How to Become Blameless and Innocent Before God

Having the grandkids there, my wife and I have been talking about how interesting it is to watch our daughter and son-in-law deal with them. We sat down last night and shared stories. We were swapping stories about when she was a kid and them dealing with their kids. He was telling stories about his family. There is one thing that's very common for most people, either if you are a parent or you have children that are grown up, and you have a common experience with most children. Not every child is like this, but most children. That is, you walk into the room and it doesn't matter whether they are 4 or 14. It's the same experience. You walk in the room and you look around and you say, I want you to stop what you are doing. I want you to stop playing. I want you to clean this room. Then you walk out. You come back about a half hour later and they are sitting there playing. You look around and what they did was they picked up things that were in the middle of the room. They maybe dusted a little bit. They didn't move anything. All they did was dust. There is still dust all over everything, but there is just dust that is wiped off in between things. Maybe they vacuumed. Basically, they took all the dirty clothes and shoved them in the closet and shut the door. You look around and you say, I told you to clean your room. They say, but I did. I did. Look! All the stuff that is in the middle of the room is cleaned up. It's cleaned up. It's done. You say, yes, but what about under the bed? Under the bed? You told me to clean my room. You lift it up and there is a 3 week old pizza under there and all this stuff and mold and things. You have to get some hazmat suit to get out from underneath there. Then you start opening the drawers and realize they took all the dirty clothes and just stuck them in the drawers. Then you open the closet and you say, no, no, no, this closet. Yeah, but the room is cleaned up.

Now, most parents have had some similar experience like that with a child.

Now, my question for you is, does God ever have that experience with us? We had, seven weeks ago, the days of Unleavened Bread, where we pictured Christ's sacrifice, God's forgiveness, and the removal of sin, taking out leavening, and the taking in of Christ, the taking in of unleavened bread, so that we are de-leavened, we are clean, we are cleansed. And next week we will be celebrating the fact that we are cleansed, that the cleansing can only take place if God's Spirit comes into us, and God doesn't work in us. We can't cleanse ourselves. We can only submit to the cleansing. So we'll be celebrating that next week. But that still brings us back to the question. In this process, do you and I, on a regular basis, does God walk into our room, spiritual room, and say, I told you to clean this room? And our answer is, we did! And yet we really didn't, because we took care of the big things, but we saw everything else as little things. These little things. They're not that important. That's what we're talking about today. Little sins. Oh, they may be wrong. Okay, we're not talking about little details that aren't important. There's lots of details in life that aren't important. But we're talking about little things that we know those are wrong things. But, you know, I didn't kill anybody today. No, so let's put this in perspective, God. Okay? I didn't kill anybody today, so this little thing isn't that important. Little sins. Now, before we go on, I want to just touch on something we need to really grasp hold of here, if we're going to talk about this. And that is, we can't just look at sins. This is what we do when we have big sins and little sins in our lives. As sin as the list of do nots. You know, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not commit adultery, don't worship grave and images. Those commandments are... I mean, we do those things. We're sinning. Those are the big things, right? So we look at those big things, and we think, well, okay, what we're looking at here is the list of sins. I haven't done that list of things today, so my room is clean. So when God says, clean your room up, I can just keep playing because, you know, I don't know, there might be a couple things I need to take care of, but the big things are taken care of. I moved the things out of the room, I swept the floor, I did some dusting, you know, the big things are done. We have to understand and recognize that sin has come into our being. It's just not the list of donuts. Sin is part of the way we think, and sin is part of the way we feel. I've talked about that before because that is one of the greatest concepts we have to grab hold of. Or we just make...we make coming out of sin nothing more than a list of things. Sin is part of who we are. The problem with little sins is we like them because they're part of who we are. In fact, we will defend them because they're part of who we are. You know, Paul was dealing with this concept of himself, you know, looking inside himself, not just looking at what he did, not just looking at his behavior, but looking inside himself. And this is a hard concept. Sometimes people will come to be baptized. And they'll say, well, I've looked at my sins, you know, and I've repented of all these behaviors. Yeah, but have you repented of who you are? What's that mean? Have you repented of what's inside of you?

