Well now, the words of my text this
afternoon you will find in the book of
Job, and I shall read the fourth verse
in the 14th chapter, where we have the
aged saint asking a very relevant and a
very important question.
Who can bring a clean thing out of
an unclean?
And then he gives us the answer.
The answer he gives is this, there is
not one.
Who can bring a clean thing out of
an unclean?
Job had become acutely aware of the fact
that he was not only guilty of certain
wrongs in the presence of God, and he
needed something which went far beyond the mere
pardon of his transgression.
Pardon is very necessary when things go wrong
in our lives, and whatever sin we may
have committed we need the pardon of God
on that account.
But this dear man of God, there back
in the Old Testament age, realized that he
needed something more than forgiveness.
He had become strangely conscious of a defilement
of spirit and of mind.
And so we have this remarkable question, a
question which I think indicates something of the
sheer pessimism that has come over him.
He is aware that his defilement is so
great that he can hardly conceive of there
being a cleansing power adequate to deal with
it.
Well now of course we live in the
full glare of the New Testament revelation, and
how happy we should be.
We know more than Job ever knew.
We know that God has made provision not
only for the pardon of sin, but for
the cleansing of it.
But before we come to that this afternoon,
I think it is very necessary for us
to realize how very much we too need
the cleansing of defilement that the scriptures speak
about.
In an age when gross immodesty and rampant
impurity assault the citadel of man's soul from
every conceivable quarter, in an age when the
moral climate of society has become the breeding
ground of the vilest and the most violent
kind of moral viruses ever to afflict humankind,
we need to know whether there is a
means of making us clean again when once
we have become defiled and besmirched as we
pass through the various places of duty in
life.
And it is to this that I want
to turn our thoughts this afternoon.
I want us, God helping us, to see
that the Lord has made ample provision not
only to deal with the guilt of sin
which requires pardon, but to deal with this
something that Job was so terribly concerned about
in his day, and which many a saint
in our day and age has longed for
and wept for, namely the cleansing away of
sin's defilement, that we may know again an
intimacy of fellowship with God in consequence of
which we daily walk with him in the
awareness of his reality.
I want to talk this afternoon then about
this very important subject of cleansing, and I
want to be rather general, though I trust
that that does not mean we are not
going to be helpful and personally helpful.
But I find the more I have to
do with Christian work and Christian ministry that
there are scores of Christian people who really
have never appreciated the biblical doctrine of cleansing,
and in consequence of which I find that
there are multitudes of people who carry with
them almost to their dying day a sense
of defilement and impurity that cripples their witness.
It impairs their prayer life, and I know
men whose mouths have been shut in the
pulpit.
There are certain things they've been unable to
mention because they've carried with them a conscience
that has never been cleansed.
Come with me then, and we consider first
of all this afternoon the condition that makes
cleansing a necessity.
Now we're going to be very general, but
we must start here.
The consequences of sin go well beyond our
mere involvement, as we have said, in its
dread penalty.
You read Psalm 51, and you will see
that David, in consequence of his terrible sin
with Bathsheba, not only did he become aware
of the fact that he needed pardon, but
he felt there was something else, the same
kind of experience as Job.
Something else needed to be dealt with.
Wash me throughly from my sins, he says.
Purge me with I shall be clean.
In other words, David too had become dreadfully
conscious of the need of cleansing.
You read the first epistle written by Paul
to the Corinthians, and then come to the
second epistle.
Start in chapter 6 verse 11, go on
to the first verse of chapter 7, and
you see the same kind of subject dealt
with.
Turn to the New Testament in 1 John
chapter 1, verses 5 to 9 particularly, and
then turn to the epistle of James, and
you will find that James deals also with
the same urgent necessity of our multitudes of
people.
Now in connection with the condition that makes
cleansing a necessity, I want to ask three
questions and try to answer them.
How do we become defiled?
What are the sources, the primary sources of
defilement?
And I think that the Bible answers that
they are three, they are threefold.
We become defiled first of all by contact
with the world which is evil, the world
outside of us.
Secondly, we become defiled because of the influence
of the old carnal nature within us.
And thirdly, we become defiled by the immediate
communication of Satan to us.
Just a word about these.
The world is the first source of defilement.
That is, society in its rebellion against God
and against His will.
