Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript – Reformation Covenant Church
Pastor Dennis Tuuri

Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it. Prone to leave the God I love. That really is our subject for the next couple of weeks which I’ll be preaching today. We turn to Psalm 19 for the sermon text. And while the particular emphasis will be verses 11-13, we will read the entire psalm. Please stand for the reading of God’s command word to us.

**Psalm 19**

To the chief musician, a psalm of David. The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth his handiwork.

Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night showeth knowledge. There is no speech nor language where their voice is not heard. Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun, which is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, and rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race. His going forth is from the end of the heaven, and his circuit unto the ends of it, and there is nothing hid from the heat thereof.

The law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul. The testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple. The statutes of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart. The commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes. The fear of the Lord is clean, enduring forever. The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether. More to be desired are they than gold, yay, than much fine gold, sweeter also than honey in the honeycomb.

Moreover, by them is thy servant warned, and in keeping of them there is great reward. Who can understand his errors? Cleanse thou me from secret faults. Keep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins. Let them not have dominion over me. Then shall I be upright? And I shall be innocent from the great transgression. Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, my strength and my redeemer.

Let us pray. Father, we do thank you for this word of yours. We thank you for the work of the Lord Jesus Christ. We thank you for the presence in the context of us individually and corporately of your Holy Spirit. We pray now that spirit would indeed open our minds to understand these things. Open our ears to hear them. May we take these words of your scriptures down deep into our soul. And may we be transformed by that renovating work of the Holy Spirit as he brings holiness to our lives as well. In Christ’s name we ask it. Amen.

May be seated. The younger children may be dismissed to go to the Sabbath school.

In the flow of the Canons of Dort, they begin in the first article by speaking of who saints are and describing their release from the dominion and servitude to sin, but then also saying that they have sin present with them. The second article in the fifth head of doctrine says that we have daily sins of infirmities and weaknesses and blemishes cling to the best of our works.

And the third article says that because of this, we could never persevere in the faith apart from the preservation of God. The Canons then go on to speak of atrocious or serious or high-handed sins. And that is basically what we’ll be talking about this week and then two weeks from today as well—these two different types of sins that the Canons speak to.

The Canons take this designation of sin very directly from the scriptures and very appropriately we can look to Psalm 19 for these two designations of types of sin that the believer, the elect in Christ, those who are in the greater David as David was, participate in.

So today we want to look at Psalm 19 and some associated scriptures and look at how this general sin principle remains in the context of our being as Christians. I guess the immediate application in terms of the Canons is that this means that if you understand how deep the sin is in us and how frequently it manifests itself in our lives, then the idea of one being able to persevere in the faith without the preservation of God is absolute folly.

So that is the place in which the church fathers bring this up. Now there was also an application to what apparently at that time was a belief of the Arminians—which was the doctrine of sinless perfection. So we’ll talk on that briefly as well. B.B. Warfield has an excellent, fairly large book on perfectionism and its various manifestations in the context of his day and age. And many of us in this church, whether you know it or not, in our backgrounds have been affected by at least the results of doctrines of perfectionism as they move through the Keswick movement, the higher life movement, and other phenomena in the 1800s and early 1900s.

So this is important for us to understand that sinless perfection is not attainable in this life and that the Canons are right when they speak about even the best of our works having blemishes attached to them.

So let’s look at Psalm 19 and we can see very quickly without really articulating the specifics of this psalm. It is important to note that Psalm 19 provides us, as it leads up to a consideration of these sins that David speaks of and that we used in our prayer of confession today, three very distinctly these sections of Psalm 19.

The first section being the description of what we could refer to as the general revelation—the creation of the universe and the world and how they witness to the truth of God. All of creation sings out that God is, that he is triune, that he is our creator and our sustainer. And that witness of God through creation has gone out to every place where languages or tongues are spoken. There’s no place that this voice, this revelation of God has not reached out to.

