Embracing Holiness: A Commitment to Christ

So, um, I remember that commercial from back in the day and hearing about that and definitely remembering the phrase "Like Mike." I remember being a kid and even having that stuck in my head: I want to be like Mike. In fact, a number of years later, they made a movie called "Like Mike," and it was just this mindset that he was the greatest of all time. We were watching him play, and you wanted to be like him, right?

But a couple of years ago, right during the pandemic, ESPN came out with a series of TV shows called "The Last Dance." What it was about is the Chicago Bulls from this era, following along. It was a documentary; they had all this footage from back in the day, they interviewed all the players. And some of y'all are not sports fans, and this is all, you know, being lost on you this morning, and that's okay because you can still grasp the main point of what I'm going to get to in just a second.

And that is that they interviewed all these players, and they won all these championships, and they achieved all of this, and the one guy at the middle of it was Michael Jordan, the greatest basketball player of all time, maybe one of the greatest athletes of all time. And he wasn't happy. You could see it as you watched this. The guy is retired now, you know, he's, I don't know, maybe he's in his 50s now or something like that. And you could see that there was this bitterness and this hurt and this regret within him.

As you watch, I wanted to play one of the interviews for y'all, but there was too much language in it, so I couldn't play it for you this morning. I was going to try and bleep it and all that stuff, but I was like, you know, I don't think we should have bleeps in the house of the Lord; it doesn't feel right to me, so I decided not to play it. But I was watching this, and they said all of his teammates, the guys that he was closest to, said, "Yeah, I mean, he was the greatest, but he was a jerk. He was not fun to be around."

He pushed and pushed and pushed. He said you'd be in practice doing push-ups, and Mike would look over at you and say, "You know, get up! We need to do more!" He was just an angry person. And it was that drive, that anger within him that pushed him to be as good as he was. In fact, if you listen to his Hall of Fame acceptance speech, one of the things that Michael Jordan does, years after he's not even playing in the league anymore, is he starts naming reporters from back when he was playing who dissed him in the newspapers, who talked bad about him on TV. And he's still carrying that guilt with him.

He names the high school coach who you may remember famously cut him his freshman year of high school and didn't let him play on the varsity team. He names that coach's name and says, "Look at me now!" And I get it, you know, you want to prove people wrong. But here's the greatest of all time, made millions of dollars, had an ad campaign saying "Be like Mike," and he's unhappy.

Jordan says in one of the episodes of "The Last Dance," he said, "It's funny, but a lot of people told me they would like to be Michael Jordan for a day or a week, but let them try to be Michael Jordan for a year and see if they like it. See if they like it, because I don't think that they quite understand that it's no fun."

I mean, we have people in the world that we look at, and we think, "I'd like to be like them. I'd like to have the money that they have. I'd like to have the influence that they have." Or maybe you're not thinking of someone famous, and it's just somebody that you know from your life, and you think, "I'd like to be like them." It might be a totally innocent thing; you might think, "I want to be like my dad," or "I want to be like my mom," or "like my aunt or my uncle or my grandparents. I want to be like them."

But church, today, and this might be a little bit of a cheesy transition, the thing and the person that we need to be like is Jesus. And I know that you get that today, and you hear that today, but I also think there's a lot of Christians who walk around saved, but they aren't like Jesus. Because I've known so many people in my life who accepted Jesus at an altar, but their life didn't really change a whole lot.

I still see the anger, and I still see the frustration, and I still see bitterness from time to time. In fact, I've experienced that in my own life. From the time that I got saved, I've had plenty of moments where I wasn't happy, or things didn't feel good, or things didn't feel right, or I felt depressed. And I've famously—not famously, but I've often talked about my own struggles with anxiety with you before, church.

The things that we look around our lives and we regret, and we wish were different. A lot of us have been saved, but we're still living paycheck to paycheck, and things are hard, and life is pretty miserable. We think, "If I just had this, if I just had that, if things were just squared away in this area of my life, then..." But the truth is that this life is never going to be perfect, and it's never going to be easy. There's always going to be something that, even when things are going well, that rears its head and comes into our lives.

