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Tabernacle Presbyterian Church Rev. L. John Gable “THE
THE HOLINESS TRADITION" A couple of years ago I was visiting with a friend of mine named Ed who told me that he had had a really unusual thing happen to him that week at work. Two of his co-workers had gotten into some kind of a disagreement on some issue and they wanted to know what a Christian might think about it. They looked around the office and wondered who might actually be one since they themselves were not, and they thought of my friend, Ed. Now it caught him somewhat off guard since he had never knowingly spoken to them about his faith or his church involvement, but he was committed to living out his faith in a Christ-like manner and apparently it showed. Wasn’t it St. Francis who said, “Preach the Gospel always, and if necessary, use words?” This desire to live our lives in such a way that people will know, or at least might suspect, that we are Christian lies at the heart of the “holiness tradition.” The desire of the holiness tradition is that we might demonstrate something of the life of Christ in our lives by the indwelling and transforming power of the Holy Spirit, and I pray that this is our desire as well. The Holiness tradition was born out of the Pietistic movement of the Protestant Reformation which emphasized the spiritual life of the individual coupled with a responsibility to live a virtuous and upright life. It found its greatest expression in the middle 18th century in England under the influence of John and Charles Wesley, the founders of the Methodist Church. They were sons of an Anglican clergyman, and John attended Christ Church College in Oxford, where he and a group of friends banded together to encourage one another to live a holy life. As we are attempting to do this Lenten season, this was the commitment they were making to “follow hard after God.” They called themselves “the Holy Club”, which sounds rather presumptuous, but their methodical approach to holiness led others at the college to refer to them as “Methodists.” John Wesley’s most famous work was a book titled Christian Perfection, which again sounds presumptuous until we understand that by perfection Wesley did not mean sinlessness, but a desire to be fully in love with God, heart, mind, soul and strength, and to show that love in purity of heart and in holy living; which again, I would hope is the desire of each of us. In our Gospel lesson today we read that Jesus is led by the Spirit out into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. This time of temptation comes immediately after Jesus’ baptism when the Spirit of God descends upon Him like a dove and a voice from heaven announces, “This is My Son, My Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” This time of tempting and testing seems to be in answer to the question, “What does it look like to be the Son of God? How does the Son of God act or respond to the temptations which invariably will come to each of us in one measure or another?” We read that Jesus faced the temptations of Satan head on and passed this critical test by trusting fully in the promises of God and by obeying the teachings of Scripture which He knew so well. This same kind of testing and temptation comes to each one of us and we too are called to demonstrate our willingness and ability to trust and obey. In our lesson from I John we read, “See what love the Father has given to us that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are.” We become children of God as we place our trust in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior and as we open our hearts to the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Since we are children of God or as we call ourselves, Christians, we too need to answer the question, what does a Christian look like? How does a Christian behave? Again in I John we read, “Beloved we are God’s children now…What we do know is this, we will be like Him. And all who have this hope in Him purify themselves, just as He is pure.” Christians then are those who desire to love God by purifying themselves, just as He is pure. This is the call to the virtuous life which lies at the heart of the holiness tradition. It is the call to set ourselves apart in such a way that someone in our offices or at school could look at us and say, “That’s what it looks like to be a Christian!” Admittedly, such “set apart” living is not easy. Several years ago a bunch of guys from our Saturday morning Men’s Bible Study, which by the way we have started here at Tab recently, decided to go whitewater rafting down the Colorado River, then hike out up through the Grand Canyon. It was the trip of a lifetime and one day I’ll share with you some of the lessons I learned on it, but one thing that caught me by surprise was how muddy and silty and extremely cold the Colorado River is. I expected it to be crystal clear and warm, so you can imagine my surprise when I jumped in for the very first time. It literally took my breath away. But about two thirds of our way down the river we came to the confluence of the Colorado River with the Little Colorado River. Unlike the Colorado, the Little Colorado is sky blue and quite warm. So we spent an hour or so eating lunch and floating down the rapids before we got back on the main river. At this confluence though we could see, very distinctly, how the two rivers merged with one another, the dark and the light, the muddy and the crystal blue. They ran parallel with one another, each remaining distinct, but it wasn’t long, probably less that half a mile, before all of the warmth and brightness of the Little Colorado lost its distinctiveness in the dark and cold of the main stream. I think of this as we, as Christians, are called to be “in the world, but not of the world.” We are called to have a distinctiveness about our lives simply because we are children of God. Yet we know all too well how difficult it is to remain distinct and set apart from the world around us. We know how difficult it is to resist the temptations which confront us every day. Like the fellow who went in to buy a new pair of socks. The pair he chose said they were “shrink resistant.” Not knowing what that meant he asked the clerk who told him, “That means they will shrink, but they don’t really want to.” We know about that, don’t we? We know full well the power of the tempter and of