In this sermon, Pastor Babij continues teaching from 1 Peter how Christians are called to be holy since God Himself is holy. Pastor Babij explains how Christians are to bear fruit unto holiness and what such fruit looks like. Pastor concludes by exhorting Christians to fear God.
Full Transcript:
Lord, as we consider the topic within the passage, I pray Lord that we would examine ourselves to see how we’re doing. So, Lord, we can know that we have progress in the Lord. Since the day we believed, every day there should be progress. There should be something we are growing in and delighting in that we didn’t delight in before. I pray that it would bring us to live our life, and to have a relationship with You in which we are growing in our love for You, Lord. That our understanding of what’s going on in the world, and what we are to do while we live here. I pray every day we would learn to live before Your eyes, before anybody else. If we live there, Lord, we don’t have to be concerned about anybody else. I pray, Lord, allow us to live there, from the inside out, before your eyes. I pray this, in Christ’s name, Amen.
Last time, we were given several exhortations in Scripture. First, that we are exhorted to have a fixed hope. 1 Peter 1:13:
Therefore, prepare your minds for action, keep sober in spirit, fix your hope completely on the grace to be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ.
According to 1 Peter, spiritual sobriety will be important in two specific areas. In these two areas, we are to be this way for prayer and resisting the adversary. In the next chapters of 1 Peter, we will understand the enemy, his character, and how he works in our life. Christians can be sober and decisive in their minds because they have a fixed hope in Christ, what He has done, what He is doing now, and what He will ultimately complete, which has been the point of this whole section of Scripture – understanding our salvation.
Under the second exhortation, we have been looking at the holiness of salvation, and how to live a holy life with a fixed-hope. We are no longer children of disobedience, wrath, darkness, or of the curse. Now, we have become obedient children to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. 1 Peter 1:14:
As obedient children, do not be conformed to the former lusts which were yours in your ignorance.
You have listened and received the Word of Truth, the Gospel of salvation, which saved you in the person of Christ. Then, you understand what the Lord requires of you from the Word of God, which makes you willingly to do what the Lord has said to live a holy life. In 1 Peter 1:14, we are warned not to do or to be what we used to be since in our new nature, we are made new. Therefore, this obedience leads to responsibility. Today, we are commanded what to be in our new spiritual natures. 1 Peter 1:15-16:
but like the Holy One who called you, be holy yourselves also in all your behavior; 16because it is written, “YOU SHALL BE HOLY, FOR I AM HOLY.”
Peter quotes directly from Leviticus 11:44-45:
‘For I am the LORD your God. Consecrate yourselves therefore, and be holy, for I am holy. And you shall not make yourselves unclean with any of the swarming things that swarm on the earth. 45‘For I am the LORD who brought you up from the land of Egypt to be your God; thus you shall be holy, for I am holy.’”
In this context, the people of God were called out, by God, to be significantly different than all the nations and all the people around them down to what they could and could not eat. They weren’t to eat the same, look the same, worship the same, or to do the same things as the nations around them. This adjective holy, in both the Hebrew and Greek language, includes in its meaning synonyms like consecrate or to set apart, for or by God, things that are not common.
In the Word of God, you see holy ground, holy vessels, holy places, and holy days. The word holiday is derived from the term holy, which is a special day that is different than all the rest of the regular days of the year. A holiday is different where we are off from work, eat special food, or have a special focus on that holiday.
A person who is holy is different because God makes them different, but they are to cooperate with that difference. When someone hears the Gospel by responding to Jesus Christ by repenting of their sins and trusting Him alone for their salvation, they are, at that point, set apart onto God and as holy. When God touches you, you become different, special to God, holy, sanctified, and God’s possession. Only God can put the touch on something or someone that changes it or them from something common place to something special, different, and set-apart.
In 1 Peter 1:15, notice where holiness is to be manifested in our life, which is something we cannot recognize. You will become increasingly holy in all your behavior. However, I must warn you that I am not talking about moralism, and the Bible is not talking about moralism. Moralism is an improvement in your behavior. The Bible is talking about transformation by God. This is not something you are cleaning up on the outside with nothing happening on the inside, which is moralism. God cleans you up on the inside, which comes out of your life in behavior, and everybody has behavior.
