Called to Be Holy

Philippians chapter 1. We have been meditating, beginning with the letter to the Philippians, and during these weeks God has led us to speak about God’s call to holiness, God’s call to consecration, to the surrender of our lives, to the sanctification of our lives. I hope you are receiving this as a Word directly for your life

, and even if you are new to the faith, new to this Church, God is calling you; God is calling our congregation. As one of the sisters who was praying here said, God is calling this Church to cleanse ourselves, to prepare ourselves, to be suitable vessels so that His anointing may dwell within us. We have the ambition to do great things for the Lord, to redeem lives for Christ—young people, homeless people, all of that—but a suitable conduit for the Glory of God is required in a city like this.

We are living in a difficult time for humanity, and if God’s anointing is going to make the difference, it must manifest itself in an unprecedented way, on a scale commensurate with the miracles and interventions we see in the Old Testament and the New Testament. It is as though we have grown accustomed to lowering our expectations, and we see the miracles in the Bible as metaphors, that is all, as poetic starting points we can use to speak about a God of mercy, power, and love; but we do not believe that He is still able to heal the lame, give sight to the blind, heal the deaf, rescue the demon-possessed, multiply the loaves and the fish, or perform those mighty miracles that we see in Elijah and in other great men and women of God. We believe that these things are in the past and that we must get used to something different. I do not believe that; the best is still ahead.

I said a little while ago that, in the patterns of the Bible, the latter wine is always better than the first wine, and I likewise believe that in these last days of humanity, the final outpouring of the Holy Spirit before Christ comes will be an outpouring such as we have never seen before. Say amen, if only to offer a little encouragement here, okay? Are you there, are you awake, amen? Or did you already give it all during the praise and prayer? That is sometimes the problem. No, let us keep going here until this is over.

So, brothers and sisters, if we want to see that level of God’s intervention in this city and this nation, we must be holy vessels; we must be suitable conduits for the Glory of God. If we wanted to settle for this level—well, God has already done what He had to do with us, so now we are simply going to cruise along, put it on automatic, and go sixty-five miles per hour, and that is all—no. I want this to take off, at warp speed, and move into another dimension, to another spiritual level; and for that, we need to give the Lord more of ourselves. We must live at white heat, and God is speaking to me, convicting me—He is convicting me, as they say in English—that for the Glory of God to be manifested in our lives, He requires a holy people, a clean people, a people crying out to Him and paying the price, brothers and sisters. This is God’s call for our lives.

If you are new to the faith, if you are just beginning to take your first steps, I encourage you to begin well. There are many Christians who have spent twenty or thirty years wandering in the wilderness, as Hebrews says, and they have still not entered the Promised Land because they have not surrendered, they have not consecrated themselves, and they have not understood the Lord’s total call for them. Since you are just beginning in the ways of the Lord and are visiting this congregation, you have the opportunity to come in strong and be one of those who reach the Promised Land after spending only a short time wandering around, by surrendering your life.

Enter into a demanding Gospel, a heroic Gospel, an epic Gospel, so to speak, amen? Enter the faith with a sense of the calling and commitment God has for your life. This is the time; let us not let down our guard or lose heart concerning what God is doing. That is why we are issuing this call at a time when God is doing something special in our Church: a call to holiness, a call to consecration, a call to examine ourselves. There is a chorus that says, ‘Let us examine our ways,’ right? And let us see what God wants from us. Each person must examine himself or herself: Lord, what areas can I surrender to You?

So that is where we are, with that call to holiness. I want to reinforce it by looking at chapter 1 of the Epistle to the Philippians, which we are using as a starting point for these meditations. Last Sunday we focused on that emphasis: servants of Jesus Christ; Paul and Timothy, servants, douloi of Jesus Christ. This means that the children of God are servants; to use a less politically correct word, we are slaves of Jesus Christ. That is the expression Paul used. The apostles saw themselves as slaves of Jesus Christ. Their degree of focus, consecration, and surrender to the demands of Jesus was so great that they considered their condition to be that of a slave, who had no life of his own, had no authority, had no autonomy, and could not decide what he was going to do. Their money was not theirs; their time, possessions, life, and destiny all belonged to God. And the Bible, as we saw, also calls us to adopt a lifestyle as servants of Jesus Christ and servants of one another.