So I want to ask you today, not only do you want to be like Jesus, but are you like Jesus? Does your life reflect Jesus to the world around you, or is it reflecting something else, someone else? Is it reflecting bitterness? Is it reflecting pain? Is it reflecting anger?

And let me ask you a question a step further. Think about the people that you know. There are people that we want to reflect good things to, right? Like, I'm your pastor; you want to reflect good things to me, right? When you're around me, you want to have it all together, right? You don't want anybody thinking that you're weak or whatever. It's kind of like you walk into church, "How are you doing?" "I'm great!" But your week has just been like a war zone, right?

We want to reflect good to those kinds of people. But think about your enemy or the people who hurt you. What are you reflecting to them? Sometimes around here, Tish and I get talking and laughing because sometimes, you know, we run a business on the daycare side of things, and sometimes we have to let some people go and find another place to get a paycheck, right?

And here's this person who we've known for years, who has a sweet spirit, who just all of a sudden turns ugly when something like that happens. And, you know, it's tough to be a manager like that and to be a boss like that, but then you see a person's true colors in that moment.

And here's the thing: even if I were fired from a place, I still want to reflect Jesus in that moment and in that place. And that's part of the heart of what we're getting at with our message today. And that is what the word "Christian" actually means.

Okay, I've shared this with you before, but let me get into it again. The original Greek word for "Christian" is "christianos." And you can see what it would look like: "Christianos." The Greek, you can see, sounds like the "C," right? The "k" sound.

It's made up of two words. You can see I've broken it down up there. The first one is "chrisos." "Chrisos" actually in Greek means "anointed." And so Jesus having the name "Christ" added to him, it wasn't like his last name, okay? "Mr. Christ, this is Mrs. Christ." You know, that's not how it worked. And these are all the little Christ kids. You know, obviously, Jesus wasn't married, didn't have kids, but you get what I'm going for, right? It wasn't his last name. Joseph wasn't "Joseph Christ," okay?

It was a title: the anointed, the Messiah, the Savior, right? So when people started calling him "the Christ," they were calling him "the anointed," right? The one who's gonna save us. Okay? And so we see "chrisos" means to anoint or the anointed.

And then "I-A-N," or as you see it there in the Greek, would be "anos," means "little ones," okay? Like children, little ones. Kind of like, you ever heard someone say, "Oh, my kids, my mini-me"? You ever heard somebody say that before, right? That's kind of what it's saying there, right? That we are to be the mini-mes of Jesus, right? We are the little ones. We are the anointed little ones. I love that, right? It's such a cool phrase.

I just think that it encapsulates what I want to be as a Christian so much: a little anointed one. I'm not Jesus himself, right? But I'm a little version, hopefully, wherever I'm going, of Jesus, right? That somehow, no matter how poor I might be at times, there are moments where I am just totally following the leading of God in that place. I am a little version of the anointed Jesus in that place.

And you might be thinking, "Well, Pastor, a little Jesus? That sounds kind of sacrilegious." In fact, there's a quote that takes us even one step further from C.S. Lewis, one of the great famous Christian writers of our era, and he said, "The church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ and to make them little Christs."

Okay? And it's a powerful... And before I get any further, can you bring up that QR code again, Shelly? Can you bring that up for us? I mentioned last week that I have a sermon companion that I'm putting up for y'all. If you scan that QR code with your phone, all the main points are already built right in there, okay?

And links to the YouTube songs that we did for worship, links to online giving, links to the live stream, a link to a 15-day 1 John devotional, all kinds of stuff, okay? I'm gonna hopefully keep building that out. So you can go ahead and... Can everybody zoom in enough to get that? Is that working? All right. Do I need to make it bigger next week, or do you think that's big enough?

If you can't scan it for some reason, text someone who did and have them send you the link, okay? Anyway, so let me jump back in. That quote from C.S. Lewis says, "The church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs."

And you might think that C.S. Lewis is being a little bit tongue-in-cheek there, that doesn't actually mean that we should be little Christs. Well, I'll say this: we are not actually gods, okay? That's not what he's saying, and that's not what the word "Christian" means. But what it does mean is that when we ask Jesus—when we're kids, we say, "Do you want to ask Jesus into your heart?" Right? What do you think we mean by that? Just cliché? Or are we asking Jesus to be inside of us, right? His presence to be with us at all times?

