“Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind,
Nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God.
And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God.” 1 Corinthians 6:9-11
We all have sinned. Some of us have commited different sins that others, some have committed more sins than others, but we are all still under the same title: SINNER. No one is “special” or “exempt” from sin, it is something that we are all under the curse of. And as we have just read above, the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God. So what we need to do is become righteous, and the only way to do that is through the blood of Christ which cleanses us.
A while back I watched someone doing some body work on a vehicle. The vehicle had begun rusting away around a few different parts of the body, wheel wells, fenders, doors etc, and it had been brought to him to be fixed. He began by taking a metal saw and cut away all of the rusty, weak metal so that only the good remained. He then sanded away the paint right down to the bare metal, and began to replace what he had just cut out with fiberglass, and by the time he was finished painting it all back up, the vehicle looked completely new once again.
Renew means “to become new or as new; to begin again.”
I use this example to try to illustrate our verses today. The rust on the car represents sin, and the cutting away of that rust and repairing it back to new is what happens when Jesus washes, sanctifies, and justifies us by His mercy and forgiveness. He takes away all of the old, ugly, impure sins that mar each of us, and He fills us with the Holy Spirit.
You could also think about it this way: Maybe you have a CD or DVD disc that has a bunch of scratches and smudges on it, so that it doesn’t play properly anymore. It skips terribly, and really is unusable, and corrupted. This time those scratches are the sins, and the only way to get those taken away is to run the disc through a machine that resurfaces them, and removes all the imperfections. It makes something corrupt and turns it into something brand new.
“For we ourselves also were sometimes foolish, disobedient, deceived, serving divers lusts and pleasures, living in malice and envy, hateful, and hating one another.
But after that the kindness and love of God our Saviour toward man appeared,
Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost;” Titus 3:3-5
We are made righteous because of what Christ has done. Not for anything that we did or can do, because we are not able to save ourselves. It is all the Lord’s doing. His love and mercy, and forgiveness.
He can take the worst sinner and turn him into a chlid of God. He took a bunch of everyday, normal people, fishermen, and turned them into apostles. And it is all possible through the working of His Holy Spirit.
Remember that when you look at others out in the world. Without Jesus, they are that rusty car, that scratched disc, but they all have the opportunity to become a believer in Christ. They all can be made something new in the Spirit.
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.
Teufer Lake King James Bible Church 