From a consideration of the image of God’s revelation in the general creation, it then moves in verse 7 to a specific meditation—now not on the general revelation but on the specific revelation of the scriptures as they were known at that time. And there’s a wonderful section here that we all should remind ourselves of on a regular basis of the purity and the value of God’s law.

God’s law is in this list described as perfect. The testimonies are sure. The statutes are right. The commandment of God is pure. The fear of the Lord is clean. And so there’s this wonderful picture of the beautiful treasure we have in God’s word to us, which is a law word, but it is always a grace word to us as well. And so we should have a very high estimation of the law of God.

Sinless perfection usually is equated to those groups of men who despise the law and who treat the law somehow with a lot of disdain. And you know, if you do that, if you lower the standard low enough, sinless perfection becomes more easily attained. But if we take a high view of God’s law, as the psalmist did, as David did, and as our savior did, and as all those who are in him should, if we take a high view of God’s law and a desire to look into it and meditate upon the truths of it and the implications of it, the standard gets quite high.

And it drives out this sinful notion that somehow in our own abilities or strengths we can attain unto sinless perfection.

So we have this combined witness of the general revelation and the special revelation, the created order and the law of God, the written revelation of God that is a demonstration of his characteristics, his attributes. And both those things come together to do things to David. It isn’t just a contemplation that results in kind of an awe and a wonder. It certainly is that, implied, but it is very practical.

Use a meditation upon the general revelation and the specific revelation because in verse 11 he says, “Moreover, by them is thy servant warned and in keeping of them there is great reward.” Two paths. The psalms always picture for us two paths. There’s a warning: don’t go down this path. And there’s an encouragement that there’s a reward at the end of this path.

And then verse 12: “Who can understand his errors? Cleanse thou me from secret faults.” So he begins with this consideration of what this revelation means to him by a meditation upon his own sinful state in relationship to the general revelation or the special revelation. And he begins with a prayer to God, a plea before Almighty God that he would indeed be cleansed from his secret sins, his errors, his shortcomings.

And then he says in verse 13, “Keep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins.” High-handed sins, sins not of inadvertence, but sins of rebellion. “Let them not have dominion over me.” He recognizes that should he be allowed—as God’s grace retreats—to go down a path of high-handed presumptuous sin, that sin begins to exercise a dominion over him. “Let them not have dominion over me.”

We will deal with verse 13 in two weeks more as we deal with the second portion of sin that the Canons articulate in the fifth head of doctrine—serious sin, atrocious sin, whatever we want to call it. Our concern today is primarily with verse 12, secret sins or faults.

But recognize that this designation that the fathers use in the Canons really is a very biblical designation. There are a number of Hebrew words used for sin. There are several New Testament words used for sin. And the most concentrated usage of these terms is, in the first case, a falling short or a wandering from the path in the Old Testament, of falling short of the mark in the New Testament.

The tribe of Benjamin—Benjamin means “son of the right hand”—and they were all left-handed archers. I don’t understand that. But the tribe of Benjamin had all these left-handed archers, and it says “they wouldn’t miss their mark. They wouldn’t miss as they shot at something.” And that word “miss” is the word for sin. They wouldn’t sin by not hitting what they were aiming at. And so in the Old Testament and in the New Testament, the primary words used for sin, one of the primary words is a word that means missing the mark that you’re shooting at.

Now, there are other words as well, though, and we have these two different words used here. One meaning to miss the mark or to err, but really a more technical designation that we’ll speak of in just a minute in verse 12. And then in verse 13, this other word that’s used for sin, which is rebellion—to rebel against a king or an authority, and it’s just, you know, a hateful casting off of it, a presumptuous high-handed sin.

In Deuteronomy 17, it says if the person is brought before the priest and the civil ruler and doesn’t do what he tells them to do, he is guilty of a high-handed presumptuous sin and he’s to be put to death. He’s to be executed. And it says when he is executed then all the people will see and Israel shall no more sin presumptuously. The same word here—high-handedly—against God.