And so if I have his presence in me and I'm going out into my neighborhood, I'm going to my work, I'm going to my family, then I am carrying Jesus into that place, right? And it's not that I am Jesus, but Jesus is in me, right? And so in a way, we are bringing Christ to that.

And so you could almost take it as far as saying that our spirit, if it's one with Christ, has the same spirit as Christ, okay? And that's a little bit of a big thought for us to think. But the reason why I'm keying in on it so much is because I want us to reflect Jesus everywhere that we go.

When I shared this quote a few years ago, a man from our congregation pulled me aside after church and said, "Pastor, I enjoyed your sermon. You're a good guy and a good preacher, and I don't want to have a problem with you, but we're not little Christs. We can't be Christ. We can never be as good as Christ." And I just don't agree with that.

Now, let me tell you, I love this man. I want to say that I'm not trying to make him sound bad. He's with Jesus today, and I spoke at his funeral, so there's no problems, okay? I'm not mad at him, but he missed the point, as a lot of us do. The point of being a Christian church is not just to get saved or to get baptized.

Man, you know what? I love it when someone stops me and says, "Pastor, you know, I've got some stuff in my life, and I want to give it over to God." And that's happened a number of times, right in front of my house on the sidewalk. You see, everybody in the neighborhood knows I'm a pastor, right? That house has been the pastor's house for how many years, Becky? Do you remember? I don't know, 60 years? Something like that. It's been the pastor's house for that long.

And so, you know, that's where the pastor lives. And I had somebody say to me once, "Didn't you used to be bald?" And I said, "Well, that was the last pastor." "No, I'm pretty sure it was you." And I was like, "I'm pretty sure it wasn't." You know? And so I think we just all—the pastors of this church just start to blend into everybody's mind at some point, right?

If you don't know, the two previous pastors didn't have much hair here, did they? And, you know, oh, y'all—oh, John McGonagall said to me once when I got here, he said, "Finally, we got a pastor with some hair." And that's funny because you may remember he was a barber, right?

So anyway, I'm joking, right? But they come to—I mean, what am I talking about? I don't even know how I got here. Church, what was I talking about? So anyway, there was a man who said all of this to me, and we kind of missed the point.

Because when we pray with somebody—when I pray with someone, I've led people to Christ on the sidewalk out here on the side of the road before who said, "You know, I want to give my life to Jesus. I want to ask for forgiveness for this stuff I've been doing. I know I'm living wrong." And I say, "Great! Let's pray." And we pray. But then I say, "I expect to see you in church on Sunday morning." And they go, "Uh, uh..." You know?

And the problem is we want the salvation; we want the freedom from the sin, but we're not sometimes willing to do what it takes to actually live for Christ. You see, God calls us to more than just salvation; he calls us to Christ-likeness, right?

You remember those bracelets, WWJD, that we used to wear around back in, you know, 2001 or whatever it was? And it says, "What would Jesus do?" And the whole point was to remind me to live like Jesus as I went throughout my day.

In fact, I would go so far this morning—I might offend somebody with this one—I would go so far this morning to say that if you have accepted Christ as your savior but your life does not look any different and does not reflect Christ, then you may not actually be saved, okay? Because all you did was take the easy thing to grab but not actually commit to following after Jesus Christ in your life, right?

Because I can go and I can do something that gives me an immediate reward, but that's not what Jesus is calling us to. He says to his disciples, "Take up your cross and follow me." Do you want to carry a cross? It's heavy; it's got old splintery wood. It's going to give you all kinds of sores on your shoulders. It's hard work. I mean, Jesus died on one. Do you think that we like to say the road is easy to Christ? Yeah, to get there. But then after that, what does it say? The gate is narrow, and few will actually enter. Why? Because Jesus requires and asks us and commands us and directs us to say, "I want you to follow me. Take up your cross and follow me."

