Sermon - 06-15-2005

15 June, 2005
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God Is Holy, This I Know. For The Praise Team Told Me So.
• God is holy. What does it mean that God is holy? How do we know that God is holy?
• God is holy, this I know. For the praise team told me so.
• God’s not holy because the song says He is! He is holy, but how do we know?
• Because the preacher gets up there and says it, so it must be true! He’s qualified to say that and that’s why he’s preaching in church. He has a degree for goodness’ sake! If he says that God is holy, well…He must be!
• My degree is in Music Education. I’m certified me to teach 6th through 12th grade children how to play instruments, not to preach the Word of God!
• My advice to you is to not believe what I tell you. Acts 17:11 tells you to not believe what I or anyone else says, but check it out. Be fair-minded and search the Scriptures daily to find out whether these things are so.
• The Barna Research Group has concluded that fully three-quarters of Americans believe that the Bible teaches that God helps those who help themselves. It doesn’t say that! Forty-five percent of all adults agree that the Bible is totally accurate in all of its teachings. That means that fifty-five percent believe it is somewhat or completely flawed. It is flawless! Twenty-nine percent of church-going adults indicated that they view worship as something that is focused primarily on God. They’re right. Everyone else is wrong.
• On all three counts, the majority of people are wrong.
• Why? Because they don’t check it out. We’re going to check it out.

Definition Of Holiness/Holy
• So if God is holy, as we believe that He is, what does that mean?
• First of all, is He holy? Yes.
• Leviticus 11:45
• The holy, consecrated, sanctified nature of something means that it is set apart.
• To say that God is holy is to say that God is immeasurable – nothing about Him can be quantified. As humans, we simply use human words to describe One who transcends time, space, mortality, intellectual capacity, dimensions, and everything else we know as reality.
• You see, the holiness of God does not simply mean that He is separate from evil – though He assuredly is. The holiness of God is far more inclusive! He is supreme to all else.
• If our heart condemns us, God is greater than out heart and knows all things (1 John 3:20).
• He is vastly superior to everything we can possibly know, learn, obtain, achieve, etc.

God Is Holy; God is TRANSCENDENT
• Not only is God separate from evil, He is separate from EVERYTHING. God is unlike anything in our experience or imagination. A helpful way to look at it is to replace the word “Holy” with the word “TRANSCENDENT” and we begin to see it in a different light.
• “You shall therefore be TRANSCENDENT, for I am TRANSCENDENT” (Leviticus 11:45).
• God is TRANSCENDENT. God TRANSCENDS anything we can know, see, touch, or imagine.
• Revelation 15:3,4
• Exodus 15:11
• Psalm 86:8-10
• God is not like us except to the degree that He is making us like Him. We are not like God except to the degree what He is making us like Him.
• God is TRANSCENDENT. God TRANSCENDS anything we can know, see, touch, or imagine.
• Try to conceive of the inconceivable. Try to imagine the unimaginable. It cannot be done!
• Psalm 19:1-6
• The Sun is a medium, run-of-the-mill star. The interior of the Sun is estimated to be around 27 million degrees Fahrenheit, with the outer layer being only around 11,000 degrees. Tomorrow’s predicted high temperature is 98 degrees and we cry about that! Imagine if it were 112 times that hot. That’s the outer surface of the Sun! The Sun is 695,000 kilometers across and is nearly 93 million miles from the earth. It takes light 8 minutes to get from the sun to earth. Light travels at the speed of light. Besides the Sun, the next closest star is Proxima Centauri. It is about 4.22 light years away. That means if you started traveling at 186,000 miles per second right now, you’d get there around 5am on Saturday September 5th, 2009.
• And David says that God has made a tabernacle, a little home, for the Sun.
• God is TRANSCENDENT. God TRANSCENDS anything we can know, see, touch, or imagine.
• We haven’t even the slightest glimpse of the breadth, the extent, the scope of God’s power.
• “You shall therefore be holy, for I am holy” (Leviticus 11:45).
• Job 38:1-11,17-23
• “And great hail from heaven fell upon men, each hailstone about the weight of a talent [100 lbs]. Men blasphemed God because of the plague of the hail, since that plague was exceedingly great” (Revelation 16:21).
• Job 38:34-36
• Job 40:1-5
• “If you have been foolish in exalting yourself, Or if you have devised evil, put your hand on your mouth” (Proverbs 30:32).
• Job 40:6-14
• Job 42:1-6
• “Woe is me, for I am undone! Because I am a man of unclean lips, And I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; For my eyes have seen the King, The LORD of hosts” (Isaiah 6:5).
• God is TRANSCENDENT. God TRANSCENDS anything we can know, see, touch, or imagine.
• “And when I saw Him, I feel at His feet as dead. But He laid His right hand on me, saying to me, ‘Do not be afraid; I am the First and the Last’” (Revelation 1:17).
• “You shall therefore be holy, for I am holy” (Leviticus 11:45).