The idea that the death penalty is a deterrent is a biblical notion directly from Deuteronomy 17. And it is particular against all sin. It’s a deterrent against high-handed presumptuous sin, the sort of sin that David prays that God would keep him from. David knew what the church fathers at Dort knew—that when God withdraws his grace, that’s what we do. But David knew it even more when he goes into the high-handed sin of sleeping with another man’s wife and then engaging in plotting the murder of that man. High-handed sin.

But these two designations of sins are extremely biblical. In the New Testament, the term for rebellion or high-handed sin is anomia—against the law. In other words, not a shooting and missing the mark, but an anomia. Really, that is more talked about as a sin principle that results in these individual acts of inadvertence.

So, I don’t want you to think that some sins are good and some sins are bad. That’s not the idea here. It is an amazing thing to contemplate that in the Levitical system that God provided for sacrifices, there were sacrifices—a whole list of them in Leviticus 5—for these inadvertent sins of the people, the ruler, the king, whoever it was. List of sacrifices. These were sins of total ignorance. “I didn’t know it was supposed to be a turtle dove. I thought it was supposed to be some other kind of bird. I didn’t know it had to be a sheep. I thought it could be a goat.” Did the wrong sacrifice. “I didn’t know that I was supposed to wash in this particular way after my uncleanness.” These are the Old Testament illustrations.

You may not know in your Christian life to do something is really wrong. But as you mature, you look back and you say, “How could I have done that thing?” There are sins of ignorance. Okay? And with those sins of ignorance are provided a whole set of sacrifices. Why? Because those sins of ignorance will cast you into hell just as quickly as the sin that is high-handed or presumptuous.

And that’s because it really stems from our Adamic separation from the life principle of God and the rebellion against God that we inherited from Adam. So these sins are somewhat related, but they are legitimately dealt with in scripture in two different categories.

David sums up all his self-examination as it were here with these two categories of sins. The church fathers at Dort did the same thing and it’s an okay thing to do. Inadvertent or secret sins as well as high-handed or presumptuous sins. And David says that, you know, “Who can understand his errors?”

You know, Jeremiah says, “The heart is deceitful above all things. Who can know it?” Now, we know that part of the verse, but it goes on to say in Jeremiah 17 that “I, the Lord, search the heart. I try the reins, even to give every man according to his ways.” “Who can know it?” God can know it. We don’t understand our heart. How wicked it is. We are selfdeceived. The dynamic nature of self-delusion is a perpetual problem for the Christian. This is a very important point. Self-delusion is that which is an extreme problem for the Christian.

David says, “Who can understand his errors?” But then he knows who can do it because he goes on to say, “Cleanse thou me from secret sins.” He knows that he’s in the presence of the one—through the general revelation and attending to his word—who does search the heart out and can determine these sins for us and cleanse us from them over time.

Okay. Now, this is why we can say as 1 John says that if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. When you come forward every Lord’s day and you confess your sin, we just used a form of confession that actually draws from these very words. Hopefully, after today and after the sermon in two weeks, we’ll have a little bit better understanding when we pray those prayers to God as confessing our sin as we come before his presence.

But as we do that, you may say, “Well, I didn’t have presumptuous high-handed sins. I didn’t, you know, plot anybody’s murder and sleep with anybody’s wife, didn’t kill anybody.” And that hopefully is the case. But understand that you certainly have a myriad number of sins that are secret sins in this designation. And they as surely as any other sin—being a violation, a transgression, a falling short of God’s righteous commands that are righteous, just, perfectly, holy, true—David said all those requirements of your law are great things. And if I fall short, it is terrible sin.

And those sins will condemn us to hell. So, if we say we have no sin, 1 John says, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. We come forward pleading with God, cognizant of our sins, our secret sins, as well as our high-handed sins, asking for his release.

David says that “against thee, against thee only have I sinned and done this evil in thy sight.” Every sin ultimately, as we just read in Psalm 51, is sin against God himself.

