You Are A Holy People

So this morning, we're going to be continuing our study in Deuteronomy chapter 7. In this section, we started last week, we're just sort of continuing. Moses is talking and teaching to the Israelites about how they're to interact with the inhabitants of the land of Canaan that they're about to go into. Last week, we saw that God instructed them to destroy the inhabitants of the land so that they, Israel, would not be corrupted by the idolatry of these people, these nations, these seven nations. They were to wipe them out. He told them not to covenant with him, not to show them any favor, not to intermarry with them. All of these exhortations with regard to how to deal with the people were meant to teach Israel the danger of being corrupted by the Canaanites and by their idolatry. And so Moses also warned them that if they didn't obey these commands, if they made common cause with the Israelites, that destruction would become their destiny. That through the corruption of the Canaanites, they would be themselves destroyed.

So this week we're continuing along in this passage where Moses instructs them not about the people but about the idols, about the altars, about the religious worship of those people. And he teaches them to do the same thing with these altars and these idols as he did with the people. You're to destroy them. And the reason that he gives for this is that they, the people of God, Israel, are a holy people chosen and loved by God. And so as we study this passage, This morning, my hope is that God will show us the idols of our own hearts. It's not as if we don't have idols to destroy, but what are they? And are we going to take an axe and a flame to them? That's the question that's before us this morning. And so my hope is that God will open our eyes to help us to see what we need to put to death, to hew down, to cut up and to burn, and that he'll strengthen us to do that work out of love for him and humility before him. Would you please stand now as we read the word of the Lord from Deuteronomy chapter 7?

Verses 5 through 8, this is the word of the Lord, and it is eternally true. But thus you shall do to them. You shall tear down their altars and smash their sacred pillars, and hew down their ashram and burn their graven images with fire. For you are a holy people to the Lord your God. The Lord your God has chosen you to be a people for his own possession out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth. The Lord did not set his love on you nor choose you because you were more in number than any of the peoples, for you are the fewest of all peoples.

But because the Lord loved you and kept the oath which he swore to your forefathers, the Lord brought you out by a mighty hand and redeemed you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh, king of Egypt. This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. So, the exhortation between last week and this week is similar. Cleansing. Cleansing. Clean. Get the stain out. Make it... white again. All right? Do you guys like taking stains out of things? Like scrubbing the puke off of a carpet? Like, why such a nasty analogy? And I'm like, well, because it gets it how nasty it actually is. Stains are hard to clean up. Many times we want a special chemical or a special powder or a special machine to do the work for us. But what God's calling them to in this passage is elbow grease. Get down on your hands and knees.

and scrub out the idolatry in this land. Wipe out the people and wipe out their places of worship. The land has to be cleansed both of the people and of their idolatry. The reason that these idols had to be torn down, the altars and the pillars and the ashram, which were basically like totem poles that were carved and graven images made out of wood or stone or clay. The reason that these things had to be destroyed is that they would be a temptation, to the Israelites to turn away from their God. Now, it would be easy to think that the things that we're around don't affect us. In fact, I think many times we tell ourselves that the things that we're around don't influence our thinking or our priorities or our desires. But I would submit to you that that's not the case and that they do affect you. I'll tell you a story. When I was a kid, I didn't have a dad.

I grew up as this only child with a single mom. And my mom worked two full-time jobs. So I was left to be raised by TV and pop culture. Nothing Christian about where I came from. And so I was drawn to growing up in a poor area, ghetto, if you will. I was left to rap music. I loved it. In fact, I still like rap music. And it's a temptation. But I grew up on... Rap. Loved it. Went to the concerts. And I was young at the time. Those things happened later on when I was in high school and later. But when I was in elementary school, we used to have to buy CDs if we wanted to listen to music. You couldn't download it. You had to buy a CD and get a whole bunch of songs you hadn't heard yet from an artist that you liked. You couldn't just buy one of them. Anyway, I had a collection of CDs. Rap music with the little black and white label on it. Do you guys remember the labels that were on there?