Because accepting Christ once at an altar does not actually equal following him. It just means you took advantage of an offer someone was giving you, right? And it's a transaction. Then Jesus doesn't want a transaction; he wants all of you. He wants everything that we have.

In fact, he goes so far to say in 1 Peter chapter 1, the Spirit inspires the author to say, "As obedient children..." As obedient children. And remember last week we talked about how we are children of God? Do you remember that? How we're adopted into the family of God?

And so, as obedient children—man, could someone show me an obedient child? That would just be wonderful. Help us. This week has been a fun one; I'll just say it that way, okay? It's been fun. Miles is like this—beside what Miles is like—obsessed with me, you guys. Like, if I'm not holding him, "Oh, Daddy, up! Daddy, up!" If I'm not paying attention to him, he wants to cook. If I'm cooking, he wants to go into the bathroom with me and watch. By the way, if he's not with me, he's not happy. It's exhausting, right?

But he's still my child. And so what the Lord says through Peter here is, "As obedient children, do not conform to the evil desires you had when you lived in ignorance."

Don't go on yet; go back. Do not conform to the evil desires that you had when you lived in ignorance. Okay? Do you know what this indicates to me, church? That when we accept Christ, if we're going to be obedient in following him, then the things we did before we were a Christian, we shouldn't do those anymore.

We shouldn't do those anymore. We shouldn't speak the same way; we shouldn't use the same kind of language; we shouldn't act the same way. And you know what? It's hard, right? A bunch of kids at daycare this week were asking me, "Well, what happens if you stub your toe and you say a bad word? Does that mean you go to hell?" I was like, "First off, I think God is understanding. I don't think God wants to send anyone to hell."

And they never said the word "hell." They said, "Do you go to down there?" It was so cute. "Do you go to down there if you say a bad word?" And I said, "God loves you, and he does not want you to go to down there," right?

So we were talking about this, and it was a really good conversation. But what the scripture is saying here is don't conform to the ways that you—the things that you did, the person that you were. And that means some of us today who are here right now, some of us really need to hear just that sentence today.

And I'm not saying this to make you feel guilty or bad, okay? But some of the things that you do or have done, God wants those things to be different in your life, okay? You know, there's this thing that happens when I pray with people on the sidewalk sometimes, or when someone accepts Christ.

And I remember praying with a mom from the daycare once, and she accepted Jesus, and I invited her to church, and she never came, right? And then I see her with her kids, and there's still that snapping and angry and cursing at her kids. And I think, "Yeah, she accepted Jesus, but nothing about your life has changed."

You see, the past might have been washed away, but the present just kept rebuilding on the stuff that was there before. You know, so as obedient children, as people who are following, as disciples, as learners—you know that we're disciples, "methetes" in Greek, also means "learner," right? As you're learning how to follow God, don't conform to the evil desires that you had when you lived in ignorance.

The next part says this: "But just as he who called you is holy, so you should be holy in all you do." For it is written, "Be holy because I am holy." And that "be holy because I am holy," you can find that in Leviticus. It says it like five or six different times in Leviticus, and I don't have these on the screen.

Leave that up for us, Shelly, okay? What you have there. But Leviticus 11:44 says, "I am the Lord your God; consecrate yourselves," which is a word of saying dedicate, commit yourselves, "and be holy because I am holy."

Verse 45: "I am the Lord who brought you up out of Egypt to be your God; therefore be holy because I am holy." Leviticus 19:2: "Speak to the entire assembly of Israel and say to them, 'Be holy because I, the Lord your God, am holy.'"

Leviticus chapter 20, verse 7 says, "Consecrate yourselves; dedicate your—excuse me—dedicate yourselves and be holy because I am the Lord your God." So we are commanded to be holy.

Let's just crowdsource the definition of holy really quick. What do you think the word holy means? Give me one or two words, maybe a short sentence to describe it. Pop? What's that? Cleansing? Yeah. Set apart? Becky, that's the right answer right there. That's actually the Hebrew answer for holiness, that the word holy literally means set apart.

But it means more than that as well. So throughout some other ideas—pure? Yeah. Anybody? Come on, I want someone who's so introverted it's painful to tell me. Okay, I'm just kidding. What does the word holy mean? Christ-like? Yeah, absolutely.