What's that mean? It's a struggle. Paul had been baptized and had God's Spirit for years when he wrote the book of Romans. And let's go to Romans 7. I'm going to read this from the New International Version just because it's easier to read out loud. Romans 7. And Romans 6, 7, and 8 create a complete concept. You know, I'm doing it, some of you that I've baptized, you know, in baptism counseling, I always have you do an in-depth study of Romans 6, 7, and 8. In-depth, personal study. What is it that God is saying here? What is Paul describing his experience? That's what's so interesting about Romans 6, 7, and 8. It is theologically dense. And yet, in the midst of all this theology, is this man's personal experience mixed together with it. And he says here, verse 14, we know that the law is spiritual. So he looked at the law of God. He didn't say it's done away with, it's bad, or it's just carnal, or it's physical. He says it's spiritual. But there's a problem. But I am unspiritual. Now, I'm made out of molecules. Now, he wouldn't have said that because he didn't understand. He would have said, I'm carnal, I'm flesh. I'm a thing. But the law, now the law is spiritual, but I'm not. And sold as a slave to sin. Now, we just went through, seven weeks ago, about seven weeks ago, the whole idea of us being in slavery to sin. In the days of the love and bread. This concept of being enslaved to sin was very deep in Paul's consciousness. And what's really amazing about that is remember, he was what we would call today an Orthodox Jew. Strict Jew. Who spent his whole life fighting sin. His whole life defining what he must do by the law of God. But when he came to the understanding of Jesus as the Messiah, he came to the real understanding of what God required of him, he began to realize that he had been modifying behaviors. But inside, things weren't changing. He was simply modifying behaviors. If all we do is modify behaviors, we eventually will go back to the old behavior. We will not maintain a new behavior. We'll eventually go back. So he realized that and he struggled with it. Look what he says here. He says, for what I want to do, I do not do, but what I hate, I do. He says, I'm struggling now with the very core of what sin is. And the laws explain to me bad behavior. But now I have to deal with where bad behavior comes from. It comes from inside of us. Now, I stress bad behavior. We're going to talk about in a minute how we can justify sin sometimes. And we justify these things because we see them as little. They're not really big. He says, and if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. He says, I agree. The law is good. It defines good and bad. That's what it does. He says, so what? I now have a dictionary. He believed before that the law saved him. Now when he came to the realization, the law is a dictionary. It shows me what good is and what bad is. And I thought, well, I'll just will myself to do good. And you know what? Inside of me I couldn't will myself to do enough good.

He says, it is as it is, verse 17, it is no longer I myself to do it, but it is sin living in me. I know that nothing good lives in me, that is in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. You look at this, he's struggling. And it's like, I don't even understand myself sometimes. I don't even get myself. Now this comes from a man who was very sure of himself at one time. Very sure that he was absolutely right with God. He had no doubt that he wasn't right with God. He was considered one of the greatest, most righteous men of his day. A Pharisee who worked for the Sanhedrin, the leaders of the entire Jewish community around the world. And he worked for them. And he was absolutely sure. You read his writings where he says, you want to talk about being an Israelite? He says, I was an Israelite of the Israelites. He says, I was the pinnacle of what a good man could be. And I was proud of it. And now you find him, a couple of decades later, saying, I don't even understand myself. I don't even get who I am. Now you read through chapter 8, and he says, but I really do know who I am. Because I'm a child of God, and Christ lives in me, and God's Spirit is what does this, and I follow along, and I stumble, and I get down, and God pisses me back up. So chapter 8 is this huge encouragement. But the power of chapter 8 comes from chapter 7. And I don't even get myself sometimes. So if you ever find yourself at times saying, man, I keep trying, and I keep struggling, sometimes I just don't understand myself. We're not too bad at company. As we'll show, Paul's not the only one to follow God to feel that way sometimes. The struggle with, how do I do this? So sin permeates us. So we're not just talking here about do's and don'ts. Because what we do is we can remove the big things from the room, and leave the little things and think it's clean. And God says, oh, we've got to get down into the crevices and the nooks. You took out the garbage out of the room. That's good. You emptied the garbage. But I did clean my room. I took out the garbage can, and I emptied it and brought it back. I cleaned my room. We're in Texas. The house we had down there had this really... The people had upgraded the house up, and they had this what I thought was absolutely beautiful tile from Italy. And it was some kind of rock tile. I thought, beautiful. And we lived there for a couple years, and I kept saying, man, I love that tile in that kitchen. That is the neatest stuff. I just say, it's just... One day Kim said, I know you like that tile, but I hate it. I said, why? She says, I just want linoleum. I said, linoleum? And it was a very expensive tile. They had a box out in the garage, and it had the price on it, and extra tiles in case you broke one. I said, this is expensive stuff. Why do you want linoleum? She said, Gary, to clean this, I have to get on my hands and knees with a little brush to clean this, because dirt and grime and food and mold forms and this stuff, it's horrible.