What did that label say? Explicit lyrics, which was the warning to the parents that there's cuss words and adult themes in the music, and therefore don't let your kids have it. My mom was too busy working and making life for us, and so she didn't have any say over that. I had money, I'd go buy the music, and when she wasn't home because she was always working, I would listen to my music. So my question is, was it a corrupting influence to me? Does the music you listen to affect you? Let me ask you another way. When you're discouraged, what kind of music do you like to listen to? When you're happy, what kind of music do you like to listen to? When you want to feel something, what kind of music do you listen to? You do realize you all have answers to these questions because you realize the music evokes things in you. It stirs up things inside of you. Well, I listened to all of this rap, and it wasn't having a good effect on me, so what did my mom do?

Did she have a big long talk with me about it? Nope. What's that? Yes. Wendy said she threw him away. Now, I don't know if you know that because you're just a wise mom or because you've heard this story. It may be both. Unknown to me, my mom went into my room and took all of my CDs to her work and threw them in the dumpster and didn't tell me about it. Now, when I discovered this, what was I to do? I was upset, right? It's all this money I spent that we were poor. She didn't tell me she was going to do it. She didn't ask my permission. She didn't tell me after she'd done it. She just went, this is garbage, and I'm getting it out of my house. And that was that. And I discovered later what had happened. There was no negotiations. There was no back and forth about this and that. It was just gone. Now, why did my mom do that? Well, she did it because she knew that it affected me. She knew that it would corrupt me. She knew that it was having an impact.

Right? And so what I would submit to you is that my mom did a good thing. My mom loved me. That was tough. I was angry. I have no doubt now that it was the right thing for her to do. That is what they, in Israel, as they go into the land, are being called to do. Don't believe the lie that you can be around corrupting things without being corrupted by them. It doesn't work that way. You're not impervious to those things. You are permeable. Those things get into you. They get into your head. They get into your heart. And they manipulate and change your affections and your desires. And it's for that reason that God said, cut them down, break them, shatter them, burn them, get rid of them. These things are the remnants and the evidence of all of those nations' rebellion.

against me. Get rid of them so you don't become like them. This command was given to Israel as a protection from being led astray. And there's a danger here that they would have faced and that we face. And it's that we're strong enough to stand in the face of temptation and the face of wickedness and resist it. Only a fool thinks that. That they can stand and that they can pull fire into their laps and not be burned by it. Who can pull fire into his laps and not be burned? Asks Proverbs. I'm pretty sure. Is that in Proverbs or Psalms, Daniel? Do you remember? It's in Proverbs, I thought. Yeah. Well, foolishly, we think we can. You know? We make all kinds of foolish decisions in our lives. We think we can carry around credit cards and not end up in credit card debt. We think we can flirt and play nice with our girlfriends and the cute girls in school and not fall into fornication.

We can multiply examples of things that we think, oh, I can, it's not that bad. I wouldn't cross that line. I'll tell you as a pastor, on many occasions I've sat in the room with people dealing with the carnage of their sin and there's a refrain. And what they say is, I never thought it would come to this. I never meant to do it. I didn't set out meaning this to happen. And yet here we are. Here they are. And so it's not for us. any more than it was for the people of Israel as they go into the land, to decide whether they were strong enough to live in the midst of all of these temptations and resist them. God, who's wise, knew they weren't strong enough to do that. And so he says, cut it down, burn it, get rid of it as a matter of protection. It's foolish of us to think that we can avoid sin while not avoiding the paths that lead to sin. Now, there's a danger here of being a hypocrite.

doing what the Pharisees eventually did with the law of God, which was to take the law of God and then build a big fence around it with a whole bunch of laws that weren't the actual law and say, well, actually you have to obey these laws. There's a danger of hypocrisy. But there's a necessity also of us realizing not just what sin is, but how we got there. It's a failure of, if you were driving, And you got lost. Now, I know that never happens because you all have GPSs and smartphones, but imagine a world where you could drive and get lost. Maybe you don't have cell phone reception. And you got lost. What do you need to know? How you got there? How long have you been on this road? Which way did you turn last? How long ago was it? What was on the corner? You need to figure out. You need to reverse engineer. How did I get lost?