The psalmist says he was brought forth in iniquity. Our savior said “that which is born of the flesh is flesh.” There is this designation in the scriptures that “the law is spiritual.” Paul says in Romans 7: “But I am carnal.” He doesn’t mean by that the law is somehow, you know, it’s not a body material. It’s not a material spiritual distinction being made. That’s not the idea. The law actually has many provisions that are extremely material. Yeah, there’s all kinds of blessings in terms of land. Land is a big theme in the law of God. And God’s people are to inhabit a land. And the blessings of God include land. It’s a very material set of law because it’s not spiritual in the sense that it has nothing to do with our bodies, that our bodies are bad somehow. It’s spiritual in the sense that it is from the Spirit who is life himself. It is lifegiving.

Our flesh doesn’t mean our physical body. There’s a correlation to that, but our Adamic nature, the corrupt flesh that we inherit and its rejection of God from Adam—it is a contaminating, it’s a contamination of death to everything it touches. It’s the reverse. So the mightiest touch that our Adamic nature involves itself with is always in rebellion against God. That Adamic nature is fallen. And our bodies are a picture of this to us.

And so the scriptures use the word flesh or carnal or it talks about this body of sin. It doesn’t mean your physical body. But there is a correlation that we will receive supraphysical bodies, not ghostly vaporous bodies. Supraphysical bodies I would say—physical bodies nonetheless—supraphysical as our savior had. So it’s not physical that’s bad. It’s that this body is a visible connection in our minds that we are one person and that we have with us that Adamic nature that is, as we just sang about, prone to wander, prone to engage itself in sins that are secret and sins that are inadvertent as well.

Now Obadias Sedgwick articulated five different ways—four different ways in which secret sins could be engaged with—and I want to run through these very briefly and I would actually add a fifth and I won’t bother to see which is which but I’ll give you five designations here of secret sins.

David says after examining God’s word to ask to be cleansed from secret sins. Well, what are secret sins? Secret sins can be—if you go out into the world and you go to your wife or your children, you go out into the world, let’s say, and you engage in sinful behavior, but you dress it up as if it is virtue. Okay? You know, Ananias and Sapphira did this. They dressed up their sin. They’re holding back from God by making a show of what they were going to give God. Remember their offering to the church, but they didn’t act in accordance with their word. They were sinning, but they put a show on their sin as to make their sin secret. And maybe you this last week went into the world and did things from an impure motivation. Maybe you did things that were overtly sinful. And yet you clothed them as it were with a clothing of righteousness or piety. And you could say that’s a secret sin.

Another secret sin that Sedgwick said—it’s kind of like fire in the chimney—when these sins are kept off the stage of the world but burn hotly in the home. In Ezekiel’s day, the people had committed abomination in secret. By secret, it meant that this was abomination committed out of the public eye.

So maybe you another way of having a secret sin is to engage in sinful conduct, sinful speech, sinful actions in the context of your home and your wife and your children, or your husband and your children. They see your sin. But they also see that when somebody comes in the door immediately the good face is put on, the sinful attitude is no longer manifested as you go into public or as the public comes into you.

And maybe this last week in your life you engaged in secret sin. That is sin that was not unseen by anybody but sin that was not seen by the public, by the church, but maybe was seen in the context of your family. You children, you come here to church each Lord’s day and hopefully you work real hard at being kind and gracious to one another and then you go home and in the context of your home, are you kind and gracious to your brothers and sisters? Well, you know, you’re not. You know, this last week, there were many things you did that were unkind to them, ungracious and selfish as you treated with your brothers and sisters. That’s a secret sin. And you should desire with David that God would cleanse you from those sins. You should hate those sins. They should feel like moldy, ucky rags dragging your brilliant new creation in Christ down as you continue to act more like Adam than Christ in your secret sins.