I thought you just swept it.

See? I would have swept it and had a dirty floor. But I would have said it was clean. Now, you women are like, I can see women actually, I understand. I don't like floors like that either. Because to actually clean it is more than sweeping it. Okay. How about ourselves? Sweeping our minds. Cleaning our minds the way God wants us cleansed. Throwing out the trash isn't enough. Look at Psalm 19. Chapter 19. This is a remarkable, just remarkable passage. It's actually a prayer.

You know, sometimes we can be down on David for his sins, but other times we see the remarkable mind of the man that God can work with.

He paid terrible price for his sins. We all pay prices for our sins. Our prices last this lifetime. Some of the prices of our sins don't disappear until the resurrection.

But his mindset towards God was so unique. But towards the end of this prayer, verse 12, he says, Who can understand his errors? That's where he mind...that's where he's starting...that question alone is amazing. How many ask a question that says, How can I even understand how unclean my room is? Clean your room. You know, it wouldn't be great if you were walking, Hey, kids, you need to clean this room. I'll be back in a half hour. They say, I don't know exactly what clean is. Would you teach me? This is what David says. Who could even know what real errors are? Cleanse me from my secret faults. Here's the problem with little sins. Because we like them, we make them secret, and we hold on to them. Little sins are just big sins that haven't grown up yet. That's all. It all becomes big sin. It all becomes big sin. It just hasn't grown up yet. It's just like planting a seed and saying, well, you know, I just planted seeds of poison ivy in my yard, but I haven't planted poison ivy because it hasn't come up yet. Little sins are just the seeds, and they grow. And he says, Cleanse me from my secret sins, the ones I don't even know yet. Verse 13, Keep back your servant also from presumptuous sins. Let them not have dominion over me. Now, that's a remarkable request from God. You know, to be presumptuous basically means that you overstep the bounds because you basically think, eh, it's not that important. God will understand. Come on, it's not that big a deal.

And, you know, we can do this in a hundred different ways. I've heard people say, Oh, come on, my marriage has nothing to do with my Christianity. Yes, it does. Oh, come on, you know, I'm a salesman, but how I do my sales pitches has nothing to do with my Christianity. Yes, it does. Oh, come on, what I do with, you know, all my Friday nights has nothing to do with my Christianity. My Sabbath giving. Yes, it does. And so what we do is we take these things and we get presumptuous about it.

We justify. We defend. And David said, guard me, because he said, if I have presumptuous sins, they will control me. They will have dominion over me. His life, our lives can be controlled by our own presumptuous sins. So how do presumptuous sins manifest themselves? And they manifest themselves in a couple of different ways. One is by what's usually called sins of omission. Sometimes presumptuous sins isn't what we do. It's what we don't do. It's not what we do. It's what we don't do. He said, well, what do you mean by that? James 1, 27. Now most of you have this memorized. But let's go to James 1, 27.

Because this is a very, for me, a very convicting verse.

Pure and undefiled religion before God, and the Father is this. So you want to know what pure religion is and undefiled. In other words, it's clean. Clean religion before God is to visit orphans and widows in their trouble and to keep oneself unspotted from the world. So what do we do? We zero in on keeping oneself unspotted from the world. So we try to pull back from the world so we don't act like the world, we don't talk like the world, we don't dress like the world. And yes, that's what we should do. We're much too worldly, and we still don't even realize that. But what about the other part of that sentence? What about the orphans and the elderly? What about the widows? I always tell my wife, I said, you know, there isn't a week that goes by that I don't feel convicted. I only saw one elderly person this week. I only called one widow this week.

