How to draw close to the Father 2 Corinthians 6:14-7:1
I. In order to draw near to God, we must know our Father’s holy character.
6:14-15 Literally, stop becoming unequally yoked with unbelievers. “Unequally yoked;” consider the absurdity of yoking together a little donkey with a huge ox – why the donkey’s hooves would be alternately lifted off the earth by the powerful gait of the massive and powerful ox (they could not pull together in unison). To drive home his point about nearness to the Father, Paul is going to ask FIVE rhetorical questions – each of which is to be answered in the negative. These five questions form a summary of reasons why believers are not to form close relationships with non-believers.
What’s the chief reason to stay away from compromised relationships? – The answer is that the true believer belongs to exclusively to God. And we must live in such a way that all of our life demonstrates we belong to God. Close, ‘bosom friendships’ with unbelievers produce an incompatible mixture. – that means in order for a believer to maintain that “closeness” with an unbeliever, the Christian will have to compromise his testimony.
You see sometimes we argue – Well, I’ll keep this close relationship with this unbeliever because maybe this unsaved friend will get saved some day. The problem is as follows: as soon as God’s truth (loved and lived out) comes up, things get uncomfortable and disturbing -- there is discomfort. That’s why Christians who try to be close friends with non-Christians will find that they have to set the truth aside in order to keep things harmonious. It’s two kingdoms; two masters; two worldviews clashing.
“Light” (the Bible metaphor for truth and knowledge of God) has nothing in common with darkness (ignorance, evil, rebellion, spiritual blindness). As nice as an unbeliever may be, they still have the devil as their spiritual father (Eph 2:2). The unbeliever is not neutral toward the light; he or she is not just lacking information – Scripture says that unbelievers have a deep-seated hatred of the light (Jn 3:19-21). (We once hated the light as well – “but for the grace of God.”) Christ and Satan are irreconcilable – they head up two opposing kingdoms locked in mortal combat – thus no concord; no agreement – only warfare.
“What harmony can there be?” asks Paul. The Greek word for harmony, sounds like the word symphony. (EX. Imagine the New York Philharmonic with a section of folks hitting trashcans with baseball bats – they wouldn’t sell tickets would they?) There can be no blending of these “musical scores” for those who are of this world love this world – they play to a different conductor; they notes they play reflect their idolatrous orientation – the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the boastful pride of life. (APPL. -- It must be obvious from our text that these two kingdoms cannot have agreement or closeness BECAUSE they have radically different interests. Now that does not mean that Christians and non-Christians do not share the enjoyment of the same legal pleasures that God has given the human race –
rainbows, puppies, great food, beach and mountains, snowboarding, music, painting, sports and recreation, nice clothes, smell of summer rain on the herbs of the field.
The irreconcilable differences between saint and sinner have to do with the changes that God has made in the Christian – as a “new creature,” the true believer has new affections, new hopes, new values, new love of God, His truth, His glory, His people, His holiness – the unbeliever does not share these “new creature” marks and distinctives with you – you have no commonality at these points. (Use Psalm one here regarding the company a believer keeps.)
So we’ve seen that God’s holiness means that He is altogether separate from sin. He dwells in light, righteousness, justice, and love – those who will live with Him forever must be characterized by these virtues. For God will not dwell with sinners in eternity anymore than you’d be willing to share your bedroom with the carcass of a decaying animal.
II. In order to draw near to God, we must know our Father’s loving heart.
6:16 – In this verse the Apostle begins his call to the separated life by explaining God’s demand for purity in your life. There must be separation from close contact with those who embrace the world’s values – a separation from all evil.
All that God is toward you in Christ is infinitely precious. It’s the Father’s loving heart that chose the believer before time and then united him to Christ in love. The Christian is a vessel of mercy. The believer is a temple of God’s Spirit – corporately the Temple of the Living God; living stones in God’s temple. Collectively believers make up a royal priesthood. Our chief blessing is the nearness of God – He has come to dwell within His people. His people house His Spirit; they house the infinite treasure of the Gospel of God. Therefore there can be no agreement between the Temple of God and idols – for idols are
rivals of God. They seek to rob God of the honor He is due – idols
corrupt and degrade their worshippers (see Colossians 3:5 for what
amounts to idolatry
).
Consider the wealth of this promise that the Lord shall be our God and we shall be His people.