So that condition as servants also imposes upon us a condition of holiness, a condition of being holy. That is why it says here: Paul and Timothy, servants of Jesus Christ, to all the saints in Christ Jesus who are in Philippi. Notice that he is referring to the entire congregation of Christians who were in that city of Philippi; he calls them saints. And I told the brothers and sisters this morning that it would be as though I went away on a trip for a while and sent you a letter saying, ‘Brother Roberto Miranda, servant of Jesus Christ, to all the saints in the congregation of Judah,’ or, ‘to all the saints who are in the city of Boston.’

The Bible tells us again and again that, by definition, the very fact that we are Christians, that we are followers of Jesus Christ, already confers upon us the status of saints. Look at another passage. Paul repeated that over and over again. Let us go to 1 Corinthians chapter 3. We are going to read a few verses from the Bible to support what we are saying, because I want us, like an airplane circling over a territory, to be able to see all the different aspects of holiness and to gain an idea of the complexity of this call from God to holiness.

I hope that by the end of this series of messages, we will have a good idea of what this call to holiness entails. There in 1 Corinthians chapter 1, verse 2, the apostle Paul also takes up this idea of holiness and sanctification, and here he says: ‘Paul, called to be an apostle of Jesus Christ through the Will of God, and Sosthenes our brother, to the Church of God which is at Corinth’—Corinth was a city of the Greco-Roman Empire—‘to the Church of God which is at Corinth, to those sanctified in Christ Jesus.’ See the idea there again: the entire Church there in Corinth; he also calls them those sanctified in Christ Jesus. And then he adds: ‘called to be saints, together with all those everywhere who call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, their Lord and ours: grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.’

So you see this idea here once again, right? It is interesting that Paul uses a different expression here. He says, ‘to those sanctified.’ I told the brothers and sisters this morning that there seems to be a small contradiction in Paul’s expression, because he is speaking to all those who have been sanctified, but he also says, ‘called to be saints.’ One wonders, well, if they have been sanctified, why are they then supposedly called to be saints, as though it were something to aspire to, something to aim for? If it is already a fact, why aim for it? But precisely there we see something of the complexity of this subject of holiness, implied in that expression of Paul.

What Paul is saying here, in other words, is this: when you enter the ways of the Lord, accept the work of Christ on the cross of Calvary, and receive that work as having been done for you—His crucifixion, His death—it has credited you with righteousness before God and made you a child of God. When you assent to that plan of salvation from God through Christ Jesus, automatically, immediately, and absolutely, it is as though a bolt of lightning, a flame of sanctification, comes upon you; and then, in a definitive, absolute sense, you are holy before God. Why? Because all your sins are erased. The Word says that if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old things have passed away, and behold, all things have become new.

So there is a sense in which, yes, when you receive Christ as Lord and Savior, you are sanctified. You are assigned the status before God of a holy creature, acceptable before God. The blood of Christ washes you, and it says that He takes your sins, casts them into the depths of the sea, and will remember them no more. So there is a kind of sanctification, a dimension of sanctification, that is instantaneous, definitive, and total; and when you enter the ways of the Lord, you walk in that new citizenship. You are a child of God, and by definition you are hagios, set apart from a way of life; you now belong to a lineage sanctified and purified by the Lord. Now, how many of you know that, as that verse says, ‘he is a new creation’—how many know that even though we are new creations, the old man is still fighting inside us? Isn’t that right?

