A Peculiar People (Part 2)

Turn with me in your Bible to the Book of 2 Corinthians.

2 Corinthians 6:11-18

Let’s pray.

We have been studying some of the aspects of legalism and the inherent dangers that come with even dabbling with such, let alone fully engaging in it even in just some areas of the church or your personal life. And again, just so there is no confusion when I use the word legalism, I mean anything that adds to the principles of Scripture or uses Scripture out of context to diminish the grace of God. Or anything that you are compelled to do by others or by your own misunderstanding of Scripture that you feel that you must do to earn favor with God or maintain your standing in the church.

Legalism can be as simple as expanding the meaning of what the Bible says to cover some aspect of church life that that a person or persons in the church are not personally comfortable with. Our current passage is a case in point. Many people take the command to be separate in verse 17 to mean that we cannot engage in any manner of activity that they consider to be of the world.

For example, some have taken this principle of being separate and have added to this phrase to make it say, “be separate from the world”, and then make that mean all kinds of things. Being separate from the world can then be shaped into anything they want, such as don’t go to a movie theater, don’t get a tattoo, don’t listen to secular music, don’t read secular novels, don’t dress in the fashions of the day if it crosses some line that you have determined in your mind, don’t walk into a bar, don’t associate with unbelievers if they…fill in the blank. The list is as endless as anything that offends the personal sensibilities of whoever is making these rules up as they go.

We can get so spiritually arrogant that anything that we don’t do becomes a mandate that no other committed Christian can do either – and I am talking about things that are not commands in the Bible in their full and proper context. If God’s Word is clear about something and the context is 100% correct, then we should avoid the sin and/or follow the command no questions asked. But most of what we expect from other believers are faulty or incomplete applications that we have fashioned in our own minds. Our motives may be proper and our heart in the right place in trying to help others to live within the confines of Scripture, but by adding something that isn’t there, we have decided that God missed something and needs our help to clarify and communicate to others.

This kind of behavior is the pinnacle of legalism and spiritual arrogance.

The beauty of God’s grace is that such things are not up to us or left to us. None of us have been appointed as God’s police department or God’s enforcers. Come alongside a brother or sister in Christ who is entangled in sin but come alongside with the love of Christ and not a whip or iron fist – just be certain that you are dealing with sin though, and not some legalistic invention of your own making. I’ll speak to this beauty of God’s grace much more in a few moments, because it is a glorious truth that will indeed set you free if you get it.

So, to review a little, we are not to be bound together with unbelievers (v. 14). In the context of the passage, this means that we are not to allow false teaching and false teachers any voice in the church. We are not to tolerate teachers and teaching that falls short of what the Bible expects from us. We cannot allow worldly ideas and philosophies to have any say or influence in the church. We can’t soften what the Bible teaches or skip over what the Bible teaches just because it offends or because our culture has become intolerant of such teaching. Being bound together with unbelievers is to simply allow their ideas and desires to replace what the Bibles says we are to do and/or avoid. This obviously means that an unbeliever cannot hold any position of authority or influence in the church.

The other terms used in verses 14-16, partnership, fellowship, harmony, in common, and agreement communicate the same thing in various ways so that nobody can try to find a loophole in the meaning of being bound together.

And then the illustrations that Paul uses are also in various ways to ensure that the point is made. Righteousness and lawlessness are at odds with each other, with righteousness implying obedience to the principles of Scripture and lawlessness being one of the many ways that sin is described in Scripture.

Light and darkness are obviously at opposite ends of the spectrum with light carrying the sense of the sphere or realm dominated by righteousness and darkness carrying the sense of the sphere or realm dominated by evil.

Christ and Belial, or Christ and Satan shouldn’t need any further explanation – you cannot get more different than that.

Believer and unbeliever is also self-evident. You can divide all of the people in this world by believer and unbeliever – there is no other state of being. Many play the game, attend church, live as morally as they can, follow rules and regulations that have levied on them by their church, but at the end of their life it will be revealed that they have always been in the category of unbeliever. Their understanding of salvation was based on works and tradition but never on repentance, never on confessing Jesus as Lord, never on truly and fully and comprehensively believing that God the Father raised Jesus from the dead.

The temple of God and idols is a picture of worship. It is impossible to genuinely worship God while still worshiping other things. God will not tolerate sharing His glory with anybody or anything else. You can’t truly worship God while at the same time worshiping money and possessions, or status and position, or relationships and family, etc.

Paul then gives a series of quotes from the Old Testament, of which there is a striking theme that you possibly have missed before, I know that I have. Please listen as I read and place emphasis on what we will devote the rest of our time to this morning.

2 Corinthians 6:16b-18

Who will accomplish all of these things? God says, “I will” four times. And it all begins with God’s activity, not our activity. “I will dwell with them and walk among them; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people.” It begins with God because He loved us while we were still His enemy and had no ability to love Him – we were spiritually dead in our trespasses and sins – Ephesians 2:1, “And you were dead in your trespasses and sins.” Eternal salvation is a spiritual work, and our physical works and deeds has absolutely no bearing on resurrecting our stone-cold dead spirits. Ephesians 2:4-5, “But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ.”

