Blameless Before God

I recently came across an article online that looked interesting to me. The title grabbed me instantly. It was called “Five Christian Cliches That Need to Die.” You know what a cliche is, right? It’s a saying that’s overused and trite.It’s something we say thoughtlessly and carelessly. What were these cliches in this article, these five Christian cliches that the author of this article says need to die? They were as follows: 1) “When God closes a door, he opens a window”; 2) “You’re never safer than when you’re in God’s will”; 3) “Let go and let God”; 4) “God will not give you more than you can handle”; and 5) “God helps those who help themselves.”

Now we can quibble about some of these. I don’t have as much of a problem with the first one and third one. But the others I do have problems; I do think these three Christian cliches need to die, meaning I think we need to stop saying them. We need to stop saying “You’re never safer than when you’re in God’s will” - that one needs to die because Jesus was the only person who has ever found Himself perfectly within the will of God, and was brutally beaten and crucified. We need to stop saying “God will not give you more than you can handle” because the Bible itself teaches that He will and in fact does give us more than we can handle, because only when we are taken beyond our own abilities will we truly learn to rely on His strength.

But the last one is the worst: “God helps those who help themselves.” All you have to do is apply that one to the idea of salvation in order to see how silly it is. God helps those who cannot help themselves, and who know they cannot help themselves, and who know how desperately they need His grace and forgiveness. There are times when depending on yourself, helping yourself, will keep you out of heaven. These three cliches, then, I think are Christian cliches that do in fact need to die.

But there’s one more I would gladly add to the list if I was writing my own article about cliches. What, you ask, is the fourth saying that I think needs to die? It’s this: “That’s just how he is.” There are variations on this: “You know you’re mom; this is what she does; every time X happens, she does Y.” “I’m so tired of the way my spouse treats me, but they’ve always been this way, and they’ll never change.”

Is it really true that a person can’t change? Is there really no hope for a person to overcome their weaknesses and sins if that’s how they’ve always been?

The wonderful reality is that the Bible reveals to us a God who not creates out of nothing; the Bible also reveals to us a God who is able to re-create us, to remake us, to renovate us from the inside out. And so dramatic is this change He works in us that the Bible describes it as going from enslaved to free, from darkness to light, from death to life. Our passage this morning displays to us this change God works in us. It shows us our past bondage, our present relationship, and our future hope.

#1: Our past bondage

New American Standard Bible, 1995 Edition: Paragraph Version Chapter 1

And although you were formerly alienated and hostile in mind, engaged in evil deeds,

We sometimes talk about people who have been in some dark places as having a “past”. But the reality is that all of us who have been redeemed have a past. When the Bible describes the past condition of believers before we trusted in Christ, it describes every believer before they trusted in Christ. One of those description of our pre-Christian life is found in verse 21. Paul writes to the Colossians and to us, “And although you were formerly alienated and hostile in mind, engaged in evil deeds.”

Now, that’s not how most of us would describe our pre-Christian past. We don’t like to think ourselves in that way. We might describe ourselves as lacking joy before we trusted in Christ or lacking peace or hope. And certainly that’s true. But the real problem, according to the Bible, is not merely that we were unhappy or anxious or hopeless. The real problem is that, according to verse 21, we were two things:

We were alienated from God. We were estranged. There was distance between us and God. Isaiah 59:1-2 says “Behold, the Lord’s hand is not so short that it cannot save; nor is His ear so dull that it cannot hear. But your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God, and your sins have hidden His face from you so that He does not hear” (NASB). In other words, God is there; He is present; He is able to stretch out His hand and save you, but God is holy and cannot be okay with sins, and so our sins have resulted in a gulf, a chasm, a pit between us and God. Prior to Christ, we were alienated from God.

But with the next term Paul goes a step further. Not only were we alienated from God; the situation was actually far worse. We were God’s enemies. Enemies of God. Your translation might say “hostile to God”. Still the idea is the same. What do enemies and hostility have in common? Hatred. You say, “Now Dustin, are you saying that I hated God?” The Bible is saying it, not me, but yes that is exactly what it is saying. Prior to trusting in Christ, we were not merely indifferent to God; no, we hated Him. We wanted nothing to do with Him, we wanted nothing to do with His church, we wanted nothing to do with His word; we had no interest in obeying Him, no desire to spend time with Him. No wonder the New Testament says we are spiritually dead and in bondage to sin.

And notice where this hatred plays itself out: in the mind. Paul says, “hostile in mind, engaged in evil deeds.” There’s this interplay between the body and the mind, between the heart and the hands. They affect each other. What you do with the one brings about changes in the other. It’s funny the things you remember from your childhood. I remember I had this tape of Bill Gaither children’s songs. One of them was called “Input, output.” I don’t remember the lyrics but I remember the point: the point was be careful what you put into your mind, because it won’t stay there. What you think about and desire, you eventually do. What you dream and fantasize about at some point becomes reality. We are fearfully and wonderfully made. And it works the other way, too. What you do in your body affects your mind; what you do with your hands gradually changes your heart. That’s how we get to the point where we not only commit sin, but we celebrate sin and approve it when other people do it.