There are some very old men in here who are still alive and kicking. There are, aren’t there? It is the truth, right? God stamps us with His seal and assigns us the status of redeemed children, but then a process of increasing perfection is supposed to begin within us. I would say that ontologically, in our absolute state of being, yes, we are holy before God; but in our lived reality—what we experience each day, our circumstances, the struggle of the mind and of our appetites—there is a progressive reality that will unfold within us, in which God will draw us closer and closer each day and indeed conform us to the image of Christ Jesus. It is as though an identity is assigned to us, but we have to grow until we fill the new shoes of that identity.

Let me give you an example. It is as though, in the army, a person graduates from officer school and, when he finishes, is given the bars of a second lieutenant. An army officer goes through training as a soldier and an officer, has the day of his commissioning, and receives his bars, which the general or someone else pins on him; and then he is already a second lieutenant in the United States Army. That is his condition, his status. But do you know what? That young man—they are generally young—must now begin a process of growing into his identity as an officer. He has to begin speaking like an army officer; he has to acquire that commanding voice; he has to acquire the bearing of a man in authority. There is an attitude he must cultivate over the years until he fills those officer’s shoes. Then he will rise through the different ranks, becoming a captain, a colonel, a general of various star ranks. He grows in authority, experience, command, and many other things, even though he is already an army officer. And the same thing happens with us.

When God sanctifies us, He assigns us an identity: children of God, redeemed by Christ Jesus, destined for eternal life. But then, while we are here on Earth, there will be a process of increasing sanctification. We are called to be holy in the sense that we are called to purify ourselves more and more each day until we become like Christ Jesus. So there is an instantaneous, definitive condition, but there is also a process of entering more and more deeply into it, so that what I am—my human relationships, my appetites, my flesh, my mind, my emotions, my habits—all of that increasingly conforms to what I am in the eyes of God. Am I making myself clear? And that is what we mean when God calls us to an increasing holiness as we enter the ways of God. Let us all understand that.

And I believe that is what happens with so many peoples and churches of God: we have not known how to handle the complexity of holiness, so we fall into oversimplification and fail to understand the tension involved, that dynamic tension that says, okay, God calls us to holiness and we must aspire to it, but it will be a gradual process, a step-by-step process, until we attain the fullness of the image of Christ Jesus. So I invite you—and I invite myself, at this time in the life of the Church—to conceive of that call from God as a call to surrender to the Lord everything He asks of us so that we may become that chosen people of God.

I know there are things in you, just as there are in me, that we can identify and that we need to ask the Lord to work on in us. I believe many people are afraid of holiness, or of the call to holiness, because they see their present condition, they see how difficult it is to break certain habits and certain conditions in their lives, and they feel intimidated; and that is why they never open their minds to the idea that, no, I can become a man or a woman of God who truly reflects the character of Jesus, and I must begin that journey and begin surrendering to the Lord every part of my being, everything He wants me to surrender to Him, until we are formed according to the Lord Jesus Christ.

The Christian life is a wonderful journey in which, each day, we give Him pieces of our being, and God goes about doing precious things; as He asks things of us, He gives of Himself to us as well. Someone has said that the trail a Christian leaves through life is like the trail of a wounded rabbit in the snow, leaving little drops of blood as it walks along. And you know what? It is the same with us. If we have truly accepted God’s call to the authentic Christian life, that means our life will be a growing crucifixion; areas of our lives will have to be left behind. God calls us to two things: He calls us to great joy, great victory, great sublimity, the great gladness of being servants of God, moments when we see the glory of God manifested in our lives, things God does in our families, in our jobs, and financially—God blesses us in many ways. But there are also moments when God says, “Come, you know what? I am going to bring you into My school of holiness. I am going to take you through a time of crucifixion, of trials, of showing you who you truly are, so that you will seek Me more and become like My Son Jesus Christ.”

So there will be situations, difficulties, and moments in your life that God will allow you to enter. But do you know what they will be for? So that through those experiences you may become more like Jesus, and so that, as He refines you and removes things from within you, you may then be happier and better able to live the full life God wants you to live. That is why the apostle Paul also speaks of this: that we lay aside every weight that besets us, so that we may run the race of faith with ease.