the temptations which face us every day; but the holiness tradition reminds us that as Christians we have access to a power which is greater than the tempter’s power and a holy desire to love God through faithful and obedient living. Growing up, Kristin’s family owned a lumber yard in Bloomington, IL. I worked there during the summers when I was in seminary. One particular driver for the company was a guy named John, and he was my first real encounter with someone from the holiness tradition. Knowing that I was studying to be a pastor, John loved talking about spiritual things, so he always requested me as his helper when he made deliveries. One day he told me that he never sins, which I doubted immediately. I couldn’t imagine how that could be or how anyone could actually believe that about themselves. Yet John was convinced that once he became a Christian he didn’t sin anymore. I thought of him as I read this passage from I John because he cited this passage as proof of His claim. In verse six we read, “No one who abides in Him sins; no one who sins has either seen Him or known Him.” Then we read on in verse nine, “Those who have been born of God do not sin because God’s seed (His Spirit, His nature) abides in them; they cannot sin because they have been born of God.” Admittedly these are somewhat confusing texts, particularly when we read just two chapters earlier in the same book, “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, God who is faithful and just will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say we have not sinned, we make God a liar and the truth is not in us.” To say we do not sin or have not sinned is to deny the economy of our salvation. It is to say that Christ died for no good reason and to no avail. In contrast to my friend, John, G.K. Chesterton would argue that the doctrine of human sinfulness is the only truth of the Christian faith that is empirically provable. All I have to do to prove the reality of sin is to look at my own life. And as the late James I. McCord, former president of Princeton Theological Seminary, once said, “To sin is man’s condition; to pretend that he is not a sinner; that is man’s sin.” Despite the fact that I never won that theological argument with John, I did come away from those discussions with a deep appreciation for the holiness tradition as it calls us to lead lives which are holy and pleasing to God. To desire less than this is, in fact, to desire less than the best. It is to desire less than the way God designed and desired us to live; it is to desire less than God’s good and perfect will for us. Whether we can achieve it or not is not the issue, such holy and virtuous living should, and must be, our desire as children of God. In his book Pursuit of Holiness, Jerry Bridges writes, “It is time for us Christians to face up to our responsibility for holiness. Too often we say we are ‘defeated’ by this or that sin. No, we are not defeated; we are simply disobedient! It might be well if we stopped using the terms ‘victory’ and ‘defeat’ to describe our progress. Rather we should use the terms ‘obedience’ and ‘disobedience’. When I say I am defeated by something I am unconsciously slipping out from under my responsibility. I am saying something outside of me has defeated me. But when I say I am disobedient, that places the responsibility for my sin squarely on me. We may, in fact, be defeated, but the reason we are defeated is because we have chosen to disobey. We have chosen to entertain lustful thoughts or to harbor resentment or to shade the truth a little.” I believe he speaks a truth here. In our confrontation with sin and temptation there is a part which only God can do and another part that only we can do. It would be wrong of us to try to do a work that only God can do in us, (do you remember Ryan’s message from a couple of weeks ago when he reminded us that we cannot be our own, or anyone else’s, Savior? That job is taken and we are not it.) But it would be equally wrong for us to ask God to do the work that we have been given to do. As we develop holy habits and as we put into practice the spiritual disciplines, we are learning to do what we can do in order to receive from God the power to do what we cannot do. Our part is to recognize that sin has no rightful place in our lives, and so to resist it in every way we can through obedience and discipline. God’s part is to forgive us when we fail and to regenerate us by His Holy Spirit, giving us the power to resist sin and temptation. Like
any physical muscle we need to develop our spiritual muscles through
exercise. Like
any new skill, we need to practice in order to gain proficiency. In
your bulletin is an insert with several suggested exercises to help us
develop the disciplines of the Holiness tradition: Respond to temptation with the Word of God. In
every one of temptations Jesus faced He responded by quoting a passage
of Scripture; we can do the same. You know those temptations
that strike closest to your heart, so find and memorize a promise of
Scripture that you can use in your time of testing. George McDonald writes that we become children of God when we will God’s will, not by accident, but by choice. We become children of God when we desire for ourselves that which God desires for us. We become children of God when we trust God to do for us what only God can do, namely save us; and when we do what only we can do, namely obey God by following the way of living He has so clearly given to us. The holiness tradition very simply calls us to “Trust and Obey”. Did you know that this great hymn of the faith was written by one of our own ministers here at Tab? Matt Kaufmann brought this to my attention this week. “Trust and Obey” was written by Presbyterian minister John H. Sammis when he was called to be pastor of the Washington Street Presbyterian Church in the 1880’s. The Washington Street church was one of several churches which Tab birthed during those years and since it had no offices, the pastor’s office was here at Tab (then called Third Presbyterian church before our name change when we were down at the corner of Ohio and Illinois). So this great hymn was written within the confines of our walls! This simple phrase captures the heart of the holiness tradition. So let us desire to “trust and obey” to the end that, should anyone ever be out looking for someone who is a Christian, they might well think of us. |