Thank you very much.
I don't know what you've done, but my
nose has begun to bleed just as you
were talking about me, so...
So, you've said something you shouldn't say.
I'll try and control this, wherever it goes.
Fortunately, I have a hanky with me.
But, anyway, if you see it dripping, just
forget about me.
It's good to be here.
Isn't the Lord wonderful?
He keeps us in life, to start off
with, and grants us the privilege of walking
with Him, and of hearing His voice, and
of sometimes representing Him.
And on this, another Lord's Day, He is
where He has promised to be.
Now, let's seek His face.
Our Heavenly Father, it is in the name
of Your dear Son that we turn our
thoughts, our hearts, turn the whole gaze of
our souls upon You, as we gather around
Your Word, particularly to think of Yourself in
Your unspeakable majesty and sanctity.
We are incapable of this exercise, incapable at
our best, and so we are utterly, utterly
dependent upon the enabling that You give from
the throne, by the Spirit, moment by moment.
Take us now into Your charge, therefore in
a special way, to the end that Yours
and Yours alone may be the glory, through
Jesus Christ, Your Son, our Savior.
Amen.
Well now, you are involved in a very
serious and a very basic study, and I
congratulate those of you who are responsible for
choosing this theme.
It certainly is very, very basic, and you
have given me what is probably the most
basic in the entire study of God and
His world, namely, the holiness of God.
This is a subject, I believe, that is
often considerably misunderstood, in that it is rarely
seen in the totality of its biblical representation.
We have a habit, especially in our 20th
century, of tearing things up into bits.
We've got no time to see things in
their wholeness.
We are not disciplined like our fathers were.
When you go back as far as the
Puritans of the 18th, 19th century, 17th century
too, you find that they took time.
If they had to get up at two
o'clock in the morning and be on
their knees till they went to work next
day, they had to take the time to
cover the areas of their study in Scripture.
We don't do that.
We have our daily readings, they're set, and
we go from verse 1 to verse 5,
or 15 as the case may be, and
we very rarely get a picture of the
whole.
We have a snippet, and it may be
good, it may be true, it may be
marvellous as far as it goes, but we
have lost the capacity almost to see things
in their God-given, as the Germans put
it, sitz im Leben, in their setting in
life, in their divinely arranged context.
Truth out of its context is never clear.
Truth out of its context, even though it
is truth, it doesn't sit well.
But truth in its context is the most
remarkable thing that you can contemplate.
Now, coming to this subject this morning, there
are just two preliminary remarks I want to
make.
One, I shall be emphasising the holiness of
God, but I want to say at the
very beginning, I want to say that I
am aware that the holiness of God is
but one of God's attributes, and I would
like you to remember that.
I am asked to speak about this, and
when a speaker takes one of many attributes,
or an aspect of a larger subject, the
danger is that the preacher conveys the impression,
this is the only one that matters.
I don't want to do that.
This is very basic, this is very fundamental,
this is central and cardinal, yet it has
to be seen in context and in concert
with everything that God has revealed about himself.
The other preliminary remark is this.
I want us to remember that in dealing
with the attributes of God, we are dealing
with something impersonal, but something impersonal that belongs
to a person.
The attribute, per se, is an it.
We would refer to it with a neuter
pronoun.
But the attribute is really an aspect of
the nature of him with whom we have
to do.
And if we can bridge that gulf, and
not think of any of God's attributes as
an it, but as an aspect of his
nature, and see the God whose attribute it
is, I think we shall be able to
worship as well as to learn.
You do not worship an it.
We must worship him.
Now then, the first main thing it seems
to me that we should do, albeit briefly,
is this.
In coming to consider the holiness of God,
we need to consider holiness in principle.
What is holiness?
Not holiness in God or holiness in us.
What is holiness?
Holiness in God or holiness in us.
And this is essentially a linguistic study.
I am not going into it, but I
want to get the substance arising out of
studies that have gone into this.
And it is not difficult.
It is very easy to get it.
The biblical vocabulary is very significant.
Any introduction by a student into linguistic studies
soon brings out the fact that words, like
people, come in families.
You very rarely have a word that does
not belong to a family.
A noun, a verb, a pronoun, an adverb,
a participle, and all the rest of it,
and they are together, and there are shades
of meaning represented, especially in Semitic languages.
The various tenses and intensity of a verb
in Hebrew gives you a sense of pressure,
or of power, or of causation, along with
the complex of the word itself.