Many times we come to the ways of the Lord with a great many imperfections that are like pounds weighing us down, and when we try to run, we become exhausted. When we try to run the race of faith, we feel exhausted; the devil hits us hard, we fall again and again, there are obstacles, things happen, and Paul says, “No, lighten your load; take those things off.” What are those things? Everything you know does not please the Lord, everything that keeps you from becoming like Christ. When we surrender all those things to the Lord, then the Christian life becomes something glorious, something beautiful, something delightful, and then we can truly partake of all the blessings God has for us.

As never before in history, God is calling us to be a holy people. You know, when God called the Hebrews to be a holy people, He was speaking to a nation surrounded by impurity, sin, and wickedness. The nations around Israel were nations devoted to pagan gods—gods of sensuality, gods of violence, gods of the earth, gods of death and darkness—and people who practiced every kind of unimaginable moral excess. And so, when God called that people of Israel to be a holy people unto Him, that meant they had to be a different people, a set-apart people, a people separated from the impurity of the world in which they lived, so that they would exemplify the holiness of the God they served.

Holiness is always lived out in contrast to a world headed in another direction, and when God calls us to be holy, it means that God wants us to separate ourselves from the filth that characterizes the world in which we live. He wants us to be different in that regard and to exemplify His holiness.

There is a passage I am dealing with—let us go to Philippians 2:15—and I am going to leave it around here more or less because I will return to some of this next week. But there is something I have been thinking about that I want us to remember because it is important. You will remember that two weeks ago I spoke about this verse. Verse 12 says: “Work out your salvation with fear and trembling, because it is God who works in you both to will and to do, according to His good will.” Then Paul continues developing that thought and says here, “Do everything without grumbling or disputes,” and here is what I want to emphasize: “so that you may be blameless and sincere, children of God without blemish in the midst of an evil and perverse generation, among whom you shine as lights in the world.”

You know that at this time in human history, the call to holiness for God’s people has become more urgent, more critical than ever before in history, because we are living at a time when humanity has thrown itself, plunged headlong, into sin. And so God says to us the same thing He said to the brothers in Philippi: that we must be blameless. That does not mean you have to be perfect, understand me, although it is good to aim for perfection. But being blameless means that, as far as possible, your conduct and your way of living are such that people cannot find an opening through which to throw a stone at you or accuse you, because your walk is upright before God and before men. You may have your faults and your issues, but there is a level of integrity God expects from us, so that the world cannot rebuke us or criticize us.

Nowadays we give the world so much cause to throw stones at us from every direction, because the people of God are not living at the level God desires. So there is so much scandal among God’s people, in the pastorate, in the evangelistic world, and on television. The lifestyle of so many Christians is, in many cases, not very different from that of the world outside; therefore, we are blameworthy instead. But the Word of God says blameless. There is another passage where the apostle Paul says that we should live in such a way that when people want to say something bad about us, they cannot; and if they attack us, let it be because we are serving the Lord, like Daniel, who was thrown into the fiery furnace because he was serving God and doing the Lord’s will, not because he was doing something wrong. If we are going to be persecuted, let them persecute us for being good before God and doing the Lord’s will.

Incidentally, that other word, sincere—the word sincere in the original Greek means unmixed, pure. It is like gold that has been purified and has no other metals in it, or wine with no water in it. That is one of the expressions used to translate that word, sincere: there is no mixture in them; rather, there is only one element, a pure specimen. So what Paul is saying is that we should be blameless before the world and that we should be pure, that there should be no mixture. In how many of us are the world and God still battling within us? We have one foot in the world and the other foot in the kingdom of God. Our affections are in the world and in the ways of the Lord, and one of the things God says is that we must die to the world—that idea expressed by Paul when he says, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me.”