I should have done more.

And I don't do that because it's my job. And I don't feel convicted because it's my job. I feel convicted because that's what true religion is. We're supposed to care for those people that much. That's what I mean by sin of omission. But God, I'm not stealing. Good. I'm undefiled from the world. I don't cheat. I pay my taxes. I pay my tithes. Good. I don't commit adultery. Great. When was the last time you went out of your way? Just to help somebody. Oh, well, yeah. People should do that. I know. But that's just one of those little things, you know. I don't know. According to James, it's what undefiled religion is. Look what he says in chapter 2, verse 14. What does it profit, my brethren? What I find here is what he uses as his argument. Because part of the book of James is arguing that we should keep the law. Okay? That's part of the argument. But look what he uses here as sort of the hammer to drive home his point. What does it profit, my brethren, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can faith save him? So therefore, you must not steal. You must not kill as part of the works that you must do. Well, he actually says that basically in another place. But look what he says here as his point, what he makes his point with. If a brother or sister is naked in destitute of daily food, and one of you says to them, depart in peace, be warmed and filled, but you do not give them the things which are needed for the body, what does it profit? That's also faith by itself. It does not have works. It is dead. So we can have all kinds of faith. And if we're not helping those in need, especially our brothers and sisters in the Church of God, then we have a faith problem. We have a faith problem. Because our faith in God isn't producing the works. Now, not doing those things, you don't feel like you're committing a sin, do you? I mean, there is no, there's no thou shalt not commandment. I'm breaking. But you know there's a lot of thou shalt commands. To use a strange phrase. There's a lot of commands to do things in the Scripture also. I mean, love your neighbor as yourself is a do command. And that's in the Old Testament, that's in the New Testament. So sometimes the sins of presumption, you know, we can be very comfortable in that we're not overtly breaking the law, and yet we can be commanding a sin just by not doing things that we're supposed to do. But those are little things, right? That's not really that important.

Another way that we can commit these sins of omission is by measuring the amount of mess in our room by the amount of mess in somebody else's room. My daughter has five kids, so we hear these kind of arguments all the time. Go pick up your toys. But Josh hasn't picked up his toys! So? They don't like those arguments with grandpa because they don't go anyplace at all. I don't care. What's that have to do with you? But Josh hasn't picked up his toys! Yeah? But you have to go pick up your toys because they're your toys. Josh will pick up his toys when he's told to pick up his toys. We measure the R dirt by somebody else's dirt. Thank you, Lord, that I don't have a drinking problem like this person. I just yell at my husband and call him dirty names five times a day, but outside of that, I say, thank you, Lord.

That's a big problem, yeah? But God wants us to clean under the bed, and every drawer, and every crevice, because we're going to have the mind of Christ. How much dirt is in the mind of Christ? How many cracks does He have? How many drawers? How many closets does He have with little sins in it?

And that's where we're supposed to go. Little sins. 2 Timothy 3. Every time I get a little complacent with my little sins, I'll tell you what I do. I go to places like 2 Timothy 3. I didn't write down all the places I go to, but this is one of them.

Boy, this is a great passage. It's about how evil people will be in the world at the end time. I love to do a Beyond Today program where I get the 2 Timothy 3 and I can thunder out, and this is the state of our world today, and it's time to repent.

Feels good. Okay. Well, let's start looking at this and say, okay, am I in this list? Verse 1, but know this, Then in the last days perilous times will come, For men will be lovers of themselves. Yeah, boy, this is such a selfish world. And of course, if you're over the age of 60, it's like, and all those young people, you know, everybody that's under age 55, they're so selfish. And if you're 40, it's like, you know, all those young people, everybody under 35, they're so selfish. If you're 20, it's all those little kids, they're all so selfish. Everybody's lovers of themselves. I'm glad I'm not. Lovers of money. None of us have that problem. Boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful. Oh, yeah, I gripe a lot. And I'm never really happy because I'm unthankful about everything. And I'm always putting my wife down, I always put my kids down, I always put my boss down, I always put everybody in the church down, I put all my neighbors down because I'm never, I'm unthankful about everything. Everything's good enough for me. But you know what? I didn't steal today. I'm sorry it's on the list. It's in the list. And there's list after list after list in the New Testament. And if you look through the list, not with, yep, that's the way my neighbor is. If you look at the list and say, am I on the list? You are. But that's your little sin, isn't it? And all these others, that's people's big sins. My little sin is little compared to that.