In fact, we can tell a lot about someone’s behavior, and we can tell a lot about them by the way they behave. We don’t even have to talk one word, just observe them, their actions, their eyes, how their brow goes up and down, how their shoulders shrug, or whatever they’re doing. Body language can tell a lot about someone’s behavior.
This passage of Scripture is very pointed: you are to be holy, but holy in a specific area, which is your behavior. This is not ritual correctness, but genuine holiness. The Old Testament, the law, did not impart the power to fulfill the man to be holy. However, the Cross of Calvary, in which Jesus died and shed His blood, and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit of God on the day of Pentecost, changed all of that by providing divine enablement to carry out this command. Without God intervening and the Spirit of God indwelling in you, this command is impossible to carry out. Therefore, the command is very clear in Scripture. God is holy, and because of His holy character, you are called to be holy, which is seen in your behavior.
The Holy Spirit makes us holy, and as we cooperate with His promptings, which is to put off your sin and put on righteousness. In that process, we become increasingly holy and sanctified. God furnishes the power and ability, and because of the salvation call, we are called to a life of holy progress. John Calvin referred to this as a definitive sanctification. Meaning, sanctification changes a human nature such that a believer no longer wants to continue sinning. The same faith, by which the sinner is justified, also makes the sinner sanctified.
In the Gospel, there is sanctification. Again, sanctification and holiness are synonymous. During sanctification and holiness, our hearts and our lives are conformed to the law. It is communicated to us by means of teaching and learning something we cannot see without the Word of God. We would never recognize it or know it without the Word of God. Acts 26:17-18:
rescuing you from the Jewish people and from the Gentiles, to whom I am sending you, 18to open their eyes so that they may turn from darkness to light and from the dominion of Satan to God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins and an inheritance among those who have been sanctified by faith in Me.’
That is the Gospel sanctification, which sanctifies us. This process is continued in the doctrine of sanctification. Simply, doctrine means teaching. In this passage, there is a form of doctrine made use of, by God, to make people free from sin, and then, servants of righteousness. Romans 6:17-18:
But thanks be to God that though you were slaves of sin, you became obedient from the heart to that form of teaching to which you were committed, 18and having been freed from sin, you became slaves of righteousness.
In other words, we went from one slavery to another slavery. We went from the slavery of sin, which is a cruel master that wants to keep you in bondage and blindness, to a good master, who wants to free you up to give you understanding of who God is, what He is doing, and what you ought to be doing. It frees us up to understand righteousness, which means the right way to think and live, and God is the one who does that. Further in Scripture, we can know how to put our armor on to stand against sin and Satan in the evil day. Ephesians 6:13:
Therefore, take up the full armor of God, so that you will be able to resist in the evil day, and having done everything, to stand firm.
All these things are included when we think about this subject of sanctification. Then, the Word of God is sanctification, which becomes very important. 2 Timothy 3:16-17:
All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness; 17so that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work.
Sanctification, in the Word of God, becomes very important to us. The Word of God gives plenty of instruction in righteousness that believers may be thoroughly furnished for everything God wants you to know and do. In fact, there is no attaining to holiness and Godliness without learning the Holy Scriptures. It takes work to learn the Word of God. The Bible says, 2 Timothy 2:15:
Be diligent to present yourself approved to God as a workman who does not need to be ashamed, accurately handling the word of truth.
Double effort must be given to study since we must unlearn many of our former, deeply rooted notions and misguided passions and desires, which is our problem. The deep-seeded stuff in our heart will be dug out by the Word of God. All the garbage is going to rise to the surface. Believe me, God doesn’t allow all that garbage to arise at once. If He did, we would have the worst horror story that we could not deal with. God allows us to see it bit by bit, and as we see it, we don’t ignore it, but deal with it.
Therefore, we do have misguided passions and desires. We desire the wrong things, we have passions and goals for the wrong ends in our life, so God will have to change all of that. In other words, the Word of God, will redirect just about everything in our old way of thinking and doing. If I were to put a percentage on it, I say that 99.9 percent of everything that you ever knew must be changed, especially since we came at it with a sinful heart, the knowledge we got from the world, and from the deception that Satan threw along our path all our life to keep us in bondage.
We must be taught the Word of God. Once we learn it, we must put it into practice. We must pray earnestly, to the Lord, to teach us as well as to search the Scriptures of where we must get this knowledge. We must get this understanding from the Word of God. We are not going to get it from anywhere else but the Word of God.