Or we can have sins that are not just kept from the general public, but kept from the family as well. Men and women, boys and girls, in private—when you’re in your own bedroom and you close the door, the bathroom, some part of the house, your computer—maybe you’re doing something that is sinful. And nobody sees it, but your eyes do see it. And that’s a secret sin. You keep it from your family. You keep it from the church. You keep it from the public. And maybe this last week, you engaged in actions that you saw which other people didn’t. And so you engaged in sins. This is another form of secret sins.

Or maybe there are those sins as well that we engage with that we don’t even see. We have thoughts that we would never allow to become actions. We have emotions that we will not allow to come out. We dwell on particular thought patterns in our minds of different stripes and varieties that will not become actions. Our eyes don’t see it. It’s secret, but it’s sin nonetheless. Sin is determining for yourself what’s good or bad. It’s thinking about things from your perspective instead of God’s perspective. It’s rejecting the counsel of God’s word and taking up your own counsel. And you have secret sin, maybe.

Now, all these sins are very dangerous. You could say in some ways they are more dangerous than openhanded sin. Why? Because God has a reason why you’re in community. He’s got a reason. He’s given you eyes and your family eyes and the church eyes. That’s so that people can help you. You know, if you have a wound and you plaster it over, or let’s say it’s underneath the skin and you can’t see it—by the time you see it, it’s really raging big now, infection interior to your body, whatever it is. Secret sins are exceedingly dangerous. They’re dangerous because they do not receive the exhortation to leave off from those sins that our more obvious sins will have.

And you know, this is not really what the psalmist is talking about. But I want to make this point because when we talk about these sins that are not high-handed presumptuous sins, I want everyone walking away from here today to have done some degree of examination of who they are and what secret sins you may be engaged with in your life. And I want you to repent of them today. I want you as you sit in your pew now or as you come forward with your offering in a few minutes to repent of secret sins that your eyes do see or at least your mind knows of in your life toward your brothers, your sisters, your parents, your children, toward your wife, toward your husband, toward your fellow workers, toward this church, whatever it is.

Let God’s spirit do its convicting work here today. And may we all endeavor mightily to strive against that which David strove against. He prayed that God would cleanse him from those kind of secret sins.

Spurgeon said, “You know, you’re worse off than, you know, the fox chased by the hounds if you’re living as a hypocrite. If you’re walking down the street hoping that the manifestation of your sins won’t come to light in your day and age, in this next week, today, next week, the next month. You’ve got things back there maybe that you’re trying to deceive others with in terms of their existence, and you’re worried that they may come out. You’re hounded by those sins perhaps. Repent of them.”

The wonderful thing about sin is that it’s forgiven by God, and we experience that forgiveness as we confess those sins to him and to those we’ve offended as well. You know, it’s a terrible thing to walk around as a hypocrite waiting for God to make manifest that which you know is lying there in the core of your being or at the center of your house. Terrible thing.

There was an old booklet I had years ago. I for a while I did a lot of reading of the Plymouth colony and the colonial period and there was a booklet I had called “Mortality Out” and it was on this idea that they had in the 15th and 1600s that somehow they thought—and I guess there was a lot of evidence that this actually occurred, I don’t know—that if somebody was killed and you didn’t know who it was, if you brought the killer close to the body, the body would bleed or the body would somehow manifest in the dead body. Now I’m talking about that—this is the person that buried it.

There was a poem called “The Dream of Eugene Aram” written in the 1826-1830s, something like that. I came across it in my reading this last week actually in Spurgeon’s Treasury of David. And in this poem it’s the same kind of thing. The guy kills somebody and he tries to plant him into a riverbed and he comes back the next day and the river is all dried up and there’s the body and he tries to put him in a different place. Finally puts him in a cave, weighs him down with stones and after many years that body is discovered, things fall apart. The earth gives up the body, so to speak. The man is taken and then executed.

Well, Edgar Allan Poe, “The Telltale Heart,” all these things. Well, that’s what you live with if you do not deal with these secret sins in your life.