Now, I am tempted to go into details.
I do not want to do that.
Two families.
The Holy Spirit has brought about two families
of words, one in the Old Testament, one
in the New.
In the Old Testament, the basic structure is
what we would describe as the letter Q,
the letter D.
Not exactly our D, either.
It is more like the Welsh.
You know, Welsh is nearer the language of
heaven.
It is a soft D, a th.
K, th, and an SH, which belongs to
most others.
So that the Hebrew word kodesh means holiness.
If you put an article before it, it
means the Holy One, and so forth.
And then there are variations of that.
Now, that is one family in the Old
Testament.
When you come to the New Testament, written
in Greek, you have the same kind of
thing again.
The Holy Spirit has got hold of another
family of words.
And here are three consonants at the base.
H, A, G, hag.
The Greek word for hagios, the Greek word
for holiness, is hagios, or holy hagios, with
variations here and there.
Now, what do these mean?
One in the Old Testament, used throughout the
Old Testament, not just by one writer in
one place, or half a dozen places, or
a hundred places, but throughout the Old Testament,
and in the New Testament, there are others.
What is the meaning of these terms?
Fundamentally, they mean to set apart.
You've got to add something to that.
In all the usages within the biblical narratives,
it is a setting of something or of
someone apart for God.
Now, I cannot pause to enlarge upon that,
even though it is, I think, a very,
very important addition.
It's not just the linguistic set-apartness.
The Pharisees were set apart.
But it is not possible to say that
they were always set apart for God.
And you and I may have things that
are set apart, and in that sense, linguistically,
we could use this word for them.
Either the Greek or the Hebrew.
But the implication in the New Testament and
the Old is this.
What is holy is set apart to be
the Lord's, or to fulfill the purpose that
God had for it.
Dr. Jim Packer, whom Knox people know fairly
well, has an act sometimes of being very
precise and concise.
Not always, but sometimes he has.
And he has culled together some of the
teaching about holiness, which I think is excellent.
It's a summary.
You'll think it's very, very simple.
But when you get down and see what
it represents, you will find that it is
very significant.
I quote.
These words are found only in religious contexts,
when the relations of God and his creatures
are under discussion.
In these contexts, however, they are used in
four connections.
They denote, one, the nature of God, two,
the duty of man, three, the work of
grace in and upon the Christian and the
Church, and four, the state of future glory.
Now this is important.
Very important.
You see, holiness is not simply something in
God, period.
And we're only describing God in his selfhood.
Holiness belongs to God.
It represents the will of God for his
total creatures, as represented in his law and
in the teaching of the prophets and of
the apostles and of our Lord Jesus Christ.
The sum total teaching of the Bible comes
to this.
God demands holiness from his creatures.
That's the demand note of God to mankind.
Then these words describe the work of grace
that makes all this possible.
In the hearts of Christian men and women
individually, and of the Church as a community.
And then finally, these terms are used to
describe God's home, the city of God, and
our home, if our home is to be
with God.
It is the city bright, whose gates are
closed to sin, not that defiles shall ever
enter in.
Everything that defiles shall be cast out.
Heaven is a holy place.
It is the holy city.
Many of us are shattered by the reference,
see our good friend here from Israel, whom
we admire with her husband for their tenacity
and perseverance in the Lord.
At Israel, Jerusalem is sometimes called the holy
city.
It is no longer a holy city in
the biblical sense.
It has become a very unholy place, which
is exceedingly sad, and our prayer is that
once again, it may become holy in the
full, odd, biblical sense.
Well now, that brings us to the next
main division in our study this morning, the
holiness of God.
Let me refer to some biblical passages.
There are so many, far too many to
quote, of course.
So these are chosen just to remind you
of the thrust of the Bible.
Moses asks in Exodus chapter 15 and verse
11, Who among the gods is like you,
O Lord?
Who is like you, majestic in holiness, awesome
in glory, working wonders?
God asks concerning himself in Isaiah 40, 25.
Now, God himself, asking concerning himself.
Here is the question.
To whom will you liken me?
Or who is my equal, says the Holy
One.
And he refers to himself.
This is not something that Isaiah adds, says
the Holy One.
God uses those words himself.
That very title of God, the Holy One,
is used over 40 times between 2 Kings
19.22 and Habakkuk 3.3. And the
phrase, the Holy One of Israel, is used
24 times within the same compass.
