This sermon delves into the importance of holiness, exploring what it means to be holy and how it is connected to knowing God's will. It also touches on the topics of reproof and rebuke. The speaker emphasizes the necessity of holiness for true happiness, highlighting the correlation between holiness and happiness. The sermon challenges common misconceptions about holiness, repentance, and the lordship of Jesus Christ, urging listeners to align with biblical teachings and prioritize God's honor above all else.

It's good to be with you, and we're really going to do three distinct things this week in the short time I have with you. The first one I want to look at is the subject of holiness and what it means to be holy. And then later on we'll look at the question of how to know God's will, which is associated with this. And then finally, if we get time, we'll look at reproof and rebuke. So will you turn in your Bibles please to the book of Matthew, Matthew chapter 5, Sermon on the Mount. I want to read to you a few clips from some famous Christians of the past, first by Charles Finney in his book, The Way of Salvation. He has a message called, On Being Holy. And 1 Peter 1.16 says this, Be ye holy, for I am holy. That's a command of God. And Finney says, This precept enjoins holiness, and our first business should be therefore to inquire what holiness is. And then he says this, Another reason why we should be holy is that God requires it of us. He has made us in His own image, like Himself, in the attributes of intellect, feeling and free will, and therefore for the same reasons that make Him require holiness of Himself, He must require it of us. He must require it of us because it is His duty to do so. He requires us to be holy because He cannot make us happy unless we will become holy. Our nature being what it is, it is forever impossible that we should be happy without being holy. God is happy because He is holy. He knows that we exist under the same law of nature and necessity, hence His benevolence prompts, nay compels Him to use His necessary means of securing our happiness. I want you to tie those two things together. Happiness, holiness is a prerequisite for genuine happiness. That God has no way of making a man happy, truly happy, until He has made him holy. And we're going to read a passage from Matthew 5, straight after the Beatitudes, verse 13. Matthew chapter 5, verse 13. Ye are the salt of the earth, but if the salt has lost its savor, wherewith shall it be salted? It is henceforth good for nothing but to be cast out and to be trodden under foot of man. Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid. Neither do men light a candle and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick, and it gives light to all that are in the house. Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your Father which is in heaven. Think not that I am come to destroy the law or the prophets. I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill. For truly I say to you, till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from this law till all be fulfilled. Whosoever there shall break one of these least commandments and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven. But whosoever shall do and teach them, the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I say to you that except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and the Pharisees, you shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven. Let's look to the Lord in prayer. Our Father we bless you this morning for your word and we pray that the Holy Spirit will speak to our hearts through these scriptures. We pray Lord that you'll challenge us afresh to live a life like Jesus lived. We bless you Lord that you've come down and you've put on display what it's like to live a righteous and a holy life. We pray when we look at this subject that is so neglected today in lives that you'll convict our hearts and speak to us about a lack of holy living. We want to be lights in the world and as it gets darker Lord the light can be seen from further and further away. We pray that you'll make us little candles shining in our own small corners. In Jesus' name we pray that that same fire and love and glory and light that surrounded your life shall bump ours and touch us and ignite us and make us small copies of what Jesus is as you live your life out through us. We pray in Jesus' name, amen. Now every year I minister in a lot of different places and I work with a lot of different organizations and a lot of different evangelistic and missionary movements. My concern is missionary evangelism. So those two major areas of missions and evangelism is something that I have a real love for. I think I've probably seen just about every kind of evangelism there is in the last fifteen years of evangelism. I've seen and done a lot of it. I haven't done a few things. I haven't done karate evangelism yet. I haven't done bowling for blessings or ceramics for Christ, but I've done a lot of them. There is visitation evangelism. There is door-to-door evangelism, which some of you have done. There is beach evangelism. There's street evangelism. There is child evangelism. There's radio evangelism and television evangelism. There is musical evangelism. There's gospel blimp evangelism where you fly over a place and drop tracks on people. There are all different forms. There really is a karate for Christ evangelism where people go and chop a house down to show how strong you can be in the Lord and then preach to people. There is athletes for action that go out and beat the cheese out of you in basketball and then witness to you at halftime as you're licking your wounds. There are all kinds of different movements and messages and methods for evangelism. And then we have some of the major movements in the nation. We have Youth