In the following passages, each one has an indication to someone being taught the Word of God. Something they could have not known unless God taught them. Psalm 119:33:
Teach me, O LORD, the way of Your statutes,
And I shall observe it to the end.
We have David and the Psalmists learning to be taught by God. Psalm 143:10:
Teach me to do Your will,
For You are my God;
Let Your good Spirit lead me on level ground.
Then, the Apostle Paul in 2 Thessalonians 3:5:
May the Lord direct your hearts into the love of God and into the steadfastness of Christ.
We don’t know how to love God unless He directs us there, we don’t know how to do the will of God unless God teaches us what the will of God is, and we cannot know the ways of God’s statutes unless we learn them from Him, but we must observe them. The Lord, Jesus Christ, in His high priestly prayer, John 17:17:
Sanctify them in the truth; Your word is truth.
The word sanctify is to make them holy, set-apart, and different, which is what the Lord prayed. For every one of the true disciples of Jesus Christ, this will take place. If you notice in these passages, there is a dependence on the Word of God, so that we may apply ourselves to this holy practice. Meaning, we cannot apply ourselves to this holy practice without the Lord’s divine assistance. Without this assistance, we have no ground to expect any hope of success or forward movement in holiness. Evidentially, we cannot practice true holiness while we are continuing in a natural state or an unsaved state. Romans 8:8-9:
and those who are in the flesh cannot please God. 9However, you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you. But if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Him.
The Holy Spirit of God is very important not only in salvation, but also in sanctification. Therefore, the Apostle brings it all together in Romans 8:10:
If Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, yet the spirit is alive because of righteousness.
From Scripture, we learn that the old and new man are two contrary states. Contained in them, not only is it sin, but also of holiness. All other things are contained therein that dispose and incline us to practice something other, in the old man, that is holy. The old man must be put off, as crucified with Christ, before we can be freed from the practice of sin. Romans 6:6-7:
knowing this, that our old self was crucified with Him, in order that our body of sin might be done away with, so that we would no longer be slaves to sin; 7for he who has died is freed from sin.
Putting off sinfulness and putting on holiness in all manner of behavior is what Peter is talking about in his epistle. Meaning, we can have a correct, Gospel-order of holiness and sanctification. The correct Gospel-order toward a holy life is as follows: God first purges our consciousness from dead works by justification, so that we may serve the living God. Hebrews 9:14:
how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without blemish to God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?
In other words, the cleansed conscious must come first before we can properly understand God and serve Him. Galatians 5:25:
If we live by the Spirit, let us also walk by the Spirit.
First, we must live in the Spirit. Meaning, we must be made alive in the Spirit and the Spirit must indwell us. Secondly, we can walk in the Spirit. If you don’t have the Spirit, you cannot walk in the Spirit, so without the Holy Spirit, you cannot walk a walk of holiness. You must be alive in God by believing the Gospel, and the Spirit of God will indwell you. Because He indwells you, you can now walk in the Spirit. This is the correct order that cannot be reversed.
Against moralism, a person can walk and change their behavior, but it’s not the spirit of God prompting them to change. They may have decided to do it, or somebody is pushing them to change such as a counselor. However, anybody can change their behavior in this area or that area from time to time in their life, especially if it has destroyed your life. “Stop doing that behavior! Look what it’s doing to you and others,” so you learn to stop.
In this case, I am talking about how when the Spirit of God indwells you, you will change comprehensively. Not just in one area, but you will change in all areas. God changes us first in our minds. Knowing this order gives us an advantage for attainment of holiness. In other words, you have the advantage of the love of God manifested toward you. As a believer, we know that God loves us whereas before we didn’t know our position standing before God. Because we didn’t know anything about God, we feared Him a lot of the times, but, as the Bible says, love casts out fear.
Therefore, God loves us, forgives our sin, receives us into His favor, He has given us the spirit of adoption where He adopted us into His family, and He is giving me a hope of His glory freely through Christ Jesus. This is huge to know. People spend their whole life searching for that in various religions and meditations, but never find this knowledge. When you come to Christ, that is when you get your questions answered.
First, you must come to Christ before you can have your answers adequately answered. When the Spirit of God comes, He comes to persuade you with sweet allurements to love God, who has so dearly loved you. Also, to love others for His sake, not for your sake, and to give up yourselves to the obedience of all His commands out of a hardy love for Him. When you obey the Lord, it’s not a, “you must do this!” Rather, by a hardy love for God.