Unthankful, unholy, unloving, unforgiving. Oh, I'm glad all of us are completely loving people, completely forgiving. And that forgiveness stuff, I really have to struggle with that. I really do. So I'm on the list. And if you look at our slanderers, you and I just, our society loves slander. And if we're not careful, we love it, too. You know, so what do we do now with all the, you know, when three months before the end of the last election, somebody came up to you and said, oh I'm stockpiling food because, you know, President Obama has concentration camps set up, and he's in the Claire Marshall law.

We're all going to be put in jail and I've got guns. It wasn't true. You say, so what? You know what? There's enough biblical reasons to get up and say, Mr. Obama had problems, but when you make up things, it's slander. I don't care who he is. You take our president now! There's enough bad things to talk about. We don't have to make up things. It's slander. But it's okay if you don't like the person. You see the problem with slander? It's okay to spread things that aren't true about somebody you don't like or somebody you see as evil.

No, it's not. Truth is truth. We have to stand with the truth. We have to say the truth. But the slander people that make up things, even if they're bad people, we can't make up things. Slanders are real. Why do some of those little sins get in there? And we can feel totally justified in slandering somebody. That's why if you have somebody that's done you wrong, that's offended, like it was brought up in the sermonette, you've been offended, and someone comes to you and says, you know so-and-so.

They got pulled over the other day for speeding. And what's the first thing you think? I knew they were a bad person. Good for them. Right? So what if you find out later it wasn't true? Do you say, oh God, I'm sorry? No, it's more like, well, I wish that was true. Or we just slough it off. We believed the lie, and then you told 50 people, all these people believed the lie, and it doesn't matter whether the person was good to you or not.

If it is untrue, it is untrue. This is what's so hard about slander. We don't slander about good people or people who we like. We only slander people we dislike. And we decide it's okay. If it's not true, it's just something else anyways. Here's how dangerous that is. To get to the place, we can spread whatever we want about a person. And whether it's true or not doesn't matter. That's a scary place to go.

It's one of the things on the list. Without self-control, I'm sure all of you have perfect self-control. But we're on the list. Okay. Well, okay. I'm on the list. Brutal, despisers of good, traitors, headstrong. I'm glad none of you are stubborn. Hottie, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having a form of godliness but denying its power. In other words, having a form that looks like we're worshiping God but we're not. From such people, turn away.

All of you have to tell me, don't even deal with those people. The problem is I'm on the list. Now maybe you're not. Actually, I'm on the list a couple of times. I'm on the list. But those are my little sins. Those are my, you know, the big ones. The room's pretty clean, folks. Just don't look under the bed. Just don't open the closet. The problem is God lives in our closet. He lives under our bed. He lives in our room. He lives here. He wants it clean.

We can't take these little sins and say they're just little. That's why we have to be careful, too. One thing we do about little sins, it's not what we do, it's what we do vicariously. You know, it's interesting in Romans chapter 1. Romans chapter 1 is this scathing attack on Roman culture and Roman ethics. I mean, Paul just unloads on these people.

He talks to them about their immorality and their envy and their violence. And I read Romans 1, and I've used it on a television program to say, this is like the United States today. What do I feel good about it? But the problem is, if I look at that list closely, I show up on the list.

There's things in there. It's like, well, yeah. But that's one of my little things. I'm not doing the big thing. I'm not participating in gladiatorial games, so I'm not that bad. But what happens when we do it vicariously? And here's the great danger of entertainment. We have to be very, very careful. You know, I think it's wrong for, you know, it to say, okay, here's the kind of movies you can watch, and here's the exact television shows you can watch, and here's the exact video games you can play. No, no, no. We all have to work that through individually. But also, we're also, understand, that means we're all interested in being responsible before God. Is one minute of nudity too much, or do you draw the line at five minutes in that movie? Where do you draw the line with your little sin?