for Christ or Campus Life. Last week I was at a Young Life youth leadership training thing in Northern California. There's Teen Challenge, of course, born out of the vision of Dave Wilkerson, dude who lives next door here, that God's raised up with a very powerful ministry. We have Youth of the Mission, of course, just a little down the road. We've got probably most of the movements for evangelism in Lyndale in ten years' time. We've got Campus Crusade, which does a lot of work both overseas and mostly on university campuses. We've got InterVarsity Fellowship, we've got Child Evangelism Fellowship, there's MAP, and you name it, we have a name and an organization and a movement to go with it. Now I'm going to say something shocking to you. These are all worthless, the Galpai Force included, and not worth the name or the paper that they're printed on unless they are staffed with men and women who are holy like Jesus is. I want to give you now four or five statements that are made today that I consider heretical. The A.W. Tozer has a tape, I don't know if you'll ever get a chance to hear it, but keep your eyes out. It has to be the longest title for a sermon that I've ever seen in my entire life. They probably have to, if they print it on a label, they'd have to take the whole label both sides to fit it in. John asked me what's going to be the title of this series, and I said, I just think we call it Be Ye Holy, make it nice and short. Here was the title of A.W. Tozer's message, one of the last to ever preach to a major youth organization involved in evangelism with young people, in which Tozer in his own words nailed up his own 95 theses like Martin Luther. Many years ago when Martin Luther felt that the Christian church had departed far from the scriptures, he got on the Wittenberg door, not the youth specialties one that's written today, but a real door in the castle in Germany in Wittenberg, and he nailed on that door these 95 theses, his statements of what the scriptures taught as opposed to what was being taught by the majority of church people in his day. And Tozer called this his 95 theses. Here's the title of his message. Evangelical Christianity has left the land of promise and is in captivity to Babylon. That's a long title. And in it he pointed out some changes that had taken place, and Tozer, like many other evangelicals of the past 20 or 30 years who've since then gone on to meet the Lord, had a connection with past preaching and past teaching that many young Christians miss today. What has happened in the early 60s, we had the Jesus movement. There was a great deal of experience. And so people took this as a test of Christianity. Have you had an experience with Christ? And it is important that you have an experience with Jesus. In 15 years of ministry in a number of churches I've met pastors and associate pastors and youth ministers that are in the ministry who do not have an experience with Jesus Christ. And it is far more common than you'd ever imagine. In other words, the nation has many, many unconverted ministers in it. And you wouldn't have to go too far, even in religious Texas, to find many, many churches with unsaved preachers in them. So it is important to have an experience with Christ. As a matter of fact, that's been one whole stream of the three major streams of the Christian church. This has been tied in what's called the mystical tradition. And the mystical tradition has... this is the background of the Quaker movement. Many of the Anabaptists, of course, were in this. The background of the Pentecostal churches, all of those who dwell on having an experience with God. And then, of course, many people in the Charismatic movement, if they trace their roots back to this. There have been famous mystics of the past, Madame Guillaume, Catholic, and St. Francis of Assisi would also fit under this. By mystic, I don't mean somebody who's meditating on their belly button and smelling flowers now and then, though the Christian mystic is somebody who sees the power of God and the reality of Jesus Christ in the creation He made, in the beauties of the things He's done, and the fundamental stress in life is to have a living, ongoing experience with this living God. And holiness involves this. There is a definite work of the Holy Spirit involved in bringing a person through to a holy life. And so that's one-third of the church. Then in the seventies, we begin to discover a problem with experience alone. And that is this. You could have an experience with the wrong Jesus. And Jesus Himself warned that there would be many Jesuses in the last days. There would be people coming, claiming to be Jesus. If you went down to Mexico, you could meet all kinds of Jesuses. They'd fight in a bullring, you know, and stuff like this. There were Jesuses who were not the Bible Jesus in Jesus' day. One man led a rebellion of many, many hundreds of Israelis in Jesus' time, and he was put to death. And he wasn't Jesus. That was his name. The word Jesus, or Joshua today, in the Hebrew equivalent, same word, just simply means Savior. And it could be Savior from communism, it could be Savior from fascism, it could be Savior from anything. So people begin to realize in the aftermath of the Jesus movement in the sixties that there were many false Jesuses going around. There was Jesus Christ Superstar, there was the Jesus of Norman Greenbaum, Spirit in the Sky, never been a sinner, I never sin, I've got a friend in Jesus. And the Bible Jesus said, if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. That truth, who is the Bible Christ? So people realize there's something else you need. We have the second stream now, that which is the stream of Scripture. And of course the people who have championed the bringing back of Scripture and the teaching of Scripture and the immersion of people into the