works need to be present? Absolutely. If I say Jesus is Lord and there is no transformation that has taken place, then my faith is not real. But here is the flip side: if my holiness is simply do this, do this, do this, don't do that, don't do that, don't do that — I am telling you that is not the whole picture either.
The Problem of Empty Motion
Maybe you're here and you've been doing pretty well. You've been hanging around here for a long time. You're spending a little bit of time in God's Word, hanging out with God's people. You heard a need for children's ministry and you stepped in. You're engaged in Young Life or Crisis Pregnancy Center, or many of the other wonderful organizations we encourage you to serve in. And yet, if you were really honest, you'd say there's something missing.
I did a study at Priority Living last summer, and I was talking about this reality — how I see it in a lot of Christians who are doing all the right things. I prayed, I looked up, and I've never seen a response like that from men and women who I would have said, and who indeed are, people who really are Christians. But they came one after another and said, "That's just me. I'm just going through these motions. I'm just doing these things."
Now, let me give you the answer. The answer is not to stop doing them. The answer is to change the motivation for doing them — to change the affection of your heart.
Replacing, Not Just Removing
I used this illustration a couple of weeks ago, but I'm not sure I used it in all the services, so I apologize if this is a repetition. When Susan and I have the boys — Braden and Yale are messing around — it's really easy to see because Braden is around fifteen or sixteen months and you can't really talk to him. I'll say, "No, no, no," and it's extraordinarily ineffective. It makes absolutely no difference. Maybe it scares him a little, but it doesn't do anything.
Susan will go over, and I've watched her do it time and again. She'll take the toy they have, or the object they're playing with, take it away, and replace it with something else. That's what needs to happen in our hearts.
Those things our hearts are focused on — even now, as followers of Christ — those need to be changed. That love for the world, that love for sin, that love for stuff, that flinch that lies, that inclination that steals, that heart that lusts — something has to replace all of that, and "no" is not enough. That "no" is not strong enough. That "no" is going to wear you out. Your love for self, your love for sin, your pride — it has to be replaced with something. What is that?
Paul's Prayer for the Ephesians
Paul prays this for the church at Ephesus:
"For this reason I too, having heard of the faith in the Lord Jesus which exists among you and your love for all the saints, I don't cease giving thanks for you while making mention of you in my prayers that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him. I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened so that you will know what the hope of His calling is, what are the riches of His glorious inheritance in the saints, and what is the surpassing greatness of His power toward us who believe."
Let me also read to you from Eugene Peterson's rendering of that same passage:
"That's why, when I heard of the solid trust you have in the Master Jesus, of your outpouring of love for other Christians, I couldn't stop thanking God for you. Every time I'd pray, I'd think of you and give thanks. But I do more than thank. I ask and ask the God of our Master Jesus Christ, the glory of God, to make you intelligent and discerning in knowing Him personally. Your eyes focused and clear so that you can see exactly what it is He is calling you to do. Grasp the immensity of the glorious ways of His life that He has for Christians. Oh, the utter extravagance of His work in us who trust Him — endless energy, boundless strength."
The Expulsive Power of a New Affection
I mentioned to you a couple of weeks ago Thomas Chalmers — C-H-A-L-M-E-R-S — whose dates are 1780 to 1847. He was a Scottish pastor, teacher, and reformer. He wrote many things, but he wrote a sermon titled "The Expulsive Power of a New Affection." If you Google Thomas Chalmers, this will pop up pretty quickly. The sermon is long, the language is heavy — it's almost King's English — and it will take you several passes to get through it. But it is really, really helpful.
In it, Chalmers argues that the only way we're going to change these affections is, first, to take the world and show that it's empty — but that's not enough. The only way we're truly going to change these affections is to replace our love for sin and for the world with a love for something deeper. And that is a love for God.
Relationship Slipping Back Into Religion
God hates religion, and yet we become almost instinctively very religious people. I've tried to make that point several times in this series. In the book of Philippians, Paul talks about all the stuff he used to do — all the religious stuff — as loss. But now it's knowing Christ Jesus his Lord, knowing Him in an intimate way.
Yet I know from my own life, and I certainly know from watching a lot of other people, that pretty quickly relationship flips right back into religion. We mentioned a book to you, and we said we've never — and probably never would — tell everybody in the church they need to read the same book. But if we were to, this might likely be one we'd recommend. It's called —
The Non-Religion
Timothy Keller's *The Prodigal God* was in the Christmas pack, so if you have a Christmas pack and haven't opened it yet, you ought to open it. There's a bunch of great stuff in there. If you don't yet have a copy, you ought to go to the bookstore and get one — not because we make a bunch of money on it, but because this is a great tool for you. This is a wonderful book that really speaks to the type of people who come to East Valley Bible Church: good people who are serious about their faith, good people who aspire to be holy because the Father in heaven is holy.
Early in the book, Keller writes this: "It's hard for us to realize this today, but when Christianity first arose in the world, it was not called a religion. It was the non-religion." Imagine neighbors of early Christians asking them about their faith. Where's your temple, they'd ask. The Christians would reply that they didn't have a temple. Where do your priests labor? They didn't have priests. Where are the sacrifices made to please your gods? They didn't make sacrifices anymore. Jesus Himself is the temple to end all temples, the priest to end all priests, the sacrifice to end all sacrifices.
No one had ever heard anything like this. The Romans called the Christians atheists, because what the Christians were saying about spiritual reality was unique — it couldn't be classified with any of the other world religions. Along comes the Christian faith, and it's totally different than anything else, because it's not about the externals. It's not about conforming to something. It's about a heart that's changed, about something that's taken place inside. That's why the gospel message is so attractive to us once we see the depth of our sin.
