Jun 16
30
SINCERITY AND TRUTH
“Serve Him in sincerity and truth” – Joshua 24:14
“Let us keep the feast…with the unleavened
bread of sincerity and truth” – I Corinthians 5:5
Here are two things that must be together – sincerity and truth. To have sincerity without truth is meaningless. To be sincere in your belief of error is no different than the zeal without knowledge of the Pharisees (Rom. 10:1-2). To have truth and hold orthodox views without sincerity simply proves you really do not believe what you say you do. But when you have sincerity and truth you have someone who really believes what he professes to believe.
We are called upon to “Hold fast the form of sound words”, “Hold fast the confidence and rejoicing of the hope firm unto the end”, and “Hold fast the beginning of our confidence steadfast to the end”. If we do not hold them fast we will prove to be apostates. If we do not hold them fast we will drag down others with us by our example. It is only he who continues in Christ’s Word, who endures to the end that shall be saved. Lord, keep me and I will be kept. Turn me and I will be turned. Preserve me and I will persevere. Do all of this for Christ’s sake!
“Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Thy name? and in Thy name have cast out devils? and in Thy name done many wonderful works? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you; depart from me, ye that work iniquity.” – Matthew 7:22-23
The self-righteous in order to justify themselves, claim to have done many wonderful works in the name of God. Isn’t it somewhat ironic that any so-called “good works” that a man does to earn or merit salvation is considered by God to be a work of iniquity? Any work man believes of his to be righteous, is truly filthy in the sight of God. God only accepts that perfect work of righteousness that He accomplished and imputes to His people. To those who insist on trusting in their own works, God says, “I never knew you.” – David Eddmenson
A little leaven leavens the whole lump.
(Galatians 5:9)
Joe Terrell
Paul uses the natural process of leavening to illustrate the affect that legalism and self-righteousness have on the soul. The Judiaisers who were troubling the church at Galatia were not calling for a complete devotion to the Jewish law. In fact, they were not even calling for a half-hearted effort. They were asking for nothing more than a token acknowledgement of the Law’s place in salvation – circumcision. But, left unchecked, even that small bit of the leaven of self-righteousness would eventually cause the whole lump of their gospel to be full of the foul leaven. The smallest particle of the doctrine which says that God’s favor may be gained by human righteousness will work its way all through a man’s heart, and if left alone, will infect an entire congregation. It has been my experience that self-righteousness is a much greater problem among Christians than immorality. I know of only a few (if any) Christians who live a blatantly immoral lifestyle. But I know many professing Christians that are very self-righteous and legalistic.
Each of us must guard his own heart closely, and, as the Jewish women of old, clean out all the leaven. It is my duty as a preacher of the gospel to guard my listeners from the evil and destructive influences of self-righteous legalism. We are tolerant of a wide diversity of opinions on many things; but, by the grace of God, we shall be completely intolerant of any teaching or practice that tends to supplant the sufficiency of Christ’s blood and righteousness as all the believer’s hope.
New Years’ Address, January 1851
All true religion flows out of the life of God in the soul. Wherever this divine life exists, there will true religion be found. Where it exists not, there may be the name of religion; but it will be a shadow without substance, a form without power, an imitation without reality. Almost the first truths that are sealed on the conscience in the earliest dawn of life and light, when men are beheld as trees walking, are connected with the life of God in the soul as a divine work.
That God is a Spirit; that he must be worshiped in spirit and truth; that there is a new birth; that the seat of all true religion is in the heart; that everything must be given up for Christ; that sin is a dreadful internal reality; and that therefore grace and salvation must be internal realities too– amid all the darkness and confusion of mind in the beginnings of the work of grace, these truths stand prominently forth, as the mountain tops lift themselves up out of the mists of the valley.
Nor are these simple truths ever shaken or undermined by subsequent experience. Much may have to be renounced. Many opinions, prejudices, pursuits, connections, attachments, may have to be abandoned; much pride, self-righteousness, creature-strength and wisdom to be burnt up; the soul may be stripped naked and bare, and “left like a beacon upon the top of a mountain, and as an ensign on a hill;” but this truth is never swept away, that the kingdom of God set up in the heart with a divine power is the main point, the one thing needful, the treasure in the earthen vessel, the white stone and the new name, without which all profession is but a mask and a show. No, all the storms, waves, and billows that, rolling over the soul, bury and drown all religion that is of the flesh and the creature, only settle and ground it more deeply in the firm persuasion that all true religion is a divine work, a new creation, and that it is begun, carried on, and perfected by the sovereign, efficacious power of God alone.