Scriptures have been the Reformation, or the Reformed tradition. And you will find many godly men across this nation who hold up strongly the preaching and the teaching of the Word of God. And I'll say this, whenever the Word of God is preached and taught, in its depth and in its fullness you're going to have some strong Christian people. Then that's two. But there is a third stream. I'll just say in passing, holiness is associated with the Word of God. Thy word is very pure, David said, therefore thy servant loves it. And there is, wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way? By taking heed according to thy word. My whole heart have I sought thee. This second part, Scripture, is also a contributing factor in Bible holiness. Now I come to the third stream, and this is the one I want to point out for you. The third stream is the one most often neglected today, and I believe in the 1980s as the church moves into real troubled times, and the world indeed moves into real troubled times, I think the past will become more and more important. These are the roots of the Christian tradition, and this of course is church history. And here we could possibly point out a weakness with the brand new crop of Christians. Now I don't know how many of you have been saved for ten years or less, but I'd imagine quite a number of you would have become Christians in the last ten years. Could I see your hands if you've become a Christian in the last ten years? Most of you then who have been saved in the last decade would have had maybe come in this way and then been exposed to a lot of this. The great problem if you cut this third one out is this, and by church history I mean the ongoing work of God the Holy Spirit for the last two thousand years as well as biblical church history. It's this, that it is quite possible to have an experience and to sit under certain teaching which uses the Bible and still be completely cut off from the mainstream of the Christian church. In other words, there are many cults who will use the Bible and who will stress some form of experience with God, but whose teaching does not classically match up with what the church has always taught. And here is where the Roman Catholic church, which of course the idea is universal. Catholic doesn't necessarily mean Roman Catholic, but I'm using it in this sense. The Roman Catholic church, their great strength has been church history. You talk to a priest, he won't quote you a lot of scripture or experience, but he'll tell you what Pope Leo the Great said in the fourth century, because their strong suit is what historically the church has taught. Now at this point I'm not going to argue as to what the church's doctrine in this particular part was biblical or not, or whether it matched up with an experience of God. What I want to show you is that these three streams are essential for us to getting a balanced picture of what the church teaches and preaches, what the Holy Spirit blesses and what the scripture says. So when you find something that matches up to the universal experience of these three, the same experience that the great mystics of the past, that which matches scripture and that which historically has been preached and taught in every great move of God and every great saint of God, you have got something worth sinking your teeth into and one million years from now you'll be enjoying more teaching on that same area, because it's really curious. Now let me say this. I do not know of any doctrine in history that is more fought and at the same time more necessary than this one. Be holy, God says, for I am holy. People don't even mind you teaching on that, as long as you don't say it applies to you and now. They don't mind if you say people ought to be holy, we really ought to, you know, as long as you immediately follow it by saying, but you can't be. Nobody can. And that is the crunch of the problem. John Wesley we remember today as the founder of the Methodist church. He would have hated to be called that because all John Wesley wanted to do was to preach the gospel as an Anglican. He was a good Episcopalian minister who was never allowed to preach in his own church. Why did John Wesley, why was he hated so much? Why didn't people like him? Well for one thing he preached the gospel, he told people they had to get saved, which was embarrassing in those days. We're good Episcopalians, what do you mean we have to get saved? What is this saved stuff? His good friend George Whitefield with whom he differed on a number of theological areas but they both loved each other until the day they died and never said bitter words to one another. His good friend George Whitefield used to preach, you must be born again, and almost every time he opened his mouth he said it. Somebody came up to him and said, Mr. Whitefield, why do you always say, you must be born again? He said, because you must be born again. Now John Wesley preached an experience with God, people didn't like that. He spent a lot of time in scripture. Wesley was a scholar, a real studious man who wrote numerous books. John Wesley not only wrote a book on medicine, primitive medicine, which was a major textbook for home medical remedies for almost 200 years and still has some neat things in it. He also wrote a book on electricity. He wrote all kinds of things Wesley did. One of the first books on electricity was written by John Wesley. And this gentleman on the back of his horse had put in 10,000 miles a year on a horse it seemed, this dude, why did people hate him so much? Because he preached this, holiness is a necessity, not an option, it is a must. You must be holy. And he not only expected people to, he demanded that they were. For this reason John Wesley was hated. And people stoned him and it was religious people who fought John Wesley. The street people didn't