Where do we draw the line? What will we do with what we do vicariously? It's not like I'm doing it, but you're participating in it. It's the great, it is the great damage that pornography does to a person. It destroys them, but they don't think they're doing anything wrong. But it destroys them.

You know, you talk about vicarious. I get a big chuckle out of social media. What people will do, I've actually had to be in counseling sessions with people and had to say, I won't counsel you anymore because you just keep fighting with each other on Facebook. So no matter what we do here, you tear it apart by going on Facebook and fighting with, oh well, you only have 300 friends each. That's only 600 people. Now you've involved in it, right?

Tell you something. Be real, real careful. What you expose about yourself on social media exposes who you are. And people will put pictures and say things on social media that you would never say or do in public. But in doing so, you're showing something about yourself.

It's a vicarious way of hiding behind something, but sort of letting people see something about you. Now I have to give a caveat here because I get a call from my, you know, I have a social or a Facebook page, but it's just for Beyond Today programs. And so all kinds of people, I mean, every day it's like, can I be your follower? You know, yeah, sure, go ahead, go ahead. Because it's a business account. So it's just for like the Beyond Today programs. So I don't pay much attention to what people post on there. And my daughter-in-law called me this week and she said, uh, you do realize that on your timeline, a woman just posted an ad and she's a, uh, she's a stripper from Nigeria.

I pulled it up on one phone, I said, oh my.

Of course she had her clothes on, but she was advertising, you know, that you could get on her website. I don't know, for so much money, you can watch her strip. I probably should take that off of there. So I did. But I was glad my, my daughter-in-law caught it. She thought it was quite my, her and my son, especially. He got a big kick out of it. Dad said, you're advertising strippers from Nigeria now, you know. But I didn't do that, okay.

But I do have to be a little more careful now on my timeline and see what in the world crazy things people put on there. Why I friended her was because people will, you know, come on, say you're going to be your friend, and I think they're watching beyond today. And she obviously, well, if she is, she's not really understanding it. Be careful what we vicariously do. That's the great danger of, you know, I'm just fascinated, fascinated with virtual reality. But there's a great danger in it. You can get so involved in a virtual reality game that you can do a crime. You can commit something that your brain thinks you're actually doing. And there's some studies. There are some psychologists that are absolutely frightened of what happens to people if they play the sophisticated virtual reality long enough and then take the game off. That there's a point where they may not be able to consciously tell the difference after a while of right and wrong. Because in the game, you would do things you would never do in real life. You'd never take a machete and chop somebody up, right? But in the game, you can do it. The problem is with virtual reality, it's not cartoon. It's like it's real. They're worried about what it actually does to the brain.

So vicarious living through other means is becoming more and more powerful in our society. We have to be very aware of that. How do we deal with these little sins, these presumptuous sins? Well, first of all, we have to be acutely, I mean, it has to be very, very powerful to us. Our daily need to be cleansed by God. That every day we have to deal with a human nature that's corrupt. We just can't be looking at the big things and say, well, I got all the big things out of the room. Let's go back to Psalm 19 again. I want to look at the verses we read and then the verse afterwards. So verse 12, Psalm 19, who can understand His errors? Who can even figure this out? Who can understand it? Cleanse me from my secret faults. You know, when I read this, this seems to be the same intellectual and emotional experience of Apostle Paul in Romans 7 and 8. It's very similar. Well, I don't even understand what I do sometimes. All I know is I look at the law and say, that's what I want to be, and then I don't always measure up. Because of inside of me is sin. It's not just something I do. And that's what we'll do sometimes. Well, that really wasn't me when I did that. Yeah, it is.

Yeah, it is. That's the point. It is us when we do these things. It's our motivations, our desires, what we do. Who can understand His errors? Cleanse me from secret faults. Keep back your servant also from presumptuous sins and let them not have dominion over me. Then notice the last part of this verse. Then I shall be blameless and I shall be innocent of great transgression. He says, then I'll be blameless. I'll be innocent because I'm not just dealing with the big things. I'm dealing with the secret things and I'm dealing with the presumptuous things.

Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my strength and my redeemer. Let my very thoughts at the core of my being, let my very emotions at the core of my heart, let the words I speak all be acceptable to you.

Oh, but no, no, no. Let's not come on. I'm doing, I didn't bear false witness today. I've kept thinking. I didn't worship any idols today.

But that's not how David sees this. He sees this as beyond that. The big things let's get rid of. Let's get down into the crevices of our mind and my motivations and who I am and my secret faults so that we just don't have bad behavior. I am a sinner. I just don't do sin. It's who I am. In fact, you'll never come to Toldur, even if we're baptized, because at baptism we have a limited repentance. Repentance is a continual activity. There's times when we don't come to really understand repentance until we've been having God's Spirit for years. And we start to realize this isn't just about things I did wrong. This is about who I am. In here I am a sinner. Sin is who I am. It's part of me. I like it. Especially the little ones I can sort of justify. The ones I can sort of get away with are the ones I can blame on other people.

You have to ask God every day to be cleansed. Remember, I talked a little bit ago at the beginning of the sermon about the mind of Christ. Well, let's go to Colossians 3.

Colossians 3. This is one other scripture to go through here.

Paul tells us, now this is a very dense passage here, so I'm not going to go through all the details of it. But the story flow of it, just reading through it, is so profound. Verse 1, if then you were raised with Christ, now we do know from Paul's other writings, being raised with Christ was the way that he described being baptized. You die with Christ and you're resurrected with Him at baptism. So if you've been raised with Christ, seek those things that are above where Christ is, sitting at the right hand of God. Set your mind on things above, not on things on the earth, for you died and your life is hidden with Christ and God. Christ who is our life appears, then you also appear with Him in glory. If Christ, the very mind of God, is in you, what pieces, what rooms, what crevices, what little places, what drawers are you hiding and saying, God, you can't go there. That's mine. That sin is mine. I like it. I'm going to keep it.

What part of you? What part of me? I have to ask myself, am I hiding, trying to hide from God? As if I can hide that and I can hold on to it. How much sin was in the mind of Christ? And you can't find any. None. There was nothing hidden in there. Nothing hidden in the mind of Christ. It was all absolute honesty, no sin. He didn't play the games with Himself that you and I play with ourselves.

Verse 5, therefore put to death your members which are on the earth. That's a remarkable way of saying that. Paul says, therefore, take the parts of your body that don't, you know, the parts of your mind, the parts of your mind and kill them. If they don't measure up to Christ, I want you to kill yourself. Not literally. I want you to take the parts of yourself and kill it. Put it to death. Part of the Christian life is literally, this is why it's painful, killing part of yourself. It's finding the things that shouldn't be there and killing them, but the reason it's difficult is you at the core, me at the core of who I am, don't want it to die. We want to hold on to certain things. We want to keep who we are. So it doesn't matter. You know, an alcoholic defines himself as an alcoholic or herself as an alcoholic. The drink is part of who they are. Giving it up is painful because you're giving up who you are. If you see yourself as a victim all the time, it's always been everybody else's fault, you've been injured and all this. You know what? That's really hard to give up because you believe you are a victim and that gives you identity. See, our sin gives us identity. We have to give that up and replace that with the mind of Christ.

A different identity. And this is why little sins are so hard, because we've got to give up how we define ourselves. We define ourselves by our envy and our greed. We define ourselves by our anger. We define ourselves by how we view ourselves and view others.

Fortunately, Christ didn't do this. Can you imagine if He would have viewed Himself in terms of how other people treat me? He had never done what He did. He was not defined by how other people treat Him. He was defined by who He is as the Son of God. We define ourselves by how other people treat us, and we justify all kinds of things.