This promise touches all the blessings of God’s covenant – that He will use His matchless perfections and immutable attributes to save us, sanctify us, protect us, provide for us, and bring us to glory. He has
forged
the wondrous promises of the new covenant in the
foundry
of His attributes so that when
His promises are experienced in your life, He is glorified and you are blessed
in Christ, the Beloved (2
Pet 1:3-4).
6:17 – Application: All God’s truth comes with obligations that shape the way you will live. Every encounter with God by means of His truth is a “crossroad” in your life; a “turning point,” a “moment of faith and obedience.” We believe His truth in order to obey His truth. The demand flowing from His covenant promise to be your God (wherein He literally gives Himself to you forever and reveals Himself to you and allows you to abide in His presence) requires that you live a separated life as God’s own possession (Titus 2:14).
Therefore the command is come out from among them and be separate says the Lord. When you socialize closely with unbelievers you pick up their values (1 Cor 15:33). Their worldview works its way into you. You begin desiring their approval and acceptance. You find that you want them to like you and so start keeping score by their scorecards.
Jesus warned about this tendency to live for the approval of others (Jn 5:40-44). He said that it can keep you from receiving Him and that living for the approval of others cancels out your ability to live for the approval and glory of your heavenly Father (see James 4:4). God has set apart believers for Himself. He has set them apart to be pure and to be enthusiastic about serving Him (Titus 2:14). We are set apart for the spiritual worship of God. We are to steer clear of that which would pollute the sanctuary of God.
6:18 -- Corporately believers comprise the temple of God – but individually we are sons and daughters of God (1 Jn 3:1-3). “I Will be a Father.” There is no greater dignity than to have God as one’s Father. It is such a high privilege to be adopted by God; to have His Spirit seal us. This is why He tells us love not the world, nor the things in the world. There is no greater happiness than to be God’s possession – to have a clear conscience, to know you are loved by God and walking with Him in the light. Sonship is the motive and meaning of Gospel holiness. For the Gospel not only tells us who our God is, it tells us what we were before salvation, who we are now, and what we will be in glory.
III. In order to draw near to God, we must know our own hearts.
7:1 – With his chain of O.T. quotes in 2 Corinthians 6:14-18, Paul has stressed the privilege of being the temple of God and the child of God; and he has highlighted the benefits of complying with God’s will of living a separated life – if we live “dead to sin and alive to God,” we will know the infinite blessing of Him dwelling with us. He will manifest His presence in your life – He will deepen your awareness of your sonship. He will make you know His covenant pledge to be your heavenly Father (Ps 25:14).
The preciousness of His promises must control us. His promises must take up residence in your heart and affections – you must identify whatever idols seek to crowd out God’s promises. (EX. The cuckoo chick tolerates no rivals; every one of them is pushed out of the nest. The invasive cuckoo chick, though living a parasitic existence, tolerates no other nest-mates but the naïve parents that feed it. So also, only a new affection can expel an old affection.)
It is the nature of God’s gracious promises to urge us on to sanctification and holiness. In Christ we have a new identity. We long to promote the glory of our wonderful God who set His particular love upon us in Christ and made us vessels of mercy.
Redemption has a specific goal – it is to prepare us to live with God and enjoy Him forever. God is working
from
and
for
the perspective of eternity. Our high calling and privilege is seen in
God’s purpose in our lives to make us like Himself (the restored image of God – conformity to Christ – elected unto this purpose. God will complete this work in His own and will not desist from it—He is relentless. That’s why His faithful discipline is such a mark of His favor. Our part is to wholeheartedly cooperate with His purpose.)
(EX. Puritan pastors such as Baxter used to ask their parishioners, “Do you believe that all of life is preparation for the next life?” What a barometer of spiritual health! We take only one thing with us into the eternal state; our relationship with God.) Paul has shown us that we are called to purity. And it must be a purity evident in body and soul; in both the outward and the inward life. There must be a clear conscience in regards to both the outward and the inward life. We must consecrate yourself to God – all the members of your being devoted to Him – that involves a commitment which we renew each day to not live with impurity in His sight.
(APPL. We live in the age of the moral disconnect. Professing Christians put confidence in their convictions and then live without dedicating the members of their body to God. What they say they believe is radically different from how they live – there is a huge disconnect; a huge gap. We could call it the hypocrisy gap. The wider the gap between what we say we believe and how we live, the more serious the hypocrisy.