like him because he said you had to get saved. The church didn't like him because he said you had to really be saved. Charles Finney we have read a clip from. Why didn't they like Charles Finney? Because he was an evangelist, there were quite a few evangelists in Finney's day, but nobody Nobody in Finney's time elicited the same response. Can you imagine a group of people standing around a tree cheering as two figures are hung in effigy and burned on the tree? And there are figures of Charles Finney and his co-libra in prayer, Brother Nash and the people dancing around the burning effigies on the tree are ministers. And 5,000 people come out of a city led by their ministers and one of the ministers says if Finney comes to this city I'll meet him at the gates of the city with cannon. These are preachers. Why did they hate Finney so much? Looking back a hundred years, you know he's safely buried now, we can say oh great man Charles Finney, yes he did some heavy things. If you'd have lived in his day which side would you have been on? Now you can write it down. Holiness has never been a popular teaching, certainly not with the world. And unfortunately many people in the church have opposed it. I want to read something now from Catherine Booth. Here's the mother of the Salvation Army. In one of her books appropriately titled Godliness, she's got another one called Holiness. Now it wasn't because she was short of words, they were her favorite preaching. She said this, I think it must be self-evident to everyone present that it is the most important question that can possibly occupy the mind of man, how much like God we can be. How near to God we can come on earth, preparatory to our being perfectly like him and living as it were in his very heart forever and ever in heaven. Anyone who has the measure of the Spirit of God must perceive that this is the most important question on which we can concentrate our thoughts. And the mystery of mysteries to me is how anyone with any measure of the Spirit of God can help looking at this blessing of holiness and saying, well, even if it does seem too great for attainment on earth, it is very beautiful and very blessed, I wish I could attain it. That, it seems to me, must be the attitude of every person who has the Spirit of God, that he should hunger and thirst after it and feel that he shall never be satisfied till he wakes up in the lovely likeness of his Savior. And yet alas, we do not find it so. This is written 80 years ago. In a very great many instances, the first thing professing Christians do is resist and reject this doctrine of holiness as if it were the most foul thing on earth. I heard of a gentleman saying a few days ago, a leader in one circle of religion, that for anybody to talk about being holy showed they knew nothing of themselves and nothing of Jesus Christ. I said, oh my God, it has come to something if holiness and Jesus Christ are at the antipodes of each other. I thought he was the center and fountain of holiness. I thought that it was in him only we could get any holiness and through him that holiness could be wrought in us. But this poor man thought this idea to be absurd. May God speak for himself. Ever since I heard that sentiment, I've been crying from the depths of my soul, Lord, speak for thyself, powerfully work on the hearts of thy people and awaken them. Take the veil from their eyes and show them what thy purpose in Christ Jesus concerning them is. Do not let them be bewildered and miss the mark. Do not leave them, but Lord, reveal it in their hearts. There is no other way by which it can be revealed and if you will let him, he will reveal it in your heart this morning. Catherine Booth, we'll probably give some more things on that. I had a phone call yesterday from a young man in Reno, Nevada. He called three times. He said, I was at a Jesus festival you spoke at and I got a hold of a couple of your tracts and I've been reading them. He said, I'm in the middle of a Christian community here and he said, I can't sleep and it really bothers me. He said, I believe I'm under conviction and Lynn, my secretary, asked him when he first called him, are you a Christian? He said, well, I've been saved for about two and a half years, I thought, but reading this I'm not sure. Little tracts, counterfeit conversion. So I talked to him for about three quarters of an hour and I said, this is going to cost you a lot of money. He said, I don't care, what I'm getting is better than the phone bill. And we just talked about living a holy life. And he said, well, do you know, this is the first time anybody in this community has ever heard of that? I said, are most of them young Christians? He said, yes. We have cut off all of it. We don't know what preachers and teachers taught and thought about holiness. And I'm not talking about you backslidden people that wrote a lot of books and never did a thing in their life. I'm talking about people who are active in ministry, who are the cutting edges of the great revival movements of our time. I have never met one revivalist in history who did not believe in practical holy living. And this is not even a doctrinal issue. It is not even an issue of the Calvinists and the Armenians, that old bugbear of thousands of years old. For instance, John Wesley was an Armenian. Well, that would be a name you could call him. I don't know why they called him that in heaven. Probably called him a man of God. But anyway, that was his theological thing. He was Armenian. And John Wesley believed in some ways, for instance, the Armenian theology would say this. Here is a man. He used to be holy, but now he's not. He once was a Christian, now he isn't. That's Armenian theology. You could be saved and lost the following day. And if you're looking at being saved from sin, and you're sinning the following day, perhaps they