So If God Is Holy, We Must Worship Him In His Prescribed Way
• God prescribed to us how we are to worship Him.
• Leviticus 9:1-6
• God is TRANSCENDENT. God TRANSCENDS anything we can know, see, touch, or imagine.
• Leviticus 9:7,16,22-24
• Bear in mind that the God in Leviticus 9 is the very same God as the God in Leviticus 10.
• Leviticus 10:1-3
• God is TRANSCENDENT. God TRANSCENDS anything we can know, see, touch, or imagine.
• Contrary to what sixty-one percent of the people who attend church believe, worship is first and foremost about serving God!
• How many times do we leave here saying, “I really didn’t get much out of the service today?” I’m guilty of that many times. We don’t like the music. We could have picked better songs. We didn’t like the way that the guy who was preaching praught the sermon. We didn’t like the way the woman next to us was dressed. The music was too loud. The music was too soft. It’s too hot. It’s too cold. It’s just right, but the fans made too much noise. Whatever.
• CHURCH IS NOT ABOUT WHAT WE GET OUT OF IT!!! It is about coming to serve a holy God.
• God has this funny idea that church is all about Him.
• We have the blessed privilege of meeting with our God on a daily basis. How cool is that?
• You know, I have Kelly Clarkson’s autograph. I played in a musical her senior year and all of the orchestra members got a sheet with autographs of everyone in the cast. More importantly than that, the Creator of the universe lives inside of me and He meets with me.
• Leviticus 11:45 (again)

So What Does All This Mean For Me?
• It says “For I am the LORD who brings you up out of the land of Egypt, to be your God. You shall therefore try really hard to be holy, for I am holy and if you try hard enough, and have enough faith and enough positive confessions, you can do anything you put your mind to.”
• Be holy, for God is holy. Be TRANSCENDENT, for God is TRANSCENDENT.
• We like it that way. It is much easier to come up with excuses if we are simply supposed to try really hard to be holy. We can even come up with Biblical excuses: It says that “in me dwells no good thing,” so you see, I try, but I don’t have the ability to do it. I mean, even Paul had a thorn in the flesh. Sin is my thorn in the flesh!
• It doesn’t say to try to be holy, it says to be holy. To be TRANSCENDENT. God’s commandments are our enablements. If He tells us to do something, we can do it.
• We are commanded to be TRANSCENDENT from the world. In word, deed, thought, and action. Everything about us is to be different than everything about the unbelieving world.
• Be holy, for God is holy. Be TRANSCENDENT, for God is TRANSCENDENT.
• So how do we become holy?
• It doesn’t say we are to become holy. It says we are to be holy. Present tense. It’s a NOW kind of thing. Stop being unholy. Start being holy. And do it now.
• “You shall therefore be holy, for I am holy” (Leviticus 11:45).
• No amount of me telling you to be TRANSCENDENT is going to make you unlike the world.
• No amount of God telling you to be TRANSCENDENT is going to make you unlike the world.
• If Jesus Christ Himself in the flesh came down here and stood up here and made a heart-wrenching, emotional plea and told you to be TRANSCENDENT, it would not make you unlike the world.
• We can’t be holy apart from God. We can’t be TRANSCENDENT apart from the grace of God.
• “Pursue peace…and holiness, without which no one will see the Lord” (Hebrews 12:14).
• So if it takes the grace of God to produce TRANSCENDENCE in our lives, and we cannot see Him apart from being TRANSCENDENT, then it must be something that He wants to do for us.
• He is giving an invitation for us to be holy. He offers a life of holiness; of TRANSCENDENCE.
• It is an invitation for us to allow Him to continue the work that He began in us.
• Galatians 3:2,3
• Philippians 1:6
• God is calling us to something that we must rely upon Him to do in us. God will make you holy if you give Him permission and allow Him to make you holy.
• Isaiah 40:21-23,28-31
• God is TRANSCENDENT. God TRANSCENDS anything we can know, see, touch, or imagine.
• Psalm 8:3,4
• Some information on where we live. We live on earth. We are in the midst of a Solar System consisting of nine planets. The Sun is a run-of-the-mill star. We already talked about that. We live in the Milky Way Galaxy. The Sun is just one of an estimated 200-400 billion stars in the Milky Way. The galaxy has a diameter of 100,000 light years. The Milky Way is one of more than 30 galaxies in the Local Galaxy Cluster. The next closest galaxy is the Andromeda Galaxy, which has a diameter of 250,000 light years or 2½ times that of the Milky Way, and it is over 2.5 million light years away.
• Psalm 33:13-15
• God fashions our hearts individually. He considers all of our works. The very same God who created the universe is the one who looks down from heaven and He takes a personal inventory of me and knows me better than I know me. He fashions my heart. Like a master craftsman. Not only did He create the heavens with one word, He created every single detail of you and me. He knows every particular about you and me. He is a HUGE God, and yet He is microscopically concerned about minute details.
• God is TRANSCENDENT. God TRANSCENDS anything we can know, see, touch, or imagine.
• The TRANSCENDENCE of God does not just refer to His magnitude, but it also refers to His kind. The TRANSCENDENCE of God required that the Son of God give His life for the sin of the world.

Jesus Love Me, This I Know. For The Bible Tells Me So.
• If Christ does not dwell in you, or you don’t know if He does, then I have some great news!
• Jesus Christ made everything.
• “For in Him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).
• He made the world, He made the heavens, He made reality.
• “For by Him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things were created through Him and for Him” (Colossians 1:16).
• Yet He left heaven so that He could come to earth that He might redeem us.
• “He was in the world, and the world was made through Him, and the world did not know Him. He came to His own, and His own did not receive Him. But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, to those who believe in His name” (John 1:10-12).
• Mankind has done everything in his power to ensure that we would never see the face of God again. God has done everything in His power to ensure that we do see Him, and that we can spend eternity together with Him. Aren’t you glad that God is more powerful than you or me?
• “that if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation…For ‘whoever calls on the name of the LORD shall be saved’” (Romans 10:9,10,13).
• “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service” (Romans 12:1).
• “But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8).
• Jesus loves me, this I know. For the Bible tells me so.