Now, to say, however, that there is another class of secret sins, and those are ones that aren’t even known to us. And these are really the ones, as I said, that David is primarily concerned with.

As I said in Leviticus 5 and also in Numbers, there are these provisions for sins of inadvertency. And the point we want to take away from this is that if we just meditate upon the things we know we’re doing wrong, we’ve got a whole bucketload of sins that we know we need to confess every Lord’s day. But now add to that bucketload a truckload, a huge monster truckload of sins that we don’t even know we’re committing.

Sin is, in the Westminster Catechism, any want of conformity unto or transgression of the law of God. You do something the law says you shouldn’t do or you fail to do something the law says you should do. We may do externally the proper actions, but if our motivation is for ourselves or for another person, it’s the wrong motivation and it is sin in the sight of God. We engage every day in hundreds, thousands of actions that really are secret sins to us. Sins of inadvertency, sins that we don’t even know are there. Sins that are integral to our nature.

Why do we say it? The best of works of Christians have a blemish to them. We say it because in those works, it’s not as if we are now the new man acting, and when we sin, we become the old man over here. We don’t have two dogs vying for supremacy—and sometimes you’re the white dog and sometimes you’re the black dog. The scriptures say you’re a unit. And in that unit, while you’re primarily motivated by your new center of existence—the Lord Jesus Christ and the new creation he’s made you—nonetheless, you have a physical body as a reminder that you have an Adamic nature. And that Adamic nature is mixed in with who you are. And it has no center of motivation to do God’s will. It has as its center the desire to pass over all counsel from God and to do its own thing.

Now it may end up doing real good stuff—may end up helping people, external displays of affection and kindness to one’s wife or husband, taking care of one’s family—but if its center is the determination for itself of good and evil, then its center is wrong and its actions are sinful in the light of God’s word.

God’s word is concerned: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.” You’re a unit. And so if you sin in any of those ways—if you sin externally, actions, good intentions, wrong actions, sin. Good actions, wrong intention and motivation, sin. You don’t know how to love your wife. You don’t know how to love your husband. Children, you don’t know how to obey your parents. You don’t even know when you sin against them. Nonetheless, it’s sin in the sight of God.

The point here is that our lives are filled with sin. And what are we going to do about it? What are we going to do?

Paul, remember Paul, “I have exercised my conscience that I do not offend God or man.” It’s what he said. He said before his conversion, he lived a life that was, you know, perfect in essence, external aspect. And yet he could cry out, “O wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of sin?”

Why? The bright light of God’s word, God’s revelation, was burning into his house as it was to David’s house. And when the light shoots in the windows, you see all the cobwebs, all the little dust balls are then become made visible by that light. And the light of God’s countenance as it grows in our lives manifests increasingly these sins we didn’t even know we had. And so the older you get in the Lord, the more you need to know, the more you do know that you have so much sin involved that all you can do, in the words of the Canons of Dort, is to humble yourself before God.

Cling to the cross in spite of all those sins and seek his forgiveness and grace.

Sins cannot be done away with through trying as much as we can to articulate them and confess them and remove them that way. Let me say that again. In—you’ll find that this scripture we read from Psalm 19 is articulated a lot in the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries when dealing with the subject of auricular or oral confession, letter in council and in many words.

But historically, the Roman Catholic Church came to a point in time they said, “Okay, here’s the deal. Once a year, you’ve got to come to the priest and you’ve got to confess everything you did wrong this last year. Every sin has to be confessed. And if you don’t obey this decree, there is no relief from guilt for you.”

Calvin talks about this in the Institutes and the point is you can’t do it. You might be able, working real hard to root out those secret sins you know of, most of them, and make a list of those and confess them to God or a priest or whoever, but you cannot know. David said, “Who can know his sins?” You can’t. You see, the more you dig and the more you confess—you may confess a hundred and the time it’s taken you to confess a hundred, a thousand more sinful ways of being have sprung up in your life because everything we do has that Adamic nature, that sinner that rebels against God, clinging to it.