had something. On the other hand, we've got John Calvin. Now you put these two guys, Jacob Arminius and John Calvin, in opposite corners, one with purple trunks, one with white, and that come out, there would be a big slugging match. John Calvin would say, no, you could never be lost. But this is what John Calvin said. John Calvin said, God has elect people. These are Christians. And you prove or demonstrate your election by living a holy life. If you do not live a holy life, you are obviously not elect. You're not saved. Now, that's the two sides of the stream. And I've never met any historical figure who was used in revivals in history who ever did not believe in holy living. They had different ideas on it. They had different ways on how it came. Some preached more on an experience. John Wesley believed in the experience of perfect love. There'd come a time in your life when if God the Holy Spirit dealt with you, he dealt with the roots of sin in your life, and boom, you had an experience of perfect love. And from that time on, you could live a holy life. And then there were those who said, it's the Scripture that purifies. We must meditate and walk in the Word, and then God will purify our hearts by faith. There were others who said, right down through history, God has found people who have lived holy lives. And this, whichever way you get it, you've got to have it. Now, many of them associated this with the baptism of the Holy Spirit. They said when you get the baptism of the Holy Spirit, you will have access to holy living in your life. So, here we have all of these streams. Now, I want to give you these four hairy areas today. And the reason why I think they're heretical areas is because people who have had these two things but are not acquainted with historical teaching of the Christian church on this area have been cut off from that. And so, when you say that, it comes as a great shock to them. And the scary thing about it is to me. People are now justifying unholy lives by using their experiences and by Scripture. They are saying, first of all, I don't know anybody who's holy. Do you? Now, what a horrible thing to do that. It's like walking into the middle of a bar and saying, I don't know anybody here who's a Christian. There can't possibly be any. Jesus came into the world to demonstrate the life of God and the love of God. Just because everybody's baptism doesn't mean to say you have to be. Look, if normal temperature was a hundred and eight, would all the doctors recalibrate their thermometers? If everybody had fever in a country, would they do it? Went to a hundred and fifty-seven, a whole community's dying. So we go, okay, doctors say, well, must be a hundred and fifty-seven. After all, fifty-one percent of the population have it, so it must be it. It's dumb. And Scripture, what is awful is when God's own word which is given to bring us to holy living is used against Him. So I'll say this, no doctrine comes from the Holy Spirit of God that teaches you you cannot be holy. Putting Jesus and His word against the whole central fountain of God? So here are the four things. We're not going to go into detail on these because I want to look at holiness in Scripture, but some of these attach to it. First, the sinner's need is more important than God's honor. I'll spell that the English way. You can cut the U out if you like. All true Britishers at heart will leave the U in, of course. What is this connected to? It's just connected to this. This doctrine is a disguised form of humanism. Puts man at the center. I was very challenged by Paul Ravenhill's message last Sunday where he mentioned that that was really a revelation to me. I never thought of it quite in these terms where he talked about the mark of the beast, 666, is man or humanity taken to its ultimate essence? And I thought, dear Lord, that is humanism. That's the dominant philosophy of our world today. Man sits in the center of the universe. And Paul said that which, anything which begins to, this is a paraphrase, this is not a quote, anything which moves towards that quintessence of man at the center is against Christ. This is like the medieval people who believed that the earth was the center of the universe and the sun revolved around the earth. Where the truth of the matter is, the sun is the center of our particular solar system and the earth revolves around it. We have become medieval in our Christianity. We are thinking that we are the center of the universe and God's sun revolves around us. The truth of the matter, the truth of the universe is the exact opposite. Because of this thought that the sinner's need is more important than God's honor, we have modified the gospel so it will best fit human needs, quote, unquote. And anything that requires sacrifice or discipline or surrender or in any way seems to perhaps take a crack at that human need and puts something higher than human need at its heart is challenged as heresy today. Matter of fact, it would be exceedingly difficult to find preaching around that says, listen, God's needs and His kingdom comes first and everything else is subservient to that. My life isn't as important as the honor of God. I think of the Roman Empire, the first three centuries of the Christian church, where twelve year old boys went out in the arena and died eaten by lions because they refused to drink a token offering to Nero as God. Twelve year old kids. They said, just, all you have to do is just take one sip and say, by that sip we acknowledge the emperor's divine. And they said no. And they went to the lions instead. Hard to find twenty-two year olds that would even stand up for Jesus and be laughed at, let alone be fed to lions. They believed that the sinner's need was not as important as God's honor. That God's honor always came first. The Moravians of the 18th century, they who