We justify all kinds of things, because that's who we are. We define it, we define ourselves that way. He says, here's the things you kill fornication, uncleanness, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. Because of these things, the wrath of God is coming upon the sons of disobedience, in which you yourselves once walked when you lived in them. But now you yourselves are to put to death. This is a continual process. He says you used to be this way, but you're still fighting these things. Wrath, or anger, wrath, malice, blasphemy, filthy language out of your mouth. You don't lie to one another, since you have put off the old man and his deeds, and put on the new man who is renewed in knowledge according to the image of him who created him. That's a sermon right there. To take and explain all that is a sermon. But that means we can't hold on to these little sins that identify us, that we justify, that we say, well, they're really not that bad. I get some bad behaviors, I get some bad behaviors, but they're not. You know, I've seen people, and I've done it myself, but sometimes I've seen people use this kind of reasoning to lead to remarkable things. Because all little sins become big sins. I've said that, but I guess you've got to keep driving that home. I'm lonely. It's Friday night. I'm bored. I keep remembering what I used to do on Friday nights. I used to go to the honky tonks and dance and drink till two in the morning, and it was so much fun. Therefore, God wants me to be happy. Friday nights are horrible for me, so I'm going to the honky tonks and drinking and having fun until two in the morning. But would you please change services to afternoon because I'm too tired to come in the morning? I'm not making that one up.

That's just many years ago, but that started as a little sin, and it started with a real human emotion. I am lonely. It started with a real human emotion. I am lonely. That loneliness wasn't a sin.

A little planted seed. It got bigger and bigger and bigger.

I've seen those things. Until over sin doesn't even seem wrong. You now can justify over it. So, let me explain why. You have a reason. We all have reasons.

Where do those reasons stand with God? God understands. God understands, so it's okay. Then why did God say, don't do this? Why did God say not to do these things? Why did God say not to do it, but I really don't mean it? But this is a little sin. At least I'm not doing this big one.

Our last scripture here is in 2 Corinthians 10. Here's when you will know when your room is totally clean.

Here's when you know that it's all swept out. You're absolutely clean. All the crevices are filled. I mean, the closet under the bed. All the drawers are perfect. Here's when you know your room is totally clean. Verse 4 of 2 Corinthians chapter 10. For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty in God for pulling down strongholds, casting down arguments and every high thing that insults itself against the knowledge of God, bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ, and being ready to punish all disobedience when your obedience is fulfilled. When every one of your thoughts, I will know when I have reached perfection and the room is totally clean, when every one of my thoughts is a Christ thought. I don't know about you. Maybe some of you are there. I'm not.

But that's where we're supposed to go. This is tough. These little sins aren't little at all. They're just seeds. They're seeds of big sins. They're just seeds. How many seeds are you planting in your life? There's got to be a big, big sin someday. A big problem. A big out of control issue. Because you're planting the seeds now and finding a way to say it's okay. It's just a little thing. Now, there's enough little things in life. There are details that we don't have to worry too much about. We do sometimes obsess on things that aren't sin. I'm talking about things that are sin. Things you're going to find in these lists throughout the Scripture. God wants you to clean your room. God wants you to clean your room. Now, fortunately, sometimes you can tell a child to leave and clean a room, and they'll try so hard. You come back in, and you realize they really, really tried. Half of it is still dirty, and you don't punish them. You look at it. They've tried, and they've spent an hour working at it. You say, you know, you did a good job. I tell you what, we'll work on the rest of it tomorrow. God does that a lot with us. Okay, you got the drawers clean. Good. I tell you what, tomorrow we'll work on the closet some. Okay? That's going to take a while.

No, it's going to take us three years to do your closet. But okay, we'll start on your closet tomorrow. That's the way God is. And I'm glad for that. You know? That it's when we just won't do it that we have a problem. Or we say, oh, come on. It's not that big a deal, God. So what? I just took the garbage can and dumped it in a drawer. So what? That's when God says, no, that's not so what. These little things are big things. He wants us to clean our rooms. He wants us to clean every crevice under the bed in the dark recesses of the closet. What I would like all of you to do, if you feel so inclined to do so. Around this Pentecost season, at some point, take those last three verses of Psalm 19 and get on your knees and pray that to God.

Get on your knees and say that you wish Him to cleanse you. I just forgive you, but cleanse you of your secret faults. You wish to help Him keep you from your presumptuous sins. You wish Him to guide you so that all your words and thoughts of your heart are acceptable to Him. When you pray that prayer and He does His work, what will happen is exactly what David said will happen. You will be blameless before God.