So I can find my way out. Because you don't have a phone to pull out of your pocket and go, just take me to wherever I'm going. You have to figure your way out. You have to figure out how you got there. Because you don't know where you're at. And the same is true with our sins. It's not sufficient for us to avoid simply sin to think we've done our work. We also have to become students of our own temptations and be vigilant to the paths and the circumstances that lead us to sin. Because along that path we lie to ourselves saying, I'm not really doing what I'm doing.

what's at the end of this path, as if we can drive down a road and not get to the destination at the end of it, because we in our strength and wisdom are able to stop. If you don't know it yet, you'll learn that that is not how it works. Satan has no desire for you to drive down a road and not get to its destination. His aim is to destroy you and everything that's precious to you, and to have you have fellowship with you in hell for eternity. And so the idea that you can play with his temptations and not be burned by them, is foolish and wicked and damnable. And so the idols in the nation of the Canaanites had to be removed. If Israel left them and just said, well, we won't go worship those gods. We're going to worship God alone. It wouldn't be long before those altars and those pillars and those ashram and those graven image would become a temptation to them. And so rooting out sin means rooting out the temptation that leads to sin. Okay?

I think the most helpful book I ever read on this topic was by John Owen. It's a short book. It's called Mortification of Sin in Believers. There's a copy that I have that's got three of his works. The longer work is on indwelling sin. I can tell you what you should get, but all of you should read it. All of you should read it. If you're in high school or above, you should read it. It's not beyond you. The language is kind of hard, but the concepts are very familiar. And he's very perceptive in understanding how our sins work, how the corruptions of our hearts work themselves out in our lives, how we get lost. And he shows us where to fight and how to fight and what to fight with. So, Mortification of Sin and Believers by John Owen is a very helpful book and short. Read it with your spouse. We have to root out temptation and recognize the paths to sin, not just the sin itself.

That's what these altars and pillars represent. I mentioned last week that there's a difficulty that they are being called to, that we have been called to. In some ways, our situation is worse than or more tense than the situation they were supposed to go into. And the situation they were supposed to go into, they were supposed to remove all of the idolatry and idolaters. And it was supposed to be their land. They were supposed to possess it by themselves without the conflict of foreign worship and temptation of that sort. Now, they didn't do that. And so they ended up intermixing and intermingling and doing all the stuff God commanded them not to and ending up being destroyed for it. But you and I, we live in a world where we're constantly surrounded by unbelievers and people who have different worship. And we have to figure out how to live amongst them without being corrupted by them. And it's a difficult task. And the reason it's a difficult task is because we're forever being tempted by...

the apparent comfort and ease of the life of an unbeliever. Psalm 73, Asaph says that he almost forsook his way and fell into sin because he looked at the life of the wicked and he's like, their life is easy, it's comfortable, they're wealthy, there's no pain in their death. Everything that my flesh desires, they have. And why do I have to live a life of devotion and resistance to sin and humility? It's so difficult, but their life is so easy. And then, by the grace of God, Asaph says, then I went into the household of the Lord, the sanctuary, and I perceived their end. He recognized that what he saw in the moment in their lives was not their eternal state. He says, surely God has set them in a slippery place, and they will not stand. But too often, that's not our perspective. We look, and we lust, and we covet.

The apparent sinning without consequence of the world around us. And we forget that God sees all and knows all and will judge all. Even if not right away, in time, every sin will be accounted for. Either by the blood of Jesus Christ or the judgment of hell for eternity. And so you and I, we have to live in this world and yet not be conformed to it. We live our lives surrounded by danger. So we ought to be ready to resist it. Standing alert, being on guard. We shouldn't be surprised when the temptations come to us. We shouldn't ever say, I don't know how I got here. If you've read the books of 1 and 2 Kings, there's a refrain in those books. It's just the historical record of the Jewish kings of Israel and Judah.