sold themselves into slavery to win the slaves, they became lepers. They didn't know all the truths of divine healing we do today. They became lepers in order to win the lepers. They joined prisoners, became prisoners to win prisoners. Their motto was to win for the lamb that was slain, the reward of his sufferings. Secondly, this one also has direct bearing on holy living. God's laws are impossible to keep. Now, I've heard that preached and taught. God's laws are impossible for man to keep. Nobody can keep the law of God. How many times have I heard that? How many times have you heard it? God gave His commandments because He knew we wouldn't keep them. That's brilliant, really brilliant. And I'm talking about famous people say that. I've heard it. It's in print. You can see it in writing. God gave us His commandments because He knew we wouldn't keep them. That is, it's like me saying to my little boy, six months, fly around the room, son. Go on, do it. I'm making it even worse. I'll kill you if you don't. This is called the justice of God. Crazy? Listen to the words of Jesus again. Think not I am come to destroy the law or the prophets. I have not come to destroy but to fulfill. Truly I say to you, till heaven and earth pass, not one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from this law till all be fulfilled. Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments and teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven. But whosoever shall do and teach, the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I say to you that except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and the Pharisees, you shall in no case enter the kingdom of heaven. And we'll look a little bit later at the rest of Matthew's gospel where he deals with the sermon on that because this is the real heart and core of what it means to live a holy life. Let me just amplify this a little bit more. Here we are in the middle of the greatest moral landslide in this century. It's being called the post-Christian era. Tremendous moral decay. I can't even think of a time in America's history where sin has been so militantly organized and so politically structured so that people are demanding rights to sin. Now in the old days, if you were a sinner, you sort of, you did it, but it was not ever thought that it was virtue and it was a right of man. It was just thought, well, you know, these are rough days and people have rough times. In the midst of the greatest moral landslide probably this country has ever experienced, in the midst of the most flagrant disrespect for any form of law, people hate government now, they don't care about any form of direction or authority in their lives, it is unblushingly proclaimed from pulpits across this nation that man cannot do what God requires him to do. We have been afraid of this little word and it's not good to be legal. I hope through this series to show you the difference between a legal experience and a gospel one. But remember this, there's something a lot more dangerous than legalism. I'd rather sit under a legal person than the opposite. Answer the word you may not have seen. You ever heard a preacher warn you against antinomianism? Yeah, people go, be careful, you could get into legalism. You ever heard anybody say, careful, you could get into antinomianism? You know what antinomianism is? It's to live without any law in your life. It's to live as if you have no guidelines, no directions. It is to live a life of absolute anarchy. Against any form of moral order or moral law or moral control or guideline in your life. That's antinomianism. Let me ask you a question. What do you think is the biggest problem in this nation? Legalism or antinomianism? Give me a legal church, a guy who says, well, you ought to do this, you know, like Hitler or Santa Claus did, we'll look at later. Give me a guy who says that or at least believes in rights and wrongs even though he's got the wrong way of doing it than a guy who stands up and says there are no rights and wrongs. We called him Jim Jones a little while ago and the world was shocked. Why should you be? People live like that all the time in this nation. We said, well, he thought he was God. He rewrote the rules to suit himself. So does a huge majority of people who profess to call themselves evangelical Christians. Why be shocked? Just because three hundred people die? Tens of thousands of people die every year and lose their souls over this doctrine. Scripture tells us in our weariness of this, we've forgotten the terrible peril of this. The law is a schoolmaster to bring us to Christ. It has limitations, but it can be used. That by the law is the knowledge of sin. Why don't people feel guilty anymore? There's no conviction in the nation because we don't know how to use the law, afraid of it. Gone is the force of moral responsibility that streamed from preaching of men like these ones I've quoted, Wesley and Booth and Finney and Fox and others. It made men weep. Gone is the heartbreak of the psalmist for the honor of God when he cried in Psalm 119, verse 53, horror hath taken hold of me because of the wicked that forsake thy law. Can you imagine a man saying, I'm horrified because of the wicked? I walk down and it fills me with horror. It's like a terror movie to me. It's like Halloween or prophecy or something. I walk down the streets and I see people living like this and it scares the peanuts out of my M&Ms. Psalm 119, verse 136, David said, rivers of water run down my eyes, rivers of water run down my eyes because they keep not thy law. Man is pictured today as helpless to obey God. He cannot help sinning. The Bible says they hated me without a cause. There was no reason, God said. Thirdly, and here is, can you still see this? Probably not. I'll put it up. Three. This doctrine has probably helped a great