FBC Daily Devotional – December 11, 2020

Faith Baptist Church

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We are at the end of the week. Looking forward to the weekend, the Lord's Day this

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Sunday. We are at this point planning to have in -person services for those who are comfortable and would like to attend.

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I'm not going to prohibit it. It's of course not recommended and we understand that.

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So if there's any discomfort at all, of course, obviously, if you're sick in any way, stay home.

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If you're not comfortable in -person services, stay home. We're live -streaming it.

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You can watch online. This week we'll be focusing again on cross -centered

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Christmas. And this week, the light of Christmas. And I hope you'll be able to tune in or join us for service on the

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Lord's Day. Well, the last couple of days we've been talking about this

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COVID illness and particularly the recommendations, what the guidelines in the medical community have suggested for avoiding the spread and avoiding getting sick from COVID.

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A couple of things that they suggested in their list that was in the paper on Tuesday. One of them was wash your hands often with soap and water for at least 20 seconds or use an alcohol -based hand sanitizer with at least 60 % alcohol.

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And then the next item they said was cover your cough or sneeze with a tissue, then throw the tissue in the trash.

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Get that dirt, that filth, that potential infection away from you. And then thirdly, avoid touching your eyes, nose, and mouth.

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Again, these are good common sense things. We understand the germs are carried on our hands and obviously in sneezing and blowing our noses and coughing and so forth.

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We understand that those things need to be thrown away, the tissues and so forth.

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And if you've got the germs on your hands and you touch your eyes or your mouth and you can transfer those virus germs to your mouth and ingest them and then you're sick, then you get sick.

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All right, so we get that. And so the emphasis of those basic precautionary things is cleansing, cleansing, keeping yourself clean from those germs.

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All right. And we've been talking about this whole idea of precaution against the physical malady of COVID and other sickness, for that matter, and looking at it in relation to our spiritual health and basing it on what

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John wrote one of his friends in 3 John 2, when he says,

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I'm praying for you that all may go well with you and that you be in good health, even as things go well with your soul.

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And the parallel is that John wants physical health to mirror spiritual health.

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I want you to be in good health, even as things go well with your soul. So there's this underlying caveat, underlying understanding, we should say, that for spiritual vitality to even exist, there must be spiritual life.

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You must have been born again by the spirit of God, where you have in repentant faith, come to Jesus Christ and trusted him as your personal savior, as evidence of the regenerating work of God within you.

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So spiritual life, then you can have spiritual vitality.

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But how is your spiritual health? This is what we're talking about. This is what we're concerned with.

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And there are some principles that scripture gives us for building and maintaining and strengthening our spiritual vitality.

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One of those things is cleansing. It's cleansing. So James 4, 8, for example, says, draw near to God and he will draw near to you.

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Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double -minded.

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What James is getting at here is that our hands are the instruments of evil deeds, of sinful behavior.

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He could have said cleanse your feet too. Sometimes our feet takes us into sin, but our hands as instruments or reflections of our doing, what we do, how we behave.

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So when our hands have got us into sin and we have done wrong, the exhortation is cleanse your hands.

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He's calling us to repent of our sin, to forsake it, to get rid of it, to cast it away.

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Even as the writer of Hebrews says, lay aside every weight and the sin that does so easily beset us, get rid of it, cast it aside.

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Then he also says, purify your hearts, you double -minded. So the cleansing, it's not enough just to cleanse your hands of the sin that you've committed.

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What about the heart that has led you there, taken you to that action, the double -mindedness in your heart, where you say you don't want something, but then you do want something.

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Purify your heart, you double -minded. It's an impure heart that results in unclean hands.

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So the cleansing of hands and heart. Well, in 2 Corinthians 7, Paul is a little broader in his exhortation where he says, let us cleanse ourselves from every defilement of body and spirit, bringing holiness to completion in the fear of God.

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So we do understand that there is no cleansing that can take place in our lives apart from the ministry of the

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Holy Spirit. We get that. But there's also responsibility that I have and that you have.

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We have personal responsibility here and we are to cleanse ourselves from every defilement of the body and spirit, of the body, of our outward actions, what we do, where we go, what we say, what we do with our bodies, but also cleanse ourselves in the spirit, our attitudes, our thoughts, the things that come out of our mouth because of defilement in our spirit.

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These things need to be cleansed as well. So if we want to have and maintain spiritual health, just as we need to wash our hands to maintain physical health, there needs to be cleansing.

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We need to wash in the water of the word. We need to be purified by the blood of Christ and how grateful we can be that the blood of Christ cleanses us from all sin.

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So if you're a child of God, keep clean, wash, cleanse yourself, not only your hands and your body, but your spirit and your heart.

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So our Father and our God, we pray that you would work in our hearts and challenge us, even convict us of those areas, even right now, where there needs to be some cleansing take place.

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And I pray that as your spirit convicts us, we would respond with true repentance, the forsaking of sin, confessing it, naming it, saying the same thing about it that you say about it, whether that sin is outward with our actions or inward with our heart.

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Cleanse us, we pray, by your grace. And this we pray in Jesus' name. Amen. All right.

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Well, again, have a good weekend and we'll come back to this theme on Monday and Tuesday of next week.

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But in the meantime, if you can join us Sunday, either by live stream or if you're comfortable with it in person,

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I hope you'll do so, as again, we focus on a theme of Christmas, a cross -centered

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Christmas. So until we meet again, God bless you. Have a great day.