This king came up and this is what he was like and then he died and then this other king came up and he lived and he did these things and then he died and this other king and it's just a long history how long they lived, what they did. There's often this refrain at the beginning of the story about that king and what it does is it refers back to this command as to whether he tore down the high places or not or whether he continued in the sins of his father or sometimes his grandfather. There's this refrain of whether or not that king who was responsible for the welfare of the people was an idolater or not. And famously, there's one king amongst dozens who wasn't an idolater. Josiah. Now, how is it that King Josiah wasn't an idolater? It's because he was very wise? No. It's because he was very old and experienced? No. In fact, he was the youngest king, eight years old when he ascended to the throne.

How is it that Josiah came to tear down the high places in Israel? Do you remember? He read the law. Do you remember that he went into the temple and it was just like, it's communicated in there as being just sort of a place of in shambles and disrepair. And like he finds the law sort of, you get the impression it's like tucked away under some stuff in an old closet covered in dust. But he goes and he finds it. He finds the scrolls and he brings them out and he reads them. He reads this. And he's looking around at the nation and he's like, what are we doing? What's going on? Not only did he see the high places, he saw the effect of the high places on the people of God. And he went, enough. Enough with this. And so he goes on a tour. And he hacks down and destroys and burns and consumes all of the high places. He just wipes them out. He did what none of his fathers or grandfathers for generations.

He sought to obey this command because he understood the effect it would have on the people. He was seeing it with his own eyes. So can you look around in your own life like Josiah looked around in Israel and say, what are the corrupting influences? What led me astray? What does my heart want? What secret lies am I whispering in my own ear about my desires? Or is that sort of scrutiny tucked away in a closet somewhere underneath a blanket. That sort of scrutiny is essential to living a life that honors God. Otherwise, you'll look around and be like, I don't see what the problems are. That is the thought of an unbeliever. We have to remember, we have to recognize, we have to believe that idolatry is detrimental to our spiritual as well as our physical lives. This much is crystal clear from the testimony of Israel's history.

Always forgetting what God said or disregarding what God said and suffering for it and not understanding why. And they were given to us as an example so that we wouldn't be like them. So do we take it to heart? This is the first reason that these idols need to be torn down for the people and their protection against idolatry. Now there's another reason that these idols need to be cleansed. And it's this. That land is God's land. He owns it. It belongs to him. And he's unwilling, because of his own holiness, to have these sort of corruptions in his land. They have to be wiped out. If you moved into a house, you bought a house, and you moved in, and there was cigarette tar all over the walls. Just move right in, hang your pictures up, and go on about your day, right? What would you do? Before you moved, all of a sudden you'd realize, ah.

Elbow grease is necessary. Dirty, nasty work is ahead. We have to clean the walls. We have to scrub them. We're going to get filthy in the process. And then we're going to go get some kills or bin or something. We're going to get some nasty paint and we're going to paint it all over everything. The kind that encapsulates all of that stink so it doesn't leach back out into our house. How many coats do you have to put on? I don't know. If Eric were here, he might be able to tell us. He's done that kind of work. But you realize it may take two coats or it may take three coats. You may have to tear out the drywall. All of this in an effort to remove the corruption of the former owner. Why would you go to all this trouble? Because it's your house. And you don't want to live in the foul stench of the previous inhabitants. It belongs to you.

And you want it to look and be yours. That's how God feels about this land. It's his to get the stink out. Also, it demonstrates, you realize the Israelites are the ones who have to do this work. It demonstrates that they're more than simply hearers of the word, but doers of it. That's what James calls us to be in his epistle. Do not be merely hearers of the word, but doers. Not forgetful hearers, but effectual doers. Go in, clean out the land, and in so doing, you'll demonstrate that you are my people and you're committed to me. Do you ever have someone tell you to do something and you're like, well, yeah, that would be a good thing to do, but I don't want to. I think I'll do some of it. Or I think I'll get to it later. Or I'll make it look like I did it. Shove all that stuff in the closet where they might hope they don't look. We do these sorts of things. Those things are,