Keller writes, "Jesus' teaching consistently attracted the irreligious, while being offered to the Bible-believing religious people of the day."
A Personal Encounter with the Gospel
Let me speak autobiographically here. It was in March of 1970, early in the month, that I walked into Phoenix Country Club and heard for the very first time the gospel. I'd been in church a great deal as a young boy — we not only went every Sunday, but oftentimes all through the week. I went to Catholic grade school, high school, and college. I knew the catechism, and I knew it well. But I never knew Christ. I never even heard that I could know Him.
I walked in that day, and Larry Wright was teaching, and he said, "You can know right now that you have eternal life." I had never heard that. I'd always heard that you could give it your best and see what happens. Then I heard him say there is nothing you can do to please a holy God, nothing you can do in and of yourself. You are the problem, not the solution. I had never heard anything like that before, and that's why what I read from Keller resonates so deeply with me.
All I had ever heard was religion. That's all man can create — religion. It might have a little Jesus in it. Someone might even say Jesus died for your sins, but the religious view treats that as a footnote rather than the foundation. It was on March 6, 1980, that God transformed my heart and began a process of informing my mind, and my life has been radically changed.
Motivation: Religion Versus Relationship
How does all of this tie together? If our motivation is behavior modification — simply a list of dos and don'ts — then I'm telling you, you're not going to make it for the long haul. And even if you do make it outwardly, here's what will be missing: joy. If you are a deeply religious person, I can almost guarantee there is no joy in your life. There's no fun. Everything becomes a rigid obligation rather than a delight.
Is it important that you spend time with the Lord? Absolutely. Is it important that you study His Word and share your faith? Yes. But there is a world of difference between telling yourself "I have to pray, I have to have a quiet time, I have to share my faith" and understanding that you get to pray, you get to study God's Word, you get to share your faith. The action may look very similar from the outside, but the motivation is entirely different.
What has to happen in your life and mine is a radical change — a change of heart. All of a sudden you find yourself falling in love with the Savior. All of a sudden you can't get enough of God's Word or enough of His people. That transformation of motivation is what distinguishes genuine holiness from mere religion.
Holiness Flows from a Transformed Heart
Sometimes I am almost embarrassed. There are guys who will walk into a Starbucks and say to a stranger, "You're a sinner, you're lost, you're going to hell." My instinct is, "Hey, nice to meet you — what's your name?" That is just not me. And some of you are the same way. But here is where it gets dangerous: we begin to ascribe holiness to a certain behavior or style. The truth is, some of you are never going to be wired like that guy, and nor should you have to be. God can use him, and we would not want to stop him.
God wants a holy people — a separated people who love Him. The evidence that they love Him and that the heart has been transformed is that the life has changed. So you need to look at your life and honestly ask whether you are living as a religious person or whether you have been truly converted.
Even if you are converted, one of the biggest struggles many of us will face is that we flip into religion from the other direction. For me, when I discovered that God is a black-and-white God — that nothing is gray for Him — I became very black and white myself, and I still am. But the danger is tying holiness exclusively to behavior. Behavior is the only way we can measure it in our own lives and in each other's lives, and so that becomes the game we play. The reality, however, is that my heart needs to be changed, my affections need to be different, and I need to read the Word of God because I love God — because the way He communicates to me is through His Word.
The Weight of God's Holiness
God is a holy God, and He wants from us lives that are holy. He is serious about this. We find it in 1 Corinthians chapter 11, as Paul is talking about communion and addressing the church at Corinth. Paul states that some among them are asleep — literally dead — because of the way they abused the communion table.
For us, in this setting, my goal this morning is that we would understand that holiness flows from a transformed heart — not from merely conforming externally to some standard. It is not about checking boxes. It is about a heart that has genuinely been changed by God.
A Preview: God Is a God of the Second Chance
Next week we are going to finish this series, and we will look at two truths: God is a God of the second chance, and obedience brings blessing and restoration. That is great news. If you are here and perhaps new, this is something I needed to hear over and over again, and the Bible is filled with it.
I was talking with Neil this morning and he mentioned we could go all the way back to Abraham. I said we could go back even further — to Cain, in Genesis 4:6. Then I thought, we can go all the way back to Adam and Eve. That is as far back as it goes. There is nowhere further to go after that — and yet even there, God's grace is already at work.
Homework: Three Men, Three Second Chances
I rarely do this, but I want to give you a little homework assignment to help you prepare for next week. I want you to look at the lives of three men. There may be others that come to mind as well, and this may stir your thinking in a couple of directions.
The first one is obvious when we talk about second chances. "The word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time." That is Jonah. The second man — how do you not love this guy? His name is Peter. He denies Christ three times, and a month and a half later he delivers a sermon and 3,000 people are converted. The third man is someone we meet in the book of Acts who also wrote a gospel we now have in our Bible. His name is Mark. Mark is at the center of a storm between Barnabas and Paul — two giants of the faith who actually break up over this man. And yet at the end of Paul's life, there is an extraordinary call that Paul sends forth regarding John Mark.
So those are the two points for next week: God is a God of the second chance, and obedience brings blessing and restoration into our lives.
Closing Prayer
Father, thank You for these wonderful truths. Thank You for the reminder that You are indeed a holy God. We see this as men simply look into the ark and thousands are killed. We can go all the way back to the garden, where a piece of fruit is eaten and all of the world is plunged into ruin, separated from You. God, I pray that we would grasp the scope of this gospel that saves us from the consequence of our sin and brings us into right relationship with You. And God, I pray that we would fight — because some of us are going to fight this; it is going to be a far bigger issue for some than for others — that we would fight the struggle to put our confidence in the flesh, in religion, and that instead we would put our confidence in You. Father, thank You for Jesus. Thank You for His life and His death. We worship You this morning and we praise You in His name. Amen.