Description
How to Achieve Holiness: Understanding 2 Corinthians 7:1
In this episode, we explore what it means to be holy as God co… (visit YouTube for more)
Transcript
God says, be holy because I am holy. Do you ever wonder how are we supposed to be holy? Well, we’ve got part of our answer in today’s verse, which is 2 Corinthians chapter 7 verse 1. Since we have these promises, beloved, Let us cleanse ourselves from every defilement of body and spirit, bringing holiness to completion in the fear of the Lord.
And when we meditate, often we ask ourselves questions. So the first question is, since we have these promises, what promises? Well, the promises that he’s just set out in the previous chapter, chapter 6, in 2 Corinthians.
He’s been talking about how, God now is going to dwell among his people and his people will be his temple. That’s us. We, the Christian church, we now are the temple of the living God. The holy God lives within and with us.
In the Old Testament, they had to go through all of these rituals to be clean in order to enter the temple and to present their sacrifices to God. We don’t have to do all that stuff, but God still wants us to be clean. Let us cleanse ourselves.
Paul says that we have a contribution to make towards our own cleanliness. Avoiding defilement of body and spirit. Body – what’s a defilement of body? That’s fairly easy to work that one out. Overeating, engaging in sex outside of marriage, being violent, all of these defile our body.
But what about our spirit? What is it that defiles our spirit? What is it that we bring into us that makes us unclean?
Have you ever read a book or watched a film and afterwards just felt a little bit dirty or felt like that’s gone into your head and now you can’t get rid of it? There are so many things that we can do, that we can consume, that are just not good for us. They make us feel unclean inside.
We want to avoid all that, so that holiness is completed in us, in the reverence fear of God.
Father God, we are your servants, but we’re also your children, and we want to be pleasing our Father. Thank you God for your help with this. Thank you for the Holy Spirit, who changes us from the inside out.
Amen.