A betrayal of the one we're trying to lead or communicate to. I mean, it's kind of a silly thought to think that you would stand in front of God or before God or that you'd have him examine your life and act like, you know, I think if I hide it over here, he won't see it. I think if we don't go quite that far, he'll understand we've tried real hard. And he'll be content with that. Because I'm content with that. And I think that's reasonable. No. He sends them on a mission to demonstrate their devotion to him. Tear down all of the altars and the pillars and the ashram and the images. Burn them all. Cleanse the land from border to border. The easy ones, the hard ones, the attractive ones, the valuable ones. Burn it all. Destroy it all. And in so doing, demonstrate your commitment to me. What have you had to...

burn up in your life as an act of faith and devotion to the Lord. Is there anything? Do you think there should have to be things that you had to burn up because of your devotion to Jesus Christ? In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus tells us if your eye causes you to stumble, pluck it out. Where is your eye that's been plucked out? Or do you settle for your acknowledgement that your eye is a temptation and a danger and needs to be watched very carefully? Do you think that that's sufficient? God doesn't. You remember that famous saying that every Christian has who likes to put scripture on their walls from Joshua? You know, they put on their walls. What's it say? As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord. You know, that artwork always gives me facial tics. And this is why. It's not the whole verse, and it's torn out of context. That verse is actually a challenge. It's a rebuke.

And it's a rebuke at the point of idolatry. But we just put roses and purple on it and act like it's some sweet platitude that was said. When in point of fact, that's not the context in which it was said. I'll read you the whole verse. This is Joshua 24, 15. Hang this on your wall. If it be disagreeable in your sight to serve the Lord, it's a heck of a way to start, isn't it? If it be disagreeable in your sight to serve the Lord, choose for yourselves today whom you will serve. whether the gods which your fathers served which were beyond the river or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living. But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord. It hits differently, right? It's like it's got a sharp edge now. Maybe it's serrated. It's like, do you love Jesus or not? Will you root out the problems or will you just play nice? Will you serve Jesus Christ or not?

If you will, then there will be things you will have to burn down and destroy in your lives for the sake of righteousness. There's no escaping it. There's no escaping it. If we take scripture seriously, there's no escaping having to say no to things that our flesh is screaming and begging us not to. And we have to stand by the grace and the strength that God provides against the torrent of our flesh and say, no, that will lead me to hell. And that's not where I want to go. God has been merciful to me. He has loved me and given me his son. And whatever he requires of me, I will endeavor to do. That's what the heart of a Christian says. And when he fails to do what he ought to do, he comes back to Jesus Christ and asks for forgiveness and mercy and strength to go and do better in the future than he's done in the past. Show me my idols.

Make them a stench in my nostrils like rotten cigarette smoke in an old dilapidated house. Make it filthy to me and cleanse me of it all. That's what it means to tear down the idols and to choose this day whom you will serve. Why are they to do that? Why is this so important? It says, because you are a holy people to the Lord your God. You're a holy people. Now we come to the primary reason that they should destroy the people as well as their idols. When God chose the nation of Israel, he set them apart for himself. Our passage says, the Lord your God has chosen you to be a people for his own possession out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth. It could have been anyone, but God chose you. You weren't like the other nations. They were different.

They were different because God made them different. And what made them different was that God chose them. They weren't stronger. They weren't more numerous. That's what our text says. He didn't love you or choose you because you were more in number than any of the peoples, for you were the fewest of all peoples. Because the Lord your God loved you and kept oath with these four of your forefathers, he brought you up out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the house of slavery. When God chooses people, he changes them. Do you hear me? When God chooses people, he changes them. He doesn't change them so they'll be acceptable to him, and he doesn't look at the ones who are already changed and say, I'll have that one. He takes the weakest, the poorest, the most vile, and breathes life into them. And then, that is just the beginning of his work in their life, to change them from what they're accustomed to and comfortable with to what they need to become. And that is the...

