Sermon Tone Analysis

Setting the House in Order: The purifying power of healthy doctrine

Scripture:

15 To the pure, all things are pure, but to the defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure; but both their minds and their consciences are defiled.

16 They profess to know God, but they deny him by their works.

They are detestable, disobedient, unfit for any good work.

2 But as for you, teach what accords with sound doctrine.

The Holy Bible: English Standard Version.

(2016).

(Tt 1:15–2:1).

Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles.

15 To the pure, all things are pure, but to the defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure; but both their minds and their consciences are defiled.

16 They profess to know God, but they deny him by their works.

They are detestable, disobedient, unfit for any good work.

Teach Sound Doctrine

2 But as for you, teach what accords with sound doctrine.

Proposition: As we strive to live out good order as the Church, we must learn to rest on the purity of the Lord, and participate in that holy purity by living out a healthy doctrine that reflects the Lord and not ourselves

Introduction:

The good order of the Church is connected to our Christian responsibility.

We cannot be responsible without good order, but good order is not just about everything and every body being in a particular place.

Good order is also an internal disposition of the heart.

Good order is not just about everything having a place, but about every heart having the right relationship with God so that we can fulfil our right function without jealousy

the good order of the church is there for the healing of the human soul.

we must understand that the healing of the soul is rooted in how deeply we appropriate the divine nature and imitate the Lord Jesus Christ.

But the good order of the church has to be lived out, and if it is lived out it with in the confines of opposition within and without the body and rooted in the exploitation of our selfishness.

I.

The good order of the Church is important because it strengthens our connections to the holy purity of Christ

Paul makes the comment that "to the pure, all things are pure" what does this mean literally (from the literary context)?

from the context of the letter, Paul is expressing that how things are handled and appropriated is directly related to the heart.

The purity of our appropriation is connected to the purity of our hearts.

It is to exist in a state of purity that is reflective of God's righteousness and holiness.

This is an indication that this is not simply a ritualistic purity or a sense of goodness, but it is to be cleaned and purified of the sin that was previously there.

Untainted, this doesn't mean that sin and taint don't try but that sin and selfishness are not successful.

This also a state of being a state of living.

It is who you are. to be pure in this way is not simply about refraining from doing certain things, but it is about a purity that flows from who you are, personally.

We are not clean because of where we are, but we are clean because of who we are.

And as believers we are clean because of what God has said about us! God presents us as pure as we participate in Christ, God declares us pure, as we do His will, and then God makes us pure as we are indwelled by the Holy Spirit and walk in obedience to the Spirit of God.

Our purity then is three pronged.

We are presented pure, we are declared pure, and we are made pure- all by God also through our participate in what God is doing, not in God's participation in what we desire.

We are cleansed by our participation in God's will, not our own will.

We often want God to clean us up because of what we do, but we never link our cleanliness to our obedience to the will of God.

When you are in line with the Lord, your purity is reflected in what you do.

It is not simply that everything is permissible, but everything is understood.

And when everything is understood, from God's perspective- it is easy to operate from a locus of purity.

This purity however is rooted in the relationship with God- not in things.

Instead it means that when we are purified by God, our desires change, because we change.

All things are pure because we desire to do what is pleasing to God.

Purity changes our priorities.

it is the faith in God that purifies.

We are pure because of our faith.

We are impure because of our disbelief.

Disbelief produces an impurity in the heart of a disciple.

The defiled is a common noun naming folk who are dirty and marked by a foreign matter.

These are those tainted by sin and selfishness.

They are contaminated and so are morally filthy.

They are dirty by the previous actions of seeking their own way in the community that is ordered by the way of Christ Jesus.

When we seek our own way as Christians we make ourselves morally dirty because we internally replace God's will with our own.

all sin begins first with the disposition of heart that seeks to love self over loving God, and a movement of the will that seeks to do the will of self over the will of God.

In the end we are defiled by our lack of trust in God's will.

II.

The good order of the Church is important because it pushes us to reflect on the dangers of defiling unbelief

This unbelief is heinous because it is connected to some within the body who have experienced the redemption of Christ, but they still reject aspects of the gospel that push them beyond what makes them comfortable.

This is something that we must understand, the gospel gives us comfort, but it doesn't make us comfortable.

The gospel gives us comfort in the midst of uncomfortable situations that come about because we are striving to be obedient to the will of God.

But when we seek to be comfortable, we run the danger of missing out on the movement of God, lose sight of the will of God, and be moved from the way of God.

There are some who are so desirous of being comfortable, the forfeit God's comfort.

When we seek our comfort-ability over the will of God, nothing is pure for us.

Why because we have replaced the Lord with ourselves and have removed ourselves from His purifying presence, and entrusted ourselves to the taint of our own whims and wishes.

In this state our minds, our hearts, our nous- becomes darkened and defiled.

We develop an inability to think along the lines of God's will.

Obedience to God is a muscle that must be exercised daily.

We can never slack in our faithfulness to God's will and way, or we will soon find ourselves becoming faithful to ourselves more than the Savior.

When we separate ourselves from God through internal self-defilement, we lose the ability to see things and think about things from God's point of view and then our consciences, that spiritual and psychological faculty that helps distinguish between right and wrong becomes self-seeking as well.

This is where folks will judge others on their own desires and neglect God's will themselves.

Or much worse, assume that they are in God's will while they live out their own desires, wants, and expectations-and have the nerve to hold others in the family of God accountable to alien and unlawful expectations because they are rooted in us and not God.

They may seem good to us, not bad, even commendable.

But because their origin is us and not God, they are unlawful in the house of God.

Because in the end they are moving in self and not the Spirit.

And when the heart is defiled- nothing is pure.

It is not the outside, but the inside.

too often as Christians we major on the externals, and leave off developing the internals.

The externals are means of expressing internal disposition.

When the nous and conscience is defiled, we become the defiling agent.

Notice that this is just what the Lord says, it is what comes out of us that defiles us, because what comes out shows what is within.

But this begs the question who is truly fit to do God's will?

None.

But we are strengthened by our relationship with Christ and the Holy Spirit- who makes us partakers of the divine nature.

It is in partaking of the divine nature that we are able to participate with God in His work.

They are called professors of God, but they are not confessors of Christ.

To profess is not the same as confess.

to confess involves faith, to profess involves information.

they declare that they are in right relationship with God, but this is where we must learn to inspect fruit and not simply talk.

Because they declare God, but they deny God with what they do.

They don't jus deny but repudiate.

They refuse to acknowlegde God in their works.

But they keep the name of God on their lips.

They are the "but" folks.

I know God can,...but....! We often have a but, because there are somethings that we feel comfortable handling our way instead of God's way!

In the end, we have to deny somebody.

either we deny ourselves or we deny God! and sometimes we find ourselves denying God because we desire to do things our way.

And often we will have the gall to deny God and when it don't work out, blame God!

We blame others, we blame anybody but ourselves.