So God wants a process of death to take place within us, but death unto life. It is a process of dying to the affections and appetites of the world. And the apostle Paul—or John—says that friendship with the world is enmity with God. The Lord Jesus Christ also said that we cannot serve two masters, because we love one more or we love the other more. We have to decide whom we are going to serve, to whom we are going to surrender our hearts and our affections. The Lord says, “Surrender yourself completely.” Why? Because we live in an evil and perverse generation. Wow, that is difficult. Many evangelicals nowadays do not like to speak in those terms because they think it sounds as though one is criticizing people too much.

Now, we must love that generation because they need God. Nor can we despise them and say, “Oh, we are better than they are.” No, we must love them and show them mercy even when we hate the things they do. Let me give you an example, and with this I will finish. This week—I think it was Thursday; yes, Thursday—I had to attend a meeting of leaders here in Massachusetts, convened by the Catholic Church. And incidentally, how sad it is—I love my Catholic brothers and sisters, and the truth is that there are many things... Frankly, I do not throw stones at the Catholic Church; I respect the Catholic Church. In one respect, let me tell you, the Catholic Church must be admired, because nowadays, when many evangelical churches in this nation have stopped fighting for certain important social issues, the Catholic Church, wounded and bleeding as it is, is stepping forward and spearheading many causes that we evangelicals have already cast aside.

But how sad that the Catholic Church has been affected by this whole scandal of pedophilia among its priests. Of course, because of this they have lost tremendous credibility in society. So they are fighting the battle for moral integrity while not smelling very good themselves, and they have laid themselves open to charges of blatant hypocrisy for failing to address this serious problem among their leadership, among Catholic leaders—the issue of the abuse of children—and for knowing it was happening but not paying the price of bringing it to light and disciplining those people. Something horrible, horrible.

However, this would take a long time to explain, but here is where I am going with it: this is why, if we are going to call the world to repentance, we have a great responsibility to exemplify proper conduct. Someone has said that you cannot preach morality in your underwear; we must clean our own house first. But that is beside the point; that is not the point. What happened was that Cardinal Shanon was there—a man whom I believe to be a man of God, whom I respect, and a man of integrity in many ways—to discuss an issue. And I want to take this opportunity to put it before you, because one would think this was science fiction. If you had told me three years ago that Massachusetts would be dealing with this, I would have said, “No, that is not possible.” But by now nothing shocks us anymore; we have already seen so much with same-sex marriage that it seems as though anything is possible.

This society, this generation, is becoming more and more perverse every day, to the point that in November, when the next elections are held and there is an opportunity to vote—I think November 2; I do not remember exactly when; well, in November—there are several things on which the people of Massachusetts will have to vote, and one of them is Proposal Number 2. Proposal Number 2 has to do with physician-assisted suicide, physician assisted suicide. That means that in the state of Massachusetts, unless God intervenes, it will be possible for a person with a terminal illness to ask their doctor to prescribe a poison that they will be able to pick up at a pharmacy and take in order to end their life, using a prescription that the doctor will provide legally and legitimately.

Imagine how many desperate people, depressed by cancer or some other situation, who think, “My life is over now, and there is no longer any hope for me,” would have the medical option of going to a doctor and saying, “Hey, I want you to give me a prescription so I can kill myself and end my life.” And they would entrust that choice to a person who is emotionally fragile and who is not even required to undergo a psychiatric medical evaluation to determine whether they are in their right mind. No, they simply have to say, “I want to kill myself. I want to end this. Prescribe the medicine for me. I am going to go over to Walgreens, go home, put on some really nice pajamas, drink the poison, and end my life.”

Look, even this is interesting, because we heard this from a very well-known firm here in Massachusetts that is trying to help with this. Right now in Massachusetts, if the vote were held today, 70% of Massachusetts voters would vote in favor of physician-assisted suicide. There are only about thirty-something percent of people, mostly Christians, who are willing to vote against that measure. That is to say, the fight to defeat this Proposal Number 2 is very steeply uphill, because this culture, this society here in Massachusetts, has reached that point: highly educated people with secular, humanistic values, far removed from the Word of God, who are willing to vote for an aberration, for a moral outrage like that.