Now, what does this mean in terms of assurance? It means that in terms of the assurance of our forgiveness, we cannot look at ourselves and how well we conform to the law of God. It’ll drive you crazy because the more you look, the more sin you see, because everything we do has this tinge as it were, this blemish, even the best of works, as the Canons say.

Morbid introspection is thus ruled out by Psalm 19 and David’s declaration that we cannot know our secret sins. That “my life is—I was conceived and born in sin and iniquity.” He said he wasn’t talking about his mom’s overt sins. He was talking about his nature in Adam. And as we delve into that Adamic nature that is still with us, whenever we look, we will never come to a place of rest before God.

We are to examine ourselves to see if we’re in the faith of the Lord Jesus Christ. Our examination has not to do with our works. Our examination leads us to the foot of the cross.

Let me read from the Canons here: “Therefore, daily sins of weakness spring up and defects cling to even the best works of the saints. They these are for them a constant reason to humble themselves before God.”

That’s the first result of this is a humbling of ourselves. A broken and contrite spirit, David said in Psalm 51, is that which’s acceptable to God. Sacrifices for particular sins are okay, but they’re not okay if somehow you think you’ve worked it all out and discovered all your sins before God and are taking care of it through the sacrificial system. No, the base of support for the sacrificial system is an understanding that it is the broken and contrite spirit. It is the publican who says to God, “Have mercy on me a sinner.” That’s the one who is acceptable in the sight of God.

If you think that through an interior inspection, you can assure your hearts before God that you’re okay, then—and an even greater danger maybe than the despair it will throw you into is the false sense of pride it will throw you into if you succeed because then you’ll be like not like the publican but like the Pharisee. “Thank you God. I’ve examined my life and I’m doing really well.” See, and he walks away not justified. The publican walks away justified.

Why? Because an understanding of our Adamic nature. God has left us with this thing and in his omniscience and wisdom to let us know that we must humble ourselves continually before God.

And secondly, the Canons say to flee to the crucified Christ. I said at the beginning of this that perseverance has as its root the gospel of the savior. Paul, remember, 1 Corinthians 1, and perseverance drives us back over and over to our effectual calling and understanding that our perseverance is based in the gospel of Christ. We don’t grow in sanctification apart from that gospel. Our sanctification occurs as we flee to the cross of Christ in a recognition of specific sins—yes—but as sins of inadvertency as well, crushing us in the context of our lives.

To put the flesh to death more and more through the spirit of prayer and by the holy exercises of godliness and to long for the goal of perfection until at last delivered from this body of death, they reign with the Lamb of God in heaven.

Scriptures affirm in Psalm 19 that inadvertent sins beset us round and about. That in our redeemed state—well, we’re redeemed. The psalm ends on that note that God is our redeemer. Nonetheless, we have daily sins of weaknesses and infirmities and blemishes cling to the best of our works. We have secret faults that we cannot even know.

God says that the realization of that is not a detraction from sanctification but is the very root of the sanctifying process in the Christian because the knowledge of that drives us in humility to the cross of Christ, and that cross of Christ and the spirit of prayer and then the exercising of works of piety—reading our scriptures, doing family devotions, thinking about God, praying throughout the day, coming to church, hearing the word preached, being assured of our forgiveness—all of that then leads us to increasing sanctification and to an increasing holiness before God.

I want us to leave here today understanding the depth of our sin and misery, but also how redeemed from all those sins and misery.

In the scriptures in Revelation 11:4, it talks about these two witnesses. And these two witnesses, verse 4 of 11 says, are the two olive trees that stand in the temple of God. What’s it talking about? Men as olive trees. Well, Romans tells us that we’ve been grafted into the olive tree, doesn’t it? Doesn’t it? That’s what it says. And the scriptures tell us that indeed we are now that olive tree as well.