Vs. 7:1 is about getting rid of the disconnect. It’s about applying the most deadly serious form of ongoing repentance to close that gap that has allowed hypocrisy to grow like spiritual cancer in our lives. And we are to do so by cleansing ourselves from all defilement of flesh and spirit. You see, that refers to the whole personality; the whole man; the inner and outer man. God wants the whole person. He wants you to draw close enough to Him so that you can share your thought life with Him throughout the day – God told Abraham to walk before Him, that is with an awareness that He was always in God’s presence, under God’s eye (Gen 17:1).
“Cleanse yourselves,”—this involves ongoing repentance. That’s the only way to close the gap – to close the gap is to eliminate the disconnect between what you say you believe and how you live. Live set apart, consecrated to God. Strive to walk before Him blameless – that is walking in the consciousness of His presence. It is walking in the light – that involves confession of sin as a daily reality (1 Jn 1:1-9). It is being conformed to the truth by loving the truth and by preaching to yourself systematic arguments for obeying the truth. “Flesh and spirit” designate regions of our being in which specific sins are committed. (APPL. Sins of the flesh and sins of the spirit each have a respective “vortex” that holds us in its pull. We must know how to escape through Christ and come back into the light of God’s fellowship.)
Sins of the flesh generate shame. The guilt spun off by sins of the flesh is degrading – in response we retreat into the grey castle of self; we lose our courage to believe that God desires fellowship with creatures as polluted as we are. As the shame keeps us in the dankness of the castle, we keep judging ourselves to be ineligible for God’s love and favor. The desire for comfort pulls us back again to carnal objects of lust. We’re vulnerable to sexual idolatry. Sins of the flesh have their own inherent dangers. Sustained unbelief is hardened by indulging in sins of the flesh. If we doubt God’s goodness, then indulge in sins of the flesh, it fixes a certain kind of bondage upon us; we lose our tenderness toward God. As the unbelief deepens; ‘addiction’ to the passing pleasures of sin can reenslave. When caught in the vortex of sins of the flesh, walking with God in the sunlit meadow of His favor and presence seems only a memory. We need an exit strategy to get out of the sins of the flesh vortex. But we find the pull of that whirlpool to be too strong. By the grace of God, the recoveries we experience are tokens of Christ’s sovereign love. He rescues us over and over again. He allows us by His Holy Spirit to believe the Gospel again – to believe that Christ is given for guilty sinners and that the provision of His cleansing blood cannot be exhausted.
We take hold of Christ again by faith as the Gospel gives us courage to go to God for more grace and love. We believe again that all of the qualifications necessary to be a child of light in the kingdom of light are provided by Christ and His finished work. We find that He who began a good work in us will keep us and continue to forgive us.
We repent and declare war on the sins of the flesh that we had tolerated (repentance is not merely a passing remorse – it involves a very proactive change in our thinking and in our willing. In involves a renewed hatred of the sin and a rekindling of our affections for things above. For further study examine each verb in this repentance passage -- 2 Cor 7:9-11). We’ve found the exit door to the grey castle! It is fresh reliance upon Christ our qualifier; as our life and righteousness. We leave the dank castle and consent again to be loved for no good reason in us. We find again that fellowship with God issues forth in joy and peace and confidence.
As we reckon His love to us and feed upon all that God is toward us in Christ we find a new strength to resist the sins of the flesh. Hoping in our Father’s love and walking with Him has become a treasure too precious to forsake – we do not wish to stoop to the sins of the flesh – they are beneath our dignity as a child of the Father’s love and as a possessor of His promises.
Sins of the spirit are a different sort than sins of the flesh. Sins of the spirit, states Charles Hodge entail the following: pride, slander, hatred, resentment, malice, spiritual pride, anger, rage, unbelief—these are sinful postures and attitudes of the heart. Sins of the spirit hold us in their vortex in a different way than sins of the flesh. Sins of the spirit hold us through self-pity; through self-deception; through a hunger for personal value, through a false sense of superiority. When under the influence of sins of the spirit, the believer is commonly in a mode controlled by entitlement and demanding-ness. There is an accompanying lack of gratitude and contentment. The attitude, “I don’t deserve this; why is this being withheld from me!” churns inside the heart. There is an ensuing contest with God – as if God must give in to the believer’s demands or worship and devotion to Him will not be restored. While under the influence of sins of the spirit, the believer holds God’s goodness and glory hostage.