Society in its refusal to accept what God
has revealed to be right and wrong.
Society that in consequence has made up its
own code of ethics, if we may so
call it.
And what a terrible code it is as
we understand it in our day and age.
The fashions and the thought forms of the
age, the age that is in rebellion against
God, have their own way of defiling the
saint.
You listen to what the world says, you
receive its insidious thoughts and entertain them in
your mind and heart, and you become defiled
by them.
And you will find sometimes that when you're
in the most holy exercise of prayer or
of worship, those thought forms and concepts that
emerge from evil men will follow you, and
they'll transform the purest and the holiest thought
into something that is unworthy.
The world then is the first source of
defilement.
It leaves its own peculiar scum upon the
spirit of the child of God, and it
defiles him.
But the same effect can emerge even when
we are isolated from the world, and in
a measure insulated from it.
You can be at prayer.
You can be even at the communion table.
The world is outside.
Physically you're not in touch with the world
at all.
And yet from within your own evil nature,
without anyone suggesting anything, you're just left with
yourself, your memory, your imagination, your heart, yourself.
But because you have the old evil Adamic
nature within you, it can send its miry
stench into every part of your inner life,
and you become defiled.
And then not only that, just as he
successfully sprayed the thoughts of our early parents
with pernicious and polluting thoughts, so does the
devil himself sometimes come near, and he puts
his doubts in our minds and his thoughts.
So it is then that we can become
defiled from three particular sources, three primary sources.
The next question I want to ask is
this.
What is it that becomes defiled?
What are the areas that are defiled in
human life?
Now again the New Testament I think is
quite clear here.
Whatever the precise nature of its origin, sin
in the form of pollution penetrates the entire
life of a man.
Paul speaks of sin's polluting influences as impinging
upon two aspects.
If you read 2 Corinthians chapter 7 and
verse 1, he speaks of the need for
cleansing of body and of spirit.
Body, spirit, the physical, the spiritual.
If you turn to James chapter 4 and
verse 8, you will find that James in
addressing the people of said that they needed
to cleanse their hands and their hearts.
Cleanse your hands, ye sinners, he says, and
purify your hearts, ye double-minded.
Now have you got it?
Here then we are defiled, says Paul and
James in concert.
We are defiled on the physical plane and
on the spiritual.
If you ask me how this comes about,
I suppose that Paul would answer, particularly in
the context of the Corinthian epistles, that there
are certain sensual and sexual vices which defile
the very body which is the temple of
the Holy Ghost.
Do you remember this verse?
This verse has frightened quite a number of
folk.
1 Corinthians chapter 6 and verse 18, shun
immorality, says Paul.
Every other sin which a man commits is
outside the body, but the immoral man sins
against his own body, so that the very
body, the organs of the body, the temple
of the Holy Ghost, have become defiled in
the sight of God.
But then there is the inner man that
becomes defiled.
What James speaks of as the heart, what
Paul speaks of as the spirit, the man
within, this includes the conscience.
Paul tells us in a number of places
how the conscience can become weakened or defiled,
1 Corinthians 8 and verse 7, or it
can become seared, 1 Timothy chapter 4 and
verse 2.
But not only the conscience, the will is
weakened, so that what a man would do,
he doesn't do or can't do.
And the very thing he doesn't want to
do, that is the thing he does.
His will has become terribly weak, and he's
unable to do the right that he knows
he ought.
Not only is the conscience affected, and the
will, so also is the mind.
In writing, for example, to the Corinthians in
chapter 3, in the opening verses, Paul tells
them there are whole tracts of Christian truth
that are important for them, but they can't
receive them.
He can't, he can't teach them, because they're
but babes in Christ, they're carnal.
And I don't need at this stage to
describe and to try to show to you
what the evidences of that carnality really was.
But because of that, you see, their minds
could not comprehend Christian truth.
Then again, the affections of a man become,
they become transformed almost, and diverted from that
which is legitimate, and right, and proper, to
that which is illegitimate, and which God proscribes.
You have a classical instance in Demas.
Demas, says Paul, Demas, in writing to Timothy,
the second letter, chapter 4, in verse 10,
Demas, he says, has forsaken me, having loved
this present world.
That surely suffices to show how, how defilement
coming from one or more of these three
sources, impinges upon the entire human experience.