So this word holy is a big word. And I remember hearing this growing up in the Church of the Nazarene. There's a well-known hymn that's kind of our battle cry: "Holiness unto the Lord." Right? We sing it every year at District Assembly. Sometimes we'll sing it here on a Sunday morning. Thought about doing it this week, but, believe it or not, didn't have it in my computer program that I'm using.

So anyway, this—in the Church of the Nazarene, we're about holiness, and holiness means all these things that were just said. Bill, you said Christ's likeness. Becky said set apart. Joyce said pure. K, what did you say? Cleansing? Yeah. Holy essentially means what we're talking about today: to be like Jesus, to be like God.

Now, I hear that phrase, and I hear this verse, and it says, "Be holy because I am holy." And it said before, "Do this, be obedient, follow after me. Be holy because he is holy." And I want you to be holy too. And I remember reading that as a kid, as a teenager, as a college student when I was right in this stage of life trying to figure everything out, you know, and making lots of mistakes along the way and doing lots of sinful things, etc., etc., etc.

And I remember reading this, and I'm thinking, "How am I supposed to be holy? I am jacked up!" You know? Like, I do not have my life in order, and I was a pastor's kid, right? And so some of y'all have come from tough backgrounds and tough situations, and you're hearing your pastor right now read this verse that says, "Be holy as I am holy," and you're thinking, "How in the world am I ever gonna do that?"

And we like to say this phrase: "Nobody's perfect," right? We hear that. And for a lot of people, the word holy is a synonym for perfect. I think the Bible is telling them you need to be perfect as God is perfect, but that's not what the word holy is, okay? It's not meant to say perfect.

But make no mistake—and this is our main point here, one of our main points here—that we are meant to be holy like Jesus is holy, period, okay? End of sentence. We are meant to be holy like Jesus is holy.

But I liked—or not liked, but I tried to explain those verses away. Well, God doesn't really mean be holy; he says, "Like I'm holy," so maybe he means holy-ish, you know? Holy sort of. And I would make deals with God, and I'd make deals with myself, and I'd try to be better at the things that I knew I was bad at, right?

I would put rules in place for myself, and I would add guidelines to things. And, you know, Elise and I were dating at the time, and so we'd say things like, "You know, we're gonna set these boundaries in our relationship to make sure that we don't do anything sinful before we're married," you know, all these kind of stuff.

We'd make all these deals and try to put rituals and rules for ourselves in place so that we could be holy. And a lot of you were raised in an era in church when it was like that. There were lots of rules. You know, you can't go to the movies, and you can't go dancing because movies could have bad language in them, could lead you down a bad path, could have this in them.

And dancing, well, we all know what happens at the club, you know what I'm saying, right? And some of y'all are like, "I don't know what you're saying. I've been nazarene-ing my whole life, Pastor."

But, you know, dancing can lead to, you know, being too close to a female or, you know, whatever, and then you start sinning at this. So we put all these rules in place to try to keep ourselves holy. But y'all heard the phrase "rules are meant to be broken," right? It's in our nature that we'll mess up. We just will.

And so holy doesn't mean, "Kathy, hold yourself to perfection, and if you fail, then you're not holy. And if you're not holy, then you don't go to heaven." Right? That's tough, but that's the way that a lot of us have thought about living a Christ-like life for a long time.

And when I read that phrase, "Be holy like I am holy," that's what I thought too. I think many of us end up in this place where we try—we know we're saved, but we often mess up. We get angry; we get ugly. Then we try to make amends with God, and we decide, "You know what? Next time I'm going to be better. I'm going to try harder."

And that works for a little while, but something happens, and we get off track again. We sin; we fall short of the glory and the holiness of God. And our passage today from 1 John chapter 3 indicates that if we go on sinning after we're saved, that we really aren't saved.

So if you're able, would you please stand with me for the reading of the word from 1 John chapter 3 today? John writes this: "Dear friends, now we are children of God." We're adopted; we're children of God; we're saved, right? "And what we will be has not yet been made known, but we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him." Holiness, right? We shall be like him.