That is the description of your entire Christian life, is God changing you, pounding on you, shaping you, throwing you into the fire of purification to burn out your dross so that you will become more pleasing and acceptable to him, so that you'll become more like Jesus, your Savior. That's what he does with us. And it's a painful process at times. Yet he does good work. He finishes what he starts. And so when he chose Israel, He made them different. He didn't simply tell them, you should be different. There was a palpable difference that he wrought in them, in their worship, in their culture, in their priorities. And that same stuff is true today of us. And to the extent that it's not true of us, we're in danger. You're a holy people. God loves you, chose you, not because you're better than anyone else.

but because it was his own good will to choose you. And having chosen you, he intends to change you. And those changes are aimed at preparing you to desire and long for and equip you to dwell in his magnificence forever. You're not fit for it now. I'm not fit for it now. We can't go to heaven how we are. We can't stand before God how we are. It's crazy. We have to be changed. And because of the great love with which he loved us, he goes about that work. Do you have anything in your life you're possessive of? Kids? Something of your parents or grandparents? I'm not talking about money. Money's cheap. Burn it up. I don't care about the money. I'm talking about something that has value that's not monetary. Something that you're like, that's mine. It's mine.

Grass. Dan, that's true of you. Dan and his grass. We all love to play kickball on it. But you understand this idea in your own life. You may be possessive of your marriage, possessive of your kids, possessive of your integrity, possessive of your conscience. And you're like, I'm not letting anyone else mess with this. It's mine. You know, and like all of the like, you need to be reasonable and you need to be even-handed and you need to be amicable and all that. It's like, yes. unless there's a threat to the thing that's mine. And then I'm not going to be amicable and agreeable and let you destroy what belongs to me. You all have this impulse. If with nothing else, you have it with your children and with your marriage. That's how God is with us. And so why do we think that he would allow us to wander and stray and give ourselves to idolatry and go, well, okay, do what you want. You're a holy people, a possession of the Lord Most High. It's a humbling thing to...

consider, isn't it? To see a God full of love and also wrath take ownership of you and say, I'm not letting you go. You aren't going to get away. Your flesh wants to lead you away, but I'm not going to let you go. I'm going to discipline you. I'm going to keep you. I'm going to change you. I'm going to put you through my school, and I will ensure you do not quit or flunk. You will graduate. And that ought to be humbling and a comfort to you. That God will possess you in such a way that he'll put you through his school, he'll teach you his lessons, and you will graduate from his school and into his presence. That's love. That's the love of God. That's what our love should be for one another. We have a long way to go. And idols that stand in the way. So being a holy people means living a life that's devoted exclusively to God. It's not an open relationship.

It's not a do-as-you-will arrangement. There's exclusivity, singularity. If our lives are a mixture of serving God and our idols, then we're tantamount to the Israelites who go into the land, make a half-hearted effort at cutting down some of the idols, the most convenient ones or closest ones to our house, and then carry on with life pretty much as we always have. That is what it looks like, and that's what it means to be divided. To refuse to choose whom this day you will serve. Now, I want to bring this to an end. How am I supposed to fight? What idols are most dangerous to me? That's the question I want to answer. This question, this idea of serving God, of rejecting idolatry and pursuing holiness. These are the themes that we find in this passage.

When we look in the New Testament and we look at the question of holiness and we look at the question of becoming more righteous and becoming like Jesus, what is it that's the greatest threat to that pursuit? I want to read to you something. It says 1 Corinthians chapter 6, picking up in the middle of verse 13 and reading through 20. It says, Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ and you're starting to get the impression that our bodies matter, like something about our bodies? Shall I then take away the members of Christ? I'm sorry, I skipped a question. Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? So there's this possession, right? You're members of Christ. You belong to him. You're in an unbreakable union with Jesus. He possesses you. Shall I then take away the members of Christ?

and make them members of a prostitute? May it never be. Or do you not know that the one who joins himself to a prostitute is one body with her? For he says the two shall become one flesh. Now isn't that the thing we all want to deny? That we can do things and not be stuck to the things that we do. They're like, somebody else did it. We don't know where this golden calf came from. It just sprung up out of the fire. Stupid. And the sort of stupidity that we do. The two shall become one flesh, but the one who joins himself to the Lord is one spirit with him. Flee immorality. Every other sin a man commits is outside the body, but the immoral man sins against his own body. And what's not explicit but implicit in this passage is also against the one he's joined to, namely Jesus Christ. Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you have been bought with a price. Therefore glorify God in your body.