And the last question I want to ask
in this connection is this, what are the
consequences of defilement?
Defilement has far-reaching consequences.
Perhaps we can conveniently sum them up today
in this sense, in this way.
We can say that the total effect of
defilement is to bring a kind of haze
between us and God, so that God is
no longer a felt reality.
We believe he's there, maybe.
We have good reason to believe he's there.
But somehow we never touch reality.
We're out of touch.
We are almost living in a kind of
a fog, in a kind of a maze.
Nothing is real.
When we come to pray, well, we go
through the, the formalities of prayer, but there's
nothing very real about it.
And when we come to the word of
God, we read it, and we say to
ourselves that we believe it, but somehow or
other it doesn't become the reality.
And one reason for this very often is
because a man has become defiled by sin.
My good friend, before we go any further
this afternoon, will you permit me to ask
the question?
It's a lovely afternoon.
It's rather sad that we have to introduce
a question like this, is it not?
Am I speaking to someone who has to
confess in the presence of God that all
the spiritual things you talk about are nevertheless
very unreal to you?
Your life is lived, as it were, in
a bog land and a fog land where
nothing is really clear, and convictions that once
you held seem to have whittled away, and
you only have mere ideas to take their
place.
The condition that makes cleansing a necessity.
Secondly, the provision that makes cleansing a possibility.
No, Job didn't know the answer to this
one.
Poor Job, can you imagine it?
With this awful, clammy sense of defilement upon
his soul, he poses the question, but he
doesn't have the answer.
There isn't one, says Job.
The prophet Zechariah knew what Job did not.
With the enabling and inspiration and revelation of
the Spirit of God, the blessed Zechariah saw
on the distance seen the opening of a
fountain, not only for sin and its guilt,
but for sin and its uncleanness.
And you and I are privileged, brethren and
sisters in Christ.
Oh, that we should be aware of it.
We are privileged to live in the full
glare of the Christian revelation and of the
divine action in Christ whereby God has done
precisely this.
Well now, let's come to it.
Scripture appears to point to a threefold provision
whereby we may bring a clean thing out
of an unclean.
First of all, we read of the cleansing
word.
The cleansing word.
Did you ever realize that part of the
ministry of the word of God is to
make us clean and keep us clean?
Now, I believe that there are many Christians
who've never really been made alert to the
fact that it is part of the ministry
of the scriptures just to do this.
Make us clean and keep us clean.
But the word testifies concerning itself that this
is indeed its God-appointed ministry, or one
of its ministries.
The word that proceeds from God is a
powerful word.
The epistle to the Hebrews speaks of it
as quick or alive and powerful.
But the point is this.
It's not only powerful, it is morally powerful.
It is a word that is active in
the same sense as God is active.
It is God's agent.
It is God's word.
And God is a holy God.
And God is concerned with the business of
dealing with sin in all its manifold ramifications.
So is his word.
So that wherever the word of God is
let loose and liberated and proclaimed and received
as we heard so wonderfully on Saturday night,
received into the depths of the heart and
allowed to do its mighty work, what happens
is this.
That word will save us from sin and
will keep sin away from us.
It's a cleansing word.
It's a purging word.
Jesus could look into the face of his
disciples and say, now he says you're clean
because of the word that I've spoken to
you.
Brethren, you and I cannot be receiving this
word properly if we are not a cleansed
people.
It is part of its ministry.
Sometimes it takes the part of a mirror
and we look in it and we see
in it as in a mirror how besmirched
and begrimed we've become.
And we become aware of spots here and
blemishes there, of how sin has impinged upon
us in this area of our life or
in that.
And as in a mirror we see ourselves.
Sometimes it becomes a lamp unto our feet
and it shows us the way out of
the quagmire.
Then it becomes a gold whereby God makes
us, like Job of old, hurry out of
sorrow.
It becomes the instrument whereby he causes us
to move and to move as we heard
this morning, quickly to flee, to shun the
mirey way.
Sometimes it is a word that woos us
away.
And then when we've come away and come
to the provision, it purges us.
And then when we are purged, if we
leave it lodged in our hearts, it becomes
a moral antiseptic so that we may say
as the psalmist, thy word have I hid
in my heart that I might not sin
against thee.
It becomes a divine antiseptic in the soul.