That when Christ appears, we shall be holy as he is holy, okay? Giving you a little precursor to the rest of the message. "For we shall see him as he is." What does that indicate? That seeing Christ as Christ is holy makes me holy. Amen?

"All who have this hope in him purify themselves just as he is pure. Everyone who sins breaks the law; in fact, sin is lawlessness. But you know that he appeared so that he might take away our sins, and in him is no sin. No one who lives in him keeps on sinning. No one who continues to sin has either seen him or known him."

"Dear children, followers, learners, disciples, little ones, do not let anyone lead you astray." What leads me astray? And what that sin is, okay, in my life, okay? "The one who does what is right is righteous just as God is righteous, but the one who does what is sinful is of the devil because the devil has been sinning from the beginning. The reason the Son of God appeared—oh, this is good—was to destroy the devil's work. No one who is born of God will continue to sin because God's seed remains in them. They cannot go on sinning because they have been born of God."

"And this is how we know who the children of God are and who the children of the devil are. Anyone who does not do what is right is not God's child, nor is anyone who does not love their brother and sister."

This is the word of God for us, the people of God. Thanks be to God.

So you may be seated. So there's this challenging thought here, this challenging set of verses that say, "Be holy as I am holy." And if you're not doing what God wants you to do, then you're not a child of God. And this is what I got to before: that we can't just accept Christ and then live however we want.

We can't just accept Christ as a "get out of jail free" card and then just do whatever we want the rest of the time. More so than that, I don't think anyone would think they can just do whatever they want, but our lives reflect that things haven't changed.

So if things haven't changed in me in the way that I'm living, then something must be off. And that's true because when I was interviewing to be a pastor—right, not here, but my licensure to be a pastor—they looked at me and said, "Are you entirely sanctified?" And all I could think about was the stuff that I'd done recently that was sinful and wrong, and I said, "Yes," right? I am entirely sanctified because I thought that's the answer I'm supposed to say, right?

But I knew that I wasn't entirely holy. So I'm thinking, "What gives here?" Because I've tried to be holy; I've tried to be Christ-like, but I fail.

Anybody ever failed at being Christ-like before? Wow, only like three people. The rest of y'all are very good. Good job! Wow, I am amazed. I should have stopped preaching; y'all could teach me something, maybe. You know what I'm saying?

So what gives? If I can't be perfect and I can't even always be good all of the time, I know what I'm supposed to do, but I don't always do it. And I know what I'm not supposed to do, and sometimes I do that instead. That's what Paul wrote in Romans chapter 7. Flash it on the screen for us real quick, Shelly, if you will.

If we're supposed to be holy but we can't really achieve holiness, then there must be something more here, right? Some other way, some other path to holiness. So I want to look at that today—a quick but deep dive on the word holy.

So you've probably heard this word, and you're saying it this morning. In fact, I know you've heard it. And a lot of times we think being holy means being a morally good person, and that isn't wrong, but it might lead us to think that God is holy because he's morally good, right? God is morally good, but that's not the reason that he is holy.

Because holiness—and this is our main point for us—holiness is about more than just being morally good, okay? It's about so much more than that. In the Bible, the idea of holiness is even bigger and more rich, and what it's really describing is how God is the creative force behind the whole universe. He's the one and only being with the power to make a world full of such beauty and life.

And so all of these abilities, they make God utterly unique, as Becky said earlier, set apart. Holiness means to be set apart for a purpose. The word holy in Hebrew is "qodesh," all right? And you should be able to see this on the screen. It means holy, but it means set apart. It means unique. It means pure.

So when Christ says to us, "Be holy as I am holy," he's not saying, "Be perfect as I am perfect." He is saying, "Be pure and be set apart for my purposes. Be unique to the world." Right? That the world has one way of living, and I want you to be different than that.

And God's way of living—God himself—is different than our world. And so God is holy, but not only is God just holy, but God is the source of all holiness. God is the source of all good, right?

Have you ever heard someone say, "Well, I'm a good person, but I'm not a Christian. Does that mean I'm going to go to hell?" I think that person is a good person because they are still God's creation, right? They are only good because they are God's creation.