We are spiritual beings having a physical experience. That which we do and accomplish in the physical in our own power cannot cross over and cause anything to happen in the spiritual realm. Everything about us that is spiritual has to be initiated by God because we are comprehensively incapable of such. All of the good works we can muster, all of the traditions and rules and regulations that we could follow, cannot accomplish the smallest measure of spiritual good. You can spend your entire life attempting to be good enough for God and end up in hell and the lake of fire because you missed what God said in His Word about salvation.

To say it another way, eternal salvation is a spiritual transformation of the soul that only God can do. “For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, so that no one may boast” (Ephesians 2:8-9).

But let’s take that another step further. Most believers who have a sufficient grasp of Scripture understand that salvation is all of God, but we somehow then make the mistake that our sanctification and spiritual growth is entirely up to our efforts, that we are responsible to grow into super-Christians. We read and/or hear all of the verses that say to persevere and press on and endure to the end. We read the commands to follow and the sins to avoid, and we begin to put the weight of complete and absolute obedience on our own shoulders to carry or in our wheelbarrow to push until we are utterly exhausted or thoroughly crushed.

We get confused attempting to find the balance between God saying, “I will” and all of the verses that tell us to do the work of the ministry and to persevere in our efforts and to stand firm against the devil.

The issue that plagues all of us at one time or another, and still plagues us if we are not discerning enough is us trying to do what only God can do instead of only doing what we have been called to do, and even then, fully relying on the Holy Spirit to empower us. We can’t seem to keep our noses out of God’s business. God says, “I will” and we essentially decide to do it ourselves anyway. And we fail miserably time and time again, but it doesn’t stop us. And we feel guilty and defeated when we fail. And we determine to do better and dig our heels in and resolve to get it done this time but fail miserably again.

We have a child or a grandchild who is involved in any number of wicked worldly practices, so we do everything but lock them in a cage to keep the world and its influences away. We keep falling to that sin that so easily entangles us, so we make vows and change our routines and try to eliminate the temptations, only to fall yet again with devastating emotional and even physical results. We start reading our Bible for hours on end thinking that this habit will keep us from harm, protect us from evil, guard us from attack, only to see all of our struggles increase or grow stronger.

We literally wear ourselves out trying to earn God’s favor and to be the “good” Christian that we have envisioned we should be. We say to ourselves, “I will” with everything in our life that only God can do. And we make an absolute mess of our lives and even shipwreck out faith in the process, all the while wondering, “What is wrong with me! Why can’t I have victory!”

Yet our bullheaded stubbornness, our prideful arrogance, and our incessant lust for control, will not allow us to see our problem for what it truly is. We are so defiantly independent that we somehow believe that we can do what in reality, only God can do. But we keep pounding our head against that wall until we are bruised, bleeding, and finally spiritually unconscious.

The first two “I wills” in our passage are all about God initiating and establishing intimate relationship with His people. In the original promises from where Paul is quoting, the context was His people, Israel, but now as Paul applies these words to the Corinthians, it has expanded to His church. Those who are His true church, meaning born-again believers, are indwelt by God the Holy Spirit and He is indeed our God, and we are indeed His people. And we did nothing to deserve or earn this amazing privilege. The only thing that we contributed to this relationship with God is our sin. His love for us was initiated by Him alone and was complete and never changing from that very first moment in eternity past.

Because of this incredible yet completely undeserved relationship that God initiated with His elect children, we should in turn act like it but in His power not by some measure of works that we can do. We are children of the King. We belong to almighty God. We have been purchased by the blood of Christ. We are redeemed and delivered and rescued and ransomed and set free from the domain of Satan’s darkness. All of which was initiated and completed by God without our help.

Beloved, this magnificent standing that we have in Christ, this unheard-of relationship that we have with holy and almighty God, this amazing grace that has been poured out on us, must have some impact on our stubborn pride, right? Can we accept that God does what only God can do, and that we have absolutely no business striving to do those things that only God can do? And can we then keep the world separate from His church in the sense of not willingly allowing the world’s morals and philosophies to take root in His church?

When we, His children, heed what God has said, when we adhere to His command to be separate, to be recognizably different from the world, to be the peculiar people that we are as aliens and strangers in this world, God promises two more insane “I wills”. God says, “I will welcome you and I will be a father to you, and you shall be sons and daughters to Me”.

Beloved, none of this is possible through our own efforts. None of this can happen by the crazy notion that we can impose our will enough to bring this into being or muster up the resolve to make it happen. Only God.

It is ridiculous for any of us to even think that we can control our lives, let alone control other people’s lives, or control those things that only God can control. I don’t care how hard you wish it to be, how much you impose your own will, how often to try and try and try with all the force you can possibly exert, or how persistently stubborn you are in making certain that you get your way, you cannot do what only God can do. You can however make yourself and everyone around you utterly miserable.

Only God can change a heart. Only God knows the future. Only God is able to turn a person’s mind. Only God can break the chains that bind. Only God can save. Only God can speak life into dry bones. Only God can fix broken relationships. Only God can do the impossible. Only God.

The sooner we stop trying to shove Him off His throne, the sooner we will stop feeling the pain of slamming our head against a wall. When God says, “I will” we are foolish to defiantly tell God, “No, I will! Stay out of it, God!”

Do you see it? Do you recognize issues in your life where you are trying to play God? And can you begin to see the amazing peace and rest that could be yours if you cease from striving and let God be God in your life.

Let’s pray.