What is the olive tree? Well, the olive tree was the place that we extracted from that tree the olive oil which was used to consecrate the priest, the altar, all the articles of the tabernacle, the courtyard—the priests, all anointed with olive oil. Olive oil as well was then a symbol of purification and it was in the context of the Holy of Holies. The Holy of Holies had doors that were constructed of olivewood. Olivewood formed a big part of the furnishings of the Holy of Holies. Olivewood is associated in the tabernacle and temple imagery with the source of holiness, the Holy of Holies.

Olive oil then is associated through the imagery of the olive oil and the consecration of things with it with a consecration to holiness of the priests and the articles of the furniture. Our savior spent the last portion of his ministry on earth at the Mount of Olives in the context of olive trees. And indeed, there’s some reason to believe he may have been crucified on an olive tree as well. We don’t know that for sure. We do know that as our savior left the temple the last time, he went back to the Mount of Olives and there taught his disciples from the Mount of Olives.

The Mount of Olives being a picture then of that construction of the Holy of Holies, our savior is there as the one who is himself going to be the offering placed upon the altar in the context of the Holy of Holies. He is in the context of the olive tree and of olive oil and of his people as well. As a result, we’re brought into that Holy of Holies through his work. Our savior ascends, we know from the Mount of Olives in the context of the Holy of Holies. Our savior suffers and goes through his dark hours as it were in that garden of Gethsemane which means “place of pressing.”

Our savior ministered in the context of the Holy of Holies and we are now grafted into, placed in the context of the Holy of Holies. We’re olive trees and we’re grafted into that great olive tree that represents the Lord Jesus Christ’s ministry and the fullness of the Holy Spirit, impregnated as it were with olive oil—a picture of the purity of the Holy Spirit in our lives.

What am I saying all this for? Well, I’m trying to put before you a visible representation that we are called—our center of our calling is to be holy in the sight of God. We are predestined—not nice intellectual abstract doctrine, no—to be conformed to the image of the savior in that Holy of Holies.

The great thing that’s happened in the salvation of you as a boy or girl or you as a woman or man is that God has affected a moral transformation in your life. Not to effect salvation, but flowing out of your salvation. And if you do nothing else today and two weeks from today to remember from these sermons, it is that you might indeed reconsecrate yourselves to the purity of the olive tree which you are grafted into now and that you would understand that the application of the olive oil is a representation of the Spirit pressed into your life that you might be holy before God.

And that you might want, as David wanted, to be cleansed from secret sins, recognizing that all your life in this body, you will continue to manifest sin—inadvertent sins, sins of ignorance, blemishes to the best of your works—but a desire to root out whatever sins God makes manifest to you as you grow in grace.

Let us, as we offer ourselves, then repent of the secret sins we know about, acknowledge that there is a multitude of sins we know not of. May we then appreciate the great breadth of God’s salvation of us in the Lord Jesus Christ. And may we remember and reconsecrate ourselves to the task of holiness of life as we leave this consideration of the sin that does so easily beset us.

We’re about, in the providence of God, it appears we’re about to embark on a great journey in this church. Not many miles, one place to another—more about that later on. But you know a great new door seems to be opening up for us as a church. And I plead with you today and I exhort you and I encourage you and I encourage myself that we walk through this next door of our growth as a church as holy people anointed with that olive oil, grafted into the Holy of Holies of our savior and recognize that’s the principle by which we now have life in the savior.

Let’s pray.

Father, we do consecrate ourselves anew to the task of serving the Lord Jesus Christ in purity and holiness. We thank you, Lord God, for our Christian liberty. Help us though, Lord God, never to see that liberty as somehow moving us away from the consecration to holiness that you call forth from us from one end of the scriptures to the other. We thank you for our salvation. We thank you that we have been saved to the end that we be sanctified and set apart to you.

We might come out of any unclean thing or activity that we are engaged with, Lord God, and might reconsecrate ourselves anew to the service of the Lord Jesus Christ both individually as we come forward and also corporately as a church.

In Christ’s name we ask you. Amen.