And then, most importantly, notice the timing of these circumstances. He doesn’t say “you are formerly alienated and hostile in mind”. He says “you were formerly alienated and hostile in mind”. It’s just one word but it makes all the difference in the world. This was once true of them, but no longer it is true of them. Here’s the thing: every person in this room who has trusted in Christ and been born again can say two things about being alienated from God and being an enemy of God: 1) that’s how I used to be, but 2) by God’s grace it is no longer how I am. No, I’m not quite where I want to be; and no, I’m not quite where I know God will one day take me; but by God’s grace I can say that I am not who I was. I’m not perfect, and I fail, but

And so, we should be the last people in the world to ever say a person is stuck in the bad habits they’re presently in. After all, we worship a God who specializes in change. Our God is able to call things into existence out of nothing. He spoke worlds, universes, into existence by His word alone. And we think that He can’t handle something as simply and routine, for Him, as changing another person’s behavior by changing their heart?

So as weird as it sounds, the first step to changing your behavior is recognizing that you’ve already been changed. You’ve already been moved out of death and into life. When you trusted in Christ, something happened called regeneration - or the new birth - big word but a simple meaning: the Holy Spirit of God takes a spiritually dead person and quickens us to new life, making in the process a new person.

That’s our past bondage, and God in grace brings us out of it. How does He do that? Next we see the second component of real change: our present relationship.

#2: Our present relationship

New American Standard Bible, 1995 Edition: Paragraph Version Chapter 1

yet He has now reconciled you in His fleshly body through death, in order to present you before Him holy and blameless and beyond reproach—

By present relationship, of course, I mean relationship with God, because that is what verse 22 implies. Now remember the background: “and although you were formerly alienated and hostile in mind, engaged in evil deeds” - now comes verse 22: “yet He has now reconciled you in his fleshly body through death.” See the change? Once alienated from God and hostile to Him, now reconciled to God. Think restoration. Restored to right relationship. Our sin has been dealt with, atoned for, forgiven, cleansed, and removed from God’s sight.

Ill. Now how did this reconciliation take place? Did God just sweep our sin under the rug? Sweeping our sin under the rug would be much like what happened recently when someone in our family got a speeding ticket. Yes, we recently had a speeding ticket in our family - I won’t tell you which one of us it was… anyway, it happened on Thanksgiving Day in Asheville. So we did the thing that you do when you get a ticket - you go see one of the ADA’s at the courthouse, they look at your driving record, they see that it’s overall pretty good, and they choose to lower the speed to a certain amount above the speed limit so it won’t affect your insurance.

So we start making plans to drive to Asheville one day and see the ADA. Well, apparently COVID-19 has even changed how speeding tickets are dealt with. I spoke with an ADA on the phone who pulled up our file, and I’m really hoping he’s about to tell us that we didn’t miss the deadline or something. But that’s not what he said. After I held for awhile, he came back on the line, and he said “Mr. Mace, that case has been thrown out on the basis of a clean driving record.” That was really good news.

Now, don’t misunderstand me. I’m not complaining about their decision. But in dropping that speeding ticket case, they were sweeping my offense under the rug. That’s their prerogative if that’s what they want to do.

But we need to understand that God doesn’t operate like that. God doesn’t reconcile us to Himself by simply dropping the charges. That won’t do at all. God is a just God. He’s a righteous God. He doesn’t look at us and wink and say “it’ll be okay, my law tells you these things are wrong but the law has to say that and, truth is, I don’t really care because I love you and I’m just going to drop the charges.” God can’t do that. Verse 21 doesn’t say, “and although you were formerly alienated and hostile…yet He has now reconciled you by choosing to forget everything you’ve done.” No, what does it say? “He has reconciled you in His fleshly body through death.” What in the world does “in His fleshly body” mean? Well the word “body” helps us understand that he’s referring to Jesus.

But the word “body” does more than that. For God and man to be reconciled, they have to be brought together, right? The gap must be closed. The word “body” suggests Jesus’ incarnation. Jesus’ physical body is where God and humanity meet - literally. Jesus is the Son of God, right? That means He’s God. Jesus had a human body and a human nature, which means He’s human. 100% divinity wedded with 100% humanity. Don’t try to think it through analytically right now; just track with me. How does Jesus’ physical body bring about our reconciliation with God? If Jesus is 100% divinity and 100% humanity, then Jesus, including His physical body, is the place where God and human beings meet. It is the place where God and man, formerly estranged from one another, are brought together.

