hoohoou,
I would have to agree with the entirety of the first paragraph you wrote, but not with the last statement. Here I guess is why. Romans 6:19 shows us that holiness is the natural fruit borne out of righteousness through faith in the grace of God. It is not preaching on sin that teaches us to deny ungodliness and worldly lusts, but the grace of God, Titus 2:11-12.
If I am preaching to the lost, I need to tell them of the grace of God that has been poured out in the sacrifice of Jesus Christ for their sins so that they can be saved from the wrath and judgment that their sin is bringing upon them. If they are adamant that they have no sin, I can use the law for it's rightful purpose, to demonstrate to them that according to God's standard they are sinners and lost. But once they realize their lost condition, it is only death to them unless they are led to a knowledge of the solution to that condition. What I do not need to do is renumerate to them all of their actions and denounce all of them as sin. This will be unfruitful. It is the kindness and love of God that brought us to repentance. Titus 3:1-7, Romans 2:4. We love Him because He first loved us.
If I am preaching or teaching to the born again, there is a place for teaching practical holiness. Paul gave us numerous examples of this. He admonished us to put to death or mortify works in our members that were not works unto holiness, and he mentioned them specifically. But this was a small percentage of his teaching, and was given in specific instances. As a believer, I have the Word of God and the inner leading of the Holy Spirit. If I am seeking Him with my whole heart, He will reveal to me the practical things that I need to do in my life. I will bear the fruit of holiness as I obey Him. After all, holiness is really neither more nor less than obedience to the word of the Lord that comes out of relationship and love for him is it not? If a believer is not seeking God with his whole heart and is instead choosing to appease his flesh, no amount of browbeating about sin is going to change that.
If an unbeliever sitting in a church hears continually that to be pleasing to God he must stop committing a laundry list of sins, he may go out in his own flesh and try to live holy, hoping to please God. But, all he is building is self-righteousness which is in God's eyes as filthy rags. All of his self motivated acts, however morally or socially good, are acts of ungodliness and unrighteousness because they are of the flesh and are an attempt as self righteousness. He needs to hear that the only way he can be righteous is through the sacrifice of Christ.
When a man is born again, he needs to be taught how to live and walk in the spirit rather than the flesh. Paul dealt with this extensively in the book of Galatians. These people accepted that they could only be save by grace but tried to place themselves back under the law as they walked out their Christian life. They tried to be made perfect by turning to enumerating the things that God saw as sin and trying to make sure they avoided those things, thinking that this external holiness was the way to further relationship with God. Not so. Paul calls them bewitched, grossly deceived. Outward holiness, or the avoidance of actions of sin, can only be the outflow of inward holiness which is the commitment to obeying the Savior whom we love with all our heart mind and strength.
So while there are times and places for us to preach and teach about specific, practical holiness, the main thrust of a pastor or churches ministry should not consist of such. I sat with a group of young men last night whom I have been teaching. We have spent five weeks building a foundation of walking in the Spirit. But only last night did we begin to talk about actions or works of the flesh that Paul talked about. We had to have the foundation of relationship and reliance on the power of the Holy Spirit. We will not major on the works of the flesh. We will major on the life of Christ in us which yields the fruit of righteousness naturally.
Hope that clarifies what I was trying to say in the post. I am all for holiness. I am all for not sinning. But it must come as a fruit of the root of righteousness. It simply does not work the other way. Some of the conventional religious wisdom has been that if we show people how terribly sinful they are that they will be driven to God. That is yoke of bondage that we are not to be entangled again with. It is a law mentality. The law showed us how rotten we were. The body needs to awake to righteousness and sin not. If we see how truly righteous we have been made by the blood of Christ, possessing the very same righteousness that God possesses, see 2 Cor. 5:21, then we are to yield ourselves to that righteousness just as we used to yield ourselves servants to sin. The resulting fruit will be holiness.
Travis.