This is the New Testament equivalent or command to kill our idols and to serve God alone and to realize that the things we do with our body, particularly sexual immorality, are the things that will lead us astray from God. If you're looking for idols and you're looking for temptations and you're thinking, is he talking to me? Yes, I'm talking to you and everyone else in this room. That is what will destroy you. That is what will lead you away from Jesus Christ. Sexual immorality. There are other things. There are other things. But that's the thing. That's the thing. I was talking to a guy this last week. He's been going to church for about a year. He's been taking his family. He doesn't go here, obviously. Just a casual friend. He knows I'm a pastor. And so we're talking and he's talking about being a good person and trying to do right and spending time around people who encourage you to do well and these types of things. And then he got talking about temptation and sin. And you know what he identified? Having gone for one year to a megachurch as being the most dangerous sin in his life.

Anyone want to venture a guess? Everyone does know, right? Lust. He just said it. I don't know if he's ever read this passage. But he knew his own heart well enough to know if I'm going to fail, I can fail in all kinds of other ways. But the most dangerous failure is actually morality. The idol of my flesh. Israel was called to purify. and cleanse the land. In some sense, they were told when they were going into this land to re-virginize it, to understand, make it pure again. Take away all of its debauchery. You and I were called to the same work, to cleanse and to purify our lives and our bodies and our homes from idolatry. This is what it means to live as a holy people, having been chosen by God and loved by him. This passage I read in 1 Corinthians 6.

shows us that when the Lord chose us, he united himself, his son, to us and that we ought to be joined exclusively to him. And we fall short in so many ways. Lord, help us and prepare us and put us in a fire and get us out and pound on us with a hammer to free us from the idols that drive a wedge between us and him. I want to read you a similar exhortation in case you're like, well, you just cherry-picked a passage to suit your own means. 1 Thessalonians chapter 4, verses 1 through 8, talking about holiness, talking about becoming like Jesus, talking about serving him. This is what it says. Finally then, brethren, we request and exhort you in the Lord Jesus Christ that as you receive from us instruction as to how you ought to walk and please God, that you excel still more.

For you know what commandments we gave you in the authority of Jesus Christ, right? And so he's calling to mind. You remember what I said to you when I was with you. And we're like, what did he say to him while he was with them? This is what he said. For this is the will of God, your sanctification. What is sanctification? That is that you abstain from sexual immorality. That each of you know how to possess his own vessel in sanctification and honor, not in lustful passion like the Gentiles who don't know God, right? The Gentiles that lived in the land, who had all their idols, who worshiped them. You're not supposed to be like them, so you need to destroy the remnant of their idolatry. You, brothers and sisters, are bought by Jesus Christ with a price. You're to clear it out. You're to clear it out. You're not to make any room for it. You're not to give any quarter to it. Lest you want to be like the Gentiles who do not know God.

He also exhorts them that no man should transgress and defraud his brother in the matter because the Lord is an avenger in all of these things, just as we told you before and solemnly warned you. And he ends this section by saying this, for God has not called us for the purpose of impurity, but in sanctification to make us holy. So he who rejects this, this teaching, this exhortation, this rebuke, for he who rejects this is not rejecting man, but the God who gives his Holy Spirit to you. That's right. You don't want to reject him. Your flesh wants to reject him. And by your actions, we reject him each day. But by faith, we return to him. And we plead the blood of Jesus Christ for mercy. What else can we do? What other hope do we have? How was it that they were supposed to clear out these idols? They were weak, and they were small, and they were feeble, and they were tired, and they were young. How was it supposed to come to pass that all these idols would be cleared out? Except that the Lord would do it.

through them and for them. He'd give them the strength to do it and the ability to do it and the will and the resolve to do it and to persevere. And that's our hope. That's our hope. So what are your idols? Burn them to the ground. That's the simple message of this passage. Identify the idols that lead you away from God and burn them to the ground. And don't look back. It's pretty simple, isn't it? Let's pray.