They may not have accepted Christ as their savior, but the goodness that you see in this world is God's doing, period. Do you get that, church? No one said amen there. Kathy said, "Right." And I'm not trying to toot my own horn, but do you hear what I'm saying? All of the good things in the world are God's doing, right?

And whether someone accepts Christ as their savior or not, he is still using them for good things for his children, right? So when some atheistic society, you know, comes up with a good plan to serve the hurting people and the hungry people and give them food, God is giving them that idea, right?

Because at our base, at our core, we are not good people, but all good things come from the Father who is above, right? It's literally what the Bible says to us, okay?

So we can still do good things, but we may not be good people. That's a different diatribe that we don't need to go down today. But the word "kodesh" means to be set apart, unique, and purified—pure for God's purposes. He's the source of all goodness.

And a helpful way to think of God's holiness is by using the sun as a metaphor, okay? The sun is unique in our solar system. I mean, it's not unique in the universe, but it's unique in our solar system in that it gives life, it gives warmth, it gives energy to our planet. It's really powerful, and it's a source of all the beautiful life on our planet.

So in our analogy, you could say that the sun is holy because it's unique, and it's there for a purpose, right? The closer you get to the sun, the more intense it gets. And it's that very power there that the sun has—the same power that gives life—that would cause you to disintegrate if you were in its presence, right?

If you were actually—in fact, if you went and laid out on your driveway and sun-tanned every day, you would disintegrate in the presence of the sun, right? You'd get cancer, and it would ravage your body, and you would die from that, right?

Even being there—and now we put the sunblock on, right? Now, some of y'all lived in the days when you put the Crisco on your face to try and get a good even tan, you know? But y'all get what I'm saying, right? I mean, my dad has this skin cancer, and it's probably because of the radiation from the sunbeams, right?

It's just that the closer we get to the sun, the power that it has that gives us life also could take our life away. And it's that very power and goodness that generates all this life, and that's what makes the sun so dangerous—that if you get too close to it, it'll annihilate you.

And in the same way, there's this paradox at the heart of God's own holiness because if you are impure, his presence is dangerous to you—not because it's bad, but because it's so good.

And the first time we see this happen, this paradox, is in the story of Moses, right? Do you remember Exodus chapter 3? As Moses heard the voice of God, God said, "Don't come any closer." Right? And I don't think he meant, "Don't come." I think he's saying, "Moses, don't come any closer because if you do, you'll die."

Because Moses had impurity in him; he wasn't completely holy. He was just a man. And God said, "Don't come any closer, for someone who is sinful and impure can't be in my presence because my goodness, my holiness is too overwhelming for them. Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground."

And the scripture goes on to say that Moses covers his face in fear, right? The presence of God was fear-inducing to him because he wasn't Christ-like in that moment. It's this intense intensity of holiness that has explored even more in the stories of the Ark of the Covenant.

You remember the Ark of the Covenant? It's this golden trunk-like thing that carried the presence of God in the Old Testament. And if people touched it, they would die—not because God wanted to kill them, but because they weren't pure, holy, okay?

And this kind of seems like what's happening here. These are these, like, magical stories or something like that. No, we see it all throughout scripture. We even see it in the New Testament as well.

And what we find here is that there are people who can't enter God's presence because they're impure. You may remember that the priests in the temple—the Ark of the Covenant was kept in this special room in the temple. It was called the Holy of Holies or the Most Holy Place.

And no one could enter that room but once a year. And when that priest went in there to enter that room, if he wasn't pure and holy, he would die. There's a legend that says—and it's not, we don't know if it's true or not—but there's a legend that says that they would tie a rope around the waist of the priest that was, you know, 50 feet long, and they would put bells on the priest's clothes so that if when he walked into that room, if he died from being in the presence of God, they could hear the bells ring and pull him back out of the room, right?

I mean, it's wild. We see that when you're in the presence of God, you are required to be holy. And this is why 1 Peter says, "Be holy as I am holy." Be like me. And that's a high bar here. It's difficult.