At that point, you will enjoy the help of the Spirit of God to incline you powerfully to obedience, and to strengthen you for the performance against all your remaining corruptions and temptations Satan can throw at you. As a result, you will have everything you need to move forward in this practice of holiness.
In this life, holiness is necessary to salvation, and you cannot separate the two. It’s not only the end, but part of the end itself. The true Gospel faith makes us come to Christ with a thirsty appetite, so that we drink of the living water and of His sanctifying spirit. Not only to trust Christ for true salvation, but a hardy desire to be made holy and righteous. Said by the Lord before the Spirit of God came, John 7:37-39:
Now on the last day, the great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried out, saying, “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to Me and drink. 38“He who believes in Me, as the Scripture said, ‘From his innermost being will flow rivers of living water.’” 39But this He spoke of the Spirit, whom those who believed in Him were to receive; for the Spirit was not yet given, because Jesus was not yet glorified.
Jesus is giving us a sequence of the promise of the Father in this passage of Scripture. He tells His disciples that it’s expedient to leave, so that the Spirit of God can finish the work. In other words, the Spirit of God is completing the unfinished work of Christ through His church. Jesus had to go back to heaven, sit at the right-hand of the Father, and make intercession for the saints. Meaning, the Spirit of God is important in our sanctification.
In sanctification, we start with justification to sanctification. When we became Christian, the first thing that takes place is that you are justified, where God declares you just before Him. At that point, we are indwelled by the Holy Spirit, in which He begins the gradual process of holiness, or sanctification. Once we believe in Christ, change starts to happen immediately since the Spirit of God is in you. It starts the instant we are justified, but it is not complete until we receive the glory by dropping off these bodies. Romans 8:30:
and these whom He predestined, He also called; and these whom He called, He also justified; and these whom He justified, He also glorified.
The process starts where it is finished in glory. In the meantime, we experience warfare. We start understanding that there is an internal struggle going on inside of us because we still sin. Romans 7:24:
Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from the body of this death?
To a military person, who committed the crime of murder, this is an illusion. To a Christian, the old man is dead, but still there, giving off decaying odor until we are glorified, where we drop off this body of death and go to heaven to be with the Lord forever. Therefore, we experience this warfare of what the Spirit of God wants us to do with the remaining corruption that we bring and drag into our Christian life wants us to do.
Remember, God must remake us and create us new again, so He does this in our passions and desires. The Holy Spirit of God is cleaning us by making changes in our lives and bringing us into conformity to the will of God. This conformity happens from the inside to out, not outside to inside. We are not just cleaning the outside, or faking behavior. We’re smart enough to say things to the right people, at the right time, and in the right context, so we can fake behavior. However, this is not fake, but real.
There is a struggle going on within with what the Word of God says on what we ought to be, and we’re dealing with it inside because the Spirit of God is convicting us. Also, God wants us to see, in our life, fruit. If we’re going to have changed behavior, we must see and recognize the change. Therefore, God wants us to see the fruit of what the Spirit of God is doing inside of us. In fact, He wants you to see the fruit too. The goal of the Christian life is righteousness. We are being sanctified so that we may do what is right and pleasing to the Lord.
This holiness and sanctifying process is seen in our behavior. In other words, the term behavior is the center of concern in sanctification. Behavior shows what is and what is not going on inside your heart. If there is no internal transformation, it may mean that a person is not a believer. However, it can mean that they are masquerading around with righteous behavior with no internal change, which is call hypocrisy.
The Bible warns against hypocrisy. The whole book of Malachi is about hypocrisy. Don’t question the love of God or saying in your heart that it is not profitable to serve God. Don’t say, “since I’ve been a Christian, look at all that has happened to me! My life seemed to be better before I was a Christian.” These are things that will take place in our mind, so the Holy Spirit is inside of us to change us, and to produce good fruit in us. This is fruit of daily connectedness to Christ
In John 15, if you are not a connected branch to the vine, you will die away. If you are connected to the vine, which is Christ, you will live. You will be supplied everything you need to live, so there will be some fruit of daily connectedness to Christ of how much you depend on Christ, how much you are growing in your love of Christ, how much you are putting into practice of what you are learning about Christ.