And you know, what is interesting is this: the doctors themselves refuse to do it—the American Medical Association, which supports other things, is against this—because they recognize that doctors are called to preserve life, not to facilitate death. But even so, this culture, which has plunged headlong into wickedness and sin, is willing to accept this. I plead with you, my brothers and sisters, that if you have the opportunity to vote in November, vote correctly, vote morally, vote spiritually, and let us make sure that we never cast our vote in favor of a perversion such as assisted suicide, or suicide permitted and facilitated by a doctor.

But my point is that this is why it is so important for us to understand the words of the apostle Paul. He says that we must shine in the midst of an evil and perverse generation; we must be blameless; we must be single-minded in our commitment to the Lord, because where is this society going to end up? In a headlong slide toward death, gloom, and darkness. The devil has been given free rein in this world, and only those who make a firm commitment to the Lord will be able to survive, will be able to stand firm. An exceptional level of purity is required in this time, and we must understand that this is the world in which we live, and we must be different. God calls you to be different; God calls me to be different; God truly calls us to be a holy people, pleasing to Him.

Let us bow our heads now; let us reaffirm our calling. And if there is anyone here this afternoon who wants to give their life to the Lord Jesus Christ and wants us to pray for you, it would be my pleasure to present you before the Lord. You may raise your hand if you wish, or come up here to the front. If God has touched you in some way this afternoon through the worship or anything else, do not delay too long; come up here, because we want to pray for you. If you came with someone and that person wants to accompany you, they may do so as well. If you have not done this before, come with a brother or a sister, and we would like to present you before the Lord. If anyone has not taken that step of faith, we would like to pray for you. Come up here to the front or raise your hand where you are, and it would be my pleasure to place you in the Lord’s hands as well, okay?

In the meantime, there in your heart, I plead with you: strengthen your commitment to God not to be a halfhearted Christian, not to be a Christian mixed with other things. Close every breach in your life; hold tightly to the measure of blessing God has given you; commit yourself to the Lord. We are living in truly urgent times, and the time for playing at being evangelical is over. It is a time to take a stand; it is a time to believe the Lord and His calling. Let us close ranks and surrender our entire lives to the Lord, fill in those weak places, strengthen the knees, as the apostle Paul says, and lift up and strengthen the arms that hang down—strengthen our commitment to the Lord. And may our love for those lost souls grow greater every day. That is why we need to prepare and purify ourselves so that we can impact that world.

I have not surrendered the world to the devil yet, you know? There are still many people of faith in this country who are praying and crying out. I am not handing this nation over to Satan yet, you know? This is a kairos time, a crucial time, and God can shine in this nation. And I believe that one of the reasons God has sent Latinos to the United States is not to cheat the IRS out of money; it is to bless this nation spiritually with their prayers, their cries to God, their red-hot spirituality, their spiritual values, their different ethic—a Church that, in a spirit of humility, teaches this nation what Christ can make possible. We can be that exemplary family.

Father, in the name of Jesus, we want to be visited by You; we want to be touched by You; we want You to use this Word we are sharing as a vehicle to enter the hearts of Your people. Do not let us sink to a level lower than what we have proclaimed, Lord. Firmly establish within us this call to holiness; make it real in the life of this congregation, Father. Take away everything that is not from You, everything that does not please You, Lord. Thank You for this precious time in which we have been able to worship You freely, Lord. We have presented our petitions before You; You have visited us with Your presence, and now send us out of here having been ministered to by Your Word. Bless us, and do not let anyone come and steal that seed which has fallen into our hearts, Lord; do not let anyone come and violate what You want to do in us. Bless these people and send them out of here under Your blessing and in Your company, and may nothing interfere, Lord, with the awareness of Your Presence—not on the way to their homes, not when they arrive there, and not tomorrow when we begin our normal working lives. May Your Word and Your Presence be as real as they are at this very moment. Thank You, Lord. In the name of Jesus we pray, amen and amen. God bless you, my brothers and sisters. May the grace and peace of the Lord be with all of you. Amen.