Ill. You know that saying “oil and water don’t mix”? It’s true, right? Do you know why? Of course you do, you guys are smart. You know that oil and water don’t mix because there is something about the chemical make up of oil and water that repel one another. That’s why if you have an oil-based salad dressing, you have to shake it periodically, because the oil and the water have run as far away from each other as they can.

Now you say, “Dustin, mayonnaise is also made of oil and water, mostly, but you don’t have to shake that.” That’s right, but why don’t you have to shake it? It’s because mayonnaise contains something those salad dressings don’t - mayonnaise contains egg. And egg is an emulsifier - it does the opposite of the oil and the water, so it brings things together which would otherwise never come together. You don’t have to shake mayonnaise, because the egg has caused the oil and the water to reconcile. [Tony Evans, illustration #744]

Jesus Christ, being the Son of God but being also a human being with a human body, in His body brings God and man together. But before we can be brought together, our sin has to be dealt with. We already know God doesn’t sweep our sin under the rug, so what does He do? He deals with the guilt of our sin Himself.

You see, the reason God can’t sweep sin under the rug is that sin is a violation of His law, and God takes His law pretty seriously. The law is an expression of the kind of God He is. It reveals His character. He is a just and holy and righteous God. He could not violate His own righteous and just law and still be a righteous and just God. It’s not a question of willingness only; it’s a question of ability. He desires to forgive us and reconcile us, but someone has to pay the bill. Most people think the cross is a demonstration of God’s love; it is, supremely so; but the cross is just as much a demonstration of God’s justice. At the cross, justice was poured out on the Son as His body hung on the cross, and through that, love was poured out onto us.

That is our present relationship. We’ve been brought out of spiritual death into life, from being God’s enemies to being His children. We’ve been reconciled to God. This is our present relationship.

Now, how do you live out the fact that you’ve been reconciled to God? How can I apply this new relationship with God to my life, practically? The first thing I can do is cultivate a relationship with God. In my office on my shelf I used to have an old book, centuries old, called Practicing the Presence of God. I was actually really disappointed when writing this sermon that I couldn’t seem to find that book. But I looked it up. Practicing the Presence of God. What does it mean to practice the presence of God? It means to do everything you do for God - pretty simple. Do it for Him - as though no one else were watching, as though no one else were with you, as though no one else in the world cares about what you’re doing at that moment. It’s enough for you that your Father sees and He cares and He is with you. I found this quote by Brother Lawrence in his book Practicing the Presence of God.

131 Christians Everyone Should Know God Is in the Kitchen

“Nor is it needful that we should have great things to do.… We can do little things for God; I turn the cake that is frying on the pan for love of him, and that done, if there is nothing else to call me, I prostrate myself in worship before him, who has given me grace to work; afterwards I rise happier than a king. It is enough for me to pick up but a straw from the ground for the love of God.”

The second way you live out your new relationship with God, besides practicing God’s presence, is in your relationships with others. Particularly your fellow church members, fellow believers. Because here’s the thing - if God has reconciled you to Himself, you and I no longer have a reason to remain at odds with other people. Jesus made this clear when he said this in Matt. 5:23-24:

New American Standard Bible, 1995 Edition: Paragraph Version Chapter 5

23 Therefore if you are presenting your offering at the altar, and there remember that your brother has something against you, 24 leave your offering there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother, and then come and present your offering.

In other words, there is something more important than worship - something so important in fact that if you are engaged in corporate worship of God with your church, you should stop worshiping temporarily and go make it right immediately. I wonder if there’s anyone in this room who could benefit from this? Is there someone in this room you find yourself at odds with? Jesus tells us that reconciling with that person, because you’ve been reconciled to God, is more important in that moment than worshiping in song or giving or listening to the preaching of the word. Why? Because the reality is that until you’ve reconciled with your brother or sister, you really can’t worship sincerely. “First be reconciled to your brother,” Jesus says. The apostle Paul put it like this:

New American Standard Bible, 1995 Edition: Paragraph Version Chapter 5

Now all these things are from God, who reconciled us to Himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation, 19 namely, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and He has committed to us the word of reconciliation.

That’s our past bondage, and our present relationship. Notice with me next, our future hope.

#3: Our future hope

New American Standard Bible, 1995 Edition: Paragraph Version Chapter 1

22 yet He has now reconciled you in His fleshly body through death, in order to present you before Him holy and blameless and beyond reproach—

Our future hope is that we will one day stand before God, as Paul says, holy and blameless and beyond reproach. When will this take place? At the judgment. The unbelieving world will stand before God guilty, with their sins being presented for all to see. We too will stand before God guilty, because none of us have lived a sinless life. But the difference between a believer and a nonbeliever is that believers who have trusted in Christ will have their sins revealed as forgiven sins, because those sins have been paid for and washed away by the blood of our Savior.

