Good morning and thank you for praying for us this week.  Our family drove 2000 miles over the 4 days to attend Grace’s mother’s funeral in the Midwest. As you might imagine the service was filled with music and praise as we thanked God for Marguerite’s 86 years of faithfulness.

 

We are in a summer sermon series on 7 virtues of an authentic Christian life.  The word virtue means strength, power, quality!  Virtue is the power we need to live a life of faithfulness in the midst of a turbulent and painfully polluted world.

 

It’s been a tough week and a difficult sermon to prepare. Satan jumped in with both feet, “who do you think you are saying anything about morality or purity! You’ve broken every commandment, if not overtly, at least in your mind. If people knew how rotten you were… blah blah blah ”

And he got to me. Jesus told the Pharisees, “Let the one without sin throw the first stone.”  He also said, “Why do you work so hard to pick the speck out of your brother’s eye when you have a log in your own?” 

 

But that’s when Satan overplayed his hand.  I quickly realized I’d be a fool to stand up here and attempt to tell anyone how they ought to live when I’ve fallen so short myself. Satan’s purpose is to deceive, accuse, shame, and condemn us. And he’s good at what he does

 

But God didn’t send his Son into the world to condemn the world. We were already condemned, he sent Jesus into the world to save the world - to rescue us from the depth of depravity to which we have fallen and make us pure/moral again! So with that in mind, let’s look at what this virtue of moral purity really means.

 

The word moral means a standard by which to judge right and wrong.  To be amoral or immoral is to be out of kilter with that standard.  The $24 question is who sets the standard by which we measure morality?  This is more than a philosophical question; this is a life/death battle with consequences that stretches all the way back to Adam and Eve.

 

The apostle Paul says that this battle rages not only around us but within us. He’s describes his own experience when he writes in Roman 8:7 “The sinful mind is hostile to God. It does not submit to God’s law – nor can it do so.”  Paul isn’t only describing himself, he’s describing us all!

 

My sinful self wants to reject God’s moral standards as restrictive, out of touch, out of date, oppressive to my freedom and self-expression. I want to make the rules, set the boundaries. I want the right to change them whenever I want to meet my present circumstances.  

 

Sounds nice, but I don’t what the pilot of my 777 doing that on my flight to Hawaii. I don’t want others drivers doing that while I’m on the freeway. I don’t want my doctor doing that during my open heart surgery. I don’t want my neighbor changing my property lines to suit his fancy. I want them to follow the exact prescribed procedures and standards!

 

When I was in college in the early ‘70’s situational ethics was the rage.  God’s moral standards were rejected as intolerant, primitive, unsophisticated, bigoted and unenlightened.  After all, it was the 1970’s. We were enlightened, emancipated, we had shaken off the chains. We’d evolved to the place where we ourselves could determine what was moral, right or wrong in any particular situation. Those who went before us were backward, primitive and superstitious.  

 

What we didn’t realize in our naïve arrogance was that this mentality, this fad of situational ethics wasn’t new or modern; it goes back through salvation history all the way to the Garden of Eden.  And it’s a lie that always ends in tyranny and bondage and abuse.

 

When the people of Israel came out of the wilderness to settle in the Promised Land, the LORD had warned them to carefully obey all that he had commanded them – to memorize the 10 commandments, to live by them lest they be drawn away by the situation ethics and immoral standards of the Canaanites.

 

Sure enough, that’s what happened, the seemly sophisticated Canaanites with their seemingly sophisticated gods belittled the country bumpkin Hebrews out of the desert with their hillbilly God of the Mountain. And inch by inch the Hebrews abandoned the Lord’s standard for the more up-to-date standards of the culture in which they lived.

 

The book of Judges in your Bible describes the result. The book ends with these words, “In those days Israel had no king, and everyone did what was right in his own eyes.”  How tragic!  Israel had no human king because the LORD, the maker of heaven and earth was her king. He set the moral standards by which she was to live. But Israel rejected his rule and authority over her. And the result was an inevitable cycle of tyranny, oppression, and bondage.  Does this sound familiar?

 

The Christian virtue of moral purity doesn’t mean that we are sinless. It means that we have placed ourselves under the authority and standard of God’s Word.  This will always put us at odds with the world around us.  When God’s people chose to live by God’s standards rather than the world’s we will be seen as awkward and a threat. We will be accused of being intolerant.

 

When we refuse to cheat at school or at work, because of our desire to live by God’s standard, our classmates and fellow workers may well see us as awkward and a threat. When we chose to live by God’s standard in our sexuality, marriage and courtship, the world will scoff and ridicule us as awkward, unsophisticated, narrow-minded, legalistic, bigoted.

 

God’s people have always been confronted with pressure by the world, the devil, and our own sinful flesh to shift God’s moral standards – to become more “up to date”.   The pressure we face isn’t new. It was faced by all God’s faithful people through the centuries.

 

Proverbs 23:19 says this, “Do not move an ancient boundary stone or encroach on the fields of the fatherless, for their Defender is strong, he will take up their case against you.”  When Israel first moved into the Promised Land, the land was surveyed and divided up by families. Sometimes when the man of the house died, an unscrupulous neighbor would sneak out and move the boundary marker to take advantage of the widow and orphans.

 

Sin always has a ripple affect beyond ourselves. When we chose the way of disobedience, whether we are aware of it or not, others suffer the consequences of our sin. Some of you still suffer the consequences of your parents or grandparents moral failures. When we move the ancient boundary stones, the ones who will suffer will be the children.

 

Jesus said, “If anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to be thrown into the sea with a large millstone tied around his neck.”

 

When we reject God’s standard because we think God is old fashioned and doesn’t know what he’s doing… when we justify our sinful behavior because Jesus will forgive us anyway, we are moving ancient boundary stones, moral standards that God put in place to protect our children – and God will hold us accountable.

 

The truth is - we’ve all done this. The Pharisees did it when they pointed out the sin in others, but were unwilling to see their own. Jesus told them, “ If you’ve even glance at a woman with lust in your eye, you’ve already committed adultery with her in your heart.”

You see, moral purity is not about what we’ve done or not done. It’s not about, “I don’t drink and I don’t chew and I don’t go with girls who do.” We are neither moral nor pure. This virtue of moral purity comes as a gift to anyone who will own up to the depth of their moral depravity and confess their sins and ask God to begin changing, transforming our hearts so we desire what he desires and live like he wants us to live.

 

The old apostle John, blind, in his 90’s wrote. “If we will confess our sin, God is faithful and just to forgive our sins and purify us from all our unrighteousness.”   David wrote in Psalm 37 “Delight yourself in the LORD and he will give you the desires of your heart.”

 

Are you willing for God to change your heart to match his own? Paul put it this way in Gal 2:20. “I (meaning my ego, my will, that part of me that is in rebellion against God’s way) I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ within me. And the life I now live in the flesh, I live by faith (trust, obedience, submission) in the Son of God who loved me and gave his life for me.”