Of course, we are all familiar with Isaiah's
great words in chapter 6.
He heard the seraphim chant antiphonally.
That is one to another.
We can't say exactly how this was.
It seems as if they are divided maybe
in two sections of a choir.
And the one side sings, Holy, holy, holy
is the Lord God of hosts.
The whole earth is full of his glory.
And the other side answers antiphonally.
And so it goes on.
That is the kind of impression which the
best linguists, it seems to me, get out
of the text.
Whether that is actually accurate, I would not
like to be certain.
But it is something of that kind.
There is an antiphonal aspect to the music
and to the words here.
But supremely, though we say it in few
words, with reference to the holiness of God,
I think one of the most outstanding and
important references is that from Jesus himself.
In his high priestly prayer, in John chapter
17 and verse 11, when Jesus, the Son
of God, remember who he was, remember that
he was the incarnate Lord, the Son of
God, the second person of the Trinity, incarnate
in our human nature.
And here he is now, in his high
priestly ministry, praying to the Father on behalf
of those, he says, whom the Father has
given to him.
And he addresses God as Holy Father.
A little later on as All-Righteous Father.
You see, some of us get too chummy
with the Almighty to be honorable.
He is not the man next door.
And he is not the man up there.
He is the Holy One of Israel.
And we need to have respect in our
souls when we draw near to him.
Jesus did.
Though equal with God, he did not, as
it were, take advantage of that relationship and
use terms that were less than honorable.
Now, the basic implications here.
God, according to the language then, what we've
seen from holiness in principle, God, according to
the language of the Old and the New
Testament, is separated, set apart.
Now, don't run immediately to the epistle to
the Hebrews, which is written on the basis
of the fact of the finished work of
our Lord Jesus Christ.
And the epistle invites us, let us draw
near.
The Old Testament tells us to keep out.
Adam and Eve were thrown out of the
garden and the flaming angels kept them out.
There was no way into the holy place
in the tabernacle.
The way into the holy place is not
yet open.
God is separated in the symbolism and in
the reality.
Not symbolism, but cause in reality.
God is separated.
Now, in what sense is God separated?
Can I put it like this?
If you were to look back over the
entire course of human history and draw a
line to divide like from unlike, on the
one side of the line you would have
to put all human and angelic creatures of
every kind.
All kinds of creatures.
We are all on the one side of
the line.
From the beginning of time, and it will
be so to the end of time.
On the other side of the line there
is one solitary figure.
It's the Almighty God, the Holy One of
Israel.
All the pantheons of deities that men have
created, they are with us.
They are the creatures of the human mind,
of the human spirit, of the human intellect,
of the human will.
We are all together on this side of
the line, the high and the low, the
rich and the poor, cultured and illiterate.
Here we are.
We are together on this side of the
line.
Who is on the other side?
When you and I come to worship Him,
though we gladly rejoice in the precious atoning
blood of Christ and the Spirit that brings
us near, let us remember you were some
time afar off who have been made nigh
by the blood of Christ.
God is separated from us, from His world
and from His people.
Now, of course, I've got to bring a
correction or a caution in here, and it's
a very important caution.
When we say that God is separated from
His world, we must not for one moment
suggest that God is withdrawn from His world,
that He's got no interest in it and
has nothing to do with it.
I cannot pursue this, but let me say
this much.
If God were to withdraw His interest in
the world for but one solitary moment, the
cosmos, the ordered universe, would immediately degenerate into
a chaos.
You say there's a lot of chaos in
the world today.
Yes, but remember this.
It is a chaos which God permits.
The writer of the epistle to the Hebrews
describes our Lord Jesus Christ bearing all things,
chapter 1, verse 3, bearing all things or
sustaining all things by the word of His
power.
Now, that word sustaining is not the picture
of an atlas holding up the universe, as
it were, lifting it up and just holding
it up and carrying it somehow lifted high.
It's more than that.
The older expositors and some of the more
recent ones will tell you that underlying that
word is this.
The whole cosmos and the whole historical process
is being upheld by an omnipotent deity, plus
being carried along, conveyed, led, directed through all
the intricacies of night and light, of summer
and winter, of all that you can think
of in human life, right and wrong, black
and white, success and failure.
It is being carried forward through all the
storms of life to its predetermined goal.
God is active in the affairs of the
universe.
He made it.
He sustains it.
Paul quoted somebody, it wasn't himself, but he
quoted someone as saying, it is in God
that we live and move and have our
being.