deal towards this. It's called the doctrine of the divided Christ. A.W. Tozer calls it. Christ might be accepted as Savior but not as Lord. In other words, it says this, God can take care of your future. He can get you to heaven and keep you from hell if you accept him as Savior. However, if you want to be a dedicated Christian and a missionary perhaps, then you really ought to check into this option because it makes the journey much more pleasant. In other words, the Lordship of Jesus Christ is optional. Do you know what an option is in a car? An option is a stereo 8-track with equalizer and power booster. That's called an option. You do not need a stereo 8-track with equalizers and power boosters to get from A to B. You do need an engine and transmission and gears and four wheels and a steering wheel. That is not an option. Now let's put it this way. The Lordship of Jesus Christ is a motor, four wheels, transmission and gearbox and a steering wheel. It is not a pleasant extra that makes the journey more fun. It is necessary you don't go anywhere. Now the difference is this. In the western world particularly, and we'll say that includes Great Britain, Australia and New Zealand, Canada and the United States, this doctrine is strongly taught. We also have no revival in the western world to speak of. There are pockets of awakening and thank God for it, but the spiritual awakenings are really crunching holes in society in third world countries. There behind the Iron Curtain you can't find people who believe that. I heard a man pray some years ago, God tear down the Iron Curtain so we can get into Russia. And I had a man standing beside me just came back from Russia and he said, I think God put up the Iron Curtain to keep our kind of Christianity out of Russia. They don't believe this in Uganda where they had a crazy man for a dictator for many years and even in that regime over 2 million people became Christians in the last 20 years. And I mean Christians, people who had walked 200 miles to fellowship with another believer. People who came together sometimes for three days to have a convention, to listen to some preaching and they were so excited about what God had done, by the time they got finished their testimonies it was time to go home again. What a difference. Ever seen an average youth group? Anybody got a testimony? Any testimonies here? Come on. How about a testimony? Surely one of you have got a testimony. Jack, are you saying? Well, yes, he says reluctantly. Well, let's have a testimony. Okay. I'll praise the Lord. Failed the Lord often, but he's never failed me. If any of you are thinking of becoming a Christian, you really should do it because it's a groovy trip. Amen. Is that a testimony? You're backslidden in Africa. The height of the revivals that take place there. If you had a testimony that was more than a few hours old, stand up and say, what happened to you yesterday? He'd say, what is God doing now? Timothy Leary was at the height of it. He came to a guy and he asked him about Jesus Christ. And the guy was talking about what happened X years ago. And Leary said, no, no, what is he doing now? And here is the last one. He can imagine how this one, this number three is connected, Christ may be accepted as Savior without Him being Lord, how that has contributed to the decline of holiness in our nation. Fourth one is repentance. Complete repentance is not a necessary condition of salvation. I think most of you have read the Bible, would notice that this word appears a number of times. Don't you think then that at least every Bible college should teach a little bit of something about repentance? I have this Cheetah's Bible here, which is all pre-marked to impress people. And in it, the thing I like about it is it puts all of these verses in the Scripture on this one subject in one piece. My Bible isn't in one piece, but at least it puts these in one piece. Here are all the Scriptures in the Bible on faith. I've got my finger around them, there, see, there's quite a chunk of them, a big bunch of Scriptures on faith. See, there's quite a lot, isn't there? Here's all the Scriptures in the Bible on repentance. It's called quite a lot too, isn't it? Let me ask you, what do you think the Bible emphasis is? What do you think our emphasis is? Do you believe it if I told you there's a Bible college in this country who have it as an article of faith, that to teach repentance as a condition of salvation is to add works to faith? What should interest you is this little phrase. See this? See this page of Scripture, plus here, and they still ran out and had to go over the page? That's called holy living should follow conversion. How many of you believe that this might be an important subject in the Bible? There is no more dealt with doctrine in the Bible when it comes to the area of salvation. There's a lot of big chunks here. The danger of neglect. God wants us to be meek, humble ourselves. God can keep us. A lot of Scriptures on that. This one's the other big one. Punishment in hell, the white sinners. Great chunk of that is punishment now, not in the next life. The temporal punishment of the wicked, a chunk of it. Okay, anyway, having shared those encouraging thoughts, can you see now? I've given you these things. These may seem fairly shocking to some of you who are new Christians. You think, well, how could people ever believe that? But all you have to do is do a little bit of traveling and a little bit of listening and have a funny feeling. You will see those four things, often taught together, are held as cardinal doctrines in our time. Instead of people going, boy, that's a pretty way off the wall thing, you teach the opposite and people will say, that's pretty off the wall. You mean to say we have to repent or we'll perish? Isn't that a bit off the wall? No, that's called Scripture. It's