Hence springs the separation between those that are born of the flesh and those that are born of the Spirit. Probe all false religion to the bottom; put the scoop into its heart and center; strip off its garments and trappings, and what will you find? SELF.
False religion may assume a thousand shapes, from preparation for Confirmation at a young ladies’ boarding school to the hair shirt and bleeding back of a Popish saint. It may run through all shades of profession, from wild Ranterism or Mormonism to the highest flight of doctrinal Calvinism. But hunt it down through all its turnings and windings, and you will find the creature at the end of the chase.
How this leaven met and thwarted Paul at every step! “You must be circumcised and keep the law of Moses,” was the first stumbling block cast into the path of the Gentile believers. And by whom? By “certain of the sect of the Pharisees which believed;” (Acts 15:5;) who, in bondage themselves to the law of works, envied the Gentile saints the liberty with which Christ had made them free. With them, as with all who are not effectually humbled under the mighty hand of God, the grand stumbling stone and rock of offence was this–that Christ must be all and the creature nothing. “I bear them record,” says the apostle, “that they have a zeal of God, but not according to knowledge. For they, being ignorant of God’s righteousness, and going about to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted themselves unto the righteousness of God.” (Rom. 10:2, 3.)
And so it is in our day. The “straitest sect of the Pharisees” did not die out in the days of the apostles. Its roots still lie deep in the human heart. It is a religion taught at the mother’s knee, nurtured and fed by schools, tutors, and governesses, strengthened in maturer years, where not knocked to pieces by worldly lusts, by sermon upon sermon and tract after tract, and handed down in old age as a precious legacy to the rising generation.
Religion is with some almost as indispensable as the air they breathe or the food they eat. It is a natural craving that requires a suitable nourishment. In some it is Popery, in others Arminianism, in others Calvinism– a numerous tribe of sisters, but with a strong family likeness stamped on all. “Let us have some religion. We cannot do without religion. Our church, our chapel, our pew, our minister, our people– we can’t exist without them.” Such is the feeling, such the language of hundreds who have not a grain of real religion, not a spark of divine teaching– who, with all this clamor about religion, have never once, perhaps, in their lives cried from a broken heart, “God be merciful to me a sinner,” or ever had one sight, by living faith, of the King in his beauty. When this strong natural feeling of religion is well varnished over by a few tears under a sermon, gilded by a sound Calvinistic creed, and kept duly polished by a consistent life, who can wonder that there are shoals of professors in the churches in whom the very root itself of divine life is lacking?
Now these, though embarked under a free grace profession, will be either Pharisees or Antinomians. The leaven, though hidden for a time, will, and must work; and when it breaks forth, contention must ensue. For errors and mistakes must arise where the Spirit of truth is not; strife and division must exist where the Spirit of love is not; pride and self-righteousness must prevail where the Spirit of Christ is not; carnality and death must reign where the Spirit of life is not; and sin must rule where the Spirit of holiness is not.
But what should all do who love vital, spiritual, experimental godliness? Contend for all truth and oppose all error. And above all, seek to be endued themselves with power from on high, and to get their religion from the Fountainhead; to be satisfied with nothing short of divine teaching and divine testimony– to buy of Christ gold tried in the fire, and to beg of him to anoint their eyes with his own precious eye-salve, so that they may see.
A mighty conflict is apparently at hand, which may arouse the most sleepy and try the most strong. We shall need in that battle, not notions, but faith– not only union with a church, but union with Christ; not a lazy hearing of sermons, as though that were the all in all of religion, but sheddings abroad of the love of God– not a sitting under the vine and fig-tree of the pulpit, and a snug corner in a Calvinistic chapel, but a putting on of “the whole armor of God, that we may be able to withstand in that evil day, and having done all, to stand.” extract from J.C.Philpot.
“…Why seek ye the living among the dead? He is not here…” Luke 24:5-6
Are you trying to seek the Lord among this worlds ‘dead’ religion? I don’t care if you are very sincere, very knowledgeable or even fanatical; if you think that you can find Christ by dead works, ceremony or law you are seeking Him, the glorious living one, amidst life-less and vain religion. And the word from God directly to you is: He is not here. – Drew Dietz
Withering in Self-righteous
I’ve never met a Christian who desired too much of himself; but I have met some who, for some reason or another, expected too much of themselves. I mean this: they look at themselves, at the old Adamic nature, and expect to see it improving, getting better or more holy, but that shall never be! If, indeed, one looks at himself and feels progressively cleaner, purer, and holier, he isn’t “growing in grace” but “withering in self-righteousness!” Even a casual examination of self will reveal that such a person’s need of Christ is diminishing rather than increasing , and that is not grace! Maurice Montgomery.