We cannot breathe without him.
Your next breath is in the hand of
God to live.
Jesus put it even more bluntly than that.
You know, oftentimes we slip over, gloss over
little things.
You know, Jesus said in Matthew 5, he
says, he causes his sun to shine upon
the just and the unjust.
Did you get that?
A sun is his.
Don't take it for granted.
It shines.
No!
He causes it to shine.
And he causes the rain to fall upon
the righteous and the unrighteous.
He's the cause that brings it about.
He's active, you see.
Even when a sparrow falls, somehow or other,
in that apparently insignificant act, don't ask me
now how, but he's there.
He's involved in it.
I'm saying all this in order for us
to qualify what we've said.
God is separate from the universe, but not
in the sense that he's abandoned it.
The 17th, 18th century deists were altogether wrong.
You remember their view of God.
They believed that God had created the universe
all right, but then they said he's created
it like a clock.
And he's wound up the clock, and now
he is withdrawn.
He's gone to take his rest somewhere until
the clock works itself out.
That's what we're in today.
Many people believe this.
It's in many images of writers and so
forth.
The clock is ticking to the 11th hour.
That's where they get it from, from the
deists.
No, no, no, no.
God did not make the universe by the
clock.
He sends his rain.
He causes the sun to shine.
He is there when the sparrow falls and
so forth.
God is involved in the affairs of the
universe.
Well, then, you ask me, how then can
God be separate?
Now, the separateness of which we speak, which
is at the heart of holiness, is twofold.
I'm going to speak of one.
I have to do it to be fair
and honest to the text of Scripture, and
it may not be as familiar to you
as it ought to be to all of
us.
It's the second aspect that we are most
familiar with.
The first is what we must refer to
as his transcendental majesty.
Something metaphysically that belongs to the nature of
God, which imparts to him sovereignty, majesty, the
kind of which you don't meet anywhere.
It doesn't belong to the creature, not even
to all the creatures come together as one.
It is something that is exclusively God's.
So the first element in God's separation, which
is his holiness, is this.
It is his transcendence.
That is really the best word to use.
Now, God's transcendence refers to his separation from
his creation in terms of elevation.
Not that he is living in a heaven
that is higher than the heavens of the
birds or the heavens of the constellations or
higher heavens, and he is in the highest
of all.
That's not it.
It's not elevated in terms of space or
time, but in being.
There is a very important debate that has
been going on in philosophical and theological circles
since I was an undergraduate.
And it is going on, and it is
raging in some places in the United States
and in Europe today.
Whether the term person is related to God
is adequate.
If you use the term person of the
creature, is it right to use the same
term of the almighty creator?
There are elements that are the same because
God has made us after his image.
Now, I don't want to go into the
intricacies of it, but the thing is, God,
you see, when you use the term person
of the creature, you've got to remember that
when we are dealing with a creator who
has received no help from any of his
creatures in this matter, he is alone.
When there was nothing, he started everything off,
and he put the potency in everything that
he made to repeat its kind.
His being, his nature, his person is something
altogether different from the person of the creature.
And this, of course, is exceedingly important.
God is really transcendent.
I've written down here, and I don't write
my notes completely, but I think I will
read this to you.
God's elevation in terms of his very nature
of his being, he is not simply separated
from his creatures in what may appear to
us a significant way.
Something like an archangel may be said to
transcend a worm.
God transcends the most exalted archangel as far
again and beyond as that same archangel transcends
a worm.
God is not the highest among all competitors
to greatness.
He stands alone.
You cannot worship God as he asks and
demands and deserves to be worshipped until you
see that God is alone.
This aspect of the divine nature and being
needs to be recognized and proclaimed.
You see, we are subject to him.
We were made by him.
We are inferior to him.
We are dependent upon him.
We are answerable to him.
And he is of an order of being
quite different from anything we know.
So that some of our better hims, some
of our older hims in particular, reflect aspects
of the being of God that your modern
ditties don't dream about.
Listen to this.
Before the hills in order stood, our earth
received its frame from everlasting thou art God
to endless years the same.
That man's breathing and atmosphere that some of
the authors of our petty little now there
are good choruses of course but I'm talking
of the petty ones that only repeat the
same old inane thing many, many times over
until you think the needle has stuck.
Here is truth gripping the man producing in
the man some sense of wonder and awe
and he is letting us have the benefit
of it in words that are fit in
the process of worship.
