Guarding Holiness: The Call to Personal Purity

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Holiness cannot be transmitted from person to person. That's the message here. Okay, now the opposite of that, but if anyone who is unclean from a corpse, he's touched a dead body, and he's unclean, he goes and touches one of his food, will that become unclean? Yes, sin can be transmitted. [00:31:01]

Holiness cannot be transmitted. You got to get it directly from God through the Holy Spirit. Sin can be transmitted by other people with whom you associate. That's the message here, very simple. I mean, you can use a human illustration from the operating theater. [00:31:47]

Holiness cannot be transmitted, but sin can, and so it's very important to be careful that we don't allow other people to transmit their uncleanness to us and defile us. I mean, if you think yourself as a, say, a sterilized hand that the Lord wants to use. [00:32:56]

The amount of divorce there is in Christendom today. Malachi chapter 2, God says, "I hate divorce." It's a very clear word. In case you haven't seen it, let me read it to you. Two verses in Malachi, Malachi 2 verse 16, "I hate divorce." [00:33:55]

How is it we have a Christendom today which not only accepts divorce, marries divorced people, and pastors become divorced, marrying their secretaries? Where is Christendom gone? And the sad thing is, where are the people who raise their voice against all this? [00:34:42]

Look at the number of Christians, born-again Christians, who watch R-rated movies. How does that happen? They say, well, that little bit of uncleanness is only for about 5 seconds. The movie is 2 hours, it's only 5 seconds. I'll tell you something, particularly if you're a man. [00:35:25]

You polluted your mind forever because you didn't understand that sin is easily transmitted. Holiness is not, and the devil is the god of this world who controls the entertainment world and tells Christians, oh well, that's innocent, that's not so bad, there's a good storyline there. [00:36:08]

Men who have polluted their minds in their younger days with pornography and other things like that will tell you from their experience that the memory of that is not easily erasable from the mind. It comes back again and again, even 50 years later. [00:37:14]

We have to see this as a far greater treasure than anything else that we can have on this Earth. And he tells us a story here of people who turned away from him in verse 15. There were people, he gives the example of believers who took these. [00:40:41]

If you are an earthen pot today, not of much value, and you want to be a person of value to God, here's what you must do. He says in this large house, verse 20, there are these two types of vessels, but if you, verse 21, cleanse yourself. [01:01:01]

You can be one of those valuable vessels of honor, sanctified, useful to the master, prepared for every good work. So he's saying that you can convert yourself from an earthen pot to a golden vessel. How? By cleansing yourself. [01:01:39]

Let us cleanse ourselves from all defilement of flesh and spirit, 2 Corinthians 7:1. Thus you can perfect holiness in the fear of God. Perfecting holiness in the fear of God is a message which is almost these guys who claim it still get angry and tell lies. [01:03:16]

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