With every new thwarting of the believer’s will, a new expression of anger exudes from the heart. The believer certainly is not happy in this state – in fact his is tolerating a low level of misery. Many believers ‘sentence’ themselves to an extended period of unhappiness because they refuse to repent of this condition in a timely manner. If it becomes habitual, they eventually become complainers and fault-finders (this author has found that complaining to others is a symptom of not praying our pain to God. Jude warns about this condition – if it is not corrected; it can be a sign of apostasy – Jude 16).
Sins of the spirit are subtle indeed – very often the pride associated with sins of the spirit is bound up in a desire to be perfect, whole, and complete in the self. It becomes an ontological issue; an issue of personhood. The “lukewarm” church of Laodicea sought completeness in self. The attitude is as follows: I will make myself complete; I will clothe my own soul by my own efforts at personal security and significance. Needless to say, God does not “cooperate” with the believers plans to lean upon an arm of flesh (Jer 17:5).
The exit strategy from sins of the flesh is not an easy one. Spiritual pride and self-pity comprise Satan’s sin – he knows all too well how to sustain its grip. The only way to be delivered is to bring one’s heart down; way down by contemplating one’s ill desert and depravity (see Ps 39; 51; Ps 90:7ff, and Ps 139).
When the believer is willing to think upon what he deserves and what he is in himself, it will help bring the heart back to a proper consideration of depraved creaturehood. But more is needed – the saint spinning in the vortex of sins of the spirit needs to come to a full stop at the base of the cross and meditate upon the depths of Christ’s humiliation.
It was my nakedness, reproach, defilement, separation, hellishness, and enmity that was being exposed to nails, jeering, wrath, and torture in the body of my Substitute. This must be allowed to sink into the spirit; into the inner man so that the believer can recover from the spiritual insanity of spiritual pride. This is the only way to recover from the gross forgetfulness and neglect of what it means to be a trophy of God’s grace – having been dug from the same lump of clay as hell-bound vessels of wrath. Demandingness, loss of contentment, and rage only give way when self is judged severely. There must be a renewed submission to the authority of Christ as Lord of all. There must be a resignation to His providence – a confidence that He sees hidden caverns of depravity in our nature that if left alone will cause soul-destroying trouble – thus He engages them in a series of preemptive strikes. He chooses our trials with perfect wisdom and love.
It is because of His discipline that we survive – without it we would be condemned along with the world (1 Cor 11:31-32; Heb 12). Our exit strategy must encompass these spiritual truths. These truths about the Lord’s dealings with us must enter the depths of our spirit. For we have been guilty of forgetting (forgetfulness is the sin the book of Deuteronomy is designed to prevent). The exit strategy involves falling on our faces at the base of the cross before our Savior – it is consenting to be the object of His Gethsemene love; a love that consented to betrayal for our sakes. It is a willingness to be utterly obligated to Christ in trusting love that gives Him the vote of confidence; that He is infinitely qualified to run our lives (Gal 2:20). He is perfectly qualified to be our King – and we own Him to be such with eternal gratitude (Ps 2).
Can you say it and mean it – apart from God’s pity, I deserve to be perishing as an ulcerated incontinent blasphemer lying in an aids ward? Preach this to yourself. Spiritual pride has grown up in a long season of neglect in your life. Beg God to allow tears to replace your anger. Plead with God to grant you repentance at the bottom of your rebellion. The noxious plants of spiritual pride are not removed with a little bit of weed spray; they will have to be pulled up by the roots. It will take sweat – Christ will assume His proper place in your thoughts and affections ONLY if this work is undertaken.
“Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God that He will exalt you at the proper time” (1 Pet 5:6). As recipients of such magnificent promises of fellowship with God – the Christian should avoid any possible source of defilement in any aspect of his life, whether from flesh or spirit.
God’s precious promises are an inducement to put to death lust and corruptions of body and mind. We must endeavor to be partakers of His holiness. To strive for holiness is evidence that we truly fear God. He reserves His promises of nearness and the sense of His presence to those who take holiness seriously (Is 66:1-2; 57:15).
God takes pleasure in those who fear Him and who hope in His mercy. God is as good as His Word; He has annexed His glory to the fulfillment of His Word. His Word is unbreakable both when He promises and when He threatens – the man who fears God orders his life accordingly. In order for us to do what God expects of us, we will have to engage in the great privilege of feeding our faith upon His promises – meditating upon all He is toward us in Christ. Going back to the Gospel so that we have the courage (in spite of our sinfulness) to keep going to the Lord for His love and grace. Taking Christ as our “Source Person” each day will mean that we must loathe self as a rival “source.” “Now those who belong to Christ have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires”(Gal 5:24).