How do you feel about that? How does an eternity of holiness and blamelessness strike you? It doesn’t sound like a lot of for to a lot of people. Perhaps that’s because they misunderstand holiness and what it is? They probably think of holiness like this author described holiness. Author John White, who wrote a book called The Fight, described holiness in terms of 16 short descriptions of misery. For John White, holiness is:

“thinness, hollow-eyed gauntness, beards, sandals, stone cells, no sex, no jokes, hair shirts, frequent cold baths, fasting, hours of prayer, wild rocky deserts, getting up at 4 A.M., clean fingernails, stained glass, [and finally] self-humiliation.” [Swindoll p269]

But is that really what holiness is? What if holiness is just Christlikeness? What if holiness is actually the thing that would enable us to finally and truly be happy? What if holiness means freedom from everything that weighs you down - freedom from sin, from guilt, from shame, from the fear of death. What if holiness, moreover, doesn’t just free you from what weighs you down but actually frees you up to be everything God made you to be? I think holiness is the key to happiness.

And because God wants us happy for all eternity, He will make us holy for all eternity. I want to encourage you, and particularly those of you with sensitive consciences. The sins you struggle with now that weigh you down, that you can’t seem to break free from, those sins don’t define you, and one day our good Father will take them away completely. There will be a day when we will no longer find ourselves inclined to destructive habits. How can I know that? Because God is faithful. “For I am confident of this very thing, that He who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus” (Phil. 1:6 NASB). It’s not up for grabs as to whether it will happen. And it doesn’t depend on us. He has started a good work in you, and He always finishes what He starts. This is our future hope.

Conclusion and call for response

But there is apparently a condition. Look back with me at verse 23: “if indeed you continue in the faith firmly established and steadfast.”

“Two frogs fell into a deep cream bowl, one was an optimistic soul. But the other took the gloomy view, “we shall drown”, he cried, without further ado. So with a last despairing cry, he flung up his legs and said “Good-bye”. Quoth the other frog with a merry grim, “I can’t get out, but I won’t give in. I’ll just swim round till my strength is spent, then will I die the more content.” Bravely he swam till it would seem his struggles began to churn the cream. On the top of the butter at last he stopped. And out of the bowl he gaily hopped. What of the moral? ‘Tis easily found: If you can’t hop out, keep swimming round.” [Swindoll p441]

When Paul says “if you continue in the faith, steadfast and firm”, he’s talking about endurance. Now I’ll admit that what he says makes it sound like it does depend on us. That makes it sound very much like there’s a chance any of us might not make it if we don’t live perfect lives. But that’s not what Paul is saying. Paul isn’t talking about perfection. He says if you “continue”. What does it mean to continue? It means to endure. It means to persevere, to keep going. And what are we to keep going in? He says “continue in the faith”.

And then He describes it negatively. “Not moved away from the hope of the gospel that you have heard.” What does it look like to continue in the faith steadfast and firm? It means to not let yourself be moved away from the hope of the gospel. The hope. Of the gospel. That’s why we can endure. We can endure because the one who calls us to endure is not an angry God waiting to strike us when we mess up; the One who calls us to endure is instead a God whose patience with our weakness is inexhaustible. We will fall. But if you’re running a marathon, you fall and skin your knee and then you get up again and keep running. It’s less like sprinting and more like running a marathon. Paul is talking about moment-by-moment, day-by-day, week-by-week, month-by-month, year-by-year discipleship.

Then there’s that word “if”. That’s where the uncertainty is found, isn’t it? If you continue. Paul’s coming at this from our perspective. From our limited perspective we say “if we continue in the faith.” But from God’s perspective there is no “if”. He will get us there. He will enable us to endure. And so what Paul means is: God will present you to Himself holy and blameless and above reproach - if indeed you continue in the faith (and because God is the One who is at work in you, it is certain that you will continue in the faith).

We’ve seen our past bondage, our present relationship, and our future hope.

So can a person change? Absolutely, when the one doing the changing. Not only can people change; those who have trusted in Christ have in fact changed; they are even now in the process of being changed; and one day, when we stand before God, that change will be perfect and complete.

So what is God showing you this morning? Is there a person in your life you’ve thought would never change? You can’t change them, but you know the One who can, so cast yourself on Him and pray for Him to change them daily. And then, in the meantime, treat that person not like the person you know they are; treat them like the person you know they can be. And in that you will find yourself trusting the God who calls light out of darkness.

But let’s turn the focus away from others to ourselves for a minute. Have you changed? Has there been a change in your life since trusting in Christ? You won’t be perfect, but there should be some change that is evident in your life. And you should continue to change throughout your life. You’ll go through periods where you don’t, but you won’t stay that way. Have you trusted in Christ? Have you committed your life to Him? Ask yourself those questions. Only good can come from asking yourself that question. So ask it this morning. You’ll find God drawing near to you as you draw near to Him.