King David, of course, had early caught this
vision.
Yours, O Lord, he says, is the greatness
and the power and the glory and the
majesty and the splendor for everything in heaven
and earth is yours.
Yours, O Lord, is the kingdom by which
he means the whole rule.
You are exalted as head over all.
Wealth and honor come from you.
You are the ruler of all things, etc.,
etc.
1 Chronicles 29.
Now then, one aspect of the holiness of
God is this.
It's difficult to use one word for it.
You can bring in the word sovereignty.
You can bring in the term majesty.
Transcendence, I think, is the most inclusive word
but it's not a very familiar one.
But it is God up there beyond our
reach and our range.
If we were left to ourselves to see
him from close at hand.
But now there is the other aspect.
God's ethical and moral excellence.
God's moral purity.
God's otherness, otherness in this sphere.
Now, it's the word ethics, I suppose, is
the crucial one to be strictly accurate here.
The word ethics comes from the same root
as the word ethos.
And when we refer this to God, the
ethical purity of God, what we mean is
this.
The purity which comes from the ethos of
the divine nature.
God produces his own ethos.
You'll have an atmosphere in your home, parents,
children.
There was an atmosphere in the home in
heaven between the father and the son and
the Holy Spirit.
It is part of the divine nature.
It is not something that was concocted.
It is part of the Godhood of God.
The ethos.
And our word ethics comes from that.
If it's rightly used, what it means is
this.
Behavior, words, actions, deeds that arise in a
manner that is consistent with the ethics, with
the ethos of God's own being.
Now, what do we know about it?
Well, scripture has a number of things to
say.
I see that I'm, as usual, a bit
too slow.
Let me just say one or two things
here.
Let me quote to you a verse which
is very germane to this.
Habakkuk, the prophet, in chapter 1, verse 13,
says, Your eyes, he says to the Lord,
are too pure to look on evil.
You cannot tolerate evil.
Now, just think of that for a moment.
He says about God, he says, I don't
like what you're going to do.
You're threatening to do certain things to our
land, and I don't understand it, he says,
because your eyes, I know, are too pure
to look upon evil.
You see it, you know what's going on,
but you can't keep on looking at it.
And then he qualifies that by going beyond
that.
He says, you cannot tolerate.
You cannot tolerate wrong.
There is a holy intolerance in God.
That is, intolerance of that which is so
utterly inconsistent with his nature that it can
have no place in his schemes.
It is intolerance of sin.
The prophet moves then from the one to
the other, but let me give you another
one.
John, in his epistle, says, take the message
that we have heard from him, that is,
from the Lord Jesus Christ, and declare to
you, God is light, and in him there
is no darkness at all.
It's the same truth, given in a different
context altogether, but it's the same truth.
God is light.
And you know what light does.
When you go into the light, you become
aware of yourself and aware of the dirt,
and maybe some blood on my face if
I could see myself in the mirror.
Well, you're not telling me anything anyway.
You've got to overlook it now for a
while.
We become aware of our blemishes in the
light which is God.
I must mention this.
I have referred to Isaiah's trisagion, holy, holy,
holy.
It is not always remembered that John, in
his book of Revelation, in chapter 4, heard
angelic beings, heavenly beings, attenuate using the same
holy, holy, holy, but with one slight difference.
Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty.
Isaiah then heard them say, the whole earth
is full of his glory.
That's not what John heard.
John heard these words, who is, that is,
let me give it to you, holy is
the Lord God Almighty, who is, sorry, who
was, who is, and who is to come.
In other words, he who is holy, holy,
holy was eternally holy.
He who is holy, holy, holy refers to
his unchangeable holiness in the present.
And with reference to his being holy as
the one to come, it means that God
will never change in his holiness.
God is, in other words, absolutely holy.
And he cannot and will not change.
And if you and I are to know
him and walk with him and have fellowship
with him and be capable of enjoying him
in his heaven at last, somehow or other,
brothers and sisters, we've got to know something
of this.
Now, I have come to a point –
this is an endless theme – where I
think I will just mention one or two
things in doing so.
Yes, I think I ought to come to
this, stressing the fact that God's holiness cannot
change because it would mean that he himself
would change.
I'll leave that there.
Let me come to say this.
God's holiness is the antiseptic of the whole
moral universe.
Antiseptic is needed in the world today, in
many areas of life.
God's holiness is the antiseptic of the entire
universe.