And when the word takes its place in
the empire of the human heart, the believer's
heart, sin may be kept at bay.
Oh, it's a wonderful word, the word of
God.
But along with the cleansing word, we have
the cleansing blood.
The whole of the Godhead is involved in
our cleansing as well as in every other
aspect of our salvation.
And along with the cleansing word of God,
we have the cleansing blood of Christ.
Our entire salvation as planned and purposed by
the Father and made possible by means of
the, is made possible by means of the
blood of Christ.
Everything ultimately is traced to the will of
the Father and the work of the Son
and particularly the work of the Son on
the cross of Calvary, where he paid the
price of our salvation and purchased our redemption
in all its glory and in all its
wonder.
Well could John speak to those addressed by
him in his epistle and say, the blood
of Jesus Christ, his Son, cleanses us.
But then along with the cleansing word and
the cleansing blood is the cleansing spirit.
Both Old and New Testaments loudly assert this.
The symbolism may change.
In Ezekiel 36 and 25 it may be
the symbol of water.
In Malachi chapter 3 and verse 2 and
again in Matthew 3 and 11 for example,
it may be the symbol of fire.
The symbol may change, but the source of
the operation is quite obvious and the ministry
is quite clear.
Water cleanses.
Fire purges.
So that one of our hymns cries out
in this way, Be it by water or
by fire, O make me clean.
My dear friend, there is none other than
the Holy Spirit of God who can apply
to your soul and heart the mighty redeeming
and cleansing provision of the blood of Christ
as it was purposed in the mind and
the heart of God.
He is the one who is able infallibly
to apply all the healing merits of the
blood and of the word.
So that when Paul writes to the Corinthians,
you remember he can assure them that they
have been really cleansed.
Some of them had been grossly defiled.
You remember this passage of scripture?
I can never read it without a frog
in the throat or something of that kind.
Do you not know, says Paul, that the
unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God?
Do not be deceived, he says, neither the
immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor homosexuals, nor
thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers,
nor robbers will inherit the kingdom of God.
And such were some of you, but, glorious
but, but, says Paul, you are washed.
And I want that word to come to
each one of us this afternoon, whether we
realize our need of it or not.
The Holy Spirit of God is the infallible
applyer of the merits of the blood and
of the word, so that though your sins
be a scarlet, they can be white as
snow.
That brings me to the last thing this
afternoon, the condition that makes cleansing a necessity,
the provision that makes cleansing a possibility.
Now we come to the action that makes
cleansing a reality.
So far we've stressed that cleansing is the
action of God, and so it is.
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
It is, as our brother John Stott would
have us say, it is the gift of
the sovereign God.
And we must ever remember that it is
the Lord's doing.
We cannot in that sense cleanse ourselves.
And yet, when we come to the New
Testament, and indeed in some places in the
old, against the background of that basic and
that primary fact, the Bible tells us that
we must get on with the business of
cleansing ourselves.
Isaiah, for example, in speaking to the people
of his day, chapter 1 and verse 16,
doesn't hesitate to tell them, cleanse yourselves, he
says.
And then when we come to the second
epistle of Paul to the Corinthians, he encourages
the Corinthians in these words, let us cleanse
ourselves, he says, from every defilement of the
body and of the spirit.
And James says the same, cleanse your hands,
purify your hearts, he double-minded.
Now the thought, of course, is this.
God has made the provision, and insofar as
you and I have become aware of our
need of defilement and of the urgent need
of it, it is God who is active
within us.
Now we must become co-operators with God,
and we must cleanse ourselves.
We must use the provision that God has
made available for us.
We must by faith lay hold upon the
promises and what the promises hold in their
bosom for us.
We must make them all our own.
We must walk in the way of the
scriptures.
We must plead with the Holy Spirit.
We must apply the blood.
What must we do?
There may be someone asking for the, a
very practical and a very quick answer to
this, this afternoon.
Dare we try to give a brief answer?
I suppose verses 5 to 9 in 1
John, chapter 1, give us, in brief words,
some clear indication what a man must do
in this context.
In order to become aware of my defilement,
if I am defiled, the thing that I
must do is this.
I must, in the words of Saint John,
I must, I must learn to walk in
the light.
And the light, of course, is God.
God is light.
And that means nothing less than this.
I must bring all my life and bear
it under the glare of his holy eye.