The Bible spends a lot of time talking about being pure—morally pure and ritually pure—which is a state where you separate yourself from anything related to death, dead bodies, disease, skin, bodily fluids. Touching any of these impure things would make you impure.

And if you think about it, I don't want to touch those things because they are impure. So it wasn't God just saying, "You can't be in my presence if you're impure." It was God protecting his people, right?

He's saying, "Don't touch dead animals because you're going to get a disease from them, right? Don't touch someone's nasty leprosy on their arm because it's going to give you nasty leprosy on your arm." Right? Kathy, you had poison ivy recently; I didn't want to be around you, okay? I love you; I didn't want to touch you, okay? You know what I mean, right?

So God gave the Israelites really clear instructions on how to wash, how to be pure, and all of these things. He didn't just do it because, "You know, you can't be in my presence." And being pure, he did it because they needed those instructions.

But we also see throughout scripture where he gives us instructions on how to be morally pure—the things we ought to do and the things we ought not to do. Why? Because God wants to be with his children, but he knows that if there is sin within us, that we can't be in his presence.

Are you with me, church? We're doing a little bit of a deep dive. The Old Testament has even more to say about holiness and purity. About 600 years after we see in the story of Isaiah this super interesting story.

So the prophet Isaiah—now I'm running out of time. This is such good stuff, church. I don't want to rush it. I don't want to rush it, okay? So where we are right now, let me put a pin in this, and we'll come back to it next week.

But here's the challenge that we hear today that I want us to take home: that God desires for us to be holy like he is holy, okay? He desires that we would live like him. And so how I want you to pray this week is, "Lord, reveal to me areas of my life that might be outside of how you want me to be and how you want me to live."

I want to be like you. Your scripture clearly says that I need and I'm supposed to be holy like you. And so, God, if there's anything within me that is not holy like you are holy, that I don't see, reveal that to me, Lord. Make it clear to me so that I might be able to be in your presence, okay?

And that's a big, huge thing that we, as followers of Christ, if we want to be followers of Christ, then Christ will reveal things to us about the way that we are living that need to change.

And here's what we're going to talk about next week: that it's God who gives the power to actually do the changing, okay? Because that's the way I've lived for many years is I thought I need to be holy; I'm going to try harder to be holy. And sometimes I can do okay at that, right?

I mean, sometimes I can, you know, hey, I made it—what do they say? Those signs at the factory that say, "200 days since a work accident"? You know? I know 12 days since Cam was unholy, right? I'm doing pretty good, right?

And that's the trap that we can get stuck in, thinking I need to be holy because the Bible says, "Be holy as I am holy." And so today, this week, what I want you to do is ask the Lord, "Hey, if there are areas in my life, things that I have a blind eye to, Lord, open my eyes to those things."

I want to invite the worship team to come back up, and we're going to sing that song "Holy Forever" to close today. And what I want to encourage you to do is, as we sing this song, think about what we talked about earlier—being in the temple of God.

And what I want to remind you of is that we can't be in the temple of God if we're living outside of the will of God. Now, I don't want anyone to leave here and think, "Well, I stink, and there's no hope for me," because next week we're going to talk about how Jesus is the actual real hope for you to get to holiness.

And it really has a whole lot more to do with his efforts than yours and what he did than what you can do. So don't beat yourself up this week because that's the big climax that I didn't get to today and I wanted to get to, and I don't want to rush it.

The whole climax is that Jesus does the purifying work in us. First, we have to be willing to come to his feet and say, "Lord, here are these things in me that I know are not in you, and I want to give these over to you and ask you to start working on me in these ways."

Heavenly Father, Lord, we thank you for your love today. We thank you for your presence with us and your holiness in us. God, I pray, Lord, that we would be people who see, hear, know, and follow your will and your leading and your guidance in our lives.

And Lord, that if there's anything within me that I need to give over to you this week, Lord, I pray that you would reveal that. I don't want to be outside of your will; I don't want to be outside of your presence. And so, God, open my eyes and my heart to those things that you would have me be, that you would have me do—the ways, Lord, that you want to reflect your goodness and your holiness in me.

Lord, we thank you; we love you. We pray these things in your name. Amen. Church, would you stand and sing this song with us?