Then, there is the manifestation of spiritual fruit, which is, as said in Galatians, love, joy, long-suffering, peace, gentleness, kindness, goodness, etc. Remember, it is fruit of the spirit, not fruits of the spirit. Meaning, it is singular since it is happening all at once. In that process, we must see where we are growing and not growing. Under that is the fruit of words, which is the words we used to use, but are now cautious to not use that terminology again since it is not pleasing to the Lord. In addition, actions that we have constantly used in the past, and since we’ve become Christian, those actions need to change.
Also, there is the fruit of righteousness. Knowing what are right behaviors that we have not been doing but should be doing based on what the Word of God is saying. There is the fruit of the fear of the Lord, so are you fearing God more than you ever have. Where are the fruits of service and good works in your life? Can we see them, or can you write them down on a paper? What did you do in the last year that you grew in these areas?
If you are not serving or being involved with good works, the problem is that you are selfish, or self-centered. All those things need to change so that you may be able to serve people. Lastly, what about the fruit of souls? Are you concerned to share the Gospel with someone you know doesn’t know Christ? Not only are you concerned to do it, but you are going to find out how to share the Gospel. You are willingly to learn the Scriptures to use to share the Gospel with people. The fruit of souls is something God will grow us in, and we realize that there is a bunch of people heading to a lost eternity without Christ. If the church is not concerned about them, who is going to be?
The Spirit of God is giving us a world-view that we never had before, an eternal view that we never had before, and He is giving us a really good view of ourselves that we didn’t think we were like. Personally, I thought I was a nice, good, and loving kid. When I became a Christian, I found out that I was not good or loving. However, it was the Word of God that brought that to my attention, and the Spirit of God that convicted me.
Therefore, the Spirit of God will bring you to repentance. Meaning, there will be a change of mind by impressing upon your consciousness or sin so that you can identify it and put it off. He is going to convict you of not only sin, but also of righteousness. Conviction is about what is right, pleasing, wrong, and evil in the sight of God. We become convinced by Scripture that we ought to change in an area, and we are given divine enablement, from the Spirit of God, to change.
Through Scripture, the Holy Spirit addresses your mind and informs your understanding with truth. He doesn’t bypass your mind but addresses your mind. John 16:13:
But when He, the Spirit of truth, comes, He will guide you into all the truth; for He will not speak on His own initiative, but whatever He hears, He will speak; and He will disclose to you what is to come.
He is not only the Holy Spirit, but the Spirit of Truth, so the Holy Spirit is working on our consciousness with truth. Romans 12:2:
And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.
In other words, don’t get pressed into the thinking and sway in which the world goes. We get swayed by the media pounding us with one thing, which may be true or not true. Today, who knows if the media is true. Eventually, if you say things six or more times, people will believe it whether it is or is not true. In Scripture, it tells us to conform to this world, but to be transformed by the renewing of our minds. 1 Corinthians 14:20:
Brethren, do not be children in your thinking; yet in evil be infants, but in your thinking be mature.
When it comes to evil, you should be like a little kid. This doesn’t mean you don’t understand evil, but you don’t go there. God is maturing us. He is bringing us from the milk of the Word to the solid food of the Word, where we gain a lot of spiritual protein. You cannot get good muscle mass without protein. Therefore, you cannot get good spiritual mass, where you become strong, without the meat of the Word of God, or the maturity the Word of God brings to our mind on how we are to think as believers.
Through the truth of the Word of God, the Holy Spirit is making this change in us, and it is happening right in your mind. The Word and Spirit go together and should not be separated. The Word of God transforms us so that we develop deep and strong biblical convictions based on Scripture, and your conscious will not allow you to live against those convictions. It doesn’t mean you will not get tempted to go the opposite way when you will, but your convictions, in the Word of God, become strong that you will be able to say no to what you used to do before. The Spirit of God is making you strong to say no. Regardless if anyone doesn’t know, God knows, and you will not commit the sin anymore.
Everyday, this will bring us to the presence of God, and now we are holy because God is holy, and He sees where we are developing in our holiness. As we develop deep convictions, which comes from a transformed mind, we will desire what is right, and to live in a pleasing manner before the Lord, Jesus Christ, in all our behavior, which is what Peter is saying.
Bottom line, pursue holiness. The Spirit of God has made us sanctified and holy, but now we pursue holiness. You learn the Word of God until it changes your mind and gives you deep convictions so that you can serve God the right way. Hebrews 12:14:
Pursue peace with all men, and the sanctification without which no one will see the Lord.
