Good morning and welcome in everybody. Today, we are going to take a look at a passage of scripture, but before we do that, I wanted to tell you a little story.
Throughout the years people have traveled across the oceans, and although they were surrounded by water it was completely undrinkable because of the salt content. What’s the old saying, water water everywhere, but not a drop to drink! They had to purify the water by first removing the salt. This was done through a process called desalination, and there are a couple different ways that this task was completed. You could either boil the water and then catch the vapor, leaving the salt in the pan, or you could use reverse osmosis where the salt water was forced through a membrane that would filter the salt from the water. Before seawater can be drinkable, it must undergo this process of purification.
This reminds me of the Christian Life.
Like reverse osmosis, we too must undergo a similar process of purification. In order to enter into eternal life, we must remove sin from our lives, a series of actions that are performed, in order to achieve something that is known as sanctification. We must do this, so that we can eventually see God.
Matthew 5:8 Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.
When you purify something, it means to cleanse it from any type of defilement or imperfection, removing things that pollute or contaminate it. This process begins when God forgives us of our past sins through the waters of baptism. When we go beneath the water, He completely cleanses our hearts and minds from our former misdeeds. But even though we are purified at that point, this world can throw a lot of obstacles in our path, ones that we must avoid and not get involved with again. We must learn to walk each and every day in our faith, turning from our past lifestyles of sin, until we are perfected, completely overcoming the desires of the sinful nature. Although we walk through this sinful world, we are not supposed to become involved living the way that the world does. Rather, we must become shining examples unto them, showing by our actions that each of us are capable of defeating sins through God’s grace and the power of the Holy Spirit. If we are ever going to be transformed into saints, the sinful routines and habits that each of us once developed in our former lives, must be changed. The church is very much like a spiritual reform school, but unlike ones that you might have been forced by others to attend, this is one that we freely enroll ourselves in, out of a love for Christ. God wants us to become good and obedient children, which means that we will need to change certain aspects of how we live our lives. Jesus died on the cross to take our sins away, but what we must do is to make sure that they stay away, becoming conquerors of the flesh, and overcomers of the carnal nature. This will require learning to accept biblical truth and following the narrow path of Christ.
God does not make us robots, but gives us the opportunity to choose our own fate. He gives each of us the opportunity to repent and believe the gospel. Like picking which way that you will go when you reach the next stop sign, you must choose the direction that you will take in regards to your own salvation, either the way of Christ, or the wide road which will only lead to destruction. To become sanctified and prepared for God’s coming kingdom, we must lovingly accept biblical truth, knowing that God’s way is the better way to go, and that He will reward those who serve and obey Him. It is better to have one friend in this world, who is the source of eternal life, rather than millions of friends who oppose Him. It is better to stand all alone, like David did against Goliath, with the understanding that the invisible and Almighty God stands at your side.
When someone makes the choice to become a Christian, they must at the same time make the choice to follow the teachings of Christianity. It is through obedience to our faith that sinfulness will begin to disappear in our lives as we purify ourselves from things that are displeasing unto God. Each of us has the great hope of obtaining eternal life through God’s grace, but we must respond to the great opportunity that has been presented to us. People can be very wasteful in this world, but of all the waste that I have ever known, there is none greater, or more abhorrent, than the waste of God’s Grace. God’s loving mercy should propel a person to loving obedience to His will. We must take the mercy that God has given us, and run with it, never looking back to the world from which we came, but forward, to the eternal world that He is taking us to. Through faith, we must strive to enter into that place. We must turn from darkness to light, and from disobedience to submission. We must become sanctified by God’s Word, so that we can undergo a complete transformation, from mud into a usable vessel, and from a sinner into a saint.
John 17:17 Sanctify them through thy truth: thy word is truth.
Many years ago, I used to take all of our family’s clothes to a certain laundromat. After I took them out of the washing machine, I would put all of the wet clothes into a big machine called an extractor. When I dropped in the proper amount of coins, I would push the start button, and it would begin to slowly spin, gaining speed with each revolution. Faster and faster it went, until it sounded like a freight train that was ready to come off the tracks. As the clothes were forced up against the side walls, they humbly submitted to the process of what they needed to go through. It was their own sanctification, as the water was completely mortified and wrung out of them, until they reached the point that the extractor had completed what needed to be done. When it finally had shut down, and the finished light came on, the clothes were now prepared and ready to go into the dryer. Likewise, sin needs to be extracted from our lives. We must learn to go and sin no more. We must get to the place in our lives where we no longer have to repent of dead works. We must allow ourselves, no matter how difficult, to submit to this process of purification, willfully placing ourselves upon God’s anvil of truth, so that we can be reshaped according to His purpose, and become sanctified for His use.
2 Timothy 2:19-21 Nevertheless the foundation of God standeth sure, having this seal, The Lord knoweth them that are his. And, Let every one that nameth the name of Christ depart from iniquity. But in a great house there are not only vessels of gold and of silver, but also of wood and of earth; and some to honour, and some to dishonour. If a man therefore purge himself from these, he shall be a vessel unto honour, sanctified, and meet for the master’s use, and prepared unto every good work.
To enter into Paradise we must be purified by the Holy Spirit which is only available through faith in Jesus Christ. We must believe the teachings of the Gospel, allowing scripture to wash over us and cleanse us with God’s truth.
2 Thessalonians 2:13 But we are bound to give thanks alway to God for you, brethren beloved of the Lord, because God hath from the beginning chosen you to salvation through sanctification of the Spirit and belief of the truth:
Remember that we must purge ourselves from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit, until all that is left is pure Spiritual perfection. Like boiling up water to remove the salt, we must endure the heat of the refiner’s fire, removing all impurities by passing through the filter of God’s truth, as each of us undergo our own…..
……Reverse Osmosis
Let’s think about these things for right now. We can be found on your web browser by searching, tlkjbc where you can find our diaries distributed through various platforms. We are not associated, nor affiliated with any other religious groups. You can get our entire podcast feeds directly, along with transcripts at tlkjbc.com or I suppose that you could find us somewhere up here, in the Great Northern Minnesota woods. Peace to you, and Lord willing, we will talk with you some more tomorrow. Till then, bye bye everybody. ❤️
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Teufer Lake King James Bible Church 