The BEST WAY to Grow in Holiness Isn't What You Think...

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Holiness is a community project. Amen. Right? Ephesians 4,

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I don't know how you argue that. Holiness is a community project. Sanctification is a community project to the modern

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Christian American ear. It sounds insane. We talk often about how the

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Christian life is inherently corporate. It's personal, but it's never private. It's corporate, right? And how

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Christian devotion is church -shaped if you read the New Testament. And so that's where I'm coming from.

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Holiness is a community project. This is not something that we will do on our own, but as being a part of a local church, by virtue of being a part of a local church where Christ is preached, where we come to His table, where baptism's administered, where we gather and we sing and we exhort and build one another up in the faith by singing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs.

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Where we come and we pray in Jesus' name to the Father together, right? We praise

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Him, we thank Him, we confess our sins, we ask Him for what we need. As we're doing all this stuff as a gathered church, week over week over week over week, and we live life in the fellowship of those saints, holiness is a fruit of all that.

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Sadly, John, few of us have been taught about what the local church even is. Few of us have been taught rightly about what corporate worship is and why we need it.

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So people don't even know how to answer the question, what do we do when we worship? People don't even know how to answer the question, why do we need the church?

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I didn't know how to answer it for the longest time. But when you begin to have some of these categories, what

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I'm about to say starts to make sense. If you want an imperative for holiness, number one, show up to your local church every

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Sunday. Show up to your local church every

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Sunday. If you want to be holy and you want to be godly, that is priority one. Without question, show up there week over week, get to know those people, lock arms with those people, love your pastors, sit under the

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Word, come to the table, observe baptism, sing and pray, and live life with those people for decades.

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And then let's talk about how that's gone because the Lord will keep His promises, He will sanctify us via our union with Christ and He will use

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His church and the means of grace that He's given us to produce maturity and holiness in our lives.

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He says, until we all attain the unity of faith and of the knowledge of the

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Son of God, okay, right? So He's like, this is the point of the work of the preachers, teachers, and evangelists in the congregation.

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The Holy Spirit empowers them, they teach the body. What are they teaching the body? They're teaching the body about the unity of their faith, so we are one in Christ.

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Secondly, about the knowledge of the Son of God, meaning Jesus, right, to mature manhood, to the measures of the statures of the fullness of Christ.

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So this whole thing is about faith, our union in Christ with each other, and then about Jesus as the

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Son of God into the fullness of who Christ is, right? This is so good. Then He says, so that, why do we wanna get to this point?

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So that we may no longer be children. What, children drink milk, tossed to and fro by the waves? Man, this sounds so similar to what we've been talking about.

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That's right, by every wind of doctrine, by cunning, by craftiness, and deceitful schemes. We've already been in four different books now that meat is associated to the knowledge of Christ for us.

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I think that's the way I would say it. Of course. The person and work of Christ on behalf of the believer. This is the meat of the

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Word. I have seen so much fruit born over the last five, six, seven years that like in terms of maturity, growth, understanding, groundedness, love, joy, charity, patience, right?

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A hatred of sin, like confession of sin. Like all of these things have happened repeatedly in the lives of our people, why?

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Not because of individual pursuits, but it's because of the preaching of Jesus and the means of grace in the church.

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The church is God's plan to accomplish the great commission. And the church is God's plan to accomplish holiness and godliness in the lives of His people.

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And that sounds counterintuitive to us, but it's biblical. And search the scriptures and I think that you'll see that that's true.

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Yes, obedience and holiness, amen. But those things will be produced by something upstream actually.