One, it is the antiseptic that guarantees the
fidelity – and there's another word I'm hanging
for, I can't get it – the reality,
the ongoing reality of all God's attributes.
It is a very remarkable thing, the holiness
of God.
It guarantees that not one of God's attributes
will be crushed or fail to have its
place in the whole.
God's holiness is the antiseptic against all influences
that could possibly curb his goodness or his
justice or his wrath or his mercy or
whatever.
So that in the plethora of God's attributes
which comprise his glory, all his attributes will
have their place.
And holiness guarantees that because in character, in
purity, he does not change.
But now it goes beyond that.
God's holiness is the antiseptic that makes it
impossible for him to be untrue to his
promises, to fail keeping his threats, or to
be deviated from the purposes which he has
disclosed to lie behind the universe and behind
human life.
God cannot change.
God cannot deviate.
And the thing above all in the nature
of God that guarantees that is his holiness.
So that you see even though as in
the questions that were asked in the brochure
other elements are brought out.
Brothers and sisters, this is the most comfortable
thing that we can tell each other.
We've got to come to terms with it.
It is a very demanding subject.
God demands of us certain things in his
holiness.
But in the last resort it is because
God is holy that he will not countenance
from without and cannot from within change because
he is holy.
I will indeed close with this.
We must respond to these two aspects of
the otherness of God.
His transcendence requires of us not that we
emulate it.
Don't try and emulate that.
Don't try and be as high as God
is.
Don't try to be as lofty as God
is.
The only one that tried that was Lucifer,
son of the morning star and that's the
way down.
When you set yourself up as God and
you argue with him and you stand in
his way, my friend, you are playing with
fire and so am I.
The response to the transcendent majesty and sovereignty
and glory of God is not to try
to be like him but to be consecrated
to him, to hand myself over, to give
myself up, to dedicate myself to the sovereign
Lord.
You find that in Moses at the burning
bush.
You find it in Isaiah in Isaiah 6.
You find it with Habakkuk.
You find it with Job.
You find it with the disciples.
You find it wherever you go.
But then as far as this other aspect
of God's holiness is concerned is moral purity.
Here we are to be like him.
As he who has called you is holy
in all manner of conversation.
Because of this, you see, the summons that
God gave to the Israelites of old and
is repeated three or four times in Leviticus
from Leviticus chapter 11 on to at least
chapter 21, I am holy and you've got
to be holy.
That is the basis upon which Peter and
the Apostle Paul build, for example, in the
New Testament.
And Peter in 1 Peter 1 verses 14,
15, and 16 brings together the command and
the demand of God from ancient Israel and
he demands it again from the church of
the New Testament.
It is because I am holy, you've got
to be holy.
Of course, Jesus said it before him.
He didn't say it in the same words
and we sometimes miss the thrust of it.
But he said to his children in the
Sermon on the Mount, he said, you are
to be perfect, he says, as your Father
in heaven is perfect.
Now you say, well, I can't be perfect.
I can't rise to that.
You've got to look at it and work
at it.
And since the provisions are given us by
the grace and the Spirit of God in
Christ and by his word to direct us
and the fellowship of the saints to inspire
us, we ought to be about the business,
the holy business from day to day and
year to year until at last he will
conclude it in his good time.
I end.
We've had a little experience recently with flowers.
Now, I'm not good at flowers.
My wife is the florist.
And what else?
We were away and had some plants and
a fellow elsewhere in the building looked after
them.
And they were quite good.
There was nothing wrong at all.
When we brought them back, they were all
alive.
And he'd had them in the right place
in his apartment and we had switched things
around in our apartment and we put them
in a corner where they hadn't been before.
Now they were near the window, near the
light.
And then I wasn't satisfied with something else.
I don't want to go into the details.
It takes time.
But we switched them back to where they
originally were and they were catching the morning
light every morning as the sun rises.
They've been completely transformed.
We've got flesh blooms and they're the most
beautiful things and they're coming out and we
don't see them anywhere else.
Brother and sister in Christ, get on with
the business of perfecting holiness in the fear
of the Lord.
I know you can't perfect it perfectly.
But one day he will come.
And when the sun comes that will manifest
from the east to the west and the
glory of the Lord we shall be like
him for we shall see him as he
is.
And the light of the glory in him
will bring out all that is latent in
his people and that is the last touch
of God on the perfection of his imperfect
people.
I'm sorry I've gone over the time.