also the record of history. It's the record of experience. You don't turn away from your sin, the sin will kill you. Say it again. You cannot be truly happy until God finds a way to make you holy. Because holiness and happiness go hand in hand. I was in Australia some years ago and a skeptical television reporter said, what have you come to Australia for? I said, I came to do the same job Jesus would do. He came in person. He said, well, what do you think he wants of people? I said, God has one purpose on his heart for Australia. He wants to make everybody happy and holy. And I said, there's no way you can make them happy without making them holy. All right, now we've only got a few minutes left and I just want to give you some definitions here. First of all, the word holy. Basic concept of the word holy means pure, something set apart for God's use. There are other words which are used. Sanctify is a word used often in scripture. How many of you have ever seen that word in your reading? Sanctify this thing or... Now all this means, sanctified thing is something set apart. It's possible in other words. So you set apart something for the service of God. You said, boy, I'd really like, I've got a car here and I'd like to put this car into the ministry. I'd like to make it available for any person, like in these festivals that go to, sometimes people will take their car and they will donate it to the ministry to transport speakers backwards and forwards from the place where they're staying to the site. That's a sanctified car. It is set apart for a special use. The word holy carries the concept of purity. To be like God is the closest description we can say of what holiness is, because holiness is really a summary of a great deal of attributes of God. We could sum up those attributes by saying this, God's love and His wisdom expressed through His power would be roughly what it means when the Bible says, holy, be ye holy, for I am holy. In other words, holiness has two parts to it. In its simplest form, holiness means to be loving like God, to be good like God, to be virtuous like God, virtuos, virtuos, virtuos, virtuos, yeah, it's weird on the board, virtuos. Here, good, to be good like God, to be virtuous like God, and to be wise like God. So when God says, you be holy, for I am holy, He's saying this. I want you to be good, to be loving, to be virtuous, and wise like me. Now in the East and the West we have two different ideas of holiness, and what they really are are divisions of this biblical concept. In the West, the word holy means good, usually means nice, and it sometimes means sort of stupid nice. So the apple dumpling gang rides again. I think, boy, how far Disney has fallen, because the good guys are not really good, the bad guys are not really that bad, there's no great moral absolutes, everything's a joke, and there's, you know, I remember a time when there used to be cartoons came out where witches would kill you if you hung around them, and they were just to be avoided at all costs. They certainly weren't fun. We, you know, we gross out at the, at those grim, the grim fairy stories, grim fairy story, because there was a story with these little kids, man, and they were eaten by the witch, they were put right in there, eaten up, well, I'll tell you what, when you're a little kid, if you learn that story, you thought, she's a witch, forget it, I'm going to stay away from her with everything I got. Now witches and nice people live next door, they wriggle their noses and have fun, they have just a few powers. The idea of a virtuous man or a holy man in the West has the idea of nice but dumb, and the heroes of the Apple Dumpling Gang were that. In attempting to reform in their writing again, they got into more trouble, burned an entire fort down by accident, just ridiculousness, tripping over things, blowing things up, trying to put stuff out, throwing kerosene on top of things, get that barrel of water and move it, guy trips over, hole goes in the gunpowder barrel, he's laying a trail of gunpowder all over the place, he puts it back, he's kicking out the fire, flame gets on his trousers, he's running around in every place, craziness, right? But this is called nice but dumb. In the end, they get the good guys by accident. I mean, the bad guys are got by accident. They accidentally open up a door and blah, blah, blah. So that's the way niceness is today, virtuous but dumb. In contrast, it's always the evil scientist, the mad. He's brilliant but mad, right? World's greatest intellect but mad. I thank the Lord for Superman who's smart and never tells a lie, Lois. This was summed up in Eric Burden's The Animal Song some years back during the time of the Vietnam War, Sky Pilot, a Vietnam chaplain who prayed over people and the word was, he's a good holy man, meaning kind of dumb but well-intentioned. See them represented like that? The missionary lady who's out there just stumbling all over her feet, but she's a nice, well-intentioned woman. That's the West. In contrast, in the East, a holy man is not necessarily good at all. You can be very, very bad and still be a holy man. Because holy in the East means aware or perceptive. A person who, to use an Eastern term, is realized. Let's forget self-realization fellowship. Okay, now those two things are the Western and Eastern pictures of what the word holy means. But the Bible picture is both. When God says be holy, He doesn't say just be nice. He means be good. He doesn't say just be aware. He means be wise. And that's a world of difference. Let's close in prayer. Our Father in Jesus' name, we thank you for the commands of Scripture. More than that, we thank you that when you command, you empower to obey. You require us so to do and you help us to do it. In Jesus' name, we ask you to help us get a handle on this word holiness. Amen.