If you are not developing holiness, you will not see the Lord. We are to pursue holiness, which is sanctification, since it is our responsibility as God’s children, and it is our responsibility to the members of the community to be holy. Hebrews 12:10:
For they disciplined us for a short time as seemed best to them, but He disciplines us for our good, so that we may share His holiness.
Holiness is required, first, for our wellbeing. When God disciplines us, His goal is for us to share in His holiness. If you are not going to deal with your sin or put off your sin, and if the church is not going to deal with your sin, God will. If you are one of His kids, He will not allow you to live any old way you want. If you don’t want to step into an area to be holy, He will discipline you by bringing something into your life. There is a manifold of things God can bring into your life to discipline you in an area of sinning.
God doesn’t do this to destroy you, but rather to share in His holiness and carry out the command to be holy. The goal is to correct us and drive out the sin in us, but only for us to be more truly the children of God. God will ensure that we will be holy. That is who God is, that is His will for us, and it will happen if you are a child of God. God has not called us to uncleanness or impurity, but to holiness. We must earnestly strive for personal and practical holiness of life, which means that believers are to be set apart from evil and separated to God, consecrated, and entirely given up to His service. Therefore, it is for our wellbeing.
Secondly, holiness is necessary for our effective service. 2 Timothy 2:21:
Therefore, if anyone cleanses himself from these things, he will be a vessel for honor, sanctified, useful to the Master, prepared for every good work.
God is growing you in holiness so that you may effectively serve. When people don’t serve, they have sin they have not put off, they have not put on righteousness, and they are not pursuing holiness. Until they do that, they are sometimes stuck in the mud. Don’t stay there to long before God’s hand of discipline comes down upon you.
In Hebrews 12:14, holiness is required for assurance of salvation. Why is it that people are not assured of their salvation? We need to know on the inside and proved on the outside in behavior that we are the children of God. Jerry Bridges said, “the only safe evidence that we are in Christ is a holy life.” If you know nothing of holiness, you shouldn’t flatter yourself that you are a Christian.
Bottom line, it is not those who profess to know Christ who will enter heaven, but those who live holy lives. Their holy progresses manifest more and more in their thinking, words, actions, outlook, world view, passions, and desires. Set-apart Christians are to reflect attitudes and behaviors consistent with their new relationship with God in Christ. Keep pursuing a life that is more and more set-apart onto the Lord.
Therefore, the Christian community should be a living example of harmony and holiness wherever you look. All this talk of holiness includes the thought of approaching God. God is holy and must be approached in holy fear. The Heavenly Father is not only a good and a loving parent, but He is a judge who demands obedience.
Many people have the idea that the Old Testament prophets preached about the fear of God, and the New Testament teachers only about the love of God. However, there are many places in the New Testament that will change one’s thinking on this matter. In fact, Jesus and the entire New Testament bids us to fear God. 1 Peter 1:17:
If you address as Father the One who impartially judges according to each one’s work, conduct yourselves in fear during the time of your stay on earth.
This passage is not talking to unbelievers, but people who are Christians pursuing holiness, which is us. We must learn how to fear God. Let’s pray:
Lord, Your Word is very piercing. It brings to our attention things we did not know, but, Lord, when we do know them, now, Lord, because of Your Spirit, give us the cooperation and divine enablement to be able to put these things into practice. So, Lord, that we could be people that not only understand holiness, but pursue it, and I pray, Lord, that we would do that in all our behavior. Lord, allow us to see the fruit of what you are working in, on the inside, on the outside. So, Lord, we can grow in our confidence and assurance of our salvation. I pray, Lord, in doing so, we know we are to reflect your character, which is one of a Holy God, who is so different than us and set apart from anything that is sinful or evil. Let us be people that are like that, and I know, Lord, that in a holy life, it becomes powerful, a life of convictions, yet a life of joy and peace. It’s a life that is good for my wellbeing as well as the wellbeing of those who I serve with and grow with in Christ. Lord, impress in our heart today the things we must change and lay aside for good. I, pray, Lord Jesus, for also the things we need to put on that we have not put on. I pray, in doing so, Lord, we truly would carry out this command in Scripture: to be holy because you are holy in all our behavior. I pray this, in Christ’s name, Amen.